SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1034 (100), Friday, December 31, 2004
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TITLE: Floodwaters
Halt Before Harm Done
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two people were hospitalized, seven embankments covered with water and six metro stations were closed in St. Petersburg as the Neva River and city canals all but burst their banks on Sunday.
Although water levels were lower on Monday, city meteorologists said the possibility of flooding would remain for the next few days. However, it was unlikely flooding would be as extensive as it was on Sunday again, they said.
On Sunday, the water in the Neva driven by a strong Atlantic cyclone from the Baltic Sea went as high as 2.39 meters above average, far above the official flood mark of 1.50 meters above average.
The water flooded the slopes of Vasilevsky Island's Strelka, seven embankments, four boiler-houses, the cellars in some buildings, and several cars.
Rescuers evacuated two women from a flooded car on one embankment. The women were hospitalized.
The water threatened to flood the metro stations closest to the city's rivers and canals.
Metro stations Sportivnaya, Sadovaya, Nevsky Prospekt, Vasileostrovskaya, Pionerskaya and Chkalovskaya were closed, with their entrances and exits sealed by metal gates, for several hours.
Sandbags were placed in front of the entrances of some of those stations to hold back the waters if they rose any further.
St. Petersburg metro representatives said Monday on the condition of anonymity that for those stations the critical level of flooding was between 2.42 and 2.46 meters, just slightly over the level of the Neva. Therefore the stations were closed for the sake of safety.
However, the metro department said that if the waters had risen further, the metro was ready to use the emergency means of protection including metal barriers.
At the same time the flood caused the closure of the federal highway to the Nordic countries near the town of Vyborg next to the Russian-Finnish border, leaving the customs point of Torfyanovka cut off from the outside world.
In the city, the Fontanka river almost burst its banks near the Anichkov Bridge and the Beloselskiky-Belozersky Palace. In the elite village of Lisy Nos, located just outside of St. Petersburg on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, water flooded the ground up to knee depth, NTV reported.
City meteorologists warned about the approaching conditions in advance, and people had time to prepare. On Saturday several city enterprises moved equipment out of cellars.
By Sunday evening, the waters had started to gradually go down. On Monday the level was only a meter above average, the St. Petersburg Meteorological Center said.
Vice-Governor Viktor Lobko said Sunday on St. Petersburg's TV channel Five that the city was saved from worse flooding by the yet uncompleted flood defense complex to the west of the city.
According to meteorologists, the flood, which was officially the 297th in the city's 300 years history, was not unusual.
Alexander Rodionov, duty meteorologist, said the previous highest flood in St. Petersburg was registered on Nov. 30 of 1999 when the water reached 2.62 meters above average.
Rodionov said, however, that such high flooding was still unusual for January since normally St. Petersburg has floods in fall and spring.
A similar winter flood was registered on Jan. 1 of 1984 when the water rose to 2.31 meters. Rodionov said, however, that he couldn't find higher flood marks for January floods in the files.
"Therefore we may suggest it was one of the highest January floods in the city's history," Rodionov said.
Rodionov said this January is a warm one, but similar above-zero temperatures were registered in St. Petersburg in January of 2000.
"During the last 30 years we experienced quite a number of unusually warm winters in this region," he said.
Rodionov said the next frosty days are expected in St. Petersburg on Jan. 14-15.
TITLE: Bloody
Sunday
Recalled
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One hundred years ago, on Jan. 9, 1905, the streets of St. Petersburg were covered with the blood of over 1,500 people killed on their way to Palace Square where they wanted to hold a peaceful protest against the policies of Tsar Nicolas II.
The day, known by the infamous name of Bloody Sunday, is still remembered, but the crowd of thousands of people that marched on city streets 100 years ago had shrunk by Sunday to just a few dozen politically active citizens who turned out in terrible weather to remember the tragedy in the Alexandrovsky Garden.
"This event was the first stage in a fight for the social and economic rights of citizens and the claims made in 1905 are still of concern today," said Vladimir Soloveichik, co-chairman of Citizens' Initiative, a St. Petersburg-based public organization.
At the beginning of the 20th century, industrial workers toiled on average for 11 hours a day. Conditions in factories were extremely tough with owners showing little concern for workers' health and safety. Attempts to form trade unions were resisted by managers.
In 1903, a priest, Father Georgy Gapon, formed the Assembly of Russian Workers. Within a year it had over 9,000 members.
The following year proved extremely harsh for Russian workers. The prices of essential goods rose so quickly that real wages declined by 20 per cent. When four members of the Assembly of Russian Workers were dismissed from the Putilov Iron Works, Gapon called for industrial action. Over the next few days more than 110,000 workers in St. Petersburg went on strike.
In an attempt to settle the dispute, Gapon decided to appeal directly to the tsar. He drew up a petition outlining the workers' sufferings and demands.
This included calling for a reduction in the working day to eight hours, an increase in wages and improvements in working conditions. Gapon also called for the establishment of the right for all citizens to vote and an end to the Russo -Japanese War.
More than 150,000 people signed the petition and on Jan. 22, 1905, (Jan. 9 according to the old Julian calendar then in use), Gapon led a large procession of workers to the Winter Palace to present the petition to Nicholas II. When the procession of workers reached the Winter Palace the police and Cossacks attacked it. Over 1,000 workers were killed and many more were wounded. The incident signaled the start of the 1905 Revolution.
"Protests that are taking place now are about the same things," Soloveichik said Monday in a telephone interview.
"They are to stop the company managers pressuring their employees, to call for freedom of speech, to go against the policies of President Vladimir Putin, who now resembles Nicholas II more and more with his approach of ruling the country single-handedly."
Citizens' Initiative has asked City Hall to install a memorial plaque in the city to mark the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday, but was told last month that it would have to raise the finances for a plaque itself.
Leonid Radzikhovsky, a Moscow-based political analyst, said Bloody Sunday set an example of how the authorities dealt with the public in the 20th century.
"This date is interesting for me in many aspects" Radzikhovsky said in a comment broadcast on Ekho Moskvy on Sunday.
"Firstly, this is interesting because Nicolas II has been beatified. To kill 1,500 people on the square is a simple thing for a holy person, but usually holy people commit such things in the name of some belief.
"The tsarist government did not do this for some principle it believed in, but because it was not able to talk to people in a different way; it didn't wish to do this and didn't even understand that there are other ways to deal with people," he said.
Since 1905 the authorities in Russia have continued to deal with crowds in the same way, whether it was the government of Nicolas II or the Soviet authorities, Radzikhovsky said, pointing out that the reforms of Pyotr Stolypin resulted in "tens of thousands people being executed by hanging" and that Stalinist-era persecution cost the lives of tens of millions of people across the Soviet Union.
"The last time [the authorities] talked to people in the language of Nicholas II was in 1962 in Novocherkassk," he added. "Since then no mass executions have taken place in Russia. There is progress, but traditions are being kept. And the main tradition that has not been changed in these 100 years is simple: a person in Russia is excrement, a beast, part of a mob. The authorities do not understand and won't accept any other way of talking to people," he said.
International historians have called the bloody suppression of a strike and workers' demonstration in Novocherkassk, near Rostov on Don, on June 2, 1962, the Bloody Sunday of the Soviet Union.
It remained secret story until the early 1990s when official information was released that during riots in Novocherkassk troops using machine guns killed "22 and wounded 39 participants in the disorders in the square and at the police station." Two more people were killed in the evening of the same day in unexplained circumstances.
Yury Vdovin, co-chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of human rights organization Citizen's Watch, said the authorities have not changed their approach to the public in the last 100 years and that in recent years their attitude has worsened.
"The general tendency of FSB officials entering the government has been reflected in unprecedented pressure on the economic and social rights of people [in the country] in 2004, on a huge scale," Vdovin said Monday in a telephone interview.
"On the other hand, the tragedy of Jan. 9 was a result of a provocation and for this reason the regime of Nicholas II does not look that bad compared to the KGB.
"The numbers of victims the KGB killed is incomparable to those killed under Nicholas II and I don't think that those who are now in power who came from the KGB are more 'vegetarian' than their predecessors," he said.
TITLE: Butov Tries to Remain
In Gubernatorial Race
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The embattled governor of the Nenets Autonomous District Vladimir Butov has complained about a decision by the Nenets district court to cancel his registration as a candidate in the region's gubernatorial elections on Jan. 23.
A member of the region's election commission, Marina Churikova, said Butov sent an appeal to the Supreme Court last week, Interfax reported Monday.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 31 St. Petersburg's Petrograd district court sentenced Butov to a three-year suspended jail term for beating up a city traffic policeman on April 11, 2003.
Butov's security guard and a driver, who were with him at that time, were given suspended two-year and three-year sentences.
Churikova said the Nenets district court canceled Butov's registration on Dec. 29 on the basis of a plea by the Nenets prosecutor's office, and again on Dec. 31 as a result of the plea by another gubernatorial candidate, Viktoria Bobrova, chief assistant to the Nenets prosecutor.
The court said Butov, who was running for his third term in the oil-rich Nenets region in northwest Siberia, had no right to do so.
The elections are to be the last for the post of the governor. President Vladimir Putin's regime has now changed the system of selecting governors. After the Nenets election, his envoys are to nominate candidates for governor and they are then to be approved by regional parliaments.
Last year, Nenets Autonomous District prosecutors disputed the legality of a new law passed by the local parliament that would have let Butov run for a third term. The State Duma in 1999 banned governors from running for a third term, but courts have argued they can do so if local laws allow them to.
St. Petersburg prosecutors initiated a criminal case against Butov after traffic officer Alexei Popov complained that Butov and his companions beat him up.
Popov said Butov beat him up when he stopped his car for a severe breach of traffic rules. According to NTV, later Popov took away his application fearing to be fired. However, the judge decided that his initial evidence was credible.
After the court announced its decision, Butov denied that either he or his companions ever touched the policeman.
Some observers said it is Butov's intention to run again that prompted the activity of St. Petersburg prosecutors.
According to the Barents Observer website, Butov was one of a few regional leaders to oppose appointing governors.
On June 24, 2002, Butov became a topic of discussion at Putin's annual press conference for journalists in the Kremlin.
At that time, a freelance reporter of Nenets newspaper Krasny Tundrovik, Alexei Vasilivetsky, had accused Butov of corruption.
Vasilivetsky said that "already the third prosecutor, who investigates cases about abuses of spending money on northern shipments, has had to retire, while governor Butov averts scrutiny."
A week after Vasilivetsky asked his question, the editor of Krasny Tundrovik, Olga Cherubina, was fired under the pretext of having infringed the financial rules of the newspaper, Reporters Without Borders said, when expressing their concern about the case in 2002.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: New Bridge Named
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The new suspension bridge over the Neva River, which was opened by President Vladimir Putin last month, has been named Bolshoi Obukhovsky Bridge by the city's naming commission.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko signed a related decree. The commission received more than 200 proposals for a name for the bridge, 77 of which were discussed and considered. The commission said the name chosen was given to the bridge because of its geographical location in the area of Obukhovo.
Flats for Liquidators
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governor Valentina Matviyenko has granted 19 apartments in a new apartment block in Sestroretsk in the Kurortny district to surviving veterans of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and their families, Interfax reported.
"No matter how many years have passed since the Chernobyl tragedy, which is still a painful spot in the hearts of many Russians, the participants of the rescue operation and emergency repairs in Chernobyl, will always be heroes," the agency quoted Matviyenko as saying. "Local citizens were among the first to lend a helping hand to Chenobyl. Risking and sacrificing their lives, they stopped the reactor."
St. Petersburg has adopted a city program aimed at providing Chernobyl survivors with housing. With federal and local funding, the city is planning to build 77 apartments for Chernobyl veterans. About one third of the housing has already been built in Primorsky and Kurortny districts.
Plane Lands in Iceland
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian plane diverted to Iceland on Saturday after a drunken man tried to start a fight with the crew and his fellow passengers, an Aeroflot spokeswoman said.
Police removed the man from the Toronto-Moscow flight, Irina Danenberg told Ekho Moskvy radio.
"A Canadian of Russian extraction in a state of alcoholic intoxication provoked a fight, swore wildly and shouted at the crew and passengers. As a result the captain decided to make a forced landing in Iceland," she said.
Ekho Moskvy quoted a passenger as saying the man punched the plane's captain.
Anti-Semitism 'Better'
MOSCOW (Interfax) - One of Russia's Chief Rabbis, Berl Lazar, said he does not agree with the U.S. State Department's assessment of the level of anti-Semitism in Russia.
"The U.S. State Department's special report lacks several aspects which point to positive changes in this respect over the past 15 years," Lazar said Sunday.
"We can't say the situation is absolutely satisfactory everywhere, but we see that it is developing the right way," he said.
Norwegians on Patrol
VILNIUS, Lithuania (Interfax) - Norwegian fighter jets will take charge of patrolling Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia's air space this week, the press service of the Lithuanian Defense Ministry told Interfax.
The first two Norwegian F-16 fighter jets are expected to land at the Zokniai air base outside Siauliai on Monday, and two more on Wednesday, the press service said.
On Wednsday, the Norwegian pilots will start patroling the three Baltic countries' air space, while the four Tornado F3 fighter jets of Britain's Royal Air Force, on duty since the middle of October, will fly back to Britain.
In three months' time, the functions will be assumed by Dutch pilots.
TITLE: Former Insider Korzhakov Drinks to an Era
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After becoming president, an intoxicated Boris Yeltsin struck and killed a man in a driving accident, said Alexander Korzhakov, once Yeltsin's closest adviser and a longtime drinking buddy, who said he covered it up.
"Yeltsin never asked about the killed man. Maybe he had no time - he was dying to become the Guarantor of the Constitution. This was his first victim for the sake of democracy," Korzhakov writes in a new edition of his memoirs, "Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk."
As Yeltsin's friend and bodyguard for a decade, Korzhakov, now 54, enjoyed unrivaled access to Yeltsin before, during and after his rise to power. Korzhakov was once seen as one of the most powerful men in the country.
But his closeness - and loyalty - to Yeltsin ended in 1996 when at the height of Yeltsin's re-election campaign he was fired amid a fierce power struggle within the Kremlin for control of the president. Since then Korzhakov has had no qualms about dishing the dirt on his former boss.
He insists that he will never again pledge his loyalties to those in power. "I am not loyal to or an enemy of [President Vladimir] Putin. I have a different life now - I'm no longer Yeltsin's bodyguard but a deputy elected by the people," he said in an interview in his State Duma office.
Korzhakov, a former KGB officer, is the deputy chairman of the Duma's Defense Committee and toes the Kremlin line as a member of United Russia. He was elected as a single-mandate deputy in Tula and has gubernatorial ambitions. His chances of being reelected to his seat in the next elections, in 2007, or becoming governor are in doubt due to Kremlin-sponsored legislation to eliminate single-mandate races and gubernatorial elections.
Even though Putin has sidelined most of those in Yeltsin's inner circle, Korzhakov has managed to hold onto his Duma seat for the time being "because he does not play an important role," said Andrei Ryabov, political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "Korzhakov is the past, a piece in a museum exhibition," he said. "Putin's team is not interested in him."
Korzhakov lives in the shadow of his former boss and in the days when his words could move mountains. In his Duma office, he kept bringing the conversation back to Yeltsin.
"My influence on him was very strong because I never flattered him and I always said what I thought," Korzhakov said.
Alexei Kazannik, who briefly served as prosecutor general from October 1993 to February 1994, told Moskovsky Komsomolets in 1994 that Korzhakov "decided everything in the Kremlin."
"All those in the president's circle know that in order to push through a dubious decision [or] get an illegal decree signed, you have to go to General Korzhakov," Kazannik was quoted as saying. "I saw ministers, presidential advisers and aides ingratiate themselves to Korzhakov."
The highest post that Korzhakov, a ranking security services general, held in Yeltsin's administration was of chief of the presidential security service.
Korzhakov has been blamed for many of Yeltsin's disastrous decisions, such as helping launch the war against Chechen separatists in 1994, an allegation he denies.
"I was the only one against it," he said, without elaborating.
Korzhakov's influence on Yeltsin grew after a parliament critical of Yeltsin's economic reforms tried to unseat him in 1993, Ryabov said.
Korzhakov convinced Yeltsin in October 1993 to storm the White House, the former parliament building that today houses the Cabinet. Tanks manned by troops loyal to Yeltsin fired on the White House on Oct. 4, 1993, after legislators barricaded themselves inside to oppose Yeltsin's decree disbanding the parliament. The showdown followed a months-long struggle over economic reforms and political power.
"Korzhakov was able to gather forces around Yeltsin to help him get out of the situation. That is why Yeltsin relied on Korzhakov," Ryabov said. "Yeltsin was afraid after the October events. He was afraid of plots, and Korzhakov was a faithful person."
Yeltsin, however, fired Korzhakov and stripped him of his military rank and privileges at the request of his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and Kremlin chief of staff Anatoly Chubais during his 1996 re-election campaign.
Korzhakov's security officers had arrested two Yeltsin campaign aides carrying a box with $500,000 in election funds out of the White House. The aides were associates of Chubais. The affair caused a power struggle between Korzhakov and a group led by Chubais to come to a head, and Korzhakov lost.
"I was fired for nothing, just because I caught two cheaters red-handed," Korzhakov said, still clearly upset about the incident.
But it is the old days with Yeltsin and their numerous drinking binges that Korzhakov remembers cheerfully. "He loved to gather groups of 1,000 people, and he would pay attention to every one of them. He could drink. He was a down-to-earth person," he said, recalling when Yeltsin was a member of the Politburo and he was his bodyguard in the 1980s.
Korzhakov was assigned to serve as Yeltsin's bodyguard in 1985 when Yeltsin was appointed first secretary of Moscow city's communist committee. He stuck by Yeltsin when he was exiled from the Politburo in 1987 for frequently challenging its authority.
When Yeltsin was elected a Soviet deputy in 1989, Korzhakov left the KGB to work for him. Yeltsin made him the head of his personal security detail when he was elected Russian president in June 1991.
Yeltsin changed after becoming president, Korzhakov said.
"He became pretentious. He wanted to be admired. He stopped listening to people who were close to him," he said. "Sometimes I had to cover up for him when he got drunk. He would drink all the time - he would start at 7 in the morning."
Drinking was Yeltsin's weakness, which Korzhakov mentioned several times in his 1997 memoirs and while sipping wine in his Duma office.
In his book, Korzhakov vividly describes how Yeltsin drank so much that he could not carry out his presidential duties. A new chapter in a revised edition released this summer mentions the drunken-driving accident for the first time.
The accident happened after the men spent an evening drinking at a banya near a village where Korzhakov had a dacha, according to the account.
"Boris Nikolayevich ... simply wanted to go for a drive, to practice driving a car," Korzhakov writes. "As bad luck would have it, there was a Zhiguli and a motorcycle on the country road about 500 meters from the village in those early morning hours. The driver of the car was talking through an open door with the motorcyclist. Nobody knows how they disturbed the novice driver. He must have mixed up the pedals again."
Yeltsin's car crashed into the Zhiguli, tearing away the door, and swiped the motorcycle off the road.
"The situation was wired - Russia's hope was drunk and scared behind the wheel and nearby was a damaged car and injured motorcyclist.
"Gorbachev, who at the time was dreaming of finding the smallest cause to remove the separatist Yeltsin from politics, would have rewarded anyone who had told him about the event," Korzhakov writes.
Korzhakov writes that he averted a potential crisis by repairing the Zhiguli. "It was turned into a new car ... [and] the owner did not report the accident to the police."
As for the injured man, "we bought medicines and changed doctors and hospitals. But after six months he died. We buried him as well, since he did not have any close relatives."
Asked when and where the event took place, Korzhakov said cryptically that it had happened in the early 1990s "in a certain small village."
Staff Writer Oksana Yablokova contributed to this report.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Registration Changes
MOSCOW (SPT) - A government decree allowing Russian citizens to stay in any city for up to 90 days without police registration came into force on Jan. 3, but Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin ordered the police to continue document checks on the streets.
Rules for residency without registration were extended from three to 90 days after the government granted that right to Ukrainian citizens - a change introduced during Ukraine's heated election campaign in November and widely interpreted as an attempt to convince voters to pick the Kremlin's preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.
A Moscow police spokesman said on Jan. 3 that the focus of document checks will now shift to the authenticity of registration papers and an inspection of foreigners' work permits, Interfax reported.
No Free ISS Rides
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Federal Space Agency said Jan. 3 that it will stop giving U.S. astronauts free rides into orbit.
"From 2006, we will put U.S. astronauts into orbit only on a commercial basis," said space agency chief Anatoly Perminov, who will go to the United States early next year with a proposal.
NASA officials were not available for comment.
Russia has single-handedly serviced the international space station since the United States grounded its shuttles after the Columbia disaster two years ago.
Nuclear Trade Arrest
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Police detained a South Korean citizen on Jan. 3 on suspicion of smuggling radioactive materials into the Far East, Itar-Tass reported.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk prosecutors said the suspect, Kim Jong-hon, worked for a South Korean firm suspected of illegally trading low-enriched uranium-238, Itar-Tass reported. The South Korean Embassy could not confirm the report.
17 Attackers Identified
MOSCOW (AP) - Only 17 of 31 attackers who were killed after seizing the Beslan school five months ago have been identified, Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel said Dec. 30.
He said documents had been sent to Interpol to help identify two of the attackers, "presumably coming from Middle East countries," Interfax reported.
Officials initially said the attackers killed at the school included nine or 10 Arabs, but they never provided any proof. Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who claimed responsibility for the raid, said the attackers included two Arabs.
Reporter Attacked
MOSCOW (Interfax) - Radio Liberty correspondent Yelena Rogachyova said she was attacked because of her professional actitivies in Yoshkar-Ola, capital of the Mari El region, on Friday.
"The assailants did not search my pockets or steal anything. They only beat me up and threatened to kill me if I tell anyone about the incident. I therefore think that this is connected with my professional work," Rogachyova told Interfax on Sunday.
She said she had not reported the incident to the police as she does not see any point.
"What for? The attack was unexpected and I don't remember the assailants' faces. But even if I file a compliant, I don't think the police will track down anyone," the journalist said.
She said she feels "more or less well" now.
"I can walk unaided in my apartment, but I avoid looking in the mirror," she said.
No comment was available from police.
TITLE: Toll Roads Approved
By the Government
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The government has granted the Federal Road Agency permission to proceed with the paperwork necessary for the construction of a high-speed toll road between St. Petersburg and Moscow.
The toll road was first presented as part of the countrywide road modernization program, approved by the government in October. On Dec. 29, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov signed the document allowing development of the project development, the government's press office said.
The tender date for the developers and the exact cost of the project will be determined in the nearest future, the Transportation and Communications Ministry said.
Other toll road projects to be developed as part of the transportation routes program include the Moscow-Minsk-Berlin speedway, the Western Diameter, part of St. Petersburg's long-delayed Ring Road, and several smaller roads around Moscow. The complexities involved in building toll roads in a country where private road ownership is still illegal have analysts predicting difficulties for obtaining investments in the multi-billion dollar projects.
Although the exact route of the St. Petersburg-Moscow 650-kilometer road has not been made public yet, some details have already been determined. The toll road will be developed along the same land corridor as the high-speed railroad - another project long in the works between the two cities.
In St. Petersburg the road will run from the city sea port, and sport eight lanes in the Leningrad Oblast and the Moscow region, six in its main section between Klin and Tosno and as many as 10 lanes where it joins the Moscow city ring road. The administrations of all the regions involved have been advised by the government to limit the use of land plots that fall within the construction zone and also to look at demolishing or moving buildings and infrastructure networks that may be located in the road's way, RosBusinessConsulting news agency reported.
Federal funding will be provided for half of the project's costs, while private investors are expected to pitch in for the other, Deputy Transportation and Communications Minister Alexander Misharin said earlier. A preliminary agreement to invest in the project was signed with Chinese businessmen during Economic Development and Trade Minister German Graf's visit to Beijing in October. However no final decisions have been made.
The government must develop a detailed investment structure to attract serious investors for the toll road project.
"This is a costly and complicated procedure. However, it needs to be done for any serious developers to become interested," Olga Litvinova, St. Petersburg-based partner at Ernst&Young said Monday in a telephone interview.
Specifically, there is a need for changes in legislation that would make private-public partnerships, or PPPs, possible between the government and investors, she said. PPPs have been long used by European countries as optimal ways to finance road constructions, however, they are as of yet impossible to form in a country where, under the law, roads cannot be privately owned, she said.
The toll road would also be more attractive should construction works go on simultaneously on several transportation route projects, said Litvinova.
"Potential developers and investors would then get the advantage of using their resources across the board and share learning, which would make the project more profitable and less risky," she said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Oblast No Rival to City
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Leningrad Oblast is not competing with St. Petersburg for investors, said oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov at the end of last month.
Every investor who places funds in construction and manufacturing facilities development is looking for a reasonable investment return period, he said.
"We will be glad if any of the investors choose the city as their destination," Rosbalt news agency reported the governor saying.
One investor he mentioned was the Shanghai Corporation, which is said to be ready to invest in a multi-billion Chinese Quarter project in the city. At the same time, he said, "If Toyota chooses to build its factory in the Leningrad Oblast, no one from the city administration will shed tears over it."
Several 100-hectare construction sites will be auctioned off in January in the Oblast districts of Kudrovo and Novo-Devyatkino, Serdyukov said. Land plots for warehouse premises and commercial real-estate buildings will also be made available for potential investors shortly, he said.
Bulgaria Air Flies On
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Bulgaria Air, the Bulgarian airlines company, started making regular flights between Sofia and St. Petersburg at the beginning of the year.
Regular air traffic between the Northern Capital and the traditional resort destination of Bulgaria has traditionally operated in summer. The decision to continue the flights in the winter has been made due to a rise in demand for both destinations, RBK reported.
Overall, the fall-winter season of 2004 marked the entrance of three new airline companies to the city market, news website Fontanka.ru reports.
Italian flights operator Alitalia began making regular flights to St. Petersburg from Milan at the beginning of November. Latvian company airBaltic began making direct flights to Pulkovo airport from Riga four times a week.
Investment Guidelines
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city administration has come up with a list of guidelines for determining when an investment project or a partnership initiative can be counted as a "strategic investment" for the city.
The main rule is that the project must aid St. Petersburg in becoming a developed industrial, financial, scientific, cultural, educational, tourism, transport-transit or a logistic center.
The project must also be expected to require more than 3 billion rubles ($1 million) in investments, the administration press service said.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko said that strategic project guidelines conclude the package of documents developed by the city administration that are aimed at creating a favorable investment climate in St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Entrepreneurial Children's Doctor Is a Cut Above the Rest
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Iraida Kolesnikova was a 26-year-old graduate student of medicine when she arrived in St. Petersburg in 1996 to pursue the equivalent of an M.Sc. Still, until she realised that she had a priceless gift from the Russian provinces of Belgorodskaya and Tyumenskaya Oblast that could infuse life into the city's decrepit children's healthcare system, she had no intention of staying.
Now she is the founder of the first privately-owned, multi-profile pediatric clinic in St. Petersburg.
"The healthcare system for children in St. Petersburg was a mess," Kolesnikova says, pointing to a huge contrast to the situations in her hometown in the Belgorodskaya region and the Siberian city of Tyumen, where she lived and studied.
Kolesnikova's creative mind which, she says, is a reflection of her personal and geographical background, inspired her to exploit "the contrast of the three cities" - Tyumen, St. Petersburg, and a small town near Belgorod.
Kolesnikova had ambitions of making a career through which she could also prove wrong "the negative attitudes shared by arrogant natives of St. Petersburg against newcomers from the provinces," who, she says, frown on and patronize those who have arrived from the provinces.
Wearing the smile of a victor, Kolesnikova says: "See what Tyumen has brought to the city which was regarded a front-runner in domestic medical care!"
Kolesnikova is referring to the "Baby," a 200-square-meter clinic at 33 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa, in the city center, which she founded four years ago with starting capital of $10,000. In less than a year that sum swelled to $350,000 worth of property and equipment thanks to an investment by the city's Set casino group.
A former athlete and the 1987 Belgoradskaya regional tennis champion, Kolesnikova had just attained her post-graduate degree in Medical Sciences, specializing in Pediatric Urology, in 1998, when she discovered that her sporting skills could be matched by her academic ones. As a tenth grader aged 16, she became the only teenager trusted to aid senior surgeons at the Tyumen Central hospital.
St. Petersburg seemed like the ideal place to follow up her medical achievements and turn dreams into realities.
On arrival, Kolesnikova bought an apartment that she would later mortgage for a $10,000 real-estate agency loan to open the "Baby" clinic in 2000. A vast portion of the starting capital, however, had to go towards "paying everyone, everywhere for one paper and then the next in order to launch this desperately needed project," she says.
Bureaucratic bottlenecks gave Koles-nikova headaches.
"Crossing the bureaucratic hurdles where most fail has been a challenge and I'm proud that I met it single-handedly," she says while rushing to a surgical ward to circumcise a day-old child whose parents and a bunch of relatives, including elders dressed in traditional Tatar garb, are gathered in a room reserved for traditional rituals.
Kolesnikova reflects with professional satisfaction on having persuaded the mostly Jewish and Muslim circumcision rituals to be moved from the confines of shrines and domestic circles to surgical wards. And she vows to turn the traditionally non-Russian practice into an acceptable social norm as it is in the U.S.
While 70 percent of circumcision cases in her clinic are performed on religious ground, the rest are carried out on requests from Russians who act on medical motives to have their kids circumcised.
One of Kolesnikova's main challenges has been to break the myth of an impossible marriage between the superstition-based science of astrology and conventional medicine. And she has hired an astrologer whose zodiac skills not only serve as psychological and medical counsel, but as a parental guide for the upbringing of a child.
"It's a paradox: our clientele in this field are mostly the young and the elderly flocking to hear what the future has in store," says Kolesnikova with a mixture of entrepreneurial pride and awareness of skepticism.
"Astrology can be a kind of a spiritual healing that adjusts the patient's mindset into a state of accepting medical treatment... with its guidance they even schedule the days and time of the operations."
In strict adherence to the same code, Kolesnikova has ruled out performing surgeries on the four days believed to portend bad omens in an astrologic lunar month. They include the ninth, the 15th, the 19th and the 29th day of the zodiac month.
Juliana Nazarova, 37, mother of 5-year-old Andrei who had his kidney removed last year, is a regular client of the clinic, and like dozens of such others she is entitled to a 10 percent discount.
Nazarova says that she sought astrologer's advice in scheduling the day and time for her son's surgery to remove a kidney tumor in November last year.
The operation followed just six months on the heels of a kidney surgery at the State Pediatric Institute. After the initial surgery, Andrei had suffered total kidney failure when he was only a year old.
"I have confidence in Koles-nikova who's giving life back to my kid, despite past woes," she said.
Nazarova, a factory engineer, sees the treatment at the clinic, whose target clientele is the lower-middle class, as affordable.
The charges start at 100 rubles for a urine test to 15,000 rubles for sophisticated endocrinal surgery. Koles-nikova says 7,500 rubles is the average cost of services at her 37-staff clinic.
TITLE: A Dark Anniversary in Afghanistan
TEXT: Amid the bells and baubles of the holiday season, few in the West paused to mark one of 2004's darker anniversaries. Twenty-five years ago last month, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, opening a Pandora's box whose effluvia include Osama bin Laden and leader of the Taliban Mullah Omar.
Afghanistan has largely slipped from the collective consciousness since the U.S. bombing of 2001, which toppled the Taliban and brought a precarious, internationally enforced peace. But, as centuries of history have shown, it is dangerous to underestimate this turbulent land, whose mountains have swallowed the ambitions of more than one great power.
The events leading up to the Christmas attack were as banal as they were brutal: In April 1978, Afghan President Mohammed Daoud, along with his entire family, was murdered in a military coup. Sympathy for the martyred Daoud can be tempered by the fact that he had gained power by throwing his cousin, King Zahir Shah, off the throne five years earlier.
Daoud was replaced by Noor Mohammed Taraki, a Moscow-friendly thug representing the more radical wing of the Afghan Communist Party. Taraki instituted a series of highly unpopular reforms that provoked rebellion and led to his murder in September 1979. Next at bat was the more moderate, if largely ineffectual communist, Hafizullah Amin. The hapless Amin had just three months to enjoy his preeminence, before he, in turn, fell to a Soviet-orchestrated coup.
The whys of the Soviet incursion are still being debated: a desire for warm water ports? A fear of Islamic radicalism on its southern flank? A helping hand to a communist regime in trouble?
Whatever the reasons, the facts are clear: The Soviet Army began inserting operatives into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. By Dec. 27, they had completed their first phase; they disposed of Amin and installed a more compliant Babrak Karmal as head of state. On the surface a short, successful operation, but it would take another 10 bloody years before the Soviets admitted defeat.
We all know the legend: Soviet soldiers and their Afghan proxies, backed by a mighty superpower military machine, could not subdue the brave, bearded mujahedin, waging a desperate jihad to save their land from the communist infidel. But those legendary mountain men were on a generous allowance from Uncle Sam, and their donkey carts often concealed missiles provided by the Americans or their Pakistani proxies.
By the time the last Soviet tank had slunk back up the Salang Highway toward Russia in 1989, millions of Afghans were dead and half the population displaced. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed, countless more injured. The Soviet Union itself would crumble in just two years.
The United States, having aided in the humiliation of its Cold War rival, grew bored with the mujahedin, until the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers brought Afghanistan back onto center stage.
But it was in Afghanistan in the 1990s that the events of Sept. 11 originated. While the Americans focused on domestic sex scandals and the Russians tried to build a viable country out of Soviet flotsam, Kabul tried to clean up the mess the superpowers had left behind.
The mujahedin morphed into avaricious warlords. Generals like Ahmed Shah Massoud, Rashid Dostum, or the American darling Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, battled among themselves for power and gain, reducing much of Afghanistan to rubble in the process.
From the Pashtun-dominated south came a movement of religious students known as the Taliban, determined to rout the warlords and return the country to Islamic purity. They were partially successful, and a regime even more repressive came to power, driving women under the burqa, banning photographs and kite flying, and holding public executions of sinners in the central sports stadium in Kabul.
The Taliban found a soul mate in a deep-pocketed Saudi who had been driven out of his own country for his radical views. Osama bin Laden found shelter and succor in Afghanistan; he was allowed to run his training camps and plan his attacks from mountain strongholds in the wilds between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In September, 2001, he struck. When the Taliban refused to give bin Laden up to American justice, the bombs began to fall. Once the dust had cleared, the United States and its allies set about molding Afghanistan into an acceptable partner.
But Afghanistan is no more likely to yield to its new conquerors than it was to the old.
Kabul today has little about it that suggests a functioning capital city. Electric power can best be described as sporadic, the water is toxic and the air heavy with what is charmingly described as "fecal dust."
Life in the provinces is harsher still. Aid workers in rural Afghanistan often head to Kabul for some much needed R and R.
Despite hardship, the Afghan people are proud, gracious, hospitable and warm. But there is violence just under the surface, which lends even the most casual relationships an air of danger.
A stroll down Chicken Street, for instance, is a delightful way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Numerous carpet sellers beckon you into their shops; in other doorways, fur coats and buzkashi whips alternate with embroidered wall hangings and hookah pipes. It is a popular spot for foreigners, at least until the suicide bombing in October, which killed a young Afghan girl and an American woman, in addition to the bomber himself.
I cannot resist the lure of the shops, but every time a figure in a burqa grabs my hand asking for "baksheesh," I can't help but wonder if she has a belt of plastic explosives under her sky-blue robes.
I have a friend, Mirwais, who works as a guard in our house. One evening he and I were watching "Osama," an Afghan movie, which highlighted the atrocities of the Taliban years. I watched the film in open-mouthed horror, while Mirwais sat giggling on the other side of the room.
Mirwais, it turns out, had been a black-turbaned student in Kandahar, the seat of the Taliban. This gentle soul, to whom I entrust my possessions and my life, is a fan of some of the less appetizing practices of the Taliban years, like cutting off the hands of thieves. My predictable American take is that this is barbaric; his is that it cuts down admirably on recidivism.
"Americans are children," he said, smiling indulgently. "When I first came from Kandahar, I thought I would kill the first American I saw. But now I see that they can be good people, too." I smiled back, but inside I squirmed. I do hope Mirwais' sentiments have changed permanently.
Those of us spearheading the current aid worker invasion would do well to remember the lessons of Christmas past. Afghanistan absorbs unthinkable levels of punishment and keeps on going.
It is the would-be Goliath who, as often as not, lies broken at the close of play. And in Afghanistan today there is no shortage of slingshots.
Jean MacKenzie is director of training for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan. She contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: The Yugansk Coverup Operation
TEXT: What happened to Yuganskneftegaz? It was sold. How? "In strict accordance with Russian law," or so President Vladimir Putin said.
With these very words, the president vindicated Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky was accused of buying the fertilizer company Apatit through a shell company, and Rosneft bought Yugansk through a shell company.
Of course, not all shells are created equal. Putin did not know the founders of the shell who bought Apatit, but Putin did know the founders of Baikal Finance Group.
I was very relieved by the president's statement. I mean, who knows where Baikal got the $1.7 billion deposit? What if the money came from Osama bin Laden, after all?
In the entire Yukos saga, two moments were the most interesting. First of all, why did Rosneft buy Yugansk through a front company? Yugansk's buyers had apparently studied the Russian economy by examining the criminal case against Khodorkovsky.
They learned that if the buyer of a company resells it to a third party, this third party is considered a legitimate purchaser. Naturally, in the case of Yugansk, this rule does not apply due to the Houston court ruling, and no one can be the legitimate purchaser of stolen goods if the goods in questions were acquired after it became common knowledge they were stolen.
However, Houston has not been mentioned at all in the Khodorkovsky case. And that's why Rosneft decided to buy Yugansk via Baltic ... Uh, make that Petersburg ... Oh, sorry Baikal Finance Group.
Yet the most interesting moment came after the auction. The very next day, experts began to get phone calls from the Kremlin. They heard a horrible scandal had erupted. Apparently, no one had expected Baikal to win. It was Roman Abramovich's people who greased the right palms and registered Baikal in a major blow to the Kremlin.
"It's Abramovich!" the market cried, though strictly speaking there was no reason to believe that it was Abramovich. The only real conclusion was that the Kremlin wanted everyone to think it was Abramovich.
It turned out later that Igor Minibayev, head of one of Surgutneftegaz's divisions, represented Baikal. "It's Surgut!" the market cried, though just because Surgut founded the winning bidder did not necessarily mean that Surgut had a stake in the purchase. It is like a businessman who has lunch with some mafiosi: Just because he picks up the tab does not mean he's the big boss.
On Dec. 28, Putin himself delivered the final blow. He announced that though the Chinese, of course, had not purchased Yugansk, they might be involved in the company's operations in the future. And immediately the market cried, "It's the Chinese!"
Interestingly, what we have here is a typical coverup operation. As an integral part of any special operation by the KGB, agents unleashed a flood of rumors to hide those really behind the deal: "Abramovich? No, not Abramovich, it's Surgut CEO Vladimir Bogdanov!" "Bogdanov? No, it's not Bogdanov, it's the Chinese!"
Why? Why in the world did they need a coverup when everything was already completely obvious? Because coverups are the purchasers' forte.
They don't know how to buy a company, but they do know how to use the rumor mill and red herrings. And no one really cares if the red herrings get tossed right in front of the television cameras.
It is not that frightening that those who started the attack on Yukos now have control of Yugansk. It is not that frightening that the Russian legal system was used as a tool to redistribute property.
The really scary thing is that the people who used state power to steal someone else's property cannot let go of this power anymore.
If they do, they will not only lose Yugansk, their Swiss bank accounts and their status as the president's buddies. They may also wind up behind bars.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Of Bob Dylan
TEXT: There's a legend in my family that we're kin to Uncle Dave Macon, the country music pioneer. We're certainly distant cousins to the Macons of our native Wilson County - and Uncle Dave lived in the next county over. My parents met him once, driving to his Tennessee farm one afternoon when they were teenagers, not yet married. This was not too long before his death.
A photograph survives to record the event, a black-and-white print taken with my mother's camera. Uncle Dave is on the front porch, sitting in the rocking chair, legs crossed, tattered hat perched on his head, banjo in his lap. His face is puffy, pitted, cadaverous; the fire that had stoked him since his hot young days - in the still-churning wake of the Civil War - is finally going out. A dying man, from a dying world.
But he welcomed the young folks anyway, even played a couple of songs for them, impromptu, feet slapping time on the wooden boards - conjuring up another reality out of rhythm, strings and joyful noise, then letting it dissolve into the air: "Won't get drunk no more, way down the old plank road ..."
Despite the reputed kinship and this ancestral encounter, the first Uncle Dave Macon song I ever actually heard was one recorded by Bob Dylan: "Sarah Jane." When I first heard the song, sung with such full-throated exuberance, I thought Dylan had written it himself. I didn't realize then the kind of alchemy he could work on other people's songs, how he could make them his own, right down to the marrow.
Like most people who get into Dylan, at first I was dazzled by the originality of his vision, his words, the brilliant fragments of a kaleidoscopic personality as they were lit up in turn by each new style. His work seemed a perfect embodiment of the Romantic ideal: art as the vibrant expression of the self - defiant, heroic, fiercely personal. But while that stance is as valid as most of the other illusions that sustain us, it only takes you so far. What I've come to realize over the years is that Dylan's music is not primarily about expressing yourself - it's about losing yourself, escaping the self and all its confusion, corruption, pettiness and decay. It's about getting to some place far beyond the self, "where nature neither honors nor forgives."
Dylan gives himself up to the song, and to the deeper reality it creates in the few charged moments of its existence. We can step through the door he opens to that far place and see what happens.
You can follow Dylan through many doors, into many realms: the disordered sensuality of Symbolist poetry; the high bohemia and low comedy of the Beats and Brecht; the guilt-ridden, God-yearning psalms of King David; the Gospel road of Jesus Christ; the shiv-sharp romance of Bogart and Bacall. There's Emerson in there, too, Keats, Whitman, even Rilke if you look hard enough: fodder for a thousand footnotes, signposts to a hundred sources of further enlightenment.
But if you go far enough with Dylan, he'll always lead you back to the old music. This is the foundation, the deepest roots of his art, of his power. For me, as for so many people, he was the spirit guide to this other world, this vanished heritage: It was after hearing his "Sarah Jane" that I first mentioned Uncle Dave Macon to my father and heard the story of that long-ago visit, and was given the photograph to keep and pass on.
Dylan realized that the essence of the old music - cutting across the rigid classifications of the ethnographers and the purists - was a shared DNA of fundamental themes, fundamental truths: the double helix of joy and mortality, threaded like twine, tangled like snakes, inextricable, irresolvable. It was this genetic code that Dylan used to grow his own art, in its own idiosyncratic forms - just like all the masters of traditional music who preceded him.
Joy and mortality: the psychic pain of being alive, your mind and senses flooded with exquisite wonders, miraculous comprehensions - and the simultaneous knowledge of death, the relentless push of time, the fleeting nature of every single experience, every situation, every moment, dying even as it rises. There's pain waiting somewhere - from within or without - in every joy, a canker in every rose we pluck from the ground of being.
This awareness shadows the old music - deepens it, gives it the bite of eternal truth. The old songs, and the ones Dylan has built upon them, create another reality, an impossible reconciliation, where time stands still, life and death embrace, decay is banished, and all our pettiness, our evil urges, our confusions are arrested and transcended. Until, of course, the song itself, being mortal, fades away as the music ends.
Perhaps this kind of transcendence only works if you're a certain kind of person, with your nerves aligned in a certain way, attuned to a certain signal. Perhaps it's just a happenstance of biochemistry. I don't know. In a world where every understanding, no matter how profound, is provisional, temporary, clouded and corrupted, I wouldn't make universal claims for any particular path. But I do think that the heightened reality offered by Dylan's music - and by the places he leads us to - holds the promise of a rough, plank-road wisdom, something that can make us feel more alive while we're living, while our brief conjuration is passing.
Anyway, it works for me.
Adapted from the upcoming book "Encounters With Bob Dylan," Vol. II, edited by Tracy Johnson.
TITLE: Italy Bans
Smoking
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROME - Smokers in Italy took their last puffs in bars and trattorias Sunday, hours before the start of one of Europe's toughest laws against smoking in public places.
Spared from the antismoking law are the outdoors, private homes, and restaurants and bars with ventilated smoking rooms. Enforcement was set to begin at 12:01 a.m. Monday, when many bars and clubs still were serving customers.
In a restaurant near Viterbo, north of Rome, a dozen cigar aficionados reserved a table for a kind of farewell dinner, promising to puff away on Tuscan and Cuban cigars between courses before the clock struck midnight, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.
"In the end we'll get used to not smoking in restaurants or bars, just like we've already had to do, for example, in trains and planes," said Francesca Cola, 38, who was smoking a cigarette as she sat outside a cafe on Rome's central Piazza Venezia.
Her annoyance was plain. "I think this is excessive zeal against smokers. It's a witch hunt," she said, adding a pledge to throw more dinner parties and eat out less frequently.
The law, championed by Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia, a physician, bans smoking on public transportation and in hospitals, cinemas, and schools.
Smokers will face fines from $36 to $363 if caught lighting up where they should not, including offices. Owners of premises who ignore the law face fines as high as $2,904.
TITLE: Powell Calls for Long-Term Aid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The United States should go beyond immediate humanitarian aid to tsunami-ravaged nations and plan to help long-term as they rebuild physically and economically, Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he wrapped up a tour of the devastation.
Powell sent U.S. President George W. Bush a report about what he saw on his trip to Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka before heading back to the United States.
He planned to brief the president in person Monday, just a few hours after his return.
Powell said Sunday that the U.S. response to the disaster has been "quite good," and that all the nations in the region have been thankful. He said people were not starving and food was reaching the region, "but there should be no illusion as to how long it's going to take to rebuild these communities."
The secretary told ABC's "This Week" that he'll recommend to Bush "that we stay engaged, that this is a long-term prospect; that we use our money not just for immediate humanitarian relief, but for economic assistance, for infrastructure development."
The United States will assess over time whether to increase its disaster aid beyond the $350 million already pledged, Powell said. "If $350 million isn't enough, I'm sure the president will try to get more into this account," he told CNN's "Late Edition."
The tsunami struck on Dec. 26, and Bush was criticized for not reacting personally and immediately while on a holiday vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
The president has been trying to make up for it in recent days, visiting embassies of the hardest-hit nations, enlisting former Presidents Bush and Clinton to increase private donations to the region and ordering U.S. flags to fly at half-staff in memory of the victims.
Following his briefing from Powell, Bush will speak to employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development and other leaders of humanitarian aid efforts, thanking them for their help in the recovery.
Powell said he has seen unimaginable devastation in places like Banda Aceh, Indonesia, that will take years to rebuild.
"It was just unbelievable to see what had been a village with trees, with schools, with houses suddenly just scraped clean as if a bulldozer went through and took it down to the ground level," Powell said on ABC. "And it's not just the devastation of the houses, to know that thousands of people were in those houses, and now they're all gone."
But he said other areas should recover more quickly.
"If you look at Phuket, the resort area of Thailand, I expect that will come up rather quickly, in a matter of months," Powell said on CNN.
He said Congress must be willing to replenish funds for the disaster relief so that the United States still has enough money to help African nations in the battle against AIDS and other humanitarian needs worldwide.
Powell was interviewed from Nairobi, Kenya, where he attended the signing of a peace agreement to end a long-running conflict in Sudan, before he flew home. Powell leaves office in ten days at the end of Bush's first term.
TITLE: Damaged U.S. Nuclear Sub
Reaches Port After Accident
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAGATNA, Guam - A nuclear submarine that ran aground about 550 kilometers south of Guam, killing one crewman and injuring 23 others, reached its home port of Apra Harbor, Guam, on Monday, according to a Navy spokesman.
The dead man was identified by the Navy as Machinist Mate 2nd Class Joseph Allen Ashley, 24, of Akron, Ohio.
He died Sunday of injuries he received in the accident, said Jon Yoshishige, spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Honolulu.
There were no reports of damage to the USS San Francisco's reactor plant, but the extent of damage to the 110-meter submarine would be determined after an investigation of its hull, Yoshishige said. The vessel reached port under its own power.
Officials said they still don't know what the Los Angeles-class submarine hit Saturday, but Lieutenant Adam Clampitt of the Pacific Fleet said it had been conducting operations underwater at the time.
Details of the accident will not be disclosed while the investigation into its cause continued, Yoshishige said.
It was apparent that the bow, or front, of the submarine sustained damage, and an assessment will be conducted to determine the extent of the damage, he said.
Lieutenant Arwen Consaul, a Navy public affairs officer here, said the hull was intact.
Navy medical personnel from Guam were brought aboard the submarine to treat the injuries, which included broken bones, lacerations, bruises and a back injury, the Navy said.
The submarine has a crew of 137.
Ashley graduated in 1999 from Manchester High School where he played drums with the high school marching band, his mother, Vicki Ashley, said on Sunday.
She said he followed the footsteps of his father, Daniel Ashley, who served eight years in the Navy during the Vietnam War.
The San Francisco is one of three submarines based on Guam.
Located west of the international date line, Guam is a U.S. territory about 6,000 kilometers southwest of Hawaii.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Baghdad Cop Killed
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Gunmen assassinated Baghdad's deputy police chief outside his home, and a suicide bomber in a patrol car killed three Iraqis at a police station Monday, a police source said.
Brigadier Amer Nayef was shot dead along with his son as they left the family home in the southern Dora area of the capital, the source said.
The powerful blast at the police station in the southern Zaafaraniya area also wounded police officers, the police source said, and the death toll could rise.
Three weeks before Iraqis go to the polls, insurgents have stepped up their campaign of violence to derail the country's first election since the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein.
55 Die in Bus Crash
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - At least 55 passengers were feared dead in southern India on Monday after a bus crashed into a canal, police said.
They said the accident occurred around 3 a.m. in Bijapur district of Karnataka state, about 530 kilometers northwest of state capital Bangalore.
"It fell into a deep canal downstream of the Almatti dam," a police officer in Bangalore said by phone.
Nine of the 64 passengers on board the state-run bus survived, a Bijapur police officer said by phone, adding rescue teams had recovered eight bodies so far.
Cleric Granted Bail
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to one of Hinduism's most venerated clerics after he spent nearly two months in jail in connection with the murder of a temple official.
Jayendra Saraswathi, who heads a highly revered monastery in Kanchipuram town in Tamil Nadu, was arrested on Nov. 12 on charges of murder, abetment and conspiracy to murder in a case that has shocked the predominantly Hindu country.
The cleric, one of India's most powerful religious leaders, has rejected the charges as baseless and said the arrest was a conspiracy. But state courts had repeatedly denied him bail.
Chavez: Colombia Lies
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that Colombian authorities were lying about their capture of a top Marxist rebel who he said had been kidnapped in Caracas by Colombian police.
The dispute over whether top FARC guerrilla member Rodrigo Granda was arrested in Colombia or snatched from neighboring Venezuela has become an embarrassment for Chavez after recent moves to improve ties with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.
Ties between Venezuela and Colombia have often been soured by incidents along their rugged 2,250-kilometer border.
Pitt, Aniston to Part
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Superstar Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have separated after 4 1/2 years of marriage, but they remain "committed and caring friends," they said Friday.
The announcement of their split followed months of tabloid stories about spousal ups and downs, including reports that Pitt, 41, wanted to become a father but Aniston, 35, was reluctant to start a family.
Pitt, one of Hollywood's most sought-after leading men, and Aniston, who became a household name on the long-running NBC television comedy "Friends," met on a dinner date in 1998.
TITLE: Carlos Moya Retains Chennai Open Title
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MADRAS, India - Spain's Carlos Moya rallied to defeat Thailand's Paradorn Srichaphan and retain his Chennai Open title on Sunday, then donated his $52,000 prize money to tsunami relief efforts.
"It is a small contribution which I hope will help the affected families," said Moya. "They deserve all the help they can get."
The top-seed battled back from 5-2 down in the deciding set to prevail 3-6 6-4 7-6 in a final lasting more than 2 1/2 hours. Around 200 people died a short drive away from the tennis stadium in Madras, also known as Chennai, when devastating tsunamis struck south and east Asia two weeks ago. Nearly 10,000 of the more than 150,000 victims of the Dec. 26 tidal waves died in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu of which Madras is the capital.
"I'm very concerned about what happened a week before I came here and want to donate all the prize money to tsunami victims," Moya said. "I want the money I have earned here to help the survivors of one of the worst tragedies of our times."
Paradorn, Asia's top player and winner in 2003, appeared set to avenge last year's final defeat before Moya reeled off four games in a row.
The disheartened Paradorn saved three match points, two in the tiebreak, before Moya clinched it 7-5 to secure his 18th career ATP title.
Paradorn had dominated the first set, the 25-year-old Thai hitting deep and moving to the net to finish.
Moya, the 1998 French Open winner, however, showed better control over his trademark forehand shots to claim a see-saw second set which featured five breaks of serve.
"I felt I was not controlling the match and he was playing too well," Moya said. "But I never gave up, I played my best tennis."
"Carlos deserved to win," said Paradorn. "We played a great match."
Moya, who led Spain's victory against the United States in the Davis Cup final in December, said he was delighted to start the season with a win.
"There is no better way to start the new year," he said. "Last year, too, I won here in January, ended the year by winning the Davis Cup and have now begun the year with another win.
"It bodes well for the tough contests ahead in the Australian Open."
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Australia's Lleyton Hewitt denied he had a history of choking in his home Grand Slam tournament and brushed aside suggestions world number one Roger Federer had a psychological stranglehold over him.
World No. 3 Hewitt said he was intent on improving his poor record in next week's Australian Open, where he has never made it past the fourth round.
Speaking at the Sydney International warm-up tournament, where he is top seed, the former Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion denied pressure to become the first local to win the Australian Open since Mark Edmondson in 1976 was weighing on his preparation.
He said there were valid reasons for his recent early exits from the Melbourne tournament - an in-form Federer last year, a "freak" performance by Morocco's Younes el Aynaoui in 2003 and a bout of chickenpox in 2002.
"I've played enough big matches in Australia that the pressure of playing in Australia doesn't bother me at all," he said.
Hewitt lost to Federer five times in 2004, including a defeat in the U.S. Open final and early exits from the Australian Open and Wimbledon.
He said he was not allowing the losses to play on his mind, particularly as the Swiss player had "taken the game to another level" in the past 18 months.
"It doesn't beat you up, especially as there's no shame right now in losing to Roger, he's a hell of a player and he's going to go down as one of the greatest," Hewitt said.
The Australian said he would concentrate on getting past the fourth round of the Open then consider the challenge posed by Federer when the time came.
"To come out and just think that you've got to worry about Roger Federer, then at the end you probably won't get to have a crack at him anyway," he said.
(AFP, Reuters)