SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1049 (15), Friday, March 4, 2005
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TITLE: Pension
Payouts
In Crisis
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One morning at the end of January, St. Petersburg pensioner Lyudmila Pavlova, 56, went to the nearest branch of state-controlled Sberbank to collect her pension as she does at the end of every month, but she left empty-handed after spending 1 1/2 hours in a line to the cashier's desk.
"They told me that my pension had not been transferred yet and said that it might be in my account the next day, Jan. 27," Pavlova wrote in her letter to the Legislative Assembly in February. "But my pension was not there on that day either. I asked them to sell me a discounted public transport pass, but they said they sell those only to people whose pension has arrived.
"When I called the Nevsky District branch of the Pension Fund the next day they very rudely explained to me that they had a computer glitch and that my pension would be transferred in March. When I asked how I was supposed to live and how I could buy a discounted transport pass, they replied that this was none of their business," she said.
Pavlova is just one of many thousands of city residents who have no money to live on this winter because of problems at the St. Petersburg branch of the State Pension Fund. The authorities describe the failure to pay as a "technical" problem.
Pensioners are supposed to be receiving more cash than previously so that they can pay for in-kind benefits they used to receive for free.
The Legislative Assembly on Wednesday asked the City Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev to investigate the reasons for the breakdown in the payment system and to punish those responsible.
Legislators on Wednesday also called on Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to intervene.
Anatoly Steklyannikov, 71, a resident of Moskovsky District, has been luckier than Pavlova, but complained last month that his payout has been 229 rubles ($8.17) less - than the 2,686-ruble ($96) pension that the government assigned to him in November 2003.
"At the first they promised to return the money they stole in January, but it didn't happen," he wrote in a letter to the Legislative Assembly in February.
"How long will the authorities lie to us and irritate sick pensioners?" he said.
Denis Pak, a lawyer working for the city parliament, said Thursday that Legislative Assembly lawmakers receive numerous phone calls every day from angry pensioners.
"The problem might be that the Pension Fund did not coordinate its actions with its regional branches when introducing the replacement of in-kind benefits with cash," Pak said in an interview.
"As a result, many people couldn't get their pensions or compensations for the abolished privileges," he said. "In the Primorsky district, for instance, people stood in lines for hours and got nothing. In many other places the picture [this winter] was the same," he said.
"People keep calling lawmakers every day and the thing is that not all of those who suffered approach deputies," Pak said.
No comment was available from the Pension Fund on Thursday.
At the end of December, when the first examples of a breakdown in the payment system became evident, Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov said human error, not computers, was to blame.
Eleven employees of the city branch of the Pension Fund had resigned, the minister said, but lawmakers say that the resignations had not led to any improvements.
"The number of phone calls from pensioners calling my office these days is exactly the same as it was," Viktor Yevtukhov, a United Russia faction lawmaker, said Thursday in a telephone interview. "Nothing has changed. In the Primorsky district it is totally out of control. The district administration is spending all its time resolving this problem."
"We expect the prosecutor's office to take serious steps," Yevtukhov said.
Yevtukhov said the deputies want pension fund officials to face criminal charges. The law permits such charges to be laid if pensions are not paid for more than two months.
The City Prosecutor's Office said it is too early to say which charges, if any, the fund's staff could face.
"We are going to examine documents and the statements the Legislative Assembly is going to send us. We will take as much time as necessary," Yelena Ordynskaya, the prosecutor's office spokeswoman, said Thursday.
TITLE: Rejected Snow Leopard Gulya Devoted to Keeper
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg's Leningrad Zoo is worried its snow leopard cub Gulya, which the city administration intends to give to the city of Kazan as a 1000th anniversary present, is too weak, both physically and mentally, to make the move.
The zoo says eight-month-old Gulya is ill and unprepared to cope with the changes that going to the capital of Tatarstan would entail.
"She is not very strong physically and has a unique character," zoo spokesman Boris Topolyansky said Thursday.
Gulya's problems began when she was born and her mother rejected her. As a result, Gulya's hormone balance was upset, and she has suffered from several infections, he said.
Then Galina Afanasyeva, a scientific consultant on the zoo's staff, took Gulya home to join a menagerie of turtles, a dog, parrots, a guinea-pig, and a chinchilla she keeps as pets.
Afanasyeva has become almost a mother to Gulya. She hand-fed her every two hours and got almost no sleep. However, Afanasyeva's care gave the cub a new lease on life and she recovered from almost all her illnesses.
But three months ago when Gulya was returned to the zoo, the move from Afanasyeva's home into a cage stressed the cub. Scared by her new surroundings, new smells and the sounds of the zoo, including the roars of lions, Gulya refused to eat.
Afanasyeva made another sacrifice and went to live with Gulya in the cage for 10 days.
"Galina took a sleeping bag in there and spent her nights with Gulya," Topolyansky said.
Gulya is now coping better, but she still feels uneasy when Afanasyeva is not around.
"We can see that Gulya has developed a dependent character, and we are worried how she will react if she moves to Kazan," Topolyansky said.
Afanasyeva said Thursday that Gulya is not ready for the move.
"I'm afraid that Gulya will not be of much interest for Kazan because of her problems," she said in a telephone interview.
"Her only advantage is that she is hand-reared and can be shown to the zoo's visitors outside her cage. However, this won't work in Kazan because she is used to only a few people in our zoo."
Afanasyeva said the zoo has informed the city's culture committee, which is responsible for the zoo, about Gulya's fragility, and has suggested that the committee wait for Gulya's mother to have another cub. If the mother raises the next cub herself, it will be healthier and more able to adapt.
"If that's unacceptable, we suggest that Gulya stay another year with us to build up her strength before giving her to Kazan," she said.
That would mean she would not arrive in the anniversary year, but could still be donated as a "virtual" gift, she added.
Topolyansky said that if the committee insists that Gulya go this year, tough preparations will be undertaken.
"We'll have to limit or even completely stop Gulya's contact with Afanasyeva," he said. "We'll need to adjust Gulya to transport."
Also worrying for zoo staff is a plan to hand Gulya over to the mayor of Kazan in the presence of a large crowd, which is likely to frighten Gulya out of her wits.
"This means we must start exposing her to big crowds of people," he said.
However, the Leningrad Zoo has no doubt that if Gulya travels well the staff at Kazan Zoo will take good care of her.
The Leningrad Zoohas good connections with the Kazan Zoo, where many of the Leningrad Zoo's animals were evacuated to during the World War II Siege of Leningrad. St. Petersburg was then known as Leningrad.
Topolyansky said the Kazan Zoo still keeps the skeletons of Leningrad's rhinoceros, who died after being evacuated to Kazan, and a crocodile, which died on the way to Kazan.
Snow leopards have been categorized as an endangered species by the World Conservation Union since 1972.
There are only an estimated 3,500 to 7,000 surviving snow leopards left in the world, and about 700 of them live in zoos.
In 2000, animal lovers raised numerous concerns that a proposed natural gas pipeline and accompanying road from southern Siberia to China would destroy the ecology of a plateau in Siberia where snow leopards live and cause their extinction.
TITLE: 'Gambit' Sets New Box Office Record
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Turetsky Gambit, (Turkish Gambit) the latest Channel One production, collected $6.5 million in ticket sales during its first week in movie theaters.
Turetsky Gambit, the latest production from the domestic film industry, looks set to break all post-Soviet box office records, beating last year's homegrown blockbuster Nochnoi Dozor, or Night Watch.
In the first week since its release on Feb. 22, Turetsky Gambit" collected $6.5 million in ticket sales in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the film's distributor, Gemini Film International, said Tuesday.
"Turetsky Gambit" is second only to the previous first-week record set by "The Matrix Revolutions," Gemini deputy director Vadim Ivanov said. "Night Watch" reaped $5.3 million in its first week in cinemas, later becoming Russia's best selling film to date with total revenues of $17 million in 2004.
"Both impressions from the film and arithmetic suggest that it has all the chances of becoming Russia's No. 1 film," said Ivanov.
Copies of "Turetsky Gambit" have been distributed to 365 theaters, Ivanov said, while only 300 cinemas showed "Night Watch." Before the release of "Turkish Gambit," the distribution record was held by "Alexander," which was screened in 348 theaters.
"Turetsky Gambit" is a screen adaptation of Boris Akunin's book by the same title set during the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War.
One possible reason that "Turetsky Gambit" had better first-week box office results than "Night Watch" is because Wednesday was a national holiday, said Yelena Maslova, an editor of industry publication Kinobiznes Segodnya.
Another reason could be that the plot of "Turetsky Gambit" is accessible to a wider audience.
Akunin's book has sold some 1 million copies since appearing in 1998. By comparison, "Night Watch," which was also published in that year, has sold about 350,000 copies.
"Turetsky Gambit" is a movie that "friends tell me is pleasant to go to with the family," said Dzhanik Faiziyev, the film's director.
The film features the Akunin character Erast Fandorin, a sleuth who is on a mission to ferret out a mole in the Russian ranks. When a beautiful woman arrives on the scene, a romance develops between the two. "Night Watch," on the other hand, is a fantasy-thriller that centers around a twisted plot including supernatural creatures.
"Turetsky Gambit" reportedly had a production budget of $3.5 million, less than the $4 million budget that "Night Watch" had.
Impressed by the success of "Night Watch," 20th Century Fox signed a deal with the film's director Timur Bekmambetov to distribute the film internationally and cooperate with production company Channel One on a big-budget prequel.
Hollywood studios have not contacted Channel One, which also produced "Turkish Gambit," for cooperation on a Fandorin series, a Channel One spokeswoman said. "People in the movie business don't react that quickly," she said.
When asked if he would accept a cooperation offer from Hollywood, director Faiziyev said: "Hell if I know. So far, I don't know what we'd get out of it."
(see review, page x, AAT)
TITLE: Journalist's Killers Identified
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV - Ukraine's chief prosecutor said Wednesday that investigators knew who ordered the slaying of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, but refused to identify the suspected mastermind.
"The killers executed a criminal order. We know the person who gave this order," Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun told reporters.
He said the suspected killers had been identified: two are in custody, one is under orders not to leave Kiev and the fourth is still at large. No charges have been filed yet.
Gongadze, an Internet journalist who wrote about high-level corruption, was abducted in central Kiev in September 2000, and his decapitated body was found months later buried in a forest outside the capital. His death sparked months of protests against former President Leonid Kuchma, whom the opposition accused of being involved in the killing. The claim was based on recordings that a former presidential bodyguard said were made secretly in Kuchma's office. In the tapes, Kuchma was overheard repeatedly complaining about Gongadze's reporting and ordering former Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko to "drive him out, throw [him] out, give him to the Chechens."
Piskun said Kravchenko was expected to meet with prosecutors Friday for questioning.
Kuchma has vehemently denied being involved in Gongadze's killing, and denied the authenticity of the tapes. Kuchma is currently at a spa in the Czech Republic.
President Viktor Yushchenko, an opposition leader who was elected president in December after a divisive campaign against Kuchma's chosen successor, had pledged to solve the case, calling it his government's moral duty.
On Tuesday, Yushchenko announced that authorities had detained the suspected killers.
Piskun said the suspects included two colonels and a police officer. The fourth is a former senior police official, identified as Oleksiy Pukach, who is wanted on an international warrant, Piskun said.
"The task from the president has been performed - the case has been solved, the killers were found," Piskun said.
On the night of his death, Gongadze got into what he thought was a taxi, and then was joined by three others and driven outside Kiev, Piskun said.
"The people who took him in the car had the intention to kill him," he said.
Gongadze was beaten and strangled, and his body was doused with gasoline and burned, Piskun said. Experts have said that Gongadze was decapitated after his death.
Piskun asked Yushchenko to provide bodyguards for the four main investigators. He also urged Kuchma's former bodyguard, Mykola Melnichenko, to return to Ukraine with his audiotapes, offering him immunity.
Melnichenko is also believed to be in the Czech Republic.
TITLE: Kursk Families Say Sailors Could Have Been Saved
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Relatives of the submariners who died on the Kursk say they will drop their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if President Vladimir Putin reopens an inquiry into the disaster.
Some relatives are dissatisfied with an investigation by Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov. He found that most of the crew died in two powerful blasts and a handful of survivors lived only a few hours after the nuclear submarine sank on Aug. 12, 2000.
Rescue attempts could not have saved the survivors and no one was to blame for the tragedy, he said.
The relatives disagree, saying that survivors lived longer, could have been saved and that someone should be held accountable. After Ustinov closed the investigation and they failed to get their claims heard in a Moscow court, the relatives appealed to Strasbourg in January.
"We have enough grounds to ask for a new investigation of the Kursk tragedy, but in fact we don't want to sue Russia," said Boris Kuznetsov, lawyer for the relatives, at the launch of his book on the catastrophe in St. Petersburg on Tuesday.
"If the president helps us, we'll recall our appeal to the European Court," he said, adding that Kursk families plan to send an open letter to the president that will be published in Russian newspapers.
The press service of the presidential administration said Wednesday that the letter from the Kursk relatives will receive an answer.
"We can't, of course, know what the answer will be, but there'll be an answer," a representative who asked not to be named said in a telephone interview from Moscow.
The press service of the General Military Prosecutor's Office said Kuznetsov has filed complaints about the Kursk investigation in several different courts, but each court has refused to reopen the case on the grounds that the investigation was properly conducted.
However, if Putin orders that the case be reopened, prosecutors would comply, the service said.
Kuznetsov's and the relatives' main disagreement with Ustinov's report is their claim that 23 sailors survived in the submarine's ninth compartment for at least two days.
"The myth that sailors of the ninth compartment were doomed was the major falsification of the official investigation," the letter to Putin says.
"We are convinced that if the rescue operation had begun on time... if the commanders of the Northern Fleet used divers and essential equipment, and if the designers and constructors of the submarine had not made mistakes over the emergency hatch, the 23 sailors would be alive today," it says.
Rescuers did not get inside the emergency hatch until Aug. 21, nine days after the sinking. Norwegian divers who opened the hatch said the submarine was completely flooded.
Relatives also said that the Kursk had not been seaworthy when it had sailed to join a naval exercise in the Barents Sea, where it sank.
"I don't believe that no one is to blame for the tragedy," said Vladimir Mityayev, the father of a Kursk officer. "I want those responsible for the Kursk catastrophe to be named."
The criminal investigation into the disaster was stopped in July 2003 after a special commission ruled that the explosion on board the submarine was caused by a torpedo accident during a training launch.
All 118 crewmembers were killed in the disaster.
Kuznetsov's book is titled "It Sank ... ," a reference to an answer Putin gave on a U.S. television program on CNN television when asked by presenter Larry King what had happened to the Kursk.
In the book, Kuznetsov makes the case that the investigation of the disaster was inefficient and came to the wrong conclusions.
TITLE: Tsereteli Designs Tsunami Monument
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Controversial sculptor Zurab Tsereteli is working on a monument to victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami in Southeast Asia on that killed about 300,000 people.
His plans were confirmed at St. Petersburg's MonumentSculptura plant, where Tsereteli usually constructs his works. The work is only in the design stage.
The center of the monument will be a tree of life - an ancient religious object of worship for the people of the world. Tsereteli plans to show the tsunami wave approaching the tree.
The monument is to be offered as a gift from the Russian people to the countries hit by the tsunami.
Tsereteli, well known for his taste for gigantism, has also unveiled plans for a bronze and granite monument to the victims of last September's hostage crisis in Beslan.
The sculptor also made a monument to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. However, Jersey City, where he first intended to install his 10-story high "Tear of Grief," rejected his work. It is now to be installed in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Tsereteli has made several works that have been erected overseas, although it is not clear that his donations are always welcome. In June last year he unveiled a five-meter statue of Honore de Balzac, the 19th century novelist, in the French town of Agde, not in Paris as was expected.
His giant statue of Peter the Great stands incongruously in the Moskva River in Moscow, where his close friend Yury Luzhkov is mayor and a number of Tsereteli works feature in public places.
Tsereteli's 45-meter monument "Birth of the New Man" stands in Seville, Spain.
TITLE: i-Free Launch SMS Translator
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Content provider i-Free has launched an English to Russian and vice-versa translating service for mobile phones.
The service that runs via SMS messages has been developed by Prompt, a translation technologies company, to operate on all mobile phone networks as of March 1.
"There are situations when a lot depends on the speed and exactness of a translation," Boris Tikhomirov, head of the Internet projects department of PROMT, said in a company statement. "In such cases a translator [service] that provides a language solution in seconds is really irreplaceable."
Such a service has been available on the Internet for several years, but its mobile phone exposure has been limited.
"Only a limited number of subscribers to some cell phone services companies had this tool before, or the option was [to use] the Internet," said Andrei Kupryakhin, general manager of i-FREE.
"However not many people have access to the Internet, while a cell phone has become part of everyday life," he said.
Mobile phone subscribers can send an SMS message on a 4443 number with the code words RE (for translation from Russian to English) or ER (for English to Russian). The answer, at a cost of 0.15 conditional units (4 rubles) per word or phrase, is sent back within seconds.
The company estimates that the service will prove especially popular among business people, students and travelers, an opinion that is not shared by other market players.
"Our company is not involved in such projects, and personally I think that the customer base for such a service will be rather limited," Anna Chesnova, manager for web sales at INFON content provider said Thursday.
A professional translator, who asked not to be named, saw the service as possibly useful as entertainment, but not as a working tool.
"It may be useful to translate one phrase but not for professional translation," he said.
Svetlana, an18-year-old student was more enthusiastic: "It is definitely a big help, especially during exams."
TITLE: Tram Firm Under Investigation
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Gorelectrotrans, the city tram streetcars monopolist, was slammed with inappropriate money allocation and financial violations in a report by the city's Audit Chamber, the Legislative Assembly budget committee said Tuesday.
While checking the activity of Gorelectrotrans for 2002-2003, the chamber found the organization's financial structure to be unsatisfactory, and the company unable to pay its bills, said Vladimir Barkanov, head of the assembly's budget committee.
"The examination was initiated by the [city] parliament together with the Legislative Assembly and results were handed over to the prosecutor's office with an aim to change the situation at Gorelectrotrans. [That is] to save it from financial collapse," Barkanov said Tuesday in a telephone interview.
"We will look though options [of] what could be done to improve the situation," he added.
In just two years of operation the company has lost millions of dollars through mismanagement, the report said.
In 2003 Gorelectrotrans had to pay a 65 million ruble fine ($2.32 million) for failing to fulfil its obligations to pay back loans taken from non-budgetary funds. The same year the company was forced to pay another 5.6 million ruble fine for delayed salary payments.
The company incurred further multimillion ruble losses as a result of ineffective tenant relations and advertising activity, the report said. Meanwhile, uncompleted construction agreements with Skat and StroibaltServis incurred 3.6 million ruble losses.
The chamber report also raised the issue of financial assistance that Gorelectrotrans provided for Rusichi charity organization that supports disabled servicemen. The company paid out 2,700 rubles each to former servicemen despite being prohibited from charity action by the City Charter, the report said.
"There are lots of ways to improve the condition of the company, such as to provide an analysis of the previous mistakes, enforce control over spending and to punish the management," Barkanov said.
Gorelectrotrans could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Gorelectrotrans owns five tram parks and five streetcar parks, some of which are located in areas attractive for residential construction, namely the Bolshaya Posadskaya Street and Sredny Prospect on Vasilyevsky Island, Kommersant reported Tuesday.
The company's 17-hectare tram park No. 3 alone has a market value of about $70 million.
City Hall promised to sell tram parks No. 4 and No. 6 territories in April last year, something that has still not be done, the newspaper reported.
"I was working on the examination [team] about a month ago. [Gorelectrotrans] have stolen all that was possible to steal," Boris Vishnevksy, a member of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly, said Wednesday.
One example was a shady deal Gorelectrotrans's former director Valentin Polyushin signed in 2002, Vishnevsky said.
"Their former director, just a few days before he left his position, sold their whole resort base located on the outskirts of St. Petersburg for some small amount of money. He just gave it up and left," Vishnevsky said.
According to the audit chamber report, Polyushin sold the Northern Venus holiday base located in the Komarovo settlement by the Gulf of Finland for 40,000 rubles ($1,430,) which was much lower than its market value.
TITLE: Bosch-Siemens to Build $65M Plant in Neudorf
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: German Bosch-Siemens Hausgeraete will invest 50 million euros ($65 million) into refrigerator plant construction in St. Petersburg's new industrial zone, the company said Wednesday.
The construction will start in the first quarter of 2007 on a 25-hectare land plot in the Neudorf-Strelna land development, 20 kilometers west of the city center near Peterhof.
The Neudorf-Strelna zone is one of the few in the city with modern engineering communications networks, a factor that played a decisive role in the company's choice of location.
"We chose St. Petersburg because of its excellent assets in terms of infrastructure and manpower, the transport accessibility, and availability of potential suppliers," Eva Delabre, BSH corporate communications officer, said in an e-mail from Munich.
"We found the local investment climate good and the administration competent," Delabre said.
Bosch expressed interest in building a factory in Neudorf back in December, but was unable to confirm the decision until now. It will be the company's second plant in Russia, the first being a gas-stove factory that opened in the Moscow region in 1998.
"Russia is a big emerging market and the company hopes for further growth and development in the country," Delabre said.
The new plant is supposed to provide the nearby towns of Lomonosov and Peterhof with 500 new job places in the first year of operations. This is especially important considering 30 percent of the towns' population commutes to St. Petersburg for work every day.
"The plant will help the city in easing traffic volumes and solving social problems in the suburbs," Vladimir Blank, the head of the city's economic development industrial policy and trade committee, said Wednesday.
Since the plant will output a finished not an intermediary product, it is also likely to subcontract local companies, which will aid the area's industrial development, Blank said.
The city reportedly spent 96 million rubles ($3.5 million) on the modernization of infrastructure networks in Neudorf, and investments Blank said will pay off within half a year of the plant's operation.
In addition, as soon as the company's tax payments exceed $5 million, it will receive profit and property tax breaks according to the existing investment conditions, Blank said.
Besides the Bosch plant, there are 35 hectares of land available to other investors interested in the Neudorf-Strelna zone. Since the area has been developed as part of the Russian-German economic cooperation program, Blank said he expects other investors to also be German companies.
"We will fill the Neudorf zone within half a year," he said, saying negotiations with potential investors are underway.
Earlier the head of German Economic House Stefan Stein named Henkel, KBE, Knauf and major German banks Raiffeisen and Dresdner among companies that are potentially interested in expanding to the area.
"It is important that companies with worldwide brand names such as Bosch-Siemens are coming to St. Petersburg. It helps improve the city's image abroad and also restores domestic consumer confidence," Blank said.
Bosch said the plant will have an annual capacity of 500,000 refrigerator after the first order of assembly lines is installed. Considering that, according to the city statistics bureau, St. Petersburg has only about 2 million households, and the average refrigerator life span is 12 years, the factory will provide a considerable contribution to the local consumer appliances market.
TITLE: City: China Town Project Is an Investor Right
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The $1.25 billion China Town project will go ahead despite citizen group protests.
St. Petersburg's legislative assembly declined Wednesday to run a citywide referendum on the matter, saying it would contradict the constitutional rights of investors.
"[The referendum] cannot be held on an issue that may limit the rights and freedoms of people and enterprises," Mikhail Brodsky, the gubernatorial representative of the Legislative Assembly, said following the decision.
"In this case, a referendum would undermine the rights of the Republic of China and contradict international agreements," Brodsky said.
The demand was put forth to the assembly by a group of 22 city residents, following heated public hearings about the project held at the beginning of February.
A citizens' group from the Krasnoselsky district - where the construction of the project, officially called the Baltic Pearl, is to take place - cited concerns over what it said would be a "Chinese expansion."
Alexander Teterdinko, a representative of the group said it retained the right to appeal the assembly's decision in court, Interfax reported.
However, experts say the controversy is just an excuse to cover up small-scale political intrigues going on behind the scenes.
Unlike other city districts eyed by foreigners for direct investments, the Krasnoselsky development has no engineering or water network infrastructure.
It's doubtful the district residents wouldn't want to see the area developed, Vitaly Rakitin, one the Krasnoselsky district heads, said earlier.
The development would also benefit the residents financially. According to Brodsky, over 30 percent of the investment money would be got towards salaries for Krasnoselsky district residents employed on the project.
"It is likely that the project will go on as [planned]. There seem to be parties that are quite interested in it. However, public opinion is important and needs to be improved for the project to progress at the desired scale and speed," said Carl Fey, professor of international business at the Stockholm School of Economics, who focuses on Chinese-Russian relations.
Baltic Pearl aims to develop the Krasnoselsky district into a mini city complete with an 80-hecatre residential area, schools, cafes and hypermarkets within six years.
Although the project has received a lot of media attention, there has been no actual development since late December when the city government signed a preliminary agreement with China's state-owned Shanghai Investment and Industrial Corporation.
"The next step would be to begin land planning and research works, a stage [that] awaits the government's permission," said Karina Chichkanova, senior lawyer at Salans International, which acts as the legal adviser to the Shanghai corporation in the city.
It is unclear, however when that step will take place, she said.
The city representatives of Shanghai's corporation declined to comment on the issue Wednesday, not wishing to be embroiled in political intrigues.
TITLE: Moskva Sold in $40M Deal
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city's 74.42 percent stake in the Moskva Hotel was sold at auction Thursday for about $40 million.
The buyer was an obscure company called Tsentr Investirovaniya, of Center of Investment.
Nineteen companies took part, including some from Cyprus and Norway, but in the final stages [of the auction] only Russian bidders remained," Interfax quoted the city property department as saying.
Fontanka.ru suggested that the buyer was a front company for Russkiye Oteli, which is associated with the Bazovy Element holding, and Adamant.
The winner's agent described the firm as a city one formed recently that had already participated in auctions for stakes in the hotels Turist, Chaika and Vyborgskaya, the report said.
The 735-room hotel favored by visitors on package tours is likely to remain a three-star one and the new owner is expected to invest about 1 billion rubles ($36 million) in developing the area around the hotel, the report said.
Built in 1976 and located on Alexander Nevsky Square, the hotel was turned into a joint-stock company in 1996.
The outstanding 25-percent not sold on Thursday belongs to more than 800 shareholders, Fontanka.ru reported.
TITLE: LUKoil to Bid In Land Sale
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: LUKoil announced it will definitely participate in the controversial land plot tender scheduled by City Hall to take place next week.
Head of LUKoil Vagit Alekperov confirmed that the company will take part in the auction for gas station sites that has come under strong criticism from the St. Petersburg Oil Club.
The club, uniting oil companies on the local market, said in February that conditions of the auction would permit the plots to be bought by one company only , allegedly LUKoil.
According to auction conditions a company interested in bidding will have to pay the city 300 million rubles ($10.7 million) before the land is signed over to them plus another 2 billion rubles into the budget during 2005.
n Ten gas station land plots that the city planned to sell at Friday's auction have been withdrawn due to a lack of interest, Interfax reported Thursday.
No bidders had registered for the plots that were to be sold as one lot by the city's property fund on March 4.
TITLE: Supreme Court Opens Door to Better Rules
TEXT: Most people don't pay much attention to the distinctly nontraditional figure of Themis that adorns the pediment of the new Supreme Court building on Povarskaya Ulitsa. But in a plenary session on Feb. 24, Russia's highest court of general jurisdiction adopted a resolution that gave new meaning to the sculptor's deviations from the accepted norms for portraying the Greek goddess of justice. Now we understand why Themis isn't wearing a blindfold and why she is holding a shield instead of a sword in her hand. On Feb. 24 she looked toward Strasbourg with her eyes wide open, thinking not about punishment but defense - of honor, dignity and professional reputation. For the first time she consented to use her traditional scales to find a balance between the right to defend oneself against defamation and the right of access to information, freedom of self-expression and freedom of the press.
The Supreme Court resolution provided rare evidence to back up President Vladimir Putin's assurances at the Bratislava summit of Russia's commitment to democratic values. It provides real hope for a radical improvement in the way the courts handle libel cases. The resolution clearly states that in such cases the courts "must take into account the legal position of the European Court of Human Rights as expressed in its resolutions on the interpretation and application" of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The courts must also bear in mind that the concept of defamation employed by the European Court of Human Rights is "identical to the concept of disseminating false and defamatory information" contained in the Civil Code. This innovation could be likened to the creation of a single time zone encompassing both Moscow and Strasbourg.
To this point, nearly two-thirds of defamation cases have ended in defeat for the press, and frequently for the public interest as well. The courts afford little protection when pensioners and schoolteachers file suit against major publishing houses or television stations. But when the plaintiff is a Cabinet member, governor, mayor or anyone else who either holds power or is close to power, victory over the press and the truth is practically guaranteed. Damages awarded for emotional distress and damage to reputation are often enough to bankrupt even the most successful publishing house or broadcasting company. Many of these lawsuits are intended not to defend the honor and dignity of unjustly injured bureaucrats, but to destroy independent media outlets. As a result, when the courts order the press to retract unproven assertions about a high-ranking or well-connected plaintiff that everyone nevertheless knows to be true, society, not the press, is the real loser.
Don't forget that the parties in a legal dispute of this kind are far from equal: Journalists are required to prove the truth of their words, but plaintiffs are not required to prove the opposite. The plaintiff enjoys a sort of presumption that journalists spread lies. The Supreme Court cannot redistribute the burden of proof spelled out in the Civil Code, of course. But after further consideration, the court for the first time concluded that plaintiffs must prove not simply that information about them has been disseminated, but that this information is defamatory. The court further defined as defamatory "information containing assertions that a natural or juridical person has violated existing law, performed a dishonorable act, has behaved improperly or unethically in personal, social or political life, is guilty of bad faith in business activities or has violated professional ethics or deviated from customary business practices.
The Supreme Court's definition of false information is particularly important. The editorial commission that drafted the final text of the resolution deliberated long and hard on this issue. In the end we settled on a definition of false information as "the assertion of facts or events that did not obtain in reality at the time indicated by the disputed information."
Information contained in official documents can no longer be considered defamatory under the resolution. If a journalist cites a State Audit Chamber report to the effect that a governor has embezzled state funds, he cannot be taken to court. The outraged governor will have to deal with the Audit Chamber directly. If a journalist cites an interview with an Audit Chamber official, he can be taken to court, but the official will also now be called as a defendant.
The Supreme Court also performed a service to the press and society by mentioning the "Declaration on Freedom of Political Debate in the Media," adopted last year by the Council of Europe. The court explained that "by courting public opinion, political figures agree to be the object of political debate in society and criticism in the mass media." The court further noted that "government employees can be subjected to criticism in the mass media regarding their job performance because this is essential to ensuring the open and responsible performance of their duties." For the first time, recommendations from the Council of Europe have become practically obligatory for Russian courts. This is a valuable precedent.
The Supreme Court didn't forget about the Internet. It explained that online defamation is punishable no less than the offline variety - provided its source can be determined, of course. Even if the source cannot be determined, injured parties can petition the courts to recognize defamatory information about them as having no basis in reality. If the Internet source of this information is officially registered as a mass media outlet, all claims against it must be considered under established rules regarding the mass media. The mass media law provides for the lifting of responsibility in a range of cases.
The Supreme Court resolution coincided with the position of the European Court of Human Rights most strikingly on the necessity to distinguish opinions from statements of fact. This distinction is nothing new in Strasbourg, but in Moscow it comes as a revelation. Until now, the courts have confused statements of fact (violist D. performed drunk as usual) with subjective opinions (in my view, violist D. performed with a terrible hangover). Moreover, the Constitution forbids compelling anyone to renounce his opinion.
The Supreme Court did not change its position on a number of points, however, making its internal contradictions even more obvious. Notably, courts of general jurisdiction will continue to consider defamation suits filed by noncommercial organizations. In principle, this makes it possible to punish critics of any government body from the presidential administration to the local police station.
The Supreme Court also chose not to follow the Supreme Arbitration Court in limiting organizations - as opposed to individuals - to compensation for actual damages, not for moralny vred, or emotional distress. Nor were the judges bothered by the Civil Code's definition of moralny vred as "physical or emotional suffering," which organizations cannot experience by their very nature. On the other hand, the resolution gave reason to hope that the courts will no longer force media outlets to pay exorbitant awards. Its resolution clearly states that compensation "must be commensurate with the damage incurred and should not lead to the restriction of freedom of the press."
The Supreme Court resolution gives us clear and concise rules for applying the Civil Code and the mass media law in cases of defamation. It could also provide a reliable shield for fair-minded judges and honest journalists. But it remains to be seen whether the potential of this resolution can be realized given the high level of corruption and administrative pressure on the courts.
Mikhail Fedotov, former press and information minister of Russia, holds the UNESCO chair in copyright and other intellectual property rights at the Institute of International Law and Economics in Moscow. He contributed this comment to The St. PetersburgTimes.
TITLE: No Piece of Cake to Restore St. Pete
TEXT: St. Petersburg construction companies have an extraordinary appetite, especially when they are licking their lips over the pie at the center of the city. They can hardly wait to dig in so they can fix it up and turn it into the open-air museum it should be, while turning a hefty profit.
The pie, though tasty, will not wind up on developers' plates for free. To get this prime real estate, they will have to deal with a huge number of communal apartment residents, who have to be relocated at the investors' expense before any renovation of the buildings can start. While developers are eager to reap enormous profits from selling residential space in the city center, they do not want to cough up the cash to buy out communal apartments.
The developers offer the residents, many of whom are poor, the cheapest possible option and try to cajole them into a move to housing on the outskirts of the city. It comes as no surprise that people who have spent most of their lives living in the city center refuse to accept such offers. Basically, the developers want to have their cake and eat it too.
Last month, several construction companies sent a letter to City Hall asking the authorities to restrict residents' rights to refuse relocation offers. I hope City Hall ignores the letter because it contradicts the principles of a market economy. The developers want to force owners to sell their property below market prices.
If developers re-examined their pricing policies and their swollen profit margins, perhaps they would see that they have ample resources to renovate the city center and give residents a fair deal. Prices on the St. Petersburg rental market have gone through the roof in the last few years. It is beyond my understanding how a dilapidated one-room apartment in a run-down area of downtown St. Petersburg rents for $500 to $600 per month, while a much nicer apartment in Vienna, for instance, costs about the same. The price of a square meter of new residential property sells for more than $1,000 in areas far from the city center. The cost of constructing these buildings can't be much more than 40 percent or 50 percent of the selling price; construction materials and labor in St. Petersburg are far cheaper than in European Union countries.
Of course, sale prices reflect demand, but it is still strange that a one-bedroom apartment in the Finnish city of Turku costs about the same as one in St. Petersburg. The average income, cost of construction, housing quality and standard of living are all much higher in Turku than in St. Petersburg. There is, however, one key difference that explains everything: developers in the EU are not looking for a 200 percent or even 100 percent net profit from real estate deals.
It is the responsibility of both developers and City Hall to change their approaches toward the renewal and renovation of the center of St. Petersburg. Construction companies should understand that they have to invest more money in relocating residents from downtown, even if this means they will not earn their usual sky-high profits. City Hall officials have to distance themselves from interfering in and profiting from the real estate market. There is no place in the city government for people closely linked to the city's biggest construction companies.
If these things don't change, St. Petersburg is doomed to stay as rundown as it is now for another 100 years. But there is little hope that this approach will change any time soon. The letter sent by developers to City Hall is a sign that in Russia, market players prefer to operate via shady deals made in the backrooms of power, rather than obeying the rules of the market.
TITLE: Fallen star
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When Vadim Kozin toured the Russian Far East in 1955, the conditions weren't quite what the famed tenor was used to. Badly tuned pianos, dripping ceilings and outdoor toilets were a far cry from the Kremlin receptions and packed halls of his pre-war years. But, as a former gulag prisoner, the singer knew all too well that his glory years were over.
A specialist in gypsy romances and self-penned love songs, Kozin once gave a concert with American singer Paul Robeson. He is even said to have performed for Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Tehran conference in 1943. Then he disappeared. His songs were no longer played on the radio and he stopped giving concerts - in public, that is. The singer continued to perform on the stage of a prison camp in Magadan, where he was serving time for political offenses, corrupting youth, and homosexuality.
After his release in 1950 at the age of 45, the singer joined Magadan's local theater troupe and started giving concerts in run-down mining towns and military bases. It was in this period that he wrote a deeply personal diary. Last month, the diary was published by Moscow publishing house Vagrius, in a book edited by longtime Kozin enthusiast Boris Savchenko. The diary's publication reflects a revival of interest in the music of the singer, who has become something of a figurehead for Russia's gay community.
Titled "Damned Art" (Proklyatoye Iskusstvo), the book opens in June 1955 and closes in December 1956, a period in which Kozin gave more than 250 concerts in the Far East and Siberia (the singer was barred from performing in Moscow or Leningrad). Kozin recorded encounters, concerts and political events, but above all, he used the diary to express his feelings of bitterness and isolation as old age approached.
"I am completely forgotten, if you think of the previous epoch when the name Kozin resounded throughout the country," he wrote in February 1956. "It's good when you don't feel tiredness, when you don't care about anything, because you are dead in your body and your soul."
A former Magadan resident himself, Savchenko keeps the two thick volumes of Kozin's diary - written neatly in blue ink and stuffed with press clippings and concert programs - in his Moscow apartment. Kozin sent him the diaries before the singer's death in 1994. "I didn't publish them for 10 years. Now time has gone by. That was 1994 and now it's 2005, and I published them at my own risk," he said Monday. Savchenko conceded that the singer probably would not have wanted to see them published uncensored, in part because of the expletive-laden content, and in part because of the criticism of his friends and acquaintances.
Savchenko first met Kozin in a public library in Magadan in the late 1960s. He became something of an unofficial biographer, publishing the first sanctioned article on the singer in 1982.
"Until then, no one knew [about Kozin]. They had forgotten him completely, as if there were no such singer," he said. "And yet before the war he was Singer No. 1, whom Stalin loved to listen to."
Although Savchenko used to visit the singer often to gather material, he didn't always get a warm reception. "'What are you writing there? I won't tell you anything,'" he recalled that Kozin used to shout. "That's the kind of prickly person he was."
In spite of his reticence, the singer once told Savchenko that he did indeed perform at the Tehran conference, an assertion that is widely disputed. While there, Kozin said, the emigre Russian singer Iza Kremer warned him that he should seek political asylum, since he would certainly be imprisoned on his return. However, Kozin refused to answer any more of Savchenko's questions about the incident.
Another taboo topic for Kozin was sex. "If I asked him about sex, he would say, 'There was no sex, I won't say anything.' That was it," Savchenko recalled. Yet Kozin confided to the author that "Friendship," one of his most famous songs, was dedicated to a man. The lyrics run, "Our tenderness and our friendship are stronger than passion and greater than love."
In one of the diary's few romantic passages, Kozin described a man whose name is not given. "How I would like even just once, even for one instant, to look into the depth of those green eyes," he wrote in August 1956. "Why does it happen like this? One person appears, and there is nothing else sacred in the world. He has filled it all himself. Who that person is, no one will ever find out."
While he may have avoided physical details, Kozin often used the diary to express his impatience with the official attitude toward homosexuality. "There is nothing unnatural in the life I want to live. There is real, good friendship and complete mutual trust," he wrote in one entry. In another, he criticized actors with their "demonstration of fictional family values" and waving of party cards. "Do I have the moral right, with my defects, to see them that way?" he asked himself. "After torturous and long thought, I have realized that I do. They are much more rotten people."
Nevertheless, Kozin was acutely aware that he risked another sentence. He was unnerved by the open gay affairs of an actor on the same tour. "His behavior will lead him to the camp," he wrote. "I must tell him that his sexual motives shouldn't affect me at all... I don't want people to think about me like that again. I will try to suffer alone."
His fears were not unfounded. In 1959 Kozin was arrested again and sentenced for homosexuality. His diaries were confiscated by the investigators, only to be returned in the 1990s; the singer was forced to write a humiliatingly detailed confession, part of which Savchenko quotes in his introduction.
Now, ironically, the story of Kozin's life has brought him new fans in the Russian gay community. The Gay.ru website has dubbed him a "gay star," and in 2003, Moscow-based KVIR magazine published a long article about him with the headline "Hurrah for the Pederast!"
In Savchenko's opinion, the Soviet authorities were interested in Kozin's diaries not because of their sexual content, of which there is very little, but because of the political opinions that the singer expressed. "He was open... He was indignant about what he saw," Savchenko said.
The diary touches on the 20th Party Congress, in which Khrushchev denounced the Stalinist cult of personality. "This brings up a completely logical question: Why didn't other Party leaders raise this question earlier?" he asked. Nonetheless, the singer was shocked when he heard of an order to take down portraits of Stalin. "My hands and feet went cold. If it's true, I won't forget this day until my death. How bad it makes us look to the world!"
While traveling, Kozin noted the lines for basic products and the lack of butter or bread in some towns. In a sardonic passage, he described reading an upbeat book about the current five-year plan while on Sakhalin. "So, I'm lying now in a cold classroom with no electricity. And I can't shave. The toilet is at the other end of the world. There is also no running water. In Tymovsk it's really impossible to read a science-fiction book called 'What Will Happen in Four Years' without indignation." His concert had been postponed because the venue had a leaking roof, he added.
The places where Kozin sang may not have been glamorous - he noted the jangling pianos and unflattering lighting that highlighted his bald patch. Still, it is evident from the diaries that his standard of living was far above average. While others lined up for "combined fat" at state shops, the singer looked for radios and typewriters and ordered suits. "I've bought a third and last length of cloth for a suit. I just need brown and light-brown now. So I have eight now, and I should have 10 all together," he wrote.
Obsessed with aging and death, the singer wrote in his diary that he hoped to retire comfortably on the proceeds of his concerts. In fact, he was to live almost another 40 years, and he gave his last concert only in 1973. In his final years he was looked after by a female fan, Dina Klimova, who came to live with him in Magadan.
When Savchenko published an article on Kozin in the magazine Sovetskaya Estrada in 1982, the singer came back into the public eye. His records were reissued, and his name started being mentioned again in the media. "When that second boom of fame started, when I went to visit him, he was still angry," Savchenko remembered. "'I needed it earlier,' he used to say. 'What's the point now when I don't have a voice?'"
The singer remained tormented by the way his life had turned out, Savchenko said. "I watched him sometimes and saw that he would withdraw into himself and tears would appear in his eyes. He would sit down and put his head in his hands. He had such an expression on his face - it seemed that life had broken him, everything was spoiled and now it was impossible to bring anything back."
"Damned Art" (Proklyatoye Iskusstvo) is published by Vagrius.
TITLE: CHERNOV'S CHOICE
TEXT: Although EMI has stated that Gorillaz is not planning to tour anywhere in the near future and Phi-Life Cypher's label Zebra Traffic have confirmed that it is this British hip-hop trio that is coming to Russia this weekend rather than Damon Albarn's band, local promoters have continued their misleading advertizing campaign for the gig.
As this paper went to press, they were still plugging Phi-Life Cypher, which consists of two MCs and one DJ, as "the full and only line-up of the virtual band Gorillaz" and referring to the band as "Phi Life Gorillaz." Be warned.
Unlike Gorillaz, Earth, Wind and Fire, which performs at the Ice Palace on Sunday, seems to be authentic if slightly shopworn. In any case, the All Music Guide describes the band as "one of the most accomplished, critically acclaimed and commercially popular funk bands of the 1970s."
One of the best local bands - Kacheli - will continue to celebrate its 10th anniversary with three concerts this weekend. Watch out for them at Fish Fabrique on Friday, Griboyedov on Saturday and Rossi's on Sunday.
The Moscow band Korabl, seen in certain circles as proto-Leningrad and who claimed that Leningrad's Sergei Shnurov actually borrowed from one of their songs, will return to the city for a pair of concerts. The band, whose members are actually artists and designers rather than musicians, will perform at Platforma on Monday and at Griboyedov on Tuesday.
Ska-punk band Spitfire will play in the city after pausing for a 14-date tour in Germany and Switzerland as the St. Petersburg Ska Jazz Review, Spitfire's spinoff project.
"We haven't played at Moloko for two years, and it would just not be right not to play there because it is the best club," said drummer Denis Kuptsov.
"It's our tribute to the club and the fans who only go to this place." Spitfire plays at Moloko on Saturday. The next, bigger Spitfire concert will not take place until May.
Tuesday is International Women's Day in Russia, which makes it a good night for live concerts. Multfilmy, a local pop-rock band, has made it a tradition to perform its for-girls-special on that day. This year, Tom Waits-influenced Billy's Band has also put together its own special gig called "Songs in the Name of Women." The band will perform its own songs as well as Tom Waits covers dedicated to women, including prostitutes and begging girls, sung in Billy Novik's coarse-voiced style.
Cabaret-punk band Chirvontsy will play at Fish Fabrique and Dva Samaliota will play at Moloko on Monday.
Don't miss the second local concert of La Minor's new line-up. The local urban-folk group, which has enlisted a balalaika player and replaced its double bassist for a tuba player, will play at Griboyedov on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, promoter Light Music has confirmed that Franz Ferdinand will play on May 19. The show is to be held at Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa on Universitetskaya Embankment.
- By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Do the dew
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: But the Angelus' bells o'er the Liffey swells, Rang out in the foggy dew.
The Foggy Dew is a new Irish pub in St. Petersburg named after a line from a ballad that commemorates the Easter Rising of 1916 and which was famously sung by Sinead O'Connor accompanied by The Dubliners.
Inside, the Foggy Dew is pleasing to the eye, and its atmosphere conveys a pleasant, well-run establishment. It is possible to reserve a table and children are made welcome.
Strangely for an Irish pub, there was not a preponderance of foreigners among the Foggy Dew's guests. This is an advantage if you act as a magnet to drunken bores who believe that because you speak the same language they have the right to impose themselves upon you for the evening.
But the Foggy Dew distinguished itself with its absence of drunken bores - and the excellence of the dishes on its menu.
The menu itself is in English and Russian and offers a good variety of Irish, German and Belgian beers. The list of spirits could not be faulted and the cocktail choice was impressive in its diversity.
The beers range in price from Guinness, the most expensive at 179 rubles ($6.10) for a half-liter (a reminder of Dublin), to Baltika 7 for a reasonable 49 rubles ($1.68). The only flaw in the drinks menu is a section of beer cocktails, the precise combinations of which the reader should be spared, but needless to say they should be banned under the Geneva convention.
Food is a must if you come to the Foggy Dew, and there is an excellent selection, of bar snacks, main courses and chef's specials.
The starters range in price from 99 rubles ($3.40) to 249 rubles ($8.58) and include a tasty and filling borshch, Russia's traditional beet soup, for 119 rubles ($4.10). There is also an excellent carpaccio of thinly sliced raw beef (129 rubles, $4.40), although some diners might consider that the chef is too generous with the dressing.
Main courses range in price from 179 rubles ($6.17) to 249 rubles ($8.58), but the chef's specials are more expensive.
The starters are generous, but it's worth persevering with the main courses, such as a marvellous dish of ginger beef for 199 rubles ($6.80) slightly marred with the accompaniment of American rather than basmati rice.
There is also a grilled salmon with white sauce (229 rubles, $7.89) on the menu that comes with an interesting selection of vegetables and salad garnish. A side order of French fries for 69 rubles ($2.37) would be superfluous to this hearty dish.
A happy hour operates Monday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m., offering a 20 percent discount. Credit cards are taken and there is a good air conditioning system. The staff are a nice bunch, and sport distinctive green bar shirts.
The music in the background started off with many traditional Irish tracks and diversified towards the end of the evening. The Foggy Dew has acquired the novel trick of playing music at a level where one can still carry on a conversation. Many establishments consider this to be a heresy.
They seem to contend that if you go out for an evening you should not be able to talk to the person you came with.
Sports fans will be pleased with the 30-inch plasma screen television that ensures that no English Premiership or rugby match need be missed. Matches can be shown on request, which should be good news when the Gaelic Athletic Association's football season starts again in the spring.
TITLE: Turkish delight
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: No literary genre in Russia sells as well as detective stories. No Russian detective story writer sells as much as Boris Akunin. If that's not a head start for making what is sure to become one of the country's biggest blockbusters this year, then, well, you could always mix all the other popular genres into the film adaptation and add a beefy dose of special effects.
Whether the resulting fizz, crackle and pop charms or not is a matter of taste. However, "Turetsky Gambit" ("Turkish Gambit") is more than palatable.
A major plus for Dzhanik Faiziyev's film is that the screenplay was written by Akunin himself, which was not the case with the disappointing TV adaptation of "Azazel," the first book in the Erast Fandorin detective series (see related story on page ii). And, respect due, Akunin has not been lazy. The film script harbors tactful surprises, tricking readers who may be all too familiar with the book.
The year is 1877, the time of the Russian-Turkish conflict for dominance in Bulgaria. As Russian progress begins to stagnate at the town of Plevna, it becomes evident that there is a Turkish spy amid the ranks, one with intellect and daring enough to foil the Russian army's communications. While a young code-man fleetingly leaves his tent to greet the lovely Varvara Suvorova (Olga Krasko), his bride-to-be, who has arrived from Moscow to meet her beloved, the spy substitutes one coded message of strategic value for another. The code-man is thrown in the clink, but the sabotage continues.
The cast of suspects before Fandorin (Yegor Beroyev) is a lively one. Foreign journalists, top commanders and Russian allies all gather as a kind of social elite in a tent that recalls a living room in a stately home.
Meanwhile the war rages on. As the camera pans across the attacking Russian army, the shot breaks into a fast-zooming imitation of a Turkish artillery ball landing amid the troops. The special effects used for this scene are purposeful and, true to the word, effective. The same cannot be said of their application to Fandorin's investigation.
No doubt to pander to youth, the filmmakers present Fandorin's thought process as a graphic landscape, and with such ridiculous overstatement that the only phrase that sprang to mind was "budget surplus." For some reason every time our detective puts his gray cells into deductive action the screen turned into a whirling rocky landscape, the kind vaguely associated with images of traveling through the earth, a journey to the afterlife, or the galactic timelines of "Stargate."
Each time, this phantasmal shot ends with a view of a cavern where all the suspects stand like chess pieces, frozen in the position Fandorin first encountered them. The cavern graphics, so reminiscent of a virtual reality game or a set from the Aurthurian-themed kids TV series "Knightmare," adds nothing - obvious or subtle - to the film, and dissolves meekly into the usual flashback moment that Fandorin's thought wishes to retrace.
Unlike the book, and as part of the genre-bending struggle of "Turetsky Gambit" (am I a historical drama, an adventure, or shall I come out of the closet as a detective story?), the film heavily sets its store by comedy, namely farce.
In a recent interview Faiziyev said that he did not see the wartime setting suppressing fun in the army barracks.
"I believe that it is only in retrospect, after the war, that people talk about how bad or sad it was. At the time, however, due to psychological demands, they defend themselves with quite a different emotion," Faiziyev told TimeOut St. Petersburg.
You'd bet your savings he would rather emigrate than transfer the same idea to a World War II movie, especially given Russia's track record of harrowing powerhouses such as Andrei Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood," Elem Klimov's "Come and See" or "Don't Move, Die, and Rise Again," directed by Vitaly Kanevsky.
Akunin's book is already less than morbid or macabre, however, and the film adaptation looks for depth or tragedy even less. The movie allots more time to good ol' soldier (or rather officer) fun than anything else. The audacity of Dmitry Pevtsov's Captain Zurov is engaging, while the farcical banter of Fandorin's chef (Vladimir Ilyin) is theatrical; even Fandorin and Varvara's romantic interest is played more giggly than gooey. I don't exactly remember splitting my sides at the humor of the book, but Faiziyev's film got the audience laughing.
The comedy element helped the film at times borrow, at times copy or imitate other works. (Fandorin and Vera work a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza pastiche as they make their way across the Bulgarian countryside.) For the slightly older viewer, the scene where Cossacks sit round a campfire, with one telling the rest some incredulous tale while opponents creep all around, is a dead ringer for Sovely Kramarov's famous "The dead are stood up with rakes in their hands, and ... silence!"-scene from the 1966 film "Neulovimiye Mstiteli" ("The Elusive Avengers"), about four young kids raising hell among the White Army during the Russian Civil War.
It's uncanny how the start of "Turetsky Gambit" harks back to the Soviet film's action-adventure mix, which at the time dubbed it the country's first "Eastern."
With a star cameo in every second role, humor, special effects and a patriotic line - Fandorin is, after all, a home-grown talent, no matter his Western prototypes - the film is bound to repay its vast budget plus advertising costs. Its lush Bulgarian settings are easy on the eye (and bring to a mind a famously pastoral series of advertisements for Stella Artois beer), and Andrei Feofanov's and Goran Bregovic's score energizes the setting.
What the film lacks in originality it will gain in box office success. Akunin's genre-bending wagon rolls on. With an American remake of "Azazel," and a Filipp Yankovsky adaptation of "The State Counselor," another Fandorin novel, in tow this year, you can be sure that someone near you will soon be coming to work with an Erast Fandorin pencil case.
TITLE: Fellow travelers
TEXT: The independent theater company Noskov & Company is not only building a reputation for bringing original works to St. Petersburg's stages, it also features a unique duo of actors - brothers Ilya and Andrei Noskov.
Individually, the Noskov brothers have steadily earned acting honors since they came to St. Petersburg from their native Ukraine to study at the Academy of Theater Arts .
The elder Noskov, 33-year-old Andrei, works in the companies of St. Petersburg's Bolshoi Drama Theater and Mironov Theater, with 30 roles in their repertoires to his name, among them Hippolytus in Euripedes' "Phaedra" and the title role in Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
Ilya Noskov, 28, is a member of the Alexandrinsky Theater but has also found fame on television. He starred as Boris Akunin's 19th century spy detective Erast Fandorin in the lavish 2002 television mini-series "Azazel" (from the novel known in English as "The Winter Queen") and had a lead role in the 24-part Stalin-era drama "Moscow Saga" last year.
Noskov & Company was formed on March 1 last year to give the brothers a chance to work on personal, radical projects. To celebrate the company's first anniversary the brothers are re-staging the company's debut production "Puteshestviye" ("Journey"). Based on "The Seventh Journey of Ion Tichy," a short story by Stanislaw Lem, the cult Polish science fiction master who also wrote "Solaris," the actors portray the multiple selves of time-traveler Tichy in a theatrical fantasy directed by Andrei Dezhonov.
In a bold attempt to connect with their audiences, the brothers invite theater-goers to submit ideas they might incorporate into their performances to the pair's web site.
Ahead of the latest performance of "Journey" at the Estrada Theater on March 14, Olga Kalashnikova spoke to the Noskov brothers about their lives on and off the stage.
What do you think makes people choose the acting profession?
Andrei: I think there is some kind of predisposition to it. For example, I was a student when I went to theater schools in Dnepropetrovsk [Ukraine], and then in Kiev. I was looking for something, and at that time I already felt that I wanted to have some kind of artistic way of life, although I didn't understand clearly what theater is. We had just one Palace of Culture in our town and I only learned what it means to be an actor after going there.
Was it easy for you when you came to St. Petersburg? Did the city accept you right away? What was your relationship with theater?
Andrei: I had a difficult relationship with the city. It didn't accept me right away, and I didn't accept it. But I liked it.
Ilya: Everything was easier for me. When you're studying, you have another perspective on life. During these years you are not living in the city, you are living in the place where you study, especially if it is a theater institute. Life is Mokhovaya [Ulitsa, where the Student Theater is based] and the Theater for Young Spectators [TYuZ], where you live and where sometimes you even stay to overnight.
Andrei: As for the relationship with the theater, this is also not such a simple question. On the one hand, the theater is my home, but on the other I demand that it gives me something back, like my family. I try to have an equal dialogue with it.
Off stage the Noskov brothers are quite different, both in appearance and character. Andrei is a leader, active and creative - an energetic person. Ilya is the opposite - contemplative. However, people constantly mix you up! What's that like?
Andrei: At first we had a creative impulse to use this resemblance/difference. It's a sort of tangle that we have in our lives, and it's rather funny.
Ilya: Some say we're a lot alike, others say we aren't.
Andrei: And others are just confused.
Ilya: And others often interview me as if I were Andrei and he were me. Once he gave an interview as Ilya Noskov. In Moscow I said something as if I were Andrei.
Andrei: So, we decided to use this situation from real life on the stage. As a matter of fact, we had some ideas which were difficult to make happen in the state-run theater.
Ilya: And as so often happens, circumstances were favorable, we had a break in our theater and cinema work, and we used it.
Is it difficult for you to work together? You are close to each other in real life and now on the stage. In working relationships it is sometimes easier to deal with an acquaintance than with someone close to you. Did you have some differences?
Ilya: In fact, we don't see each other often in real life. We're working, we have families. That's why "Journey" is an opportunity to spend more time together.
Andrei: In the beginning we had always wished we could work together.
Ilya: In the [state-run] dramatic theater you often play roles you don't want to. You do it because you can't refuse work in the theater. A co-performer may not relate to you properly and the performance might fail. If it is a good company, there are often two people who know each other very well and understand the story they want to tell the audience - then everything is different. I think that this is the special charm of our performance.
Andrei: Of course, we have had some difficulties. We had the same opinion on some things and a different one on others. Some kind of moot dialogue continues even now. There is also the director Andrei Dezhonov, who is part of the dialogue, the discussion, and who solves arguments.
On your web-site you ask your audiences to help you work on the new play. Is this also an attempt to enter into a dialogue?
Andrei: Yes, it is, and people really send us their ideas. And we have our own. I think the theater is an embarrassment now: it has lost its place in the life of society.
Ilya: Theater has become just a form of entertainment.
Andrei: And we, as two actors, two individuals, try to understand what theater is and what audiences need today. In "Journey" and in future projects we try to answer some questions for ourselves and for the theater-goer. To talk to him, to learn what he thinks and expects. Maybe it's necessary to throw cold water on him, but we have to make him active.
Nowadays many people go to the theater just to be entertained and not to be made to think.
Andrei: It's the influence of the times, and regrettably, it concerns not only the theater, but everything.
Ilya: Can the theater, an artist, a spectator exist without thinking and reading or is this a path to disaster ... ?
Andrei: We try to understand it, because we feel a responsibility to the profession, to the theater. Maybe these are big words, but that's how we see it.
Links: www.noskovy.ru
TITLE: Speaking in tongues
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Some of the giants and the dwarves among nations, as well as the various rising, vanishing and forgotten among the world's tribes were represented in St. Petersburg at an exhibition aimed at motivating Russians to explore linguistic, artistic and cultural secrets that exist beyond the walls of libraries and museums.
But with the exception of the Bangladeshi diplomatic representative and low-profile Russian officials, local political, cultural and diplomatic heavyweights shrugged off the event dedicated to the United Nations' International Mother Language Day on Feb 21.
The day has been observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
"Languages are the most powerful instruments for preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage," writes the UN on its web site devoted to the celebration. "All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue."
In this spirit, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, in whose city more than 100 nationalities reside, was invited to the exhibition, which took place in a conference hall at the Institute of the International Academic Program, part of the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University.
The event was attended by people from more than 50 countries, from as far as Tibet, Sumatra and Bangladesh, Albania, Japan and Cameroon and even from the tiny desert tribes of the Turkana, Kalahari and Sahara deserts, but not by Matviyenko or other City Hall officials who all turned down the invitation to the exhibition.
"To them it's no more than worthless students' merry-making. Russia's image in the eyes of the international community is not an issue of concern," said Lidiya Sorokina, head of the State Polytechnical University's International Club, who organized the exhibition in collaboration with the Institute of the International Academic Program and the Bangladeshi Students' Association.
Accusing the invited absentees of "ignorance," Sorokina said, "they don't seem to realize that at issue is love and respect... Their absence disregards alien cultures and traditions since language is not something to be treated in isolation of cultural values."
The one-off, one-day show was marked by a display of hundreds of artifacts, including indigenous traditional crafts, paintings and textiles from personal collections, and books and manuscripts. Together, the vast range of items depicted linguistic dynamism from various historical epochs and spoke volumes about East and West.
The miniature paper statuettes on display were typical of indigenous crafts that communicate an unspoken, universal language of good and evil to all peoples of the world, and not only to the millions who speak more than 500 tongues in the Indonesian archipelago where they were made.
The Indonesian statuettes in one of the archipelago languages represent the five "good" Kurawa brothers - Yudhistira the Wise, Bima the Strong, Arjina the Handsome, and the Loving Twins Vakula and Sadewa - who are engaged in an endless fight against their "evil" Pandawa Lima cousin brothers, who, marked with horns and tails, are always at loggerheads with everything good and humane.
Meanwhile, Bangladeshi contributors to the show introduced visitors to the history and society of their nation through the symbolism of a monument which was the whole event's signature item .
The seemingly meaningless monument is a collection of small rectangular blocks symbolizing "children," standing beside a huge rectangular figure symbolizing the "mother."
To Bengali speakers, the "Mother Tongue" monument, which can be found standing in locations throughout the country, is a symbol of victory in the "linguistic war" of the 1950s, in which the people of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) fought the dominant Urdu-speaking West Pakistan (now Pakistan) over the use of Urdu as a national language to the detriment of Bengali.
The Arab display took visitors into wilderness from the Arabian and Sahara deserts of Ancient Egyptian civilization to the modern-day Middle East. The Sub-Saharan Africa displays featured items from Kenya, which shed light on the little-known Turkana, Masai and Giriama tribes.
From Central Africa, Congolese contributors were proud to show how their land became a meeting point for African languages from the North, South and West of Africa and the East African Coastal language of Swahili (itself, being a mixture of Bantu, Arabic, European and South-East Asian languages).
The show brought together a diverse range of artifacts to celebrate the UNESCO-backed language day: English was represented ("Hot English" magazine, which teaches modern English to non-native speakers, was on sale), while Turkmen participants had a good day selling the "Rukhnama" ("The Holy Spirit"), a book of proscriptive philosophy by Turkmenbashi, also known as Saparmurat Niyazev, the dictator of Turkmenistan. It is a book which rivals the bible in the number of languages into which it has been translated.
TITLE: Devil may care
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: We're not particularly sad. It's just the kind of music we make," said Stuart Braithwaite, the guitarist and vocalist of Mogwai, the highly original band that has played loud, mostly instrumental, atmospheric indie rock since it formed in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1996. The band's initial goal has been described as creating "serious guitar music."
Mogwai's most recent release, "Government Commissions (BBC Sessions 1996-2003)," out on Pias Recordings in January, was picked up by Moscow-based record company Soyuz for a licensed release in Russia later this month.
"The reason we're putting out this collection is simple: the recordings here are worth hearing," wrote the band in an announcement for the album.
"Some are definitely better than the official recordings. Some are sketchy but, to be honest, so are we. Sketchy but nice. Nicely sketchy."
Braithwaite, who spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone this week, explained that the idea of the album is as simple as that.
"[We wanted] just to really collect some of the recordings that we've done and just let people who don't live in this country hear them. Eight of the album's 10 songs were recorded for John Peel, who died in October, but Braithwaite said it was not originally intended to be a tribute to the BBC's late radio legend.
"We'd already completed it before he actually died, so it wasn't meant as a tribute, but it serves as one," he said.
"He had a big part," said Braithwaite of Peel's involvement in the radio sessions included in the album.
"The last session was live, so he was in the studio playing records as well."
Braithwaite admitted the prime importance of Peel's programs to the band's members.
"They were a huge influence," he said.
"I mean, listening to his radio show when we were growing up was really important, and a lot of music we were influenced by we heard about on that show."
Braithwaite, who cited Joy Division and Sonic Youth as his influences, opposes the term "post-rock" that is often used to describe Mogwai's work.
"I don't really think that's a very good term, but it doesn't really bother me," he said.
Braithwaite described the balance between tracks with vocals and instrumental numbers on "Government Commissions" as "normal."
"There are two songs that have singing, the same kind of balance as on a normal [Mogwai] record," he said.
The title "Government Commissions" is intended to be an ironic reference to the BBC, according to Braithwaite.
"I suppose it's kind of a joke just because the BBC is owned by the government [sic]. It's kind of like we've been commanded by the government. It's our tribute to communism," he said.
The band's name, Mogwai, is the Chinese for "devil," but Braithwaite found it difficult to recall the circumstances under which the name was chosen.
"I can't remember, to be honest," he said. He admitted that he frequently fishes out song titles, such as the album's "Hunted by a Freak," from the tabloid scandal-sheet The National Inquirer.
Apart from Braithwaite, Mogwai features John Cummings on guitar, Barry Burns on keyboards, Dominic Aitchison on bass and Martin Bulloch on drums. Braithwaite, Aitchison and Bulloch are the band's founding members, while Cummings joined later in 1996.
Mogwai's new studio album, the follow-up to 2003's "Happy Songs For Happy People," is being recorded in Glasgow and will be released in 2005.
Mogwai's "Government Commissions (BBC Sessions 1996-2003)" will be available in Russia as a licensed release on Soyuz later this month. Links: www.mogwai.co.uk
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: China Blast Kills Kids
BEIJING (AP) - A cache of explosives in the home of a coal mine manager blew up in a town in northern China, killing him and at least 20 children at a nearby grade school, news reports said Thursday.
The explosion occurred Wednesday in Kecheng, a town in Shanxi province, one of China's biggest coal-mining regions, newspapers reported.
"Grade school students who were in class were buried," the Shanxi Commercial News said.
Serb General to Submit
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Former Serb army general Momcilo Perisic will surrender to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague next week, the sixth suspect in five months the Serb government has persuaded to turn himself in.
A government statement late Wednesday thanked Perisic for his "moral" decision which was "in the interest of the state", and said he would go to The Hague on March 7.
Perisic will be the fourth suspect to surrender in a month in what are widely seen as goodwill gestures Belgrade hopes will help to get its foot in the door of the European Union.
Baku Journalist Slain
BAKU (Reuters) - A prominent opposition journalist was shot dead outside his home in the Azeri capital of Baku on Wednesday, police said.
A police spokesman said seven bullets were fired at Elmar Huseinov, a fierce government critic and editor-in-chief of opposition magazine Monitor. Two of the shots hit his heart, the spokesman said.
Monitor is a popular magazine but has been closed several times and fined by a court for publishing stories about top politicians and businessmen.
UN Supports Action
LONDON (Reuters) - The UN Security Council on Wednesday supported UN peacekeepers in the Congo who killed at least 50 militiamen and condemned the earlier slaying of nine international troops.
The soldiers from Pakistan and South Africa, engaged in a gunfight with the militiamen, who had attacked civilians Tuesday in the northeastern Congo region of Ituri.
TITLE: Safin Tells
Davis Cup
Teammates
Tie Is Tough
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Australian Open champion Marat Safin warned his Russian teammates on Tuesday not to take lightly first-round Davis Cup opponent Chile.
"The tie will be a tough one, but we are playing in Moscow and have every chance to win," Safin said of the tie that begins Friday. "But we must be really careful."
Since winning its first Davis Cup title in 2002, Russia has won only one World Group tie - in 2003, and needed a victory over Thailand in last year's playoff round to remain in the elite group.
Chile is unbeaten in its last four Davis Cup ties, and did not lose a single match in three ties last season on its return to the World Group after a 20-year absence.
Even without double Olympic champion Nicolas Massu, who is injured, Chile has arrived with confidence.
"If we didn't think we have a chance to win, we wouldn't have come here and would stay in summer down in Chile and were probably going to the beach," Chile captain Sergio Elias said.
"We understand it's a difficult task. However, that's a part of the competition. We have great players, great team spirit. We've come here to do the best we can. If we don't win here, well, tough luck," he said.
Massu has not played since the Australian Open, sidelined by a leg injury.
"Massu is definitely an important part of the team, but he did talk to all of us, wishing us good luck. And he was really sorry he could not come here," Elias said.
In Massu's absence, his gold-medal doubles partner in Athens and singles bronze medalist Fernando Gonzalez will lead Chile's effort.
"The team spirit was very important [at the Olympics]," Gonzalez said. "Always when we play for our country we play much better than on the tour. So this will be very important this week."
Gonzalez, ranked No. 19 by the ATP - just above Massu, has a 16-5 record in Davis Cup play and is unbeaten in his last 10 matches over two years.
Elias' choices for Chile's second singles are Adrian Garcia, Hermes Gamonal and Paul Capdeville.
His Russian counterpart Shamil Tarpishchev has Mikhail Youzhny, Nikolai Davydenko and Igor Andreyev to choose from.
"Down in my soul, I have made a decision, but it's too early to say - we have two more days," Tarpishchev said.
Safin has a 20-14 record for Russia. He lost to Nicolas Kiefer in the first round of the Dubai Open last week - his only match since winning his second Grand Slam title in Melbourne in January.
But Safin said it was easier for him to play for the national team than in the individual matches.
"It's easier for me to play for the national team, especially in Moscow. When you play individually, sometimes your fans get disappointed when you lose and they don't like it and come out with claims," Safin said.
TITLE: NHL May Seek Replacements
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TORONTO - The NHL and the union have met with their respective camps since the season was canceled two weeks ago.
When the two sides will meet with each other again to try to end the lockout remains the big question.
On Wednesday, 67 agents were given a similar update to the one their clients received from the players' association a day earlier when the league gathered its board of governors in New York on Tuesday, while more than 150 players met with union leadership in Toronto.
During four hours of talks, there was no resolution as to what would happen should the NHL seek to use replacement players next season.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who said the league plans to invite the players' association back to the bargaining table soon, and the board of governors haven't committed to that direction should a collective bargaining agreement with the union not be reached. But it is an option the league would likely explore.
"We know that could be a possibility down the road if they choose to go that route,'' players' association executive director Bob Goodenow said. "It's in the future and not being dealt with at the present time.''
Goodenow called the possibility disgraceful on Tuesday. He wouldn't say on Wednesday if agents would be decertified from the union if they negotiated a replacement contract with a team.
"There's a lot of sentiment, I think, among the agents and players about the issue but no formal policy has been implemented,'' Goodenow said.
Agent J.P. Barry said he would never represent a replacement player, even if his most profitable client decided to become one.
"They won't be my client any longer,'' Barry said.
Pat Brisson refused to say whether he would drop teenage phenom Sidney Crosby if he decided to play.
"I can't answer that. I'm not going to answer that,'' Brisson said.
Crosby is widely expected to be chosen with the first pick of the draft, scheduled for June. But without a new agreement between players and owners a draft can't be held.
More than 300 NHL players are currently playing in Europe, and that could be an option for Crosby next season. Some have said that players shouldn't complain if replacements are used since NHL players have taken jobs from lesser players in Europe during the lockout.
If the owners try to get an impasse declared and then implement a new system, the players' association would likely call for a strike.
Mark Gandler, who represents more than 20 players, doesn't think any of his clients would go against the union and play.
"I just can't see a single client that we represent that would cross the line,'' Gandler said.
Agent Don Meehan hopes it never gets to the point where the NHL uses replacement players, and that the sides will reach an agreement long before the season is slated to start in October.
"I don't even want to think where we'll all be, at that point, if we don't have hockey,'' Meehan said.
Meehan, who represents more than 100 of the NHL's 700-plus players, said Wednesday's meeting gave agents a chance to voice their opinions.
"What became clear today is that there are players that are going to have opposing views throughout this process,'' Meehan said. "I think there are agents within the room that are going to have their own views.''
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Kobe Case Settled
DENVER (AP) - With a terse news release, the sordid sexual assault case against Kobe Bryant that gripped the nation abruptly ended with an agreement that ensures the basketball star never goes to trial for what happened in a hotel room two years ago.
Few experts believed the civil lawsuit would ever be heard by a jury, saying it was unlikely that Bryant and the 20-year-old woman who accused him of raping her relished the prospect of having to divulge potentially embarrassing, intimate details in a courtroom.
Terms of the settlement were not released. Law experts said the agreement probably spelled out financial penalties for revealing.
Sir Bobby Raps Jose
LONDON (AFP) - English football's senior manager, Sir Bobby Robson, has told Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho to learn some humility.
Robson, the former Newcastle and England manager who showed Mourinho the ropes when the Portuguese man was his assistant at Barcelona, agrees Mourinho is a master coach.
But he added: "Everything has gone his way, but sometimes you've got to learn a bit of humility.
"Jose's impact in England has been staggering but he must learn how to lose."
Pakistan Wobbles
DHARAMSALA, India (Reuters) - Pakistan floundered at the start of its first test tour of India for six years, reaching 165 for five wickets on the rain-hit opening day against an Indian Board President's XI on Thursday.
Almost four hours of play were lost to bad light and drizzle at this northern hilly venue to frustrate Pakistan captain Inzamam-ul Haq after he won the toss and chose to bat.
Soccer Legend Dies
AMSTERDAM (AFP) - Rinus Michels, the coach who invented the total football played with such verve by Ajax Amsterdam and Holland, has died aged 77.
He had undergone heart surgery in a hospital in the Belgian town of Aalst when he died.
Michels coached Ajax from 1965 to 1971 when a team led by the incomparable Johan Cruyff won four Dutch titles.
Fleet Center Renamed
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) - Boston's premier sports venue, the Fleet Center, has a new name.
TD Banknorth Inc. has reached an agreement to put its name on the home of the Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins, said Delaware North Cos., which owns downtown Boston.