SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1052 (18), Tuesday, March 15, 2005
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Nobel
 Winner
 Alfyorov
 Hits 75
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Once St. Petersburg Nobel Prize laureate Zhores Alfyorov and his former student Alexei Kovsh played cards with German businessmen on a train to Germany. Alfyorov and Kovsh won the game. As they were leaving the train, their partners asked Alfyorov why it was that he played cards so well.
 
"Because I'm a Nobel Prize winner," Alfyorov said with a smile.
 Everybody who knows Alfyorov, who will celebrate his 75th birthday on Tuesday, says he has great talent, unbelievable energy, and an excellent sense of humor.
 Alfyorov, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for research that has formed the basis of information and communication technology, is known not only for being a leading academic, but also as a political figure, a deputy in the State Duma for the Communist party who has fought to save and develop Russian science.
 "Alfyorov has three major qualities," said Gennady Mesyats, vice-president of the Academy of Science.
 "First, he is a prominent scientist, who developed his own direction that revolutionized modern electronics," he said. "Secondly, he is a great organizer. Third, he is a prominent political activist, who went into the Duma not because of his ambitions but because of his heartfelt agony for the plight of Russian science."
 Alexei Kovsh, Alfyorov's former student, said his former teacher is "a man possessed by science."
 "Once Alfyorov lived in his laboratory for a month so that he would not lose the time it took to go home and come back. He just brought a pillow to his lab and lived there," he said.
 Alfyorov's research, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, laid the groundwork for modern information technologies, Kovsh said.
 "The semi-conducting heterostructures [which can be used in laser and electronic devices] that he developed were a focus of research at that time, and Alfyorov was the first in the world to discover them," Kovsh said.
 Alfyorov was born in Vitebsk in Belarus in 1930. He was the son of Russian officer Ivan Alfyorov who later became the director of various Soviet plants.
 The family traveled a lot because of his father's job and Zhores and his elder brother, Marx, were constantly changing schools. Marx, whom Zhores followed as an example of how to live and who had been a promising student, was killed in World War II.
 When Alfyorov was 10 years old he read the Soviet bestseller "Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin, and all his life he followed the advice of the books leading character, Sanya Grigoryev: "Fight and search, find and never give up."
 In his latest book, "Science and Society," which was launched on Saturday, Alfyorov said his love for physics began thanks to his teacher Yakov Meltserzon in School No. 42 in Minsk, from which he graduated after the war. 
 "I was so impressed by my teacher's story about how a cathode oscillograph worked and the principles of radio location that I went to study at the Leningrad Technical and Electricity Institute," Alfyorov said.
 Later Alfyorov went to work in the city's Technical Physics Institute headed by prominent Russian physicist Abram Ioffe. Today Alfyorov heads the institute.
 Mesyats said Alfyorov is generous toward his students and talented scientists.
 "You know, talented people are usually people of complicated character," he said. "They may be rather reserved and find communication difficult. However, he is ready even to get involved in others' family relationships in order to understand their problems and help them solve them."
 Kovsh said Alfyorov was an excellent lecturer.
 "His lectures were extremely interesting," Kovsh said. "At his lectures we touched on the history of science, on what turned the world upside down, created information technologies, and the Internet."
 Alfyorov was "a demanding teacher, who paid attention to details," but he was "almost unable to give a bad grade to a badly prepared student at exams," the former student added.
 "One of Alfyorov's gifts as a physicist was that he could get the essence, the main idea, of any phenomenon very fast. You know, in physics there are thousands of details but you have to choose two or three of them to make the right conclusion. Alfyorov was great at that," he said.
 Antonio Luque, a Spanish physicist and director of the Solar Energy Institute in Madrid, said the most surprising thing about Alfyorov was that "he is unbelievably energetic for his age."
 "He is very energetic and looks as if he is only 55 years old. Nothing can stop his activity," Luque said.
 Kovsh said Alfyorov has a great sense of humor and is still "a bit of a hooligan by nature," who can tell anecdotes non-stop.
 "The only place where Alfyorov is always serious is the Duma because what has happened to Russian science [which is in dire economic straits since state-funding was cut after the collapse of the Soviet Union] breaks his heart," he said.
 Mesyats said Alfyorov is a man of firm convictions, who stands for social justice, and who deeply values the positive achievements of the Soviet Union. 
 In an interview published in the newspaper Soviet Russia in 2003, Alfyorov said that he is an adherent of "the ideology of socialism," which he thinks could work very well in the country if its ideas were not perverted.
 Alfyorov's birthday will be marked by the unveiling of his bronze bust at the intersection of Ulitsa Bukharestskaya and Ulitsa Fuchika on Tuesday morning. After a ceremony dedicated to Alfyorov at the Academy of Science, numerous guests will pay tribute to him at a celebration in the Shostakovich Philharmonic Hall.

TITLE: Kasparov
 To Enter
 Politics
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Garry Kasparov, the world's top chess player for two decades and considered by many the greatest player in history, has announced his retirement from professional chess in an ambitious gambit and vowed to devote his energy to battling what he called the "dictatorship" of President Vladimir Putin.
 
Kasparov, 41, a former world champion who has been No. 1 in the rankings since 1984, made his announcement Thursday in Spain after winning the annual Linares chess tournament, one of the game's most prestigious events, on a tiebreak despite losing his final-round game to Bulgarian grandmaster Veselin Topalov.
 "Before this tournament I made a conscious decision that Linares 2005 will be my last professional tournament, and today I played my last professional game," Kasparov said at a news conference. 
 Kasparov, one of Putin's most vociferous liberal critics, released a statement Friday on his web site, kasparov.ru, saying that Russia was "moving in the wrong direction," and that he would "do everything possible to fight Putin's dictatorship."
 "I did everything that I could in chess, even more," he said in the statement. "Now I intend to use my intellect and strategic thinking in Russian politics."
 Kasparov has accused Putin of rolling back democracy in the country and creating a police state. In a Wall Street Journal comment last month titled "Caligula in Moscow," Kasparov called Putin's nomination of Anton Ivanov, a senior official at Gazprom-Media from Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg, as the new chairman of the Supreme Arbitration Court, "a move akin to Caligula's naming a horse to the Senate."
 Kasparov is chairman of Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group formed by prominent liberal opposition leaders, including former Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov, independent State Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov and Irina Khakamada, who ran against Putin in 2004.
 Denis Bilunov, Kasparov's assistant in Moscow, said by telephone Friday that Kasparov and Ryzhkov were planning to travel together to at least 10 regions in the coming months to give political speeches.
 Ryzhkov declined to comment on Kasparov's future plans when contacted by e-mail Friday.
 Nemtsov said by telephone that he hoped Kasparov would be "as successful in politics as he was in chess."
 In his chess career, Kasparov never shied away from political battles, going back even to before he became world champion by defeating the Soviet establishment favorite, Anatoly Karpov, in Moscow in 1985.
 In 1984, the rivals' first world championship match, also in Moscow, broke up in controversy after five months when Florencio Campomanes, president of the international chess federation, FIDE, stopped the match after 48 games when the score stood at 5-3 to Karpov, citing concerns for the players' health. 
 Karpov had led the match 5-0, but after a long series of draws, Kasparov had won two games in a row, prompting speculation that Karpov was on the verge of physical and mental collapse.
 At a news conference covered by Western television, Kasparov loudly protested the decision, and while a new match was being organized, he angered top Soviet officials by giving interviews to Western media insinuating that FIDE, the Soviet Chess Federation and Karpov's team were conspiring against him. 
 In November 1985, Kasparov won the second match to become the 13th world chess champion, and successfully defended his title against Karpov in 1986, 1987 and 1990.
 In a 1987 autobiography, "Child of Change," Kasparov, a vocal proponent of perestroika, wrote that he was saved by the intervention of Mikhail Gorbachev's pro-reform ideology chief Alexander Yakovlev. "The (chess) authorities were told in no uncertain terms that our dispute had to be settled at the chess board. There could be no more dirty tricks," Kasparov wrote. "[Yakovlev] prevented them from attacking me in the Soviet press, trying to ruin my image in the country. It was their last chance, and he stopped them."
 Kasparov, who later dubbed Gorbachev the "Louis XVI of communism," was aligned with several short-lived liberal movements in the early 1990s, including the Democratic Party of Russia. Infighting in the party prompted Kasparov to help form a breakaway faction, the Liberal-Conservative Union, shortly after the DPR's creation. Kasparov eventually threw his support behind Boris Yeltsin, but switched allegiances, backing Alexander Lebed's bid for the presidency after Lebed predicted that an ailing Yeltsin would not finish his second term.
 Political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said he thought Kasparov would not remain in politics for long, given his previous forays into the political arena.
 "With the exception of chess, he has never proven himself capable of committing fully to any project," Pribylovsky said. "He will do something very well for one month, and then he'll take a trip abroad and disappear completely."
 Pribylovsky conceded, however, that Kasparov appeared to be serious about his activities with Committee 2008, which he helped found during last year's presidential election campaign.
 "It's the longest he's ever stuck with a political movement," Pribylovsky said.
 Internet chess journalist Mig Greengard, a close friend and associate of Kasparov's, said the fact that he was giving up the game that made him famous was the best indicator of his intentions.
 "He could have continued being a political dilettante while remaining the No. 1 player in the world," Greengard, editor of chessninja.com, said by telephone from New York on Sunday. "He could have continued using his chess success to bring publicity to his political cause. If there were any questions about how serious he is [about politics], his retirement should answer them."
 Alexander Roshal, editor of the Russian chess magazine 64, said he was not surprised that Kasparov had retired.
 "Once he saw that the reunification process was hopeless and that he would not be able to win back his title, he realized there was nothing more for him to accomplish in chess," Roshal said.
 Born Garrik Vainshtein in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1963 to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, Kasparov began studying at the Soviet Union's most prestigious chess school, run by former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, at age 10. After the death of his father, Kim Vainshtein, Kasparov adopted his mother's surname. At 12, Kasparov became the youngest player to win the Soviet junior championship, and became a grandmaster on his 17th birthday.
 Kasparov, famed for his aggressive play built on fearsome calculation skills and deep preparation, was renowned for intimidating and distracting opponents with wild gesticulations and fierce facial expressions during games. 


TITLE: Rehabilitation Puts Amputees Back on Feet
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the disabled struggle for more equality and full integration into society in the West, the Soviet legacy of institutionalizing and marginalizing people classed as invalids holds steady in modern Russia. Although state support for people with disabilities was more consistent in Soviet times, citizens with physical and mental disabilities were often sequestered in institutions, where they received little if any individual attention. Parents were encouraged to give up even their mildly-disabled children to these institutions after birth. People with disabilities, or <i>invalidi </i>in Russian, were treated as pitiful cases, who had little chance to live independent lives.
 In St. Petersburg there is only one such social and professional rehabilitation center sponsored by the government: the 11th floor of the Albrecht Scientific and Practical Center for Medical Surveying, Prosthetics and Rehabilitation of the Disabled.
 It's a national rehabilitation center for children and adults who need prostheses. It aids both those born with physical deformities as well as those who have lost limbs in accidents or in war.
 The Albrecht Institute is one of only three state-sponsored rehabilitation centers serving all of Russia. The other centers are in Moscow and in Novokuznetsk, Siberia. 
 The Albrecht Institute serves mainly those residing in the Northwest region, but patients come from as far away as Siberia.
 People often come to us when they are denied disability insurance by the state and they come here to confirm that they are eligible for it, said Lyudmila Karasayeva, head of the social and professional rehabilitation department. A patient can write to us from anywhere in Russia to ask to be admitted here. We won't deny them treatment just because of their region.
 Along with providing physical therapy, treatment and outfitting of prostheses, the institute's newest department, social and professional rehabilitation, which opened 10 years ago, teaches people with disabilities new work skills, including typing, shoe repair, sewing, knitting, book binding and computers.
 The department also hosts literary clubs and theatrical performances starring patients, organizes field trips to the State Russian Museum for both outpatients and inpatients and runs its own match-making service. This is a monthly social evening called the Blue Bird Club.
 The clients we serve at the social and professional rehabilitation department are people who used to lie around all day feeling useless - people who had no reason to live, Karasayeva said. The most important thing is that people are smiling and laughing now. Several marriages have occurred thanks to the Blue Bird Club.
 Despite their handicaps, the clients of the institute are an outgoing and optimistic group.
 Lada, a 32-year-old with cerebral palsy, who has been coming to the Albrecht Institute since 1988, has undergone 13 separate operations and can walk only with the aid of crutches. She lives with her parents but dreams of living on her own someday.
 I've always been independent, but in St. Petersburg it's hard for me to get around on my own. I like coming to the center because I can move about freely without any help.
 Lada has a boyfriend that she met at Albrecht and the two communicate mostly by phone and try to meet at the center whenever possible. After working for the last 10 years as a telephone operator, Lada is now taking typing and computer courses at the center and would love to find a computer job where she can work from home.
 The center has only six old computers and no Internet access.
 Viktor, a 17-year-old from Sakhalin, had to have his lower legs amputated eight months ago after suffering from severe frostbite when he was knocked unconscious outside of club in his hometown. He's now studying shoe repair three times a week at the center and hopes to find a job when he returns home in a month.
 Valery, a volunteer at the center, is a student of art and culture in his 20s who lost his leg as a child. He travels to the center to help with the theatrical performances held on the small stage in the community room every month. In a recent performance called Paintings Come to Life, patients acted out scenes from famous paintings in the Russian Museum. 
 It's quite difficult and expensive for me to come to the center by <i>marshrutka, </i>Valery said. But it's so enjoyable to come here and to put together a performance piece before an audience.
 Natasha, an avid performer and local celebrity at the center with a degree in art and design, lost both her legs when she fell under a train at age 5. Although confined to a wheelchair, she married her husband whom she met at Albrecht and the two have an 18-month-old child. Her daughter, Lida, is undergoing rehabilitation for a correctable leg problem.
 My husband and I would love to work, but we can't find jobs, she said. My husband, especially, would like to do computer work from home, but, unfortunately, we can't afford one.
 The Albrecht Institute has several different units serving children aged up to 5, 5- to 18-year-olds, adults, and a separate unit for Afghan and Chechen war veterans. The author was declined permission to meet with the war veterans.
 The children's units are filled with orphans from <i>internaty </i>(institutions) Russia-wide, and from families throughout the region, some of whom live at the hospital. Because they grow quickly, children often need new prostheses as often as every six months.
 Although all treatment and equipment, including wheelchairs, crutches and prostheses, are covered by the government, many parents pay out-of-pocket for better and more modern prostheses, which can be a huge financial burden on a family.
 The institute is sponsored by the federal government but is in dire need of funding. 
 The social and rehabilitation department suffers most of all.
 We receive the least amount of money of all the departments, Karasayeva said. I would love to build a kitchen in our department so our patients can get accustomed to independent life. I would love to buy musical instruments for them, but as this is not a matter of life or death, we are the last in line to receive funding. 
 We launched this department in one room, and only two years ago we were given a whole floor. All the tools for occupational rehabilitation are so old. We have priorities like purchasing drugs, repairing the heating pipes and electrical system. So we need real sponsors or partners who have a stake in this program.
 The Albrecht Institute has a long history. It was founded in the 19th century as the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was later patronized by the last tsarina, Alexandra. 
 Hermann Albrecht, a notable surgeon of German descent, headed the first prosthetics clinic at the hospital in 1914 to serve the victims of World War I. Later, the prosthetics institute joined up with the Panel of Medical and Social Audits (VTEK), a governmental institution that assesses a disabled person's ability to work, and these two organizations moved to one large facility on Bestuzhevskaya Ulitsa in the Kalininsky district.
 The government decided to merge these two institutions into one center in the '80s, Karasayeva said. This saved a lot of money, and it was easier for patients not to have to travel between two separate places.
 According to official statistics from the Health Ministry, nationally 3.7 million people with disabilities apply for state subsidies every year, 1.4 million of those apply for the first time. However, the ministry puts the number of actual disabled much higher at 10.8 million. The state classifies a disabled person, or invalid in Russian, as someone with either a physical or mental disability.
 For more information on the Albrecht Institute, or if you would like to donate or volunteer please contact Lyudmila Karasayeva (Russian) at 544-6272, ludkaras@yandex.ru or Jennifer Davis (English) at jennifurious@yahoo.com.

TITLE: Young Scientists Get $100,000
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Seventeen young Russian scientists who are conducting research on energy received grants valued at a total of $100,000 from the prestigious Global Energy Foundation in St. Petersburg on Monday.
 
&quot;This award was a big surprise and honor for me and my team,&quot; said Alexei Nalevin, 28, a scientist from the Moscow Energy Institute, whose team won the first prize for developing computer programs to prevent breakdowns in energy systems.
 &quot;I think such grants are extremely important for our science, which unfortunately has suffered badly from the country's economic crisis, which resulted in a whole generation of Russia's young scientists being lost,&quot; Nalevin said.
 The grants, the first of their kind, were announced at the final session of the three-day international symposium Science and Society, which was part of a meeting of Nobel Prize winners and winners of the Russian Global Energy prize. 
 Ivar Griaever, a Norwegian winner of the Nobel prize for physics who presented a certificate to Nalevin, said he &quot;envied young scientists because they have their future discoveries ahead of them,&quot; while his were already in the past.
 Zhores Alfyorov, who presided at the award ceremony, said that the grants were given to young scientists working &quot;in the most promising sectors of energy science.&quot;
 Those sectors include solving ecological problems in the energy sphere, the economics of energy, and the use of new information technologies.
 The grants are for 24 months. When the term is over, winners will make the results of their research public.
 The Global Energy International Prize Award was founded in 2003 on the initiative of Alfyorov to reward international scientists who make significant achievements in energy science. This year's winners will share a total of $1 million.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Visa-Free from Exclave?
 </b>

KALININGRAD (SPT) - A visa-free regime could be introduced as an experiment between the Kaliningrad region and the European Union, Interfax quoted Martin Vukovic, the Austrian ambassador to Russia, as saying Monday.
 "The special location of the Kaliningrad region, which is in the center of Europe and surrounded by EU countries, could be used in an experimental way by letting its residents visit neighboring countries without having to get a visa," he was quoted as saying.
 
 
<b>Kaliningrad Insurance
 </b>

KALININGRAD (SPT) - The recent decision of Lithuanian authorities to oblige Russian citizens traveling through the Baltic state to and from Kaliningrad to have a medical insurance policy could harm the ability of Russian railways to recruit staff, Interfax reported Friday.
 Managers of the Kaliningrad railway are concerned that the requirement will cost them an additional $67,000 to provide the 1,500 staff who work on passenger trains plying the route between the main part of Russia to the exclave with policies.
 
 
<b>Threat to Jewish Leader 
 </b>

PETROZAVODSK (SPT) - A swastika and a threat to Dmitry Tsvibel, head of Petrozavodsk Jewish community, have been drawn on a wall of the Karelian Country Museum, a building that has been used as headquarters of the community, Interfax reported Friday.
 "Extremists inspired by lawlessness are for the first time threatening a leader of the community," Interfax cited Tzvibel as saying.
 The leader of the local Jewish community said somebody had tried to set fire to the back door of the museum last week. Extremist slogans had appeared previously, but none of the reports filed by members of the community to the police had brought any results.
 
 
<b>Call to Shift Court Case
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) -Yevgeny Chernov, a former commander of the Northern Fleet, has asked that a lawsuit brought against him for offending Oleg Yerofeyev should be moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Friday.
 "I'm not going to go to Moscow because doctors have refused to let me go long distances. In the two years since the lawsuit was filed my health has worsened ," Interfax cited Chernov as saying.
 Yerovfeyev, another former commander of the Northern Fleet, filed the lawsuit in 2003 over claims made in Chernov's book "Secrets of Underwater Disasters."

TITLE: Ultra-Nationalist Newspaper to Be Warned
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The City Prosecutor's Office has decided against opening criminal cases against ultra-nationalist newspapers that print articles identified by human rights advocates as breaking laws on inciting racial hatred.
 
The St. Petersburg branch of Citizen's Watch and the Democratic Russia party asked the office to investigate the newspaper Nashe Otechstvo, or Our Fatherland, in July 2004.
 They received a reply last week that said prosecutors had decided to warn the newspaper over the articles but would take no other action against it.
 The office has issued similar warnings to other small newspapers in the city and Leningrad Oblast that publish articles that denigrate people who are not Russian.
 &quot;According to rumors, the city prosecutors are divided into two groups -those who wanted to prosecute the papers and those who were not bothered by the activities of nationalists and wanted to leave things as they are,&quot; Yury Vdovin, co-head of Citizen's Watch, said Friday in a telephone interview.
 &quot;I also heard a rumor that the standoff was decided in favor of the second group after the General Prosecutor's Office in Moscow said not to touch the nationalists,&quot; he said.
 &quot;It looks like in the end they decided to go for a compromise: the warning was issued as a signal to the papers that they must mend their ways, but they were not prosecuted,&quot; Vdovin said.
 The General Prosecutor's Office had no immediate comment on Monday.
 The human rights advocates sent the prosecutors a letter alerting them to a series of articles in Nashe Otechestvo that appeared to incite national hatred.
 &quot;On the first page of the paper, right under its logo are words that appear to be the slogan of the National Might Party of Russia, which says, 'National Might Party of Russia is the party of those who are ready to fight against the Jewish yoke,'&quot; the letter said.
 &quot;The first column on page two of the paper contains the assertion that [President Vladimir] Putin chooses [members of the government] depending on whether they are Jews or Freemasons and there is an assertion that 'citizen Putin was appointed Russian President by a Zionist Council,'&quot; it said.
 The prosecutor's office did investigate the paper, according to a report released by the National Democratic Republican Party, an organization that has been accused by federal politicians of inciting racism.
 Prosecutor's office staff searched the St. Petersburg apartment of Andrei Shchekotikhin, Nashe Otechestvo's editor. 
 His colleagues Andrei Andrianov, a shareholder of Za Russkoye Delo, or For the Russian Cause newspaper, and Oleg Gusev, the latter paper's editor, were called in for questioning.
 Gusev confirmed that he and his colleagues from similar newspapers had been under the scrutiny of city prosecutors in the last few months.
 &quot;I have an official request to come to the City Prosecutor's office on March 15 to receive an official warning in relation to materials inciting national hatred. What they mean by that I can only guess,&quot; Gusev said Friday in a telephone interview.
 &quot;All these accusations are groundless. They have no evidence that something wrong was published in our paper,&quot; he said.
 Meanwhile, human rights advocates are demanding sterner action from prosecutors. Lyudmila Narusova, a Federation Council member and widow of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, met city prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev about the newspapers on Thursday, according to Citizen's Watch.
 &quot;She asked him why the prosecutor's office is being tolerant on issues of national hatred when President [Vladimir] Putin has a strong dislike for nationalists' activities in his home city,&quot; Vdovin said.
 Zaitsev has promised to think a bit more about the matter, Vdovin said.
 But Artyom Bakunin, acting assistant city prosecutor, said that the office will do nothing more than issue a warning to Nashe Otechestvo and other papers and that no further steps are planned for the near future.
 &quot;The matter was examined and as a result of the examination a warning was sent,&quot; Bakunin said Friday in a telephone interview. &quot;I don't have any information of any other [actions] being planned.&quot;

TITLE: Starovoitova 
 Trial Nears
 Final Stage
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The defense in the trial of suspects accused of assassinating State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova is expected to finish presenting evidence on Tuesday, allowing the trial to enter its final, cross-examination stage.
 
The defense last week called for a witness' letter that would &quot;clear up the circumstances under which [the prosecution's] evidence was obtained&quot; to be submitted as evidence.
 Judge Valentina Kudryashova refused to grant the request and barred the name of the witness and the content of the letter from being made public. 
 Ruslan Linkov, Starovoitova's assistant who was injured during the assassination in December 1998, said investigators are already familiar with the letter, which was handed over when examination of the case had just started. 
 &quot;It was filed by a defense witness, who later said that it was written under pressure from the suspects, so this is nothing more than another attempt by the defense to drag out the hearing,&quot; Linkov said Friday.
 The witness is a relative of Yana Kolchina, wife of one of the suspects on trial, according to Izvestia. The witness told investigators that he had installed eavesdropping devices on Starovoitova's staircase before she was shot. He revealed to investigators the names of the suspects who are on trial, the paper said.
 Last year, the witness gave evidence in court, at which time he asked the court to disregard the letter.
 A request to replace the judge was refused as was the defense's subsequent call for the trial to be abandoned on the grounds of the judge's alleged bias..
 Linkov said the trial, which began last winter, could be finished sometime next month.
 &quot;The cross examination part could last for about two weeks or so,&quot; he said.


TITLE: Latvia Regrets
 Baltic Absence
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: IMATRA, Finland - Latvian Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis has expressed his regret that Estonia's and Lithuania's presidents declined to attend celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in Moscow on May 9, RIA-Novosti reported Thursday. 
 
Noting that Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga will attend the event, Kalvitis said he will present Latvia's position on the end of World War II. 
 &quot;After World War II Latvia lost independence,&quot; he was quoted as saying. Unfortunately, our neighbors will not go to Moscow to present our viewpoint together.&quot; 
 Kalvitis spoke at a press conference in the border city of Imatra after a meeting with Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen on Wednesday. 
 Vanhanen said that Finland has no intention of reviewing its relations with Russia regarding the events of World War II. &quot;Both sides should let historians do it,&quot; he was quoted as saying. 
 Finnish President Tarja Halonen is to attend the Moscow celebrations.

TITLE: Family Denies
 Hiding Rebel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Residents of the house where authorities said Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov was killed in Tolstoy-Kurt denied that he had been hiding in their basement, casting doubt on Moscow's accounts of the killing.
 
The Federal Security Service said Maskhadov was killed in a special operation last Tuesday. 
 But Yakha Yusupova, who said she lived with her husband and 15-year-old daughter in the house, said that Maskhadov &quot;was not here,&quot; and that she suspected federal forces may have brought him to the house in a truck. 
 &quot;He could not have been here,&quot; said Yusupova, 44, who returned to her home Thursday after what she said was questioning by authorities at a police precinct. 
 On Tuesday morning, Yusupova said, armed men came into the yard, took them outside, handcuffed her husband to a post and held her and her daughter all day in the garden. At one point a truck drove up and something was taken out, she said. 
 At about 10 a.m. local time, a soldier told them, &quot;'Cover your ears, they're going to blow up your house now,'&quot; and an explosion followed, she said.
 Staying with relatives Wednesday night, they learned from the television news &quot;that Maskhadov had supposedly been killed at our house,&quot; she said.

TITLE: Russia to Alert
 UN to Baltics
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia said Monday it would fight what it called double standards at this year's UN Human Rights Commission meeting, throwing a spotlight on allegedly unfair treatment of Russian-speakers in Latvia and Estonia.
 
&quot;Russian representatives intend to actively use the commission tribune to draw the attention of the international community to the negative humanitarian situation in Latvia and Estonia, in particular, to the policy of open discrimination against the non-titular population by the given states,&quot; the Foreign Ministry said in a statement marking the opening of the commission's annual session in Geneva.
 Moscow routinely accuses Latvia and Estonia of discriminating against their large Russian minorities.
 Over the weekend, Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov warned the United States and the EU against seeking a UN vote condemning Moscow for its human rights record in Chechnya. The Foreign Ministry backed that up Monday by saying it would push for a &quot;balanced and tough&quot; resolution on human rights and terrorism.


TITLE: Gazprom Needs Speed To Gain U.S. Market
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Gazprom must move faster with a major Arctic liquefied natural gas project if it is not to miss a narrow window of opportunity to supply the increasingly competitive U.S. market, analysts say.
 
Gazprom plans to pick Western partners this year to develop the Shtokman deposit in the Barents Sea and build an LNG terminal to start supplying the United States by 2011.
 It also plans a separate LNG plant at Ust-Luga near St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, amid what analysts say are attempts to diversify a customer base traditionally oriented towards Europe and enter the flexible and growing LNG market.
 &quot;Gazprom see the U.S. market as a commercial opportunity they need to pursue urgently, especially as Europe is looking at a huge potential gas oversupply from various sources,&quot; said Jonathan Stern of the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies.
 &quot;But time is key - if you are late, you will end up in a huge crowd, all trying to get a toehold in the U.S. market.&quot;
 Gazprom, like producers around the world, has been lured by sky-high gas prices in the United States, where demand is expected to grow by over 26 percent by 2015, while domestic production is predicted to rise by just 9 percent, leaving a substantial supply gap.
 LNG - gas that is supercooled to liquid form and shipped on tankers to markets where it is regasified - meets three percent of U.S. gas needs now, but is expected to rise to 10 percent by 2010.
 But Gazprom will face stiff competition as producers from Trinidad to Qatar and Nigeria are also eyeing the U.S. market and have a head start. Energy companies have petitioned to build 40 to 50 LNG-receiving terminals in North America.
 &quot;If you count all potential supplies, there is way too much capacity beyond 2010. So competitive dynamics will be key - timing, underlying economics, leverage in the U.S. market, etc,&quot; said Frank Harris, LNG specialist at WoodMackenzie consultancy.
 Gazprom aims to produce 31 billion cubic meters of gas from Shtokman to supply an LNG plant with an annual capacity of 15 million tons. With reserves of 3.2 trillion cubic meters Shtokman's first phase will cost over $10 billion to develop.
 Oxford's Stern was doubtful Shtokman would be up and running by 2011 as planned and said Gazprom should try to get the smaller $1.5-billion Ust-Luga LNG project - a joint project with Petro-Canada with a capacity of 5 million to 7 million tons a year - moving first.
 &quot;Shtokman will be hugely complicated - legally, commercially and intellectually. There is a production sharing agreement involved,&quot; he said. &quot;I somehow do not see it happening before 2014, even with the best will in the world.&quot;
 But Gazprom has one trump card: Western majors' eagerness to get into Russia. So far it has signed preliminary agreements on Shtokman with ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Statoil and Norsk Hydro.
 &quot;Gazprom is exploiting international oil companies' desire to move into Russia,&quot; Harris said. &quot;It is similar to what Qatar Petroleum did - saying we have the gas, you have the capital, the expertise and the ability to bring the market for the LNG.&quot;
 A key factor is many of these firms are involved in projects for re-gasification terminals on the U.S. coast and are keen to find competitively-priced LNG volumes. Planned re-gasification capacity is even greater than contracted LNG, Harris said.
 Gazprom currently supplies over 30 percent of Europe's gas needs and while volumes will slowly grow, it faces stiff competition from suppliers such as Algeria, Qatar, Iran and Libya, which are touting pipeline gas as well as LNG.
 Analysts say LNG, costs for which have fallen 40 percent in the past 15 years, could soon start to affect the dominance of pipelines in the EU market, especially as Russian pipeline gas, priced under long-term deals, is still relatively expensive.
 And although Europe's call on Russia's gas is rising, demand growth is expected to be slower than in Asia and the United States.

TITLE: Historical Center May Be Shrunk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The city's historical zone within the bounds of which no new construction is allowed could be reduced fivefold to stimulate new business development, a federal committee said Monday.
 
The federal monument control, use and protection committee proposed for the reclassification of many parts of St. Petersburg's historical center as &quot;protection,&quot; rather than conservation zones. The move would officially open up the area for new real estate projects but monitor each possible construction on a case by case basis. 
 Discussing its vision for the city at this week's &quot;Modern Construction in a Historic Environment&quot; conference in the Hermitage Theater, the committee said a reduction of St. Petersburg's 3,000 hectare conservation zone would provide a satisfactory compromise between maintaining the city's historical face and stimulating property development.
 &quot;The concept will provide a future for real estate development in the center and conserve the city's historical heritage,&quot; Vera Dementyeva, head of the protection committee said Monday at the conference. 
 Until now all construction in the city center has been permitted as exceptions to the rule, or rather the law, which provides for a consolidated conservation zone in the four central districts of St. Petersburg, a territory of 3,060 hectares.
 Under the committee's concept, the conservation zone would be reduced to cover only the remote city center. It would include parts of Nevsky Prospekt, the Fontanka embankment and Vasilyevsky island, as well as the major historical-architectural ensembles such as the Peter and Paul Fortress, Smolny Cathedral, and Tavrichesky Park and Palace.
 The rest of the central area would be classified as part of a larger protection zone where new construction would be permitted &quot;upon individual project review and discussions,&quot; Dementyeva said.
 The committee says it hopes the new concept will be a more honest, suitable approach to development since there have been over 300 exceptions made by Smolny so far permitting construction in the center anyway, news web site Fontanka.ru reported last week. 
 Speaking at Monday's conference, Alexander Viktorov, head of the architectural and construction committee, assured the attendees that all the city monuments under UNESCO's world heritage protection will remain intact if the new concept is approved by the city.
 In addition, the city will focus on limiting the height of new construction, although it was not a straightforward issue, Viktorov said.
 &quot;St. Petersburg is a flat city, and all the 'newcomer' buildings noticeably stand out if they are above a certain height,&quot; he said, citing the Renaissance Hilton hotel and a new building opposite the Aurora battle cruiser on the Neva fa&ccedil;ade as examples.
 Sharing her experiences, Sherida Paulsen, former head of New York's architectural monuments protection committee, agreed with St. Petersburg officials that preserving historical environments is a challenging urban task.
 &quot;Although height has never been an issue for [New York], putting things together so they fit has,&quot; she said.
 The conference, sponsored by the Hermitage together with Pro Arte Institute and the American Consulate, draws comparisons between two unlikely architectural siblings, St. Petersburg and New York. It will run through Wednesday.

TITLE: Toyota Denies Change of Plans for Factory
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Toyota Motor Corp., the world's second-largest automaker, has discounted last week's media reports of the company ditching plans to build an assembly plant in Russia.
 
&quot;The company is still in the process of making a decision regarding an automobile assembly plants in Russia, and nothing has changed in our position since last year,&quot; company spokesperson Anastasia Kokareva said Monday in a phone interview from Moscow.
 Daily newspaper Kommersant and various Internet news agencies reported that Toyota would not go ahead with the automobile assembly plant last Friday, citing an earlier report in Japanese daily Sankei.
 Sankei proposed that Toyota would abandon its plans for a factory in Russia because of disagreements with the country's authorities, citing the statements of several unidentified officials. 
 Kokareva said there had been no information issued to the Moscow office from Toyota's Japanese headquarters that would justify the media reports.
 The plans announced by Toyota earlier this year included building an assembly plant for its Corolla and Camry brands in Russia. Vehicle components would be first be delivered from Japan, while the motors would be supplied to the Russian factory from Poland.
 It was believed that the plant would be completed by 2006, with investments of about $144 million. The plant's capacity was estimated at 50,000 vehicles annually to match the sales volumes of Toyota cars in Russia in 2004.
 Toyota's management has been discussing its plans with Leningrad Oblast, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod region officials since November 2004.
 After the company's talks with Governor Valentina Matviyenko during her visit to Japan, St. Petersburg was pinned as the likely project winner.
 Toyota's representatives expressed an interest in the area of Shushari, next to the city's Pulkovo airport and the ring road. It was expected that Toyota would make a decision in February, but no final date for the announcement has been made, the company said Monday.

TITLE: Communists Turn to Messaging
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - After decades of hammers and sickles, red flags and wordy slogans, the Communist Party is looking to a propaganda device Lenin and Stalin never dreamed of: cellphone text messaging.
 
The party has been struggling to regain influence and broaden its aging support base. On Saturday its leaders called for a fresh propaganda push to attract younger Russians and gain attention despite being largely shut out by the Kremlin-dominated news media.
 At a party plenary meeting outside Moscow that focused on propaganda, first deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov said the party should turn to methods such as graffiti and cell phone messaging.
 Members of the party's youth wing &quot;could use telephones to send political jokes or rhymes, or attract attention to events - anything that motivates a person to send the message along to someone else,&quot; Melnikov said in comments broadcast on NTV television.
 Melnikov also said the party should make more use of the Internet, NTV reported.
 Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called on his comrades to smarten up their propaganda efforts, using artistic images, satire and advertising. Using a phrase from that capitalist tool, he said they should seek to &quot;sell the brand&quot; of the party, according to ITAR-Tass news agency.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Clean Cash in Russia
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) -There are no more that ten banks in Russia that are involved in criminal money-laundering deals, federal service head said Friday, RIA Novosti reports.
 Viktor Zubkov, the head of Rosfinmonitoring, a federal financial monitoring service, said that the banks involved in money laundering schemes are mostly "small banks," whose operations should be reviewed by the agency's officials, together with Central Bank and law enforcement representatives.
 "If everything is clean, we go in and out. But where there are [some sort of] disparities, criminal money - we have to make a decision about such banks right away," Zubkov said.
 
 
<b>Road Assessor Chosen
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Giprodor Research and Development Institute has won the tender to conduct a feasibility study for the second major highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, The Transport Ministry said late last week.
 Together with subcontractors Ernst &amp; Young Russia and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Giprodor will have until December this year to conclude its finding and assess the feasibility of the $6 billion project. The highway will act as a second, paid link between the two cities that the ministry expects to be completed around 2010.
 
 
<b>Grocer to Buy Rival
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) - Discount grocery store Pyatyorochka said on Friday it had offered to buy smaller rival Kopeika in what would be Russia's biggest retail takeover. 
 A spokeswoman for Pyatyorochka said that total turnover of a new merged entity could reach $3 billion by 2006, while local media estimated a deal might be worth around $500 million. 
 "We have made a proposal on a buyout of either 100 percent of shares or a portion of shares," company spokeswoman Yuliya Kolesnikova said, but added that the offer was tentative. 
 Kopeika confirmed it had received the offer but said its five-year plan, adopted in 2003, did not provide for a sale.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: EU Seeks Clear Air 
 </b>

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The EU Executive Commission wants to create an open aviation market with Russia and China and is seeking a mandate from the 25-nation bloc to start negotiations, it said on Monday. 
 "(The Commission) asks the council (of ministers) to authorize without delay ambitious airline accords with China and Russia," the European Commission said in a statement. 
 The Commission said previous bilateral deals between EU member states and the two non-EU states were redundant. 
 "The agreements are aimed both at economic opening up and at cooperation with a view to harmonizing the rules governing the markets," it said. 
 The EU is the destination for 75 percent of all passenger traffic from Russia while China will become an Asian hub, the Commission said.
 
 
<b>Ukraine Woos Russia
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko meets owners and top managers of Russia's biggest companies in Kiev Monday in a bid to win more investments from the neighboring country, Russia's Vedomosti reported.
 The president's office invited representatives of Russian companies including LUKoil, Russia's biggest oil company, Gazprom, the world's biggest natural gas producer, and Unified Energy System, the world's largest electricity company by capacity, the newspaper reported, citing unnamed representatives of the invited companies.
 Ukraine's $60 billion economy expanded 12 percent last year, while Russia's $533 billion economy grew 7.1 percent. Ukraine, a country of 47 million people, has drawn $7.8 billion in foreign direct investment since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, compared with more than $72 billion in neighboring Poland, which has a population of 38 million, in the same period.
 
 
<b>Tallinn Invests $498M
 </b>

LONDON (Bloomberg) - Estonia's Port of Tallinn, the third-largest port on the Baltic Sea's eastern coast, plans to invest 371 million euros ($498 million) in the next five years to expand services and almost double loading capacity.
 Loading may rise to 60 million tons a year of cargo, up from 37.4 million tons loaded last year, said Diina Niitane, a senior specialist at the port. Crude oil and oil product cargoes account for 72 percent of volume, mostly transited from Russia, Kazakhstan or Belarus for export.
 "It's not only about increasing capacity, it's also to increase efficiency,'' Niitane said Monday in a telephone interview from Tallinn.
 Tallinn port last year lost competition to Russia's port of Primorsk, which became the second-largest port on the Baltic Sea's eastern coast. Russian oil companies diverted some shipments from the Baltic states' ports to Primorsk, linked with an oil pipeline to Siberian fields.
 Tallinn port made record investments last year of 66.5 million euros, mostly to modernize water transport facilities at its Muuga branch coal terminal and a new container terminal, the company said on its web site. The port will invest 49.1 million euros in upgrades this year.
 
 
<b>No Progress for Shell
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the leader of a project developing Russia's Sakhalin II oil and gas deposit, said no progress had been made in talks with Gazprom about the state-run Russian natural-gas producer participating in the field.
 Shell spokesman Maxim Shub denied yesterday's report in the Observer that Shell agreed to give Gazprom a stake of as much as 7 percent in the venture, seeking in return participation in Shtokman, an Arctic oil and gas project developed by Gazprom.
 "We have been in talks with Gazprom over its possible participation in Sakhalin II for quite a long time,'' Shub said Monday in a telephone interview from Moscow. "No decisions have been made.''
 The $12 billion Sakhalin venture is one of Russia's two biggest oil and gas developments. It plans to start producing 9.6 million tons a year of liquefied natural gas in 2007. Shell holds 55 percent in the venture.
 
 
<b>Marriott Sells in U.K.
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - British leisure group Whitbread Plc said Monday it has set up a joint venture with the U.S. Marriott hotels group to sell its U.K. hotels, raising at least 1 billion pounds ($1.92 billion) within two years.
 Whitbread said it was creating a 50:50 joint venture with Marriott International to hold the luxury hotels until they are sold, and would receive an initial payment of 710 million pounds on May 5.
 The company said 400 million of that would be returned to shareholders through a special dividend of 135 pence per share, another 100 million would be used to reduce its pension fund deficit and the rest to repay debt.
 "We expect the joint venture to sell the properties within two years because we want to achieve maximum value and benefit from the current appetite for hotel property assets and the continued upturn in the hotel cycle," Whitbread Chief Executive Alan Parker told reporters in a conference call.
 He said the joint venture, under which about 8,300 staff would transfer to Marriott, would improve the company's return on capital employed and enhance earnings per share.
 
 
<b>Yukos to Resurrect
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Yukos may resume exporting crude by pipeline to Europe next month, Yukos Senior Vice President Alexander Temerko said.
 "If they don't seize more money, assets or oil, we will try to export oil in April,'' Temerko said Monday by telephone from London. "We can't completely leave the international market.''
 Yukos has a pipeline export quota of about 10 million to 12 million tons of oil after the government in December seized and sold Yuganskneftegaz, which accounted for 60 percent of Yukos's production and nearly all of its exports, Temerko said.
 How much oil the company can export will depend mostly on transport fees and export duties, Temerko said. "The most important factor is the availability of financing,'' he said.
 Yukos has been in constant contact with Transneft, the state-owned pipeline monopoly, which helped work out a system for settling exports after courts froze Yukos's assets as part of tax cases against the company, he said.
 Yukos, which is struggling to survive after Russia filed about $28 billion in tax claims against the company, quit exporting through pipelines in January except for some supplies from its own refineries. It has maintained some oil supplies by railway to China this year.

TITLE: Yukos Linked to Spanish Bust
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MADRID - Spanish police have arrested people suspected of siphoning funds from oil firm Yukos without the company's knowledge as part of a bigger money-laundering ring, a source close to the investigation said Sunday.
 
&quot;These are individuals who from inside the Russian company appear to have diverted sums of money ... which then left the country without the knowledge of the company or the tax authorities,&quot; the source said.
 Spanish police said Saturday that they had cracked a money-laundering operation worth up to 250 million euros ($337 million) that might have links to Yukos, but did not specify what those links might have been.
 Police arrested 41 people, including several lawyers, based on Spain's southern coast and suspected of being part of a large criminal network spanning several countries.
 On Monday a Spanish judge ruled that four of those arrested should remain in custody, with another 10 possibly to be detained, French daily El Pais reported. 
 At least 22 have been released, some on bail, the newspaper said Monday.
 Prosecutors from at least seven countries including Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. have now joined the investigation, El Pais said.
 The probe centers on a Marbella-based law firm called Del Valle Abogados, which is suspected of setting up companies that transferred money to tax havens and other countries where it would be difficult to trace, El Pais said.
 The raids followed 10 months of investigation. Those arrested included Spanish, French, Finnish, Russian and Ukrainian citizens. The Spanish Interior Ministry said the operation was Spain's biggest crackdown on money laundering ever. 
 Police said they were chasing links to other activities including homicide, drug trafficking, illegal arms and prostitution.
 The source declined to say how many of the 41 were Russian.
 &quot;They seem to have been ripping [Yukos] off as well, to invest in a Dutch company, which then sent the money to Spain,&quot; the source said.
 Police also seized a ship, two small planes and 42 luxury cars, the Interior Ministry said, adding that Spanish authorities worked closely with the Russians on the case, dubbed &quot;White Whale,&quot; which involved more than 300 police.
 The ministry said police had been able to determine the possible destination for money stemming from a massive illegal siphoning of funds originating at Yukos, allegedly diverted to a Dutch company and then reinvested in a Spanish unit.
 On Saturday Yukos denied reports that it might have been involved in money laundering in Spain. Yukos spokesman Alexander Shadrin told Ekho Moskvy that such reports were &quot;nonsense.&quot;
 &quot;The only place left to look is on Mars - did we launder something there?&quot; Shadrin said. Russian prosecutors could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday. 
 Prosecutors have opened a criminal case against the general director of a joint venture between Yukos and MOL of Hungary, a Yukos spokesman confirmed Friday.
 Oleg Vitka, who has been detained by prosecutors, is accused of violating licensing agreements between April 1 and Dec. 31, 2003, that led to the Zapadno-Malobalykskoe company exceeding its agreed extraction quota by 52 percent, and receiving extra revenues of 536 million rubles ($19.5 million).
 After appearing Wednesday for questioning by prosecutors in Khanty-Mansiisk region, where the company is located, a court in Nefteyugansk ordered that Vitka's period of custody be extended by two months.
 <i>(Reuters, AP, Bloomberg) </i>

TITLE: China Confident it Has 
 Priority on Russian Oil
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - Russia will give priority to China in supplying oil through a planned Siberian pipeline as the two countries build up energy cooperation, the Chinese prime minister said Monday. 
 
Premier Wen Jiabao appeared to be trying to put a positive spin on Russia's choice of a competing Japanese plan that would have the pipeline run to the Pacific, bypassing China. Moscow later agreed to add a branch line to carry crude to China's northeast. 
 &quot;The Russian government and President Putin have made it very clear that first consideration will be given to China when they build the Siberian oil-gas pipeline,&quot; Wen said at a news conference. 
 Beijing is looking to Russia to meet the growing energy demands of its booming economy. China already is the world's third-largest oil importer, after the United States and Japan, and imports soared 35 percent last year. 
 Beijing wants the pipeline to reach the northeastern Chinese city of Daqing, the center of the country's oil industry. 
 The pipeline, due to be completed by 2010, is expected to cost $10.75 billion and to be able to carry 1.6 million barrels of oil a day. 
 Beijing is looking to Russia as a major energy supplier as the needs of China's booming economy grow. 
 Wen said energy will be a key topic when he meets his Russian counterpart, Mikhail Fradkov, later this year. 
 China and Russia &quot;have also studied the possibility of cooperation in oil and gas development,&quot; Wen said. 
 Beijing expects to import 10 million tons (1.4 million barrels) of Russian crude oil this year by rail and 15 million tons (2 million barrels) next year, Wen said. 
 China's total crude oil imports soared 35 percent last year to 120 million tons (17 million barrels).

TITLE: State Set to Ease Tax Burden
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Monday that new tax proposals approved by the government last week will cut companies' tax burden by $7 billion per year. 
 
The proposals, which will simplify the collection of Value Added Tax and speed up refunds to exporters, would cost the government $5 billion less than an alternative plan proposed by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, which envisaged slashing the VAT rate to 13 percent from 18 percent. 
 The changes will also allow companies to write off 10 percent of equipment purchases as operating expenses, thus reducing their corporate profit tax bill, Kudrin said in an interview published Monday in the Kommersant daily. 
 A Cabinet rift between Russia's liberal economists and Fradkov appeared to have been healed on Friday when Kudrin announced that an agreement had been reached to keep VAT at 18 percent. 
 Fradkov's plan would have meant the VAT cuts would need to be funded to the tune of some $12 billion from a special stabilization fund created to insulate Russia against oil price fluctuations. 
 &quot;We have avoided a number of abrupt decisions connected with the decrease of a number of taxes, even though we believe such decisions would be right,&quot; Fradkov said at President Vladimir Putin's regular Monday meeting with the Cabinet, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. 
 In an apparent tradeoff, Kudrin announced that the price threshold per barrel of oil after which export duties and tax are contributed to the special stabilization fund will be raised from $20 per barrel to $23 per barrel - a move that the economists say will pump a further $6 billion into the federal budget.

TITLE: Dispute Engulfs Newspaper
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A labor dispute has erupted at Moscow News, a weekly newspaper that was a flagship of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost, or openness, policy and today is one of the last bastions of independent media in Russia. 
 
The conflict erupted after the editor in chief, Yevgeny Kiselyov, decided not to renew contracts for five of the paper's leading journalists including two deputy editors. In response, 20 of the paper's 32 staff members demanded Kiselyov's resignation, saying he is unsuitable for the job. 
 Speaking on the Ekho Moskvy radio station Monday, deputy editor Lyudmila Telen said, &quot;The paper has improved over the past 15 months, but not because of anything Yevgeny Kiselyov has done because, forgive me, he hasn't done anything.&quot; 
 Kiselyov is one of Russia's best-known journalists, having hosted a critical weekly political analysis program on NTV, Russia's first nationwide private TV channel, which he co-founded with media and banking tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. 
 He led protests when the station was taken over by an arm of state-connected natural gas monopoly Gazprom in 2001 in a move perceived as being punishment for the station's critical coverage of President Vladimir Putin. 
 After the station's closure, his team split with some key members staying on at NTV, who said they objected to Kiselyov's abrasive leadership style. 
 Kiselyov and his team moved to privately run TV6 - displacing journalists already working there - only for the station to lose its license in 2002 in a dispute with one of its shareholders, a government-connected pension fund. 
 Kiselyov was hired as editor in chief of Moscow News 15 months ago when a subsidiary of Menatep, the majority shareholder in the embattled Yukos oil company, purchased the ailing paper and charged him with restoring it to its former pioneering role.

TITLE: Mean Machine
TEXT: You get respect with this,&quot; says Gennady Lazurin, an aviation millionaire, as I drive his Kombat armored tank-ette along the roads of St. Petersburg. As frightened faces stare at me and our looming vehicle from their graying, battered Ladas, I see what he means.
 The Kombat T-98 closely resembles a large Securicor van with lots of extra shiny knobs and lights. The car was designed to protect objects of vast wealth - namely Russian businessmen - from kidnapping, assassination, or estranged wives.
 The brainchild of Dmitry Parfyonov (owner of the St Petersburg design factory Autokad), this Kombat is one of only nine in existence. Prices start at Pound82,000 ($158,000) rising to Pound180,000 ($347,000) for the most heavily armored version, which can shrug off an anti-tank round. Autokad is now planning to make 100 of these luxury vehicles in the U.K. to compete with the American Hummer.
 Gennady, who's about 1.8 meters tall and 90 centimeters wide, has kindly agreed to let me test-drive his T-98, which can withstand incoming from a light Russian-made Makarov pistol (but not a Kalashnikov).
 The windows are about 5 centimeters thick. They don't even wind down fully. It's like looking at fellow drivers through a riot shield. I had decided earlier that Gennady is better off not knowing that I am an appalling driver, who wrote off a hire car and another car in America six years ago, and whose wife is reduced to trembling hysteria whenever he takes the wheel.
 The sheer size of the Kombat is initially unnerving, but the St Petersburg highway clears before it, allowing the driver to enjoy the vast roar of the engine and surprising lightness of handling. On the asphalt, its brakes can take it from 80 kilometers per hour to a standstill in about 10 meters, easing some of my fears at being in charge of the SUV equivalent of a Challenger tank.
 The leather seats, Bose stereo, endless 4x4 controls around the wheel and clear lines of sight eased my heart rate, too-and, after about 15 minutes of driving on the highway, I had enough confidence to go as close to &quot;off road&quot; as is sensible.
 We head down a side road that leads into some woodland. As if part of a previously arranged obstacle course, three identical, large Russian Kamaz trucks appear and head towards us. We show no fear, and keep on the road towards them-and all three pull to one side, terrified.
 The Kombat's acceleration is worryingly responsive. I like it just a bit too much. Light-headed after a few bursts on the highway, I decide to try it on the dirt road, and feel Gennady wince as we ramrod over a big dip in the mud. The Kombat handles it remarkably well, its suspension yielding mild discomfort, like taking a speed bump in a Lada at 32 kilometers per hour.
 The &quot;Dzheep&quot; is now part of Russian culture. All over Moscow, blackened Hummers park ungracefully on the pavement, but their thick windows and shells don't provide the same protection as their predecessor, the military Humvee.
 The Kombat is, according to Parfyonov, a high-performance, high-protection, homemade version for Russia's ridiculously wealthy. The heavy armor, which can bring the car's weight up to 4,250 kilograms, may seem like a neurotic's indulgence. But traffic accidents are one of the more harmless risks on Moscow's roads.
 Assassinations are commonplace, and armor can make a difference. Boris Goldman, an advertising executive, was killed last April when a biker placed a bomb on the roof of his armored Volvo C80. The bomb - set by the assassin's employee to detonate immediately, thereby killing the biker too - tore through the only weak spot in the armor, killing Goldman and his passengers.
 Gennady, 48, a former Aeroflot pilot, lives in Estonia, a few hours from St Petersburg, and faces no such daily risk. His firm Eminex charters airliners across Europe. When they started out, he drove an Opel. As testament to his success, he now drives the Kombat T-98 after his son spotted one in a magazine.
 &quot;It looks aggressive but kind,&quot; he says. &quot;It smiles.&quot; He says that it handles the same as his Mercedes S-class, and that traffic police, notorious for demanding bribes for trumped-up offenses, often pull him over just to have a look at the dashboard.
 Beneath the bonnet - you need both arms to lift it - is an U.S. Vortec eight-liter engine, enabling it to go from 50 kilometers per hour to 120 kilometers per hour in about five seconds. The armor is mostly Swedish, the glass Finnish, and it can come with a mini-bar, DVD player, three TV monitors and a navigation system.
 Parfyonov plans to open an assembly plant in Britain, to sell to the European market without paying hefty Russian export-import taxes.
 The T-98 handles beautifully. I can only compare it to a Cherokee Jeep I drove six years ago (it survived), whose center of gravity was so high it bounced about like an elaborate Space Hopper.
 The Kombat is a much more serious toy, a Space Hopper weighed down with Kevlar-making you the biggest, baddest kid in the playground.
 <i>
 
Nick Paton Walsh is a staff writer for The Guardian newspaper where this article first appeared. Reprinted under copyright of Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. </i>

TITLE: Domestic Car Makers Left at the Mercy of Import Law
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The future of the domestic car industry hangs in the balance as Russian manufactures warned that a possible reduction of import duties on parts for foreign cars could put many of the nation's factories out of business.
 
In last month's signed letter send to Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, domestic manufacturers urged that a lowering or a cancellation of import duties would mean the loss of over 100,000 jobs, business daily Vedomosti reported Friday.
 The Russian plants' financial losses would amount to 1 percent of gross domestic product, the letter said.
 The government has wished to ease the duties on foreign car manufactures for some time now, in view of Russia's future entrance to the World Trade Organization. In 2004, Fradkov promised the Chairman of the EU Commission, Romano Prodi, to decrease the maximum duty on imports of new foreign cars from 35 percent to 20 percent.
 In January, the Committee on Protection Measures in External Trade recommended that the government cancel the duties on imported car components.
 The recommendation immediately led to the letter from the Russian manufacturers, and an early March meeting between Alexei Kaulbars, a regulations director at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and representatives from the domestic car manufacturers.
 Although no resolution has yet been reached, car lobbyists told Vedomosti that both parties have stated their case. The final decision could lie in the hands of the prime minister, the newspaper reported.
 &quot;We are still of the opinion that the decree on reducing import duties should be adopted,&quot; an unnamed official at the ministry told Vedomosti.
 Industry experts agree with the heavy losses estimated by domestic manufacturers, but see the domestic car industry's most likely solution in joint ventures rather than protectionist state measures.
 The car market in Russia comprises of three major segments: new domestic cars, imported used foreign cars and new foreign cars either imported or assembled in Russia, Jan Dorizon, spokesperson for AutoFramos, a car parts joint venture in Moscow, told Autobusiness magazine.
 The first market segment though big (over 50 percent, Dorizon estimates) has recently been on the decline. Domestic carmakers AutoVAZ, GAZ and Moskvich have all stopped production several times in the last two years due to a surplus of their cars, unsold, in factory warehouses.
 The situation is quite different in the latter two segments. High import taxes may have given a temporary breathing space for Russian automakers, but consumers say the quality of domestic products has not improved while prices have risen.
 Alexander Chernikhin, an excavator driver, says his 1983 Ford Sierra compares very favorably even with a relatively new, two-year-old Russian Zhiguli. In addition, the foreign car is more comfortable.
 A used foreign car model, such as his brother's 1993 Volkwagen Golf, Cherkikhin rates as already much superior to new domestic models Zhiguli 8, 9 or 99.
 If Russian cars could formerly rely on their competitive price, the growth in affluence in domestic consumers has meant a shift away from the cheaper end of the car market.
 A 2004 survey by analysts from AutoVAZ, published in Autobusiness magazine, noticed that the average purchase potential of Russians lifted from about $7,000 before 2003 to $10,000 last year, and that figure was expected to grow by a further 50 percent in two years.
 If such an increase still left most famous foreign car brands out of reach, the sales potential for foreign cars made in Russia has dramatically increased, the magazine said.
 &quot;It looks like the future might be set for locally produced foreign cars. They are cheaper than the imported new models and quality-wise superior to domestic cars,&quot; the magazine said. 
 At present there are six foreign car manufacturers operating in Russia, including Ford, GM, Hyundai and KIA. The list is expected to enlarge considerably in the next two years as Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen eye construction of assembly facilities in Russia.
 The inflow of foreign manufacturers seems only logical considering the immaturity of the Russian auto market. At present there are about 150 to 160 cars per 1,000 of the population. In Western Europe every second person owns a car.
 &quot;These figures prove not only the Russians' low income but also an enormous unmet demand for cars that are affordable and meet Western quality standards. The demand for them is growing in proportion to the economic growth,&quot; Dorizon said.
 The changing trend has not left Russian producers completely behind. In an almost unprecedented move, AutoVAZ recently recalled 1,086 vehicles of its Zhiguli 2120 model because of a possible problem with the car's front brake.
 The move could be seen as an indication of the changing mentality of domestic producers as they look to maintain higher standards and working practises. Analysts warn that this is, however, only a start, and an absolutely necessary one if domestic manufacturers are to justify their rising prices.
 &quot;The price increase for new Russian cars has brought them to the level of foreign cars made in Russia,&quot; Alexander Kovrigin, general director of car market analytical agency ASM Holding, said in a statement at the end of last year.
 The situation means that domestic cars can no longer blame poor quality on price, Kovrigin said. Given the simple choice, customers will vote for better value for their rubles.
 Viktor, the owner of a one year old Lada who asked not to be identified, has no qualms about what he would choose.
 &quot;I would get rid of this rusty toolbox in a flash if I could afford a foreign brand car,&quot; he said.

TITLE: Taking Art Abroad <br> Can Be a Valuable Lesson
TEXT: What are the rates of tax on works of art taken out of Russia?
 </i>
 

Chapter 25-3 of the Tax Code, which came into effect on Jan. 1, imposes a state duty on cultural valuables being taken out of Russia. The duty is 5 percent of the item's value for a modern piece, and 10 percent if the piece was created 50 or more years ago. 
 
&quot;Cultural valuables&quot; are defined very broadly in the law titled &quot;On Taking Cultural Valuables Into and Out of Russia.&quot; The list includes paintings, sculptures, icons, rare books, archaeological finds, historical valuables and archives.
 This provision refers to yet another list set by the cultural heritage service of the Culture and Press Ministry. The second list defines cultural valuables much more narrowly, and excludes pieces of modern art.
 Consequently, despite the Tax Code provision, a picture by the modern painter Vladimir Dubossarsky bought at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art would currently not be subject to a state duty. However, don't be surprised if the cultural heritage service soon amends its list to include modern art.
 If you plan on taking a Faberge egg or a Tsar Nicholas II coin out of the country, be prepared to pay an extra 10 percent above the object's value. The duty is based on the purchase price of the item. However, an expert can give a different estimate of its value, sometimes vastly different. To pay less duty, if you paid a lot for a rare violin, for example, it might be better not to provide the expert with details of the purchase price.
 To take a piece out of Russia, you have to apply to the ministry's cultural heritage service. Service experts will decide whether a particular item is on the list of cultural valuables, and consequently whether you have to pay state duty on it.
 You will not be allowed to take particularly important cultural valuables out of Russia at all. 
 You will pay the duty after the expert valuation and before receiving a Culture and Press Ministry certificate that will allow you to take the piece out of Russia. Some art galleries offer to get this certificate for you.
 You cannot pay the state duty at customs. Customs officers will only check whether you have the ministry certificate. If you do not have it, you can be fined for up to 1 million rubles ($36,000) or imprisoned for up to seven years.
 If you are taking a piece out temporarily, you will pay 0.01 percent of its insurance cost. An artist can take his own work out of Russia free of charge.
 
 <i>
Olga Boltenko is a tax lawyer with Haarmann, Hemmelrath &amp; Partner. </i>

TITLE: Doomed to Invest in Russian Oil
TEXT: At a recent industry conference, LUKoil President Vagit Alekperov was asked about the prospects for foreign investment in Russia's petroleum sector. The question came only five days after a public statement by Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev that auctions to develop certain major oil, gas and mineral fields would only be open &quot;to those companies in which not less than 51 percent of the share capital belongs to Russian participants.&quot;
 
No wonder that Alekperov's response beginning &quot;you are doomed to invest in Russia&quot; was greeted with appreciative laughter. Taken as a whole, the legal history of foreign investment in the petroleum sector in post-Soviet Russia suggests that international oil companies are indeed &quot;doomed&quot; to invest in the sector, just as Russia is doomed to seek such foreign investment. Compared to other major oil exporting countries that have shunned foreign investment, Russia has neither the historical imperative nor the geological luxury of going it alone.
 After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, international oil companies, or IOCs, were keen to invest in Russia and add significant oil reserves to their balance sheets. Russia had the potential to increase exports with the help of foreign investment, as production continued to decline and domestic consumption fell.
 Russia had a variety of models to choose from. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia and Mexico, merely pay for foreign oil field services and allow no foreign participation in production itself. Some, like Canada, offer licensing concessions, and some offer various other forms of participation including sharing the oil produced with investors by means of production-sharing agreements, or PSAs, which are used in countries as disparate as Angola, Indonesia and Libya, as well as other CIS countries.
 Of course, a country's oil policy is made as much on political as economic grounds. In February 1992, Russia adopted the current Underground Resources Law. It states the government owns all of the country's oil, gas and minerals, and offers licenses on auction or tender to third parties to explore and extract them in return for royalties and taxes. While the law does not prohibit foreign companies from holding licenses, foreign investors may be excluded by other laws. Licenses cannot be sold or used as collateral; they are not property and are not protected from changes in the tax laws, for example. 
 Yet Russian crude exports continued to fall until the mid-1990s. Some of this was due to former allies not being used to paying for oil in convertible currency, but falling production was also a problem. Without a stable, transparent legal regime, it was argued, Russia could not attract the investment needed to jump-start production, much less develop new prospects. As a result, both IOCs and various experts recommended a PSA regime. The PSA is essentially an agreement between the government and an investor enshrined by law, under which the investor risks money to explore and develop a prospective field, and if enough petroleum is found, it is shared between the government and the investor according to an agreed formula. 
 While discussion and formulation of a PSA law dragged on, Russia eventually signed three ad hoc PSAs with IOCs: the Sakhalin-1 project in June 1995, the Sakhalin-2 project in June 1994, which came into force after Sakhalin-1, and the Kharyaga project in northeastern Siberia in December 1995. Not surprisingly, all concerned expensive and technically difficult projects outside the original western Siberian oil district. After they were signed, but before any of them had come into force, President Boris Yeltsin signed the new PSA law in late December 1995.
 Far from accelerating the pace of foreign investment, the new law arguably slowed it. International oil companies complained that it was inconsistent with the Tax Code and lacked other provisions needed to secure the economics of PSA projects, and withheld investment in the hope that the PSA law would be rectified. Opponents of the PSA law, including domestic Russian majors such as Yukos, lobbied against it on the grounds that it unfairly favored foreign investors over Russian producers. Gradually, the opponents prevailed, culminating in 2003 with amendments limiting PSAs to a short list of fields approved by the State Duma - and only where a licensing auction had already failed.
 Meanwhile, production and exports of petroleum have steadily increased, despite the fact that not a single PSA has been created since 1995. There are several reasons for this, including a natural lag before the grandfathered PSA projects began production. Foreign investment in Russian oil companies, as well as mergers and joint ventures with Russian companies, has also played an important role. Yet much of the increase in production has been due to Russian companies making relatively inexpensive investments in existing oil fields. 
 Despite the difficulties, neither Trutnev's remark nor the apparent denoument of the Yukos affair is likely to stem the flow of foreign investment. Trutnev's remark referred to a specific group of fields, including Sakhalin-3. It has long been expected that they would be developed jointly with Russian companies. In the case of Sakhalin-3, for example, subsidiaries of Mobil (now ExxonMobil) and Texaco (now ChevronTexaco) won the right to negotiate a PSA for that project in 1993. But well before the PSA law was effectively neutralized 10 years later, those companies were already negotiating with Rosneft to form an alliance to develop the project. A new auction for this project - for a license and not a PSA - will determine how it is developed. A joint venture between Russian and foreign companies would not be a surprising result. 
 This is not to suggest that the new draft law on underground resources will be rapturously welcomed by potential investors. The bill explicitly limits &quot;users of underground resources&quot; to Russian entities and explicitly grants the government the right to restrict the use of &quot;strategic&quot; assets. Moreover, the liability of users for noncompliance is broad, with exceptions only for illegal acts of the government or due to force majeure. But most Russian subsidiaries owned by foreign investors can participate, and foreign investors may welcome other provisions of the bill, such as classifying the right to use underground resources as &quot;real property&quot; that can be pledged or assigned with governmental permission, and expanding the use of auctions. And existing licenses will remain valid, or may be converted to contracts to use underground resources, the new term introduced by the bill.
 So why are international oil companies doomed to invest in Russian petroleum? Why shouldn't Russia follow Saudi Arabia's or Mexico's model? Whatever the ultimate profile of the anticipated Gazprom-Rosneft merger, the new state-owned behemoth will not be comparable to Saudi Aramco or Mexico's Pemex. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Russia does not have one enormous and easily exploited oil field as its cornerstone asset. Unlike Mexico, with its constitutional prohibition on foreign capital participating in the oil industry - though its reserves are mostly found in the very deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico - Russia is developing, and gives every indication that it understands the need to develop its difficult offshore and remote reserves with the help of foreign capital and technology. Russia not only has multiple petroleum regions and dozens of oil fields, but also an established working relationship with foreign capital. A variety of private oil companies continue to operate, many with substantial foreign ownership. The PSA law, however hobbled, remains on the books and could be revived for the appropriate project, while the new law does not represent a significant departure from present practice. 
 Russia will continue to need capital and technology to maintain and increase the ever more vital income it derives from oil exports, while IOCs will continue to seek to add reserves wherever they are available. Taken in context, neither Trutnev's remarks nor the Yukos affair gives any indication of changing this situation. 
 
 <i>Shane R. DeBeer is a partner with the international law firm Chadbourne &amp; Parke. He contributed this column to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Karabakh Tensions Part of New Great Game
TEXT: As the United States and Russia continue their uneasy struggle for influence across the CIS, a remote corner of the southern Caucasus is gaining prominence once again, part of a series of regional subplots that could aid or impede any grand designs for power. The corner in question is Nagorny Karabakh, a tiny mountainous enclave inhabited predominantly by Armenians, which was the scene of a brutal armed struggle in the 1990s when local separatists successfully ended Azerbaijan's rule. Since that time, Karabakh's Armenians have controlled the enclave and its borderlands, having fashioned their own republic, which enjoys significant support from neighboring Armenia. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan refuses to acknowledge any change, instead seeking Karabakh's return to its full control. 
 
Emerging in 1988, the Karabakh struggle was once heralded as a test case for Soviet nationalities policy under Mikhail Gorbachev. Karabakh's Armenians, with the support of Armenia, initially sought to secede from Azerbaijan, citing their constitutional right to self-determination. However, when these demands met with violent reprisals against Armenians across Azerbaijan, peaceful rallies and petitions were replaced by low-intensity conflict pitting Armenian partisans against Azerbaijan's special forces, amid the rapid demise of Soviet power.
 With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Karabakh struggle quickly spiraled into all-out war. By 1994, it had left tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands uprooted on both sides. The conflict also drew in a host of regional actors - Armenia and Azerbaijan, of course, but also neighboring Turkey and Iran, as well as Russia and eventually the United States. This made for a complex geopolitical equation. Indeed, depending on whom you speak to, the Karabakh issue is framed differently. For native Karabakhtsis, it is a pure-and-simple national liberation struggle that seeks to remove foreign occupation. For politicians in Yerevan and Baku, Karabakh is an apple of discord vied over by competing states. For regional powers, it is a political playing card, through which ethnic tensions can be stoked, suppressed or otherwise manipulated depending on the interests at stake. The problem, of course, is that all four levels operate simultaneously within a hierarchical nest of power relations.
 Following a 1994 cease-fire, the Karabakh conflict has subsided to a large extent. True, border skirmishes continue, and military preparedness remains a priority for Armenians and Azeris alike. Yet all concede that a tenuous &quot;not-war, not-peace&quot; environment has slowly set in. The war on the ground has been largely replaced by a war of words, as all sides press for advantage at the negotiating table. Meanwhile, these sides seek to create new facts-on-the-ground that will bolster their positions in the future. For example, the self-declared Nagorny Karabakh Republic has consolidated its de facto independence by establishing firm links to Armenia, on which it now relies for substantial economic and political support. At the same time, Azerbaijan has skillfully parlayed its trump card - massive Caspian energy reserves - into a strong multilateral foreign policy that has steered away from dependence on Russia and toward friendly ties with Turkey and the United States, thus creating a favorable mix of anxiety and dependence among those who seek favor with Baku. Diplomacy aside, there are also concerns that oil and gas money now entering Baku may contribute to its remilitarization, thus leading to renewed hostilities.
 In this war of maneuver, uneasy coexistence has been the norm for the last decade or so. In Baku, Soviet strongman and former President Haidar Aliyev made some noise occasionally, but generally remained low-key, as he favored negotiated solutions and steered clear of any destabilizing developments that might upset investors. In Yerevan, the dovish President Levon Ter-Petrosyan and his successor, the slightly more hawkish Robert Kocharyan, have been even less prone to belligerence, given the ongoing pressures they face from neighboring Turkey and the United States, which have scarcely concealed their support for Azerbaijan. Perhaps most compelling has been the rivalry between the United States and Russia, as the two have evinced markedly different approaches to the region. The former seeks a negotiated settlement within an East-West integrated sphere of influence that would extend from Turkey to Central Asia, effectively cutting off Iran from Russia. The latter has sought permanent instability in Karabakh and elsewhere that would ensure the Caucasus' continuance as its primary zone of influence.
 This slow-motion dance has faltered only twice: once in early 1998 when Ter-Petrosyan was ousted after becoming too conciliatory in his talks with Aliyev and again in 2001 when Kocharyan and Aliyev agreed to a tentative compromise that blew up when Aliyev returned to Baku and apparently changed his mind. Today, however, things appear to be changing: Ilham Aliyev, recent successor to Haidar, has retained his father's authoritarian habits at home while demonstrating increasing belligerence abroad, both in his pronouncements and concrete initiatives. He is emboldened by Russia's seeming retreat, coupled with the United State's recent involvement in the region, as well as its present attempts to court Baku in the campaign to isolate Iran. Thus, with wind in his sails, Aliyev has combined periodic threats to retake Karabakh by force with diplomatic offensives designed to paint Armenia as the conflict's aggressor. The most recent initiative is a proposed UN resolution decrying Karabakh's hold over &quot;occupied territories&quot; surrounding the enclave, in which Baku demands that Armenians evacuate these lands before negotiating anything regarding Karabakh's status.
 Armenians reply that these are buffer zones, required as a cushion against possible future attacks - a claim supported by the occasional war cries that still emanate from Baku. Moreover, Karabakh's authorities report that their &quot;occupation&quot; hardly resembles the West Bank or Baghdad; rather, Karabakh's borderlands have been settled sporadically and unevenly, in many cases by itinerant refugees driven from Azerbaijan during the war years. These claims, too, have been borne out, most recently by French mediator Bernard Fassier, who was in Karabakh as part of an OSCE monitoring team in January. Fassier notes in part, &quot;In many areas there is no electricity and poverty predominates. I wouldn't say people live. Rather, they are surviving in half-destroyed walls topped by a tin roof.&quot;
 Not surprisingly, Armenians have rejected Baku's territorial preconditions for a settlement, saying that the central issues - guarantees of Karabakh's security and, ultimately, its political status - must remain at the forefront of any negotiating process. Azerbaijan replies by stressing Karabakh's illegitimacy as a party in negotiations, insisting it will only deal in state-to-state scenarios involving Armenia.
 So what is to be done? Having spent a good deal of the past decade in Karabakh, I know first-hand that native Armenians are stubbornly distrustful of Azeri authorities, and would sooner die than return to the pre-1988 status quo. Accordingly, Azerbaijan must take the fundamental steps of acknowledging Karabakh's right to exist and allowing its inclusion as a side to the negotiations. No solution - no matter how clever - can work without local involvement.
 A second issue, however, is perhaps even more thorny: It involves the regional balance of power and, specifically, how Russia intends to react to growing U.S. aggressiveness in and around the Caucasus. If Russia retreats, leaving matters in the hands of U.S.-led interests, more blood may be spilled before a solution is reached. On the other hand, Russia must acknowledge that it cannot use the blunt instruments and blatant manipulations of its recent past, if it is to maintain influence. Rather, Moscow's intentions must become more transparent, aiming to build trust within a framework of regional cooperation rather than by perpetuating instability among vassal states. Otherwise, the stalemate will continue well into the next decade.
 
 <i>John Antranig Kasbarian holds a Ph.D. in geography from Rutgers University and serves as Nagorny Karabakh program director for the New York-based Tufenkian Foundation. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Housing Code Gives Incentive for People's Initiatives
TEXT: The new Housing Code came into force on March 1. This innovation will have a strong influence on the reform of the communal housing sector in St. Petersburg.
 
From the point of view of moving ahead with reforms the clear-thinking majority of specialists give the new Housing Code a positive evaluation. The code has finally introduced a system of legal relationships that makes the services correspond to socio-economic realities. Most importantly, it puts owners in control and the state, as an owner, has the same rights as private owners. Previously there were many aspects leftover from the Soviet times that hampered the creation of a market for communal housing services.
 Another achievement of the new Housing Code is its emphasis on the main problem of reforming the services - making the public take charge of managing their apartment blocks. In order to stimulate the activities of citizens, a range of radical measures are foreseen. Article 161 says, &quot;the means of managing an apartment block will be decided at a general meeting of [apartment] owners.&quot; Three possibilities are offered - direct management by residents, a condominium or special users' cooperative, or a management company. Article 45 says such general meetings should be held once a year.
 That means that the way the absolute majority of apartment blocks in Russia are managed now is illegal as of March. Even those where a condominium has been formed are not exempt from holding general meetings to choose the form of management. Thus all owners of homes and even non-residential space are obliged to hold meetings. If residents refuse to fulfill the law, the local administration takes charge and is then supposed to choose a property manager by tender.
 All of this is absolutely innovative. Previously the management of state-owned buildings was organized quite differently. Firstly, a condominium had to be formed that would manage the entire property including the land on which the buildings stood and only after that could a management system be selected. If an apartment block contained no more than four private owners, they were able to manage it themselves. If a condominium was not organized the state services would manage the property. Now the limit of four owners for self-management has been lifted. There is no need to form a condominium first, before anything else can happen. The residents themselves, not the state, decide which system of services and which company they wish to employ. In addition, the system can be chosen directly at a meeting of residents, either through a tender or by asking the housing cooperative to make the decision.
 Putting such a key decision in the hands of citizens, and at a meeting rather than through a formal organization as was previously the case, appears to be a great stimulus to organize self-management. And to give the creators of the Housing Code their due, they have conscientiously made the law support this. A whole range of articles describe in detail the procedures on how the meetings should be conducted and what counts as a quorum in different situations. Even absentee votes, which are extremely important for houses with large numbers of residents - up to 1,000, and even in cases when a significant number of owners of an apartment in St. Petersburg live elsewhere.
 The main achievement of the new Housing Code is that it has not introduced any revolution in people's minds. The law simply regulates practices that have already been introduced to lead to more or less successful management of residential properties by the residents themselves. Like all good laws it is founded on realities - &quot;it has legalized the rising of the sun,&quot; which according to Antoine de Saint-Expury is the key to the successful observance of laws. The only problem is that the sun must rise over the entire country and not in isolated patches.
 For the legalization of the mechanisms of the Housing Code to yield practical results they need to operate at the level of the whole country or entire administrative regions. But in St. Petersburg, for instance, the growth point is only 20 percent of residential homes and 80 percent are still managed indifferently. Everything depends on the citizens, on their initiative, and their desire to take their lives into their own hands. But Russians are not used to behaving this way - they did not even take advantage of the possibilities that they had earlier, preferring to leave responsibility to anyone but themselves - President Vladimir Putin, the government, the regional administration, the municipalities, even the neighbors.
 Disregarding the active resistance of conservatives, the authors of the Housing Code have succeeded in making residents, or, to be more accurate, property owners, directly responsible for deciding how their apartment blocks are to be managed at a general meeting. Thus the entirely justified view that citizens are passive appears to be the greatest weakness of the reform. Russia is following the example of Estonia, which in 2003 also required its citizens to take responsibility for the management of their apartment blocks. In addition, as in Tallinn, St. Petersburg has eliminated the state-run services organizations.
 Nevertheless, if the level of citizens' initiative does not grow, then nothing can be done - it's not possible to force people to enter paradise.
 
 <i>
Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday. </i>

TITLE: The Rendering
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: In the heady months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the chickenhawks of the Bush Regime were eager to flash their tough-guy cojones to the world. Led by the former prep-school cheerleader in the Oval Office, swaggering Bushists openly bragged of &quot;kicking ass&quot; with macho tactics like torture and &quot;extraordinary rendition.&quot;
 
&quot;We don't kick the [expletive] out of them,&quot; one top Bush official told The Washington Post on Dec. 26, 2002. &quot;We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.&quot; In the same article, other Bush honchos boasted about withholding medical treatment from wounded prisoners; knowingly sending prisoners to be tortured in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan (&quot;I do it with my eyes open,&quot; said one top agent); and breaking international law as a routine part of interrogations by U.S. operatives. &quot;If you're not violating someone's human rights,&quot; said an interrogation supervisor, &quot;you're probably not doing your job.&quot; These freely admitted violations included beatings, hooding, exposure, sexual humiliation and the medieval barbarism of strappado: chaining a prisoner with his arms twisted behind his back and suspending him from the ceiling, where the weight of his own body tears at his sockets and sinews.
 The invasion of Iraq, itself a war crime of staggering dimensions, simply extended this long-established and officially sanctioned system of brutality to a new arena. And to thousands of new victims, the overwhelming majority of whom were innocent of any crime, as the Red Cross reported. While the investigative work of Seymour Hersh and others in exposing the horrors of Abu Ghraib is indeed laudable, it should not have come as any surprise. The atrocities detailed in the revelations were identical to those the Bush Regime had openly acknowledged as standard practice just months before.
 The only difference, of course, was the fact that pictures of the Abu Ghraib atrocities were also published and broadcast. Public sensibilities - untroubled by previous verbal admissions buried deep in slabs of newsprint - were suddenly shocked by the lurid visuals. A Republican-led Senate investigation declared that it had uncovered &quot;even worse&quot; pictures of torture: stomach-curdling photos and videos of bloody abuse that could stain America's name for generations. The Bush Regime braced for an election-year firestorm of scandal. Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld offered the president his resignation.
 Then - nothing happened. The outraged Republican senators never released their damning pictures. Rumsfeld kept his job. A &quot;few bad apples&quot; in the lower ranks were put on trial; the top figures involved in the torture system were promoted. And even though Pentagon and CIA investigators continue to document hundreds - hundreds - of cases of torture, abuse and outright murder in Bush's gulag, the storm has passed. Indeed, Bushists like John Yoo, one of the primary authors of the &quot;torture memos&quot; undergirding the gulag, see the 2004 election as a public affirmation of blood and brutality. The vote is &quot;proof that the debate is over,&quot; Yoo told The New Yorker. &quot;The issue is dying out.&quot;
 Yet the Regime was shaken a bit by the brief tempest. Instead of macho swagger about &quot;kicking ass&quot; and &quot;taking off the gloves,&quot; there are now prim assurances of legality. PR fig leaves are being artfully draped over once-bulging displays of butchness. This week, The New York Times was chosen for a high-profile leak, &quot;revealing&quot; that while Bush himself gave the order to &quot;render&quot; U.S. captives to nations that practice torture - supposedly as a cost-saving measure - the CIA is scrupulously ensuring that no prisoners are ever actually tortured by foreign torturers in the torture chambers where Bush has consigned them. Such prissy hand-wringing is a far cry from the old braggadocio (&quot;I did it with my eyes open&quot;) and cynical shoulder-shrugging of December 2002, when one rendition op dismissed the very notion of CIA supervision of its foreign torture partners: &quot;If we're not there in the room with them,&quot; he smirked, &quot;who is to say&quot; what goes on in the outsourced interrogations?
 But Bush is facing something far more dangerous than the occasional hiccup of bad PR or toothless probes by his Senate bagmen. There are now several lawsuits afoot filed by innocent survivors of the &quot;rendition&quot; system set up at Bush's direct order. These cases could not only expose the ugly guts of his gulag, but also produce direct evidence of criminal culpability on the part of Bush and his minions under U.S. and international law.
 The Regime has responded with draconian ruthlessness to this genuine threat. In the main rendition case - and in an unrelated lawsuit concerning officially confirmed evidence of terrorist infiltration at the FBI before 9/11 - Bush is invoking the rarely-used, extra-constitutional &quot;state secrets privilege.&quot; This nebulous maneuver, unanchored in law or legislation, allows the government to suppress any evidence against it merely by asserting, without proof, that disclosure of the truth might &quot;harm national security.&quot; Evidence &quot;protected&quot; in this way cannot even be heard by a judge in secret - a well-established practice used successfully in numerous other national security cases over the years. It is simply buried forever, and the case collapses.
 It is almost certain that Bush's invocation of this &quot;night-and-fog&quot; measure will be upheld. So let us be clear about the consequences. It will mean that any crime committed by a government official - torture, rendition, murder, state terrorism, even treason - can be sealed in permanent darkness. The justice system itself will be &quot;rendered&quot; into a black hole. The victims of state crime - American citizens as well as foreign captives - will be left without rights, without redress, without a voice. Bush's kingdom of strappado will reign supreme.
 
 <i>
For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Iraqis in Last-Minute Talks
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Kurdish leaders converged on Baghdad for last-minute talks Monday with majority Shiites as both sides pressed to secure a deal to form a coalition government before the newly elected parliament meets for the first time later this week.
 
Shiites and Kurds have been haggling over the makeup of the new government ever since the Jan. 30 ballot elected a new national assembly. Parliament meets Wednesday.
 The political deal calls for Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, to be named president. Conservative Islamic Dawa party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite majority United Iraqi Alliance coalition, would become prime minister.
 &quot;We're not interested in the government posts, we're more interested in Kurdistan and Iraq's interests,&quot; Talabani told reporters in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad. &quot;We have made good progress,&quot; Talabani said.
 


TITLE: Israel Approves Route of West Bank Barrier
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has approved the final route of a barrier around Jerusalem that will include the largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank on the Israeli side, officials said Monday, prompting Palestinian complaints that Israel is endangering fledgling peace efforts.
 
The decision means Israel will take lands claimed by the Palestinians for a future state, including traditionally Arab east Jerusalem, the intended Palestinian capital. The barrier will also encompass a chunk of the Palestinian town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem, to include a Jewish shrine, officials said.
 Israel began building a separation barrier in the West Bank two years ago, saying its aim was to keep out Palestinian attackers. Palestinians say Israel could have built the barrier on its territory if the only concern was security. They say the real intention was to grab West Bank land and draw a final border without waiting for a peace deal. One-third of the barrier has been completed.
 In the West Bank city of Ramallah, UN Secretary-General Kofi said after a meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that the United Nations is establishing a register of damages to Palestinian property and claims against Israel resulting from the barrier construction.
 &quot;We are establishing that register to be able in time to help with those claims,&quot; he said. Annan did not elaborate on a possible UN role in helping Palestinians with their property claims. Annan said the UN position on the barrier is clear. The UN General Assembly has passed a resolution against the barrier, and the United Nation's world court said in an advisory ruling last year that the barrier is illegal and must be torn down.
 The decision on the final route of the Jerusalem segment of the barrier was made late Sunday in a meeting of senior Cabinet ministers chaired by Sharon, said a senior government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
 Under the plan, prepared by the National Security Council, the West Bank settlement of Maaleh Adumim would be included on the Israeli side of the barrier. Eleven crossings would be built into the barrier to allow access from the West Bank, and construction is to be completed by the end of the year, the official said.

TITLE: China Authorized to Attack Taiwan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - China's parliament enacted a law Monday authorizing force to stop rival Taiwan from pursuing formal independence, sparking outrage on the self-governing island and warnings that the measure would fuel regional tensions. The ceremonial National People's Congress passed the law despite U.S. appeals for restraint. It came a day after President Hu Jintao called on China's military to be ready for war and followed a 12.6 percent increase in the country's defense budget for 2005.
 
Premier Wen Jiabao said the mainland still wants to unite peacefully with the island and doesn't want to disrupt the status quo.
 &quot;It is not targeted at the people of Taiwan, nor is it a war bill,&quot; Wen said at a news conference. But he also warned outsiders not to get involved: &quot;We do not wish to see foreign interference.&quot;
 A Taiwanese government spokesman rejected the measure as a &quot;serious provocation.&quot;
 &quot;It also brought emotional pain to the Taiwanese people, restricts Taiwan's freedom and democracy, and has a serious impact on security in the East-Asia region,&quot; said Joseph Wu, chairman of the island's Mainland Affairs Council, which handles policy toward Beijing. 
 In a session broadcast on national television, the Chinese delegates burst into applause after the law was approved by a 2,896 to 0 vote, with two abstentions. The body usually votes overwhelmingly for Communist Party policies, but the emphatic result was meant to send a message of the intensity of Beijing's sentiment on the issue.
 Taiwan and China split in 1949. Beijing has threatened repeatedly to attack if it tries to make its de facto independence permanent. The United States is Taiwan's biggest arms supplier and could be drawn into any conflict over the island.
 A leading Taiwanese lawmaker criticized the measure as a &quot;savage law.&quot;
 It shows that China &quot;feels futile and doesn't know how to deal with Taiwan's democracy and freedom,&quot; said Chen Chin-jun, a member of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
 &quot;We can clearly see that Taiwan and China... are not one China. They are two Chinas or one country on each side,&quot; Chen said in Taipei. &quot;Whatever law they passed, Taiwan has its own sovereignty, government, country and democracy.&quot;
 The law says China would &quot;employ nonpeaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.&quot; It said such steps could be taken if Taiwan declared formal independence, if &quot;major incidents&quot; occurred causing Taiwan to separate permanently from China, or if &quot;possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted.&quot;
 The law doesn't give details of what specific developments might trigger an attack. It adds no new threats or conditions, but it codifies the measures for authorizing military action.
 Legislators said the law would send a message that Beijing's patience was wearing thin.
 &quot;For us in the armed forces, this gives us a legal foundation on which to make our preparations to maintain our sovereignty and territorial integrity,&quot; said Lieutenant Zhang Shantong, a delegate from the People's Liberation Army.
 Japan warned that the law could increase regional tensions.
 &quot;We are concerned about negative effects of the bill on the peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits and the relationship between the two sides, which had been improving,&quot; said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda.
 Tokyo and Washington issued a joint statement in February listing for the first time the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue as a joint strategic objective.
 China has spent heavily in recent years to modernize the PLA, focusing on adding high-tech weapons to extend its reach and back up threats to attack Taiwan.
 &quot;We shall step up preparations for possible military struggle and enhance our capabilities to cope with crises, safeguard peace, prevent wars and win the wars if any,&quot; Hu said Sunday, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
 Many Chinese are strongly nationalistic and support unification with Taiwan. But because China allows no opposition politicians or free press, it was difficult to gauge the level of genuine support for the law.
 On a Beijing street, a migrant from the poor inland province of Anhui who was selling pirated DVDs showed little interest in the government's statements about Taiwan.


TITLE: Dalai Lama Embraces China
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HONG KONG (AP) - Exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama said in an interview published Monday he wants the region to remain part of China so it can benefit from that country's economic boom.
 
&quot;I am not in favor of separation. Tibet is a part of the People's Republic of China... Tibetan culture and Buddhism are part of Chinese culture,'' he told the South China Morning Post. &quot;Tibet is underdeveloped and materially backwards. We want modernization. So for our own interest, we are willing to be part of the People's Republic of China, to have it govern and guarantee to preserve our Tibetan culture, spirituality and our environment,'' the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying.
 &quot;As the material development of China moves forward, we gain materially,'' the newspaper quoted him as saying. The newspaper quoted an unnamed official with the Dharmsala, India-based exiled Tibetan leadership as saying the Dalai Lama now wants Tibetan autonomy on religious and cultural policy, but not political, economic or diplomatic matters. Chinese communist troops marched into Tibet in 1950.
 Beijing says it has been Chinese territory for centuries and has spent decades trying to suppress pro-independence sentiment.
 The Dalai Lama fled to India in the late 1950s.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Pope Returns
 </b>

ROME (Reuters) - Pope John Paul, looking fairly alert and waving to crowds of well-wishers, left hospital on Sunday and returned to the Vatican 18 days after he underwent throat surgery to relieve severe breathing problems.
 The 84-year-old Pope left the hospital riding in the front seat of a gray van just five hours after his departure was announced. He was wearing his traditional white cassock and blessed the crowds from behind the glass as his motorcade made its way to the Vatican some 4 km (2.5 miles)away.
 
 
<b>Egypt Proposes Truce
 </b>

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters)- Egypt has proposed that Palestinian militant groups agree to a one-year truce with Israel at negotiations starting in Cairo on Tuesday, one of the militant factions participating said.
 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hopes to win backing from the militants for the cease-fire he agreed last month at a summit in Egypt with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
 So far, the militants are following only a de facto truce.
 
 
<b>Hong Kong Leader
 </b>

HONG KONG (AP) - Donald Tsang, a career civil servant, took over as Hong Kong's leader Saturday, facing the tough task of pleasing a public that wants more democracy while obeying Communist Chinese rulers who have opposed calls for greater freedom.
 Tsang would only be Hong Kong's second leader since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule eight years ago. He replaces the much-maligned Tung Chee-hwa, who quit two days ago citing failing health.
 
 
<b>Rwandan Leader Jailed
 </b>

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (Reuters) - The UN tribunal for Rwanda sentenced a former local leader to six years in prison on Monday after he pleaded guilty to a charge of extermination by omission under a plea bargain with prosecutors.
 The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted Vincent Rutaganira of aiding and abetting the killings of ethnic Tutsis who came to hide in a church in Muguga, Kibuye province, between 8 and 15 April, 1994. 
 It was the shortest sentence handed down by the tribunal.

TITLE: Lowly SKA Beat Ak Bars Stars
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: SKA St. Petersburg saved all the drama for their home finale as they defeated star-studded Ak Bars Kazan 5-4 in their final home game of the ice hockey season at the Ice Palace Thursday night.
 
Alexander Shinkar and Konstantin Gorovikov each scored twice and had an assist as the two teams took turns taking the lead. 
 At 16:10 in the third Alexander Golts fed the puck to Gorovikov who one-timed it past NHL-star and Ak Bars goalie Nikolai Khabibulin to take a 5-4 lead. 
 Ak Bars bumped the intensity up a notch, aggressively fighting to tie up the game in the final two minutes. SKA's David Nemirovksy was penalized for holding at 58:56. 
 At 19:30 Ak Bars pulled &quot;The 'Bulin Wall,&quot; as Khabibulin is known in the NHL, in exchange for a 6th skater. 
 In the ensuing battle for the puck SKA's Alexander Zavyalov was called for cross-checking at 19:31. Ak Bars managed to get in a few shots before SKA managed to clear the zone about 10 seconds before time expired to seal the victory. 
 &quot;We underestimated our opponents and were unprepared,&quot; Ak Bars head coach Zinetula Bilyaletdinov said with a tone of frustration. 
 SKA head coach Boris Mikhailov said &quot;[After losing to Neftekhimik Nizhnekamsk 6-2] there were a lot of words said in the locker room. Our up-and-coming players played and they gave it what they had... about 90 percent of what I asked. And we won today. I am always happy when our fans get to end the season with a win.&quot;
 If the truth be told, the SKA younger players didn't get that much ice time, but the top three lines managed to keep the NHL packed Ak Bars in check as best they could.
 The NHL's 2002 rookie of the year Ilya Kovalchuk opened the scoring at 06:57 in the first period. SKA's Yegor Shastin tied the game at one, sneaking one past Khabibulin in the 9th minute. Vyacheslav Kozlov, who played for the Detroit Red Wings throughout the 1990s before ending up with Kovalchuk on the Atlanta Thrashers in recent years, put Ak Bars back in the lead with a power-play goal at 17:19. 
 Anaheim Mighty Ducks defenseman Ruslan Salei was credited with an assist. Shinkar evened the score at two with a power-play goal at 03:24 in the second frame. Pittsburgh Penguins stalwart Alexei Morozov scored with an assist from Kovalchuk at 27:57, giving Ak Bars a 3-2 lead. Shinkar answered a second time at three minutes after the midway mark in the game, keeping SKA in the game with a 3-3 tie. Buffalo Sabers defenseman Alexei Zhitnik was penalized for cross-checking one second before the second period expired. 
 &quot;I told the guys after the second period that they needed to capitalize on the power-play early in the third. This is our chance, we have to use it,&quot; Mikhailov recalled. &quot;It was the turning point in the game.&quot;
 Gorovikov scored a solo goal 50 seconds into the third period giving SKA their first lead of the game. Less than two minutes later, however, Nashville Predators Denis Arkhipov fed the puck to Ak Bars stalwart Denis Zaripov, who scored with a wrist shot past SKA net minder Andrei Mezin to lock the game back up at 4 goals apiece. 
 With the game still up for grabs both teams played conservatively, looking for opportunities until Gorovikov scored the game winner. 
 Following the game, journalists peppered Mikhailov with questions about his future with the team, but so far the Soviet hockey legend has remained mum. 
 &quot;The season doesn't end until the 15th against CSKA in Moscow. I have absolutely no comment until that time,&quot; he said. 
 SKA won their penultimate game of the season 3-1 over last-placed Molot-Prekamye in Perm on Sunday.

TITLE: IOC Eyes
 Moscow For Games
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Members of the International Olympic Committee's evaluation team on Monday began scrutinizing Moscow's bid to host the 2012 Summer Games firsthand, meeting with city officials on the first of four days of site visits, high-tech presentations and high-level wooing. 
 
With bright-pastel flags flapping in wintry winds and billboards reading &quot;Imagine It Now!,&quot; the 13-member evaluation committee met with Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov on Monday morning. 
 Later in the day, the evaluators were to hear presentations on Moscow's bid, followed by a reception hosted by Luzhkov and others.
 On Wednesday, the evaluators will meet with President Vladimir Putin and have a private tour of the Kremlin. 
 Luzhkov touted his city's sporting legacy and said stadiums and sporting complexes built for the games would be well used - even after the games. 
 &quot;We are capable of building these sites. We are capable - and this is very important - to utilize the sites once they are built to their full capacity,&quot; Luzhkov said. 
 Moscow is the last of the five cities to be visited by the committee and is widely considered a long-shot candidate. Paris, London, Madrid and New York are the other finalists for the 2012 games. 
 In spite of the tough competition, state-controlled television Channel One commented, &quot;It's still too early to consider Moscow an outsider. All the cities have their strengths and weaknesses.&quot;
 Moscow's bid boasts of holding all events within city limits, unlike some recent games where some competitions were hours away from the host city. 
 The bid plan focuses on an &quot;Olympic River&quot; concept - placing most of the venues and the Olympic village alongside or near the Moscow River, with boats providing transportation. Authorities say the city would have to spend about $10 billion to stage the event, most of which would come from private sources. 
 Authorities also pledge to expand the city's road system, build new subway facilities and nearly double the city's hotel capacity to 61,000 rooms. 


TITLE: Zenit Bounces Back
 With a 4-1 Victory
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: FC Zenit St. Petersburg bounced back from its meltdown finish last season to open the 2005 championship campaign Saturday with a 4-1 thrashing against Dynamo Moscow at Petrovsky Stadium. 
 
The win puts Zenit at the top of the Premier League ahead of CSKA Moscow, who strolled to a 3-0 win over newcomers Terek Grozny. Champions Lokomotiv Moscow beat Tomsk 2-0. 
 Newly-signed Croatian defender Ivica Krizanac opened Zenit's tally after 38 minutes. Goals from Russian internationals Andrei Arshavin and Alexander Kerzhakov scored within three minutes of each other early in the second half.
 Portuguese striker Nuno Fresho got one back for CSKA on after an hour's play, but Zenit sealed victory with a late goal from Czech defender Pavel Mares.
 The strong opening of Zenit's 2005 campaign reflects what the local media delight in dubbing a &quot;soccer revolution&quot; taking place since Czech coach Vlastimil Petrzela joined the St. Petersburg team.
 &quot;Unlike the 1917 [Bolshevik] revolution, which was followed by years of civil war, famine and devastation, this one has brought us nothing but joy,&quot; said veteran sports commentator Gennady Orlov, who has covered Zenit for more than three decades.
 While six premier league clubs compete for attention in Moscow, Zenit is the lone top-flight team in the Northern Capital.
 The club has always enjoyed a huge following since being founded in 1938, but only recently has soccer fever in St. Petersburg reached a peak unmatched anywhere else in Russia.
 On match days, vast numbers of the city's 4.8 million people proudly wear the team's blue and white colors. Every Zenit victory is greeted by a cavalcade of cars down Nevsky Prospekt, bringing traffic to a halt.
 Petrzela became only the second foreign manager in Russian soccer history when he was appointed in November 2002. He guided the team, which had just finished in 10th place, to the runners-up spot in his first season in 2003. 
 The following season the team looked poised to capture the league title 20 years after winning their first and only Soviet championship when they were known as Zenit Leningrad.
 Although an end-of-season collapse deprived them of a podium place, Petrzela was quickly offered a three-year contract extension and he remains a cult figure among local fans.
 &quot;We were all very surprised how quickly the fans have warmed up to Petrzela. He is really liked here,&quot; said Orlov.
 The love affair between Petrzela and the city took time to blossom. Zenit fans were suspicious at first about the foreign coach after he signed several of his compatriots at the expense of local players.
 But the charismatic Czech soon won them over.
 Saturday's famous win against Dynamo will only cement his reputation.
 Petrzela took a team that had been through three coaching changes and was in danger of relegation and quickly transformed its players into title contenders.
 He led them on a 27-match unbeaten streak between July 2003 and May 2004 and their attacking style and youthful exuberance attracted attention.
 Even the opposition has been impressed.
 &quot;Undoubtedly Zenit has been the most attractive side in Russian football,&quot; said Dmitry Loskov, who captained Lokomotiv Moscow to last year's title.
 In the 22-year-old Kerzhakov, the league's top scorer last season, and Arshavin, 23, Zenit have two of the most potent strikers in the domestic game.
 Zenit made Europe take note last year when they thrashed former European champions Red Star Belgrade 6-1 on aggregate in the UEFA Cup first round and then hammered AEK Athens 5-1 in the group stage.
 In many ways, Petrzela should be regarded as a pioneer in Russian soccer.
 The country's only previous foreign coach, little-known Yugoslav Boris Buniac, was appointed by struggling Uralan Elista in 2000 but lasted only a few weeks, unable to save them from relegation.
 Petrzela's success led to an influx of foreign managers, a trend which alarmed Russia's old guard.
 Wealthy Moscow clubs, CSKA, Dynamo and Spartak, as well as Alania Vladikavkaz hired foreign coaches last year, but all of them were either fired or quit before the end of the season.
 The Czech also raised eyebrows among the Russian coaching fraternity last year when, on the eve of the title showdown in St Petersburg, he accused CSKA and their boss Valery Gazzayev of playing unattractive and boring football.
 CSKA beat Zenit 3-0 to go to the top of the league and after the match Gazzayev said the comments had inspired his team to victory.
 &quot;I have to publicly thank Petrzela for giving us extra motivation,&quot; Gazzayev grinned at a post-match news conference.
 Petrzela admitted his sharp tongue often got him into trouble. &quot;I can recall how my comments about bribery and corruption created a huge storm in Czech football a couple of years ago,&quot; he said.
 &quot;The Czech FA was forced to fire all referees implicated in the scandal, but it really helped clean up the game.&quot;
 No matter how popular he has proved in St. Petersburg, Petrzela feels he is still adjusting to Russian football.
 &quot;No doubt, with every passing week I feel more comfortable here,&quot; he said at the team's training base north of the city, where Zenit began preparations for the 2005 season.
 &quot;Obviously, the language was the most difficult thing to overcome, but it was the players' mentality that shocked me the most,&quot; said the 51-year-old, who now speaks good Russian.
 &quot;But now I'm beginning to understand the Russian mentality a bit better,&quot; he added, smiling.
 
 <i>(Reuters, SPT) </i>

TITLE: Locals Take
 11 Golds
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Team Russia dominated the first-ever international women's boxing tournament held in St. Petersburg last week winning 11 gold medals in 13 weight categories at SKK Sport and Concert Complex on Saturday.
 
&quot;I am proud of the success our women had. I knew we were the strongest team and this puts in a good position for the upcoming European Championship in Norway later this year,&quot; said Natalya Karpovich, president of the Organization for the Advancement of Women's Boxing.
 Italy's Simona Galassi defeated India's Meena Kurmari for the gold in the 50 kilogram weight category, and Ukraine's Alexandra Kozlan defeated Russia's Lyubov Laptina to take the gold in the 66 kilogram weight class. 
 Russia captured 19 medals overall:11 gold, 4 silver, and 4 bronze. Yelena Sabitova, Yulia Bychkova, Sofia Ochigava, Yevgenia Gribenshchkova, Yelena Karpachyova, Yelena Gorshkova, Yulia Nemstova, Irina Sinetskaya, Olga Slavinskaya, Olga Novosyolova, and Galina Ivanova won gold medals in the 46, 48, 52, 54, 57, 60, 63, 70, 75, 80, and 86 kilogram categories respectively.