SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1089 (55), Friday, July 22, 2005
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TITLE: Greens: Putin Is Wrong
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg environmentalists  Thursday denied President Vladimir Putin’s allegation that foreign businesses pay environmental groups to lobby against certain projects, causing financial losses to Russia.
Putin made the remarks at a meeting with human rights activists at the Kremlin on Wednesday and apparently referred to this happening in relation to a port in the Leningrad Oblast. Putin, who was a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, could have been involved in such an undertaking.
“We started building a port near Finland,” he said Wednesday in remarks quoted on the presidential web site. 
“Our partners, I know for sure, invested in the activity of environmental organizations, just to prevent the development of the project because it created competition to them in the Baltic.” 
“Ten times our partners came and conducted examinations, including from Finland. Finally, in the end, they accepted that they couldn’t find anything wrong,” he added
“Ecological expertise must not hinder the development of the country and the economy,” Putin said. “As soon as we start to do anything, one line of attack against us always has to do with ecological problems.” 
The presidential press service in Moscow was unable Thursday to specify which port Putin had been referring to or to furnish any evidence that environmental groups had been paid by foreign competitors.
Nevertheless, the oblast’s oil terminal at Primorsk is the one most affected by the protests of the environmentalists in recent years.
In 2002, soon after the port was opened, a group of northwest Russian environmentalists sent a letter to the Kremlin and to the responsible authorities asking that they pay closer attention to the risks of environmental problems that could arise from an accident in Primorsk.
“According to our information there is no infrastructure at the port of Primorsk to liquidate accidents of oil leaking,” the letter said. “[The absence] is linked, first of all, to a low level of production outcome and weak supplies with equipment to gather the leaked oil, including [special] vessels. The equipment in the port of Primorsk is able only to deal with emergency leaks ranging from 500 metric tons to 1,000 tons of oil,” the letter said.
“The Birch Islands nature reserve is located to the west and south of Primorsk,” the letter continued. “It is protected by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. It has a total area of 12,000 hectares, and is of a great natural value. The costs of liquidating a serious accident in this area would be equal to the total investments in the port’s construction.” 
Greenpeace estimates there are around 15 million tons of leaked oil in Russia every year.
The management of the port could not be reached for comment Thursday, but environmentalists themselves have confirmed that their intervention brought visible results.
“The situation has changed for the better, but in principle we are against such a facility being located next to a natural reserve of world significance,” Oleg Bodrov, co-head of Green World, local environmental organization, said Thursday in a telephone interview.  
“Unfortunately, Putin has blamed us for this,” said Bodrov, who was among the letter’s signatories three years ago. 
“His words are a slap in the face. This is just outrageous that the president says that somebody has paid us to do something.”
Greenpeace representatives also said Putin’s unsubstantiated allegations were shameful and said they did not hear anything new in his words.
“These are typical remarks that we have been used to for quite a while,” Dimitry Artamonov, spokesman for the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace, said Thursday in a telephone interview. “They are quite typical for the president and authorities, who have no clue about the way civil society works in the world.
“I do not rule out that such organizations, [created by certain businesses to defend their interests] exist,” he added. “But it is very wrong to treat organizations acting in the interests of the public and trying to protect the environment and monitor the ecological safety of projects, such as new ports and factories this way.”

TITLE: Festival To Celebrate Potatoes
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A vitamin-packed vegetable from the New World that has become a Russian national icon will get its own festival for the first time this weekend.
The Old World’s first contact with potatoes came in 1537 when the Conquistadors found them in Peru. They did not arrive in Europe until about 1570, but people were not at first attracted to them and it was not until 1780 that they gained widespread popularity.
In Russia, various rulers, including Peter the Great, who saw them in the Netherlands, weighed the potential of the bulbous tuber in Russia, but the real breakthrough came 240 years ago.
In 1765, Catherine the Great signed a decree ordering that all possible measures be taken to distribute “these healthy and nourishing vegetables” in Russia. That year, 57 kegs of German potatoes arrived in Moscow, from where they were distributed throughout the country.
In addition, hundreds of sacks of potatoes were sent to the provinces, together with instructions on how the governors should distribute them.
Even then it was touch and go.
“The people were absolutely against having this strange product on their table,” said a statement from PR agency STOP, which is promoting the festival. “They called the potato ‘the devil’s fruit.’ In order to interest landowners in their cultivation a real marketing campaign was launched.
“Articles dedicated to the potato appeared in fashionable journals referring to it as a ‘marvelous flower,’ ‘a cure for all ills’ and ‘a poison to counter all insects,’ which could be used to make bread, porridge, dumplings, starch and powder.
The government promulgated the role of the potato in Russian life and between 1755 and 1766, the Senate considered the subject 23 times.
In 1765, the Senate ordered the Medical Collegium to publish special “Instructions on how to grow and use ‘earth apples,’ which in Britain are known as ‘potatoes,’ and in other places as ‘earth pears,’ ‘tortufeli’ and ‘kartofeli,’ and how to store them in winter.”
Ten thousand of the instructions were published and distributed, with 50 going to a province and 25 to a city. Funds were also allocated to buy and distribute potatoes.
The authors assured landowners “that these apples, which require extremely little care, not only are healthy and pleasant food for people, but can also be used to feed all kinds of domesticated animals.”
In St. Petersburg, an economic society was formed in 1765 that published scientific articles about the potato, its nutritious value and cooking qualities. One article by the scientist Ivan Komov said “no vegetable is more useful than the ‘earth apple,’” and that “these earth apples can substitute for bread.”
It was not long before peasants discovered that one could make vodka from potatoes, a practice that continues to this day.
But it is on Russians’ kitchen tables that potatoes enjoy their greatest popularity. In times of famine, nutritious potatoes have kept many people alive.
In the early 1990s when the economy all but collapsed and people plunged into poverty, there was a boom in potato growing with people hurrying to their dachas to plant most of their land with potatoes. The harvest was enough to fed them all through the winter.
But at the height of summer and at other times depending on the variety, comes a highlight for many potato lovers — new potatoes. Homegrown or sought at markets, they offer the finest pleasure to tuber lovers.
Larisa Moisechuk, head of the dietology department at St. Petersburg’s Mechnikov hospital, said potatoes are very healthy because of the many vitamins and mineral traces that they contain.
Potatoes are especially useful for people with heart and circulation problems because they contain potassium, and they also help people with kidney illnesses. Potatoes are also very rich in vitamin C, Moisechuk said.
“However, to save the vitamins, put potatoes directly into boiling water for 20 minutes. People should not put them in cold water first,” Moisechuk said. “Then the potatos will keep its mineral traces.” 
A daily norm of potatoes for a healthy person is 200 grams. The best way to cook potatoes and retain their beneficial effects on health is baking,” she added.
The high consumption of potatoes in Russia is due to their high calorie content and nourishing qualities, Moisechuk said. Traditionally northern nations need higher-calorie foods and potatoes grow well in Russian territories because they require little tending.
On Saturday, 10 Russian cities will celebrate New Potatoes Day. In St. Petersburg the day will start at the entertainment complex of Divo-Ostrov at Krestovsky Island at noon.
The founder of the holiday is potato chip maker Lay’s. The organizers plan to use the celebration to establish a new annual national tradition, similar to those of Beaujolais Nouveau in France, the Oktoberfest in Germany, or the tomato festival in Spain.
The program of the festival includes theater performances about the history of the potato, contests for adults and children, cooking competitions with audience participation and shows by popular actors.
The first performance will feature Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and will tell about the history of potatoes in Russia.
Between the performances there will be a contest of children’s drawings under the slogan of “Every Potato Has Sun In It.”
At the same time a cooking contest will present the city’s best cooks, who will have the task of cooking the most unusual and delicious potato dish. The public will have an opportunity to try all the dishes and judge them.

TITLE: Non-Whites See Red After Being Detained
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: If it’s a nice sunny day and you think it might be fun to go out and play on the grass, don’t — at least not if you are not white.
That’s the advice Korean student Jae Myong Shin and four friends, both foreign and Russian, have after being detained for three hours by police on July 7 for playing frisbee on the grass of the Field of Mars.
An Indonesian, a Finn, a Korean and three Russians threw their frisbee for about half an hour before five of them were detained by police. 
“Our crime was, literally ‘entering the grass,’” Shin said in a letter to The St. Petersburg Times.
The Field of Mars is always full of people walking dogs, drinking beer, reading books, and even riding horses. It has no fence or warning signs around, and the number of people on the grass on the day they went there indicated that the young people could do the same.
Shin said hundreds were having a good time on the same grass, without the police saying or doing anything to them. The only reason that the frisbee players were noticed was apparently that two of them were “different colors.”
“The officers giggled, secretly staring at us as they got close enough to see that we were all students and some of us even foreigners,” he said. “The officers broke into our group asking for identification, without indicating who they were, or what we did wrong.”
The young people reluctantly followed the police orders, allowing the police to establish that one young man did not have any identification document with him. The man was ordered to go with them to the police station, along with another who had a bicycle for unclear reasons. When three others decided to accompany them, the police said they could come too.
Shin said he was immensely irritated because he and his friends were obviously picked because they were of different races.
“They picked us up because usually foreigners, stopped by police, get scared and prefer to pay a bribe right away, even if they did not do anything wrong.  But it was not the case with us,” Shin said.
At the police station, police treated them with respect, and only made them fill out a form, where the young people had to write that they didn’t know the law.
The incident ruined their weekend, he added.
Police could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Shin said that having lived in Russia for several years, the foreigners realized that a small bribe to the police would have set them free. 
“Unfortunately, that is something we don’t do, which turned out to be the wrong choice,” he said.
“This situation proved one more time that the Russian police discriminate foreign male students,” Shin said. “Living in Russia as a foreign male student, one can expect frequent run-ins with police; which also includes being prepared to be asked to pay for essential human rights.”
In the past two years the Indonesian student has been stopped by the police more than 100 times for no apparent reason other than being a foreign male student, he said.
Shin, who was also stopped by police at least six times in the last four years of his studies at the Journalism Department of St. Petersburg State University, said he usually tried to understand them “as people who have low salary and look for a way to make more money.”  
Yury Vdovin, co-chairman of the city branch of human rights organization Citizen’s Watch, said the police must have a reason to stop people in the street to check their documents.
If people are stopped they should demand explanations for why they were stopped, and the identification documents of the police. However, arguing with police in Russia can be dangerous, so people should control their emotions even if they are in the right, he added.
Vdovin said if the students felt they were justified, they should write to the head of the city police with a request to sort out the problem.
The frequent police checks have always been a source of irritation to Russians and foreigners, who often end up paying officers bribes to avoid an unpleasant confrontation.
Meanwhile on Thursday, St. Petersburg prosecutors opened a criminal case against policemen who refused to register a complaint from a foreign student who was attacked, Interfax reported.
Several people in the entrance hall of an apartment building attacked the Indonesian man, a student at the Polytechnical University. The attackers beat him up with sticks and stole his passport, money and a cell phone.
After regaining consciousness, the student appealed to the nearest police station to record the attack. However, the officers at station No. 26 of the Krasnogvardeisky district refused and made no investigation.

TITLE: British Ambassador Attacked, Robbed on Nevsky Prospekt
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: British Ambassador Tony Brenton was robbed of his wallet and his wife was slightly injured in an attack in central St. Petersburg, Interfax and Itar-Tass reported Thursday.
Brenton and his wife were walking along the city’s main street, Nevsky Prospekt, at about 6:15 p.m. on June 26 when they were surrounded by five young people aged 15 to 16, the news agencies said, citing a police report filed by Brenton.
The assailants took Brenton’s wallet, which contained a credit card and 3,000 rubles ($105) in cash, Interfax said. His wife, Susan Brenton, suffered a sprained arm when she tried to stop the robbery, it said.
 “It will be difficult to find the culprits because the ambassador did not immediately inform the police and the incident only became known after several weeks,” an unidentified police official told Interfax.”
The British Consulate in St. Petersburg alerted police about the robbery on Monday, Interfax said. 
Police have opened a criminal investigation.
Consulate spokeswoman Anna Myslova declined to comment other than to say that 20 British citizens, including Brenton, have reported being victims of crimes to the consulate this year.
Brenton confirmed the robbery in a statement Thursday.
“It is a real pity that street crime like this is so prevalent in such a beautiful city as St. Petersburg,” he said. “The authorities were very helpful and supportive. I wish them every success in making their city as safe as it should be.”
In April, the consulate released a pamphlet warning tourists about pickpockets and street gangs who prey on visitors and advising how to avoid them.
Interfax later reported that crime in St. Petersburg was up 28 percent in the first half of this year with a total of 44,667 crimes being reported. However, only 12,921 of these were solved, the agency reported prosecutors as saying.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: No Invite to Estonia
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Five-day Estonian visas could be available without having to obtain an invitation starting next year, Fontanka.ru reported Tuesday, quoting the Russian Union of Tour Operators.
According to amendments to a law under discussion in the Estonian parliament, visitors would be required only to have enough money to pay for their stay in the country and their return.
The law is expected to come into  force from Jan. 1, 2006, the report said.

Former Minister Dies
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Nikolai Aksyonenko, former Railways Minister and a key member of former President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle, died after a long illness, local media reported Wednesday.
Aksyonenko, 56, was put in charge of the powerful Railways Ministry in 1997. He combined this job with the post of first deputy prime minister in the governments of Sergei Stepashin and later Vladimir Putin, and was once considered a candidate for prime minister.
In January 2002, President Putin fired Aksyonenko after he was charged by prosecutors with abuse of office that resulted in the loss of 70 million rubles ($2.3 million) in government funds.
However, he was allowed to leave the country to receive medical treatment.

TITLE: Study: Bribes Cost $319 Bln Per Year
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Bribery is on the rise, with businesses and individuals forking out $319 billion per year to bureaucrats, police, educators and doctors, according to a study released Wednesday. 
However, people are gradually growing more reluctant to pay bribes, it said.
Bureaucrats and other state-paid employees are putting growing pressure on people to pay bribes, despite well-publicized efforts by the Kremlin to crack down on corruption, according to the two-year study by Indem, an anti-corruption think tank, and Romir Monitoring.
“The stable growth of corruption is provided by the extra pressure that the authorities are putting on ordinary people to make them pay bribes,” Indem president Georgy Satarov said at a news conference.
“However, ordinary people have appeared to become more reluctant to pay bureaucrats, finding other ways of solving their problems, and this a very positive effect,” he said.
One piece of good news is that bribes to traffic police have dropped to $183 million per year, half of the $368.4 million they were four years earlier, when Indem and Romir last carried out a similar study.
The latest study found that businesses were paying about $316 billion per year in bribes, a nearly 900 percent increase from four years ago. Indem interviewed 1,000 businesspeople and 3,000 ordinary people for the latest study.
Ordinary people are paying another $3.01 billion every year in payments and bribes for free services such as education and health care, as well as to traffic police, military recruitment officials and doctors who can get draftees out of compulsory military service, the study found.
About 75 percent of the bribes paid by businesses goes to low-ranking local officials, either in municipal administrations or the local branches of federal agencies such as tax offices. Of the rest, 20 percent goes into the pockets of regional authorities, and 5 percent goes to federal officials.
The largest share of bribes, about 30 percent, is collected by fire and health inspectors, who regularly check buildings to make sure they meet federal standards. Licensing authorities come in a close second, followed by fiscal officials such as tax inspectors.
The average businessman pays out $135,800 in bribes every year, an amount that is 13 times higher than four years ago, the report said.
As for other bribes, most go to institutes of higher education, mainly for admission into colleges and universities. Those bribes total $583 million per year. 
Health care costs patients $401.1 million in bribes per year, a drop of 33 percent from four years ago, Satarov said.
Bribes to courts for just or favorable decisions total $209 million per year, a decrease of 23 percent. 
Yelena Panfilova of Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog, said the Indem study showed how corruption was evolving under Putin. “I consider this survey a litmus test of the efficiency of the very same authorities who in 2001 declared fighting corruption a policy priority,” Panfilova said.
Transparency International currently ranks Russia as the 90th-least corrupt country out of 145 nations included in its annual corruption index.

TITLE: 19th Century Geodesic Point Rescued
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A rare geodesic point near St. Petersburg that played a key role in the mapping of Russia as railways and roads were laid in the 19th century was rescued by a group of enthusiasts this week.
The keeper of exact geodesy coordinates — marked on a buried cannon — was put in a 40-ton shell of concrete and iron, which like an Egyptian pyramid hides the geodesic mystery from the uninitiated. 
“This is just one of six points installed not far from Pulkovo in the second half of the 19th century and maybe the only specimen of an artillery- geodesy point,” said Vitaly Kaptsyug, secretary of the St. Petersburg Society of Geodesy and Cartography.  
“It is preserved at the 25th kilometer of the St. Petersburg – Gatchina highway,” he added. “It stood up to the storm of Russian history in the 20th century — two wars, the siege, revolution and industrialization, but it was at risk of being lost.”
The 8-meter steel tower that once stood over the point was cut up for scrap metal and an attempt had been made to drag the cannon from the earth. 
“The mark left by a steel cable stayed on the cannon as evidence of modern vandalism,” Kaptsyug said.
Chairman of the geodesy society Anatoly Bogdanov learned  about the point and other geodesy organizations responded to his appeal for help, sending a group who protected the relic in a concrete sarcophagus. 
Maps used by lay people are modified forms of topographical maps that are based on exact coordinates. The coordinates are determined by geodesists and marked as a special point — a small point marked by a hole or a cross, such as one that the cannon marked. 
All of Russia can be surveyed and mapped using a network of such points. The same is true of the rest of Europe. 
At the beginning of the 19th century the points were made from special stone constructions.
The construction changed with time, but some of the original points were saved, as was the case with one near Pulkovo.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Peter Statue at Pulkovo?
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT)  — The council of the St. Petersburg League of Nationalities has suggested the Peter the Great statue given to the city by sculptor Zurab Tseriteli should be mounted outside Pulkovo 1 airport, Rosbalt reported Monday.
“All travelers who come to our city by train through Moskovsky railway station are met by a splendid statue of Peter the Great,” the league was quoted as saying in a letter to Governor Valentina Matviyenko. 
“It would be logical if all people coming to St. Petersburg though the main air gateway were also met by a magnificent statue of the founder of the Northern Capital,” the letter continued. 
On July 12, the St. Petersburg Public Council voted down a proposal to install the statue in the historical city center.

Many Mobiles Stolen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city metro prosecutor’s office initiated 785 criminal cases over the theft of cell phones in the first half of the year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Despite steps being taken by law enforcers to prevent the widespread theft of cell phones, the number of cases keeps growing, Interfax cited the prosecutor’s office as saying.
The most frequent victims of the thefts are women and teenagers who are unable to defend themselves against criminals. 
Phones most often get stolen at the moment when doors of a train are closing, the report said.
The prosecutor’s office said many cases of cell-phone theft go unreported.

Explosion Case Closed
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT)  — A criminal case over an explosion in a storeroom at Kronstandt in May has been closed because the suspect blamed for the accident died as a result of the explosion, Interfax reported Wednesday.
“The investigation found that the explosion occurred as the result of violations of procedures for dismantling weapons,” Interfax cited Igor Lebed, prosecutor of Leningrad military district as saying.
The May 17 explosion of a depth charge was followed by a fire. Four people were  injured and one died.

Island Called Kolchak 
n MOSCOW (SPT)  — The government has decided to restore the name of White leader Admiral Alexander Kolchak to an island in the Taimyr Bay of Karsky Sea, Itar-Tass reported Tuesday.
Rastorguyev Island is to be renamed Kolchak Island, according to a decree signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, the report said.
Kolchak led the White Army in Siberia during its uprising after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. He was shot by Bolsheviks as a counter-revolutionary and the island was renamed in 1937.

TITLE: Business Gets Taught A Lesson on Sex Ed
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Business leaders gathered Wednesday for an unprecedented public discussion on how to harness their libidos to maximize profits.
Between jokes and rounds of giggles, some 30 dapper entrepreneurs also raised the possibility that President Vladimir Putin’s power vertical is a sign of repressed sexuality.
The round-table event, titled “Business and Sexuality,” was organized by the Association of Managers, a management-training organization with over 1,000 Russian and international member companies. 
The purpose was to provide a forum for “everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask,” said the association’s executive director, Sergei Litovchenko.
Litovchenko acknowledged the sensitivity of sex-related topics in Russian public life, saying he decided to hold the round table after members repeatedly suggested the topic get some open discussion. 
The three themes of the round table — attended in equal numbers by women and men — were straightforward enough: sexuality as a resource for business success, sexuality as a management tool, and sexuality as a source of barriers and problems.
Many speakers seemed to have trouble sticking to the agenda, however. One speaker, Novgorod region Deputy Governor Vladimir Podoprigora, apologized for a lack of focus.
“There are so many beautiful women here,” Podoprigora said. “I don’t know if I can discuss such a burning topic because I’m thinking about something else entirely.”
Podoprigora’s speech ranged from the Biblical story of creation and instances of patriarchalism in Russian proverbs to an American professor who attributed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to a repression of sexual drives.
A clamor erupted when the next speaker, Mikhail Chernysh, chief researcher at RAN Institute of Sociology, said that research tying repressed sexuality to authoritarian forms of government was relevant to modern Russian life. 
“The very term ‘power vertical’ is closely related to our discussion today,” Chernysh said. “As a rule, verticals are a certain form of the realization of repressed sexual drives in life.”
“Don’t forget who you’re talking about,” interjected Dmitry Zimin, honorary president of mobile phone giant VimpelCom.
Marina Shakalova, managing director of Management Training International, told of being pelted with tomatoes at a U.S. conference on women in the workplace when she suggested that “using femininity can be a great resource.”
She cited U.S. management guru Tom Peters in her defense, echoing his belief that “the 21st century will be the century of female management thanks to the flexibility and improvisational ability women have in solving problems. Women are naturally more creative than men.”
BBDO ad agency managing partner Olga Dobrozakova disagreed. 
“Unfortunately, the statistics show that men are more creative than women,” she said. 
Calling on her experience in the advertising industry, Dobrozakova said the most successful advertising campaigns were made by men and claimed that more men had been nominated for Oscars.
A conciliatory note was sounded toward the close of the event by Anatoly Kupchin of Agentstvo Kontakt, a recruiting firm, who claimed that both men and women should be able to use so-called masculine and feminine styles of leadership regardless of their gender.
“A good manager should be able to switch roles at any time,” he said.
Several managers giggled.

TITLE: Gazprom Given All-Clear For Buyout of Sibneft Stake
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court removed the final roadblock to a possible Gazprom buyout of Sibneft on Wednesday when it handed full control of Sibneft back to a group of shareholders led by Roman Abramovich.
The Basmanny District Court lifted an asset freeze on a 14.4 percent stake owned by Yukos, and the shares were immediately returned to Sibneft in exchange for an 8.8 percent Yukos stake.
The swift swap leaves Yukos without a blocking stake in Sibneft and means that Gazprom can snap up a controlling stake in the oil company.
“I think we’re closer to the endgame on Sibneft. Gazprom is now much more certain to be buying it,” said Stephen O’Sullivan, co-head of research at United Financial Group.
“Sibneft will go to Gazprom. [I’m] just not sure when,” he said.
President Vladimir Putin earlier this month indirectly confirmed reports indicating that Gazprom might buy Sibneft. “I know that Gazprom and Sibneft representatives discussed this deal,” Putin told reporters during the Group of Eight summit in Scotland.
Putin’s remarks came as speculation mounted that Abramovich was in talks to sell his majority 57.7 percent stake in Sibneft and following a company announcement that it would pay a record $2.3 billion in dividends for 2004.
Wednesday’s ruling whittles down Yukos’ stake in Sibneft to just 20 percent, effectively finalizing the breakup of the YukosSibneft merger, which would have been the world’s fourth-largest oil company. The merger fell apart during the legal assault on Yukos and its core shareholders.
The Sibneft shares, like most of Yukos’ assets and funds, had been frozen by the tax authorities and the Prosecutor General’s Office since 2004 as part of the state’s pursuit of some $27.5 billion in back taxes.
The Basmanny ruling followed an annulment by the Chukotka Arbitration Court of a 2003 share swap between Yukos and Sibneft. 
In the swap, Yukos got 72 percent of Sibneft and Sibneft got 26.1 percent of Yukos. 
An additional stake of 20 percent minus one share in Sibneft was purchased by Yukos for $3 billion, leaving Yukos with 92 percent of Sibneft.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Geoilbent Split Agreed
MOSCOW(Bloomberg) — LUKoil and Russneft agreed to split the ownership of Geoilbent, a Siberian oil venture LUKoil has sought control of since June, Kommersant reported, without saying where it got the information.
LUKoil’s purchase of 66 percent of the oil company was challenged in three Russian courts by a Russneft unit that claimed priority rights to the stake, and by individual investors, Kommersant reported.
Cyprus-registered Broadwood Trading & Investments Ltd, which Russneft bought from Yukos and renamed in April, holds 34 percent of Geoilbent, the newspaper said.
LUKoil bought the 66 percent stake from Novatek for 5.1 billion rubles ($178 million) and unspecified commitments in June, according to the first-quarter financial report issued by Novatek, Russia’s second-biggest natural gas company.
LUKoil spokesman Dmitry Dolgov declined to comment. Russneft Vice President Eduard Sarkisov was not immediately available to comment.

KrasAir Bids for Malev
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian airline KrasAir submitted the highest offer for Hungary’s state airline Malev Rt., among three bids the government received for the national carrier earlier this month, Magyar Hirlap said, citing unnamed sources.
If chosen, KrasAir would assume about half of Malev’s debt of 36 billion forint ($176 million), the newspaper reported Wednesday. Aviation Solution International submitted a “similar” bid to KrasAir, Hirlap said.

TITLE: European Management Schools Unite in City
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Hoping to increase their competitiveness on the global market, four European business schools have joined forces to offer a unified program through St. Petersburg State University’s School of Management.
The university announced this week the launch of what is promoted as new International Executive MBA program. It said the cooperative effort of four European schools represents a contrast to the way Russian business schools operate merely as branches of foreign schools or rely on tight partnership with them.
Market players say the program offers different packaging for what is essentially the same product that is currently available.
Based on its previous work with the schools, the university has picked the HEC School of management (Paris), Copenhagen Business School, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (Bergen) and IAG School of Management at Catholic University of Louvain to provide lecturers for the MBA.
“We will all follow one educational model, offering a full range from bachelor’s degrees to EMBAs. All participating schools are well known for their research programs,” Valery Katkalo, dean of the university’s School of Management, said Tuesday.
The cooperation will bring mutual benefit, Katkalo said.
“Business education is going global. To be successful national business schools have to work globally. Russian potential grows twice as fast as world average,” said Jean-Paul Larson, professor of HEC.
The long-term cooperation between the schools will come about through joint research projects and teaching. Russian consultants will participate in business case designing to put western experience into a local focus.
“We don’t want to export our experience. We want to develop it with equal partner in Russia,” said Jean-Jacques Lambin, professor of IAG.
The proposed 18-month program will be divided into five parts: company economics, finance, accounting, marketing and functional management.
The program is oriented towards senior managers and businessmen with a lot of experience, focusing on advanced courses instead of basic ones. Lambin said the lecturers for a program of such standard could not be provided by one school alone.
Other management schools in St. Petersburg disagree, and point out that the university’s offer is much like that of its rivals.
“You hardly find a business school saying it’s not oriented to top managers. That the essence of MBA programs,” said Margarita Adayeva-Datskaya, communication vice-president of the Stockholm School of Economics.
“Cooperation with foreign business schools is the basis for the majority of Russian MBA programs. LETI and IMISP invented such programs with almost the same partners as St. Petersburg State University,” Adayeva-Datskaya said. The only new face on the scene is HEC, she said.
Katkalo expects the university’s program to attract 20 to 25 students in its first year. Several applicants from Europe and the CIS, as well as from foreigners living in Russia, have already come in, he said.
At 20,000 euros ($24,400), the program will certainly have a unique feature — the most expensive price tage for an MBA in Russia. Katkalo pointed out that the price was half that in Europe, and predicted that it could yet change. “Business education pricing is dynamic. That is only the launch price,” he said.
St. Petersburg State University will cover most of the investment burden. Details have not been released, but the promotional costs could range from $60,000 to $70,000, Katkalo said.
In Russia 55 educational institutions are licensed to provide MBA programs, which market players say leaves room for more. “There are about 1,500 MBA programs in the world, so Russian market is far from saturation,” Adayeva-Datskaya said.
As for the usefulness of an MBA, that remains a moot point.
Alexander Yegorov, consultant at recruiting company ANCOR, said an MBA is a good investment that increases a manager’s value on the job market, but can equally mislead both the manager and his employer.
“Many graduates switch jobs in the hope of using their new business knowledge at the new company. Not all of them succeed. Many Russian companies employing MBA graduates are just not ready for changes in management and business processes that such a person brings with them,” Yegorov said.

TITLE: Scania to Build Two Bus and Truck Plants
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The world’s fourth-largest truck and bus manufacturer Scania AB plans to seize initiative on the Russian auto market.
Scania will build its second Russian bus plant in the Leningrad Oblast and may follow that with a truck factory, the Oblast’s economy and investment committee press-service said Tuesday in a statement.
The new plant will also broaden Scania’s production range in Russia. In addition to the Link buses for innercity travel and Line buses for intercity routes, the new factory will assemble another of the Swedish maker’s OMNI brand models: the City, for use in the city and the suburbs.
The bus factory will initially have annual production capacity of 400 buses, which could rise to 600, employing 500 workers. About 60 percent of production will be sold within Russia, with the rest marked for export to Western Europe.
Meanwhile, a truck factory that Scania is considering for the Lomonosov region will have manufacture up to 10,000 vehicles per year, Oblast officials said.
Andrei Chursin, commercial director of Scania Russia, declined to specify a launch date and investment volumes for the two plants, saying plans were still under discussion.
Chursin did say, however, that Russia has emerged as one of the automaker’s top priority markets, being the seventh most important country in terms of bus sales and the twelfth largest consumer of tracks.
The company invested 80 million Swedish krona ($10.2 million) into opening its first manufacturing venture in Russia, Scania Piter, in 2002. Scania has only one other assembly plant in Europe, located in Poland.
Analysts said that the Swedish firm’s expansion was a wise decision, but had its problems.
“Russia may be a good production base for European countries due to easy export through the St. Petersburg sea port,” said Gairat Salimov, auto industry analyst at Troika Dialog brokerage. The Russian market, however, will pose greater competition problems for Scania without a large distribution network, he said.
Kamaz controls one third of the heavy and mid-weight truck market in Russia, while sales of light trucks are mostly dominated by domestic automaker GAZ.
“I think Scania will try to produce mid-weight trucks. But, it’s the most difficult market segment: Prices are low and demand grows very slowly because of the big number of older trucks still in use,” Salimov said.
In the bus market Scania’s main rivals are Ruspromavto and PAZ (Pavlovsk autoplant). Scania’s production capacity from two plants would make up about three percent of the 19,000 vehicles annually in the country, and would face few difficulties with sales, Salimov said.
The Swedish automaker’s first plant, Scania Piter, allows a total production of 450 buses a year. Scania’s sales have risen from just 26 in 2002, to 94 vehicles in 2003 and 151 last year, said Natalia Solovyova, development and promotion manager of Scania Piter. The forecast for this year is 250 vehicles.
Scania delivers buses to municipal and private transport companies, mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Scania competes with Russian Buses, Nefaz and Voljanin, Solovyova said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: CIT Changes Name
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City-based fund manager Creative Investment Technologies has changed its official name to CIT Finance, the company said this week in a statement.
“According to our research, the new name is more suitable to our targets and the direction of our services,” said Vladimir Kirillov, head of CIT Finance. 
The fund manager is a 100 percent subsidiary of Web Invest Bank and boasts more than 11,500 clients nationwide, the collective sum of whose investments totals 6 billion rubles ($214 million).
“We see that our clients are also looking for long-term financial planning,” Kirillov said, adding that the provision of loans, among other financial services, has become a growing business direction for the company.

Medicine Alters Hands
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — CV Protek, the country’s largest pharmaceuticals distributor has lost its business in St. Petersburg, the most lucrative market in the country, to city-friendly operator Imperia-Pharma, business daily Kommersant reported this week.
Protek said this week that it ceased to be the city’s authorized distributor, while sources within the company added that Protek’s replacement would be Imperia-Pharma, which used to act as the national distributor’s regional agent for St. Petersburg, the paper said.
The city has about 900,000 beneficiaries entitled to cheap medicine, and unlike the situation in Moscow where several distributors operate alongside each other, St. Petersburg has only one federally authorized license.
The market is worth about $200 million, accounting for 12 percent of the 50.8 billion ruble federal program to provide cheap medicine to beneficiaries.
The reason Imperia-Pharma has been allocated Protek’s busines has not been officially voiced, although the paper alleges that the smaller local firm has ties to the city’s authorities.

SEAT Snubs Russia
MOSCOW (SPT) — Spanish automaker SEAT has decided to stay out of Russia’s booming car market and will not open a chain of dealerships here, parent company Volkswagen Group Rus said Tuesday.
SEAT has declined an offer from Volkswagen Group, which includes VW, Audi and Skoda, to open a network of dealerships, said Vera Logvinova, assistant to general director of Volkswagen Group Rus Ronny Mßller.
“We were in the planning stage but then had to drop [the plans],” Logvinova said. SEAT determined that dealerships in Russia would be financially disadvantageous, she said.
Volkswagen plans to increase sales by 52 percent this year to 11,500 vehicles, up from 7,588 in 2004, Mßller told Interfax last week. 
SEAT, however, occupies a miniscule share of the market. SEAT sold 157 cars in 2003 and a mere 87 vehicles last year, according to Vremya Novostei newspaper.

Internet Use to Rise 24%
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The number of Russians using the Internet could rise by 24 percent in 2005 on last year’s figure, nearing 10 million people, J’son & Partners research agency said Wednesday in a statement.
In June 2005, about 7.6 million people used the net, almost 30 percent higher than the same time last year, the agency said. That user figure may hit the 9.8 million mark in another six months.
Nonetheless, the agency notes that the rate of growth in the number of users is slowing. J’son & Partners predicts that the profits of net providers will rise by 46 percent to $1.5 billion this year.

TITLE: Taking Aim at the New NATO
AUTHOR: By Alexander Golts
TEXT: Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov is a remarkably open and sincere person. It makes you wonder how he ever served as an intelligence agent. He was ordered to strengthen relations with NATO, and he has done all he could to accomplish this task. Once every six months, smiling till it hurts, he meets with NATO defense ministers, signs cooperation agreements and observes joint military exercises intended to develop operational interoperability between Russian and NATO troops.
Everything about the military and political alliance with NATO makes Ivanov sick, however, and his hatred for that “aggressive military bloc” has been known to slip out at the most inopportune moments. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Ivanov was asked to assess Russian-NATO cooperation, and he got a little carried away. “Five years ago, no one could have imagined the progress that we have made in our relations to date,” he said. “Having said that, the unification of our military capabilities strikes me as unrealistic. We cooperated in Kosovo in the 1990s, but I don’t see any region of the world where we could repeat that cooperation today. Iraq is out of the question. Afghanistan is also not an option for historical reasons, although we provide the country with military assistance.”
I find it difficult to believe that Ivanov simply forgot about the joint Russian-NATO patrols in the Mediterranean set to begin next year, Russia’s proposal to create a common anti-missile defense system for the entire European continent, and other programs. It’s just that Ivanov despises NATO to such an extent that he considers all cooperation with the alliance to be completely pointless. And the top brass couldn’t agree more. No sooner had Ivanov spoken out about the impossibility of cooperation with NATO than Konstantin Sivkov, head of the General Staff’s Center for Strategic Military Research, told Interfax-AVN that NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders posed a potential threat to national security. U.S. tactical aircraft, operating from advanced NATO bases, are capable of striking key cities in European Russia such as Moscow, Tula and Kursk, Sivkov said. 
Brussels prefers to view statements like these as remnants of the Cold War mentality. In fact, such hostility toward NATO is entirely rational. For all the declarations of cooperation and the existence of the NATO-Russia Council, the Russian military establishment cast NATO in the role of “global enemy” from the very beginning. The brass desperately need an enemy of this size and scale to justify maintaining its massive, conscription-based Army —  an enemy so mighty that in order to defend against it the Defense Ministry must have the capability of placing 6 million to 8 million men under arms. At the same time, military leaders aren’t so brash as to single out a specific country as the enemy. NATO, regardless of its actual policies, has therefore become a euphemism referring variously to the United States, the European Union or the West as a whole.
At times, this approach leads to blatant contradictions. The Defense Ministry’s program for developing the armed forces, occasionally referred to as the “white book,” declares at one point that military cooperation with the United States should be expanded, then does an about-face, stating elsewhere in the document that NATO —  dominated by the United States —  is pursuing a policy of aggression that must be repulsed.
The fact that as a result of its ongoing transformation NATO looks less and less like a “global enemy” plotting to attack Russia only fuels hostility toward the alliance in Moscow. NATO’s rapid expansion to the east, which the General Staff views as a threat to Russian national security, actually makes it difficult if not impossible for NATO to conduct large-scale military operations on the continent. In order to admit new members in Eastern Europe, NATO military leaders have been forced to abandon their attempt to impose a single standard on the armed forces of all member states. This in turn means that NATO command cannot deploy the armies of all member states at once.
NATO leaders made this decision based on the reasonable calculation that such large-scale operations were no longer necessary now that the threat of a Soviet invasion had passed. Under a new proposal that has been widely discussed within the alliance, the armed forces of member countries would no longer be responsible for defending their national borders. From the perspective of Russian strategists, this proposal smacks of incredible stupidity or even treachery. But NATO is increasingly focusing on so-called “niche capabilities”: that is, separate, select units that when required could be combined to form an expeditionary force. The limited size of such expeditionary forces obviously renders them incapable of attacking Russia.
The fact that the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have made NATO membership a foreign policy priority only compounds the Russian military’s hostility toward the alliance. The point is not that these countries want to thumb their noses at Russia by allowing NATO to install bases on their soil. Like the former Warsaw Pact nations, these former Soviet republics want to join NATO as part of their broader integration into European institutions, not because they fear for their safety. 
It’s worth noting that candidates for NATO membership must meet political as well as military criteria: They must be democracies with civilian control of the military. This is what guarantees their integration into the military community of civilized nations. Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics believe they can meet these criteria. Russia, on the other hand, has repeatedly insisted that it has no intention of joining NATO, obviously having decided that the membership criteria are unacceptable. But when a country rejects civilian control of the military it has no choice but to believe its generals, who look for threats around every corner.

Alexander Golts, deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Cow Deaths as One Measure of Why Things Go Wrong
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
TEXT: Arriving in Moscow by train early Tuesday morning I overheard quite a common, but very up-to-date question that my neighbor had asked of a women sitting in front of him. The woman appeared to be a Russian who had settled  in the United States quite a long time ago.
“Why do you think everything goes wrong in this country? What is it about these people?” my neighbor asked.
I guessed him to be a computer specialist from Moscow in his early 20s and studying opportunities to get out of Russia once and for all.
“That’s a very difficult question. I think about it often myself, but cannot find an answer,” the woman replied. “On the one hand, it’s clear that Russia has everything it needs to progress — land, resources, so many talented people … But on the other … Hmm … You know, if one farmer’s neighbor in America has one cow, the farmer who doesn’t have any will do all he can to get two cows. In Russia, that farmer would do anything he could to make his neighbor’s cow die as soon as possible. Maybe that’s the answer?”
Soon after, the train pulled to a halt. The travelers from my compartment each went their separate  ways, but the question “Why?” stuck in their minds.
Looking up at the Kremlin’s skyline that day I thought, “Have the thousands of people who sit behind its walls found an answer or are they even looking for one?” 
In a recent interview printed in Der Spiegel magazine, Vladimir Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, hinted the Kremlin does spend some time thinking about it.
“We have understood that we are surrounded not by enemies, but by competitors. In the sphere of modernization of our society we’ve moved forward very little so far. [We] should look for technical, intellectual solutions in the West. The idea that we will invent something new on a blank space is silly. We should get down to studying,” he said.
This is a rather progressive thought that, if implemented, could change the attitude of Russian neighbors who kill each other’s cows. Surkov made further comments on the matter in a “secret report” to Russian businesses that was published by Radio Liberty last week and that shows that the Kremlin is sticking to its principles.
“It would be nice to escape to Europe, but they wouldn’t take us. Russia is a European civilization. This is a poorly lit outskirt of Europe, but still not Europe. … we are deeply connected to Europe and have to be friends with them. They are not enemies, just competitors. It is even more shame that we are not enemies,” Surkov was quoted as saying.
It is hard to judge by these quotes if in the long run Russia will “Go West” as it rapidly did in the beginning of the 1990s. 
In the “secret report,” Surkov went on to contradict himself by suggesting that the Kremlin still treats the West as some threat to the Kremlin’s influence in the republics of the former Soviet Union. He believes that all the recent defiance of the Baltic States against Moscow as well as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine were organized by the West to undermine Russia’s influence.
“I’m not in favor of conspiracy theories, but this is obviously a planned system of measures,” Surkov was cited as saying. “I’m not talking about “orange” revolutions, about the activity of humanitarian institutions. Everybody knows Freedom House is headed by [James] Woolsey, who headed the CIA at some point. Only an idiot could believe in a purely humanitarian mission of this office. 
Here we shouldn’t forget which goals certain circles have for these states. We should remember this in our work.”
This phrase contradicts all the positive impressions made by Surkov’s previous statements. It is clear that the Kremlin is still feeding itself with illusions about possible threats coming from the West.
To get rid of these illusions the Kremlin should understand one simple thing — even if the financing for the uprising came from the West, it was Ukrainians who accepted it and if they did, it was their choice in any case.
President Vladimir Putin tried to promote his candidate Viktor Yanukovych rather openly, though happily with little result.
If the Kremlin wants the West to study its society it has to stop suspecting its neighbors. Nobody’s interested in killing the Russian cow any more, not in Ukraine, Europe or the United States.

TITLE: The singing festival
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Finalnd’s Savonlinna Opera Festival, one of the oldest in Europe, running until Aug. 7, opened earlier this month with an opera set in the ancient Russian capital Veliky Novgorod, 300 kilometers south of St. Petersburg.
“Set in a land of forests, the opera tells about complicated human relationships and confrontations between people and regimes, from slavery right up to the league of free nations dwelling in the forest,” said librettist Paavo Haavikko of the opera, “The Horseman,”  which he created with composer Aulis Sallinen. “Dream and reality, historical truth and fictitious events interweave in music, poetry and emotion.”
The tale takes place 500 years ago and begins in the house of a Novgorod merchant, where horseman Antti and his wife Anne are serving their master. The story begins with a peculiar twist: Anne spends a night with the master, while the master’s wife humiliates Antti by sending him to go round the city looking for a maiden, dressed as a bear.
“The Horseman,” performed five times during the month-long festival, will next be performed on Wednesday.
Olavinlinna, a romantic medieval castle, has hosted the Savonlinna Opera Festival since 1912. Verdi’s “Aida,” Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann,” Puccini’s “Turandot,” Jaakko Kuusisto’s “The Canine Kalevala” and a series of vocal recitals of Finland’s most distinguished musicians such as bass Matti Salminen and tenor Juuso Hemminki are part of the program this year.
Initially called a “Singing Festival,” the Savonlinna Opera Festival was established by renowned Finnish soprano Aino Ackte, who first encountered the castle in 1907 when she attended a patriotic meeting there. The singer’s trained ear immediately recognized the tremendous potential of the romantic, excellently preserved castle — in both atmospheric and acoustic terms.
Ackte’s original brainchild, however, didn’t survive World War I.  In 1967, however, the festival was revived as the Savonlinna Music Days festival.
Now, the one-month-long festival is a prestigious European musical event, showcasing fresh interpretations of operatic jewels, such as Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” as well as unveiling contemporary Finnish classical music. 
At the beginning of the 20th century, when Finland formed part of the Russian Empire, many Finnish musicians studied at St. Petersburg’s Rimsky-Korsakov conservatory. That process is now happening in reverse, with many Russian musicians touring Finland — conducting operas, appearing at many different festivals and even staging opera and ballet performances. 
The town of Savonlinna, noted for its spa and peaceful scenery, was a popular resort among wealthy Russians before the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. Russians are, once again, waking up to the lake region’s treasures. 
Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater launched its own event in the Olavinlinna castle three years ago: during the first week of June, Muscovites come to the shores of Lake Saimaa for an annual ballet fiesta, showcasing their most acclaimed productions.
More and more Russians spectators are attending Finland’s musical events.
Valery Gergiev, the artistic director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, often praises the Savonlinna Festival. The maestro has admitted that magical opera performances in Olavinlinna castle inspired him to stage shows in historical castles and monasteries on the outskirts of St. Petersburg including at Vyborg Castle, the Ivangorod Fortress and the Uspensky Monastery in Tikhvin. 
Visually, the Mariinsky shows have been hugely successful yet the poor acoustics at the locales has sometimes damaged the performances. During the performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh” in Tikhvin, last year, the artists even had to use microphones. The weather sometimes leads to cancellations of shows because the impromptu stages are built in the open air.
But outdoor opera is staged with a touch more technical sophistaication at Savonlinna where organizers are proud of commendable acoustics.
A courtyard-turned-hall, accommodating 2,200 people, is covered by a moveable plastic roof first installed in 1987. Not only does it protect audiences from intrusive mosquitoes but plays a key role in the venue’s amazing acoustics. 
Paavo Suokko, the festival’s senior adviser, said the roof cost 2.5 million euros to build, and an additional 300,000 euros is spent every spring to re-mount it after a winter break. 
“The echo in the hall is 1.8 seconds, which is ideal for opera, and we are very proud of the acoustics,” Suokko said. “The words can be distinguished very well from any seat.”
The only dramatic accident with the roof so far happened, ironically, when Mariinsky musicians were performing. 
The roof collapsed during heavy rain, showering the Russian performers with a mighty waterfall.
The fortress was founded in 1475 by a Danish knight Eik Axelsson Tott, and takes its name from St. Olav, the castle’s patron saint. On St. Olav’s Day next Friday, July 29, entrance is free to the castle — but be warned, it gets very crowded.
The castle was built in a strategic location to protect the the Swedish-Danish union from Slavic principalities.
But throughout its history the fortress changed hands several times, first to Russians in 1714 when it was conquered by the army of Peter the Great, less than 10 years after the tsar founded St. Petersburg. 
The Russians added much to the castle including several bastions and one fort, named after renowned commander Alexander Suvorov, who served there for about two years in late 18th century. Since 1973 the castle has been connected to the mainland by a pontoon bridge; before then it could only be reached by boat and was well protected.
“Even a frog couldn’t jump into this castle,” Field Marshall Suvorov said of Olavinlinna.
These days the Suvorov bastion serves as a dressing room for performers at the opera festival which now brings fame to the castle, and audiences are not allowed to enter it.
The festival welcomes up to 60,000 opera lovers each year. About 80 percent are Finns but the event is quickly gaining international recognition. People speaking German, English, French, Italian and Russian can be heard during the intermission.
The festival’s symphony orchestra, assembled from the country’s finest musicians, does some touring outside the festival, which also helps to establish contacts with other companies.
The festival mixes home-grown talent and guest performances. Traditionally, the last week of the festival is dedicated to performances by visiting theater troupes. The festival also collaborates closely with tourist agencies to offer budget-price packages for visitors. This has made the festival financially successful and provided funds to invite some top directors to stage performances and even premieres of new Finnish operas.
A festival highlight this year is Jaakko Kuusisto’s “The Canine Kalevala,” sung in Finnish. First premiered last year, the comic, tongue-in-cheek opera, transforms Finnish epic the Kalevala into a cheerful event about pooches, mutts and hounds. It has immediately become an audience favorite. 
“Long, long ago, when the world was still young, far away in the land of the Kalevala there lived a free and untamed tribe of dogs,” reads the libretto. “Their neighbors in the dark northern regions of Pohjola were a band of wild and wicked wolves. The land between them was inhabited by a covey of cunning cats. The dogs and the wolves vied for the rule of the forests, and heated skirmishes sometimes broke out between them.”
“Every year we have a guest company, which brings over both their national operas and works from the classical operatic repertoire,” said Jukka Pohjolainen, marketing director of the Savonlinna Opera Festival. 
The Mariinsky Theater performed here in 1995 and 1996, while last year the festival hosted the Latvian National Opera. Latvia joined the European Union last year, and this invitation was a welcome gesture on behalf of EU-member state Finland.
This year, the guest company is Gran teatre de Liceu (the Barcelona Opera House). The renowned Spanish troupe will be performing Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amoure” and presenting a “Spanish concert night: Granados: Goyescas and the Best of Zarzuelan” from Aug. 2 until Aug. 6.
www.operafestival.fi

TITLE: Worn out
AUTHOR: By John Rockwell
TEXT: The New York Times
Like some mighty machine, clanking and groaning, the Bolshoi Ballet lumbered into the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday night, its first visit in 18 years to the home it used to haunt, at the old Met and the new, from 1959 through the 1970’s.
With 130 dancers (out of 220 at home in Moscow), a good-size orchestra and the usual gaggle of administrators and technicians, this two-week visit represents a considerable investment by the Met — an investment of money and of faith in the still-potent power of the Bolshoi brand name.
The Mariinsky Ballet (along with its Opera) in St. Petersburg has rather eclipsed the Bolshoi in recent years. But the name Bolshoi still means something special to American ballet lovers who remember its glory years, and all those ballets with muscular leaping men and commanding, dazzling ballerinas.
That image owed something to the stability of the Soviet system and Soviet subsidies, and to the 31-year reign of Yury Grigorovich as director. Grigorovich’s signature ballet was “Spartacus,” the story of a slave revolt that fit perfectly into Soviet ideology and showcased the manly virtuosity of the old-style Bolshoi male dancer. As it happens, “Spartacus” comes up Friday as the second ballet in this Met season, and we shall see how the company does it today.
The repertory next week features rarities: a newly choreographed version of “The Bright Stream,” suppressed in 1935 but boasting a full-length score by Shostakovich, and “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” Petipa’s first full-length ballet, now reconstructed. Alexei Ratmansky, who leads the company after an unsettled period, did the “Bright Stream” choreography.
But for Monday’s opener, the Bolshoi and the Met settled on the tried and true. “Don Quixote” is having quite a run this season because of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part of Cervantes’s novel. Last month Suzanne Farrell reconstructed Balanchine’s 1965 version in Washington, and American Ballet Theater opened its own Met season just eight short weeks ago with basically the same Petipa-plus version the Bolshoi dances.
One says Petipa-plus because while Petipa first choreographed it in 1869, to Minkus’s transcendently cheesy music, and then revised it, it was Aleksandr Gorsky who in 1900 set it in the form we know it today. It steadily evolved during the Soviet era, with all manner of more or less well-advised accretions, and has been steadily popular in Russia, having been danced by the Bolshoi nearly 1,000 times. In the West, it took versions by those Soviet emigrants Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov to establish the Petipa-Gorsky version here.
The ballet is a charming Mediterranean romp, a comic adventure in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are largely reduced to observing some flashy dancing and the formulaic love affair of the spirited Kitri and the dashing Basil. If the Bolshoi company is a kind of machine, so is this ballet: Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times has referred to it as a “machine for dancing.”
The Bolshoi uses a version of the ballet from 1999 by Aleksei Fadeechev, himself a former artistic director for a short while. The Fadeyechev “Don Quixote” is longer than Ballet Theater’s version, with more mime and character dancing. It uses rather wan sets and lavish if glitzy costumes based on 1906 originals. It was seen at the Kennedy Center in 2000 but didn’t make it to New York for the Bolshoi’s short season at the New York State Theater under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival.
There will be ample time in the next two weeks to take the measure of the Bolshoi Ballet today. Each of the four ballets will have three casts, and everyone is likely to relax from the pressures of a rapid setup at the Met (Ballet Theater gave its final “Giselle” Saturday night) and opening-night nerves.
That said, Monday’s performance was pretty charmless and pretty ragged. Dancers charged out, fixed smiles on their faces, blasted their way through the choreography with a kind of slam-bang effort, and ended with a forced flourish to elicit applause. Of seductive Spanish charm, there was precious little; in that regard, Ballet Theater’s “Don Quixote” was the clear winner. The performance I saw had Diana Vishneva, the Kirov star, as Kitri. The Kitri on Monday was Svetlana Zakharova, herself a former Mariinsky ballerina and now the seeming star of the Bolshoi. Tall and thin and leggy, she whipped through her steps and extensions and leaps and lifts with hard-working determination, but that was about it.
Only in the big pas de deux in the third act did she and her partner, Andrey Uvarov, begin to come into their own. His variations had an elegant stylishness, although nothing to make one forget Ballet Theater’s men, and their lifts together were nicely done.
Everyone seemed a bit more relaxed in the third act, and there were noteworthy bits of dancing throughout. Anna Antonicheva proved herself an elegant classical dancer as Queen of the Dryads. (The dream sequence in Act II is the purest Petipa in the ballet.) Alexander Petukhov was a sweetly funny Sancho Panza, more Russian than Spanish. The spectral Alexey Loparevich mimed the Don. Natalia Osipova sparkled in her short variation in the third-act grand pas. Timofey Lavrenyuk made a dashing toreador, sinuously partnered by Maria Allah. Anna Antropova was a striking Gypsy and Nina Kaptsova a cute, Sarah Lane-like Cupid.
Importing the Bolshoi orchestra may well prove rewarding down the line. Here, under the direction of Pavel Klinichev and with Minkus’s tired music, the musicians didn’t rise to the occasion. The playing was full-bodied, but sloppy and unfinished. Rather like much of the dancing.

The Bolshoi Ballet performs through July 30 at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, New York.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: American guitarist Gary Lucas, formerly of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, will return to the city to perform one of his most famous works, the soundtrack to the 1920 German silent film, “The Golem” (“Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam”). 
Recently released on DVD, the work premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 1989. Set in the 16th-century Prague, the expressionist film was directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener and is considered an early horror classic.
Lucas performed in St. Petersburg at the SKIF festival last year as a solo guitarist. “I have been called a ‘guitarist of 1000 ideas’ by The New York Times and in truth resemble a one-man space orchestra navigating the cosmos,” wrote Lucas in an email exchange with The St. Petersburg Times at that time.
“I always strive to take my audiences on a trip — in that sense I would describe what I do as essentially psychedelically based pictorial music. At the same time I like to be hyper-aggressive and physical with my music as well as ethereal and mystically based.”
Lucas will perform his soundtrack to “The Golem” while the film is screened at Dom Kino on Saturday. He will also appear with local guitarist Alexei Plyusnin at Moloko on Monday.
Pre-release copies of the long-awaited second album from The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review appeared this week. The fast-to-record, slow-to-be-released CD has been held up for a number of reasons — the latest and most vicious being Russian law, which demands that musicians who want to release cover versions of other people’s songs must get approval from the copyright owners, according to Denis Kuptsov, the band’s drummer. As a result the band were unable to sell copies of the album when it was “launched” with a concert at Platforma club in December.
“It’s because of a Russian law  — there’s nothing like this in the West. When you release an album with covers in the West, you simply list the songwriters and the royalties go to them automatically,” said Kuptsov. “But ‘everything goes through the ass’ in Russia.”
Months went by but the album’s pre-release copies now lack two songs originally recorded for it, covers of Depeche Mode’s “Policy of Truth” and an instrumental from the 1977 Soviet film “Usatyi Nyan.” 
However, the album’s full version will be released internationally on Megalith Records, a label owned by Rob “Bucket” Hingley of the ska band the Toasters, Kuptsov said. No international release date has been set.
According to singer Jennifer Davis , the new album will be officially released in Russia in September and will be probably accompanied with another live premiere.
Meanwhile, Davis’ own band, J.D. and the Blenders, will perform at Moloko on Saturday.
Last but not least, Tequilajazzz, arguably the city’s leading alt-rock band will perform its traditional “summer concert” at Moloko on Friday.

TITLE: Export duties
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In a disappointing setback for the St. Petersburg band La Minor, its Western European tour with concerts planned for Germany and the Netherlands in July and August, scheduled to start this Wednesday, has been postponed.
The local urban-folk band’s accordion player Sanya Yezhov did not receive a German visa after he mischievously had put “unemployed” as his occupation while filling in the papers for the consulate.
Musicians’ sometimes unpredictable behavior is one of the problems that promoter Natasha Padabed of the agency More Zvukov encounters while organizing European tours for local music bands, with her Dutch partner Stefan van der Burg.
As well as La Minor, More Zvukov’s leading acts now include folk-punk band Iva Nova and surf/electronica band Messer Chups, but Padabed said she also promotes concerts when asked by friends that include older local bands such as NOM or Dva Samaliota. The tours include all kinds of venues, from festivals to squats.
“Some other bands ask me to organize a tour for them, but I do it in my spare time, semi-professionally because you can’t make your living doing that,” said Padabed.“These bands are not known in Europe so the fees are relatively low. One should start bit by bit.”
However, the first Western European tour that Padabed put together was for local hardcore punk band Bondzinsky which performed in the Netherlands and Germany in 2000. 
The following year, she was one of the coordinators for SKIF, the city’s best-known left-field music festival, before she moved to the Netherlands to study ecological management at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in 2001.
Splitting her time between St. Petersburg and Amsterdam, she organized two tours for the folk band Babslei as well as for Messer Chups, the off-beat band led by guitarist Oleg Gitarkin, formerly of punk bands Bukva O and Nozh Dlya Frau Muller. 
However, things have changed dramatically since the late 1980s, when there was an appetite in the West for all things Soviet caused by glasnost. A Russian group touring Germany or the Netherlands does not raise eyebrows anymore.
“Many Russian bands think that there is so much money in Europe and that playing in a club there guarantees a very good pay check and much else besides,” said Padabed.
“But in reality it’s not like that. Europe is overfilled with music, from every place — from Africa, Asia, all over, but Europe is very small. For instance, Holland is as small as the Leningrad Oblast. There are many more clubs there, but the competition is very tough.”
However, over the several years that Padabed has promoted Russian club bands’ tours in Europe she feels some interest remains.
“There is an interest in Russian music,” she said. “I have a feeling that promoting a concert for a Russian band is easier than for a band from the Czech Republic or Hungary.”
However, Russian 1980s stadium rockers such as Alisa or DDT have no chance with Western European audiences. The kind of pompous “Russian rock” that those veteran bands perform draw few people outside the Russian diaspora in Europe, said Padabed.
“My friends promoted a concert by [popular band] 5Nizza in Berlin, and only Russians came, no Germans,” she said.
The bands that Padabed works with have more authenticity and originality.
“Such bands as Iva Nova or La Minor are very interesting, they play original folk stuff that doesn’t sound like World Music from the other countries, so they have a niche,” she said.
“Messer Chups have become rather well known; people recognize them in the street in Berlin, they even have their fans and their records are available there.”
According to Padabed, the country in which Russian acts are most welcome is Germany. “It’s okay in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria, but for some reason it’s easier to work with Germany. Especially in Berlin and Hamburg. There are a lot of clubs, and there is an intense cultural life there.”
While there are promoters, mostly Russian emigres, who organize concerts by local club bands in Western Europe, it is usually a case of mounting one or a couple of concerts rather than regular tours.
“Visas are still the biggest problem, as clubs cannot usually arrange a visa for a month or two,” said Padabed.
“You can’t go on tour by train or plane. The band should have a bus and its own amplifiers and drums, because clubs normally don’t provide them.”
“But with Messer Chups, there are only two of them, so we fly, for instance, to Germany, rent a car there, and travel with Stefan as a driver and the sound engineer and me as tour manager and the one who sells CDs.”
Padabed said she receives 10 percent from the band’s payment for her work. “It’s a small percentage, [agents] usually charge 20 percent or even more if it’s a big agency. But most bands I work with are friends and their fees are not too high.”
Bands normally receive a guaranteed fee and/or a percentage of the take at the door.
“Venues sometimes pay a band 100 percent of the entrance takings, while they make money on the bar,” said Padabed.
Accommodation is usually provided by the clubs. “The musicians stay at a hotel, a hostel or sometimes at somebody’s home,” said Padabed. 
“Some clubs have a room for musicians with beds. They also provide some food and drink. So when Western bands come here, they are very surprised that they have to buy beer themselves, that they are not provided with food and place to stay. Nobody cares here. The Russian bands who played in Western Europe feel this difference very sharply.”
www.morezvukov.nl
www.kultprom.org

TITLE: Lessons Bill Clinton Can Teach Russia
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Sonin
TEXT: The autobiography of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, “My Life,” has come out in Russian translation under the title “Moya Zhizn.”
The book describes exactly what’s lacking in Russian politics, such as the recognition that election campaigns aren’t a waste of time and money, but a way for the voters to express their will. 
That campaign fundraising isn’t some kind of shameful, mysterious endeavor, but the very thing that obliges politicians to stay in touch with the rank and file. 
That local and regional elections provide the best possible training for politicians and voters alike.
In the book, Clinton tells how, as the youngest governor in the United States, he lost his first re-election bid just two years after taking office. 
Back then, the good people of Arkansas considered gubernatorial elections so important that they held them every two years along with elections to the state legislature. 
After coming up short at the polls in 1980, Clinton hit the road and visited nearly every town and hamleti n Arkansas — a state that boasts no large cities — in order to figure out what he had done wrong and how to ensure victory the next time around. 
What he learned was that he was as popular as ever with the voters, but they were upset about a new automobile tax. 
He also learned that what went over well with the voters before he became governor — his Yale Law School charm and progressive stand on the death penalty — was far less attractive in a former governor seeking re-election. 
As a result, in the next election he campaigned as an opponent of the unpopular tax and an advocate of the death penalty.
This is exactly how democracy is supposed to work: The newly elected governor represents the views of the majority. 
This sort of responsiveness was just starting to emerge in Russia in the 1990s, but it has been all too easily eliminated by recent changes to the electoral system. 
Rather than meeting with their constituents, Russian politicians spend their time negotiating with the presidential administration, although this is hardly likely to give them an idea of what the voters back home are thinking.
After losing in his second attempt, Clinton went on to become governor of Arkansas four more times in a row. 
And that was enough to make him a strong contender for the presidency of the United States. 
But he had a long way to go before the election. Clinton visited nearly every state in the nation and spoke at hundreds of rallies to raise money for his campaign. 
No contribution was too small; in fact, contributions of $100 and less accounted for the greater part of his campaign war chest. 
In Russia, by contrast, party leaders do not raise money from tens of thousands of supporters, but from a handful of major companies. It should come as no surprise that, once elected, they represent the interests not of the majority, but of this handful of wealthy backers.
In the United States, the newly elected president fills some 3,000 government posts, usually with people from his own party. 
Clinton appointed the very people he had got to know on the campaign trail over the years, who had worked on his campaigns for the U.S. Congress, Arkansas attorney general and governor, and whom he had come across as he traveled the country supporting other Democratic candidates. 
Election campaigns serve as a way of promoting the careers of people who are tireless, capable and loyal recruitment specialists. 
We in Russia can only look on with envy at this institution. The “democratic career ladder” began to take shape under Boris Yeltsin, but President Vladimir Putin’s personnel policy has proven horribly ineffective.
On the whole, Clinton’s autobiography makes for interesting reading — a chance for Russians to find out about what we don’t have.

Konstantin Sonin, professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR, wrote this column for Vedomosti.

TITLE: A life less ordinary
AUTHOR: By Matthew Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It said to be the worst habit of the self-aggrandizing pseud: picking up the memoirs of a famous figure and flicking to the index to see if he or she get a mention. Ridiculously, I did this when I took a deep breath and manhandled Bill Clinton’s bestselling memoirs, first published in 2004 and now out in paperback in English and hardback in Russia.
And there I am, right there on page 429. Well, I’m not exactly singled out but Clinton writes of an “amazing rally” in Portland, Oregon when he was running for president in September 1992, and I was in the crowd of “over ten thousand people [who] filled the downtown streets.” 
But as well as that, Clinton descended from the stage and shook hands, he writes, “with what seemed like thousands of people” lining the street. I was one of them. 
His hands are enormous and sweaty, and its strange to think about what we now know Clinton has done with those hands down the years. It was obvious then that Clinton was a superstar whose charisma outshone any politician — any public figure — of his age.
At nearly 1000 pages in tiny type, “My Life” has been rightly criticized for its length. In a preface to the paperback edition, Clinton addresses the point with characteristic clarity and humility: 
“When I saw how many people of modest means came to the book signings [for the hardback edition], I worried about my long and heavy book also being to expensive.” 
Why should he worry? He was paid  $10 million for it and cannot run for elective office again. There are two answers to that, one cynical, one less so. 
The first answer points to Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, who could make a run at the White House in 2008. “My Life,” although an exhaustive and studious account of the late 20th century U.S. and world affairs, reveals nothing that could compromise that gambit and continues to play to the gallery of public opinion. 
The other answer is that William Jefferson Clinton, born to a widow of very modest means in the tiny, windswept town of Hope in the backward Southern state of Arkansas in 1946, really does care about people.
“My Life” is told straight, starting with the sometimes anguished, sometimes sentimental retelling the whirlwind romance of his parents and the death of his father, William Jefferson Blythe, in a car crash before his son was born. The death of his father cast a long shadow over Clinton’s life, and he mentions it several times as the spur to his relentless energy — he wanted to achieve as much as he could in life lest he was “taken” early in life too. There are other powerful influences; a fun-loving, hard working mother; a kindly no-nonsense grandfather; his uncle Buddy in whose memory Clinton would name a dog he owned during the presidency; dozens of friends and neighbours, some of whom end up working in the Clinton administration 40 years on.
The complex portrait that emerges of his mother’s second husband, Roger Clinton, is one of the best literary achievements in an otherwise conventionally-written memoir. A loving man whom Clinton calls Daddy, the elder Clinton was nonetheless an alcoholic with a temper. Several key episodes read like scenes from a Tennessee Williams play and deepen both Clinton’s compassion and capacity for self-destructive behavior, as the whole world was to find out in 1998.
Escape, if that’s what is was, comes as the brainy young Clinton schleps off the Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Entering the orbit of powerful Arkansas Senator William J. Fulbright, the student Clinton is eager to learn and eager to please. Later, as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford, England, he takes a carefree trip around Europe and even manages a short trip to Moscow (later this fact was used against Clinton by political enemies).
After his marriage to the brilliant Hillary, Clinton returned to Arkansas to build his political career. He served 12 years as governor and Clinton really wants you to know about each decision he took during them. The book gets bogged downed in the minutiae of government and campaigns and, despite Clinton’s boundless enthusiasm, becomes a bit of a bore. 
In a way this reflects the man: his story is amazing by any standards, but it is Clinton’s command of details that leave the rest of us cold that propelled him. He’s certainly not the racy sex monster of legend, but come across as something of a nerd who seems genuinely amazed anybody might think differently. 
The last third of the book takes us through each turbulent year of his two terms as U.S. president, and three themes emerge. Clinton’s deft stewardship of the economy, his deep engagement in a “interconnected” foreign policy, and the machinations of his enemies that eventually lead to bizarre impeachment hearings about the man’s sex life.
Clinton is not very forthcoming on what exactly went on between him and Monica Lewinsky (or other women with which he was linked). This is understandable: the lurid details are already out there for those who want to know them.
“My Life” is not that kind of book. Like the man, it’s more complicated  than that. 

“My Life” is published in Russian by Albina Business Books, a division of Independent Media, which owns The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Surf’s up
AUTHOR: By Matthew Duncan
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Malibu Taco
36 1-aya Liniya, Vasilyevsky Island. Tel. 328 0171
Open 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Menu in Russian and with explanatory photographs
Cash only. Lunch for two with beer 729 rubles ($25)

Whether it is nostalgia or novelty, Malibu Taco is honest about what it serves: the Californian version of Mexican cuisine. 
Recently opened on Vasilyevsky Island by American and Russian entrepreneurs, the restaurant offers fast food quality with laid-back service. The white walls with blue and orange painted strips are a bright alternative to the gray street, but hardly bespeak a powerful or original design concept. From every table you can see TV screens with surfers hanging ten on a pipeline, as well as the usual MTV videos. Tinny dance music plays in the background (where are The Beach Boys?). A real surfboard hangs on one wall in between black and white photos of yet more surfers. On the whole, they could have tried harder.
It was relatively warm last Saturday when we surfed by. Our group was a mixture of foreigners familiar with Mexican food, Russians who were not, plus a child.
The menu is a predictable listing of tacos, burritos, quesadillas and nachos. The combination meals are a good idea (burrito, taco, garnish and drink for 130 rubles ($4.50); quesadilla, taco, garnish and drink for 120 rubles ($4.19). The difference between here and the usual fast food joints is that here beer is also on the menu — Nevskoye or even bottled Corona with a slice of lemon. 
The staff were friendly and did their best to rectify the misunderstandings that arose over our order. No doubt the service will become smoother with time. The food arrived in a timely fashion — at least some of it did. As usual in Russian restaurants, one of the party has to look on while the others dig in. Fortunately it wasn’t me this time.
The food was of mixed quality and not spicy enough. The most enthusiastic response was for the chicken taco (which I had). Less enthusiasm was forthcoming for the beef variety, but nearly everyone, I noticed, cleaned their plate. There was more than enough food for the youngster (though she found it a bit weird) but not really enough to satisfy a Russian appetite.
Perhaps the food was generally bland because they are trying to cater to Russian tastes. This might be a mistake, because the niche of this restaurant might be the nostalgic expat market and most of these prefer a little more spice to their Mexican. To remedy this, salsa is offered as one of several side sauces. While the cheese in the quesadillas and burritos is real grated cheese, the nacho cheese is processed and plasticky. The chips were light and not too salty. 
The restaurant advertises Tequila parties on Saturdays, but as the waitress advised, the parties won’t be starting until they get a liquor license. Hopefully for them, that will happen soon. Mexican food — and even more so the Californian version — is unlikely to become popular in this city without promotion. What is more, located where it is, way out on Vasilevsky Island, we wondered whether the idea would catch a wave or beach itself in a couple of months. 
Malibu Taco is something new on the St. Petersburg lunch menu, and should be welcomed as such. The city is desperately in need of more cheaply priced alternative cuisine. Still, the restaurant needs to iron out a few wrinkles before it becomes a really viable option. A good step towards this would be to enlarge their portions and use real ingredients.

TITLE: Sunnis Continue Boycott of Constitution
AUTHOR: By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq — Sunni Arabs decided Thursday to continue boycotting the committee drafting Iraq‘s new constitution, casting doubt on whether the group can meet an August deadline to complete its work. Insurgent attacks, including two car bombings, killed 15 people, officials said. 
Kamal Hamdoun, one of the 12 remaining Sunnis appointed to the commission last month, said the Sunnis would continue their boycott pending an international investigation into the assassinations of two colleagues Tuesday and until other demands are met.
Even if the Shiite and Kurdish committee members decided to try to meet the August deadline without Sunni participation, questions would be raised over the legitimacy of a charter and whether it would win Sunni approval in an October referendum.
Fifteen Sunnis were appointed to the parliamentary committee last month in a move to lure many in the influential minority away from the insurgency.
Two members resigned under rebel threats, and two prominent Sunnisâ committee member Mijbil Issa and adviser Dhamin Hussein al-Obeidiâ were assassinated in front of a Baghdad restaurant two days agoâ prompting other Sunnis to suspend participation in the drafting.
“Our decision is to go on with suspending our participation until our conditions are met,” Hamdoun told The Associated Press.
He said the conditions include an international investigation into Tuesday’s killing and a greater role for Sunnis in drafting the constitution. He also demanded that the chairman of the committee, Shiite cleric Humam Hammoudi, withdraw a statement made Wednesday that the final draft would be finished by the end of the month.
Elsewhere, two suicide car bombings and a string of other attacks in and around Baghdad Thursday left 15 people dead, police and army officials said.
A suicide car bomber rammed into an Iraqi army checkpoint, killing six soldiers in Mahmoudiyah, about 20 miles south of the capital.
Thirteen others were injured, army Lt. Odai al-Zeiadi said.
A second Iraqi army checkpoint in the southern Baghdad suburb of Bueitha was also hit by a suicide car bomber, killing one soldier, al-Zeiadi said. Six other soldiers were injured, he said.
Hamdoun said there were no plans to name a replacement on the committee for Issa, a law professor from Kirkuk, until all the Sunni demands are met.
The United States has been pressing for Iraq’s parliament to approve the new constitution by Aug. 15 so it can be submitted to a national referendum two months later. 
If the charter is approved, then a new election for a fully constitutional government will be held in mid-December.
A broad-based constitutional government could enable the United States and its international partners to begin scaling back their military presence in Iraq next year.
Even if the constitution is finished, the lack of an endorsement by the Sunni community could cast doubt on whether the charter wins approval in the referendum. 
If two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces vote against it, the constitution cannot be approved.
Sunni Arabs constitute about 20 percent of Iraq’s 27 million people but form a majority in several provinces including Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh.
In other violence, unidentified gunmen assassinated three members of the Qadisiyah provincial council as they were heading to an Internet cafe in the western neighborhood of Khadhra, said police First Lt. Mohammad Al-Hiyali.
In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave of Sadr City, an employee of the Ministry of Trade was killed in a drive-by shooting, police First Lt. Talib Naim said.
Explosives were thrown into the compound of a British security firm in western Yarmouk, killing one Iraqi guard and injuring two others, said police Maj. Falah Al-Mihamadawi. 
Witnesses said the armed attackers had driven up in a speeding car. 
Meanwhile, a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi patrol detonated at dawn in Latifiyah, killing three and injuring another three soldiers, said a Babil provincial police spokesman. 
Latifiyah is located about 30 kilometers south of Baghdad in a Sunni insurgent-heavy area known as the Triangle of Death.

TITLE: 4 Blasts Hit London Again, Chemical Bombs Ruled Out
AUTHOR: By Robert Barr
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Explosions struck three London Underground stations and a bus at midday Thursday in a chilling but less deadly replay of the suicide bombings that killed 56 people two weeks ago. 
Only one person was reported wounded, but the lunch-hour explosions caused major shock and disruption in the capital and were hauntingly similar to the July 7 bombings by four attackers.
The London police commissioner confirmed Thursday that four explosions took place in what he described as “a very serious incident.”
“We’ve had four explosions — four attempts at explosions,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said outside police headquarters at Scotland Yard.
“At the moment the casualty numbers appear to be very low ... the bombs appear to be smaller” than those detonated July 7.
Police also said an armed police unit had entered University College hospital. Press Association, the British news agency, said they arrived shortly after an injured person was carried in.
Sky News TV reported that police were searching for a man with a blue shirt with wires protruding. In a memo to hospital staff, officers asked employees to look for a black or Asian male, about 1.8 meters tall, wearing a blue top with a hole in the back and wires protruding.
The explosions did not shut down the subway system, although three lines remained closed more than two hours later. 
Police in chemical protection suits were seen preparing to enter the Warren Street Underground station. Sky News reported that police said no chemical agents were involved in the explosions.
Explosions also were reported at the Shepherd’s Bush and Oval stations.
Stagecoach, the company which operates the stricken bus, said the bus was structurally intact and there were no reports of injuries.
Closed-circuit TV cameras on Hackney Road showed the No. 26 bus immobilized at a stop with its indicator lights flashing.
Prime Minister Tony Blair canceled his afternoon appointments as the developments unfolded.
The incidents paralleled the blasts two weeks ago, which involved explosions at three Underground stations simultaneously — quickly followed by a blast on a bus. Those bombings, during the morning rush hour, also occurred in the center of London, hitting the Underground railway from various directions.
Thursday’s incidents, however, were more geographically spread out. 
London Ambulance said it was called to the Oval station at 12:38 p.m. and Warren Street at 12:45 p.m. The July 7 attacks began at 8:51 a.m. 
“People were panicking. But very fortunately the train was only 15 seconds from the station,” witness Ivan McCracken told Sky news.

TITLE: Armstrong Placed For Seventh Tour Win
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: REVEL, France — Lance Armstrong’s teammates are doing a better job of beating him than his rivals. 
Armstrong’s Discovery Channel teammate Paolo Savoldelli won Wednesday’s 17th stage of the Tour de France, three days after George Hincapie earned a stage victory of his own. Meanwhile, Armstrong has yet to win an individual stage so far. 
“I’m not bummed out at all,” Armstrong said. 
Armstrong looked content to just protect his overall lead Thursday during the Tour’s 18th stage — a 117-mile route through south-central France with five climbs, including a steep uphill finish. 
The race began under scorching hot sun, with Armstrong hoping to save himself for Saturday’s final time trial. 
On Wednesday, the six-time defending champion donned his 79th yellow jersey — only Belgian great Eddy Merckx has more — after maintaining his comfortable lead through the Tour’s longest stage. Armstrong remained 2 minutes and 46 seconds ahead of his nearest challenger, Ivan Basso of Italy, and on course for his seventh straight Tour victory before retirement. 
With Armstrong’s win seemingly secure — only an accident or an alarming drop in form stands in his way — the battle for second and third is far more uncertain. 
Basso was in second place and Mickael Rasmussen was third, while Ullrich needs to make up serious time to avoid finishing off the podium for only the second time in his Tour career. He was fourth last year. 
Ullrich, the 1997 Tour winner, trails Armstrong by 5 minutes, 58 seconds, and is 3:12 behind Basso and 2:49 behind Rasmussen. He has little chance of catching Basso, so his priority now is to pass Rasmussen on the penultimate stage time trial in Saint-Etienne. 
“I’m still working hard for it, I will keep on fighting as hard as I can. There are two more stages and then a time trial where I can make up time,” Ullrich said. “Rasmussen is not known as a good time trial rider.”
Rasmussen finished 2:06 behind Ullrich in 174th place in the opening stage time trial, which was more than 21.7 miles shorter than the 34.5-mile route around Saint-Etienne on July 23. Ullrich should have a significant edge because he’s able to maintain a much higher tempo than Rasmussen over long distances. 
He finished 22nd in Wednesday’s 148.8-mile trek across southern France from Pau to Revel — the longest stage of this year’s race. 
Armstrong was 23rd, and both finished 22:28 behind Savoldelli.  The Texan tied Bernard Hinault, the last Frenchman to win the Tour in 1985, for the second-most yellow jerseys a 105-mile run from Albi to Mende where he will look to conserve his lead rather than attack. 
Armstrong came into this Tour with 66 jerseys and, if he holds the lead to Paris, would retire with 83. Merckx won 111 in the 1960s and ‘70s, but Armstrong has more Tour titles — a record six compared to five for Merckx, Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Jacques Anquetil.

TITLE: Russia May Synchronize ’06 Season
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian Premier League has suggested canceling its traditional summer season in order to bring its schedule in line with that of European soccer, which starts in the fall and ends in spring, Sport-Express reported Wednesday.
The new format, which the premier league has been mulling over for years, will start in fall 2006 if approved.
The topic was discussed at a general meeting of members of the Russian Premier League on Tuesday, after they faxed the executive committee of the Russian Football Union, or RFU, with the offer on Monday evening.
RFU president Vitaly Mutko told Sport-Express, “I understand that the [fall-spring] system has its pros and cons, ... but we will be studying the premier league’s suggestion seriously.”
Mutko added that the issue would be formally settled at the RFU’s December conference.
Currently, 33 of 52 European nations affiliated with governing body UEFA have their regular seasons run through the winter. In the former Soviet Union, only Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine play during the winter. The most recent switch to a winter season was in Ukraine in 1992.

TITLE: Nadal’s Reign on Clay Continues
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: STUTTGART, Germany — Rafael Nadal won his 30th straight match on clay Wednesday, beating American qualifier Hugo Armando, 6-1 6-2 in the second round of the Mercedes Cup. 
The French Open champion won in an hour to extend his streak and improve to 44-2 on clay this year. Nadal hasn’t lost on the surface since falling to Igor Andreyev in the quarterfinals at Valencia on April 8. 
“Things are going great,” Nadal said. “I played more aggressively than usual and didn’t make many mistakes, which is important on clay.”
The 19-year-old Spaniard is chasing his sixth straight title on clay and eighth overall this year, which would match top-ranked Roger Federer’s tour best. 
The top four players at the $737,000 event won Wednesday, but many seeds struggled. Second-seeded Nikolai Davydenko beat Spain’s Ruben Ramirez-Hidalgo 6-4 6-1 to reach the third round, while third-seeded Gaston Gaudio rolled past Germany’s Andreas Beck 6-3 6-3 and fourth-seeded Tommy Robredo of Spain fought back to oust Italy’s Potito Starace 6-7 (4) 6-3 6-2. 
Unseeded Rainer Schuettler, who has slumped to 91st in the rankings, upset seventh-seeded Mikhail Youzhny of Russia 7-5 6-3 to the delight of the German crowd, while Argentina’s Juan Monaco beat fifth-seeded David Ferrer of Spain 6-4 6-2. 
Nadal will face fellow Spainiard Fernando Verdasco in the third round. Verdasco ousted the 14th-seeded Andreyev 6-4, 5-7 7-6 (5), while 16th-ranked Paul-Henri Mathieu of France beat Spain’s Albert Costa 6-3 6-4. 
Another win for Nadal would push the 19-year-old phenom into a four-way tie for the sixth longest streak on clay with Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander and Guillermo Coria. The record is held by Guillermo Vilas, who won 53 straight in 1977. 
Nadal said he was surprised by his own consistency this year. 
“I don’t go up, I don’t go down,” Nadal said. 
“I’m young and I’m motivated for every tournament. I love to play and I love the competition.”

TITLE: Myskina Fails to Stop Topless Photos
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Former French Open champion Anastasia Myskina can’t stop a photographer from distributing topless pictures taken of her during a 2002 magazine photo session, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. 
Myskina was 20 years old when the photographs were taken by Mark Seliger, according to a written decision by U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey in Manhattan. 
Mukasey wrote that the Russian star’s rights were not violated when topless photographs were published with an article weeks after she won the French Open in 2004, despite her insistence that she did not understand a photo release form with her signature on it and was not fluent in English at the time. 
“Absent allegations of fraud, duress or some other wrongdoing, Myskina’s claimed misunderstanding of the release’s terms does not excuse her from being bound on the contract,” the judge wrote. 
Myskina’s lawyer Alexander Berkovich said Tuesday he didn’t know if he would appeal. 
“Obviously, we’re disappointed with the decision,” he said. 
The topless photos were taken after Seliger photographed Myskina for the cover and interior of the Gentleman’s Quarterly “Sports” issue in 2002 as part of a pictorial and profile of female tennis players.