SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1103 (69), Friday, September 9, 2005
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TITLE: Putin Seals Pipeline Deal, Meets With Merkel
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Thursday broke new ground in Russian foreign policy by meeting not only with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder , but also with his likely replacement, opposition leader Angel Merkel.
Putin and Schroeder  attended the signing of a landmark agreement in Berlin between Gazprom and Germany’s E.ON and BASF to build a $5 billion gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. 
Once in full operation, the new pipeline — which bypasses Belarus, Poland and Ukraine — will handle one third of Gazprom’s current annual exports to Europe. The pipeline, due for completion in 2010, will have two branches that  combined will carry 55 billion cubic meters a year.
The pipeline will run from Vyborg near St. Petersburg to Greifswald in northeast Germany. At a later point, the pipeline will be extended to the Netherlands and the U.K.
Putin also met with Merkel, the leader of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, at the Russian embassy. 
The meetings came ahead of Germany’s Sept. 18 parliamentary elections that look set to make Merkel the country’s next chancellor, either at the head of a conservative government or as the leader of the largest party in a grand coalition with Schroeder’s Social Democrats. 
The latest opinion poll, conducted this week, gave Merkel’s CDU a lead of 8 percentage points over the Social Democrats.
During the election campaign, Merkel has promised to take a more conservative stance in relations with Russia compared to Schroeder, who is a firm ally of Putin’s. Schroeder  and Putin have met a total of 32 times during their time in office.
Merkel, an East German, has said she would pay more attention to Poland and Ukraine, and would not overlook their interests when dealing with Russia.
Putin’s evenhanded treatment of Schroeder and Merkel stands in contrast to his stance during foreign elections last year, when he openly backed the incumbents and their allies in the Ukrainian and U.S. presidential elections. 
The different approach appears to  be aimed at pre-empting a possible chill in relations with Berlin in the event of a Merkel victory and at ensuring that the Baltic gas pipeline goes ahead, regardless of which party or parties form the next German government. Under a Merkel-led coalition government, Schroeder could still play a role in policy, particularly in shaping relations with Russia.
At their meeting, Putin and Merkel both said they saw Russian-German relations developing positively. 
“Regardless of the internal political processes in Germany, this desire for the positive development of our relations is intact,” Putin said, Interfax reported.
Merkel said she was also keen on cooperation. 
“If I manage to come to power, we will develop a strategic partnership,” she said, according to the Russian translation carried by Interfax. “I adhere to the traditions of Chancellor [Konrad] Adenauer.” 
Speaking earlier in the day at a joint news conference with Schroeder, Putin said that a Merkel victory would not affect bilateral relations. 
“Germany and Russia have always had good relations. It’s good if they are supported by good personal relations, but ... relations between Russia and Germany should exist and develop regardless of such friendship,” he said.
Putin said he hoped to remain friends with Schroeder after the elections. 
When Putin was asked if he was supporting Schroeder’s campaign by meeting with him ahead of the elections, he replied, “You know that I have a planned meeting with Angela Merkel. Why don’t you ask if I support her?”
Putin said last week that his visit was not aimed at backing Schroeder or that it constituted interference in the campaign. 
“We don’t meddle … also, it is pointless and silly to stop all contacts just because they have elections,” Putin said at his residence near the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Aug. 29.
At his meeting with Merkel, Putin noted that his visit came just five days ahead of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany, on Sept. 13. He said that former chancellors Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, both from Merkel’s CDU, had favored good relations with Russia.
Merkel replied by saying that she would have visited Russia to celebrate the anniversary if it had not coincided with the German election campaign.
It was Merkel who proposed the meeting, Putin aide Sergei Prikhodko said, RIA-Novosti reported Thursday. 
Roland Goetz, a Russia analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said that Putin’s visit could qualify as an intervention in the campaign as it gave Schroeder an opportunity to “make a show for the media.” But the effort would have “no significant effect” on German voters, he said by telephone from Berlin on Thursday.
Last year, Putin made a series of statements in favor of President George W. Bush during the United States’ closely fought election campaign. Putin also made public appearances with the Kremlin’s favored candidate in Ukraine’s disputed presidential elections, Viktor Yanukovych, but not with his successful rival, Viktor Yushchenko.
Putin broke new ground by meeting with Merkel, said Boris Shmelyov, head of the center for comparative political research at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “It’s the first such step in Russian foreign policy,” he said. “In previous years, there were no cases when the head of state met the leaders of the opposition in other countries.”
By meeting Merkel, Putin was following the example of Western leaders, in part because he does not want Merkel to block the Gazprom agreement if she becomes chancellor, Shmelyov said.
For the Kremlin, the importance of Germany, Russia’s largest trading partner and creditor,  extends far beyond the gas pipeline deal. Germany has advocated Russia’s interests in the European Union and NATO, Shmelyov said.
In 2003, Russia, Germany and France also opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Some of the sheen could be taken off of the German-Russian strategic friendship if Merkel wins the elections, Shmelyov and Goetz said, as she has criticized Schroeder  for sacrificing ties with Germany’s eastern neighbors by cozying up to Moscow and has promised to pursue a more even-handed approach. Merkel has also vowed to repair ties with the United States.
“Merkel is more skeptical about Russia and closer to the United States,” Shmelyov said.
Germany could review its policy on Iraq to support the United States, and listen more to Poland, the Baltic states and CIS countries in their relations with Russia, Shmelyov said. A Merkel-led Germany would also express more criticism about Russia’s internal affairs, over Chechnya and the state of democracy, he said.
And Merkel would not likely repeat Schroeder’s description of Putin as a “democrat through and through,” Goetz said.
But Germany’s energy needs and economic interests will prevent it from drifting too far away from Russia, Shmelyov said.

TITLE: Residents Fight Bid To Resettle
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A St. Petersburg apartment building that once housed workers for Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, whose endowment funds the Nobel Prize awards, is facing demolition after being condemned.
The building at 32 Ulitsa Mira was constructed in 1912 for skilled workers at the Russkii Dizel engineering plant, which was owned by Nobel. Despite this, the building is not protected for its historical status.
Lenexinvest, a subsidiary of daughter firm of development company Lira, which plans to demolish the house and erect a nine-story elite residential house in its place, has told residents that the house is condemned and that Lira will resettle them into new apartments.
LenexInvest could not be reached for a comment.
However, most residents of the building and neighboring apartment buildings, located in a prestigious area of the city’s Petrograd Side, are angry about the plans and doubt that the process is legal.
“We don’t want to move out of our building, and — we have the deepest doubts that our building has been condemned,” said Vladimir Volkov, a resident of 32 Ulitsa Mira.
The evaluation of the state of the building could be a forgery, he said.
Residents of the building never saw the commission that Lira says confirmed that the building represented a danger to the lives of residents and were surprised to hear about it, he added.
The residents and several independent experts have inspected the building’s foundations and walls and found no signs of it being so unsafe that it should be pulled down, Volkov said.
“I have lived in this building for many, many years, I love this place and its historical atmosphere, and find its central location very convenient ,” he said. “So why would I be willing to move out of here — because someone wants to construct an elite building here and make money on it?”
Another resident Natalya Shumilova said she and her family did not want to move out.
“We have a three-room apartment and we did repairs there, and we are far from sure about what kind of new apartment the investor will offer us or where that apartment will be located,” she said.
“We also really appreciate the area surrounding our house, the trees and the children’s yard, where we can let our children play and feel safe,” she said.
The five-story building, like many in St. Petersburg, looks shabby and its facade needs repairs, but it does not appear to be in imminent danger of collapse.
Shumilova said some residents, especially those who live in communal apartments where they share kitchens and bathrooms with other residents, are only too happy that Lira is offering them individual apartments and are eager to accept Lira’s offer.
Residents of neighboring buildings are also unhappy at Lira’s plans. They fear that the new elite high-rise will block the sun from reaching their five-story buildings.
“In the St. Petersburg climate we will not only miss out on the light but will also suffer from humidity,” said Yury, a resident of a neighboring building, who did not give his last name.
“Besides, not only does every building on the Petrograd Side have its individual image but they also have an individual history, and if we begin to destroy those buildings, the historical atmosphere and value of the district will be destroyed,” he said.
The residents have sent several requests to the district administration and municipal authorities asking them to review their plight, but have not yet received any answers.
Alexei Skvortsov, a senior lawyer at Reim SMT real estate company, said the residents of the building should not panic, but should take certain actions to protect their interests. The residents could file a complaint to a court challenging the condemning of their home, he said.
“They have the right to demand an independent commission on the issue, and there are many independent experts,” Skvortsov said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
If it was a regular interdepartmental commission examined the building, he doubted its conclusions could be falsified.
“I’ve never heard of that happening,” Skvortsov said.
Land in the central city, including on the Petrograd Side, is very expensive and desirable for investors. It is also very hard to get construction sites, he said.
Another issue for the case would be if residents had privatized apartments in the building, and then investors would need to fully compensate the market value of those apartments, he said.
Yury Panov, head of municipality No. 60, to whom the building’s residents have appealed said the municipality did not like LenexInvest’s actions.
“We think that the public hearings, which are needed in such cases and which the investor conducted, featured breaches of the law, because many people didn’t know about it and didn’t come, while residents of the neighboring buildings, who are no less involved were not invited at all,” he said.
He described the conclusions of the Expert Construction Commission, the city’s official independent commission that deemed the building as being unfit to live in, were “rather strange.” The commission hired private firm Zhilkomexpert  to survey the building, and then confirmed its results, he said.
Another independent inspection should be conducted, he added.

TITLE: Do-It-Yourself Paternity Kits Available Soon
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian men who wonder if they are raising someone else’s child will soon to be able to conduct tests at home on “who the father is.” 
If international patterns hold true, they will find the child is not theirs in one out of five cases.
British company DNA Solutions, which will open its first office in Russia in St. Petersburg in about 10 days, is to provide DNA kits to customers so that they do the tests themselves. Marketing manager Daniell Leigh said DNA Solutions is the first company to offer such a service in Russia.
“This will be the first company offering free DNA home testing kits that can be sent to individuals who can collect their own DNA samples from their home along with a relative and return these to us for analysis along with payment,” Leigh said in a telephone interview from London.
The company decided to open its office in Russia after experiencing a large demand from Russian nationals for DNA testing services over the last three years, he said.
The company continuously received such requests and demands for DNA testing kits from Russians in its offices in Finland, Sweden, UK and Germany.  
For 5,650 rubles ($200) the test will, in 10 to 15 days, show the relationship between a father and child with an accuracy of 99.9 percent, he said. 
Samples will first be sent to DNA Solutions laboratories in Australia or the U.K., but the company is also considering opening a new laboratory in Russia soon, Leigh said.
Parenthood testing has received a a lot of publicity in Europe,  including cases featuring celebrities actress Liz Hurley and tennis player Boris Becker. Disgraced British M.P. David Blunkett went to court to get a paternity test to shore up his claims to the child of his lover.
However, U.K. Health Researchers suggest that in the general population only one in 25 dads is raising another man’s child.
The most common reasons for DNA’s parenthood testing are fathers who may have doubts that their child or children don’t look like them, or their wife had an affair or they have heard a rumor that their wife or girlfriend may have had a one-night stand, Leigh said.
“It’s these doubts that begin to grow and many fathers want to make sure they are raising a child that is biologically related to them. Many fathers think that raising a child or children is a very large financial commitment and therefore they do not want to pay for another person’s child,” he said.
However, Russian experts on children’s rights expressed their doubts and even anger at the service DNA Solutions plans to offer.
Marina Levina, head of St. Petersburg charitable foundation Parents Bridge, said the introduction of such an easy procedure could be destructive.
“It is aimed at indulging not very good emotions and desires,” Levina said. “And in most cases it will be directed against women and children.”
The procedure of parenthood DNA testing was introduced in Russia years ago in state clinics, several of which are in St. Petersburg, she said. 
The prices for the tests with those clinics are much lower than the ones offered by DNA Solutions, and are about 1,000 rubles ($30), she said.
However, most often the tests are done only if a court orders them. Parents need to check paternity for alimony in case of a divorce, or some other legal reasons. In that case, such testing would be done for free, Levina said.
Boris Altshuler, head of the Moscow-based non-governmental organization Right of the Child, said he considered the service offered by DNA Solutions “immoral.”
“It’s a cruel service,” Altshuler said.
“It is immoral to satisfy such idle curiosity. And this procedure may lead to tragedies for both parents and children. However, people, who offer this service, will make good money on it because human curiosity works like a drug, and people will go for it,” Altshuler said.
“I must also say that genetic relationship is not all that important for happiness. If a child lives in a family he must be loved in any case,” he said.
He said DNA procedures should be performed only in state clinics and not by private companies, which serve commercial interests that may mean they are unreliable.
“I think, such service should be prohibited,” Altshuler said.

For more information see www.dnasolutions.ru

TITLE: PR Professionals In A Spin Over Bloggers
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The world’s spin doctors are concerned about the power of the Internet. 
Blogs, or personal Internet journals, created by angry customers are costing large corporations multi-million losses despite upbeat press releases being churned out by their counterparts, speakers said at the Fifth Baltic PR Weekend conference Thursday.
Matthew Anderson, a director for Ogilvy Public Relations, said most research shows trust in leaders and experts is vanishing. 
More and more people are turning to blogs and Internet forums when seeking reliable information. Seven million blogs already exist online, with 25,000 new ones created every day, he told the gathering in the Grand Hotel Europe.
“What appeals to people is the free exchange of views, the very personal approach and candid attitude,” Anderson said. “By contrast, spokesmen seem like robots and are often not credible. When people doubt the messenger, they doubt the message.”
That blogs are trusted more than advertisements is a global phenomenon, he added, urging Russian PR gurus to get busy developing responses to the challenge. 
Silencing blogs which are multiplying rapidly is a Sisyphean task, so Anderson incorporates personal elements in information distributed through PR-channels — producing live witnesses that the target audience can relate to. 
Anderson said the most visited Russian blogs include livejournal.com, dirty.ru and anfrax.ru.
Russia has about 17.5 million Internet users, but the modest figures are expected to nearly triple in the next five years. 
Communications Minister Leonid Reiman predicts the number of Internet users will reach 50 million by 2010. The number of Russian Internet surfers has been growing by 35-40 percent annual over the past five years. 
Yury Kobaladze, managing director of Renaissance Capital investment company, and a former FSB spokesman, told the meeting that censorship is a key issue for public relations. 
The protection levels of classified information in investment funds and banks as well as overall secrecy surrounding their activities exceed those of tight-lipped and self-contained security forces, he said. 
Gaining access to documents is difficult not only for outsiders. “Even public relations staff don’t have access to a huge share of documents, and without such access it is quite tough for them to do their job well,” Kobaladze said.
The constitution bans censorship but officials often raise its use especially in regard to terrorism, for instance the Nord-Ost hostage crisis in Moscow in 2002.
Vladimir Medinsky, vice-chairman of the State Duma’s committee for economic policy, business and ownership was quick to give a recent international example of censorship. 
“After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the police in the U.S. were instructed to break people’s cameras if they saw anybody unathourized taking photos in the disaster area,” he claimed. 
“When President George Bush was filmed with two survivors for TV, the shoot was staged 50 kilometers away from the scene.”

TITLE: Ukraine’s Yushchenko Fires Government
AUTHOR: By Olena Horodetska
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KIEV — Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko fired his government Thursday as the team which led the Orange Revolution less than a year ago broke apart amid infighting and accusations of mass corruption. 
Yushchenko, who has pledged to stamp out the corruption widespread under his long-serving predecessor Leonid Kuchma, said at a news conference he would ask regional governor Yury Yekhanurov, 57, to form a new team. 
But he sought not to alienate completely the charismatic Yulia Tymoshenko, a key figure in the mass protests late last year that propelled him to power and who until Thursday had been prime minister since his election in January. 
“These people remain my friends. It is very difficult but today I must remove this Gordian knot,” Yushchenko said, accusing his outgoing government of lacking team spirit. 
“I set one task for the new team — to work in a united team. I do not want any more the intrigues between two or three people that were determining the state policy.” 
He also accepted the resignation of close ally Petro Poroshenko from his powerful security post and suspended another aide — both of whom had been accused of involvement in corruption. In sacking Tymoshenko, whose fiery oratory brought thousands out on the streets in last December’s pro-Western Orange Revolution, Yushchenko moved decisively to end a crisis that has threatened his credibility. 
Ukraine’s state security (SBU) chief Oleksander Turchinov — another Yushchenko ally — also tendered his resignation. 
The crisis follows months of tension between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko over Ukraine’s economic direction and came to a head last Saturday when his chief of staff quit alleging deep corruption in the administration.

TITLE: Red Army Vet Deported
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TALLINN, Estonia — Estonia has expelled a retired Russian military serviceman after years of wrangling over his right to stay in Estonia. 
The Citizenship and Migration Board said that Nikolai Bragin, a Russian citizen whose age and rank were not released, was deported to Russia on Aug. 24. 
Bragin was one of several retired Red Army soldiers who had remained in Estonia despite court orders to leave the country. Bragin was first ordered to leave Estonia in 1994, and was offered an apartment in the Russian city of Tver under a U.S.-financed assistance program. 
However, Bragin insisted on staying in Estonia and his residence permit in Estonia was extended several times due to health reasons, officials said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Street Killing Detention
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Police on Wednesday detained a suspect in their investigation of the murder of a pedestrian on Aug. 22 who was apparently beaten to death with a baseball bat because he blocked the path of a vehicle driving on the sidewalk, Interfax reported.
“One of the two suspects was detained yesterday in the Fruzensky district.” The report quoted an unnamed police source as saying. “The second suspect and the vehicle in which they were in have not yet been found.”
The detained man was described as a private entrepreneur born in 1975.

Hepatitis Investigation
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City prosecutors have suspended a criminal case over an outbreak of hepatitis A infection among staff of Pyatyorochka supermarkets in late April, Interfax reported Thursday.
“The case has been suspended in connection with the difficulty of establishing a guilty party,” the city prosecutors office was quoted as saying.
Eighty-three of 104 Pyatyorochka workers were found to be infected and caterer Eshel Eli, which supplies lunches to the chain, was investigated.

3 Judges Step Down
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Legislative Assembly on Wednesday accepted the resignations of three judges of the City Charter Court, Interfax reported.
The departure of judges Olga Gerasina, Natalia Gutsan and Alexei Liverovsky on the grounds that their mandates have expired leaves the court, which has been in a drawn-out conflict with City Hall, without a quorum.
Legislative Assemby deputy Igor Mikhailov was quoted as saying that the judges should serve only five years, but Alexander Osotsky, the chairman of court which oversees that City Hall keeps to the City Charter,  has said that the current judges should serve six years.

Suicide Linked to Scam
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The suicide of a Nevsky district police captain in Sochi on Monday may have been linked to the seizure of a huge haul of smuggled mobile phones last Friday, Izvestia reported Wednesday.
Citing an unnamed highly ranked city law enforcement official, the paper said that Igor Pastukhov jumped from the 12th story of a hotel and that his wife had linked the death to problems at work.The telephones, valued at 600,000 euros, were to be sold in the city.
A colleague of Pastukhov said that it was possible the captain was murdered, the report said.

TITLE: Sun Micro Picks City as Focal Point
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sun Microsystems will expand its operations in St. Petersburg, possibly hiring as many as 200 more staff within the next 10 months, the company said Thursday at a news conference.
The announcement comes a month after the IT firm’s India Managing Director, Bhaskar Pramanik, identified St. Petersburg among four cities to receive “major investments” in 2006, Forbes magazine reported last month.
Pramanik named India’s Bangalore, the Czech Republic’s Prague, and China’s Beijing as the other three key places for Sun Microsystems to grow out facilities and boost staff.
“I expect that … by the end of our next financial year, which is the end of next June, [the St. Petersburg center] will number between 350 and 500 staff,” said Anya Barski, director of Sun Microsystems’ development center in St. Petersburg, which works mainly on Java-based software.
Barski added that the employee numbers were more likely to be near to the upper marker, although there was no set staff target. She declined to detail the size of investment the computer services firm would divert to enlarge their St. Petersburg business.
James Gosling, the creator of the Java computer code and currently the chief technical officer at Sun Microsystems, visited St. Petersburg on Thursday especially to take part in the conference.
“There were several reasons why we decided to focus on St. Petersburg,” Gosling said. “Above all, it is the city’s underemployed talent … we see a lot of potential here.”
Sun Microsystems has not been the only IT major to put faith in the skills of St. Petersburg programmers, which has put a strain on the availability of human resources, as well as inflating wages in the industry.
Intel has five research and development centers in Russia, which employ over 1,000 staff — the chip-makers biggest software programming operation outside the U.S.
“The growth of [an IT company in Russia] is linked to availability. Now there are very few programmers in St. Petersburg that have over five years experience and are looking for work,” said Igor Kaloshin, head of Intel in St. Petersburg.
Director of Kelly Services IT Resources in St. Petersburg, Yevgenia Delnova, said that simply finding another 200 programmers in St. Petersburg “will not be noticeable. The problem is Sun Microsystems is not the only major company looking for new staff.”
When 10 companies seek about 100 or 200 new employees, the effect is a rise in salaries, especially for the in-demand Java and C++ based programming, Delnova said. 
It is imperative that St. Petersburg avoid this knock-on effect if it is to stay competitive with Chinese and Indian IT companies, Kaloshin said.
Maria Chernobrovkina, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in St. Petersburg, said “the city’s IT firms are all aware of the issue and are trying to act on it.”
In part, most global majors like Intel, Motorola, among others work directly with St. Petersburg universities to prepare students for the real work environment.
Sun Microsystem expects to follow the same route, “expand[ing] the relations we have with the city’s universities. We have already begun a student internship program,” Barski said.
The U.S.-based firm also plans to work with the city’s technological colleges in terms of structuring the academic curriculum, offering some grants and other benefits, “although this is still an issue for the future,” Barski said.
“The potential of Russian youth is massive, but they have no confidence,” Kaloshin said, adding that cooperation between academia and business could help to change this.

TITLE: The Great Vodka Row: Liviz Strikes At Smears
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A notorious row in the city’s vodka industry may soon reach the courts.
St. Petersburg-based alcoholic drinks producer Liviz went into counter offensive this week, rebutting the smear campaign against the firm’s vodka, which a newly formed public organization has alleged to be poisonous for consumers.
The general director of Liviz, Yury Nikulin, called an extraneous press meeting Tuesday to “prove the quality of the company’s products and stop the slander,” which he suggested had been indirectly initiated by a rival.
Nikulin stopped short of naming the rival, saying only that “its Midas’ ears were clearly seen in all those provocations and we all know who is behind it.”
The scandal erupted earlier this year when a recently registered Moscow-based Citizens Committee for Alcohol Quality started the publication of accusatory statements about Liviz on the Internet, as well as mailing letters to the St. Petersburg firm’s distributors discrediting the company’s products.
The public organization based accusations of harmful, low quality produce on tests conducted by a Moscow State University’s chemistry laboratory.
The laboratory had carried out tests on two bottles of Liviz vodka and in a report stated the levels of hazardous substances found in the vodka.
Liviz said that the organization then publicized copies of the report that had been tampered with to cut off the last column of test results, which showed the levels to be well within legally authorized norms.
“Normally you’ll find not only cadmium, cuprum and zinc in water, but also mercury, arsenic and practically all elements from the periodic table. The question is of quantity,” Nikulin said.
Irina Popik, a laboratory assistant at Moscow State University who performed the tests, said “[Liviz] vodka satisfied all sanitarium requirements and standards.” She said she gave the full report to the public organization, but later found the test’s conclusions to have been misused.
The Citizens Committee for Alcohol Quality responded in an e-mail on Thursday saying that the Moscow university laboratory had been “specifically pressured” by Liviz not to cooperate with them.
Yekaterina Sokolova, press secretary for the public organization, said Liviz vodka “was tested to be within the norms … but the norms themselves were established 25 years ago,” and do not correspond to modern sanitation levels.
“If ordinary citizens boil water before drinking it … the use of heavy, not properly purified water by alcohol manufacturers leaves one anxious,” Sokolova said.
She added that the organization has now prepared “all the necessary expertise” on all major alcohol producers with help from other laboratories, and is ready to continue the campaign.
At the press meeting Liviz denied the possibility of failure in their manufacturing. “For making vodka, on top of obliging the health standards, we remove dash, chlorine and heavy metal salts by purifying water on a molecular level using modern equipment,” said Inna Nikitina, Liviz deputy director for production.
She said the water used for vodka production is 20 times softer than the standard Neva river water. Galina Dmitriyeva from Rospotrebnadzor, which tests food sold at retail chains, confirmed the safety of Liviz products, as did Natalia Kryzhanovskaya, head of the certification department at St. Petersburg center for quality control.
Among the worst accusations, Liviz said that the Citizens Committee for Alcohol Quality claimed the vodka maker had killed 11 people to hide the low quality of its products.
However, Dmitriyeva said no case of fatalities linked to vodka consumption had been registered in St. Petersburg this year. The only poisonings registered had been caused by misuse of alcohol.
Liviz said they aim to take the offenders behind the smear campaign to the courts. The Citizens Committee for Alcohol Quality said in an e-mail that this would in fact act as a benefit for them “to publicize additional evidence under a bigger spotlight.”
While the row continues, Mikhail Dynin of the Northwest alcohol business association said that alcohol importers are benefiting from an anti-Liviz media campaign. The biggest winners have been Ukrainian producers, who grabbed seven percent of the local market last year.
Liviz is among the top ten alcohol producers in Russia. An industry insider, speaking on conditions of anonymity, said that any other top ten company could potentially benefit from the discrediting of Liviz.
The source noted the high-profile row over the Gzhelka brand ownership between Liviz and another top vodka-producer Kristall. However, he said, it is “most unlikely that any serious alcohol producers would get involved in such a ridiculous campaign.”

TITLE: Hansabank Starts Work In Russia
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Hansabank, the largest financial institution in the Baltic states, has started banking operations in Russia and will specialize in long-term loans to commercial clients, the bank said Tuesday.
Hansabank, which plans to offer commercial loans with terms of up to 10 years, joins a handful of banks that offer long-term financing in Russia, including Raffeisenbank and Citibank.
The bank began operations in Russia with a leasing business in 2002.
The news comes at a time when Russian lenders are pushing for greater lending protection in order to make the banking system more stable. Longer-term financing tools guard against a run on the bank in times of crisis.
Russian law currently obliges lenders to return deposits to clients upon request. A report in Vedomosti earlier this week said the government was likely to change this law.
Russians are typically loath to commit their money to a financial institution for an extended period of time.
“Nobody wants to put money in the banks for 10 years, so the banks couldn’t give long-term loans,” said Richard Hainsworth, CEO of RusRating, a Moscow-based company that rates banks.
State-owned Sberbank, the country’s largest bank, does not lend money for more than eight years, Hainsworth said.
Established in Estonia in 1991, Hansabank is 100 percent owned by Swedbank.

TITLE: City and Oblast Compete on Tax
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Recent changes in tax legislature in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast provoked strong debates when the business communities of both regions met with the authorities Wednesday.
Representatives of both governments promoted their new tax schemes as clear and advantageous, but doubts remained over interpretations at a meeting sponsored by the St. Petersburg International Business Association.

ROUND 1
“We have retained [the offer of] tax concessions. In some cases, they are now applied not only to the profit earned in investment projects, but to total company profit,” said the Leningrad Oblast Vice-Governor Grigory Dvas.
In his turn, the head of the St. Petersburg committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade, Vladimir Blank, said that “property, profit and land taxes, and land buyout prices are the important tools for attracting investors.”
Since January purchasing city-owned land has become considerably cheaper, the authorities fixing the price of land at nine times the rate of the property’s land tax, as opposed to the previous ratio of 30 times the tax.
In addition, a new law on land tax, which will decrease the rates applied to industrial territories by 40 percent, will be approved next month, Blank said.

ROUND 2
St. Petersburg will have a new tax scheme in force from Jan. 1, according to which profit tax can be reduced from 17.5 percent to 15.5 percent if the company invests more than 150 million rubles ($5.3 million) into local projects. The rate drops to 13.5 percent if the company invests more than 300 million rubles ($10.6 million).
For the city’s high-tech companies, the rate of 13.5 percent profit tax will be permitted when their local investments reach 50 million rubles.
In addition, should a company’s investment be more than 150 million rubles in fixed assets within a year, the tax on its property halves —from 2.2 percent to 1.1 percent.
The situation in the Leningrad Oblast is different. Its regional law on tax concession was revoked by the federal authorities in 2004, which resulted in suspended negotiations with investors.
An amended version of the oblast law came into force at the end of July. It deals not with tax concessions but with subventions that are regulated not by tax, but by budget law, essentially placing the giving out of concessions exclusively in the hands of the oblast.
To qualify for a subvention, a company has to earn 90 percent of its profits from local investment projects and sign an investment agreement with the oblast authorities. Profit tax has been set at 20 percent.
Businesses can receive subventions for up to 33 percent of taxes paid to the regional budget if they invest more than $10 million in the oblast, up from the previous minimum of $1 million. Profit tax is fully returned to the company if it invests more than $50 million.
Dvas said he plans to allocate 1.2 billion rubles ($42.5 million) for subventions this year.

ROUND 3
Dmitry Babiner, head of tax practice at Ernst & Young in St. Petersburg, said “many investors will benefit from tax legislature changes,” but warned that “bureaucratic delays are possible.”
Also, allowing tax concessions as regards to total company profit automatically reduces the estimated investment project payback period, he said.
Representatives of the Tax Agency from both regions said legal disputes with companies are rare. However, one dispute emerged directly at the meeting.
When the tax authorities said that “investment into fixed assets” meant acquisition and payment, the audience disagreed. “Acquisition is handing over ownership. It doesn’t necessarily involve payment,” said Olga Makarova from Pratt & Whitney Russia.
Other moot points included distinctions between taxpayer groups and the risks of back-tax claims. Selling property will reduce the total investment volume and the company may lose tax concessions, said Yelena Malakhova from the St. Petersburg branch of the Tax Agency.
The same may happen if the company hands over property to its subsidiary. Buying of existing production facilities, leasing schemes and the increase of authorized capital stock are not considered “investment into fixed assets” that can qualify for tax concessions, Malakhova said.

TITLE: Back Tax Claims Loom Over Ford Plant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ford denied on Thursday claims that its Vsevolozhsk plant in the Leningrad Oblast received new, “large” tax claims from the authorities.
The plant’s spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko refuted claims that appeared earlier in the day in an Interfax news agency report that the automaker’s Russian venture faced “large” tax claims.
Interfax did not report the amount of the claim or what period it stemmed from, quoting a source at the Vsevolozhsk district tax inspectorate.
“No official claims against the company have been received as yet. Former claims [which Ford faced earlier this year] were judged as invalid by the Arbitration Court on May 30 this year,” Kulinenko said in a telephone interview.
Another source at the tax agency had told Interfax that a new claim against Ford that amounted to “more than 40 million rubles” was being prepared.
Interfax said that the district’s tax inspectorate confirmed the claims but refused to make any comments. Spokespeople for the federal tax authorities declined to comment on Thursday.
Ford, the second-biggest U.S. carmaker, announced plans in June to invest $30 million in the Vsevolozhsk plant to double its output of Focus cars. The company plans to produce 60,000 Focuses in Russia by January.

TITLE: Industrial Gains Mask Low Competitiveness of Local Plants
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Despite St. Petersburg’s industrial production increasing by 17 percent this year, city officials said Wednesday the boom masks issues that if neglected could lead to serious negative effects in the future.
“We are worried by the low competitiveness of local industrial firms,” which has come to be especially prominent with the arrival in Russia of foreign producers, said Vladimir Blank, head of the city’s committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade.
The disadvantages that Russian industry faces include high land prices, low investment activity, and the absence of a protective federal industrial and technological policy, Blank said.
With factories often located on attractive real estate, landowners often seek more profitable returns than an industrial plant could provide.
Blank promised that the city will regulate land prices in industrial areas using a zoning system as part of the new general city plan. The city will negotiate with local monopolies to keep stable tariffs on water, electricity and gas in zoned off areas, which could also attract further foreign investments, he said.
Industry insiders greeted the authorities’ words with optimism, but named several complications. Namely, that the low demand for industrial products has meant few outside investors have been drawn to pour money into existing city plants. Last year, up to 70 percent of investments into machine building came from the local companies themselves, the industrial managers and entrepreneurs union said in a report.
Vladimir Katenev, St. Petersburg trade and industrial chamber president, said a major restriction in improving industrial product quality was a lack of affordable credit schemes for domestic firms to turn to for investment.
Blank, however, pointed out that  portfolio investors have offered local companies “easy loans.” However, Russian managers turned them down because “they are not ready to share their property,” Blank said.
Natalia Shcherbakova, senior tax department manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers in St. Petersburg, views the problem as largely to do with local business mentality.
“Russian business has developed very quickly under the entrepreneurial skills of owner-managers, who sometimes are psychologically not confident enough to accept second-generation business strategies that focus on the creation of wealth rather than retaining control,” Shcherbakova said.
“The cost of debt can be reduced by switching from a long term secured debt to dilution of existing shareholding, but that is something that Russian business needs to come to terms with. It needs to recognize that control should be about implementing strategies of effective long-term wealth creation and not solely about the pride of ownership,” she said.
If attracting investments requires being transparent, holding regular audits and operating a clear management structure, Blank said that only 1 in 15 local companies fully corresponded to international corporate management standards.
Shcherbakova agreed that “the lack of transparency is a major barrier to both attracting foreign investment and obtaining long-term debt,” but warned against generalization. “A number of Russian companies have developed into respected businesses with a world-class reputation,” she said.

TITLE: Turning His Back on Growing Anger
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Does anyone remember the Bashkirian Airlines plane that collided with a DHL cargo jet over southern Germany back in July 2002 because of mistakes made by a Swiss-based air traffic controller? Do you remember how long it took to get an apology from the Swiss government? Do you remember what happened to the air traffic controller, how he was taken in for questioning and then released without charge? And then how an unfamiliar-looking man in black appeared at his front door? 
The man pulled out a photograph of his wife and two daughters, who had died as a result of the controller’s mistake. The controller was so taken aback that he dropped the photographs on the ground and stared back, astonished, at the uninvited guest, who stabbed and killed him. The man had nothing left to lose. And no one left to lose. The Swiss government soon apologized to the relatives of the victims of the plane crash.
That man turned out to be Ossetian. People who know Ossetians say that they can put up with insults or grief for a long time, a very long time. They know how to wait and wait patiently, very patiently indeed, until everything comes to light. And then they take revenge. And it is cruel revenge, sometimes fatal for the guilty party.
So why did President Vladimir Putin, a year after the tragedy, grant an audience to the Beslan mothers who lost their children in the hostage-taking? Was it because he was frightened? I would say that it was not just because of that, although he does seem to have become at the very least wary of the situation around Beslan, even if he was not actually frightened.
Some people have condemned him, saying that he behaved cynically by deciding not to go to Beslan himself and inviting the mothers, crushed by grief, to Moscow. Others say that he behaved courageously – he had to be brave, they say, to look these women in the face and listen while they asked incredibly difficult questions and to try not to lie when answering them. I believe that there are lots of different things mixed up in the answer to the question “Why did he do it?”
There is something that smacks of the president’s past as a KGB man: He knows how to get on to the wavelength of the people he’s talking to, whatever they’re talking about, and he knows how to make an impression on them, to get their trust. It is what he was trained to do. Probably, he hoped that he would be able to win over the Beslan mothers, to bring them around to someone else’s side. But to whose side exactly?
There was something personal about all of it. He really did feel sorry for these people. You could see that he was finding the meeting really difficult. But in all of this you could also see that the authorities were frightened of these women and their faces, which had turned gray from grief.
For a whole year the authorities dragged their feet, insulting the mothers by pretending to conduct an investigation of the Sept. 1-3, 2004, seizure and storming of the school, which led to the deaths of 331 people, when in fact they were not conducting any investigation at all. Parliamentary commissions in North Ossetia and Moscow found far more questions than answers. And contemptuously, the people whose job it was to find the answers did not give them to the mothers. 
The trial of the only hostage-taker to have been caught — although there are now suspicions that there are in fact other terrorists who survived and are still at large — was intended to be a public, Soviet-style show trial. 
But it finished with accusations being leveled at the government officials who had been responsible for carrying out the operation. The situation in North Ossetia, which until recently had been one of the calmer republics in an increasingly unsettled North Caucasus, has started to heat up, all as a result of what has been happening in Beslan.
Now that the president has indicated that the investigation still needs to get to the bottom of what happened, it is not out of the question that they will find another couple of “fall guys.” But the Beslan mothers did not hear any apology from Putin himself. Will it be enough to offer them two more fall guys as victims? For the anniversary of Beslan the Kremlin came up with another plan, a new law on a parliamentary investigatory commission. 
But judging by the draft law, the commission will be something of a paper tiger. It will not be easy to set it up. The idea of creating it must be approved by a majority vote from both houses of parliament and, in essence, by the ruling party. The subject of an investigation, including a full list of all the people to be summoned to give evidence, must also be approved in advance by a parliamentary majority. 
The period for submitting information could last up to 30 days. No provision seems to have been made for bringing criminal charges against anyone who gives false evidence or declines to give evidence. In other words, the commission will not have enough power to force high-ranking civil servants to speak candidly. It is difficult to imagine Federal Security Service or Interior Ministry officials giving evidence under oath in public. Or is it?
One would like to hope that all this will come about sooner than we can now imagine — we, who have become disillusioned by the government’s cynicism and its contempt for public opinion. 
Perhaps we will yet see the director of the Federal Security Service in front of parliamentary investigators. He is made to take the oath. He swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He starts giving evidence. He is given some documents to look at. They turn out to be photographs of the victims of yet another terrorist attack. He is so taken aback that he drops them on the ground...

Georgy Bovt is editor of Profil.

TITLE: Rushing Toward Irresponsibility
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: In early May, Swiss authorities arrested former Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov on a U.S. warrant. Shortly thereafter a State Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDPR, called for Adamov to be returned to Russia or physically eliminated in order to keep state secrets from falling into the hands of the Americans.
One day later, Adamov was placed under tighter security. Four guards accompanied Adamov when he was allowed outside to exercise. The Russian ambassador had to empty his pockets when he visited the prisoner. Adamov is convinced that the decision to deny him bail was made in light of the Duma deputy’s statement.
Adamov, who has written two opinion pieces from prison for Izvestia, told me about all this during a recent telephone conversation. “I have seen on television how a private citizen’s call for the assassination of [Venezuelan President] Hugo Chavez was condemned by the U.S. authorities,” Adamov said. “But in our country, a public official called for my assassination and the government has never come out with an official response.” The State Duma speaker’s condescending comment, “We’ll see,” hardly qualifies as an official response. The television news anchors have reported on the story with irony.
“If an average person, not a Duma deputy, had made a statement like this, it would have been considered incitement to commit a criminal act,” lawyer Vladimir Entin told the press. But Duma deputies are immune from prosecution.
Paradoxically, the Swiss take our public officials more seriously than we do. They regard Duma deputies as grown-ups who are responsible for what they say, and they react accordingly. In this country, by contrast, it never even occurred to anyone to take the deputy’s statement seriously. The press had fun with the story for a while and forgot about it.
These days, the papers — and not just the tabloids — are feeding us all sorts of details about a soft-porn film that parodies Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. The film was partly written by Alexei Mitrofanov, deputy leader of the LDPR.
You may recall the shock and horror expressed by the press back in 1993 when the nationalist, imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky led the LDPR to a strong showing in the first Duma election. Today, Zhirinovsky and his colleagues have become media darlings. In turn, these politicians have ratcheted up the level of nonsense they spew because they realize that this is the key to generating publicity. No one seems to care that Zhirinovsky beat up a young female journalist in public a few years ago, or that he horribly insulted a more experienced female journalist or that their fellow journalists responded with a vow to impose a news boycott against Zhirinovsky.
And we’re not just talking about Zhirinovsky here. Not long ago, NTV had no qualms about giving airtime to the anti-Semite Albert Makashov. Sergei Dorenko now hosts a program on Ekho Moskvy radio — the same Dorenko who during the information wars of the late-1990s violated all possible standards not just of professional ethics but also of simple human decency. One of his main victims was Vladimir Gusinsky, then the owner of Ekho Moskvy, who was zealously defended by the station during his lengthy, losing battle with the state.
I am much more concerned about the total and voluntary loss of squeamishness among journalists today than I am about all the talk of impending authoritarianism, censorship and the gutting of the electoral system. We are far too willing to join in the rush toward total irresponsibility. In so doing, we foster total cynicism in our audience, the ideal feeding ground for both authoritarianism and censorship. And we undermine whatever respect we may have enjoyed abroad.

Alexei Pankin is opinion page editor at Izvestia.

TITLE: Art and taboo
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Tiger Lillies, once a frequent guest in Russia, will return after a two-year hiatus. The outrageous British cabaret trio last came to St. Petersburg to perform and record a collaboration album with local ska-punk band Leningrad in September 2003.
In the past two years the band was extremely busy releasing two albums, “Punch and Judy,” based on a theater show, and “Death and the Bible,” described as “10 sad songs of Death and 8 jaunty tunes [about] Jesus and pals on one CD” on the band’s web site.
“It was recorded at the same time as ‘The Sea’ [2003],” said The Tiger Lillies accordion player and vocalist Martyn Jacques speaking by phone from London this week about the group’s most recent album.
“The original idea was going to be, like, a double album, ‘Death, the Bible and the Sea,’ the three subjects that I wrote about quite a lot. But, I’m not quite sure why, in the end we just decided to release one album. It was all recorded in Hamburg, Germany, three years ago. We released it just a couple years later.”
According to Jacques, the band will release another pair of albums by the end of this year, one, tentatively called “Urine Palace,” containing new songs recorded at the Soho Theater in London, while another, called “The Little Match Girl” will be based on The Tiger Lillies’ theater show after the Hans Christian Andersen story. The Tiger Lillies’ double bass player Adrian Stout and drummer Adrian Huge also contributed to “Lucky Dog Recordings 03/04,” a solo album by the Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples released in July.
Meanwhile, the Berlin performance “The Mountains of Madness,” a collaboration with the band and bassist Alexander Hacke of the the German experimental rock band Einsturzende Neubauten, based on stories by H.P. Lovecraft, was filmed for a DVD release in August. 
In this year’s Meltdown festival held in London in June and curated by the U.S. punk legend Patti Smith, The Tiger Lillies, whose influences include Gypsy music, Italian opera, Bertold Brecht, American folk singers and 1970s British punk, performed three Brecht songs during the festival’s night dedicated to the German playwright.
“[Smith] performed on the same night. She sang a couple of songs by Brecht. She was very good curating the show. I think David Bowie did Meltdown a few years ago, and I don’t think he even turned up, he wasn’t even there. So she was there every night and was performing at a lot of shows so she was actually involved in the festival. She’s a good person, I think, Patti Smith.”
The Tiger Lillies’ collaboration album with Leningrad, “Huinya,” was released in Russia in March, after many delays, but Jacques said he had not had a chance to listen to the resulting CD.
“I haven’t seen a copy, actually, I hope I will see one when I come to Russia,” he said.
“I enjoyed doing it. I had the rough mixes, I mastered copies of it, and I thought it sounded funny. Again, I like to do these projects, crazy projects with different people. It’s good fun to collaborate with different kinds of musicians, different styles, different backgrounds. I think the band is very funny. Leningrad is a funny bunch of guys.”
Two years ago, The St. Petersburg Times sat with The Tiger Lillies in the kitchen of a rented flat to speak about art and taboos, soon after a Moscow newspaper attacked the trio for Satanism due to controversial songs and image.
“The British Tiger Lillies [...] have been labeled by the Western media as ‘the most incorrigible scoundrels, blasphemers and sado-nazis in the world,” said the somewhat misinformed article.
“The Tiger Lillies are banned all over Europe, and they play only in skinheads’ clubs.”
Using the word “blasphemers,” the journalist probably refered to “Banging in the Nails,” The Tiger Lillies’ song about the crucifixion from the band’s 1996 album “The Brothel to the Cemetary.”
“I’m crucifying Jesus, banging in the nails, and I am so happy, because old Jesus failed,” sings Jacques in his trademark falsetto vocals in the song, sending some into shock.
“I write quite a lot of lyrics that are really extreme,” said Jacques.
“The way I see it, it’s a bit like if you go to the National Gallery (I wish people would understand it like this in a way), you see paintings in there, people being raped, people being buggered, all this is violence, terrible violence, and terrible things going on.
“If you look at a Crucifixion [scene], there’s a man and he’s having nails [driven into] his wrists. The violence of it, it’s obscene. His ribs are always cut, there’s blood coming out, it’s really violent, and so much of the Bible is graphic violence. And now that’s art. What’s the difference between that and what we did. I just wish people would listen to some of the lyrics that we do, and just saw as being art.”
According to Jacques, The Tiger Lillies’ work helps listeners to deal with prejudices imposed by society, liberating their minds.
“What we’ve been doing is sort of like looking at the way people think and the way society works. That’s what artists always try to do — to make people question. We try to make people think. It’s challenging, trying to push people and opening people’s minds. 
“And that’s what art tries to do. There are lots of artists in the world and they all try to do this thing, one way or another. Maybe some of them don’t really rationalize it. We just try to make people challenge their conceptions and prejudices — and bring out the absurdity of them.”
There are more uncomfortable subjects that The Tiger Lillies touch on in their songs. For instance, the 1997 album “Farmyard Filth,” with such songs as “Hamsters” and “Sheep,” concentrates on bestiality. Speaking about that work, Jacques stressed the absurdity of social taboos.
“In a way that’s a game we play as artists,” he said.
“If we talk about September 11, it’s totally acceptable to film people jumping out of a building. Real people. Over and over again. That’s totally acceptable.
“I can’t sing a song where I profess my love for a sheep. That’s unacceptable. You can’t have that on television. It’s a silly song about falling in love with a sheep. There’s just a suggestion, ‘Perhaps there’s a sexual connotation with this relationship.’ Then it becomes a taboo. I think artists tend to work with real taboos.”
Jacques argued that such songs as “Sheep” are simply a truthful reflection of reality.
“Why shouldn’t you be able to talk about the things that actually exist. I think people do actually like to have sex with sheep. I sing a song about falling in love with a sheep — why is it offensive when it’s true? I mean there are people who love to have sex with animals. And not just animals — dead people, anything, that’s actually real!”
Bassist Stout recalls a story to illustrate how The Tiger Lillies’ truthful approach to the harsh facts of life helps people not to go insane.
“There’s a man in London who used to drive an ambulance,” he said.
“He came running into the pub, ‘Oh, thank God, you are playing, I can have a couple of pints. And he’s just been picking up arms and legs from this huge car crash. And [the man] was thinking: “Oh great, The Tiger Lillies are playing tonight.’ That’s true. He chose this job and he chose to see The Tiger Lillies. That’s what it’s all about.”

The Tiger Lillies will perform at PORT at 7 p.m. on Sunday.
www.tigerlillies.com

TITLE: Let’s go Dutch
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As part of Window on The Netherlands, a massive presentation of the country’s culture and business which has been held annually in St. Petersburg since 1996, there is Dutch Punch, a new mini-festival bringing alternative music and film from Holland to Russia.
Launching with the documentary “Piter” at the Pik film theater on Tuesday, Dutch Punch will feature three bands and a DJ who will perform in St. Petersburg as well as in Pskov, Moscow, Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod.
“When I am here I miss good concerts, there’s so much music in clubs in Europe that you can’t take it all,” said Natasha Padabed, who promotes Dutch Punch with her Dutch partner Stefan van der Burg as the cultural agency Kultprom. The pair is also behind More Zvukov, another agency which is responsible for the European tour schedule of local bands La Minor, Iva Nova and Messer Chups, while Padabed, who splits her time between St. Petersburg and Amsterdam, is also a program director of SKIF, the biggest local festival of left-field music and arts.
“The booking managers in European clubs are having hard a time because they get hundreds of disks every month, while it’s mostly commercially legitimate pop acts that come to St. Petersburg.”
A performance by De Kift at the Shuvalov Palace might be Dutch Punch’s most ambitious. The experimental Dutch band, which performed at SKIF in 2002, will stage an opera based on “Yelizaveta Bam,” the classic absurdist play by Daniil Kharms. Kharms (real name Yuvachev), who perished in a Soviet prison in 1942, was the central figure in the avant-garde literary group Oberiu, the acronym for the “Association for Real Art,” in the 1920s and 1930s.
Called “Vier Voor Vier,” De Kift’s work based on “Yelizaveta Bam” was released on a CD in 2003.
“We immediately thought that the best place for our opera to be performed would be the former House of the Press, nowadays the Shuvalov Palace, because this is where the premiere of  Kharms’ ‘Yelizaveta Bam’ took place in 1928,” wrote Ferry Heijne, De Kift’s vocalist, trumpet and trombone player, by email this week. The performance is also part of the Kharms Festival dedicated to the author’s centenary.
“Kharms is not as well known in Holland as, for instance, Gogol, but a lot of people, especially people who are into experimental, alternative, independent forms of art, are familiar with him and there are quite a few theater groups which have made performances based on his works,” wrote Heijne.
“I think that the spirit that I find in Kharms’ texts is universal. His absurd humor is something I still find very refreshing and vivid. But the most important thing for me was the desire of Kharms and Oberiu to realize a new form of art, something that hadn’t been done before. ‘Everything that’s extreme is difficult to make. The parts in the middle are easier to make. The center is not difficult at all. The centre means balance. You find no struggle there.’ I find this piece of text of Kharms’ very inspiring.”
The stage presentation of “Vier Voor Vier” in St. Petersburg will differ from the album version, according to Heijne.
“The biggest difference is that we have a different female singer, Monique de Adelhart-Toorop, in the role of Yelizaveta Bam,” he wrote.
“‘Vier voor Vier’ is an opera, and with an opera you can expect theater, scenery, drama and music. It will all be there, but since De Kift is a musical group the emphasis will be on the music.”
The show will be filmed by Dutch filmmaker Andre van der Hout as part of a documentary about Kharms and Oberiu.
“De Kift is very peculiar, typically Dutch band, it couldn’t emerge anywhere else,” said Padabed. 
“But they are not typical Dutch people, not burgers. Their roots lay in 1980s punk as with The Ex, for instance, but they are not punks at all.”
De Kift will perform “‘Vier voor Vier” at the Shuvalov Palace on Sept. 18. It will also perform a regular concert at Platforma on Sept. 17.
Hailing from Utrecht, the post-rock band We vs. Death will perform at Red Club on Thursday 
The Amsterdam-based electro-pop band Zea will perform at Platforma on Sept. 16. DJ Bone will spin records at the 2nd Floor on Thursday and at Datscha on Sept. 16.
“He plays punk, rock and roll, surf, garage, ska and soul from vinyls,” said Padabed. “He is famous for jumping on turntables and hanging from the ceiling. He’s just crazy.”

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: A concert by Patti Smith last Friday turned out to be one of the best rock and roll shows that St. Petersburg has ever seen. 
Backed by a three-piece band including her long-time guitarist Lenny Kaye, Smith covered her entire career from her seminal 1975 debut album “Horses” to semi-improvized songs that she composed while in St. Petersburg. One was an ode to the city, mentioning drinking coffee in local cafes and ending with the words “Now I don’t want to go home.” 
Smith also performed “Beslan,” an improvised song that she dedicated to the victims of last year’s hostage taking in Dagestan. The two-hour-long show featured Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and ended with Smith’s own anthem “People Have the Power.”
After Smith’s concert the 1,000-seat Music Hall is becoming popular with rock bands. Tequilajazzz is scheduled to celebrate its 12th anniversary with a concert there. The band traces its history from its live debut at the legendary TaMtAm Club on Sept.4, 1993. Tequilajazzz perform on Saturday.
There is an excess of agitation among local music fans about an upcoming concert by Laibach, a Slovenian industrial band that makes some sort of artistic statement by wearing quasi-Nazi uniforms and transforming trivial pop songs into totalitarian anthems that sound just as horrible. 
The band appears to be equally popular both with local intellectuals and skinheads. Its only Russian concert  so far took place in Moscow in 1994 and ended in a massive fight between fans and the police, Afisha magazine reports. Laibach will perform at PORT on Friday. The concert is best avoided.
More exciting is the return of The Tiger Lillies, a cabaret-punk trio from London that has not performed in St. Petersburg since September 2003.
Speaking with The St. Petersburg Times by phone from London, vocalist and accordion player Martyn Jacques said The Tiger Lillies would introduce some guitar songs at the band’s forthcoming concert in St. Petersburg.
“I’d like to play quite a lot of guitar,” Jacques said. “I’ll try and bring a guitar with me, maybe I’ll try to play a few more guitar songs than I have recently. In the last two or three years I have tended to play the piano quite a lot as well as the accordion, obviously. So maybe I’ll play some more guitar songs, if I have room to bring a guitar with me.” The Tiger Lillies perform at PORT on Sunday. See article, page i.
Joe Cocker is set to repeat Paul McCartney’s 2004 feat by performing an open-air concert at Palace Square this week. The director of the State Hermitage Museum, which is located on the square, Mikhail Piotrovsky is reportedly unhappy about the noise of such concerts and their effect on the museum’s artwork.
Cocker was good in 1967 when he delievered a highly original cover of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” at the Woodstock festival. Cocker will perform on Thursday.

TITLE: Nordic trends
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Cutting-edge classical music by Finland’s Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg, Norway’s Rolf Wallin, and Iceland’s Haukur Tomasson will be performed during the New Nordic Music Festival beginning Saturday and running through Sept. 17.
Jointly organized by the Pro Arte Institute, Norden and the Nordic Councils of Ministers, the event is hosted by the Sheremetyev Palace, Mikhail Chemiakin Foundation, and the State Conservatory.
The organizers opted for distancing the event from the most famous names in Nordic music of the caliber of Jean Sibelius or Edvard Grieg. The festival isn’t meant to show the evolution and path of classical music in the region but rather represent new trends without connecting them to their predecessors.
The five Nordic states — Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland — are represented not only by the most recent composers talent. The countries sent along ensembles and soloists, who made their reputation performing contemporary classical works.
Guest musicians come from Denmark’s Athelas Sinfonietta, Norway’s Poing, BodÚ Sinfonietta and BIT20 and Sweden’s Institute for Electrocoustic, also known as EMS. Joining them will be Pro Arte’s own orchestra “eNsemble,” which is scheduled to make several appearances during the festival.
A native of Finland, who settled in Paris in 1982, Kaija Saariaho is the biggest international name on the list of participants. Saariaho’s works bear romantic and poetic names, such as “Secret Gardens,” “Wing of Dream” and “Castle of the Soul” and tend to fluctuate on the edge of pure tone and chaotic sounds.
Saariaho, 53, studied composition under Paavo Heininen at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy and subsequently at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, graduating from there in 1983. 
In 1982, upon arrival in Paris, she took a course in computer music at IRCAM, and since then computer technology has been been put to extensive use in her work.
Both Saariaho and Lindberg — along with their compatriot composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen were at the heart of the musical society Open Ears, which was established in the late 1970’s at the Sibelius Academy with the aim of unveiling new music to the Finnish audience and performing their own works.
Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin was born in Oslo in 1957 and belongs to the same generation of musicians. Creating works for a wide range of instruments, he has been busy writing commissioned musical pieces by the Oslo Philharmonic and Trondheim Symphony orchestras, in addition to composing works for international events outside of classical music, including the Molde International Jazz Festival and the World Music Days in Oslo. Wallin is also a respected music critic, whose articles and reviews appeared in Dagbladet and Ballade, and he is also a professor at the Norwegian State Academy of Music. 
One of the most promising up-and-coming composers featured in the program is Icelandic composer Haukur Tomasson, who received the Nordic Music Prize lin 2004 for his opera “Gudrun’s Fourth Song” set to the ancient Icelandic Eddic sagas. The opera, sung in Icelandic, won critical praise for its dramatic tension and innovative musical language.

TITLE: Horsing around
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A French-Russian film crew is in St. Petersburg this week to shoot a series of key episodes for a historical movie based on a French novel about an astonishing horse ride by a Russian cossack through Siberia.
“Serko” tells the story of young cossack officer Dmitry Peshkov’s staggering 9,000 kilometer ride across Siberia in the winter of 1889-1890. It is based on the novel of the same name by contemporary French writer and equestrian Jean-Louis Gouraud. Director Joel Farges is also responsible for the script.
The author of “Serko” is himself an experienced rider, who once covered 3,333 miles from Paris to Moscow in 75 days, and then presented his two French steeds, Prince and Robin, to Mikhail Gorbachev, then the president of the USSR and his wife Raisa, in 1990. 
It took Peshkov 200 days to cover the huge distance separating Blagoveshchensk from St. Petersburg on his faithful horse Serko. The journey earned the officer a prestigious award from Tsar Alexander III, and Serko a place at the royal stables.
“In this fascinating story, it is the horse that deserves the greatest admiration, and for that reason my book is named after Serko,” Gouraud said of his novel in the preface of the book.
The record set by the Russian cossack is yet to be surpassed.
“Russian history is abundant with extraordinary events, and it is a real pity that it wasn’t Russian filmmakers who first got their hands on the captivating story of cossack Dmitry Peshkov,” said the film’s Russian producer Andrei Sigle. “But with this movie the country will rediscover one of its undeservedly forgotten heroes, of which Russia can be proud.”
The film is a joint production by Russia’s Proline-film and French studio CDP. The two companies have previously worked together on Konstantin Lopushansky’s film “Ugly Swans” (Gadkie Lebedi) set to released next year.
In Sigle’s opinion, the romantic film exploring relations between people and nature as well as the issue of human maturity (the main character, who starts his journey as a naive, fresh and tender youth, survives betrayal, starvation, the loss of a friend, risks his life and discovers a woman’s love en route to St. Petersburg) will be met warmly by Russian filmgoers.
“This is what the people want to see after so many dark and aggressive films flooding the screens,” Sigle said.
Cossack officer Dmitry Peshkov, played by Andrei Chadov, the star of Timur Bekmambetov’s notorious blockbuster “Night Watch” (Nochnoi Dozor) and Alexei Balabanov’s provocative “War” (Voina), has a noble goal behind his long and exhausting trip. The rider starts the journey with the aim of reaching out to Alexander III amd telling him of the plight of the Evenks, a people who routinely suffered from injustice and blatant theft by local officials.
Many of them, including Governor Korsakov, try to prevent Peshkov from completing his venture with the help of French magician Emil Fragonard, who arrives in Russia in hope of earning a fortune through his shows and attractions. Fragonard is played by French actor Jacques Gamblin.
Catherine Dussart, the film’s French co-producer, said the film makers aren’t “aiming to be unique” but are driven by excitement and enthusiasm about the fascinating historical episode.
“We didn’t think of all the potential pitfalls, obstacles and complications,” Dussart said. “We had a story, which we really wanted to shape up into a film.”
Dussart admitted the French crew was astonished by the depth and complexity of the acting demonstrated by the Russian cast. 
“Not only Andrei Chadov was overwhelming in the lead role but so too were provincial actors from theaters in Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude,” the producer said.
The shoot began in Irkutsk in March and then continued around Lake Baikal before coming to St. Petersburg. Later this fall, the crew will travel to Ulan-Ude to film more episodes.
The film incorporates a substantial ethnographic element. During their long journey the young cossack and his indefatiguable horse visit remote, desolate villages and settlements of Evenks, Buryats, Manchurians and other ethnic minorities. 

“Serko” is scheduled to premiere in March 2006, nearing Easter holidays in France.

TITLE: Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps
TEXT: By Matt Brown and Uilleam Blacker
The St. Petersburg Times
Although St. Petersburg has been home to Irish pubs — such as Mollie’s and The Shamrock — since the fall of the Soviet Union, a more recent phenomenon has been the establishment of English pubs following in their wake.
The word “pub” is a slang shortening of “public house,” and in essence, an English pub is like a private house which happens to run a “public” business in its front room selling booze. 
This explains why a traditional English pub, unlike an American bar, a German beer hall or a Russian pivnaya, has a cozy interior style based on an idealized living room with leather armchairs, an open fireplace and brass ornaments. 
Independent pubs in the U.K. were swallowed up by corporate giants years ago, and the traditional look of pubs in England became hopelessly passÎ in its home country. So the concept of the “English pub” was commodified and exported abroad to cater to a stereotypical notion of Englishness held by Anglophile foreigners and nostalgic ex-patriots alike. 
Some of St. Petersburg’s new English pubs are located relatively close to one and another which means that visitors can preserve another English tradition — the “pub crawl.”
This involves groups of revelers having a drink in one pub and then walking to the next, and the next, and the next, until everybody is “crawling.” 
Below is a suggested pub crawl. Other English-style pubs not on the route but worth a visit include The Telegraph on Rubinshteina Ulitsa and James Cook on Maly Konnushenaya Ulitsa.

RED LION, Ploshchad Dekabristov
What do you get if you take ye olde English Pub and give it a large injection of American pizzazz? Something like the Red Lion. 
It certainly has the look of an English pub —  oak furniture, old beer mats, old photos, mirrors with ale advertisements. Then you go into the next room, which also looks authentic. Then the next, then the next... and then you are lost. Because this is the first mark of the American influence of art director Douglas Pullar — the Red Lion is big. It is almost as if someone has collected several smaller pubs and stuck them together to create an alehouse-behemoth.  
The Red Lion has been around since way back in 1999, but only moved to its new location a couple of years ago, and its authenticity extends beyond the decor. Bottled ales, Carling on tap, a good range of whiskeys, and a  few good traditional English dishes on the menu (full English breakfast, fish and chips, Shepherd’s Pie etc.) — all the basics for a proper English pub experience.
There are some things about the Red Lion which are not necessarily found in your average village tavern in England — free champagne on ladies night (which seems to last most of the week) for example. There is also a lot of action: live music, DJs, a dance floor, and a self-service karaoke. 
“The idea is that there’s something for everybody,” Pullar said.  
If, however, all this free booze and crazy partying is a little too exuberant for you, you can always drop in for traditional English Sunday lunch or a sip of afternoon tea, which will be available soon. Far more English.

Turn right upon leaving and walk south past St. Isaac’s Cathedral, over St. Isaac’s Square and 10 minutes along Voznesenky Prospekt. Leo’s Pub is on the right side.

LEO’S PUB, Voznesenky Prospekt
If you find the labyrinthine halls of the Red Lion a little daunting, you can always head for Leo’s Pub, a neater and more chilled-out affair.  
According to director Valery Maltsev, the pub’s owner is a big fan of all things English, particularly football and traditional pubs. Leo’s is his attempt to bring the best of English pub culture to his native Russia.
Although they haven’t done a bad job, there is something distinctly Russian about the place. The decor is all there, complete with a genuine English red telephone box, and some fantastic stained glass windows featuring the logos of well-known beers, ales and spirits — but there is something a bit artificial about it.
There’s nothing artificial, however, about the list of over 50 whiskeys on the menu — an array which features every name the connoisseur could wish for, and which would put many of Leo’s counterparts in England to shame. English beers include Carling and Strongbow on tap and Newcastle Brown in bottles, although for the real beer-lover they have a list of 17 of the finest beers from around Europe on tap (and let’s face it — Carling probably doesn’t fall into that category).
Traditional English fare — fish and chips, pub sandwiches — is available, but the choice is limited and the emphasis is more on drink than food.
Maltsev says that the pub is for those who want to enjoy good beer and good whiskey in a peaceful atmosphere and in good company. There is also small room in the basement, complete with big-screen TV, comfy leather armchairs and self-service bar. Perfect for watching a footy match with a pint and your mates.

Turn right upon leaving and walk as far as Canal Griboyedov. Turn left and follow the canal to the second bridge, a foot bridge. Cross it to the right and walk to Sennaya Ploshchad. Cross over Sadovaya Ulitsa to Moskovsky Prospekt. Turn right and walk 10 minutes to the first bridge over the Fontanka river. Cross it and immediately turn right. You’ll see Dickens with its distinctive blue sign.

DICKENS PUB 
Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki
At Dickens, the latest addition to the English pub scene, the horse brasses are sparkling, the chintz curtains are starched and the mahogany tables are freshly polished. If it all seems oddly familiar, that’s because this is the second pub opened under the Dickens brand after the first was opened in Riga, Latvia, in 1999. According to business daily Delevoi Peterburg, proprietor Igor Rusu invested $800,000 in the place, obviously with Great Expectations for its success. 
But judging by a recent visit, he could be facing Hard Times. Early on a Tuesday evening, many of the empty tables in the pub were deemed “Reserved” and we were forced to sit in a charmless beer garden that is more like a car park with a red telephone box of yore standing pointlessly in it.
Dickens will overcome such teething troubles when it attracts a fun-loving crowd and learns a thing or two from its more lived-in big sister in Riga.
There’s a full menu, including fish and chips, with a range of international beers — 10 of them on tap — all reasonably priced.
Dickens is quite unRussian in that its waitresses and bar staff are efficient and the bouncer is particularly friendly. Come to think of it, that’s quite unEnglish too. 

Upon leaving Dickens, retrace your steps to Sennaya Ploshchad. Go straight on along Pereulok Grivtsova until Kazanskaya Ulitsa and then turn right. Continue on Kazanskaya until before the cathedral. The Office is on the left.

THE OFFICE, Kazanskaya Ulitsa
The Office is another place opened by Russians with a passion for pub culture — it is owned by the people who brought you Mollie’s Irish bar.
The aim of The Office is partly to recreate the atmosphere of London pubs and to cater to a more conservative clientele than Mollie’s. There is a classy, restaurant feel, with the emphasis on a quality dining experience, rather than Guinness-fueled carousing, according to the pub’s director. Something a little more reserved, and, perhaps, a little more English.
The pub’s menu features general European cuisine, with nothing particularly English. No fish and chips, although there are onion rings.
Carling and Strongbow cider, among other tipples, are served in genuine English pint glasses, with bottled Newcastle Brown also to be had. The range of whiskeys is not bad.
The place looks the part, but the owners of The Office have succeeded rather in recreating the feel of an authentic English chain pub than of the real thing. Fans of Wetherspoons will feel right at home, which isn’t a bad thing.

TITLE: Troops Hunt for New Orleans’ Hold-Outs
AUTHOR: By Michael Christie and Mark Egan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW ORLEANS — National Guard troops prepared to hunt on Thursday for thousands of people believed still in ruined New Orleans, as the White House sent a new wave of top officials into areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. 
The New Orleans stragglers were but a fraction of the million people displaced by the Aug. 29 storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Their fate in what was once one of Americas’s favorite party cities was playing out in the spotlight.
Eddie Compass, the New Orleans police chief, said there were still thousands “wanting to leave” and waiting for help.
But some were staying in defiance of Mayor Ray Nagin’s mandatory evacuation order. “Those that don’t want us to find them, they hide,” said Gregg Brown, a South Carolina game warden helping in the search.
Robert Johnson, 58, said he had no money and nowhere to go, and wanted to stay to protect his home.
Officials have said perhaps 10,000 people remain in the below-sea level city where water and electricity were cut off after levee breaks flooded most of what had been home to 450,000 residents.
With a national recovery effort that may cost taxpayers $150 billion and a death toll that may rise into the thousands, there was unrelenting criticism of the U.S. government’s response to the disaster.
President George W. Bush ordered more tours of the region by top aides, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who was due on Thursday in hard-hit Mississippi as well as New Orleans.
In addition, the administration said Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Social Security Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart would travel to Houston, Louisiana, and Alabama on Thursday and Friday. They were to see relief facilities and get first-hand accounts about damage and recovery efforts.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, scorched by criticism of its performance, was handing out $2,000 debit cards to thousands of survivors. At the Houston Astrodome where 16,000 New Orleans evacuees are being housed, long lines formed for the money.
Criticism of the speed and scope of the government’s response came from members of both political parties and the private sector.
The situation “amounts to a massive institutional failure,” said Raymond Offenheiser, president of the Oxfam America affiliate of the international relief agency. Oxfam mounted in Mississippi the first domestic U.S. rescue in its 35-year history.
“Before Katrina, we reserved our emergency response for countries that lack the resources of the United States. If we’ve got this kind of failure at home, how can we expect poor countries to do better?” he asked.
The White House was preparing 
a new emergency budget request likely to total $40 billion to $50 billion for the recovery, in addition to $10.5 billion approved by Congress last week. 
Some in the U.S. Congress estimate that federal spending will ultimately total upward of $150 billion.

TITLE: Arafat Illness Not Known
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Yasser Arafat’s medical records do not give conclusive results regarding what caused his death, The New York Times and Haaretz newspapers reported Thursday, prompting Palestinian officials to call for the publication of the records. 
The reports were the first based on the actual medical records since Arafat died in a Paris hospital on Nov. 11 after falling ill in his West Bank compound a month earlier. Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat, and other relatives have kept the records secret since his death.
A stroke was the final blow that killed Arafat, but it is not clear what disease or illness led to a deterioration in his health, The New York Times concluded in its report. The records show, according to independent experts who studied them, that Arafat’s symptoms make it highly unlikely that he died of AIDS or poisoning, the newspaper said.
But Palestinian doctors continue to insist that he was poisoned, The Times reported.
While the Israeli Haaretz daily cites experts as saying that Arafat died of AIDS, poisoning or an illness, it points out that the medical report states that “a discussion among a large number of medical experts ... shows that it is impossible to pinpoint a cause that will explain the combination of symptoms that led to the death of the patient.”
Arafat’s personal doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, who did not treat Arafat in his final weeks, said that he knows French doctors found the AIDS virus in Arafat’s blood, Haaretz reported. The virus given to Arafat by Israel was used to disguise poisoning, the paper quoted him as saying.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office called the accusations that Israel infected Arafat with AIDS or poisoned him “nonsense,” Haaretz said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Roberts Awaits Nod
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. Chief Justice nominee John Roberts’ confirmation hearing will begin Monday, Senate leaders said, with Democrats vowing to take as long as needed to question the 50-year-old conservative who could lead the Supreme Court for decades.
At the White House, President George W. Bush said the field was “wide open” for his other pick for the nation’s highest court but that the pending nominee was unlikely to be in place by the time the court begins its new term on October 3.
Bush nominated Roberts to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a leading conservative whose funeral was held Wednesday.

Veto on Gay Nuptials
SACRAMENTO, California — Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Wednesday he will veto a bill that would have made California the first state to legalize same-sex marriage through its elected lawmakers. 
Schwarzenegger said the legislation, approved Tuesday by lawmakers, would conflict with the intent of voters when they approved an initiative five years ago. Proposition 22 was placed on the ballot to prevent California from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states or countries.
A veto override in California requires a two-thirds vote in both the Assembly and Senate. The California Assembly approved the bill 41-35, while the Senate voted 21-15.

Rocker Told to Pay 
LAS VEGAS — A federal jury decided Wednesday that Rod Stewart should pay a Las Vegas casino $2 million plus interest for a canceled show in December 2000. 
The seven-member panel found that Stewart should not have kept an advance he was paid for the New Year’s weekend show that he said he was unable to perform at the Rio hotel-casino because of throat surgery several months earlier.
One of his lawyers, Kerry Garvis Wright, said outside U.S. District Court that the 60-year-old singer will appeal.
 
U.S. Hostage Freed
BAGHDAD (Reuters) — U.S. troops freed an American who had been held hostage in Iraq for 10 months when they raided a farmhouse outside Baghdad on Wednesday, the military said in a statement. 
Roy Hallums had been kidnapped on November 1 along with five colleagues from a Saudi-owned company when gunmen raided a villa in Baghdad. Four Iraqis were released fairly rapidly but a fifth man, Filipino Robert Tarongoy, was freed only in June.
“Hallums is in good condition and is receiving medical care,” the U.S. military said in its statement 

Egyptians Go to Polls
CAIRO (Reuters) — Egyptians voted in their first presidential election Wednesday but President Hosni Mubarak’s most prominent rival said widespread abuses undermined the credibility of the vote, which Mubarak is expected to win.
Ballot counting started when polling stations closed at 10 p.m. after 14 hours of voting. The result could take three days to prepare, election official Osama Atawia said.
Turnout was low as voters chose between Mubarak and his nine rivals, most of them little-known leaders of political parties with few members, monitoring groups said.

TITLE: Agassi Astounds U.S. Open in Classic Comeback
AUTHOR: By Bill Barclay
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — In the end James Blake, like the rest of Flushing Meadows, had no choice but to embrace the legend. 
Andre Agassi’s astounding recovery from two sets and a break down to win their all-American U.S. Open quarter-final started on Wednesday, finished on Thursday and will be remembered for years. 
The 35-year-old with the bad back completed a 3-6 3-6 6-3 6-3 7-6 victory with a forehand service return that plopped perfectly on to the junction of baseline and tramline nine minutes after one o’clock in the morning. 
“I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this good here before,” said the eight-times grand slam champion, who will play another American, Robby Ginepri, in the last four. 
“All this support means the world to me. It just felt great. I never felt like I was going to win that match but somehow it just fell my way,” Agassi said. 
On a day when American world No. 1 Lindsay Davenport was beaten by a Russian with one of the worst serves in women’s tennis, Agassi and his wild card opponent combined to send the host nation’s spirits soaring. 
Blake, who had saved one match point with a forehand punch down the line, bore his scarcely deserved defeat with the grace of a man grateful to have played his part in a great sporting moment. 
“It couldn’t have been more fun to lose,” said the 25-year-old as he congratulated a player he admits is his idol at the net. “I want to see you do it again.” 
So too, do the 20,000 privileged souls who bellowed long beyond bedtime on Arthur Ashe Court and were rewarded with a come-from-behind classic. 
Blake has endured enough pain outside tennis to keep his defeat in perspective. Last year he suffered two broken back vertebrae, lost his father to cancer and contracted a form of shingles that paralysed half his face. 
Agassi is the oldest U.S. Open semi-finalist since a 39-year-old Jimmy Connors reached the last four in 1991 and his victory over Blake, his second successive five-set win, showed talk of his retirement is premature. 
Davenport stumbled out of the tournament after a 6-1 3-6 7-6 defeat by sixth seed Yelena Dementyeva, who fully deserved her win despite serving 12 double-faults to take her five-match tally to 62. 
The Russian, runner-up last year, will face Mary Pierce in the semi-finals after the rejuvenated Frenchwoman thrashed third seed Amelie Mauresmo 6-4 6-1. 
Davenport’s defeat means the U.S. will not have a representative in the women’s semi-finals for the first time since 1994. It was only the second time in the last nine U.S. Opens that she has failed to reach at least the semis. 
Dementyeva lost to compatriot Svetlana Kuznetsova in last year’s final and this time she could face another Russian, with top seed Maria Sharapova contesting the other semi-final against Belgian Kim Clijsters. 
“It was a very tough match. I feel this is a lucky place for me,” said the 23-year-old Muscovite, who saved one match point at 5-6 in the tiebreak before producing a backhand winner to take it 8-6. 
“After last year I’ve been dreaming about [the final on] Saturday night every single day so who knows?” 
Pierce, the 30-year-old 12th seed who knocked out Belgian Justine Henin-Hardenne in round four, mesmerised Mauresmo 6-4 6-1 to reach the last four at Flushing Meadows for the first time. 
Pierce won the last of her two grand slam titles in 2000 but a new approach to her mental and physical conditioning has helped her to rediscover her best form this year. 
“It’s amazing, I’m 30 and this is my 17th year on the tour and there are still firsts for me. That’s pretty exciting,” Pierce beamed. 
Mauresmo must be beginning to wonder if she will ever win a grand slam title but refused to blame herself. 
“Mary when she plays like that can beat anyone,” the 26-year-old said. 
Unseeded American Robby Ginepri took a more tortuous but now-familiar route into his first grand slam semi-final, beating Argentine eighth seed Guillermo Coria in his third successive five-set triumph in the men’s singles. 
Ginepri needed six match points to beat the dogged Argentine 4-6 6-1 7-5 3-6 7-5. 
Coria, suffering from numbness in his racket hand, finally caved in by gifting victory to the American with his 13th and 14th double-faults.

TITLE: Russia Pushes Its Luck With 0-0 Draw Against Portugal
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A 10-man Russian side held out for a 0-0 draw against Portugal on Wednesday at Lokomotiv Stadium in a result that did it no favors in its fight for a place in the World Cup finals but still left it with a chance of qualifying.
Captain Alexei Smertin was harshly sent off just before halftime for a second bookable offense, but to its credit, Russia held off the Portuguese, who fielded much the same star-studded team — with players such as Figo, Deco and Cristiano Ronaldo — that beat Russia 7-1 last November.
“I have big hopes that we can reach the finals,” coach Yury Syomin said after the game. “The players wanted to win. Today’s game showed that we can play on the same level as the vice champions of Europe.”
With Slovakia’s game against Latvia finishing 1-1 on Wednesday, Russia will almost certainly have to beat the Slovaks in Bratislava in its last game on Oct. 12 to get one of the playoff spots, which are handed to the second-place finishers in each group.
The Russian team’s fate has been entwined with Portugal since a 2-0 defeat at Euro 2004 that knocked it out of the tournament and a humiliating 7-1 defeat in Lisbon last year, which ushered in Syomin as coach after Georgy Yartsev was fired.
With Dynamo Moscow more Portuguese than many of Portuguese league sides and Dynamo’s Portuguese midfielder Maniche making less-than-flattering remarks about the Russian Premier League a few days ago, the game had a certain grudge factor. 
Even before the sending off, Russia had been pushed back after a promising 20 minutes that saw it play the ball around, with strong runs coming from Smertin and Marat Izmailov, until Portugal’s class began to show. With only one attacker, Syomin had picked a defense-minded side, but neither team looked particularly set to score. Alexander Kerzhakov had the best chance after a typical St. Petersburg connection with his FC Zenit teammate Andrei Arshavin. 
Ronaldo caused Russia’s defense innumerable problems, and it was a foul on him that gave Smertin his first yellow card — and one on Deco that earned him the second. However, neither foul looked malicious enough to warrant a yellow card. 
“Deco had no right to behave as if he had been killed,” Syomin said.
His expulsion opened up the game in the second half. Although Portugal dominated, Russia, with Arshavin again to the fore, was able to create more chances on the break than in the whole of the first half. Diniyar Bilyatedinov even pulled off a zig-zag run from midfield that Ronaldo would have been proud of — although it did not lead to a clear chance, much like many of the Manchester United winger’s runs.
With the draw, Russia has 19 points in 10 games, with Portugal five points ahead and almost certain to claim automatic qualification. Russia, its chances for qualification growing slimmer by the game, hosts Luxembourg on Oct. 8.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: England Loses Qualifier
BELFAST (Reuters) — Northern Ireland beat England 1-0 on Wednesday to seriously dent the chances of its old rival winning European Group Six and qualifying directly for the World Cup finals. 
The win, Northern Ireland’s first over England in Belfast since 1927 and only its seventh in 98 meetings, is a huge embarrassment for manager Sven-Goran Eriksson. 
It was Swede’s first defeat in a qualifying game since he took charge of England in 2001. 
England’s misery in front of a delirious crowd was compounded by a yellow card for striker Wayne Rooney, who will miss the next qualifier against Austria on Oct. 8. 

Ashes Security Tight
LONDON (Reuters) — A capacity crowd crammed into the Oval on Thursday after rigorous security checks at the entrance for the fifth and final test between England and Australia. 
A win or draw for England, who won the toss and elected to bat on a pitch predicted to yield plenty of runs, would give them the Ashes for the first time since 1989. 
Security is the tightest ever for a cricket match in England after the July 7 bombings in London which affected the Oval tube station. 

L.A. Wants Olympics
LOS ANGELES (AFP) — Los Angeles, the only American city to host the Summer Olympics twice, is set to announce plans to bid for the 2016 Games, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The second most populous city in the United States, Los Angeles hosted the event in 1932 and 1984, with the latter providing a $232.5 million profit. The last American city to host the Summer Games was Atlanta in 1996.

Datsyuk To Stay
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Pavel Datsyuk, a restricted free agent with the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings, will remain at Dynamo Moscow for at least another season after they matched the offer of their Russian league rival Avangard Omsk. 
The All-Star center, who last month refused a reported $5 million offer by Detroit, signed a one-year contract with Siberian club Avangard on Monday. 
But Dynamo president Anatoly Kharchyuk said that his club had matched the Avangard offer, reported to be worth at least $6 million. 
“We have matched their offer and we already registered his contract with the Russian Professional Hockey League,” Kharchyuk told local media on Wednesday. 

Menchov Confident
LOGRONO, Spain (Reuters) — Denis Menchov is confident he can win the Tour of Spain after defending his lead during two tough days in the Pyrenees. 
“Winning it is now possible,” the 27-year-old Russian told reporters Wednesday as the peloton enjoyed its first rest day after 11 days on the road. 
The Rabobank rider leads the overall classification by 47 seconds from pre-race favourite Roberto Heras of Spain with Francisco Mancebo, also from Spain, one minute 53 seconds back.