SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1130 (96), Tuesday, December 13, 2005
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TITLE: Putin Makes Flying Visit to Grozny
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: GROZNY — President Vladimir Putin attended the opening session of Chechnya’s newly elected parliament Monday, pledging to help rebuild the war-shattered Chechen capital and urging authorities to combat rampant abductions. 
Putin, flown into Grozny by helicopter under tight security, praised members of the new parliament for choosing peace and blamed foreigners for bringing in arms and destabilizing the region with extreme Islamic views. 
“I thank all those who took part in these elections, and in the whole difficult peace process,” Putin told lawmakers after his helicopter landed in front of the parliament building. 
“I assure you we are on the right road, and those [separatists] who are on that side and try to defend their mistaken ideals either do not know or have forgotten that Russia has always been a reliable defender of the interests of the Islamic world.” 
The Nov. 27 election, in which the United Russia party won the largest number of seats, was a key part of the Kremlin’s argument that the southern region is stabilizing, despite daily fighting, rampant abductions and endemic unemployment. 
Many observers, however, said the vote was far from free and fair and analysts say the new legislature will be nothing more than a rubber-stamp body for Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed governing elite. 
Speaking at the parliament session, Putin hailed the elections as a landmark step in Chechnya’s history and promised that rebuilding Grozny would be a top priority for the government. 
Putin also urged authorities to punish those responsible for abductions “no matter who they are and what agencies they represent.”
“It’s necessary to take every measure to end abductions,” he said. 
Nearly 1,700 people have been abducted in Chechnya and are still missing, a regional government committee said earlier this year. 
Seated on Putin’s left as he spoke was Ramzan Kadyrov, the 29-year-old deputy prime minister who heads a widely feared paramilitary force that is blamed for many of the abductions of civilians. Kadyrov, whose father, Akhmad Kadyrov, was Chechnya’s president until he was assassinated in a May 2004 bomb blast, is widely expected to become Chechnya’s next president sometime after he turns 30, the minimum age requirement for the post. 
Human rights groups say that federal troops and local security forces, including the so-called kadyrovtsy paramilitary fighters, have been responsible for most of the kidnappings. 
Putin also on Monday insisted that Russia’s military action in Chechnya was not directed against Muslims. 
By waging a war against Russia, the rebels are destroying “a key bulwark of support for the Islamic world,” he said. 
“Chechnya has battled with many problems and this gave rise to conflict not only in Chechnya and also in Russia,” he said. 
“The worst thing that happened was that the people who brought weapons, brought with them also a perverted interpretation of the Koran, absolutely not natural for the peoples of Russia’s North Caucasus.” 
The Kremlin says stability is taking hold in the region. But, in a sign of the security worries still afflicting Chechnya, Putin’s trip was unannounced and Russian news agencies did not report it until he had left. 
Putin visited Chechnya twice last year after Akhmad Kadyrov’s assassination. He then promised to rebuild Grozny, where 90 percent of buildings are still in ruins from federal troops’ bombardment of the city. 
Interfax reported on Monday that nine Defense Ministry troops were killed in November. 
No statistics have been made available for recent losses from the Interior Ministry, which controls the majority of the 100,000 federal troops in and around the region. 
(AP, Reuters)

TITLE: Extremist Jailed For Inciting Racism
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Dmitry Bobrov, the 25-year-old leader of St. Petersburg extremist youth group Schultz-88, has been sentenced to six years in prison for inciting racial hatred and encouraging juveniles to join an extremist group.
Bobrov and six fellow members of the group faced charges including hooliganism, inciting racial hatred and forming an extremist organization.
The crimes in the Schultz 88 case include an attack on a McDonald’s restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt in 2003, an assault on an Azeri man in the Nevsky district, an attack on two Chinese students at the Dostoyevskaya metro station, and two attacks against Armenians at the Alexandrovskaya railway station.
Six other defendants in the case were all either acquitted or received suspended sentences. Charges of incitement of racial hatred are rarely brought in Russian courts. 
Commenting on what he believed to be light sentencing for the other offenders convicted, Alexei Bundin, the state prosecutor in the case, told reporters on Friday that the Prosecutor’s Office will send an appeal to the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court. 
“I am convinced we have proved everyone’s involvement in these crimes,” Bundin said. “The court disagreed, but we will be sure to file an appeal.”
The extremist organization was named in reference to Bobrov’s nickname which is Schultz. The double eight is a nod towards H, the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. The figure 88 stands for the two capital letters of “Heil Hitler!”
The criminal case against Schultz-88 was opened in spring 2003. 
Members of the group had initially been charged with the lesser, non-hate-crime of “hooliganism,” but this was later reclassified as a hate-crime, following the results of an expert linguistic examination which proved the racist nature of brochures and other promotional materials prepared and distributed by Schultz-88.
The linguistic examination was carried out by Nikolai Girenko, a renowned ethnographist and Russia’s leading expert on hate-crimes, before he was gunned down by unknown assailants in the doorway of his apartment in June 2004. 
In his official report, the expert concluded that the lexicon of the group’s promotional materials was definitely aimed at provoking racial intolerance and ethnic hatred. The case was sent to court in March 2004.
Bundin said that Bobrov himself never took part in physical attacks, preferring to give orders and observe his comrades at work.
Attacks on non-Slavs are routinely reported in St. Petersburg. 
But even more remain unreported.
Olga Tseitlina, a lawyer with the St. Petersburg office of the Russian Committee of Lawyers in the Defense of Human Rights, said the vast majority of crimes against ethnic minorities in St. Petersburg not only never reach the court, but are not even reported to the police. 
“We have to remember that most of the dark-skinned people attacked by skinheads are illegal migrants,” she said. “The last thing they want is contact with the police, so even if they are in serious trouble, they are highly unlikely to ask a policeman for help. They would rather try to take care of things by themselves. The police only have to check their documents to deport them,” Tseitlina said.

TITLE: Elton Rumor Sparks Public Outcry
AUTHOR: By Robin Stringer
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A rumor that British singer Elton John and his partner David Furnish are getting married in St. Petersburg, following an appearance by the gay couple at a city charity event last month, provoked a public outcry that revealed homophobia is alive and well in 21st Century Russia. 
Russian journalists linked the advent of new civil partnerships legislation in the U.K. with the long-term couple’s visit to the city, and suggested they were planning to hire the Konstantinovsky Palace, a presidential residence outside St. Petersburg, for a gay civil partnership ceremony. 
The story was first reported on NTV’s St. Petersburg service and quickly picked up by Russian wire services and newspapers.
In response, Nikolai Kuryanovich, a State Duma deputy with the far-right Liberal Democratic Party and an aide to its flamboyant leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, filed complaints with the Russian Ministry of Culture and President Vladimir Putin’s administration demanding that no such ceremony take place. 
“I ask you to take all necessary measures to prevent the defilement of Konstantinovsky Palace or any other monument of architectural or historical importance with such blasphemous acts as the marriage of sodomites,” Kuryanovich wrote in the complaint, which he posted on the LDPR website. 
“The marriage of homosexuals signals the end of the traditions of the British court, which finally fell under the pressure of tolerance and homosexuals … first Prince Harry was ordered to drop his trousers in front of a platoon of soldiers on parade by a black sergeant, now they are allowing same-sex marriages in England.”
The rumor also became the subject of heated reaction from callers to Russian radio stations such as Ekho Moskvy.
But Gary Farrow, a spokesman for Elton John, declined to comment when contacted by the St. Petersburg Times.
 But it seems the singer is not planning to celebrate his wedding in St. Petersburg. 
British media reported that John and Furnish will be registering a civil partnership at the same registry office in Windsor, west of London, used by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles for their wedding in April.
The LDPR received nearly 12 percent of the vote in the State Duma elections in 2003, and is notorious for its leader’s often outlandish comments.
Zhirinovsky has proposed the re-acquisition of Alaska through the use of military force, the invasion of Iran, and the construction of large fans to blow Russia’s nuclear waste into Germany. 
More recently, Zhirinovsky sent a telegram to France offering to send Russian football hooligans and gangs with military experience to help them quash riots. 
His party also advocates a law against Russian women marrying foreign men to prevent the dilution of the Russian gene pool, as well as to stem emigration. 
Homosexuality in Russia was illegal until 1993, and acceptance of same-sex relationships in Russia is still in its infancy. 
Vicky Powell, editor of London’s Gay Times, wrote in an email to the St. Petersburg Times that “it seems as though the existence of this spurious rumor has served a purpose in allowing those who oppose gay and lesbian rights a perfect opportunity to register anti-gay views at the highest and most public level.”
The BBC reported in January that Ed Mishin, Editor-in-chief of Moscow-based Kvir [Queer] magazine, attempted to marry Edvard Murzin, a politician from the Bashkortostan autonomous region, who claims he is not gay but defends gay rights, in January.
Mishin told the St. Petersburg Times the pair expected to have their application rejected but were seeking legal grounds to challenge the Russian Family Code, which forbids gay marriages. Mishin and Murzin believe the code contradicts the Russian constitution. 
“The Russian constitution does not say that people of the same sex cannot get married,” Mishin said in a telephone interview last week. “It says in black-and-white that sex, race or religion-based discrimination is banned.”
“Gay marriages do not contradict the morals of our society — what does is the absence of such marriages,” he said.

TITLE: Kremlin’s English TV Station Hacked Off Air
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — A computer hacker drove the Kremlin’s new English-language television channel off air on Monday in a major embarrassment for the station just two days after it started broadcasting. 
Russia Today presents news from a Russian perspective and is designed to counteract what the Kremlin sees as an unfairly critical approach to Russia in the foreign press. 
Before going off air on Monday, it showed reports on the new parliament in Chechnya and on the Russian constitution, but broadcasting was dogged by technical glitches. 
The screen froze several times, and at least one news package was played out of sequence. 
“There was an attempted invasion of the computer system, which gave rise to viruses, which led to break-downs in transmission,” Margarita Simonyan, the channel’s editor-in-chief, told Interfax news agency. 
She could not say when programming would return — the channel showed a tuning signal after it fell off the air — but said technicians were working as hard as they could. 
Russia’s image abroad has deteriorated since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000. 
Critics say he has presided over the crushing of independent-minded voices, and say the arrest and trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a politically-driven case designed to force businessmen to toe the Kremlin line. 
More recently a draft law that would tighten state control over charities and pro-democracy groups operating in Russia caused consternation. 
Russian media have debated how far the new television channel will stray from the Kremlin’s line on sensitive issues such as the simmering violence in Chechnya. 
Simonyan, a former Kremlin correspondent for state TV channel Rossiya, has said Russia Today will offer “objective and interesting” reporting.

TITLE: Demonstrators Take To Streets for Rights
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: About 100 St. Petersburgers gathered to consider the Russian Constitution at a meeting organized by local human rights advocates on Saturday afternoon on Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa. 
The meeting was part of a nationwide campaign, “the March of the Dissenting,” organized by the United Civil Front which is chaired by chess champion and democratic politician Garry Kasparov.
Protesting against what they call blatant and widespread violation of the Russian constitution, campaigners held meetings across the entire country, including  in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Voronezh, Tomsk, Ulyanovsk, Irkutsk, Chita, Ioshkar-Ola, Tambov, Kaluga, Vladimir and Astrakhan.
“We are here to speak up to protect the Constitution, we want the state to respect its own constitution,” said Mikhail Amosov, head of the Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. 
“We don’t want the Constitution to be amended and have further restrictions and limitations of freedom and liberties inflicted upon it. The problem of  disregard for human rights and democracy is particularly alarming.”
Denis Bilunov, a member of the federal council of the United Civil Front, told reporters on Saturday that the march’s organizers hadn’t expected large crowds to attend. 
“Our ambition was to have something happening in many different places, rather than to turn the action into a real mass event,” Bilunov said. 
“We perceive all the anti-humanitarian reforms of the current regime to be a creeping anti-constitutional coup,” Bilunov added. 
“All the recent laws, from the one creating new registration rules for non-governmental organizations to the one canceling gubernatorial elections, serve to limit public control over the government.”
Saturday’s meeting attracted an eclectic crowd including human rights advocates concerned about the defeat of democracy, representatives of the Soldiers’ Mothers and Memorial human rights groups, supporters of animals’ rights, environmental activists, left- and right-wing politicians and members of a newly founded non-governmental organization aimed at protecting Vasilievsky Island from City Hall’s ambitious plan to construct a new port on a man-made island in the area.
The meeting’s participants carried bold slogans calling for the protection of the constitution, support in the fight against growing extremism, the stopping of controversial construction projects and for the treatment of animals with compassion. 
The event’s motto was written on a large banner, which read “Rights aren’t granted, rights are won.”
Russia adopted its new constitution on Dec. 12, 1993, and that date was  declared an annual public holiday. 
The State Duma earlier this year canceled the holiday and added the time off to New Year holidays instead. 
The meeting’s organizers chose to hold the event on Saturday because they wanted the meeting to coincide with International Human Rights Day, which is marked each Dec. 10. 
Irina Flige, head of a branch of the St. Petersburg human rights group Memorial, offered her version of the low resistance of the country’s government and law enforcement toward nationalist movements.
“It feels as if too many people in the country’s law enforcement agencies, deep at heart, agree with the extremist or nationalist views of the members of radical groups,” Flige said. 
“This closeness and the good understanding that they share leads to the police placating the nationalists or turning a blind eye to their misconduct,” Flige added.
“It easily explains the fact that the police don’t even bother to install extra patrolmen near the known hangouts of the extremists.”
In their speeches at the meeting, human rights advocates urged the consolidation of forces to ensure improvements in the observation of people’s rights.

TITLE: Milosevic Seeks Respite In Moscow
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on Monday asked judges at his war crimes trial for time off from prison to visit heart doctors in Moscow during the UN court’s winter recess. 
“This wouldn’t even affect your schedule,” Milosevic argued. 
Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson appeared momentarily stunned by the request. “This is an application for provisional release ... I can’t believe you’re even making it,” he said. 
Milosevic is facing 66 counts of war crimes in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia during the 1990s. He has been held in the court’s maximum security detention center since he was extradited from Serbia in June 2001. His trial has been running since early 2002, slowed by Milosevic’s frequent bouts of illness. 
Milosevic suffers from high blood pressure and three private doctors who examined him last month recommended six weeks’ rest. A court-appointed cardiologist agreed the former Serb leader could use a break, though he said six weeks was longer than was needed.

TITLE: Opposition Unlikely To Have Large Influence on City Duma
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — While some of the new faces in the Moscow City Duma may be colorful characters likely to mount a vocal opposition to City Hall policies, the United Russia majority — including 20 deputies re-elected to the legislature — will likely ensure that the party gets its way on all important issues.
The new deputies include Sergei Mitrokhin, deputy leader of the Yabloko party; Communist Nikolai Gubenko, a former Soviet culture minister; and company directors representing United Russia. 
A total of 22 deputies will stay for another term in the 35-seat City Duma elected Dec. 4, according to the list of deputies announced by the city election commission late Thursday.
Twenty of the re-elected deputies are from United Russia, including the deputies elected from 15 single-mandate districts. Five other deputies were re-elected on United Russia’s party list, and two were re-elected on the Yabloko list.
Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said the United Russia deputies returning to the legislature were nominated for another term because they had proved loyal to Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who co-heads the party.
But Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said some of them owed their nominations not to Luzhkov but to other senior party officials who were looking to build support for a successor to Luzhkov, whose term ends in 2007.
The City Duma is to vote on a mayoral candidate proposed by President Vladimir Putin, and Luzhkov has said he will not seek to remain in office. Putin sent a bill to the State Duma in October that would allow parties that win elections to regional legislatures to nominate candidates for regional leaders to the president. The bill, which has yet to be considered by the State Duma, would not require the president to back the winning party’s nomination.
United Russia will have 28 deputies in the new City Duma, up from 20 before the elections. The new faces include businessmen Alexander Milyavsky, director of the Rubin television factory; Igor Protopopov, director of Audit i Finansy; Anton Paleyev, a lawyer and member of the Moscow City Bar Association; and Andrei Kovalyov, director of Ecoofice.
At least two other re-elected deputies also have links to businesses. Alexander Semennikov is a co-founder of supermarket chain Sedmoi Kontinent, and Sergei Goncharov, head of the veterans’ association of the Federal Security Service’s Alfa counterterrorism unit, is believed to have connections to private security companies founded by or employing former Alfa officers.
Pribylovsky said the business representatives were seeking a status that would help them to deal with the tax authorities, rather than the chance to influence City Duma decisions.
“All decision-making in the Duma is controlled by City Hall,” Pribylovsky said. “Lobbying can’t help if [City Hall] feels that something isn’t good.”
Mark Urnov, dean of the department for applied political science at the Higher School of Economics, welcomed the arrival of company directors into the legislature, saying they could formulate new ideas. 
Other new United Russia deputies are Tatyana Potyayeva, director of School No. 1,531, and Igor Yeleferenko, political editor at TV Center, a television channel controlled by City Hall.
The Communist faction comprises Vladimir Ulas, head of the party’s Moscow branch; Gubenko, the former Soviet culture minister who is also director of the Taganka Theater; and two other, lesser-known politicians, Sergei Nikitin and Vladimir Lakeyev.
Lipman said the Communists would “add color to the Duma” because Ulas and Gubenko were strong oppositional politicians. But Pribylovsky said Gubenko would likely be too busy with his theater to attend all the Duma sessions.
Urnov said the Communists would lobby for social spending and criticize the housing maintenance reform that will force Moscow tenants to pay 100 percent of their utility bills starting next year.
Mitrokhin will fight mainly for human rights and could be the loudest opposition voice in the Duma, Pribylovsky and Lipman said.
“Mitrokhin will be the source of all scandals,” Pribylovsky said.
Urnov said City Hall’s plans to ban rallies in the city center, citing heavy traffic congestion, would not pass quietly with Mitrokhin in the legislature.
But City Hall will most likely get its way on just about everything, given its large majority, Lipman said. “Mitrokhin and the Communists will create noise, but they won’t influence decisions,” she said.
And however vocal their opposition, their protests may not always be heard, given the opposition’s limited access to the media, she said.
The new Duma is expected to convene on Dec. 21.

TITLE: The Lessons and Pain of a Year Spent Behind Bars
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Alexei Kolunov, a student at a prestigious Moscow technical university, says that the year he and other young National Bolsheviks spent in prison has only strengthened them and their opposition party’s cause. 
“We are no longer afraid of anything — of prison, of beatings, of threats. If the authorities want to stop the National Bolsheviks, they will have to kill us,” Kolunov, 22, a student at the Stankin Institute, said Friday, the day after his release.
On Dec. 14 last year, he and 38 other activists from the National Bolshevik Party in their teens and early 20s briefly seized a public reception office of the presidential administration, locked themselves in and hung a poster reading “Putin, Quit Your Job!” in a window. Riot police stormed the building, thrashed the activists and arrested them. 
On Thursday, a Moscow court found them all guilty of public disorder. Eight of the activists were sentenced to prison and are serving terms ranging from 18 months to three years. The other 31, including Kolunov, were given suspended sentences and set free. One of them, who was only 15, had been freed earlier after spending two months in prison, but the others had been held for nearly a year.
 Prison was a trying experience for the young political activists, most of whom consider themselves intellectuals and come from Moscow and other big cities. 
“The worst thing this year for me and many of my comrades was our understanding of how much this must be hurting our parents,” Kolunov said. 
Two other released activists — Moscow student Vladimir Tyurin and sound technician in a Yekaterinburg theater, Semyon Vyatkin, both 21 — said the same. 
“But you know, when I talked to my dad after they let me out, he told me that I was doing the right thing and that he was proud of me,” Vyatkin said. 
For another activist who was released last week, the year in prison was particularly painful because it prevented him from seeing his father before he died in late September. The Dutch government had requested that Vladimir Lind, who holds Dutch and Russian citizenship, be freed for a few days so he could visit his father, a prominent Dutch lawyer who was suffering from cancer. 
The request was denied. Lind was allowed to speak with his father by telephone for one minute and only in Russian. 
What gave them courage during their year in jail, the activists said, was the belief that they were advancing the National Bolshevik cause.
“In prison, I understood that I was on the right track and was doing important work for the party,” Kolunov said. Their escapade, which led to the jailing of such a large number of young men and women, elevated the National Bolsheviks from a fringe youth group to an opposition party that established opposition parties — from liberal Yabloko to the Communists — were willing to accept, he said.
In the past year, the National Bolsheviks and other opposition parties have held joint public rallies, and the Communists provided a temporary office for the National Bolsheviks after their own headquarters were shut down last summer.
Kolunov said he was held in six different cells in the Krasnaya Presnya prison, where most of the inmates are common criminals, and each time he had to adjust to a new situation.
“There was a cell with eight inmates and there was one with 50. I was really scared after the arrest about what I would say when they brought me to a cell with criminals,” he said. “But actually, there was nothing much to fear because Limonov had asked the crime bosses who oversee the prison not to allow other criminals to get rough with us. In fact, there is a law in the prison that no one can be hurt without a serious reason.”
Eduard Limonov, the irreverent counterculture writer who founded the party in 1993, acknowledged in an earlier interview that he had asked criminal bosses to offer protection to the jailed activists.
Vyatkin, who spent his year in custody in the Butyrskaya prison, said 40 inmates were crammed into his cell, which was designed to accommodate 22 men.
“We had to sleep in shifts, and the biggest problem for me was that I could not move a lot while in the cell— you can’t even take several steps there,” he said. 
Vyatkin also complained about the lack of information from outside, saying that the only newspaper brought to his cell was Komsomolskaya Pravda, often a week old.
Tyurin, who also was held in the Krasnaya Presnya prison, said it was difficult for the intellectual youth to adjust to the prison environment.
“There were several unpleasant encroachments from criminals who referred to Limonov’s book and the scenes of homosexual sex in it,” he said, referring to the novel “It’s Me, Edichka.” 
“We had to learn how not to be devoured by the others,” Tyurin said. 
Even in jail, the activists said they continued their struggle against the system.
“It was really exciting to continue challenging the system from prison,” Kolunov said. “For example, we helped to establish communication between the cells and with the outside world through the so-called roads.” He described a network of cells connected by string run through windows and ventilation systems, which inmates used to exchange messages and pass forbidden items such as tobacco, drugs and money. 
They learned other lessons that they said could serve them well in the future as members of the political opposition. 
“We learned how to talk to criminals, how to talk to investigators, to prosecutors,” Tyurin said. “Well, we thought then that if others could go through this, then we could also, and we turned out to be right.”
Another practical lesson they learned was not to take women with them when holding a protest action that could land them in jail, he said. 
“Sometimes they talk too much with the investigators and create problems for the others,” Tyurin said.
The National Bolshevik Party, with its nonviolent protest performances, has a growing following among urban youth, and official harassment of its young members has only boosted its popularity. 
The authorities have responded to the party’s rise by raiding its offices and brutally treating those who get caught participating in public political stunts. Last month, the Supreme Court banned the party.
“We will get our revenge, now that we are stronger and have become hardened,” said Kolunov. 
“But we will not resort to terrorism; it is a road to nowhere. We will try to pursue legal methods, though we understand that there are very few of them left for a true opposition party in Russia.”

TITLE: Law On NGOs Reviewed
AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Friday sent State Duma deputies a list of proposals softening a bill that charities and pro-democracy groups had said would make it harder for them to operate in Russia.
But Russian nongovernmental organizations said the changes, which followed expressions of concern from Washington, were superficial and that the main thrust of the bill — to enforce state control over their activities — remained.
“The aims of this draft law deserve support, but the mechanisms for implementing them should correspond more closely to the principles of civil society,” Putin said in a document sent to the Duma. Putin has previously said the bill was necessary to stop criminals, spies and terrorists from hiding under the cover of NGOs.
His new proposals would do away with a clause in the legislation that meant foreign NGOs could only work in Russia if they were separately financed Russian legal entities. 
He also said the legislation should be amended to allow NGOs to operate in Russia through branches and that they would need only to inform the authorities that they exist, according to a text of the proposals released by the presidential press service.
“A big problem with this bill was that it was prepared without consultation, and after the bill appeared there was a lot of exchange, discussion and debate. Some of that is reflected here,” said Steven Solnick of the Moscow branch of the Ford Foundation, a U.S.-based philanthropic and educational organization.
“I do not want to suggest that this makes it a wonderful bill, but clearly this statement addresses some of the most glaring issues.”
The NGO bill has brought a storm of criticism at a time when Russia prepares to take over for the first time the rotating presidency of the Group of Eight industrialized countries next year.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week voiced concern about the legislation, saying NGOs were key to democracy.
Putin’s proposals on Friday left in force clauses requiring Russian NGOs to register. NGOs say this will give bureaucrats much greater scope to interfere in their activities.
“There are some positive elements [in Putin’s proposals], but they are few and they are superficial,” said Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of the rights group Memorial.
“I cannot say that this is a significant shift. The noise around this draft required some steps to be taken. But basically, the law remains the same, and if this is the case, it is bad for us. It is bad for everyone.”
Putin also left unchanged a plan to create a government watchdog for NGOs. He said the criteria for granting or refusing registration should be made clearer. The Duma is due to consider the bill in a second reading on Friday.

TITLE: Cheers and Taunts for Ex-PM Kasyanov
AUTHOR: By Heleen van Geest
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KURSK — Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov drummed up support for a liberal opposition coalition at a rally on Saturday, which his supporters said the Kremlin had tried to disrupt with dirty tricks. 
Kasyanov, who served as prime minister for much of President Vladimir Putin’s first term, has become a vocal critic of the administration, saying democracy is under threat in Russia. 
“The authorities by their decisions in the past couple of years have demolished a lot of democratic principles that our society should be based on,” Kasyanov said, speaking during an eight-hour train journey to Kursk.
“I am meeting people and explaining ways to improve the situation. I think we will get more and more support.” 
Kasyanov has said he may run for president in 2008, when Putin has to step down, and that he wants to revive the Democratic Party, created in 1990 as the first alternative to the Communist Party, as the foundation of a coalition. 
Although Kasyanov’s public popularity rating is negligible, his status as the former prime minister makes the idea of a presidential bid credible, although analysts say he lacks the cash or power base to beat any Kremlin-backed heir apparent. Commentators have also said that after he came out as anti-Putin, he risked becoming a Kremlin target— like the now jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. 
In July, prosecutors accused Kasyanov of signing documents as prime minister that helped him get a luxury riverside villa outside Moscow. He denies accusations of wrongdoing and has said he is the victim of a smear campaign by the authorities. 
But about 70 protesters in Kursk shouted “Give back your dacha” and “We don’t want an Orange Revolution,” referring to the uprising that ousted Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine and installed pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko as president. 
Kasyanov’s press secretary, Tatyana Razbash, told Interfax the protesters were members of pro-Putin youth movement Nashi. It was also reported they were local Communists. The rally’s organizers had struggled to find a venue that would have them, which Kasyanov said he believed was the fault of middle-ranking state officials. 
“I don’t think it’s serious, but it’s strange to feel such an attitude from the authorities. ... There is a false idea that every independent social development in this country should be under control,” he said.

TITLE: Polish Aide Turned Back
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW — Belarussian border guards refused entry Sunday to an aide to the Polish prime minister, Polish officials said, in the latest diplomatic incident between the two uneasy neighbors.
Michal Dworczyk, who advises Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz on the situation of ethnic Poles abroad, said that he was turned away at the Kuznica Bialastocka border crossing about 200 kilometers northeast of Warsaw. 
“As the Belarussian border guards told me, I am an undesirable person on the territory of the Republic of Belarus,” Dworczyk said on TVN24 television. 
Poland will seek an official explanation as quickly as possible from the Belarussian Embassy in Warsaw, government spokesman Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz said. 
Dworczyk said that his frequent contact with Angelica Boris, the leader of the Union of Poles in Belarus, likely contributed to the decision to refuse him entrance. Authorities in Minsk do not recognize Boris as the rightful head of the organization and have arrested her several times. 
Two other Polish officials traveling with Dworczyk were allowed into Belarus. Unlike Dworczyk, those officials both held diplomatic passports. 
Polish authorities accuse Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko of cracking down on the freedoms of some 500,000 ethnic Poles in Belarus. 
Lukashenko has accused Poland, with the backing of the European Union and the United States, of encouraging Belarus’ Poles to help oust him.
Belarussians will vote in a presidential election next year.

TITLE: Schroder to Head $4.75 Billion Pipeline
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: BABAYEVO, Vologda Region — Former German Chancellor Gerhard SchrÚder on Friday was named to a key post on the $4.75 billion North European Gas Pipeline, the project he and President Vladimir Putin signed off on shortly before he left office. 
The pipeline will give Gazprom direct access under the Baltic Sea to some of Europe’s richest gas consumers, and has left transit countries Ukraine and Poland fearful of losing access to Russian gas.
The appointment of SchrÚder, a close ally of Putin and an enthusiastic backer of the pipeline project, as head of the pipeline company shareholders’ committee came as pipes were ceremoniously welded at the official start of construction. 
High-ranking Russian and German officials wearing fur hats stood in temperatures of minus 15 degrees Celsius and watched the welding in a forest clearing near the Vologda region town of Babayevo, 475 kilometers north of Moscow. 
Further highlighting the close energy ties between Russia and Germany, Matthias Warnig, the head of Dresdner Bank’s Russian operations, was appointed CEO of the pipeline project. Putin and Warnig have been friends since Putin’s days in St. Petersburg city hall in the 1990s.
 The Wall Street Journal reported the two men knew each other in East Germany when Putin was a KGB agent, but Warnig has denied this.  Dresdner last week sealed an $800 million deal to buy one-third of Gazprombank, and in October advised Gazprom on its $13 billion purchase of Sibneft. 
In Moscow and Berlin, analysts welcomed the appointments as giving the project political clout in Western Europe, but some politicians in Germany questioned whether SchrÚder’s involvement was appropriate, given his recent role in greenlighting the project. 
“It stinks,” said Reinhard Buetikofer, co-chairman of Germany’s Green party, the junior member in a coalition with SchrÚder’s Social Democrats until September, The Associated Press reported.
Rainer Bruederle, an official of Germany’s right-wing Free Democratic Party, said he hoped that SchrÚder’s post would be purely honorary because if it were not it would raise questions about whether SchrÚder had kept his public and private affairs separate, The Associated Press reported.
It was not clear what role SchrÚder or the shareholder’s committee would play in the pipeline’s management, or under what financial terms SchrÚder had accepted the post, if any. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller stood in a forest clearing next to a long line of already connected pipes and waved for the welding to begin. 
After the pipes were joined, warmly dressed executives from Gazpom’s German partners, BASF and E.ON, together with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and German Economics Minister Michael Glos, signed their names on the pipe.
Staff Writer Catherine Belton contributed to this report.

TITLE: ESA Head Stands By Clipper
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The head of the European Space Agency said Friday that he was confident he could win enough support from member states to help develop Russia’s next-generation spaceship. 
Russia hopes its reusable Clipper shuttle will be ready for test flights early next decade and would then gradually take over from the veteran Soyuz spaceship, which has been putting cosmonauts into orbit since the 1960s. 
Earlier this week, ministers from ESA countries failed to pledge money to the Clipper program, despite agreeing to spend more on other space research. But ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain remains optimistic. 
“I am convinced we can get wide support,” he told reporters in Moscow after talks with the Federal Space Agency. 
The ESA would like to plough an initial 50 million euros ($59 million) into the project over the next two years, before deciding how much to be involved further down the line. 
Dordain hoped a decision would be made by June next year.

TITLE: ‘No Concensus’ as Russia Blocks Kyoto Extension
AUTHOR: By David Fogarty and Alister Doyle
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MONTREAL — Russia blocked agreement at a UN climate meeting on Saturday by objecting to details of a proposal to extend the Kyoto Protocol on global warming beyond 2012.
Moscow’s refusal also blocked approval of a separate Canadian plan to open new talks on a long-term fight against climate change to include Kyoto outsiders such as the United States and developing nations such as India and China. 
“The document as it stands now does not command consensus,” Russian chief negotiator Alexander Bedritsky told the 189-nation meeting during a marathon session stretching into the early hours. Russia proposed that any agreement should allow all nations, not just the wealthy industrial countries, to be able to offer voluntary commitments in reducing greenhouse gases. Kyoto’s first phase does not include the developing world or big, and rapidly growing, polluters such as India and China, and a major theme of the Montreal talks is how to bring them on board. 
Other ministers praised Russia for bringing Kyoto to life — its “yes” enabled Kyoto to enter into force in February 2005 after years of delays — but urged Moscow to back off. 
“If it were not for Russia, the Kyoto Protocol would not be in force,” British Environment Minister Margaret Beckett told weary delegates, adding that Moscow deserved a place of honor. But she said this was not the time to scuttle the historic talks. “It would be a tragedy if a further decision by the Russian Federation would block more progress.” 
Under Kyoto, about 40 industrialized nations have to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases. The United States, the biggest emitter, pulled out of Kyoto in 2001. 
The draft decision would urge rich nations to decide new commitments beyond 2012 as early as possible without setting a detailed timetable.

TITLE: Lisin To Add $609 Million to His Metals Fortune
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russia’s second-richest man, Vladimir Lisin, is to add more than half a billion dollars to his fortune this week when part of his metals giant, Novolipetsk, lists on the London Stock Exchange.
The listing values the steelmaker, which Lisin acquired through a series of deals over the past decade, at around $8.7 billion.
Lisin is selling 7 percent of his 90 percent stake in the listing on the London Stock Exchange, where shares start trading Thursday, giving him roughly $609 million based on the share price set by bankers this past Friday.
“The company has come of age. It has more weight now,” said Alexander Pukhayev, an analyst with UFG brokerage. 
Lisin, who has overseen the rise of Novolipetsk to become the world’s seventh-most profitable steelmaker, was upbeat on the London Stock Exchange foray. “I am delighted that Novolipetsk’s secondary offering has attracted such strong interest from international institutional investors,” he said in a statement.
Considering the history of the plant, which is as heavy as the industry it operates in, Lisin’s delight has much justification.
Born in 1956 in Ivanovo, Lisin started out in the metals industry as a welder while studying engineering at the Siberian Metallurgical Institute.
Not long after graduating, he moved to Kazakhstan to work as an engineer at the Karaganda Steel Plant, according to the Novolipetsk web site. It was there he would start to accumulate his fortune. Within a couple of years he had been offered a senior post at Karaganda, reporting to Oleg Soskovets, who would later become the Soviet Union’s last metals minister and then deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin.
It was around that time that Lisin made his first money as a director of TSK-Steel, a subsidiary of Karaganda that Soskovets helped set up, Lisin told Forbes in November 2004, speaking in a rare interview.
TSK-Steel used a loophole in Soviet law that allowed private firms to export defect metal — a business that before long had an annual turnover of $25 million. Not long after Soskovets left for the Kremlin, Lisin started working for Sam Kislin, a Russian emigre, and it was through this link that Lisin would eventually come to start buying up stock in Novolipetsk. 
Kislin was one of the main players behind Trans Commodities, which supplied Soviet metal plants with raw materials. Kislin’s business had hit a snag when the plants stopped paying, but his new acquaintance “pulled the money out,” Lisin told Forbes, saying he used his contacts to recoup around $30 million.
After that, business boomed at Trans Commodities, as Lisin spearheaded the use of tolling — receiving ready metal from factories in return for raw materials and a small fee.
For the better part of a decade, starting in the 1990s, Russia’s burgeoning metals business changed hands as fast as it made headlines through contract killings and money laundering.
Kislin left Trans Commodities in 1992, leaving the business in the hands of his original partner, Mikhail Chyorny, who soon joined forces with younger brother Lev Chyorny and investors David and Simon Ruebens to form a new company, TransWorld Group.
TransWorld, where Lisin was taken on as a manager, was also a booming business, yielding a profit margin of up to 40 percent in 1994 when metals were selling for $1,500 per ton, Simon Rubens told Fortune magazine in 2000.
By 1995, TransWorld accounted for 5 percent of the world’s aluminum production, generating annual revenues of nearly $7 billion.
It was during his time at TransWorld that Lisin found himself serving on the board of five metals plants, including Novolipetsk.
As TransWorld’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, Lisin started buying up shares, building up a 13 percent stake by 1996, according to Forbes.
Lisin left TransWorld in 1997, putting his Irish-registered Worslade Trading form to work by buying up more shares in the company.
That same year, then-Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov said that Mikhail and Lev Chyorny had strong ties to Russian organized crime.
Before long, Lisin had purchased a further 50 percent stake from American financier George Soros and Monaco-based financiers Richard and Christopher Chandler for $200 million, Forbes reported.
The remaining 34 percent stake, however, eluded Lisin for some time, as its owners — the Chyorny and Rubens brothers — sold out to holding company Interros, owned by metals magnate Vladimir Potanin.
By 2002, Lisin and Potanin had struck a deal to swap assets, with Potanin yielding his stake in Novolipetsk for an 8 percent stake Lisin had bought in Potanin’s Norilsk Nickel. 
While the terms of that swap were not disclosed, analysts believe Lisin did well out of the deal, with his 8 percent in Norilsk worth roughly half the 34 percent stake he received in Novolipetsk. 
As Novolipetsk becomes the most recent Russian company to list in London, the scars of past corporate wars leave some uncertainty. The prospectus for the London share emission includes 26 pages of risks, ranging from investigations into price-fixing to potential conflicts of interest.
“There’s been a lot of confusion over what is owned by Novolipetsk and what is owned by the owner of the steel company,” said Timothy McCutcheon, analyst with Aton brokerage.

TITLE: Corruption Casts Doubt On Russia as G8 Leader
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A steady increase in corruption and the lack of political will to fight it will present major obstacles as Russia assumes the G8 chair in 2006, Transparency International said Friday.
The Berlin-based watchdog released its 2005 World Corruption Barometer on Friday, with results showing Russians increasingly pessimistic about the institutions meant to protect them and increasingly certain corruption will get worse.
That’s not just bad news for business, it’s bad news for President Vladimir Putin as he claims one of the biggest spotlights on the world stage, TI Russia head Yelena Panfilova said Friday. 
The Kremlin-sponsored bill cracking down on NGOs is likely to exacerbate the problem, she said.
The Group of Eight’s Forum for the Future agenda, reaffirmed at the Gleneagles summit in July, “has a huge anti-corruption component that has to be fulfilled with the participation of civil society organizations,” Panfilova said at a news conference. “How these organizations will be able to carry out that requirement of G8 leadership after these changes, to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine.” 
In the new TI survey, conducted by Romir Monitoring, 1,630 Russian citizens named the police, political parties and the parliament as the most corrupt institutions, and NGOs and the church as the least. 
This makes a government crackdown on NGOs “a logical inconsistency,” the TI Russia director said.
Sixty-two percent of survey respondents said corruption has increased a little or a lot in the last three years, and 50 percent expected it to grow further over the next three — a sign pessimism is deepening. In last year’s survey, only 38 percent expected corruption to get worse in the near future.
TI’s World Corruption Barometer tracks personal experiences of corruption, as opposed to the organization’s better-known Corruption Perception Index, which ranks countries according to a poll of independent experts. In that poll, Russia dropped to 126th out of 159 this year, its lowest level since 2001.
Vladimir Vysenko, a representative of the liberal Republican Party, said corruption was increasing due to the lack of a single high-profile corruption prosecution within the Kremlin leadership over the past five years.
“As long as that kind of signal is lacking in our country, people will keep doing what they’re doing. People always watch what’s happening at the top,” Vysenko said, speaking at the conference. 
“It’s curious how Putin will handle himself when he heads the G8. There are going to be quite a few questions put to him, in part about this,” Vysenko added.
Citizens believe corruption has the greatest influence on political life, with survey respondents putting the degree of influence at 3.4, with 4 being the greatest possible influence. Corruption’s influence on business was a close second, at 3.1.
The release of the report coincided with UN Anti-Corruption Day, and Panfilova said that officials fed up with consistently grim corruption rankings should push for the ratification of the UN Convention Against Corruption, which Russia signed in 2003 but has yet to ratify.

TITLE: Designer Instills Unique Corporate Culture
AUTHOR: By Jennifer Davis
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Like advertising, marketing and public relations, commercial graphic design is a relatively new field in post-Soviet Russia. Graphic designers, responsible for providing the look and feel of a certain product or company, create corporate identity materials such as logos, letterheads and websites, as well as packaging. Alexander Leliak, a young entrepreneur and designer, launched his design firm sixteen months ago after ten frustrating years slogging away in St. Petersburg’s fledgling design field. His firm, mediamama, strives to produce beautiful, high-quality projects by providing a unique work environment for its designers.
“In the past ten years I have seen so many good projects derailed because of uninformed clients, bad managers, and a general lack of understanding of the Russian market,” said Leliak.
 “At mediamama, we wanted to create an agency without a large bureaucratic structure. We wanted the studio to be run by the designers themselves. We felt that the client should be able to communicate directly with the designer who would be working on the project.” 
Together with colleagues Kiril Asakhov and Alexander Morozov, Leliak founded mediamama in 2004. 
“We are a design agency, not an advertising agency,” said Leliak. “We help companies decide how they want to present themselves — help them come up with their corporate identity and image. We help them streamline their ideas and decide what it is they want to say about their company.” 
“I think the level of design and advertising is still very poor in Russia,” he said.  
“This is mostly due to the newness of the market. It’s really only existed for fifteen years. But clients can be a problem as well. Russian clients often come to us with a very specific idea of what they want. One important question I always try to pose to my clients is, ‘Are you making design decisions based on your own, or your customer’s tastes and preferences?’ A client who allows a designer creative freedom is the best—allowing the designer to come up with his own ideas.” 
Mediamama’s clients have included multinationals like Panasonic and DuPont, as well as smaller local companies such as television station STS and Aquarel restaurant.  Leliak, who speaks fluent English, is happy to work with foreign companies as well, such as Niras, a Danish consulting engineering company who recently designed a new climate regulation system for the State Hermitage Museum. So far, most clients have been referred by word of mouth. However, mediamama has just produced an elegant, full-color portfolio of the company’s work, entitled “Ideas for Happiness,” which will be distributed to potential clients whose mission is in line with that of mediamama’s. 
“I’ve never seen a book like ours anywhere, definitely not in Russia,” said Leliak. 
“I think it shows that we are trying to do something positive — create beautiful work. Advertising agencies often try to convince consumers to buy things they don’t really need. We are sending this book to certain companies that we like — that we feel contribute positively to society.” 
Sergio Fox, a client from the Danish company, Niras, can attest to Leliak’s and mediamama’s professionalism. 
“Mediamama were chosen to prepare some posters and brochures to describe our project principals,” he said. 
“We really liked their style, very thoughtful and elegant, and we are planning some new brochures with them. Danish architects — often our clients — and quite a critical set of people regarding aesthetics admired the work too, so (their work) certainly met Danish standards.”
Mediamama has instilled a unique corporate culture in its small office consisting of just ten full-time employees. Its horizontal structure as opposed to a manager-dominated vertical structure generates an atmosphere where the designers feel valued and can flourish creatively. 
“Many of our designers contacted us directly, hoping to work for us. Currently, we have five designers,” says Leliak. “But we hire more on a freelance basis if the project demands.” 
When hiring new designers, Leliak prefers to see creative art projects as opposed to commercial work in the interviewee’s portfolio. “I get a better feel for the designer’s individual approach that way,” he said. “I look for enthusiastic employees with lots of various interests. I want somebody who’s inspired by life.” 
Leliak himself is an experienced rock climber and also spins discs at local hotspots Dacha and Novus under the moniker DJ Soup.
He has a great interest in many of the arts including photography and music, and feels that graphic design is the best way to express himself. 
“I used to draw all the time to amuse myself in school…drawing non-existent brands and logos. But I didn’t even realize what I was doing at the time,” he said. “I like that there are certain boundaries in the field of graphic design — it’s not as open as painting for example, sometimes these boundaries force you to come up with an elegant solution.”

TITLE: The Natural Leader in Us All
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Leadership, an elusive quality which is infinetely valuable in a range of careers, is well within every budding entrepreneur’s reach, participants at the “Leadership is a Key to Success” conference were told this week.
AIESEC, the world’s largest student organization, brought the city’s employers and local students together to challenge preconceived notions of leadership through case studies of leading St. Petersburg companies.
“The topic of leadership is one we hear and talk about every day. We are trying to challenge ourselves and make the students interested,” said Vladimir Burovtsev, the general director of Kirov Factory speaking at the AIESEC press conference Thursday.
According to Alexander Posazhennikov, head of personnel at Eurosib, a St. Petersburg-based transportation company, central philosophy the event sought to promote is that everyone can be a leader.
“Very often the notion of leadership and management are equated. In my opinion, this should not be the case. They exist in parallel. And the main conclusion from the event for me was that leadership is an attitude,” said Posazhennikov. 
“If we look at it from the perspective of a person’s attitude and the changes it can bring, then there is no doubt everyone can became a leader. This guarantees not only success but literally, by establishing a sense of control, it can make life meaningful,” Posazhennikov added.
Quoting one of student participants, Posazhennikov said that “leadership is only possible in a sphere that you love.”
“It is impossible to become a leader in any field. This is an illusion. Besides, nobody needs to do that. Leadership is only possible in a field where we can be ourselves,” said Posazhennikov.
After taking part in case studies, students said they now see leadership as something quite different from what they were taught at university.
“We were amazed at how many approaches to leadership exist out there,” said Sergey Bereznev,  a student at St. Petersburg  State University’s faculty of management.
Anastasya Priyomova, HR and professional development specialist at Ernst & Young, said leadership potential is a core quality they look for in any potential employee, regardless of the position. 
This supports the idea that while every manager should be a leader, not every person with leadership qualities needs to take up a management position immediately.
“Leadeship potential is of utmost importance and essential for any student hoping to find a post with us. Our employees need to update his or her leadership qualities at each step he or she makes up the organization’s career ladder,” said Priyomova.
More specific advice was available from Pedersen and Partners, the largest recruiting firm in Central and Eastern Europe, which opened a St. Petersburg branch December 1. 
Poul Pedersen, one of the company’s partners said in an interview  Friday: 
“In Russia we look for someone who is street smart, more active than analytical and willing to try, make a mistake, then try again and learn; who learns to deal with the unpredictable, and can cope with change,” he said.

TITLE: Blue-Collar Shortage May Halt Development
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A fall in all major areas of industrial production, coupled with a prolonged crisis in vocational education, has led to a shortage in blue-collar workers thatcould soon threaten economic development in Russia.
 “Both the city and the neighboring regions have exhausted all resources of qualified and unqualified blue collar workers,” said Olga Andreyeva, business development manager at Coleman Services recruitment agency. 
“With no labor legal framework or accommodation facilities, the use of guest worker labor does not solve the problem and just entails lots of new ones.”
In the Soviet era blue-collar jobs were among the most prestigious professions in the country. However, financial and management positions have acquired higher social ratings since the perestroika reforms. Most Russian blue-collar workers average 40 to 50 years of age, and there are few young people eager to take their places and take over their professional skills and experience. 
“According to the statistics, only 20 percent (about 100,000) of school-leavers in St. Petersburg enter vocational schools, whereas most teenagers choose to study at university,” said Maria Margulis, staff leasing branch director at Ancor recruitment agency. 
However, not even graduating from vocational school guarantees an opportunity to put into practice the knowledge gained through study. Soon after graduation most, students undertake compulsory two-year military service. In order to “attract young guys who come back from the army, we developed special programs which aimed to enable them to continue to work at our enterprise,” said Alexander Ovchinin, HR manager at the Admiralty shipyards. The lack of supply means that many companies are eager to take on even unqualified workers, and instead provide them with special on-site training courses, said Andreyeva.
 “Staff training courses in the area of production are just about the only solution to the problem,” said Vladimir Shvedok, director of production at the Sestroretsky tool plant. At the same time, according to Margulis, many companies that use modern or non-standard equipment prefer to hire young specialists with little or no working experience, and train them to operate specificially with their equipment. 
Salaries for qualified workers can be two to four times higher than those for non-qualified blue collar workers. Of the 80,000 to 150,000 guest workers who arrive annually to the city, those who work night shifts and extra hours often earn considerably more than their local counterparts, said Kseniya Makarova, production assistant at EMG Professionals recruitment agency.

TITLE: Sick Days Take Their Toll on Financial Health
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Nobody likes sharing a workspace with a coughing colleague. After all, sick people in the office can infect the rest of the staff. A look at labor laws, however, shows it’s not always fair to treat ailing attendees as selfish workaholics, since taking sick leave can mean seriously risking one’s financial health.
Dmitry Volodin, the head of planning at Sukhoi Design Bureau, said he went to work while sick on a day when he was supposed to participate in the presentation of a major project to a Defense Ministry committee. 
“I called my boss, but he insisted that not only I come to work, but moreover, that I come earlier than usual,” Volodin said. “I couldn’t tell him, ‘No.’” 
By staying at home, he would have lost not only a bonus, but also part of his salary, since Sukhoi pays a lower rate for sick days in accordance with current legislation.
As in many countries, Russian labor laws provide for paid sick leave — but unlike in many other countries, the sick pay rate here is supposed to have a ceiling. Federal law mandates that sick pay should not exceed 12,480 rubles ($433) per month, and that a doctor’s certificate verifying the employee’s sickness is required.
The first two sick days are paid by the employer. After that, sick pay comes from the Social Security Fund, or FSS. Svetlana Vidgof, a spokeswoman for the FSS, said the maximum monthly sick pay sum is set by the federal government each year and depends on the average unified social tax paid by all employers for their employees. In 2006, the sum is set to increase to 15,000 rubles ($521) per month.
Some sick employees are paid even less than the maximum amount. According to the law, sick leave payments made by the fund are scaled, based on length of service. Those employed for more than eight years are entitled to 100 percent; five to eight years merits 80 percent; and employment of less than five years guarantees 60 percent. 
Although these are supposed to be percentages of regular wages, the maximum is still 12,480 rubles per month, regardless of an employee’s regular pay rate. 
“It seems that for an employee with monthly income over 12,480 rubles, it’s not worth getting sick,” said Ksenia Shmatkova, the human resources manager for CHEIL Communications Rus, part of the Samsung Group.
Yevgeny Timoshenko, a managing partner at Timothy’s Legal, said that according to existing legislation, a company cannot pay a sick employee over the set maximum amount, “except for cases when such ‘overpayment’ is directly stipulated in a collective agreement or in the company’s internal rules.” 
Viktor Podlipchuk, a senior manager for human capital at Ernst & Young, said that even in such cases, the “generous” company might have problems with the tax authorities. “It’s very difficult for an employer to write up the ‘overpayments’ as payroll and thus write them up as costs,” he said.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 60 Russian and international companies operating in the capital found that approximately 30 percent paid sick employees their regular wages in full, another 30 percent paid limited amounts in accordance with the law, and approximately 30 percent paid a certain number of sick days at 100 percent of an employee’s usual salary rate and the remainder at the limited rate in accordance with the federal law.
“In order to observe the laws and avoid losing employees, many companies stipulate a certain number of days in a year an employee can use for sick leave without a doctor’s certificate,” said Tatyana Kuznetsova, a partner at BPO Executive Search & Consulting.
“These days are paid in full, as if the employee was not sick. More days can be missed only with a doctor’s certificate. In that case, the law is followed in full.” 
That is approximately the situation at CHEIL Communications Rus. 
“We understand that in the winter, many people have light colds,” said Shmatkova. “Sometimes someone needs to see a dentist or a doctor. So we give our employees seven days per year for attending to minor medical problems. They do not need to have a doctor’s certificate if they’re missing a day one time and two days the next time.” She added that employees who were sick for a longer period had a choice of either taking sick leave and losing part of their paycheck, or taking a vacation, either paid or unpaid.
Svetlana Povago, a human resources specialist at Toyota’s Russian branch, said it only paid its employees what they were legally entitled to. 
“You’ll agree that on one hand, it’s economically unprofitable to pay a sick employee their full pay, and on the other hand, there’s the law,” Povago said, adding that people often came to work sick, as no one wanted to lose money because of an illness.
A 2004 survey by the U.S.-based Project on Global Working Families showed employees in 139 of the world’s countries were entitled to sick leave pay, naming the United States as a notable exception. Data for 126 countries showed only three countries with a flat pay rate, while 20 mandated that sick employees must be paid 100 percent of their wages, and 96 paid upward of 50 percent of wages. 
(Vedomosti, SPT)

TITLE: Blue-collar Shortage: Ways to Cope With Crisis
AUTHOR: By Marat Altynbaev
TEXT: One of the acute problems for businesses which choose St. Petersburg and Leningrad oblast as their principal location will soon be a severe shortage of qualified blue-collar personnel, regardless of the nature of the business or the principal nationality of the employer. As indicated by local business representatives, the symptoms of this major impediment are already noticeable and represent one of the critical factors, especially for large-scale manufacturers, when planning future production. The reasons for such a situation range widely, from the nation-wide demographic crisis, to booming industrial development in the North West region, and the shortage of suitably qualified employees.
 A simple example: according to estimates from Leningrad oblast authorities, if current labor market tendencies persist further, by 2015 every fourth work position will be vacant. Similarly, according to forecasts, “St. Petersburg will feel a sustained lack of workers by 2008-2010, unless corrective measures to tackle the situation are taken,” said Vice Governor of St. Petersburg Mikhail Oseyevsky. 
In an effort to overcome this perspective of impending crisis, business has tried to find ways to minimize the effect that blue-collar shortage may have on their long-term goals. Labor migration, despite being one of the immediate solutions, cannot be viewed as a long-term answer. Furthermore, from a legal standpoint the regulation of this process is currently far from perfect, which causes companies additional problems. Specifically, when recruiting from other countries in the CIS, one of the principal sources of blue-collar workers, in addition to work visas an employer must obtain a work permit for each person. This process is extremely burdensome from a practical point of view and takes approximately four months and considerable effort. 
The situation here may be improved only through amendments to federal legislation, which currently makes fast and effective blue-collar migration from neighbouring countries next to impossible. Instead, in an effort to limit illegal migration legislators resort to populist measures, imposing additional barriers to complicate the process of getting a work permit and raising fines for any unlawful use of foreign workers. Such an approach mostly hits legitimate businesses, which are trying to comply with the constantly changing requirements of migration authorities, and not the offenders themselves. 
One of the options for employers in this situation would be exploring the possibilities which current legislation already makes available, namely apprenticeship. In this way blue- collar personnel could be “home-grown” to fit the necessities of a particular employer to the maximum. The Labor Code allows companies to enter into apprenticeship agreements both with currently employed workers (in order to re-educate them to a higher standard of qualification) or with job-seekers. The legal nature of such an agreement lies more in the sphere of civil, rather than labor, legislation. In short, under an apprenticeship agreement a company undertakes to provide training to an individual with consent from the latter to be employed with them upon completion of the training. The agreement may be structured in such a way that in the event of a trainee not entering employment within a particular company, he or she should later compensate the company the costs of apprenticeship.
In theory, such a scheme is aimed at the preparation of qualified, career-oriented and loyal personnel. However, in practice such mechanisms are not that frequently used — this fact is supported by the virtual absence of subordinate legislation and court practice. Consequently, these norms appear to be underdeveloped and some practical issues need to be resolved in order to efficiently make use of apprenticeship agreements. For instance, it is not clear what can be deemed a “justifiable reason” for termination of subsequent labor relationships, which can allow a trainee not to fulfil the obligation of working for a particular employer for an agreed period of time. 
Another example: in the event a company plans to attract a certain amount of students as trainees from a relevant sphere of education, legislation does not provide any particular contractual scheme of cooperation between these two entities. This could mean that in order to establish continuous cooperation they would have to perpetually ‘reinvent the wheel.’ 
One of the obstacles blocking successful implementation of the apprenticeship scheme is military service, for which a significant part of blue-collars are eligible upon completion of their professional education. Such circumstances create a gap between the moment a course is completed (which also may include apprenticeship) and the time when a company can fully utilize the employee in the production process. The solutions here could range from changing state military policy (for example, raising the draft age) to the development of training programs, aimed at maintaining ties between companies and potential employees upon the completion of military service.
This list of inadequacies can go on, the main idea being the necessity to elaborate existing legislation in such a way that it indeed becomes an efficient instrument to be used by businesses. In order to achieve this, the legislators should keep in mind not just the need to adopt certain norms, but also to have a clear vision of their practical implementation.

Marat Altynbaev is Associate at DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Watching Russia Watch Over Its NGOs
AUTHOR: By John Edwards and Jack Kemp
TEXT: When we visited Moscow earlier this fall, almost everyone we talked to agreed that Russia is becoming steadily less democratic. Yet Russia’s society and economy are in many ways freer than ever. Our visit convinced us of the vitality and potential of Russian civic groups and nongovernmental organizations, much like the ones Western Europeans and Americans know in their own countries. Unfortunately this sector — human rights monitors, environmental groups, policy research institutions, even public health advocates — is now at risk.
The latest challenge to civil society comes from legislation introduced by members of President Vladimir Putin’s party and other factions in the Duma, the lower house of Parliament. This legislation would, among other things, keep foreign nonprofit organizations from having offices in Russia and deny foreign funds to Russian organizations that are suspected of engaging in undefined “political” activities. Even the limited grants permitted under the new law would be taxed as though they were corporate profits, at rates exceeding 40 percent. Virtually all nonprofit groups would be affected.
The Duma has passed this bill at its first reading by an overwhelming margin of 370 to 18. Two further votes are required before it comes into force; the next is scheduled for December 16.
If this measure becomes law, it will roll back pluralism in Russia and curtail contact between our societies. It will flagrantly breach the commitment that President Putin has made to numerous Western leaders to strengthen such ties.
Its passage also raises the bizarre prospect that the president of Russia will play host to next summer’s Group of 8 summit meeting even as his country’s laws choke off contacts with global society. If this happens, the contrast with last summer’s meeting at Gleneagles, Scotland — at which nongovernmental organizations from around the world led the effort to “make poverty history” — could not be starker. It will unfortunately bolster the arguments of those who say that Russia has no place in the G-8 at all.
Russian officials and legislators have responded to criticism of the legislation by saying that they are trying only to prevent outside interference in internal political affairs. Though this response carries unsettling echoes of Soviet times, the Russian government has a legitimate interest in protecting the integrity of the electoral process and political campaigns. After all, other nations, ours included, have the same goal — but they accomplish it without encroaching on fundamental freedoms or cutting off their country from the outside world.
In truth, the aim of the proposed legislation is much broader. Senior Russian officials have described nongovernmental organizations as a “fifth column” in Russian society and even as fronts for foreign intelligence services. If this proposal comes into force, the government will have in its hands the authority to close down nonprofit groups simply because it finds their views and activities inconvenient.
The Kremlin’s initiative reflects the unwillingness of those who wield the power of the Russian state to accept the idea that civil society is not theirs to control. For Europeans and Americans, this principle is fundamental. You can’t claim to be a modern country without it.
Those of us who strongly support greater partnership with Russia and believe that it can build modern political, economic and social institutions need to send an unambiguous message: such laws put this goal out of reach. U.S. President Bush apparently raised this issue when he met with President Putin in South Korea last month, and we expect him and his administration to continue to do so.
But President Putin should not hear only from the United States. European leaders, both in and out of government, have as great an interest in this matter as Americans do. European organizations have built active and successful partnerships with independent organizations in Russian society. Indeed, Europe’s relations with Russia would not really be “normal” if such partnerships did not exist.
President Putin has said he’ll consider modifications of the bill, because “civil society in Russia should not suffer.” But what’s wrong with the bill is not this or that offensive provision. The real problem is its underlying purpose, and that cannot be fixed.
Russia faces a choice between entering the mainstream of the modern world, or trapping itself in an eddy of reaction and isolation. For Europeans and Americans who want to welcome Russia into the mainstream — and who believe we have many reasons to work together — the legislation before the Duma is a serious warning about how that choice is being made. The right advice for Mr. Putin is obvious: shelve the bill and start over.

John Edwards and Jack Kemp are co-chairmen of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on United States policy toward Russia. This comment first appeared in The New York Times.

TITLE: Beer Patrol
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin has signed off on a law strengthening administrative responsibility for drinking low alcohol drinks in public places. The law, first and foremost, and quite obviously, is aimed at the drinking of beer, the world’s most popular low alcohol beverage, if you’re prepared to term beer a low alcohol beverage as the Russians do. In days gone by, those drinking out in public could be subject to certain measures, but the crime was only vaguely defined, and no concrete figures were set as to the size of the fines that could be administered. 
Now, we’re being told, they’re going to be playing hardball. Anyone who decides to have a beer out in the street, in a park, in a bus or even, heaven forefend, on Palace Square, will be picked up by the police who will be entitled to fine the miscreant from one to three minimum wages which is to say 100 to 300 rubles. Control over the sale of such drinks to minors is also being stepped up. 
The internet sites and forums of beer drinkers in the city have varied in their take on the news. There are optimists who believe that St. Petersburg will no longer be littered with beer bottles and cans. The pessimists believe that the entire law is pointless, and will only serve to boost the income of the police officers enforcing it. Clearly, both the people that want to see the city cleaned up and those that see the measure as an encouragement for small-change corruption have a point. In any event, people will carry on drinking beer out in the street just as they always have done. For gangs of teenagers wandering about the city, bottle in hand, bumping into a police officer is always a bit of an adventure. And, of course, hardcore alcoholics who are in the habit of meeting up in the park every morning in order to drink a beer as a “hair of the dog” are never going to have enough cash to pay the fines anyway. The cops can write out the receipt, of course, but who’s going to actually pay the fine?
Unfortunately, it’s all too predictable. The state is employing entirely uncharacteristic consistency in this matter. Previously, fines were administered for the drinking of hard liquor in public places (over 12 percent proof). Those fines, however, did nothing to cut down on the number of drunken picnics by the Kazan Cathedral, say, and during the White Nights the city’s embankments were always littered with bottles of champagne from every price range, from Soviet champers to Don Perignon. And that’s without even mentioning the vodka parties on the streets bordering St. Petersburg University on Vasilievsky Island.
On the other hand, something really does have to be done about the “street culture” of drinking beer, which has become a worrying icon of daily drunkenness that is less than pleasing to the eye. It’s clear that fines aren’t going to be enough to deal with this. Anyone with an ounce of common sense hopes that the brewers themselves will get involved in sobering up the drunken disorderliness that comes with drinking out in the street. They did much to create this monster, and they must help to eradicate it. 
It’s no secret that the culture of drinking beer out in the street has often been encouraged by the brewers. Of course, beer has for years been drunk outside of homes, bars and restaurants, and people will continue to do so for years to come — it’s absurd to fight that, and entirely unnecessary. It’s a question of scale. When the vast Russian brewing industry — one of the most effective and successful in the country — works on encouraging outdoor drinking, impressive results are only to be expected. For a long time, the adverts focused on exactly this style of drinking. You can see the results on any walk through the city. It’s even reached the point where large plastic bottles, introduced to encourage consumption at home, have become popular among al fresco drinkers. A unique, if unwanted, achievement. 
According to various sources, in Europe, where average consumption per capita is about the same as in Russia, 45 percent of beer sold comes in bottles or other packaging. The rest is drunk on tap in bars and restaurants. In Russia, however, beer on tap accounts for just over 10 percent of total sales. We can hardly blame the brewers for this — beer in bars and restaurants is far more expensive than beer in bottles, and the general prosperity of potential drinkers when marketing strategies for the sector were developed was very low. On top of that, there were simply too few bars and restaurants back in the 1990s, when those same strategies were applied. 
Now, however, much has changed. The bar and restaurant sector is growing by about 100 percent a year, and the average citizen is now getting used to the idea of dining and drinking out. That means it’s time to change those above-mentioned strategies, which entails not only adjusting advertising campaigns in order to encourage drinking in bars, but also investing in reasonably priced bars, as many brewers do in the West. New bars of this kind would be a stabilizing factor for brewers, and an effective medium in which they could promote their brands. And, when all’s said and done, they’ll do much to improve the atmosphere of neighborhoods they appear in. On top of that, this would be a good chance for these businesses to demonstrate the now fashionable trend for “social responsibility” in a form that the general public can understand. 
It goes without saying that this will require constructive collaboration from the local authorities, who must encourage the opening of such beer bars, including permanent facilities and the seasonal tents out in the open air that begin to crop up throughout the city in the late spring. The tents, in fact, will be the most effective means of attracting youngsters in the early days of such a shift. When enough of these bars appear, competition between them will be intensified (at present, it’s almost non-existent), and prices will come down. The increase in the number of bars and tents and the fall in prices will be far more effective in taking beer consumption off the streets than any system of fines.
The authorities, of course, will have to put some effort into finding additional premises for bars and tents, and this may involve the city budget contributing towards the renovation of some of the city’s flooded basements in order that they be transformed into drinking houses. But, after all, the state’s ideology of “social responsibility in relations between business and the state” has been billed as a “two-way street.” So, the authorities should be prepared to meet their end of the bargain. 
Threatening fines is not rocket science. Genuine responsibility before society requires constructive measures, rather than futile, token measures.

Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.

TITLE: Sacred Terror
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: The much-belated, poll-prompted outcry of a few U.S. elected officials against the widespread use of torture by the Bush administration — following years of silent acquiescence in the face of incontrovertible evidence of deliberate atrocity — is a welcome development, of course. But it has left an even more sinister aspect of Bushist policy untouched, one that likewise has been hidden in plain sight for years.
On Sept. 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of “lethal measures” against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an “enemy combatant.” This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate “enemies” on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.
The existence of this universal death squad — and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents — has not provoked so much as a crumb of controversy in the American establishment, although it’s no secret. The executive order was first bruited in The Washington Post in October 2001. We first wrote of it here in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the edict also applied to U.S. citizens, as The Associated Press reported.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of a U.S. citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on Nov. 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred in Pakistan this month, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaida figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner’s son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by The New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be “small and agile” and “able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously.” 
The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on “extrajudicial killings” noted in December 2004: “Empowering governments to identify and kill ‘known terrorists’ places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists. ... While it is portrayed as a limited ‘exception’ to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others.”
It’s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an “enemy.” It’s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler. 
This was vividly demonstrated in one of the most revolting scenes in recent U.S. history: Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2003, delivered to Congress and televised nationwide during the final frenzy of war-drum beating before the assault on Iraq. Trumpeting his successes in the war on terror, Bush claimed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists” had been arrested worldwide — “and many others have met a different fate.” His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: “Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem.”
In other words, the suspects — and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects — had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds — or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world. 
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called “the meaning of American justice.” And the assembled legislators applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man’s bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his contempt for law — our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
Not even now, when the U.S. people’s growing revulsion at Bush’s bloody handiwork has emboldened a few long-time enablers of atrocity to criticize the “excesses” of his gulag and his “mishandling” of the war in Iraq. A few nips at the flank of the beast have been permitted. But the corroded heart of Bush’s system of state terror — officially sanctioned murder by presidential fiat — remains curiously sacrosanct.

For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com.

TITLE: Anger Drives Insurgents in South
AUTHOR: By Oliver Bullough
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NALCHIK — Timur Mamayev was repeatedly beaten by police, who insulted his religion and harassed his children, his wife says. He appealed for help to the authorities but got no answer. 
Mamayev’s patience snapped in mid-October when, as part of a group of 150 young Muslims, he attacked government buildings in Nalchik. 
“It was a protest. They did not want to win independence, 150 people would not win anything. They sacrificed themselves in an attempt to change things,” said his wife, Fatima, 32. 
She says she has not seen her husband since the day of the attack. 
To the authorities, her husband is a terrorist who tried to overthrow secular rule. To his relatives, he was just a desperate man trying to make his point the only way he could. 
Some 24 police officers and 93 rebels died in the clashes in Nalchik, a grid of dusty, tree-lined streets with ramshackle single-story houses in the Kabardino-Balkaria republic. 
The authorities saw the assault as further proof of the insidious spread of international terrorism across the poor south, and President Vladimir Putin called the crushing of the revolt a victory. 
Separatists from nearby Chechnya said they staged the raid with support from local anti-Kremlin insurgents. 
But Nalchik’s residents saw the uprising as part of a pattern in the Muslim North Caucasus, from Dagestan in the east to Kabardino-Balkaria in the west. 
They say that young men were following the example of their fellow Muslims in Chechnya and taking the fight into their own hands — not to win independence, but to get even. 
“The police declared war on Muslims. And these lads gave up thinking they could achieve anything peacefully, so they took up their guns so people would hear them,” said Larisa Dorogova, a lawyer who describes herself as representing “believers.” 
“This is not a war between religions, or between nations. It is between police and believers,” she said. 
Islam is one of Russia’s four official religions, and the country’s approximately 20 million Muslims have their right to worship enshrined in the Constitution. Officials have repeatedly emphasized that the Chechen war and operations in neighboring regions such as Kabardino-Balkaria are not aimed at Muslims but at terrorists. 
Analysts, however, said oppression and harassment of Muslims, and the closure of mosques — Nalchik has only one official mosque after the others were shut — had sparked the revolt. 
“What happened was caused on the one hand by Islam, and on the other hand by the inept behavior of the local authorities and police who provoked the population,” said Alexei Malashenko, a scholar with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The security problem was a result of the stupid policies of the local government. … I think there is no link to international terrorism.” 
Nalchik’s Muslims have many theories about police behavior — some say they are targeted because they do not give bribes. Attitudes toward Muslims among the security forces and officials have hardened under the influence of the Chechen war and linked attacks, like the Beslan school hostage-taking. 
“It is clear that there is a massive repression [of Muslims] throughout Russia, which is scary,” said Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of human rights group Memorial. “Force of arms achieves nothing. Our work in the North Caucasus shows that people who are attacked by police are not just bandits but ordinary people, and this just helps the people who we call terrorists.” 
Chechen separatist leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev claimed his commanders helped organize the Nalchik attack. Chechen rebels, keen to bolster anyone who can put pressure on federal troops, have offered help to guerrillas elsewhere. 
“Today the forces opposed to Russia, not finding other ways of fighting tyranny, come to us and that is a great help for us,” Sadulayev said after the Oct. 13 bloodshed in Nalchik. 
Officials have accused the Chechens of wanting to set up an Islamic state between the Black and Caspian seas. 
“Anyone who picks up arms, threatens the life and health of our citizens and the integrity of the Russian state will be dealt with in the same way,” Putin said after the Nalchik attack was put down. “Our actions have to be commensurate with all the threats that bandits pose for our country.” 
Relatives of the dead in Nalchik said what angered them most was the state’s refusal to release the bodies for burial. 
Authorities said that since the dead men were suspected of terrorism they would be buried in unmarked graves. 
Mamayeva used her cell phone to show a film of the vans used to store the bodies of those killed on Oct. 13. She failed to find her husband among them. 
In the gloomy vans, naked bodies lay piled on top of each other. Necks and arms were twisted at impossible angles. 
“I went into the wagons three times before I found the body of my son. He was lying on his face, so I turned him over to see him, and his insides just fell out,” said Said Tishikov, whose 25-year-old son, Ruslan, was among the dead. 
Relatives said Moscow’s failure to win over devout young Muslims was just storing up trouble for the future.

TITLE: Massive Oil Fire Erupts North of London
AUTHOR: By Thomas Wagner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, England — Firefighters used chemical foam to extinguish part of the inferno raging Monday after explosions at a fuel depot north of London, while a huge oily smoke cloud from the blaze drifted over northern France and headed toward Spain. 
The blasts Sunday, which injured 43 people, sent balls of fire into the sky and blew the doors off nearby houses, also contributed to a surge in oil prices to above $60 Monday.
The explosions came just four days after an al-Qaida videotape appeared on the Internet calling for attacks on facilities carrying oil that it claims has been stolen from Muslims in the Middle East, but police said they believed the blasts were accidental.
“We’re keeping an open mind but there is no indication at this point that is anything other than an accident,” Chief Superintendent Jeremy Alford said Monday. “When we get into the site ... we’ll treat it as a scene which may be a crime. We’ll do full forensics.”
The explosions occurred five months after transit terror attacks that killed 52 people and four suicide bombers.
Fire officials said they had put out blazes at half the 20 fuel tanks at the Buncefield depot 40 kilometer north of London, the fifth-largest in Britain. Authorities approved the use of foam to fight the fire after determining the runoff would not pollute ground water supplies.
Jane Hogg, the mayor of Dacorum Borough Council, said firefighters hoped to have the blaze fully extinguished sometime Monday, but a thick black plume of smoke continued to billow from the depot, which stores gasoline, diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel.
Left to itself, the fire might burn for three days, said Roy Wilsher, chief fire officer in Hertfordshire county.
“We are in uncharted territory. This is the largest fire of this kind that the U.K. and Europe have dealt with,” he said at a news briefing.
A smoke cloud also drifted over northwestern France and was expected to reach Spain within 48 hours, France’s national weather service said Monday.
Most of the 2,000 people evacuated from their homes Sunday were still waiting to return, some biding their time with children and pets at a recreation center.
“I really want to get back, have a bath, have a shave, change clothes, but we’re pretty lucky. Nobody died,” said Frank Maw, 49, a civil servant.
Hogg said authorities were trying to get people back in their homes as soon as possible, but first they needed to be sure that the homes were structurally sound.
Most of the injured were treated for cuts and bruises from flying glass. One of two men with more serious injuries remained in a local hospital on Monday, Hertfordshire Police said. The other was released.
Chief Constable Frank Whiteley said police had yet to interview managers at the oil depot, and that the fire may have destroyed evidence leading to the cause.
“It may well be that once the fire is out, there will be very little for our forensic teams to look at, but I think we will find out what happened,” Whiteley said.
The depot, operated by French oil firm Total S.A. and part-owned by Texaco, stores 4.2 million gallons of gasoline, diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel.
Oil companies, pipeline operators and the airline industry held emergency talks Monday to keep supplies flowing, although authorities said the explosions wouldn’t lead to a shortage. Oil prices surged above $60 amid forecasts of colder weather in the U.S. Northeast, boosted expectations of a rise in demand and an agreement by OPEC to maintain its present output. 
Total said it already had contingency plans to reroute supplies that normally run through the plant. 
“There shouldn’t be any problem with supplies,” said company spokes-woman Lesley Else. “Everyone is working together to ensure minimal disruption.” 
The Buncefield plant at Hemel Hempstead carries jet fuel to Heathrow and Gatwick airports. British Airways said it expected no disruption of schedules because of the fire. 
Wilsher said firefighters were using nearly 8,500 gallons of water per minute from two different attack points to fight the fire. He said the wind was causing the smoke to swirl around the site, making conditions harsh for firefighters. 
He said firefighters were within 50 meters of the blazing tanks. 
“They will be wearing breathing apparatus and protective equipment. They will be monitored by safety officers, and we will be bringing relief in all the time to make sure they are not in those conditions for too long,” Wilsher said. 
Police officers also wore breathing masks while maintaining a wide cordon around the site. About 25 officers were examined by doctors for breathing problems. 
Britain’s deadliest oil-related disaster was the July 6, 1988, explosion and fire on the North Sea oil platform Piper Alpha, off the Scottish coast, which killed 167 workers. 
In 1994, a blast and fire at an oil refinery in Milford Haven, Wales, injured 26 workers and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage. Oil companies Texaco and Gulf were eventually fined for violating health and safety regulations.

TITLE: Car Bomb In Beirut Kills MP
AUTHOR: By Alaa Shahine
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIRUT — A car bomb killed Lebanese newspaper magnate and anti-Syrian lawmaker Gebran Tueni in Beirut on Monday, a day after he returned from Paris where he had based himself in recent months in fear of assassination.
Several Lebanese politicians immediately blamed Syria, which has denied any role and said the killing was timed to smear it.
Police said Tueni, publisher of An-Nahar daily, was among four people killed in the explosion that destroyed his armored sports utility vehicle as it was driving in the Mekalis area of mainly Christian east Beirut. Some 32 people were wounded.
The bodies of Tueni, 48, his driver and a bodyguard were found in his car, charred beyond recognition. 
A previously unknown group calling itself “Strugglers for the Unity and Freedom of the Levant” claimed responsibility for the killing in a statement faxed to Reuters, saying the same fate awaited other opponents of “Arabism” in Lebanon.
There was no way to verify the authenticity of the claim, whose wording appeared designed to cast suspicion on Damascus.
Security sources said a parked car packed with up to 100 kilogram of dynamite was detonated by remote control as Tueni’s car passed by. Tueni’s car was hurled from the road and landed in a different street dozens of meters away.
“I heard a deafening explosion and when I looked up I saw a car flying in the air,” one passerby said.
Tueni was killed just hours before the UN Security Council was due to receive a report by chief UN investigator Detlev Mehlis, who has been trying to identify those behind the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.
An interim report by Mehlis in October said the evidence pointed toward the involvement of Syrian officials and their Lebanese allies in Hariri’s killing. Syria denies this.
Supporters gathered outside An-Nahar offices, near the site of mass protests that followed Hariri’s murder.
The death of Hariri transformed Lebanon’s political landscape, sparking a global outcry and Lebanese protests that forced Syria to pull its troops out of Lebanon after 29 years. 
Lebanese Druze leader and politician Walid Jumblatt told Arab satellite television channels that Tueni’s killing was linked to the Mehlis report and suggested Syria was behind it.
Asked who was responsible, he told Al Arabiya television: “Gebran Tueni and An-Nahar were being threatened for a long time by the Syrian regime... we got the message. We will persevere.”
Jumblatt said: “They killed Gebran Tueni today because Mehlis will present his report today. This is a message to the international community and the Lebanese community.”
Syria condemned the latest attack in Lebanon. The region has been rocked by more than a dozen major bombings and assassinations since the detonation of the truck bomb that killed Hariri and 22 others.
“Syria denounces this crime that claimed the lives of Lebanese, irrespective of their political stances,” Syrian Information Minister Mahdi Dakhl-Allah told LBC television.

TITLE: Australian Race Riots Enter 2nd Night
AUTHOR: By Mike Corder
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SYDNEY, Australia — Young people riding in vehicles smashed cars and store windows in suburban Sydney late Monday, a day after thousands of drunken white youths attacked people they believed were of Arab descent at a beach in the same area in one of Australia’s worst outbursts of racial violence. 
Sunday’s attack — apparently prompted by reports that Lebanese youths had assaulted two lifeguards — sparked retaliation by young men of Arab descent in several Sydney suburbs, fighting with police and smashing 40 cars with sticks and bats, police said. Thirty-one people were injured and 16 were arrested in hours of violence.
The rampage on Monday broke out in Cronulla, the same coastal suburb where the violence began, and in neighboring Carringbah, said Paul Bugden, spokesman for New South Wales police. Calm was restored by early Tuesday.
Bugden said six people were arrested and one person apparently was hit by a rock in Monday’s violence. He did not have descriptions of those involved in the rampage, but he said it “obviously stems from the last 24-48 hours.”
Australian Associated Press, citing a resident who declined to be named, said men riding in up to 50 cars and wielding baseball bats converged on Cronulla, smashing cars. Ambulances were called to help at least one injured man seen lying on the side of the road.
Steven Dawson said a bottle thrown through his apartment window in the suburb of Brighton-Le-Sands showered his 5-month-old son Caleb with glass, but did not hurt the child.
Horst Dreizner said a car had rammed into his denture store and he feared the violence would escalate. “Personally, I think it is only the beginning,” he said in a telephone interview.
Elsewhere, about 300 people of Arab descent demonstrated against Sunday’s attack outside one of Sydney’s largest mosques, amid tight security.
The riots began Sunday after rumors circulated that youths of Lebanese descent were responsible for an attack last weekend on two lifeguards at Cronulla Beach. Police said the assault was not believed to be racially motivated.
Police, meanwhile, formed a strike force to track down the instigators of the attack, some of whom were believed to be from white supremacist groups. Police said they were also seeking an Arab man who allegedly stabbed a white man in the back.
Morris Iemma, the premier of New South Wales state, said police would use video images and photographs to track down the instigators. “Let’s be very clear, the police will be unrelenting in their fight against these thugs and hooligans,” he said.
Prime Minister John Howard condemned the violence, but said he did not believe racism was widespread in Australia.
“Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians irrespective of their own background and their politics,” Howard said.
But he added: “I’m not going to put a general tag (of) racism on the Australian community.”
Australia has long prided itself on accepting immigrants — from Italians and Greeks after World War II to families fleeing political strife in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In the last census in 2001, nearly a quarter of Australia’s 20 million people said they were born overseas.

TITLE: Sopranos Actor To Face Charges
AUTHOR: By Nahal Toosi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — An actor who once played an aspiring mobster on “The Sopranos” faces murder charges along with another man in the death of an off-duty police officer, authorities said Sunday.
Lillo Brancato Jr., 29, was hospitalized in critical condition with gunshot wounds suffered when the officer shot him after catching two men breaking into a home. Brancato’s friend Steven Armento, 48, was also shot and in critical condition.
Prosecutors planned to charge Armento with first and second-degree murder and Brancato with second-degree murder in the death Saturday of Officer Daniel Enchautegui, 28, said Steven Reed, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office.
The two men also face burglary and weapons possession offenses, Reed said. He did not know if either had lawyers who could comment. An arraignment had not been scheduled.
Brancato got his acting break as a 16-year-old in the Robert De Niro-directed film “A Bronx Tale” in 1993. He appeared in a dozen other films.

TITLE: Six-Month Countdown to World Cup Begins
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LEIPZIG, Germany — Next summer’s World Cup has finally taken shape for millions of fans around the globe who can begin contemplating their team’s prospects after the draw for the opening round of the 32-team tournament. 
Host Germany will get the ball rolling in the 64-game tournament when its team plays Costa Rica in Munich on Friday June 9 — exactly six months to the day after the draw in Leipzig last Friday. 
World champion Brazil will not be in action until the fifth day of the competition on June 13, when its team faces Croatia at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, the venue for the final on July 9. 
By the time that match is played the hopes and dreams for most will be over but almost every coach appeared optimistic about their chances Friday. 
As well as facing Costa Rica, who they have never previously met, Germany will also play Ecuador for the first time in its history and Poland, who have never beaten the Germans in 14 previous meetings. 
World champion Brazil, seeking its sixth world title, begin the defence of the trophy against Croatia in Berlin on June 13 with Japan, coached by former Brazilian great Zico, and Australia making up Group F. 
The toughest section of the draw has Argentina, Netherlands, Serbia & Montenegro and Ivory Coast matched in Group C. 
The Netherlands, which reached the final the last time the World Cup was held on German soil in 1974, were the most dangerous non-seeded floater in the 32-team draw. 
They are likely to advance with Argentina from their group but neither will under-estimate World Cup debutants Ivory Coast, or Serbia & Montenegro. 
England’s coach Sven-Goran Eriksson faces his own countrymen from Sweden in Group B for the second successive World Cup with Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago making up the group. 
The majority of players in Trinidad’s squad play their football in England and Dwight Yorke, the team’s most famous player, won the Champions League with Manchester United six years ago. 
Familiar foes and neighbors France and Switzerland, who met in Euro 2004 and then came through the same World Cup qualifying group unbeaten, were drawn together again in Group G, opening their campaigns against each other in Stuttgart on June 13. 
France, which went out in the first round as defending champions four years ago, will then meet South Korea in Leipzig before playing African debutants Togo in Cologne on June 23. 
The France-Togo match will be something of a family affair too as many players in Togo either play in France or have close links with the country and the tie brings back uncomfortable memories for the French. 
The French met Senegal, almost all of whose players were with French clubs, in the opening match as defending champions in 2002, lost 1-0 and went home at the end of the first round. 
Ukraine begin their first World Cup finals against Spain in Leipzig on June 14 in a Group H game with Tunisia and Saudi Arabia completing their section. 
Italy, the United States and the Czech Republic, who all met in the same opening round group in 1990, were brought together again with newcomers Ghana completing their Group E. 
The close links between Portugal and its former colony Angola will add spice to their opening Group D meeting in Cologne on June 11 when Angola make their World Cup debut. Seeded Mexico and Iran complete the section.

TITLE: WORLD CUP IN BRIEF
TEXT: More Tickets Online
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Another 250,000 tickets for the 2006 World Cup in Germany will be available on the Internet through a lottery system starting Monday. 
The draw for soccer’s showcase was held Friday. Applications can be made on the Internet at www.FIFAworldcup.com through Jan. 15. The lottery will be held Jan. 31. 
“We assume the demand will far outstrip the contingent this time again,” said Horst R. Schmidt, vice president of Germany’s World Cup committee. “There isn’t a fairer method to distribute the tickets than through a lottery.” 
Schmidt said there were only a limited number of tickets left for the semifinals and final. 
Schmidt said the World Cup committee expected demand to rise after 80 percent of the earlier available tickets were bought by Europeans.

Belarus Fires Coach
MINSK (Reuters) — Belarus fired coach Anatoly Baidachny on Saturday after the country finished second from bottom of its World Cup qualifying group. 
The Belarus Football Federation have installed Baidachny’s assistant Yury Kurnenin as coach and said he would either be confirmed in the job at their next executive committee meeting in two months’ time or they would appoint somebody else. 
Last month Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said a former Czech Republic national coach was a possible candidate, without being more specific. 
The 53-year-old Baidachny failed to steer Belarus into contention for a place at next year’s World Cup in Germany after they won just two of their Group 5 qualifying matches. 
Italy won the group with 23 points ahead of Norway with 18. Belarus finished fifth with 10 points. 

Ronaldo’s Nobel Prize?
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) — Brazil and Real Madrid striker Ronaldo said on Sunday that one of his ambitions in life was to win the Nobel Peace Prize. 
“I want to leave a good image not just in football but as a United Nations ambassador,” he said in an interview with the weekly news magazine Epoca. 
“I’m going to work for all my life and battle hard to win a Nobel Peace Prize,” added Ronaldo who, like Real Madrid team-mate Zinedine Zidane is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme. 

Rooney Wants to Win
LONDON (AFP) — England striker Wayne Rooney has revealed that England are determined to win the World Cup for coach Sven-Goran Eriksson.
The Manchester United player insists Eriksson has the full backing of his squad, despite questions over the Swede’s ability to inspire England to glory in Germany next summer.
“There is a feeling we should win the World Cup for Sven. He’s a great manager,” the 20-year-old Rooney told the News of the World on Sunday.

Czechs Worried by U.S.
PRAGUE (Reuters) — Both the U.S. and Ghana could cause World Cup shocks following Friday’s draw for next year’s tournament in Germany, Czech coach Karel Bruckner has warned. 
Italy, the United States and the Czech Republic, who all met in the same group in 1990, were brought together again with newcomers Ghana completing Group E. 
“It is bad that we do not know the U.S. team and have to play them in the first match,” Bruckner told Czech daily Mlada Fronta Dnes. 
“It would be better to see them first in action,” he said. 
Bruckner said Italy were the toughest team in the draw, but added: “I don’t want to make a big deal of the draw. We will just play our own game.” 
The Czechs narrowly qualified for the World Cup by beating Norway in the play-offs.

TITLE: Manchester United Frustrated by Everton
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United, eliminated from European competition in midweek, endured Premier League frustration on Sunday when it was held to a 1-1 home draw by Everton. 
United, knocked out of the Champions League following a 2-1 defeat by Benfica on Wednesday, fell behind to an early goal by James McFadden but earned a point thanks to an equalizer from Ryan Giggs. 
The Old Trafford club remains third in the table with 31 points from 15 matches. 
Liverpool, also on 31 points, is second on goal difference with runaway leader Chelsea on 43 points having played a game more than its two closest rivals. 
Everton, which has collected 17 points from 15 matches, climbed two places to 15th. 
“I think we deserved to win,” United manager Alex Ferguson told Sky Sports. “We had four or five clear chances but their goalkeeper [Richard Wright] had an excellent game. 
“I think we got a bit anxious in the second half. The players were desperate to win, they tried their best and put all their effort into it and when they got the chances I thought we’d go on to win it. 
United looked unusually nervous in the opening period and Everton wasted a good chance after three minutes when keeper Edwin van der Sar scuffed his clearance straight to striker James Beattie but his shot was blocked by Mikael Silvestre. 
The visitors were ahead four minutes later when McFadden fired a left foot shot past Van der Sar at the near post after good work by Kevin Kilbane and Leon Osman. 
United fashioned an equalizer after 15 minutes when Giggs guided the ball past Wright with the outside of his left foot from near the penalty spot after a delightful pass over the defence by Paul Scholes. 
With the Old Trafford crowd getting behind their team, United created further chances for Rooney, who headed Giggs’s fine cross straight at Wright, and the Welsh winger himself whose low shot was turned around the post by the keeper. 
United’s dominance continued after the break with Scholes’s fierce shot beaten away by Wright. 
Everton was pinned back in their own half but twice launched dangerous counter attacks, McFadden forcing a flying save from Van der Sar and Kilbane wasting a good chance by firing high and wide. 
Giggs almost snatched an injury-time winner when he curled a left-footed free kick over the defensive wall and Wright pulled off a diving save. 
Midfielder Phil Neville, who left United for Everton in August, was named man of the match on his first return to his former club. 
“It was an unbelievable day for me,” said Neville, who lined up against his brother Gary, the United captain. “It was great to be back here. 
“I am so glad we put on a performance. Sometimes teams can be fearful [at Old Trafford] but today we gave it a good go.” 
Everton manager David Moyes added: “I’m happy to come here and get a draw although if we had shown a bit more quality in the final third of the pitch we might have got a second goal.”

TITLE: Paerson Takes Victory In World Cup Slalom
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ASPEN, Colorado — Anja Paerson of Sweden stormed back in the second run of the slalom to defeat Janica Kostelic of Croatia by three-hundredths of a second under a clear blue sky Sunday at the Aspen Winternationals, the only U.S. stop on the women’s World Cup circuit. 
“I’m so happy that I have Janica by me,” Paerson said afterward, “because she will be and already is one of the greatest skiers ever in history.” 
Kostelic wasn’t feeling so great, though, after failing to hold on to a lead of more than one second over Paerson after the first of the two slalom runs. 
“I feel stupid for myself,” Kostelic said. “She was one second behind, which is a huge thing in skiing.” 
Paerson, third following the first of the two runs, sailed down the Aspen Mountain course in 46.71 seconds in the second run to win with a combined time of 1 minute, 36.01 seconds. 
Kostelic, winner of three gold medals for Croatia at the Salt Lake City Olympics, was second at 1:36.04. Kathrin Zettle of Austria, third in Saturday’s giant slalom, was third Sunday, too, in 1:36.44. 
Making up a one-second deficit is a daunting challenge for anyone, even Paerson, the two-time defending overall World Cup champion. 
“Normally you never take one second off,” she said. “I was just trying to make my run as quick and as charging as possible, and just try to go for it as much as I could.” 
U.S. skiers had a rough day on their home snow. Kristina Koznick, a six-time World Cup champion who plans to retire after this season, was 14th. Julia Mancuso was 19th, and Lindsey Kildow skied off course and finished last among the 30 skiers. One of America’s best slalom racers, Sarah Schleper, is out with a back injury. 
Koznick, who finished third twice in Aspen, was emotional contemplating her final run in a U.S. race. 
“Yeah, I mean it’s pretty disappointing because I would have liked to have won a World Cup in the U.S.,” she said, tears in her eyes. “It’s pretty disappointing because I’ve been training really well and I feel really comfortable.” 
Paerson, second in Saturday’s giant slalom, celebrated her latest World Cup triumph with her trademark belly slide at the finish, although she acknowledged it was not one of her most impressive post-race efforts. She has won 15 World Cup slalom races.

TITLE: Sports Watch
TEXT: Loko Taps Serb
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Lokomotiv Moscow have appointed Serb Slavoljub Muslin as coach, the Russian premier league club said on Monday. 
Muslin, who last week quit Belgian first division side Lokeren, replaces Vladimir Eshtrekov, who was sacked after seven months in the job following a disappointing end to the season. 
The 2004 Russian champions threw away an 11-point lead, winning just two of their last 10 games, to finish third behind city rivals CSKA and Spartak and miss out on a place in next year’s Champions League qualifiers. 
Eshtrekov also failed to guide Lokomotiv into the Champions League after replacing long-serving manager Yury Syomin, who took over Russia’s national team in April. 
Muslin becomes the first foreign manager in Lokomotiv’s history. The well-travelled Serb has also coached French clubs Brest, Girondins Bordeaux and Le Mans as well as Serbia’s Red Star Belgrade, Bulgaria’s Levski Sofia and Ukraine’s Metalurg Donetsk. 

Ride ‘Em Cowboy
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Bull riding champion Matt Austin broke Ty Murray’s season money record Sunday, earning $12,368 for a second-place finish in the final round of the National Finals Rodeo to push his total to $320,765. 
Austin, from Wills Point, Texas, broke the record of $297,896 that Murray set in three events in 1993. The 23-year-old rider, who clinched the world title Friday night, also topped the NFR aggregate standings with 586.5 points on seven successful rides. 
“I never imagined I’d win this much money in one year,” Austin said. “All this hasn’t soaked in yet. I hope to do as good as this next year. I’m going to go out, try my hardest and keep that same mind frame.” 

Shaq’s Back on Track
MIAMI (AFP) — Shaquille O’Neal returned after missing five weeks with a sprained ankle and helped inspire the Miami Heat to a 104-101 National Basketball Association victory over Washington.
Miami guard Dwyane Wade scored six of his season-best 41 points in over-time while O’Neal contributed 10 points and 11 rebounds for the Heat, which snapped a four-game losing streak in the return of dominating center O’Neal.
“Shaq” played in his first game since spraining his right ankle in a loss to Indiana on Nov. 3, playing little until the key moments late in the second half.

Finnish Fix Claim
HELSINKI (Reuters) — A number of footballers in Finland’s top soccer league have been paid thousands of euros for helping to throw matches, Finnish daily Ilta-Sanomat reported on Monday. 
The newspaper cited a player, speaking under condition of anonymity, in its report. 
Finland’s football association said it had no knowledge of bribes being paid, but added it would assist the police and the Veikkausliiga league in investigating the allegations and bringing those involved to justice. 
“At this point, there is no reason to doubt the truth of the information presented in the respected newspaper,” the Football Association of Finland said in a statement.