SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1136 (2), Friday, January 13, 2006
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TITLE: Putin, Yushchenko Defend Gas Agreement
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Barely a week after Moscow and Kiev were accusing each other of theft and blackmail, President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yushchenko, hailed the controversial deal that ended their tense standoff over gas supplies as fair and in line with “market economy principles.”
During a news conference Wednesday in Astana, where the two leaders attended the inauguration of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Putin and Yushchenko stood side by side and sought to put a positive spin on the deal, both saying it was “mutually beneficial.”
Yushchenko’s comments came a day after his government was thrown into turmoil by a parliamentary vote for the ouster of his Cabinet over the deal, with his former Orange Revolution ally Yulia Tymoshenko accusing him and his government of striking a deal that was unfavorable to Ukraine.
Wednesday’s briefing followed a meeting, part of which was televised, where the two leaders sat in armchairs and swapped what appeared to be light banter, good-naturedly interrupting each other mid-sentence.
Putin began the news conference by praising the deal, under which Ukraine will pay an average of $95 per 1,000 cubic meters for gas in 2006, nearly double the price it paid last year. Gazprom had demanded that Ukraine pay $230 instead.
“This choice was made with full respect and taking the interests of both sides into account,” Putin said. 
“I would like to say that we are very pleased that after many years of relations with Ukraine we finally have people in Kiev who do what they say,” he said.
Yushchenko said that the fierce dispute had even served a useful purpose, as the deal reached was “mutually beneficial” for Russia and Ukraine. 
“Over the last two months, we went though a rather difficult and turbulent period, but I believe it was mutually beneficial,” Yushchenko said. “We came to principles that are clear and transparent.”
He added that the deal would “get rid of suspicions that Russia sells gas to Ukraine for half of the price and that Ukraine pumps it farther for [the other] half of the price.”
The gas dispute has tarnished Russia’s reputation as a reliable energy supplier in the eyes of the West and has led several European countries to look into alternatives to getting their gas supplies from Russia. The deal has been widely criticized for giving secretive Swiss-registered middleman Rosukrenergo the potential to export gas from Ukraine and to divert profits from Gazprom.
On Jan. 1, Gazprom reduced gas supplies going through Ukraine, and spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov bluntly accused Ukraine of stealing Russian gas from the transit pipelines that deliver supplies to Europe through Ukrainian territory.
But 10 days later in Astana, Putin struck an altogether softer note.
“Ukraine is our closest neighbor and partner, and I reckon that one should pick polite words when speaking about such a country,” Putin said.
Yushchenko said Wednesday that the agreement put an end to “feudal relations” between Russia and Ukraine.
Under the deal, Gazprom will sell gas to Rosukrenergo for $230 per 1,000 cubic meters and add cheaper Central Asian gas to the mix. Ukraine will then buy gas from Rosukrenergo for $95 per 1,000 cubic meters.
Rosukrenergo is 50 percent owned by Gazprombank. The other 50 percent is nominally held by Austria’s Raiffeisen Zentralbank on behalf of investors that it has refused to identify.
Putin said Wednesday that Gazprom’s sale price of $230 could rise or fall depending on global market prices. “And we will certainly agree [to lower the price], if it goes down,” Putin said.
Putin said he and Yushchenko had also discussed the conditions under which the Russian Black Sea Fleet uses the naval base in Sevastopol, as well as nuclear energy cooperation between the two countries. 
As the gas dispute escalated late last month, some Ukrainian politicians called for a hike in the rent Russia pays for its use of the Crimean port. Yushchenko later assured Putin in a telephone call that the rent would not be reviewed unilaterally.
During their armchair meeting, Putin at one point lightened the tone, saying that he would like to take up Yushchenko’s invitation to go skiing in the Carpathian Mountains.
When Yushchenko laughed, Putin joked, “Incidentally, they say that there’s no snow there, unfortunately, I mean ...”
“There’s frost, frost,” Yushchenko cut in.
“There’s frost, but there’s no snow,” Putin shot back.
The dispute came after what Putin has described as “a year of lost opportunity” in Russian-Ukrainian relations. 
Strains appeared with the disputed presidential elections in late 2004, and relations further soured after Yushchenko beat the Kremlin’s favored candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, in the December 2004 presidential election rerun, vowing to build closer ties with Europe. 
The ostentatious display of mutual understanding and sympathy between Putin and Yushchenko in Astana appeared to be prompted by the need to defend the Rosukrenergo deal against its Ukrainian and international critics, said Maxim Dianov, head of the Institute for Regional Problems think tank.
Putin also needs the agreement to hold up because it is very beneficial to Gazprom and Russia, said Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst.
“Putin needed to stress the good relations between Russia and Ukraine to calm down the West, which became concerned about its energy dependence on Russia during the gas scandal with Ukraine,” Markov said.

TITLE: Inspections Stepped Up At Airport
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Pulkovo II, the city’s international airport, has imposed heightened security measures and introduced round-the-clock monitoring of its premises by experts from the Federal Service for the Protection of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor) in light of the recent outbreak of bird flu in Turkey.
The crews of all flights departing from and arriving in St. Petersburg — particularly those stopping in Turkey, countries bordering on it and South-East Asia — must inform airport authorities in the event of any of their passengers demonstrating symptoms associated with bird flu or suggesting general flu or a severe cold: fevers, headaches, coughing or a runny nose. Passengers arriving from Turkey and South-East Asia will also have to fill out questionnaires similar to those developed during the SARS outbreak in 2003.
Rospotrebnadzor and the Federal Tourism Agency also obliged all travel agencies to inform their clients about the recent outbreak of H5N1, the deadly strain of bird flu detected in Turkey, and supply them with a list of preventative measures.
Tour operators say Russian travelers are becoming concerned about visiting Turkey, yet no charter or regular flights to the country have yet been canceled, said Tatyana Demeneva, deputy head of the Northwestern branch of the Russian Tourism Industry Union.
“Travel agents are naturally alarmed about the way the situation is developing as it potentially threatens to damage the winter season in Turkey,” Demeneva said. “But, naturally, winter tourism in this country doesn’t even remotely compare with the mass pilgrimages to Turkey that come every summer, when the country is visited by about 1.5 million Russians.” 
Nadezhda Filina, a manager with the PAK Grupp travel agency, said people started calling the agency and asking about the risks of catching the dangerous virus. “For the moment, tour operators have no legal grounds to accept cancellations, so we have to just be patient and explain the situation to the clients,” Filina said. 
“Besides, the management of several top hotels in [the popular Turkish ski resort] Palandoken have officially informed our company that there are no towns or villages, let alone agricultural facilities in the proximity of Palandoken, which is located several thousand meters above sea level.”
The health concerns haven’t yet affected prices. A week-long group tour to Turkey costs about $700 per person, and there appears to be no trend towards a drop in prices, Demeneva added.
If the virus spreads to the areas where summer resorts are located, however, the problems will be exacerbated, warns Sergei Sinitsyn, press secretary of the Federal Tourism Agency. 
“There are reports about mass deaths of poultry in Western Turkey, and in particular, around the popular Kusadasi sea resort,” Demeneva said. “If these deaths are confirmed as bird flu cases, fears will increase.”
Last year, H5N1 was registered in several regions of Russia, including Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Chelyabinsk, Tambov, Tula and Altai region. No humans were reported as having been infected.
The St. Petersburg medical authorities have asked locals to be on their guard. Igor Rakitin, the city’s chief sanitary doctor warned locals against close contact with any wild birds encountered.
“Keep away from flocks of pigeons,” Rakitin told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday. “Don’t feed wild birds from your hands and avoid any direct contact with them.”
In the meantime, experts from St. Petersburg’s Influenza Research Institute are packing their bags for Turkey. “Our specialists are going to assist their foreign counterparts in diagnostics and research,” said the institute’s director Oleg Kiselyov at a news conference on Thursday.
The institute is also due to start testing its own vaccine against the dangerous H5N1 strain on humans later this month.
“All tests should be complete by the end of March, and I hope we will start mass production of the vaccine in April”, Kiselyov said. “We expect to produce five million doses in the first production run.”
Kiselyov prediced a bird flu pandemic within the next two years and called for the development of a vaccine against the pandemic strain, which may take up to nine months.
Kiselyov also suggested vaccinating domestic poultry as an efficient preventative measure against the spread of the disease.

TITLE: Cheap Gas Not Part of Russian Plans
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ukraine denounced the Russian gas price hike as political vengeance, but Russia’s friendlier neighbors, including Armenia, are also being asked to pay more for natural gas. 
The reason appears to be that the Kremlin has largely scuttled its strategy of currying favor with cheap gas in the hopes of collecting greater political dividends by repackaging Gazprom as a profit-oriented, transparent global energy player. 
State-controlled Gazprom —  a darling with investors that skyrocketed in value after foreign ownership limits were lifted this week —  now looks well-positioned to significantly raise Russia’s status as a world energy power. 
But the trade-off raises the specter that Russian-led alliances with its neighbors might follow the fate of the Warsaw Pact and other East European partnerships because gas has been the trump card in the Kremlin’s policy for keeping other former Soviet republics anchored to Russia.
For most of the 1990s, newly independent neighbors enjoyed steep discounts on energy imports from Russia as their leaders pledged loyalty to the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, and other alliances pursued by Moscow. 
Russian officials, however, announced last August that the Kremlin would rethink its CIS policy after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko assumed power in peaceful revolutions and set out to politically reorient their countries toward the West. Long-serving Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin followed the two leaders’ cue.
A senior Kremlin official told RIA-Novosti on Aug. 23 that Russia was planning a radical change in its policy vis-a-vis other former Soviet republics as well as influential players such as the United States and the European Union. The official said Russia would not tolerate an arrangement in which it did not receive economic or political benefits for selling gas and oil at a discount. 
Later that day, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Russia would abandon its tacit agreements with its neighbors in favor of relations based on international standards.
Asked to comment on the Kremlin official’s statement that Russia planned to effectively punish Western-leaning neighbors by halting cheap gas and oil supplies, Lavrov said: “As market reforms proceed in our countries, we will be increasingly basing our intergovernmental ... and economic relations on world practices.” He spoke after chairing a meeting of CIS foreign ministers.
In reality, Russia had used gas to punish and reward neighbors long before August. Belarus, which is forming a common state with Russia, pays a little less than $50 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, considerably less than other former Soviet republics. Also, Russia had used the discounts to wrestle concessions from recipient countries, including the continuation of their membership in the CIS or entry into new alliances such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
The promised punishment of higher gas prices for Westward-leaning countries did materialize with Ukraine, which agreed last week to pay $110 per 1,000 cubic meters, more than double the previous $50. Ukraine secured the $50 rate in 2004 when the Kremlin was pushing for a presidential candidate who ultimately lost.
Moldova, whose president has proclaimed a policy of seeking integration with the EU and NATO, is now being asked to pay $160, and Russia cut off gas supplies to the country last week.
Moscow, however, is asking both Armenia and Georgia to pay $110, even though Armenia is one of Russia’s closest allies and Georgia has antagonized the Kremlin more than any other member of the CIS.
Naturally, Gazprom’s decision to raise the price from $56 is raising eyebrows in Armenia, which is not only in the CIS but is also a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which Moscow is trying to elevate into a full-fledged military bloc, and hosts two Russian military bases on its territory. In contrast, Georgia’s leadership is pushing for the quick closure of Russian bases on its territory and has openly voiced plans to seek NATO membership.
“It is difficult to convince a country that is an ally that the price hike on such a vital commodity as gas is an entirely disparate, commercial decision,” said Tevhan Poghosyan, executive director of the International Center for Human Development in Yerevan.
Armenia is dependent on Russian gas, which powers its Razdan electricity plant and provides heating for many households. Also, Armenia has effectively been semi-blockaded, with Turkey and Azerbaijan blocking its borders due to a dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
The price hike, if it goes through, will have a positive impact too because it will encourage Armenia to further diversify its foreign and security policies to more actively engage countries other than Russia and powerful players such as the EU, Poghosyan said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Festive Fire Hazards
MOSCOW (AFP) — More than 1,000 Russians died in fires during New Year’s celebrations, an emergency ministry official said Wednesday. 
“1,008 people perished in fires between the 1st and 10th of January,” said Viktor Beltsov, a senior official. 
“Around 75 percent of fires were due to accidents often provoked by drinking binges,” he said. 
More than a thousand fires blazed in Russia overnight on New Year’s Eve, killing 135 people. 
Almost as many fires occurred during the next 24 hours, killing 184 people, the ministry said. 
Despite many warnings from firemen, Russians are often victims of accidents with easily-available firecrackers and fireworks during this period. 
Around 50 people die daily from fires in Russia, with the annual toll ranging between 18,000 and 20,000, Beltsov said. 

Call to Find Reporter
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York-based press watchdog called on Russia on Tuesday to do more to solve the disappearance of an investigative reporter who went missing in St. Petersburg in June 2004. 
The Committee to Protect Journalists said the investigation into Maxim Maximov’s whereabouts had stalled, with prosecutors giving no information on how the investigation had developed. 
The committee said he was last seen going to meet a source in St. Petersburg on June 29, 2004, and that his car was found at a local hotel a month later. 
Russian media have said that Maximov, a reporter for the weekly magazine Gorod, was looking into possible police corruption. (AP)
Klebnikov Case

MOSCOW (AP) — The court trying the two suspected killers of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov accused one of the defense lawyers of impeding the court proceedings Wednesday and then ordered a weeklong break. 
Moscow City Court Judge Marina Komarova accused lawyer Ruslan Koblev of a breach of ethics in the closed-door trial that began Tuesday, and referred him to the Moscow bar association. 
A court spokeswoman said Koblev had “crudely infringed on the norms of the professional code, and also court orders,” RIA-Novosti reported.
The trial’s next session was scheduled for next Wednesday. 

Pope Meets Victims
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI met Wednesday with a group of 30 children who survived the 2004 hostage crisis in Beslan, greeting them and posing for a photograph with them. 
The children, all wearing blue caps, attended the pope’s 90-minute public audience at the Vatican and met privately with him. 
Italy’s civil defense department, which had sent rescuers to Beslan during the hostage crisis, brought the children to Italy for a weeklong trip, which also included visits to the Colosseum, a top-league Serie A football match in Milan and a trip to Venice. (AP)

Missing United Russians
MOSCOW (SPT) — United Russia last year purged its membership of 38,000 people who did not exist, said Andrei Vorobyov, head of the party’s executive committee, Vedomosti reported Wednesday.
The party removed the names before the Justice Ministry’s Federal Registration Service began a check last year to make sure that national parties met new membership requirement rules, he said. The rules came into effect Jan. 1.
A registration service spokesman said checks also were carried out last year on the Communist, Rodina and Liberal Democratic parties. Checks will soon start on Yabloko and the Pensioners Party, he said.

TITLE: Power Station Issues Report On 2005
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Leningrad Nuclear Power Station, or LAES, located in the town of Sosnovy Bor, 80 kilometers west of the city, produced 22 billion 143 million kilowatt-hours in 2005, according to the plant’s annual news report, released on Thursday.
LAES supplies approximately 40 percent of St. Petersburg’s electricity. It employs over 10,000 people in a town of 60,000 and provides up to 80 percent of Sosnovy Bor’s revenues.
The plant has four RBMK-1000 Chernobyl-type reactors. Three of them are currently in operation, while the fourth is undergoing repairs aimed at prolonging its life span.
Dmitry Artamonov, head of the local branch of the international environmental organization Greenpeace said plans to prolong the life-spans of outdated reactors, without having carried out environmental tests are dangerous.
The report said no leaks were registered during the year, and radiation levels didn’t exceed the norms.
But the report didn’t mention the highly-publicized accident on Dec.15 of last year, when two workers died from severe burns after molten metal splashed out of the electrically heated furnace at Ecomet-S, a private enterprise processing some of the plant’s non-radioactive and low-radioactive waste. Ecomet-S is located on the surrounding territory of the plant.
Oleg Bodrov, head of the Greenworld environmental group located in the town of Sosnovy Bor and engaged in monitoring the work of the plant, said LAES should not have allowed a private enterprise to deal with its waste, even if the waste is not highly radioactive. Bodrov said Ecomet-S operates without having passed independent environmental checks.
Bodrov also said this is not the first such accident at Ecomet-S. “A similar incident took place there on the night of Aug. 17 - 18, 2002 leaving two workers injured, and there have been more incidents,” Bodrov said. 
Despite LAES’s reassuring comments about the normal radiation levels, Greenworld’s Bodrov said long-term environmental and genetic research shows that pine trees near LAES have cito-genetic deviation levels that are almost three times higher than pine trees located 30 kilometers closer to St. Petersburg.
The report also didn’t cover the plant’s storage facilities, which are overloaded by more than 40 percent.
“The station’s overloaded storage site is located only 90 meters from the Gulf of Finland,” Artamonov said.

TITLE: Synagogue Rampage Leaves 8 Wounded
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova, Kevin O’Flynn and Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A man wielding a hunting knife went on the rampage at a Moscow synagogue on Wednesday evening, stabbing eight men, including an Israeli and a U.S. citizen.
The attack, which witnesses, prosecutors and Jewish leaders called anti-semitic, came a year after President Vladimir Putin expressed shame over a rise in anti-Semitism in Russia during commemorations at Auschwitz.
In a statement released by the St. Petersburg Jewish Community on Thursday, the organization said it had been shocked by the attack.
“The stabbing is all the more outrageous because it was carried out during prayers,” wrote the community’s spokesman Moyshe Treskunov. “It is a litmus test for the Russian government. If the authorities fail to react to growing nationalism and turn a blind eye to the problem, extremists take it as an encouragement and become reckless.”
The attacker, who had a shaved head and wore a leather jacket, shouted “I came here to kill! I came here to kill!” as he ran past guards into the Chabad Synagogue at 6 Bolshaya Bronnaya Ulitsa, near Pushkin Square in central Moscow, at 5:30 p.m. and stabbed worshipers, witnesses said.
“The attack is the result of the development of nationalist ideology, which remains unpunished and out of control,” reads the statement. “It would be wrong to think that extremists are exclusively against the Jews. The problem is bigger than simple anti-semitism. The recent series of attacks on ethnic minorities and antifascists in St. Petersburg demonstrates that extremists target anyone who doesn’t share their views.”
A secretary at the Moscow synagogue who gave only her first name, Tatyana, said by telephone that she was in the office and heard people screaming as the man stabbed them.
The man was wrestled to the ground by the synagogue’s chief rabbi, Yitzak Kogan, his son, a guard, and several worshipers, and they held the man until police arrived, she said.
Moscow City Prosecutor Anatoly Zuyev said eight people were injured and that three were foreigners: U.S. and Israeli citizens and a Tajik citizen.
The chief rabbi’s son-in-law, who is also a rabbi, was also wounded and undergoing surgery, The Associated Press reported.
The injuries ranged from light to medium, but none was life-threatening, Interfax reported, citing doctors. The wounded ranged in age from 21 to 75 and were taken to Sklifasovsky First Aid Hospital, Botkin Hospital and City Hospital No. 33, Interfax said.
St. Petersburg’s Great Choral Sinagogue has increased security measures following the Moscow attack. More guards have been hired to patrol the temple and security at the entrance has been tightened up. “We haven’t yet contacted the city police or authorities for help,” Treskunov said. “After all, we feel that protection of its citizens is an integral responsibility of every state.”
Borukh Gorin, a spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, said the stabbings took place in a room close to where evening prayers were about to start, the Associated Press reported. Zuyev, who arrived at the scene shortly after the attack, said the suspected attacker was a 20-year-old Moscow resident and that he was being questioned at the nearby police precinct No. 83. Media reports later identified the suspect as Alexander Koptsev. Interfax said late Wednesday that after being questioned Koptsev was hospitalized at Sklifasovsky with unspecified injuries. The report did not say how the injuries had been inflicted but described them as moderate. It was unclear whether Koptsev had been charged.
Zuyev said investigators had classified the attack as “inflicting injuries out of ethnic or religious hatred,” which under the Criminal Code carries a maximum punishment of 12 years in prison.

TITLE: Duma Hears Salary Plans For Army
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Soldiers’ salaries were increased 15 percent this month and will grow by 25 percent next year, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday.
But Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov complained that “the social status of servicemen was still unsatisfactory,” hurting morale and the military’s prestige.
The two spoke at the State Duma, which reconvened Wednesday.
As of this month, a sergeant earns 6,000 rubles ($210) and a lieutenant makes 9,600 ($330). Kudrin said the pay would grow by 10 percent next January and 15 percent in November of that year, with the aim of increasing salaries by 150 percent by 2009.
As salaries go up, soldiers will lose monthly rations of canned foods or the cash equivalent, Kudrin said. “Food compensation should be left in the past,” he said.
Ivanov, who also serves as deputy prime minister, told reporters inside the Duma that soldiers needed assistance in addition to the pay rises, saying that more than 130,000 families did not have apartments, while 31,000 required better housing.
Ivanov also said the Cabinet would submit four bills before April that would cut compulsory military service from two years to one starting in 2008 and amend the rules of the compulsory service. He said the bills, ordered by President Vladimir Putin in December, would cancel some exemptions but those “for students will be 100 percent preserved.”

TITLE: GlobeTel’s Wireless Ambition
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: GlobeTel Wireless is to start building wireless networks in the city as part of a $600 million pan-Russian project providing “highly affordable” and high-speed internet access, the company said December 30. GlobeTel, a subsidiary of American telecoms firm GlobeTel Communications, plans its first installation in April of this year.
“Russia will quickly and at a relatively modest cost, have a wireless infrastructure that will rival any in the industrialized world,” said GlobeTel’s CEO Tim Huff in a company press release. 
GlobeTel, who will be utilizing up-and-coming WiMax technology for their networks, said the project would take up to 27 months to finish. According to the statement, the company will manage the completed network and retain an ongoing 50 percent shareholding in the operation.
The network will be able to provide voice-over IP telephony along with residential and business-based DECt service, Huff said.
 “DECt technology, particularly in conjunction with the low-cost VoIP service, is the key to delivering highly affordable wireless telephone and broadband access to areas with a limited or high cost service,” Huff added. 
Moscow-based Internafta will pay a total $600 million to acquire and install the networks. They regarded the deal as “significant”.
 “This initial step with GlobeTel …will prove to be significant for all of us in the relatively short-term,” Maxim Chernizov, one of the founding principals of Internafta said according to the GlobeTel press release.
According to GlobeTel, the company’s goal is to obtain 10 million subscribers during the first three years of operations. 
GlobeTel believes they will be able to capture up to 30 percent of the current market, suggesting a monthly subscription fee of $35-50.
“The Russian internet market is severely limited by a lack of infrastructure and by the high cost to individual users of obtaining high speed internet access, even in those relatively rare cases where it is available,” Huff said.
“Given our highly competitive cost base and pricing strategy, we are optimistic that we are able to meet, or exceed, this target,” said a GlobeTel statement issued January 6.
Analysts said the wireless WiMax technology, which has been present on the Russian market less then a year, is the next step after WiFi and has great potential.
“In the future no provider with appropriate resources and frequencies will be able to ignore WiMax – its presence in the service portfolio will be a key one,” said Anna Orlova, telecom analyst of J’Son&Partners management in an emailed statement Thursday.
However many experts do not share GlobeTel’s optimism, calling the company too ambitious.
“GlobeTel is not a “unique” player on the market and will encounter tough competition, as there are around 280 wireless access providers in Russia at the moment and we anticipate many new entrants in 2006,” said Konstantin Ankilov, an analyst with iKS-Consulting in a telephone interview Thursday.
“Besides, in Russia not only providers of wireless access, but also large telecom operators are showing interest in WiMax technology,” Ankilov added.
Orlova agreed that claims to attract 10 million subscribers seem rather unrealistic at present. 
“As I understand, GlobeTel will use technology combining WiFi and pre-WiMax. This won’t bring any significant profit in the near future, given the fact that there are several tens of thousands of public WiFi subscribers in Russia,” said Orlova.
Although the WiMax brand itself stands up well and acts as a good promotional tool, market players have yet to find a mass and profitable way of applying this technology, Orlova said.

TITLE: Gref Accuses Regions Over Cost of Communal Services
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Inflation may have been limited to 10.9 percent in 2005, but a report published by the Federal State Statistics Service on Wednesday has revealed that prices for communal and housing services increased three times as much. 
Prices for most categories of food and consumer products grew in line with the average consumer prices growth index or even slower, but communal, power and water supply monopolists’ services increased well over 30 percent.
According to RIA Novosti, head of the Ministry for Economic Development and Trade German Gref indicated the absence of competition in the markets for communal services, transport and power as a reason for the high rate of inflation.
He also accused regional authorities of increasing communal service prices. In November 2005 Gref proposed a decree prohibiting regional authorities from setting communal service prices, declaring it the exclusive responsibility of the federal government until 2009.
Experts disagree on the rationality of this move.
According to ITAR-TASS, the Minister for Regional Development Vladimir Yakovlev said that tariff growth in the communal and housing sector could not be artificially stopped since “only 50 percent of it depends on natural monopolies regulated by the government.”
“The other 50 percent of the tariff is the unregulated part, which depends on construction materials and metal prices,” Yakovlev said.
Chairman of the Committee for Natural Monopolies at the Federation Council, Mikhail Odintsov, said that on the contrary, limiting tariffs could stop inflation in this sector of the national economy, RIA Novosti reported.
Andrey Zaostrovtsev, leading research officer at the Leontief Centre for Social and Economic Research, said that if there were competition in the communal and housing industry, price regulation would be “useless and harmful.”
“As to natural monopolies’ services, there is experience abroad of leasing out networks on special terms,” he said.
However in Russia, Zaostrovtsev said, audit procedures were not conducted in relation to natural monopolies in the communal and housing sector, so it is impossible to say if current prices are rational.
A political analyst at Expert Severo-Zapad magazine, Vladimir Gryaznevich, explained that the “chronic disrepair of housing infrastructure leads to a sharp increase in spending, which is much faster than inflation.”
State regulation could not stop a growth in prices, Gryaznevich said. “It is possible to stop tariff growth, but it will only speed up the destruction of the communal and housing sector infrastructure,” he said.
“Current prices fully correspond to actual costs. They include the cost of preventative repairs and modernization, as well as the cost of failures in supply caused by a lack of repair,” Gryaznevich said. This year prices for communal services are likely to outpace inflation again, Zaostrovtsev said.

TITLE: Local Financier Set For State Role
AUTHOR: By Anna Sherbakova, Anatoly Temkin, Yelena Ragozina and Boris Grozovsky
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: One of St. Petersburg’s most influential financiers, Vladimir Kogan, has been appointed to the Russian government, two days after the sale of his stake in PSB. Kogan has taken on the post of Deputy Director of Rosstroi, which comprises the Federal Construction Agency and the Communal and Housing Services (CHS), in what experts perceive as the first step in what will be a glittering career in the state sector. 
Kogan has known President Vladimir Putin since the early 1990s. In 1994, structures closely associated with Kogan became shareholders in the Industrial and Construction Bank (PSB), which went on to become the central component of the St. Petersburg Banking House, with Kogan, the president of the Banking House, heading PSB’s board of directors. 
A source within the Banking House reported that Kogan hoped to become a member of the Federation Council, while a St. Petersburg banker who wished to remain nameless reported that he hoped to be appointed head of the Central Bank or one of the other state banks. 
In October 2005, however, Kogan was appointed general director of the Northwest directorate of Rosstroi, overseeing the construction of St. Petersburg’s dam. The project, which has an estimated cost of 10 billion rubles ($351 million) is being personally overseen by Putin. 
Kogan was able to achieve little while working on the project, according to Kirill Ivanov, director of the Dormost agency, as winter is unsuitable for construction. 
Kogan will continue to work on the dam project, according to Sergei Kruglik, head of Rosstroi. “We have to speed up the construction — if building work has been going on for 25 years, you either have to abandon it, or get it finished quickly,” Kruglik said. In 2004, Putin said that the dam should be completed by 2008. Kruglik said that in order to speed up the process, its manager would have to work within Rosstroi, adding that he had provided the initiative for Kogan’s appointment to Rosstroi. 
Kruglik said that when day-to-day management issues on the dam construction have been resolved, Kogan’s responsibilities will be broadened. 
“Kogan has a great understanding of finance and economics,” Kruglik said, adding that he would be overseeing one of the president’s priority national projects for the housing sector. 
Vatanyar Yagya, a deputy with St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly, said that during the 1996 governor elections Kogan supported both Anatoly Sobchak and Vladimir Yakovlev. For that reason he has good relations with both Yakovlev, who is currently the Regional Development Minister, and Putin’s administration, Putin having also supported Sobchak. 
A source at the Banking House said that the president, rather than Yakovlev, was behind the appointment. “Why would Yakovlev want a subordinate that can go over his head to deal with his superiors?” the source asked. An entrepreneur closely associated with Yakovlev also said that an appointment at such a high level could only be made with the support of the presidential administration. 
Kogan’s appointment cannot be seen as purely bureaucratic as Rosstroi is a state corporation with an annual budget of around 40 billion rubles ($1.4 billion). Similarly, Kogan is widely regarded as being in “quarantine” as he makes the transfer from being an entrepreneur into a bureaucrat, the entrepreneur said. He added that if the process of privatization is to be reversed, the state will need qualified managers such as Kogan.
The Chairman of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov at the end of November proposed the idea that a state construction corporation be created in order to control price rises in the housing sector in the event of the state providing support to mortgage schemes. 
“Demand will develop, but if we can’t increase supply, prices will simply take off,” Mironov said.
In order for Kogan to occupy a senior position within the government, he will have to build up a track record in state administration, the source at the Banking House said. This will take up to a year. 
“Rosstroi, for Kogan, is a step up the career ladder,” agreed a representative of the Presidential Social Chamber. “This is a very ambitious man, and in the same way that he became one of the most powerful bankers, he can now do the same in government service.” 
“An entrepreneur that has sold his business to the state has two options — he can go abroad or get involved in the implementation of major state projects,” said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies.

TITLE: Sibur Moves To Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Temkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: January 1 saw Gazprom-controlled ‘Sibur,’ the country’s largest petrochemical holding, begin work with a new judicial address in the northern capital. Local authorities anticipate Sibur to contribute around 2.5 billion rubles ($87.7 million) a year to the city budget.
According to Sibur representative Gennady Fedotov,   the company was previously  registered in Salekhard Yamal-Nenetsky Autonomous District, and the Sibur Holding office will stay in Moscow. 
Fedotov said that Sibur pays about 10 billion rubles a year to budgets on all levels, but refused to say how much would stay in St. Petersburg. 
A representative of the city’s legislative budget-finance committee, Vladimir Barkanov, affirmed that in 2006 the city could already expect Sibur to pay 2.5 billion rubles in taxes.
“The company will not move its operational activities, nor do they own any property in the city,” Barkanov said. 
Barkanov considered the reregistration of Sibur to be the result of an agreement between governor Valentina Matviyenko, and the director of Gazprom, Alexei Miller. 
According to the head of tax practice at Pepeliaev, Goltsblat and Partners’ St. Petersburg branch, Maria Andreyeva, the tax code states that the local part of profit-related tax is divided between those regions where the company is registered and carries out its activities. By this coefficient the division depends on the amount of office workers and property.
“If Sibur doesn’t move its head office, then city authorities will be in for a big disappointment,” Andreyeva said.

TITLE: ‘Day Watch’ Brings In Record Receipts
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The latest home-grown blockbuster to reach the country’s cinemas, “Dnevnoi Dozor,” or “Day Watch,” reaped more than $20 million in its first nine days, setting a new record for the Russian film industry, its distributor, Gemini Film International, said Wednesday.
What the film has brought in so far is already more than double the $9 million opening-week record set by the Afghan War epic “9 Rota,” or “Company 9,” released last September.
“So far, this is an unprecedented case,” said Alexander Kovalenko, a spokesman for Gemini. “We’ve done everything to ensure the film becomes the champion.”
A sequel to the 2004 blockbuster “Nochnoi Dozor,” or “Night Watch,” which was also directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the film is the second part of a trilogy based on a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko. In Lukyanenko’s best-selling fantasy thriller, present-day Moscow is turned into a battleground between the forces of good and evil. 
The 140-minute movie — produced at a cost of $4.2 million by state-owned Channel One — boasts 40 minutes of special effects, including a giant ferris wheel rolling down Moscow streets and the Ostankino television tower breaking in half.
In total, analysts estimate the film could bring in $35 million, more than double the $16 million generated by “Night Watch” in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
“Company 9” raked in a total of $25.61 million in the region, making it the country’s box-office champion so far.
Analysts attribute the box-office success of “Day Watch” to a heavy advertising campaign and the fact its release coincided with the start of the 10-day New Year’s holiday.
“Everything will be watched during the New Year,” said Sergei Lavrov, a box-office analyst with the Russian Film Business Today, an industry publication. Channel One did not disclose the film’s advertising budget, which Lavrov estimates was more than $3 million. 
Touted as “the first film of the year,” “Day Watch” was released at 2 a.m. on Jan. 1 across Russia and the CIS. Around 4.5 million viewers have seen the film so far, according to Gemini.

TITLE: State Battleship Maker Yantar Wins $1 Billion Indian Order
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — State-controlled battleship maker Yantar has won a government tender worth around $1 billion to build three frigates for India, sweeping the deal away from Kremlin-connected financier Sergei Pugachyov.
“The results [of the tender] were announced on Dec. 22 by the inter-ministerial commission. ... The contract signing is now under way between Rosoboronexport and the customer,” Yantar first deputy general director Vladimir Kiselyov said from company headquarters in Kaliningrad.
The deal would be worth no less than $1 billion, Kiselyov added. 
The Krivak-class frigates on order weigh 4,000 tons, are roughly 125 meters long and are equipped with advanced weapons systems capable of striking naval, aerial and coastal targets.
Rosoboronexport, which negotiates the vast majority of the country’s weapons export contracts, was not available for comment Tuesday.
The deal should be signed this year, Kiselyov said, adding that it would take 56 months to deliver the first frigate.
Winning the tender, Yantar beat off St. Petersburg-based rivals Severnaya Verf and Baltiisky Zavod by offering a better delivery schedule and a “better relationship with the Russian Navy,” Kiselyov said.
Both Severnaya and Baltiisky are controlled by United Industrial Corp., or OPK. In turn, OPK is owned by Mezhprombank, which is controlled by Pugachyov, who is also a Federation Council senator. 
OPK bought Baltiisky last year, ending a long-running rivalry with Severnaya Verf for export contracts. Baltiisky itself had completed a similar deal worth $1 billion with India back in 2004. 
Kiselyov said Yantar would build the same class of frigate as Baltiisky. A Mezhprombank spokesman was not able to comment Tuesday.
The Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation with Foreign Countries refused to comment.
“For Yantar, this contract is a real chance to remain a player in the market,” said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a defense think tank. “It looks like the Russian military too would prefer to have competing shipmakers at a time when the government is trying to bring them together.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Pyaterochka Sales 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg)  — Pyaterochka Holding NV, Russia’s largest supermarket chain, said sales rose 23 percent last year after it opened new stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the country’s two biggest cities.
Net revenue rose to $1.36 billion, the company said Thursday in a Regulatory News Service statement, from about $1.1 billion a year ago. Pyaterochka in December slashed its sales forecast for the year by as much as 19 percent, to between $1.3 billion to $1.35 billion, triggering a 35 percent drop in the company’s shares, their biggest one-day decline ever.

Micex Benchmark
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange Index gained Thursday. Lukoil, the country’s largest crude oil producer, and Sberbank, the biggest lender, rose.
The ruble-denominated Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, or Micex, advanced 1.6 percent to 1,105.01.
Lukoil rose 1.1 percent to $64.70. Crude oil gained for a second day on concern a dispute between Iran, OPEC’s second largest producer, Europe and the U.S. over its nuclear program may escalate. 
Oil for February delivery advanced 0.9 percent to $64.49 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Surgutneftegaz, the fourth-biggest oil company, advanced 1.8 percent to $1.295. Tatneft, Russia’s No. 6 oil producer, rose 2.8 percent to $3.70.
Sberbank gained 3.7 percent to $1.530, set for an all-time high. The shares have jumped 17 percent in the past three sessions on optimism the state-controlled bank will benefit from rising demand for loans and banking services.
Kazakhstan Exports 
n ASTANA (Bloomberg) — Kazakhstan increased crude oil and gas condensate exports by 0.7 percent to 47.9 million metric tons in the first 11 months of last year from the same period a year earlier, Interfax reported, citing the national statistics agency.
Oil product exports rose 51 percent to 3.3 million tons in the first 11 months, the news services said. Kazakhstan raised 2005 gasoline production, including aviation fuel, 22 percent to 2.4 million tons for the whole of 2004, the news service said. Fuel oil output rose 31 percent to 3.6 million tons; kerosene production fell 16 percent to 248,600 tons; gasoil output rose 27 percent to 3.7 million tons.
Kazakhstan raised crude oil production 1.2 percent to 51.3 million tons from 2004, Interfax said. Gas condensate extraction rose 21 percent to 10.7 million tons, the news service said.

Azerbaijan Cuts Gas
BAKU (Bloomberg) — Azerbaijan cut its natural gas imports from Russia by 8 percent to 4.5 billion cubic meters last year, Interfax reported, citing an unidentified official at State Oil Co. of Azerbaijan, or Socar.
Gazprom sold gas to Azerbaijan at $60 per 1,000 cubic meters last year and will charge $110 this year. Gazprom will supply 4.5 billion cubic meters to Azerbaijan this year, the news service said.
Azerbaijan consumes about 14 billion cubic meters of gas a year, Interfax said.

Vodka Supplies Low
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will start running out of vodka in two weeks if the government doesn’t figure out how to issue the excise stamps required under a new law, Vedomosti said, citing producers and officials.
Vodka makers haven’t been able to produce this year and inventories are being depleted because of the confusion, the newspaper said. The Federal Tax Service can’t distribute the stamps that have already been printed because the Finance Ministry hasn’t drafted regulations for how to do so, as required under a law approved on Dec. 21, Vedomosti said.
The ministry’s press department couldn’t say when the regulations would be ready or who in the ministry was responsible for drafting them, the paper said. Nobody at the Finance Ministry was immediately available to comment when Bloomberg called Thursday.

Moldova’s Kiev Buy
CHISINAU (Bloomberg) — Moldova is buying natural gas from Ukraine after Gazprom cut supplies of the fuel at the beginning of the year, Interfax reported, citing Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev.
Moldova pays $80 per 1,000 cubic meters to Ukraine, the same price it paid last year to Gazprom, the news service said. Moldova plans to secure gas supplies from Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan.
The Moldovan government and Gazprom are in talks about a new gas-supply contract for this year, the news service said.

Record Reserves
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s foreign currency and gold reserves, the world’s sixth-biggest, rose to a record $182.2 billion at the end of 2005 as revenue increased from oil exports. The reserves, which have surged more than 46 percent from last year, increased by at least $57.7 billion last year, the country’s central bank said Thursday in an e-mailed statement in Moscow. The reserves were at $182.3 billion as of Jan. 6, the bank said.

TITLE: A Strange Year Ends in Phantasmagoria
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Everybody in Russia long ago got used to the fact that the consequences of decisions often turn out to be far from those intended by the people who made the decisions in the first place. But even with that as a given, it is still true that certain consequences of certain decisions here are difficult to perceive in any context other than utter phantasmagoria.
The most curious thing about this is that concepts from utterly different ideological planes can apparently live together in perfect harmony in the minds of Russian leaders.
First, the former German Chancellor Gerhard Shroder was invited to take a key post in a pipeline project of state-controlled Gazprom. This was at least more or less understandable — indeed, it fit nicely into the accepted mindset of today’s Russian bureaucrats: A former politician, who had actively lobbied on behalf of a project and in fact pushed it through literally a week before his departure after losing an election, acquires as his reward a nicely remunerated job. There is no great dissonance in such a story.
But with the invitation of former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans to join the management of Rosneft, there was something surprising from the word “go.” For if you believe the widely circulating suggestions (supposedly confirmed by President Vladimir Putin himself), then the replacement for the modestly declining Evans would not be just anybody, but the all-powerful deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration, Igor Ivanovich Sechin (now nicknamed “the real Igor Ivanovich” to distinguish him from presidential aide Igor Ivanovich Shuvalov). The real Igor is, putting it mildly, not a man known for pro-Western (not to mention pro-American) sentiments. This is a man who, by several accounts, served as one of the key ideational locomotives, consistently and on principle, in the railroading known as the Yukos affair. 
We should recall that one of the reasons for the fall of the Yukos chief was that he wanted to raise the capitalization of his company by bringing its accounting practices into line, entering Western financial markets and even selling part of the company to a powerful U.S. oil corporation (this is beyond his involvement in Russian domestic politics and his purchase of State Duma deputies). And now, while Khodorkovsky was sewing quilt jackets in a Chita prison, the best components of Yukos have gone to Rosneft and people have begun to talk about Rosneft issuing an IPO on the London Stock Exchange. 
And simultaneously with that — literally during the same span of days — a discussion has been going on about how foreigners aren’t suitable for leading positions in Russian extractive firms since their very presence there would give them access to state secrets, such as data on oil reserves. I emphasize that all of this — the Evans invitation and the talk about state secrets — comes from the same source. Or to take another example, last week Putin came out with a remarkable two-in-one formula: Having announced the necessity of “transparency” of information on Russian mineral reserves, he immediately made a statement negating what he had just said — since, well, this transparency should not violate the interests of national security.
The broader context of the discussion of all these problems looks no less contradictory. Take the case of the Evans invitation: It was practically a summons to a foreigner to take up a government position at the same time the Duma was considering a bill on NGOs that included provisions for tight restrictions on foreign financing for such organizations. And at the center of the Duma’s harsh criticism was financing coming largely from the United States. And the U.S. Congress came out with a resolution at the same time against the proposed Russian law.
It is also worth recalling that it was only recently that we saw a furious propaganda campaign — a campaign carried out with the active participation of highly placed government types — against the adoption of Russian children by foreigners. This campaign bore an undisguised anti-American character. And in all this wild collection of completely disparate actions, announcements and intentions nobody sees anything contradictory? Is this not all quite absurd? 
The most amazing thing of all, if you please, is that by their very instincts the overwhelming majority of Russian politicians and upper echelon bureaucrats are de facto pro-Western in orientation — that is, they understand that an IPO is the logical and sole economically correct path of development for a major corporation. And that doing it on the London stock market or on Wall Street is the best way to go. And they understand that confrontation is a losing option. Without the West and without the United States, Russia, with all its treasure trove of natural resources, has no real way to develop generally and no real way to exploit these resources in particular. And you can go further: These people also prefer to keep their money in the West, to buy property there and to send their children there to be educated. They likewise uniformly prefer to vacation at Western resorts rather than, say, some island off the coast of Iran.
So where does this split personality, this bifurcated consciousness, come from? As Gogol put it, “There is no answer.” You tell me.

Georgy Bovt is editor of Profil.

TITLE: Ringing the changes
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: During the Soviet-era, Russian bells rarely tolled. Now factories making bombs and ships have revived the skills needed to make new bells.
A decade ago, Andrei Sushko, a nuclear physicist from one of Russia’s top-secret cities, added another line to his resume: bellmaker. 
It all started in 1991, when Sushko was standing in an honor cordon welcoming the relics of St. Seraphim to their final resting place at the Diveyevo convent, near the closed nuclear research city of Sarov. The sound of bells accompanying the procession dumbfounded him, he said.
“Diveyevo had awful bells,” he said. “I really disliked their toll.”
Sushko couldn’t believe that was the sound that had inspired writers and artists in pre-revolutionary Russia, he said. It was then that he thought of trying his hand at bellfounding. With the help of his colleagues, he produced his first set of chimes a few years later.
“The idea was beautiful,” Sushko said of bellmaking, speaking by telephone from the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, the heart of the country’s nuclear program, located in Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16. “Everybody supported us,” he added.
Founded in 1946 on Stalin’s orders to create the first Soviet nuclear bomb, the center is effectively a self-sufficient town with a string of labs and plants, including its own casting facilities.
Now, more than 100 bells from Sarov’s nuclear center adorn churches across Russia, including the country’s northernmost church, on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic, Sushko said.
The largest bell he has made weighed 9 tons and the smallest just 6 kilograms, he said. The origins of the centuries-old art of bellmaking in Russia are shrouded in the haze of time. The first mention dates back to 1066, when the First Novgorod Chronicle records an enemy prince seizing the town of Novgorod and claiming its bells as spoils of war. Bellmaking was slowed by the Mongol invasion in the 13th century but was later revived and began to flourish.
Rung today primarily for marking holidays and calling the faithful to worship, bells played a far greater role in pre-1917 Russia, when they were often the sole means of announcing news across vast open spaces.
By the early 20th century, more than 100 companies across the country were producing just under 2 million tons of bells per year, according to Metallurgical Bulletin. 
Pre-revolutionary Russia produced a wide range of bells, such as sleigh bells and ship bells, with church bells accounting for half of total production, according to the bulletin. 
Fierce atheism brought about by the 1917 Revolution took a heavy toll on the industry. The last bellmaking facility is generally believed to have been shut down in 1930. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the revival of the industry was just a matter of time.
Nikolai Pyatkov, from the small Urals town of Kamensk-Uralsky, said he became the first post-Soviet bellmaker when he registered a bell foundry, Pyatkov and Co., in 1991. A metal caster by training, Pyatkov said he was also the only professional caster in the country. 
“Apart from casting, I know nothing else in my life,” he said recently by telephone.
Pyatkov worked in rented premises until he opened his own plant in 2003, and he now employs 30 people. Since 1991, his company has produced more than 1,000 bells, including some for St. Basil’s Cathedral and churches in the United States and Greece. 
Last year, Pyatkov and Co. produced 120 tons of bells, tripling the amount it produced in 2002. By comparison, he said the largest bell-maker in Europe produced 90 tons of chimes per year. 
Pyatkov said his firm would also make 120 tons this year, a sign that demand was slowly leveling off.
“The boom is over,” said Nikolai Kislitsyn, the editor of Metallurgical Bulletin.
The market in Russia is coming of age and has started to emphasize quality over quantity, with those less qualified or less determined dropping out, experts said. About six companies churn out bells now, Kislitsyn said, down from 10 enterprises just a few years ago. A Voronezh-based firm called Vera is the only company that Pyatkov said could compete with his firm.
Between them, they control 80 percent of the market, Pyatkov said, estimating its total volume to be about 250 to 300 tons of bells per year. With 1 kilogram of bells costing $15 on average, he said, the value of the market could be estimated at $3.7 million to $4 million.
The largest bell produced by Pyatkov’s firm weighed 9 tons and cost a customer 2.5 million rubles ($86,745). However, his business does not ring up huge profits, he said.
“This is a typical small business with all the problems associated with it,” he added.
And then there are the bigger enterprises, for which bellmaking is a mixture of business, a clever marketing gimmick and a spiritual affair. 
Automobile plant ZiL and shipyard Baltiisky Zavod make bells at their giant casting facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg, respectively.
“For us, this is an absolutely unprofitable business,” said Igor Savelyev, a spokesman for Baltiisky Zavod. 
The first bell, weighing 1.2 tons, was made for Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998, Savelyev said. About 200 bells have been cast at the shipyard since then, he said.
It was the shipyard that was entrusted with making the modern Tsar Bell, which at 72 tons is Russia’s largest functioning bell. It was hoisted into the country’s tallest belfry, in the Moscow region town of Sergiyev Posad, in January 2004. 
It took five months, nine furnaces and 100 tons of bell metal — a time-honored bronze alloy of copper and tin — to produce a rough copy of the 200-ton Tsar Bell on display at the Kremlin, Savelyev said.
The Federal Nuclear Center’s Sushko firmly believes in the peacemaking mission of the bells.
“The bells will save the world,” he said.
Asked whether he saw any incongruity in combining nuclear weapons manufacturing with making chimes, he said: “Both are for the good of Russia.”

TITLE: Chernov’s Choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Although it is sometimes said there are enough oil dollars in Russia to tempt international acts, both big and small, to perform here, the tentative schedule of concerts in 2006 shows that few exciting new performers are planning the trip. As in recent years, the emphasis is on either forgotten or recently reformed Western bands that have few fans outside Eastern Europe.
This trend will be epitomized by a concert called “World Heroes of Rock” at the Ice Palace, the city’s largest performance venue.
This year’s “heroes” will be hard rockers Uriah Heep, Nazareth, U.D.O. and Tony Martin Band, and the German disco band Supermax. (What makes Martin a “hero” is probably his stint as Black Sabbath’s vocalist in the band’s post-Osbourne, pre-Dio period between 1989 and 1991.)
Uriah Heep, recently called “the worst band in the world” by the British music monthly Word, will also tour Ukraine, performing in cities such as Odessa, Donetsk and Kharkiv. The promoters announced that the “World Heroes of Rock” concert, the fourth to be held in the city, is now fixed as an annual event. It will take place at the Ice Palace on Feb. 23.
However, the city’s most-talked-about-concert-by-aging-rockers has to be that by The Rolling Stones.  The group making its St. Petersburg debut at the Kirov Stadium on June 13. The Stones’ only show in Russia to date was in Moscow in 1998.
Depeche Mode will return to the city for the third time and perform at the Sports and Concert Complex (SKK) on March 3. The British band opens a massive European tour in Dresden, Germany, this Friday to promote its recent album, “Playing The Angel.” 
Two more 1980s bands — A-Ha and Simple Minds — will follow. Hailing from Norway, A-Ha, best known for hit songs such as “Take on Me” and “Hunting High and Low,” reformed in 1998. Simple Minds, whose peak was its performance at Live Aid in 1985, released its last album  last  September. A-Ha  perform at the Ice Palace on March 24, while Simple Minds, who are not as well known in St. Petersburg, play at the less spacious Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on April 3.
The U.S. band Fun Lovin’ Criminals, which performed at the beer restaurant Tinkoff when it came to the city in 2004, was so popular with the Russian audience that its forthcoming show has been scheduled to be held at the 3,000-capacity Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa on March 11.
On the less  mainstream  front, the Romania-born, Britain-based violinist Alexander Balanescu is due to perform in March; Painkiller, the improv-noise trio of saxophone player John Zorn, bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Yoshida Tatsuya, arrive in late May (no exact dates or venues have yet been set) while the Kronos Quartet will perform June 3.
However, the most refreshing report (if confirmed) is that The Arcade Fire, a new and happening band from Montreal, Canada, will probably make it to the city some time in 2006.
See gigs for this week’s events.

TITLE: Squaring the circle
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Soviet porcelain of the post-Revolutionary era marries art and commerce.
As part of its annual “Christmas Gift” cycle of eyecatching exhibitions, the State Hermitage Museum is displaying until March a unique collection of porcelain created in St. Petersburg after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Drawn from the repository of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, which is now under the stewardship of the Hermitage, the show is sure to become the hit of the season.
The factory, which traces its history to the middle of the 18th century, was nationalized after the Revolution and later in the Soviet era became well-known internationally as the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory. 
Now a private company trading on its imperial roots, it might seem absurd for the Hermitage to present works produced at the factory under Bolshevik diktat. It isn’t — and that’s because the works are of the highest artistic merit. 
The exhibition features about 250 predominantly authentic works of porcelain and 15 sketches from between 1918 and the mid-1930s. 
This was period when Soviet Russia searched for ways to legitimize the new order, as well as ways of “decorating” it, through the means of both visual and applied art. 
For example, one of the exhibits — a famous Nathan Altman sketch — illustrates the fact that artists were invited to decorate Palace Square to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918. 
That year many artists — among them many noticeable figures of the time such as Altman, Ivan Puni, Vladimir Lebedev, Alexander Samokhvalov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin — were attracted to the porcelain factory to produce agit-prop art which embodied the tenets of the new state.
Revolutionary slogans, political maxims and aphorisms from posters on the street were transferred to plates, dishes, cups, and saucers. 
Small white porcelain forms were burdened with such quasi-biblical exaltations as “The Kingdom of Workers and Peasants Shall Have No End” or such visual and verbal didactic statements as “Our Morality is Born of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat” and “Only Labor, and Labor until Bloody Blisters [are formed] Will Bring Us Final Victory.” Sometimes such rhetoric and its visualization looks too heavy for fragile porcelain. 
The appearance in 1923 of Suprematist artists at the factory, then, was a fresh and fruitful development in which art and the porcelain medium perfectly combined. 
Thus, the porcelain produced by the master of the genre Kazimir Malevich and his pupils Ilya Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin forms the main emphasis of the exhibition.
This also explains the sly pun of its title “Around the Square” (“Vokrug Kvadrata”) invoking works produced alongside Malevich’s signature masterpeice “The Black Sqaure” as well as the sqaures and circles of Suprematism.
Like the Bolsheviks, Suprematist artists also had ambitions to change the world, expressed in the harmless maxim: “To liberate art from the ballast of the representational world.” 
Besides pure geometry of design, the artists, following the same principle of the “supremacy of forms,” began to experiment with form. 
This was a breakthrough because before then, in the early ‘20s, tsarist-era white porcelain (so called “linen”) was still the main material with which artists worked. 
But Malevich designed gripping Suprematist “half-cups” and a teapot with a lid. The latter, according to the impression of the artist contemporaries, resembles a steam locomotive. White, geometric porcelain forms became perfect bearers of the fundamental visual grammar of Suprematism (squares and circles) in the works of Ilya Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin. Suetin’s work takes up almost half of the exhibition as he was associated with the factory the longest period. 
In the late ‘20s, along with the Suprematist series of experiments (“Inkwell with Lid,” the “Architecton” vase), Suetin, like his teacher, addressed — not without political pressure, it may be assumed — figurative painting.
In stylistic terms, “Around the Square” is heterogeneous and this indicates that during the ‘20s Soviet Russia was finding its aesthetic feet. The exhibition shows that the State wasn’t strong enough to insist on only one style (although later it was, and this became known as Socialist Realism) and for a while tolerated very different artists and concepts. 
During one period and at one factory the abstraction of Vasiliy Kandinsky and the pure geometry of Suetin, is joined by the figurative work of Mikhail Adamovich or Sergei Chekhonin; the decorative and inventive style of Nikolai Lapshin contrasts with the straight, narrative work of Zinaida Kobilezkaya or Maria Lebedeva. 
From its inception under Catherine the Great, almost all the pocelain produced by the Imperial Porcelain Factory was geared for export markets and this continued in the Soviet era: the porcelain on show at “Around the Square” was not aimed at ordinary Soviet citizens (it was too expensive). As in tsarist Russia, the factory satisfied the needs of the country’s leaders. In a sense the factory was always able to perfectly combine ideology with commerce. With the help of such art during the Soviet-era, the new ideology itself became a commodity with which Soviet government made either economic or symbolic capital.   
 
“Around the Square” at the State Hermitage Museum (Room 152) runs through March 19. www.hermitage.ru

TITLE: Mix and match
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Although the musical part of the International Arts Square Winter Festival has now drawn to a close, the State Russian Museum will continue to attact visitors with its contribution to the event — an enormous and quite involved exhibition called “Collage in Russia: The 20th Century.” 
The show took two years to prepare and comprises 400 paintings, drawings, sculptures and applied art objects from the collections of St. Petersburg and Moscow museums and private collections, as well as works by living artists. 
“This is the first ever large-scale experimental project realized in the Russian Museum,” its organizers said in a press release. The core of the experiment is that the curators intended to show collage as more than a narrowly defined artistic genre from a certain era and employing specific techniques. The Russian Museum went further and presented “its own version of the development” of collage on the basis of the whole of Russian 20th century art. Perhaps for this reason the huge exhibition is arranged in two separate spaces.
Collage was introduced by Pablo Picasso when he glued a piece of oilcloth to a cubist still life in 1912. The use of foreign materials in paintings was very inventive and, as art history shows, was hugely influential. 
Begining with Dadaists, Surrealists, and Constructivists, collage may include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of glass or colored papers, photographs, or just “found objects,” that are glued to a solid support or canvas. 
Today collage holds a permanent place in the lists of major artistic media, along with drawing, painting, prints and sculpture. And as the show perfectly demonstrates, it is totally applicable in the Russian art tradition.
Since collages’ first appearance in Russia in 1913, many more artists would approach the medium, continuing to do so to this day.
The first “classical” part of the exhibition deals with traditional two-dimensional objects. It features collages, decoupages and photomontages as well as mixed media objects (sketches for posters, home-made pieces or amateur caricatures). 
Perhaps to stress thematic continuity, the curators have mixed the works of Alexei Kruchyonikh, Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klucis, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalya Goncharova with works of contemporary artists such as Aleksandr Florensky, Aleksey Khvostenko (Khvost) and Valery Koshlyakov. 
The second part appeals more to “collage thinking” rather than to its technique, a style that, according to the curators, could even be three-dimensional thanks to its principle of joining heterogeneous materials within one work of art. It features assemblages, sculptures and sculptural objects, installations and “digital collages.”
Again, there are a lot of notable names and remarkable works: the fascinating sculptural objects of Konstantin Simun; Timur Novikov’s “carpets”; Oleg Khvostov’s self portrait; Dmitri Kaminker’s sculpture of Soviet commissar Felix Dzerzhinsky; the exciting “Islam Project” by Moscow’s AES-group; and so on. 
A drawback of the show is that under one title the curators equate “collage technique” with “collage thinking.” The two are conceptually quite different and there is difference between collages and assemblages, installations, sculptures on all many levels. There is also the etymological problem of the use of the term collage in some cases. “Collage” is originally a French term for pasted paper, that is, with the help of glue — and doesn’t make much sense in the term “digital collage,” for example.
These junctions and disjunctions would be an interesting subject for an exhibition, but, unfortunately, this isn’t it. 

“Collage in Russia: The 20th Century” runs through May 15 at the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum.

TITLE: C’est magnifique!
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Garcon
25 Canal Griboyedov. Tel: 570 0348
Open from midday until 1.00 a.m.
Menu in Russian, English and French.
Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two without alcohol 2,480 rubles ($87)

When you enter the French restaurant Garcon, you touch ornate wrought-iron banisters, inspired by the classic art nouveau metro entrances in Paris designed by Hector Guimard. The three small brightly lit rooms in this impeccable restaurant, which opened in November last year, captivate with soft bright red sofas and tasteful copies of French impressionist paintings. 
Garcon has yet to pass the test of time but this newcomer has arrived on the local gastronomic scene with all the attributes of a gourmet dining establishment. With true French style, its French chef charms guests with free treats to accompany  their meals. 
Haute cuisine reigns in Garcon. Oysters, homards, foie gras, asparagus, truffles, and fragrant herbs are featured prominently on the menu. Some of these ingredients made it even as far as into the desserts. Pineapple carpaccio with foie gras is a compelling example.
We found matching art nouveau ornamentation on the menu, dishes and curtains. The art nouveau theme is not overdone in the restaurant but is rather a flickering presence tastefully restrained. The sensual style, which  thrives with organic forms,  is also found in the presentation of some of the restaurant’s dishes  to turn dinner into an aesthetic experience. The restaurant’s angelic waiters are swift, delicate and helpful. 
Garcon’s chef accompanies each dish with a matching bread. St. Jacques scallops with fragrant herbs, mango and Pata Negra ham (650 rubles, $22.80) was served with “seafood bread,” topped with dried seaweed. But the charm of the dish lies in its tangy mustard cream sauce.
Garcon has a noticeable accent on seafood but visitors craving for red meat have much to explore, from baked veal fillet with saffron polenta (850 rubles, $29.80) to chateaubriand steak Rossini with sauce Pascal (1,750 rubles, $61.40) and venison filet with violet potatoes, cherry tomatoes and “corsa” sauce (950 rubles, $33.50).
Although lobster soup with lobster salad looked seductive, we decided on lentil and foie gras soup (280 rubles, $9.8) which proved a winning choice. Despite its expensive ingredients, the soup arrived in a large bowl, and would have been a meal in itself. Topped with black truffles, the rich soup had a thick puree-like texture and lingering foie gras taste. 
To return to the seafood theme, we ordered Sturgeon Goujonnette (850 rubles, $29.80), and its presentation reflected the chef’s creativity. The juxtaposition of grilled sturgeon and fried bacon was unorthodox but triumphant. Thin stripes of grilled courgette, drops of cream-curry sauce, fried bacon and slices of grilled sturgeon were layered in familiar curvy forms.
For once in a St. Petersburg restaurant, the music — soft French songs or lightweight classics — matched the ambience. One won’t hear the dread sound of pop in Garcon, a common plight in the vast majority of local restaurants, regardless of the class of their cuisine. 
For dessert creme brulee with rosemary (150 rubles, $5.20) is highly recommended. The dessert is tender with a classic caramel flavor, crispy crust with a hint of fragrant rosemary.
Pineapple carpaccio (200 rubles, $7) is served with zesty pineapple sorbet and two small balls of foie gras wrapped in caramel crisps. The contrasting ingredients work well together, while the juicy yet smooth sorbet deserves special praise. The sorbet, available in pineapple, raspberry, blackcurrent and other varieties, can be ordered separately as a dessert, as can homemade creamy vanilla and chocolate ice-cream made according to the chef’s own recipe.

TITLE: Iran Resumes Nuclear Program
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN — The British, French and German foreign ministers met Thursday to agree on a response to Iran’s resumption of nuclear activities, with Britain’s prime minister saying the West likely will push to refer a defiant Tehran to the UN Security Council. 
International impatience with Iran has grown since the country broke UN seals on its uranium enrichment plant Tuesday and said it was resuming nuclear research after a two-year freeze. The decision increased worries in the United States and other Western countries that Iran intends to produce nuclear weapons, while Russia, a longtime Iran ally, also expressed disappointment.
Enriched uranium can be used as a fuel for both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is only for fuel.
At stake as the foreign ministers gather is their countries’ two-year diplomatic effort to persuade Iran to halt its uranium conversion and enrichment activities.
A last-ditch round of European-Iranian talks had been scheduled for Jan. 18, but German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler said Wednesday that the Europeans cannot continue negotiating with Iran unless it pledges not to enrich uranium.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament on Wednesday that Iran’s latest move, coupled with a string of anti-Israel remarks by the country’s new president, “cause real and serious alarm right across the world.”
“I think the first thing to do is to secure agreement for a reference to the Security Council, if that is indeed what the allies jointly decide, as I think seems likely,” Blair said.
The three countries have been negotiating with the backing of the United States, which has been seeking Tehran’s referral to the Security Council.
“I think the next step will be probably to go before the UN Security Council,” U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News radio Wednesday. If that happens, Cheney said, sanctions “would be probably [be] the No. 1  item on the agenda.”
Russia and China, both members of the International Atomic Energy Agency board that would have to approve referring Iran to the Security Council, have previously opposed the idea.
However, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said Wednesday that Russia and the United States share “a deep disappointment over Tehran’s decision to leave behind the moratorium on all activities tied with uranium enrichment.”
China on Thursday urged more talks, without saying whether it would back taking Tehran to the Security Council.
China “hopes that all parties concerned can exercise restraint and resolve this within the IAEA framework and through peaceful negotiations,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Beijing. “We firmly believe this serves the interests of all parties concerned.”
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed to press ahead with the nuclear program.
“Unfortunately, a group of bullies allows itself to deprive nations of their legal and natural rights,” he said. “I tell those superpowers that, with strength and prudence, Iran will pave the way to achieving peaceful nuclear energy.”
“The Iranian nation is not frightened by the powers and their noise,” he said.

TITLE: Pope’s Would-be Assassin Let Out of Turkish Jail
AUTHOR: By Jon Hemming
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ISTANBUL — Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot and gravely wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, was released from a Turkish jail on Thursday after serving more than a quarter of a century behind bars. 
“Agca is now a free man. After 26 years Agca is now getting wet in the rain,” his lawyer Mustafa Demirbag told Reuters.
Agca’s motives in shooting the Pope in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square remain shrouded in mystery, but some believe he was a hitman for Soviet-era East European security services alarmed by the Polish-born Pontiff’s fierce opposition to communism.
An Italian ex-magistrate who probed the 1981 shooting says Agca could now be in danger because he knows too many secrets.
Casually dressed and looking solemn, Agca was first whisked from his Istanbul jail to a military base for medical checks. He clutched a picture of himself meeting Pope John Paul.
The army insists he must do his military service, a legal obligation for all Turkish men, but it was not immediately clear whether or when this would take place. He left the jail under heavy police guard, reflecting fears he might try to evade the draft as he did in the 1970s.
But his lawyers hope he will win a reprieve or else do a shorter stint because of his age.
Agca, now 48, served 19 years in an Italian prison for the assassination attempt before being pardoned at the Pope’s behest in 2000. He was then extradited to Turkey to serve a separate sentence in an Istanbul jail for robbery and murder.
Under new Turkish laws, his time served in Italy was deducted from the 25 years left on his sentence in Turkey for the 1979 murder of a liberal newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci.
His early release has triggered criticism in Turkey.
“Day of shame,” said the centrist Milliyet newspaper, for which the slain Ipekci worked. It criticized Justice Minister Cemil Cicek for not intervening to keep Agca behind bars longer.
Former Italian magistrate Ferdinando Imposimato said in Rome this week that Agca was now in danger.
“I think the Turkish government should guarantee Agca’s security because he knows so many secrets and he may be killed,” he said. “The best thing would be to keep him in jail.”
Imposimato said he was convinced the former Soviet KGB was behind one of the most notorious assassination attempts of the 20th century and that secret services were hiding the truth.
Agca has given conflicting reasons over the years why he raised his gun above the crowd in 1981 and shot the Pope. At his trial in Italy, he claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus and said the shooting was a fulfilment of a prophecy the Virgin Mary told children at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. Some 14 years after the trial, the Vatican said the Virgin had indeed made such a prophesy.
Prosecutors failed to prove charges that Bulgaria’s communist-era secret services had hired Agca to kill the Pope on behalf of the Soviet Union. 
The so-called “Bulgarian Connection” trial ended with an “acquittal for lack of sufficient evidence” of three Turks and three Bulgarians charged with conspiring along with Agca. 
Pope John Paul, who is credited by historians with helping the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, said on a trip to Bulgaria in 2002 that he had never believed the country was linked to the assassination bid. 
The Pope died last year aged 84. 
In the 1970s, Agca belonged to a right-wing militant faction and also had ties to Turkey’s criminal underworld. 
He was jailed in Turkey after killing Ipekci, but soon escaped with suspected help from sympathizers in the Turkish security apparatus. Turkey has always denied any official link with Agca and has dismissed him as mentally unstable. 
Agca claims that he is now a man of peace specially chosen by God. The Vatan newspaper quoted him on Thursday as saying he would write a “new Bible” after his release from jail.

TITLE: Assad Ordered Hariri Killing, Says Official
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Former Syrian vice president Abdel-Halim Khaddam has accused President Bashar al-Assad of ordering the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri. 
Asked if he thought Assad was directly responsible for Hariri’s killing in Beirut last February, Khaddam told Britain’s Sky Television in an interview broadcast on Thursday: “In my belief, yes, my personal belief is that he ordered it.”
“But at the end of the day there is an investigation. They must give the final decision,” he added.
Khaddam, who moved to Paris after resigning in June, has said in interviews since December that Assad had threatened Hariri shortly before he was killed in a car bombing on Feb. 14. Assad has denied the charge.
In December, Khaddam told Arabiya television that the killing of Hariri could not have been carried out by Syrian agents without Assad’s participation.
Assad is under intense international pressure to cooperate with a UN probe into the killing of Hariri. Syria said on Thursday it would not allow investigators to meet Assad.
Khaddam has said he seeks the overthrow of the Syrian government, and Syrian officials call him a traitor.

TITLE: Emboldened Democrats Grill Supreme Court Nominee
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Senators critical of the Bush administration aggressively questioned Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito on Wednesday. His wife briefly left the confirmation hearing in tears. 
In the third day of hearings, Democratic senators accused Alito of being evasive on issues ranging from abortion to presidential powers to past membership in a conservative alumni group at  Princeton University.
South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Alito: “I am sorry that you’ve had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this.”
While Alito appears headed for confirmation by the full Republican-led Senate later this month, several Democrats made clear that after a relatively gentle start of proceedings on Monday and Tuesday, they were waging an election-year fight.
Alito, pressed repeatedly about his membership two decades ago in the alumni group that opposed efforts to admit more women and minorities to the university, said, “I’m not any kind of a bigot.”
“I believe you,” Graham said.
At one point, Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, was crying in the crowded hearing room and then left. She returned about an hour later and sat behind her husband.
President George W. Bush has nominated Alito, 55, a federal appeals judge for the past 15 years, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, often the swing vote on abortion and other social issues on the nine-member court.
Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, began the day’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, saying he was troubled Alito had not disavowed a 1985 memo in which he wrote that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”
“I’m concerned that many people will leave this hearing with a question as to whether or not you could be the deciding vote that would eliminate the legality of abortion,” he said.
Alito, who wrote the memo as a Reagan administration attorney two decades ago, has not said how he would rule if abortion came before him on the high court. But the nominee reaffirmed his vow to keep an open mind and respect legal precedent and noted the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion had been upheld repeatedly.
Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said, “Judge Alito has responded, but he has not answered.”
Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee’s top Democrat, said Democrats were also troubled by what they saw as inconsistencies in many of Alito’s answers.
Alito listed membership in the since-disbanded alumni group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, or CAP, in a 1985 application for a job in the Reagan administration. He told the panel he had no recollection of any involvement with the group.
Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, quoted a 1983 essay, “In Defense of Elitism,” from the alumni group’s magazine that read, in part: “People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns, blacks and Hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and Hispanic.”
Alito, a member since 1990 of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, denounced the essay as offensive and said he did not know the group had promoted such positions.
Kennedy told reporters later that he was sceptical that Alito could not remember any involvement with CAP.

TITLE: ‘Mrs Smith’ Due to Have ‘Mr Smith’s’ Child
AUTHOR: By Erin Carlson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — If the two most gorgeous people in the world had a child, what would it look like? Angelina Jolie will answer that question this summer, when the bombshell “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” actress is due to give birth to boyfriend Brad Pitt’s baby. 
Pitt’s publicist, Cindy Guagenti, confirmed to The Associated Press on Wednesday that Jolie is pregnant with Pitt’s child. Jolie leaked the news to a charity aid worker while filming the political thriller “The Good Shepherd” in the Dominican Republic on Monday, People magazine reported.
Pitt, Hollywood heartthrob and former flame of actresses Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow, has also filed to be the adoptive father of Jolie’s two children, Maddox and Zahara.
But their new addition will be the glamorous couple’s first biological baby, a presumable shoo-in for “Sexiest Offspring Alive.”
That would follow in the parents’ footsteps. Jolie was named Esquire magazine’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” in 2004, while Pitt was named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1994 and 2000.
Dr. Lawrence Reed, a New York City-based plastic surgeon, said the child’s good genes will in all likelihood make his services unnecessary.
“You have a very beautiful mother with great bone structure,” said Reed. “You have a very handsome father with excellent bone structure and facial features. The genetic prediction would make this child have a greater chance by far of being what everyone would consider an attractive baby, an attractive person.”
Reed said he predicts Brangelina’s baby will be “much taller” than Pitt, who stands at 6 feet, and the 5 feet, 7 inches Jolie.
“The eyes will be incredible,” he said. “I can’t see this ever not working out.”
Dr. Stephen Marquardt, who studies human attractiveness and uses math to measure beauty ratios, disagrees, saying gene combinations can produce infinite possibilities, including less attractive results.
Nevertheless, Marquardt said he thinks there’s “probably a better chance that you can have pretty kids if you have pretty people.”
“I think if you kind of averaged their faces, you’d have a pretty reasonable looking kid,” said Marquardt. “She’s real exaggerated, he’s kind of plain.”
But in the end, as Dr. Jasper Rine, a genetics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, points out, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
“Based upon my many years of experience with genetics and as a parent, I can safely predict that the two parents will consider their baby beautiful.”

TITLE: Sharapova Ready For Australian Open
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia — Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova says she will battle through the pain of a long-standing shoulder injury when the Australian Open begins Monday. 
The former Wimbledon champion, who withdrew from last week’s Australian hardcourt championships on the Gold Coast because of the injury, said her doctors had advised her it would not get any worse by playing the year’s first grand slam. 
“I wouldn’t say it’s at 100 per cent, but the good thing is a month back I found out the cause of the problem,” Sharapova told reporters at a sponsors’ promotional event on Thursday. 
“Doctors tell me it can’t get any worse and I can keep playing. 
“I’ll have to suck it up and just try to do the best I can. 
“It can bother me, it can get tight, but I’m going to go through the pain and do everything I can to win.” 
The 18-year-old Russian, who lost to eventual champion Serena Williams in the semi-finals last year, was seeded fourth for the tournament. 
In the men’s draw, Andy Roddick was confirmed as the No. 2 seed, meaning he’ll avoid playing favorite Roger Federer unless they both make the final. 
With Federer so far in front in the rankings, and with world No. 2 Rafael Nadal sidelined with a left foot injury, most interest revolved around which man would be seeded second and assured of playing on the opposite side of the draw. 
Australian Open organizers listed the seeded players in the same order as their rankings, for both men’s and women’s draws. 
Local favorite Lleyton Hewitt, losing finalist here last season, was one beneath Roddick in the latest rankings and was given the No. 3 seeding. 
Masters Cup winner David Nalbandian was listed at No. 4, with Russian Nikolai Davydenko seeded fifth. 
The defending champion, Russia’s Marat Safin, withdrew because of a lingering left knee problem and four-time winner Andre Agassi is out with an ankle problem. 
All of the women’s top 10 are expected in Melbourne, with top-ranked Lindsay Davenport seeded No. 1, U.S. Open champion Kim Clijsters at No. 2, WTA Championship winner Amelie Mauresmo at No. 3, Sharapova at No. 4 and Mary Pierce — the 1995 Australian Open winner — at No. 5. 
French Open champion Justin Henin-Hardenne, who won the 2004 Australian Open, was seeded eighth. 
Venus Williams was seeded 10th and her younger sister, defending AustralianOpen champion Serena Williams, was seeded 13th. 
Clijsters and Petrova withdrew from the Sydney International on Wednesday because of injuries, but Australian Open chief executive Paul McNamee said both were expected to be fit to play in Melbourne. 

(Reuters, AP)

TITLE: Man U Move Raises Evra’s Cup Chances
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MANCHESTER — Patrice Evra hopes his move to Manchester United will help him secure a place in France’s squad for the World Cup finals later this year, the defender said on Thursday. 
Evra has been capped five times at full international level and believes his switch to Old Trafford will benefit him in his quest to remain in Raymond Domenech’s plans for the tournament in Germany. 
“I was consistent with my form at Monaco and by repeating that consistent form here, and hopefully playing as regularly as possible, and with it obviously being a bigger club I think it’s more striking for the international manager,” Evra told a news conference. 
“Hopefully with all that taken into account it will make it more difficult for him not to take me.” 
Evra said his decision to join United was straight-forward after opting to end his stay with Monaco, where he had been since August 2002. 
“It was an easy decision to make based on two reasons, the history of Manchester United and the stability of the club,” added the 24-year-old left-back. “Monaco is a big club with some good players but Manchester United has some absolutely great players and my job is not to talk to the press, but repay the confidence of the Manchester United manager and directors on the pitch and not with words.” 
Evra said he expects to have to compete for a starting position at his new club but looks likely to be manager Alex Ferguson’s first-choice left-back, at least while Gabriel Heinze recovers from a long-term knee injury. 
“He has emerged as one of the best full-backs in Europe and we are very happy to have secured his services for three and a half years,” said Ferguson. 
“We have probably been short of cover in that position and he will us a different alternative to Gabby. Patrice is a very attacking player and that’s a great option for us now.”

TITLE: ‘Skiing Wasted is Not Easy’ Says U.S. Champion
AUTHOR: By Erica Bulman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WENGEN, Switzerland  — U.S. ski coach Phil McNichol questions whether Bode Miller should remain with the team following his comments about racing and drinking. 
The overall World Cup champion said during a profile on CBS television that it’s not easy “to ski when you’re wasted.” 
The United States Ski and Snowboard Association has been swamped with angry phone calls from team donors and corporate sponsors since those remarks, and president and CEO Bill Marolt traveled to Wengen to meet with Miller. 
McNichol said Tuesday that Miller has been testing the team’s limits the last two years with his contentious statements, late-night habits and refusal to compromise with staff. 
“I don’t know what the answer is. First we have to call the question: Can we still do this together?” McNichol said. “I think the question Bode has to answer is: Do you still want to be a part of the United States ski team?” 
“He’s always tried to be a rebel, which was OK because it was fun sometimes and actually brought a lot of thinking outside the box and pushed the barriers,” he added. “However, it’s grown to a place where it’s no longer about being opinionated and outspoken. It’s about how much do I really want to be here.” 
Miller, who travels the tour independently in his own RV, could race separately from the U.S. team. Kristina Koznick left the women’s team in 2000 to train and race autonomously with boyfriend and coach Dan Stripp. 
Such a move could require Miller to handle his own logistic and administrative responsibilities and pay for his own coaches, service and travel. 
Miller, who last season became the first U.S. skier to win the overall World Cup title in 22 years, told CBS in a broadcast aired Sunday that “there’s been times when I’ve been in really tough shape at the top of the course.” 
“Talk about a hard challenge right there,” Miller said. “It’s like driving drunk only there’s no rules about it in ski racing.” 
Asked if the risk meant he would never ski drunk again, the 28-year-old Miller replied, “No, I’m not saying that.” 
McNichol said this was only the latest in a string of problems Miller caused the team, which has long disapproved of his self-portrayal as a wild partyer who likes to drink. 
In this month’s online edition of Maxim magazine, Miller says he has arrived at races drunk “from the night before, where I’m just sobering up by the first round.” 
“We’ve been pretty busy cleaning up after our one outspoken cowboy,” McNichol said. “When important people start to ask what kind of organization are you guys running, it’s going to get the boss’ attention. 
“[Miller] definitely feels entitlement. His impression is that he’s really not that much work for us because he’s not around much, but he’s bar-none twice the work of any other athlete in the program.” 
Earlier this season, Miller angered ski officials by calling for liberalized anti-doping rules. Teammates say they are now targeted for increased drug testing. 
Last month, Miller refused to take an equipment test to ensure his ski boots conformed to regulations and was fined $762. 
The team ended up paying the fine for him, McNichol said. 
Miller, who gripes about his sponsor and media obligations and often talks of a deep lack of motivation, last year threatened to skip the Olympics and launch a rebel ski tour. 
Miller declined to speak to reporters at the World Cup races in Adelboden last weekend. He is entered in every race this weekend at the Lauberhornrennen — a super-combined Friday, the traditional Saturday downhill and a slalom Sunday.