SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1152 (18), Tuesday, March 14, 2006
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TITLE: Minister Questions Autopsy on Milosevic
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia does not fully trust the autopsy on Slobodan Milosevic and wants to send its own doctors to examine the body, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday. 
Milosevic’s son, meanwhile, said the family would consider asking for Milosevic to be interred temporarily in Moscow until a funeral could be held in Belgrade. 
Lavrov also repeated Russia’s criticism of the UN war crimes tribunal for refusing last month to allow the former Yugoslav president to travel to Moscow for medical treatment. 
Clearly stung by the rejection of Russia’s “100 percent state guarantee” that Milosevic would return to finish his trial following treatment, Lavrov told reporters that Moscow was “disturbed” by the decision. 
“It cannot fail to alarm us that Milosevic died shortly afterward,” he pointedly added. 
“Essentially, they didn’t believe Russia,” Lavrov said. “In a situation where we weren’t believed, we also have the right not to believe and not to trust those who are conducting this autopsy.” 
Russia has asked the court to allow its experts to “take part in the autopsy or at least acquaint themselves with its results,” Lavrov said, adding that a team of medics was ready to fly “urgently” to The Hague. 
The Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed Health Ministry official as saying a Russian team would leave for the Netherlands early Tuesday. 
Milosevic died in his cell Saturday, the tribunal said. The body will be claimed by Milosevic’s son, Marko, on Monday or Tuesday, Milosevic’s lawyer, Zdenko Tomanovic, said. 
Although authorities in Belgrade had issued an international arrest warrant for Marko Milosevic in 2003 for alleged abuse of power, the charges were later dropped. 
Speaking in an interview with Russian state-run television, Marko Milosevic said he would appeal to authorities to consider allowing Milosevic to be interred in Moscow temporarily. 
“It depends on whether they will secure my family’s safety,” he said outside the Dutch Embassy in Moscow, where he received a visa to travel to The Hague to claim his father’s remains. 
“I have appealed, though unofficially since I just arrived here ... whether we can bury him in Moscow, at least temporarily, until there are conditions in Serbia when it will be possible to do everything as it should be,” he said. 
Lavrov also confirmed that his ministry received a letter from Milosevic in which he complained of inadequate medical treatment in jail and asked Moscow to revive efforts to let him undergo treatment in Russia. He said the letter was dated March 8 but arrived in Moscow on Sunday. 
“It expresses concern that in his opinion certain methods of treatment conducted by doctors of the tribunal had a negative impact on his health,” Lavrov said. 
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Milosevic’s family, including his older brother, Borislav, requested Russian pathologists’ involvement in additional forensic research. 
Borislav Milosevic, who lives in the Russian capital, was himself hospitalized overnight with a heart problem at Moscow’s Bakulev clinic. 
“I had some problem overnight, but it wasn’t a heart attack,” Interfax quoted him as saying.  
UN war crimes tribunal spokes-woman Alexandra Milenov said Sunday that an autopsy revealed Milosevic had died of a heart attack, and that he had been suffering from two heart conditions. She did not name the conditions, but said the doctors determined they might have caused the heart attack. 
A Dutch toxicologist on Monday confirmed that he found traces of an unprescribed drug in a blood sample taken from Milosevic earlier this year. 
Donald Uges said he was asked to inspect the sample after Milosevic’s blood pressure failed to respond to medication given by doctors at the UN detention center near The Hague. 
Uges said he found traces of rifampicin, a drug that could have reduced the effectiveness of his other medications. 
Tomanovic, Milosevic’s lawyer, said Sunday the former president had feared he was being poisoned. 
He showed reporters a six-page letter to the Russian Embassy which he said Milosevic wrote Friday — the day before his death — claiming that traces of a “heavy drug” were found in his blood. 
Russia has historic ties with largely Slavic, Orthodox Christian Serbia and sharply opposed the NATO bombing of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia in 1999.

TITLE: The Richest In Russia Keep Getting Richer
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s billionaires nearly doubled their fortunes over the last year on the back of sky-high commodity prices, according to Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s richest people.
The combined net worth of the country’s billionaires shot up from $90.6 billion in 2005 to $172.1 billion in 2006, Forbes said. The new list, published Friday, includes 33 Russians, including seven newcomers. Twelve Russians are in the world’s top 100 — up from five last year. 
“This is just a phenomenal gain,” said Luisa Kroll, the Forbes associate editor in charge of compiling the list, to which 30 reporters in seven countries contributed. “It puts Russia ahead of a country like India,” she said Friday by telephone from New York. 
Russia has the third most billionaires of any country worldwide, according to the list. No. 1 is the United States, followed by Germany. Moscow, with 25 resident billionaires, is topped only by New York, with 40.
Topping the Forbes list for the 12th straight year is Bill Gates, with an estimated $50 billion. The 793 billionaires on the list — 102 more than last year — have a combined wealth of $2.6 trillion, an increase of 18 percent.
Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, retained his position as the richest Russian, jumping 10 places to become the world’s 11th-richest person. His fortune is estimated to be worth $18.2 billion, up from last year’s $13.3 billion. 
“He cashed out. A lot of it is cash,” Kroll said. 
Last year, Gazprom bought 72.6 percent of Sibneft from Abramovich’s Millhouse Capital holding in a $13 billion deal.
While Abramovich’s fortune soared, so did those of his nearest Russian competitors, the ranking shows. The top 10 Russians all have oil or metals interests, or both.
LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov’s fortune jumped from $4.3 billion to $11 billion, making him the country’s second-richest man as he overtook steel magnate Vladimir Lisin and Alfa Group’s Mikhail Fridman. 
In the world ranking, Alekperov is now No. 37, up from 122nd last year. LUKoil’s market cap has roughly doubled to $61.5 billion over the past year. 
Most of the Russian billionaires on the list have seen their fortunes grow dramatically in the past year, benefiting in large part from strong gains in commodities prices.
“Russia is doing very well, and the fortunes of those who invested last year almost doubled,” said Peter Westin, chief economist at MDM Bank. 
“All the commodities that Russia produces are now very expensive,” said Kirill Vishnepolsky, deputy director of Forbes’ Russian edition, which helped compile the list.
The list also saw growth in fortunes held in Brazil, India and China — Russia’s closest emerging-market rivals — with India producing 10 new billionaires, more than any other country apart from the United States, and China eight, Forbes said. 
Increases on Russian stock markets, like those in other leading emerging-market countries, fueled much of the Forbes list growth. 
The RTS grew 108 percent in the year ending Feb. 13, ahead of India’s stock market, which grew 54 percent, and Brazil’s, which saw growth of 38 percent, Forbes said. In contrast, China’s stock market grew by 3 percent, and U.S. markets by just 1 percent, Forbes said. The dollar-denominated RTS index and the ruble-priced MICEX both burst through the 1,000-point barrier in the second half of 2005.
Viktor Vekselberg, chairman of the Renova holding, moved up a notch to fourth-richest Russian, doubling his fortune to $10 billion, Forbes said.
Meanwhile, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, vanished from the list altogether, after tumbling to No. 292 last year. Serving out an eight-year prison sentence after being convicted of fraud and tax evasion, he is now worth less than $500 million, Forbes said.
The most notable Russian newcomer on the Forbes global list is Suleiman Kerimov, a Dagestani-born State Duma deputy who clocked in at $7.1 billion, becoming Russia’s eighth-richest man. 
A member of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, the intensely secretive Kerimov is thought to control Nafta-Moskva, a successor to the Soviet oil trader Soyuznefteexport, and has built up his wealth investing in Gazprom and Sberbank. Last year, Kerimov reportedly bought Polimetall, one of the country’s largest gold and silver miners. 
Kerimov was listed on Forbes Russia’s 2005 rich list as being worth $2.6 billion.
As a Duma deputy, Kerimov is not supposed to conduct business. A spokeswoman for Nafta-Moskva said Friday that she had never heard of Kerimov.
“He is an exceptionally fortunate investor,” Forbes Russia’s Vishnepolsky said. 
Another new name on the Forbes list is Rustam Tariko, a vodka magnate and owner of Russky Standart bank, with a fortune of $1.9 billion. 
Forbes ran a separate profile of Tariko, 44. He “came out of nowhere to build a fortune by turning middle-class Russians into debt-addicted consumers,” his Forbes profile said.
Dmitry Rybolovlev, board chairman of Uralkali, a producer of potassium fertilizers in the Urals, also broke into this year’s list, cashing in on a global demand for potassium fertilizers, Forbes said. He ranks 32nd in Russia with $1.6 billion.
Other newcomers are Pyotr Aven, Alfa Bank president ($3 billion); Leonid Mikhelson, chief executive of independent gas producer Novatek ($2.5 billion); Alexander Frolov, board chairman of No. 1 steelmaker Evraz Group ($2.3 billion); and Vasily Anisimov, a metals magnate and chairman of Coalco, a New York-based real estate firm ($1.3 billion).
While the rich are reaping the rewards of booming commodity prices, their bigger fortunes could theoretically bring benefits to other sections of the population, said Vladimir Pantyushin, chief economist at Renaissance Capital.

TITLE: Putin Signs New Law On Advertising
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime-time televisions ads will be cut back significantly under new legislation that was signed into law by President Vladimir Putin on Monday. 
The bill, which was approved earlier by Russia’s two chambers of parliament, also bans tobacco advertising from billboards and closes a loophole that had allowed liquor manufacturers to advertise their brand-name wares under the guise of mineral water and other nonalcoholic products. 
While ordinary Russians are largely sick of advertising cutting into evening viewing, industry representatives have warned that the restrictions will send ad prices soaring and hamper companies’ chances of promoting their products to Russia’s burgeoning consumer culture.

TITLE: Russian TV Channel Revives Prison Claim
AUTHOR: By Judith Ingram
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian state television revived an allegation that Ukraine hosted a secret CIA prison for terrorist suspects, a move Kiev allegedly made to prove its loyalty to the United States. Ukrainian officials denied the report. 
The alleged prison was located in a former nuclear weapons base in a military garrison in the Kiev region, an investigative reporter for Rossiya television said in a broadcast late Sunday. He said the prisoners were probably transferred to Ukraine from Poland and Romania. 
“In the opinion of many foreign experts, Ukraine served as a buffer,” the reporter, Arkady Mamontov, said. “When information about the location of secret prisons on the territory of East European states, first of all Poland, came out and the scandal started, they remembered the Ukrainian variant.” 
The Russian state television allegations come just two weeks before Ukraine’s parliamentary elections, in which one of the top issues will be whether Kiev’s top foreign policy priority should be Russia or the West. President Viktor Yushchenko aspires for Ukraine to join NATO. The party that is currently ahead in the polls, led by former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, favors closer ties with Moscow. 
Ukrainian officials have vehemently denied the allegation of a secret prison, which were first printed in a Swiss newspaper in January. 
“It is nonsense,” Ukrainian State Security agency spokeswoman Marina Ostapenko said Monday. “We have already said more than once that these allegations don’t correspond to reality.” 
She said that when the allegation first emerged, “we checked into it.” 
Defense Ministry spokesman Andriy Lysenko said only Ukraine’s president or defense minister could decide to establish such a facility, “and no such decision has been made.” 
“Such a prison never existed, does not exist and probably will not exist in Ukraine,” Lysenko said. 
Mamontov last made a splash in Russia with his report on British spies allegedly sending and receiving intelligence through transmitters hidden in a rock in a Moscow park and funding non-governmental organizations. The footage for that broadcast came from Russia’s intelligence service. 
Mamontov did not divulge his sources for the Ukraine prison report, saying only that he got most of his information “practically from a firsthand source.” He also spoke with an employee of a company that performed a renovation at the base and with soldiers who described underground storehouses. 
The allegations of secret CIA prisons in Europe were first reported by The Washington Post in November. The New York-based Human Rights Watch group identified Romania and Poland as possible hosts of secret U.S.-run detention facilities; both denied involvement. Clandestine detention centers and secret flights to countries where suspects could face torture would violate European human rights treaties.

TITLE: Banks Want Yukos Ruled Bankrupt
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A syndicate of Western banks has filed a petition in the Moscow Arbitration Court for Yukos to be declared bankrupt, the oil firm said Friday, suddenly opening the way for the state to swallow up the remains of a company that has experienced the biggest reversal of fortunes since the Soviet collapse.
The banks, led by France’s Societe Generale, filed their petition on Friday on claims of $482 million outstanding on a $1 billion loan, Yukos’ London-based spokeswoman Claire Davidson said. An unnamed court official told Interfax that the court had immediately agreed to hear the petition, speeding up a procedure that normally takes five days. Calls to the court Friday were not answered.
“Maybe we’re now seeing the endgame,” said Tim Osborne, managing director of GML, Yukos’ main shareholder, once known as Group Menatep. The group, once one of the biggest business empires in Russia, has been the target of a relentless politically charged attack for more than two years. Its founders, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, are serving eight-year sentences in Siberian prison camps, while Yukos is a shadow of its former self after its main production unit was taken over by the state in December 2004.
“Maybe we’re now seeing how they’re going to take it under state ownership. This has only been a question of time,” Osborne said.
But even as Yukos reeled from the sudden bankruptcy suit, executives in London were considering a last-ditch offer from the Lithuanian government to buy its Mazeikiu Nafta refinery in Butinge. The company received the offer late Friday, Davidson said. If acted on, the deal, potentially worth up to $1 billion, would enable Yukos to pay off the banks’ claims.
It was not clear, however, whether the offer had come too late for Yukos to avert the bankruptcy suit amid mounting state pressure on its employees. Yukos’ chief lawyer in charge of the Mazeikiu deal was in Moscow over the weekend after receiving a summons from the prosecutors for questioning, leaving managers in London without his guidance, Davidson said.
But while the firm still held out hope for a sale before bankruptcy goes into force — a process that could take up to three months — others said state pressure could make it difficult.
“The company has been paralyzed by pressure from the prosecutors,” said Alexander Temerko, a Yukos shareholder and a former senior vice president at the company, who is now living in London. “Management has to make a decision on Mazeikiu. But the state keeps on trying to block it.”
The banks’ filing came at the end of a treacherous week for Yukos in which it finally appeared to be heading toward collapse. The firm’s lead executive in Moscow, Anatoly Nazarov, declared mutiny on Monday against his seniors running the company from self-imposed exile in London and said he was taking over command. Some within Yukos saw Nazarov as acting on orders from the state.
It was still unclear over the weekend how the company’s London-based chief executive, Steven Theede, would resolve the Moscow rebellion. A planned meeting in Kiev on Monday to discuss the standoff has been called off, a Yukos representative in Moscow said.
Until this week, Yukos had looked as though it was keeping its head above water, despite a freeze on its accounts and the takeover of its biggest oil unit, Yuganskneftegaz, by state-owned Rosneft. It said last month it had managed to pay off $21 billion of its staggering $33 billion back tax bill. In the meantime, it sold its 49 percent stake in Slovak pipeline operator Transpetrol for $103 million to Russneft, and it was continuing to haggle over bids for Mazeikiu.
Under a ruling by a Dutch court, the Western banks would have been first to collect from the sale of these foreign assets. Under their Russian bankruptcy filing, however, foreign banks would be last in line to recover funds from Yukos after employees and the state and state-owned companies were paid, which raised some eyebrows over why they filed the bankruptcy suit at all.
But Menatep’s Osborne said the writing had long been on the wall. He said the Russian government had blocked Yukos every time it neared a deal to sell Mazeikiu and claimed the banks were now acting in consort with Rosneft, the country’s new oil champion, by filing the bankruptcy suit.
“The banks are acting on Rosneft’s behest,” he said by telephone. “Rosneft has given some sort of guarantee to the banks that they will get both their funds and involvement in the Rosneft IPO.”
Proof of this, he said, was in Rosneft’s recently published GAAP accounts for the first nine months of 2005. In those accounts, which are posted on its web site, Rosneft said it reached agreement in December 2005 with Societe Generale over “regulating” the guarantee on the $1 billion loan held by Yuganskneftegaz. Yugansk had been the guarantor on the $1 billion loan to Yukos, but until December Rosneft had declined to recognize its liability for the debt. Rosneft said in the accounts that the agreement would come into force no later than April 30, 2006.
For Yugansk to take on the guarantee, the banks, either by filing for bankruptcy or announcing default, have to establish that Yukos cannot pay, Temerko said. “Alternatively, they could have waited for the sale of Mazeikiu,” he said. “But there was no announcement and then the whole process inside the company got out of control.”
Under the circumstances, Temerko said, it was no surprise the banks acted as they did.
“The only way out of this crisis situation is to announce the results of the tender for Mazeikiu,” he said.
But as company management collapses amid infighting and claims by the teams in both Moscow and London that money is being lost, the sale of Mazeikiu has become a hot political issue.
The Kremlin has been hindering the sale of Mazeikiu to Yukos’ preferred candidates, Kazakhstan’s KazMunaiGaz and Poland’s PKN. Both companies bid more than $1 billion, while the more-favored candidates for the Kremlin, LUKoil and TNK-BP, bid much less.
In November, as the bids were being submitted, Russia’s national pipeline monopoly stopped KazMunaiGaz from going ahead with plans to ship crude to Mazeikiu.
To increase pressure on Vilnius over the sale, Moscow slashed oil supplies to Lithuania at the beginning of this year, putting the squeeze on vital revenues.
Rosneft president Sergei Bogdanchikov said last month that the state-owned oil firm could be interested in acquiring the Lithuanian refinery itself, though the company has little spare cash.
Rosneft has been trying to call the shots at Yukos’ Moscow office already, making use of the firm’s refineries and transportation networks and pressuring managers there to do its bidding, Temerko has said.
Earlier this week, Rosneft declined to comment on his claims.
As a decision on Mazeikiu gets bogged down, foreign banks are also eyeing big commissions from involvement in this year’s expected initial public offering of Rosneft on foreign exchanges. The government has said it wants to raise up to $20 billion from the sale, making it potentially the nation’s biggest-ever IPO, despite the threat of lawsuits from aggrieved Yukos shareholders.
Societe Generale declined to comment Friday.

TITLE: Iranian Rejection Draws Russian Rebuke
AUTHOR: By Ali Akbar Dareini
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — Iran on Sunday ruled out a proposal to conduct uranium enrichment on Russian territory, drawing a harsh rebuke from a lawmaker in Moscow who said the move destroyed the only chance for a compromise in the standoff over Tehran’s suspect nuclear program. 
The announcement came as the permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — were to meet this week to discuss a draft statement aimed at increasing the pressure on Iran to resolve questions about its nuclear activities amid heightened fears they are aimed at developing atomic weapons. 
Moscow has sought to persuade Iran to move its enrichment program to Russian territory, which would allow closer international monitoring. Iran said previously that basic agreement had been reached on the plan but details were never worked out. 
“The Russian proposal is not on our agenda anymore,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said. “Circumstances have changed. We have to see how things go with the five veto-holding countries [on the council].”
Asefi’s comments to reporters effectively mean the Russian proposal is dead. The nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran to the council, which could impose political and economic sanctions. 
The five Security Council powers have been considering how to deal with the standoff and gain more compliance with Tehran, including demands that it abandon uranium enrichment. 
In Moscow, Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the international affairs committee of the lower house of parliament, said Iran’s decision meant the end of chances for a compromise on the issue, according to Russian news reports. 
Kosachev also warned Tehran that its refusal to continue talks on the Russian offer could “radicalize” the Security Council’s debate, the Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies said. 
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, meanwhile, said Tehran had no intention to use oil as a weapon in its confrontation with the West over its nuclear program, contradicting a statement made a day earlier by Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi. 
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is determined to continue to provide Asia with the oil it needs as a reliable and effective source of energy and will not use oil as a foreign policy instrument,” Mottaki said at a conference on energy and security issues in Tehran. 
Iran is the No. 2 producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia. It also has partial control of the narrow Straits of Hormuz, a key route for most of the crude oil shipped from the Persian Gulf nations to world markets. 
The United States and its Western allies accuse Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says it only aims to produce energy. 
Iran, which only has an experimental nuclear research program, repeatedly has warned it will begin large-scale uranium enrichment if the IAEA formally referred it to the Security Council. Last week, it offered what it called a “final proposal” to agree to suspend large-scale enrichment temporarily in return for IAEA recognition of its right to continue research-scale enrichment. 
Asefi suggested Tehran would wait for the outcome of the Security Council meetings to make a decision on whether to begin large-scale enrichment, which scientists say would take months to do. 
“Regarding industrial scale uranium enrichment, we are going to wait for two, three days,” he said. 
Uranium enriched to a low level produces fuel that can be used in a nuclear reactor, while higher enrichment produces the material needed for a warhead. 
Iran has insisted it will never give up its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel. It restarted research-scale uranium enrichment last month, two years after voluntarily freezing the program during talks with Germany, Britain and France. 
Mottaki, the foreign minister, reiterated a veiled warning that Iran may consider withdrawing from the NPT if its right to enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel is not respected. 
“If we reach a point that the existing rules don’t meet the right of the Iranian nation, the Islamic Republic of Iran may reconsider policies,” he said. 
A report last week by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran was testing centrifuges, which spin uranium gas into enriched uranium, and had plans to begin installation of the first 3,000 centrifuges late this year. Iran will need to install about 60,000 centrifuges for a large-scale enrichment of uranium.

TITLE: Russia To Pay $41,700 In Compensation
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The European Court of Human Rights has ordered Russia to pay $41,700 in compensation to a Rostov woman over her illegal arrest and beating in the second ruling this year in favor of a victim of police brutality.
The court ruled Thursday that Russian authorities had ignored the right of Olga Meneshyova, 26, to a fair investigation after she was illegally detained and beaten by police officers seven years ago, and ordered the government to pay her compensation, Interfax reported.
A native of the Rostov region town of Bataisk, Meneshyova was detained on Feb. 13, 1999, by three plainclothes Rostov police officers, who searched her house without a legal search warrant. After she refused to answer their questions, the officers took her to a nearby police precinct, Interfax reported. 
Later the officers said they were investigating a murder and wanted to question Meneshyova about a suspect she had known.
At the precinct, the officers beat Meneshyova with truncheons, held her by the throat and threatened to rape her and kill her relatives, Interfax reported.
After being held for five days without charge, Meneshyova was released without explanation. Doctors documented bruises all over her body that were consistent with a beating, but prosecutors and a local court found no grounds to begin a criminal investigation against the police officers, the news agency said.
With the help of human rights advocates Meneshyova appealed to the European court, which encouraged Russian prosecutors to open an investigation.
After receiving several threats, Meneshyova attempted to call off her appeal, but the court continued the investigation, Interfax reported.
In January, the European court ordered Russia to pay $300,000 to Alexei Mikheyev, 29, who in 1998 was subjected to electric shock torture by police in Nizhny Novgorod. Mikheyev sustained spinal injuries that left him paralyzed after jumping out of a precinct window.

TITLE: Thousands of Police Scour Mountains for Terrorist Basayev
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: ROSTOV-ON-DON — Thousands of police are searching Chechnya’s southern mountains for rebel warlord Shamil Basayev, Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov said Friday.
“Up to 3,000 police are involved in a round-the-clock operation to capture Basayev,” Kadyrov said, according to a spokesman for Chechen President Alu Alkhanov. 
At least 10 policemen loyal to the Chechen government have been killed in recent days in clashes with rebels in the foothills of the mountains, a source in the local security forces said Friday. 
Witnesses said explosions in the battles in the Vedeno district were so loud they were audible in Grozny, 50 kilometers to the north. 
A spokesman for the local government’s Anti-Terrorist Center declined to confirm the losses, saying official figures showed three policemen had been killed and one injured. He said four rebels had been killed. 
The source said security forces had been ambushed when trying to attack a base run by Rabbani, a separatist leader usually identified by his first name alone and who has previously led rebels in neighboring Dagestan. 
Also Friday, unidentified gunmen gravely wounded two police officers in a shootout at a market in Ingushetia near Chechnya, the regional Interior Ministry said. The shootout broke out shortly before noon outside a restaurant at the central market in the town of Ordzhonikidzevskaya, said a duty officer in the Ingush Interior Ministry. The gunmen managed to escape. 
On Saturday, Kadyrov said that 7,000 former rebels had voluntarily laid down their weapons since 1999. Most had joined Chechen government forces, he said. 
(AP, Reuters)

TITLE: Duma Deputy’s Son Kidnapped, Beaten as Warning to His Father
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The teenage son of a State Duma deputy was abducted and beaten Friday by unidentified men, who freed him several hours later with a warning for his father, Interfax reported.
Mikhail Markelov, a member of the nationalist Rodina faction, told Interfax that three men pushed his 16-year-old son, also named Mikhail, into a black car with tinted windows in northern Moscow as he was walking to school Friday morning. Markelov was in Tver at the time, and his son was staying with his grandparents.
According to Markelov, the men told his son: “We hope you understand why you are here. Tell your father if he doesn’t want people see his photo on a tombstone, he should be quiet.”
Markelov, who is also an investigative television journalist, said he did not know what was behind the threat. He had had no business conflicts, and the television program he produces at TV Center does not touch on politics, he told Interfax.
The attackers, who had Slavic appearances, took the boy’s mobile phone and some cash he was carrying, and punched him in the face, the report said.
“Let your father get a good look at your mug” were the last words the teenager heard before he was pushed out of the car near Mytishchi, northwest of Moscow, 2 1/2 hours after he was abducted, Interfax said.
Markelov filed a complaint to police Friday, the report said.

TITLE: Minsk Warns Lawmakers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK — The Belarussian Foreign Ministry said Friday that a group of Eu-ropean Union lawmakers was not welcome to monitor this week’s presidential election, accusing the legislators of intending to provoke conflicts.
Seven members of the European Parliament are seeking to monitor the election next Sunday, in which President Alexander Lukashenko is running for third term amid opposition warnings of possible election fraud.
“The goal of these so-called ‘ob-servers’ is to provoke conflict situations during the election campaign and destabilize the situation in the country,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Popov said in a statement. Popov said some 900 observers from CIS republics and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe would be enough to monitor the election.
Bogdan Klikh, one of the European Parliament lawmakers, said he and his colleagues possessed diplomatic pass-ports and would still go.
“If Belarussian authorities claim that elections are taking place democratically, why can’t we see that?” Klikh said.
Last month, authorities detained and charged four activists of the Partnership group who planned to monitor the vote.

TITLE: All in the Family for Brother of Russia’s Most Hated Man
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As Anatoly Chubais, the CEO of electricity giant Unified Energy Systems, battled blackouts in an unusually cold winter, his brother Igor was engaged in a very different struggle: the search for Russia’s roots and historical destiny.
“When we were told about ‘the rotten West’ [during the Soviet era], we didn’t believe in it,” Igor Chubais said during a recent interview in his Moscow apartment. “We knew we were being mocked. But the same source also created an incorrect image of Russia, and we still believe in that.” 
Anyone who harbors doubts about Chubais’ patriotism will find them dispelled by a visit to the philosopher’s apartment. Its three main rooms are painted in the colors of the Russian flag: The bedroom is red, the study is blue and the dining room is white.
The soft-spoken 58-year-old, who heads the Center for Russian Studies at the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow, recently wrote a book called “The Russian Riddle Solved.” Published last year, the book outlines Chubais’ ideas about the country’s future — which could hardly be more different from those of his younger brother Anatoly, the architect of a controversial set of mid-1990s privatizations and a co-founder of the liberal SPS party.
In his book, Igor Chubais writes that when a state is based upon a strong national idea, it can create an effective strategy for its own development. Although his point of view is conservative, in the book’s introduction he assures readers that his patriotic feelings have nothing to do with those of the Communists, led by Gennady Zyuganov, nor with those of so-called “national patriots,” such as Dmitry Rogozin, head of the nationalist Rodina party.
Asked to clarify his views, Chubais defined them as pochvennicheskiye, or grass-roots. He said that while his type of patriotism meant a “respect for all close and distant neighbors,” it also consisted of “a special feeling and relationship toward Russians, wherever they are living, toward the Russian language, toward Russian history and culture.” 
Chubais’ book argues that Russia, rather than trying to be a continuation of the Soviet Union, should return to the values and principles of the pre-revolutionary era. The author mentions the liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II and the growth of agriculture and industry in the period leading up to World War I as examples of homegrown Russian development.
Russia should aim “to continue the historical logic and carry it into the present day, taking into account the events of the 70 years under Soviet rule,” Chubais writes. “Reunification with one’s self does not mean becoming a closed country. Historically, Russia was always an open country, and returning to this means a return to Europe for all of us.”
“I am not advocating a return to the past,” the author stated during the interview. “I am advocating that those ideas and values be retranslated to modern times.”
Chubais believes that the image of tsarist Russia as a hopelessly backward country was a myth created by the Bolsheviks that has persisted to the present day. “The winners always try to present the losers in a twisted way,” he said. “During the last quarter of the 19th century, the Russian economy was developing rather rapidly. As for its culture, I could only compare it with ancient Greece — the country had the greatest poetry, literature and music.”
Speaking about Russia’s past, Chubais said that the “Russian enigma” was also a myth, created by the country’s ever-present bureaucratic class.
“Americans and Germans do not say they are an ‘enigmatic nation.’ Being enigmatic makes it easy for bureaucrats to do nothing, and to control the property and money that recently became a treasured possession for many of them,” he said.
“One of the strategic aims of bureaucracy is that no question needs to be answered,” Chubais added with anger.
During the interview, Chubais avoided questions about his brother, whose pro-Western views on politics and economics differ sharply from his. He did say, however, that Anatoly once asked him for advice in the early 1990s. “I told him to look at my web site,” the philosopher said. “But what happened later on was very different from what I had written.”
Chubais spent much of this winter promoting his book. At one presentation in Moscow’s Independent Press Center, he argued that Russia did not devote enough resources to the task of defining its national idea. “We have an institute of American and Canadian studies and an institute of Arctic and Antarctic studies, but we don’t have an institute of Russian studies,” he said. “This is intellectual stagnation.” 
He also said he was ready to engage in political discussions with members of pro-presidential circles and the liberal camp. The only exception was his own brother.
Asked by reporters if he would like to invite his brother to a debate on NTV’s popular political talk show “To the Barrier,” Chubais said no. “I am not going to summon my brother to a duel. We have a family relationship, and it is wrong to betray someone.”

TITLE: State Moves to Close Down Internet Portal Over Cartoon
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government agency tasked with regulating the media is seeking to shut down a popular, independent online news agency in the Altai region called Bankfax after an anonymous reader posted a reprint of a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed on its forum and called for the destruction of Islam. 
The director of Bankfax, Valery Savinkov, said the anti-Muslim posting appeared to be a pretext, since similar postings can be found on many Russian Internet forums. The authorities, he said, seemed to be using Bankfax as a test case for a wider crackdown on freedom of speech on the RuNet. 
“The authorities are testing a model on us on how to punish not those who truly cause offense, but those whom they think should be punished,” Savinkov said by telephone from Barnaul, the capital of Altai. 
The head of the Siberian branch of the Federal Service for Media Law Compliance and Cultural Heritage said that Bankfax, like all other media organizations, must be held responsible for the information it disseminates. 
“The task of a news agency is to distribute information, and in this case it was distributing an extremist comment,” Gennady Popryga said by telephone from Novosibirsk.
The federal service, known as Rosokhrankultura, has filed a civil case against Bankfax, demanding that it be shut down. The case is scheduled to be heard Friday in a Barnaul court. 
On Thursday, Rosokhrankultura issued a warning to another Internet portal, Gazeta.ru, in a similar case involving the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that set off protests around the world earlier this year.
The case against Bankfax arose after an online user with the nickname “Bratka” posted a scanned page of an Argentinian newspaper showing a reprint of one of the caricatures, with a comment calling for the destruction of Islam.
The posting appeared on the evening of Feb. 17 on a thread discussing the controversy created by the caricatures, which were first printed by a Danish newspaper. 
“The comment was posted on a Friday evening, when no one was in the office and could delete it,” Savinkov said, adding that usually the online content of the web site is checked every 10 minutes and about 10 comments are deleted every day, usually for offensive language. 
On Sunday, Feb. 19, Savinkov was called to the Altai region prosecutor’s office, where he learned about the case being brought against Bankfax by Rosokhrankultura.
The following day, the prosecutors opened their own case and began investigating whether the posting had incited religious hatred. Savinkov is a witness in the criminal case. 
A spokesman for the Altai prosecutor’s office, Valery Ziyastinov, said that the person using the nickname Bratka had not yet been identified. If located and found guilty of extremism, Bratka could face up to five years in prison. 
“We also need to find out whether the Bankfax moderators could have deleted this post quickly and not waited until prosecutors began asking questions,” he said by telephone from Barnaul.
Savinkov said that Bankfax had passed on to prosecutors Bratka’s IP-address and e-mail address. “This person has posted comments on our web site almost daily for about two years. It should hardly be a problem to find him,” he said.

TITLE: Khakamada Uses ‘Sex’ to Sell Political Memoirs
AUTHOR: By Anastasiya Lebedev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Shut out of the Kremlin-dominated political arena, liberal politician Irina Khakamada is trying to reach out to people with a new book — a serious, if informally written, guide to a woman’s place in the male-dominated world of Russian politics. Along with tales from the Kremlin, it offers tips on everything from fashion to how to avoid unwanted sexual advances from other politicians.
It comes complete with a racy cover, featuring the word “sex” in Englishprominently below a picture of Khakamada in a low-cut dress.
At a book signing at the Moskva bookstore in central Moscow last week, in time for International Women’s Day last Wednesday, Khakamada accepted gifts of eggs and mimosa branches, and accused a lone critic in the audience of being paid to disrupt the event. 
Khakamada, who leads the Our Choice party and ran for president in 2004, said the book, titled “Sex v Bolshoi Politike,” or “Sex in Big Politics,” was intended as a nonpolitical way of reaching out to people. 
“We can influence [politics] only by becoming an ally of the people,” she said, adding that she planned to quit politics if Russia’s democrats failed to unite and become a force to be reckoned with by the time of the 2008 elections.
The book’s title is a play on “Sex v Bolshom Gorode,” the Russian name for the U.S. television show “Sex in the City,” and like the revealing cover photo was chosen to attract attention and appeal to a wider audience, Khakamada said at the presentation. 
She pointed out that the word “sex” meant gender, and that the book talked about the adventures of a woman in the male-dominated world of politics.
Khakamada said she wrote the book to shed some light on decision-making by the country’s elites, to show politics as a male-dominated area and to describe people in different parts of Russia.
Written in an informal, colloquial style, the book includes anecdotes from Khakamada’s personal life, a smattering of embarrassing moments at the Kremlin, an introduction to the political elite’s etiquette and a wealth of fashion advice. In “problem-solving” sections spread throughout the book, Khakamada doles out suggestions, presumably from her own experience, on circumnavigating politicians who ask for sexual favors, ranking a crowd of officials by clout level and handling advice from image-makers.
In the mostly middle-aged crowd lining up for a signed copy of her book, women outnumbered men two to one, and many were eager to praise Khakamada’s political and personal qualities. 
The Moskva bookstore has been selling 50 to 60 copies of the book per day, store spokeswoman Natalya Chuprova said. About 200 copies of Khakamada’s book were sold at its presentation, Chuprova said.

TITLE: “Critical” Levels of Nuclear Waste Need Storage Facilities
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The construction of new nuclear storage facilities in Leningrad Olbast is unavoidable, experts have said, citing the critical level of radioactive waste in the region. 
“Russia has accumulated about 500 million cubic meters of radioactive waste, the total activity of which is 1.5 billion curie — 30 times more than the fallout from Chernobyl,” head of nuclear safety at Rosatom Igor Diakov said at a seminar in St. Petersburg last week, Interfax reported.
The Northwest region is faced with the most serious problem, since all existing storage has been filled, he said.
At the seminar, organized by the International Projecting and Scientific Institute for Complex Power Technology and Rosatom, the Swedish company SKB IC demonstrated projects for ground and underground waste storage.
The 340,000 cubic meter underground storage is akin to a metro system and should be located 100 meters below the surface in Cambrian clay. It would consist of five storage chambers and one chamber for control purposes. The project would cost $7,500 per cubic meter, according to SKB IC estimations. The storage could be based near the Sosnovy Bor district.
If construction starts now, the storage will be operating by 2020, experts said. By then between 200,000 and 250,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste will have accumulated in Leningrad Oblast.
SCB IC president Klaes Lindberg said that “the advantages of overland storage are its convenient location and the fact that it is relatively cheap to build.” However, he did not give precise figures.
“Both projects would satisfy safety concerns. Rather, the choice should be based more on both projects’ cost,” Interfax cited Alexander Nikitin, chairman of ecologic center Belluna as saying. Nikitin considered overland storage to be more easily replicable in other regions.
Igor Luchkov, head of assessment and analysis at Becar real estate agency, said that the cost of the project will depend on the mass of concrete necessary to build the facility and the technical requirements of construction.
Since no such project has yet been realized in the city, Luchkov suggested that the tender could be used to choose a constructor who meets all the technical requirements but at the least expense.
“The only alternative to radioactive waste storage would be not to produce such waste at all, i.e. to renounce nuclear power completely,” said Gianguido Piani, an independent expert on the power industry.
“Most people are afraid of radioactivity, but do not care about the harmful effects of other types of waste. A coal power plant produces at least 1000 times more solid waste than a NPP,” Piani said.
“There are methods in which radioactive waste can be encapsulated in glass, which is particularly stable. From the point of view of safety, it makes more sense to store them far from urban centers,” the expert added.
According to a Rosbalt report released earlier this month, Oleg Sergeyev, chairman of the commission for sanitarian and epidemic control and ecologic protection at City Hall, said that federal programs for radioactive storage and usage are under-funded by up to 70 percent to 80 percent, while storage facilities in the city are completely exhausted.
Under-funding causes some serious risks. For example, the territory of the Ikofolk company, based in the city, is home to about 12,000 sources of radiation, Sergeyev said.
The special use and storage plant Radon, which processes waste from all over the region, has started using emergency facilities because of a lack of storage. At the moment it stores over 80,000 cubic meters of waste, and the remaining space will be filled within the next three years to four years, Interfax reported citing Radon director Alexander Ivanov. Construction of new production facilities is under discussion, with about $5.35 million of funding to be provided by the federal program for radioactive waste treatment, following government approval, Interfax reported.

TITLE: French Giant Buys 4 Stations
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The European Media Group has expanded its Russian portfolio with the acquisition of four radio stations: Radio 7 and Melodia in Moscow, Melodia and Eldorado in St. Petersburg and their respective regional networks, EMG president Jorge Polinsky said Friday, Interfax reported Friday.
Polinsky did not indicate the cost of the deal, saying only that Le Gardere media holding provided “several tens of millions of dollars,” which were spent in part on the acquisition of the radio stations from the Warburg Pincus investment fund, the former majority stakeholder.
EMG was founded by French company Europe Plus, itself set up by Jorge Polinsky and Le Gardere group.
In Russia EMG already owned Europe Plus and Retro FM radio stations.
As a result of the deal EMG now employs 4,500 people in Russia and will become one of the leading commercial radio holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg in terms of audience, Polinsky said.
“We are setting the same goal for the whole of Russia,” said Alexander Polesitsky, general director of EMG in Russia.
According to Igor Veretennikov, expert at FINAM investment company, the cost of the deal could not exceed $1.2 million.
“Radio assets are undervalued in Russia compared to television and leading print media. However the situation could change in the nearest future. The radio business is rapidly consolidating,” Veretennikov said.
He considered the assets acquired by EMG as of “average interest.”
“These are second rank companies. Given additional investment and correct management, they could significantly increase profits,” Veretennikov said.
In terms of number of stations, EMG has moved up to second place in the Russian radio market, something which allows vast potential for development, Veretennikov said.
EMG now is among the leading radio holdings in terms of audience and advertisement revenue, he added.
Another expert suggested the deal to be worth more. According to Kommersant daily, the general director of Russian Media Group Sergei Kozhevnikov said that EMG could pay over $20 million for the companies.
EMG’s main competitors in Russia are ProfMedia and the Russian Media Group (RMG).
According to data released by COMCON research company, EMG’s daily audience share in Moscow is 19.6 percent, RMG’s 19.2 percent, and ProfMedia’s 15.1 percent. 
“The purchases create serious competition to RMG’s and ProfMedia’s holdings,” said Elena Koneva, CEO of COMCON. “It is true that to effectively stay on their heels, EMG will need to solve the problem of internal format competition among the holding’s new and current radio stations,” she said.
“The best strategy would be to continue the successful tradition of perfecting the format and polishing the play-lists, and not to radically change it,” she added. 
As part of the restructuring of their assets, EMG will introduce a unified information service for all their radio stations, Interfax reported Polesitsky as saying. EMG would benefit from creating a single news service and consolidated advertisement sales, Veretennikov said.
“The new assets could use the know-how of Europe Plus and Retro FM –— examples of high quality musical stations in Russia. This could increase audience levels as well as profits,” he said.

TITLE: Russia Seals Algeria Arms Deal
AUTHOR: By Guy Faulconbridge and Hamid Ould Ahmed
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW / ALGIERS — Algeria has agreed to buy $7.5 billion worth of combat planes, air defense systems and other arms from Russia, the head of Russia’s state arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, said Friday. 
Russia also agreed to write off $4.74 billion of Algeria’s Soviet-era debt during a visit by President Vladimir Putin to the North African oil-exporting country, the first by a Russian leader in half a century. 
“The total figure of the contracts that we signed was for $7.5 billion,” Rosoboronexport chief Sergei Chemezov said in comments shown on Russian state television. It was unclear when the arms would be delivered. 
“Practically all types of arms we have are included: anti-missile systems, aviation, sea and land technology,” he said. “Russian technology is in no way inferior in quality to Western [technology], but in price it is 15 percent to 20 percent cheaper.” 
Russia, one of the world’s leading arms exporters with annual sales of more than $5 billion, is seeking to boost arms sales by widening its client base. Most of Russia’s arms exports currently go to China, India and southeast Asian states. 
Algeria will buy 40 MiG-29 fighters, 20 Sukhoi-30 fighters and 16 Yak-130 training planes as well as 8 S-300 PMU2 Favorit rocket systems and about 40 tanks, Itar-Tass reported. 
A meeting between Putin and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, scheduled to last for one hour, went on for more than 5 hours, NTV television reported.
Algerian state radio confirmed the debt write-off and said the country would spend the same amount in return on buying goods and services from Russia, without mentioning the arms deal. 
Putin is keen to restore Russia’s role as a global diplomatic heavyweight and boost its standing in the Arab world. 
His invitation to Palestinian Islamist group Hamas for talks last month and an offer to enrich Iran’s uranium to help defuse a diplomatic crisis have won him praise in Arab countries. 
Ahead of Putin’s arrival, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met his Algerian counterpart, Mohamed Bedjaoui, in Algiers. 
“We discussed ways of boosting economic and commercial cooperation. Internationally, we talked about Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Western Sahara,” Lavrov told official media after the closed-door meeting. 
The two countries, both big gas suppliers, were also expected to sign an energy deal involving Algerian state oil and gas company Sonatrach and Russia’s Gazprom and LUKoil. 
Gazprom head Alexei Miller, who accompanied Putin, said on Friday that his company and Sonatrach would seek to boost gas cooperation, including liquefying gas for tanker shipments.
Moscow is seeking to benefit from huge investment opportunities in Algeria, whose trade exchanges with Russia were no more than $364 million last year, against $8 billion with the United States. 
Algeria, an OPEC member, is implementing an ambitious $80 billion, five-year program aimed at boosting growth and drawing more investments as it recovers from a decade-long civil war.

TITLE: Foreign Minister Says U.S. Holding Up WTO Entry
AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW – Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he suspected Washington was holding up Russian entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for political reasons.
Lavrov said in a newspaper interview published on Monday that the trade issues U.S. negotiators cite as stumbling blocks to Russia’s WTO entry do not seem to trouble the industry groups whose interests the White House says it is protecting.
“We cannot fail to see a political subtext in the position of the American negotiators,” Lavrov said in an interview published on Monday in the Vremya Novostei daily.
The United States and Columbia are the only two countries yet to sign the bilateral deals that would allow Russia — the biggest economy still outside the trade club — to join after more than a decade of membership talks.
The key sticking point in talks with Washington is access to Russia’s financial markets. Moscow says it will not allow foreign banks to open branches in Russia because it is trying to protect its still-developing domestic banking sector.
Disagreements over farm trade, Russian aircraft imports and intellectual property theft also need to be ironed out.
Lavrov said Washington was setting the bar higher for Russia’s entry than it had for other recent entrants.
“From us they are demanding what they call WTO plus. Each time, the Americans demand from us things that we thought we had settled in principle. Like the opening of direct branches of foreign banks in Russia,” said Lavrov.
“The conditions we are offering have for a long time suited American bankers, which is what the heads of Citibank and other leading U.S. financial corporations have told us.
“Everything suits the bankers, but the administration wants something more. Even though the administration, you would think, should take care of its bankers.”
Lavrov said he raised the issue during a visit to Washington earlier this month.
“This gives us cause for concern and I, at the instruction of the president of Russia, told (U.S. President) George Bush about it. And he, in my presence, gave an order that this situation should be sorted out and he should be informed every 10 days about the state of play.”
Lavrov said it appeared that Russian neighbor Ukraine, which is led by a Western-leaning administration, was getting preferential treatment in its application to join the WTO.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted last week to revoke the Jackson-Vanik amendment in respect of Ukraine. The amendment is a provision left over from the Cold War that restricted U.S. trade ties with the Soviet Union.
Revoking Jackson-Vanik is a key precondition for WTO entry. It is still in force with Russia.
“The situation is getting to be indecent where the restrictions imposed by the Jackson-Vanik amendment continue to apply ... when the reasons for introducing those restrictions in the first place have long gone,” said Lavrov.
“For Ukraine everything was solved practically instantaneously. It is hard, of course, to rid oneself of the thought that it is connected to the forthcoming elections.”

TITLE: Anti-Monopoly Chief Vows To Fight Violators, Ease Inflation
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The chief of the country’s anti-monopoly watchdog vowed Friday to step up competition protection and accused those who had violated Russia’s anti-monopoly legislation of fuelling spiraling levels of inflation. Such businesses generate about 30 percent of Russia’s inflation, Federal Anti-Monopoly Service chief Igor Artemyev said at a breakfast organized by the Russian Managers Association. 
Artemyev pledged to step up his fight against companies that engage in monopolistic practices, as well as to crackdown on bureaucrats who help businesses gain an unfair market advantage. The nature of Russian monopolies is unique in that there is “monopolization and hindering of competition by government bureaucrats,” said Artemyev.
The anti-monopoly service has already locked horns with many giants, including leading cement maker Eurocement Group. It levied an unprecedented $70 million fine on the company last October for what it said was an unfair use of its market position to raise cement prices. Eurocement’s appeal hearing is scheduled to be heard in the Moscow Arbitration Court on March 23, the company said Friday.
To accelerate the fight against antitrust violators, the service is pushing through a bill that would allow the anti-monopoly watchdog to be more aggressive in initiating court cases against government authorities.
The bill also tweaks the definition of monopolistic behavior by private companies and increases their penalties for such actions. The State Duma is set to pass the bill by this summer, Artemyev said. 
The efficacy of the new legislation will depend on the will of the courts to side with the anti-monopoly service against state-affiliated giants, Al Breach, the head of research at UBS, said Friday.
Energy is one of the most notable sectors dominated by the state or state-backed companies. Last fall’s gasoline price hikes — when gas prices jumped by 5 percent and 8 percent within a week — were widely attributed to the inordinate influence of a few energy sector players, said Olga Belenkaya, an economist at Finam investment company.
In the construction sector the reins are also held in the hands of the few. “Companies close to municipal authorities dominate the construction industry,” making the sector a quasi-monopoly, Belenkaya said. 
A staggering 90 percent of land allocated for residential construction across Russia was not allocated through open auctions, Artemyev said. Within one month, the anti-monopoly service plans to file about 1,000 cases against local authorities for these violations, he said.
Multibillion-ruble government contracts in health care, including those for ambulances, also lack transparency in handling, with numerous violations, Artemyev said.
Belenkaya said that a crackdown on monopolistic practices would alleviate some inflationary pressure. But Alex Kantarovich, chief strategist at brokerage Aton, disagreed. 
“I doubt it will have an immediate and measurable effect on inflation,” Kantarovich said Friday. 
The government should try to boost market efficiency, but to blame monopolists for inflation is much like “searching for a black cat in a dark room,” he said.

TITLE: Firms and Universities Join Forces to Satisfy IT Boom
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With demand for IT specialists growing at 25 percent to 30 percent a year, software companies and universities are joining forces to offset a state system of education that is failing to keep pace with the booming industry.
Valentin Makarov, president of the association of software developers RUSSOFT, said that there are two types of worthwhile education — programs held at university departments in close cooperation with software developers, and courses organized in further education and retraining centers.
“In both cases qualified programmers are trained by teachers who have experience in commercial programming and scientific research,” Makarov said.
Andrei Terekhov, head of system programming in the department of mathematics and mechanics at St. Petersburg State University, indicated that the absence of unified educational standards for program engineering was the main problem.
“Education programs even in specialized institutions are too academic. Students are not taught to plan, assess risks, manage projects and tackle other practical issues,” Terekhov said.
Companies have to spend about six months training the young specialists they hire, he said.
Only 10 percent of IT specialists become high-level programmers just after graduating. About 40 percent of graduates attend additional training courses. Half the students find jobs in other areas.
To tackle these problems the city’s leading universities have started experimental programs in cooperation with private companies. As CEO of Lanit-Tercom, Terekhov organized additional education for his students. About four years ago company specialists started running courses on new technologies and management. Students also run experimental projects. 
“Nobody expects a commercially profitable product. The goal is the study of new technologies and science,” Terekhov said.
The projects get more complicated as studies advance. Students are also taught to plan budgets and present projects. The most talented ones are already employed by Lanit-Tercom and other companies by the time they graduate.
“At the moment we are trying to create a techno-park near the faculty in Petergof to house 2,500 people from between 30 and 40 companies. We expect them to participate in educating students,” Terekhov said.
SoftJoys Computer Academy has a program of further education, which comprises over 500 hours of lectures divided into six terms.
The program aims to compensate for the State University’s focus on physics and mathematics at the expense of computer science. Professors combine teaching experience with software development, and the program is based on the suggestions of IT companies.
At the end of the program students undergo practical work in leading IT companies and complete diploma projects. Network equipment producer D-Link holds lectures in the Polytechnic Institute to prepare specialists in network technologies.
While D-Link tries to make those courses available to a mass audience, the Polytechnic Institute promotes the introduction of such courses in school and university programs.
Reksoft launched a center in 2001 to train students in programming, testing and project management, the best students being offered positions with Reksoft at graduation.
“Russian companies choose various ways to overcome the deficit in personnel. We not only monitor wages and adjust them to market conditions, but also try to create a comfortable social and cultural environment in the company,” said Nikolai Puntikov, director of StarSoft Labs.
StarSoft Labs also hires people from other countries in the former Soviet Union and educates students from local universities, which allows them to hire 10 to 30 people per month.
Puntikov agreed that traditional courses should include the preparation of software engineers. However, he said that fundamental education should not change dramatically, since Russian specialists are sold om the global market as “people able to solve problems” as opposed to routine programmers within a limited field.
“Programmers who understand quantum mechanics could easily solve a client’s problem,” he said.
Unlike their Indian equivalents, most Russian programmers hold degrees in higher education. However most programmers should be supplied by a system of vocational colleges, and this “does not function at all,” said Valery Andreyev, general director of SoftJoys Computer Academy.
“We have more and more projects that while far from ‘rocket science,’ still demand important professional skills. People with higher education are often bored with such work. It is time to educate specialists in narrow fields within the framework of secondary specialized education. I have no doubt they will be in demand,” Puntikov said.
IT professionals see a solution to the problem by combining the advantages of the classic education system with working specialists, in constant supervision of programs from professional associations.
RUSSOFT promotes amendments to university education program in the ministry for informational technologies. At the city level the association promotes development of technical schools.
“IT science has a constant part like theory of algorithms and permanently changing part like programming technologies. To keep an eye on it within the framework of standard education is impossible,” Andreyev said.

TITLE: The Spirit of Giving
AUTHOR: By Masha Gessen
TEXT: This has probably happened to you. Say, if you have a child in a Russian state school. At some point or another you will hear something about a “donation.” The better the reputation of the school, the more you will have to “donate” and the more frequently. The best state schools, which are officially tuition-free, charge as much or more as the average private school — except the money is procured as ostensibly voluntary donations, which is to say, these schools do not charge; they extort. If you do not pay, your child risks being penalized or even expelled.
If you own or run a business in Moscow, you are accustomed to mild-mannered men who call or come by to tell you that all the businesses in your area are “donating” to the construction of a church down the street, or some similarly honorable cause. If you do not pay, your business risks being penalized by the city; you may even lose your space.
There is an important difference between the unpleasant tuition-collecting practices of Moscow’s public schools and the extortion practiced by people working for or otherwise seemingly affiliated with the city (the mild-mannered men’s exact connection to the city administration can be difficult to trace). The schools collect money through pretend donations and elaborate structures such as “friends of the school clubs” because they are forbidden, by law, to charge tuition. The city, on the other hand, collects taxes and various fees the payment of which is never pretend-voluntary. Extorting additional taxes on top of the legally collected taxes is essentially a mafioso practice, a mob-style way of running a city.
Kommersant on Thursday ran a story on a new twist on this old practice. President Vladimir Putin has apparently issued a directive ordering businesses to finance Russia’s newly declared war on terrorism. The National Anti-Terrorism Committee, formed Feb. 15 and headed by FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, will be run in part on money “donated” by big business, Kommersant reported. The Russian Council of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs is meeting next week to discuss the particulars. In other words, the president seems to be ordering business to finance a state agency through direct donations on top of the taxes the companies already pay.
Kommersant points out that this isn’t the first time Putin has compelled business to “donate” to the state. As prime minister in September 1999, he got six of Russia’s largest corporations to co-found a charity to help Russian military families. In August 2000, 11 companies pitched in to come up with compensatory payments to the families of submariners who died aboard the Kursk. Three more charities — dedicated to aiding street children, energy research and the basic sciences — were founded at the government’s prompting from 2000 to 2002. Judging from the list of contributors and the amounts collected, donations on the part of large companies must have averaged about $1 million.
Finally, last October the presidential administration announced the launch of an Olympics foundation, to the tune of $30 million to start with. The list of funders reads like a who’s who of Russian business. 
Now, the government is planning to use the foundation to make payments and award cars to Russian athletes who won medals in Turin — in other words, to use private funds donated to an ostensibly nongovernmental charity to give out rewards in the name of the state. Once again, this is the sort of thing a government can do with taxes, not with voluntary donations.
But you can be certain Russian business will continue to make “donations” to support any and all state initiatives. The risks of not doing so are all too clear. 
It’s not about being expelled from school, or even about losing your space if you are a business. These days, when it comes to the relationship between the Russian state and Russian business, it’s always about losing it all.

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

TITLE: A Place For More Modest Ambitions
AUTHOR: By Anna Shcherbakova
TEXT: When I first heard someone say “It’s not a good place to live because there aren’t enough jobs” (it was in 
San Diego, California) it sounded very strange. A couple of years later and I admit it isn’t that unusual to measure the charm of a particular town in such terms. And certainly from this point of view St. Petersburg is not the most attractive. 
My former colleague has been looking for her dream job for almost a year. Every year, thousands of people leave St. Petersburg for Moscow in search of a better choice of jobs in banking, publishing, consulting and other spheres, not to mention politics. The mass migration of officials and top-managers of state-owned companies has exacerbated this process to an unhealthy extent. 
Yet even if President Vladimir Putin had fewer friends in St. Petersburg, many of the people who were born or grow up here could still find a good position in the capital. But the brains are flowing 600 kilometers to the south, with big ambitions and expectations of more senior positions and higher salaries. Although some theories claim that motivation depends on the job’s excitement and responsibility, with money merely a question of “professional hygiene,” for ambitious people salary remains very important.
According to the old and unjust rule, salaries in Moscow are approximately twice as high as in the Northern Capital, even though many things cost the same, with the one exception of real estate. This financial disparity is pushing people from quiet St. Petersburg to the noisy capital. 
On the other hand here the need for a qualified workforce is growing. A good dozen new plants have been launched over the last couple of years or are under construction. Retailers and banks are also looking for new staff. New career opportunities appear almost every day, according to recruiters. The number of candidates is limited, they claim, and soon the situation will change from a buyer’s or employer’s market to a seller’s or an applicant’s market. A qualified accountant or an IT-engineer or programmer has the luxury of choosing between two or three job offers. 
Why is the market so limited? First of all, the workforce in Russia is not as mobile as in the U.S. or Europe. Secondly, if people do move they are likely to head straight for Moscow. 
Apart from salary, what differentiates regional labor markets? I think that it comes down to ambition. People go to the capital in order to become big bosses, manage hundreds of employees and wear expensive jackets. Such an opportunity is open to everyone. 
Those who stay here may have more modest ambitions, and are ready to work a daily routine where nothing much changes. Indeed, some of them are becoming big bosses themselves. Sometimes it is just a question of patience. 

Anna Shcherbakova is the St. Petersburg bureau chief of business daily Vedomosti.

TITLE: A Time For Trade Unions
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: When the new Labor Code went into effect in February 2002, many believed that it spelled the end of alternative trade unions. The code stipulated that only one union could represent the employees of any given enterprise. It therefore came as no surprise that the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, or FNPR, a conservative holdover from official Soviet-era trade unions and a close ally of the United Russia party, hailed the new code as an historic victory.
The new Labor Code dealt a serious blow not just to alternative labor organizations, however, but to anyone who attempted to stand up for workers’ rights. Strikes were effectively outlawed. The right to down tools was included in the new code, but the conditions spelled out in the code made organizing a strike all but impossible. This didn’t bother the FNPR leadership, which had no intention of fighting for the rights of its members in any case.
The experience of the last four years has shown that the Labor Code may have done more damage to the FNPR than it did to the alternative unions. Not every local FNPR official is a corrupt opportunist, embezzling membership dues and making a killing on the sale and lease of union buildings. But whenever honest FNPR leaders try to do anything else, they get hit with the full force of the repressive Labor Code.
Infighting has increased within the FNPR, and many unions have opted to leave, most notably the trade union representing the employees of the Ford Motor Company plant in the Leningrad Oblast. As they pulled off two successful strikes, labor activists at the plant discovered that their own union was more concerned about collecting dues than supporting their initiatives. By contrast, alternative unions were extremely supportive despite their shortage of resources and political clout.
The core group of alternative trade union activists held together under the assault, although many labor organizations went under. The largest alternative organization, the All-Russia Confederation of Labor, or VKT, has survived in a somewhat depleted form, along with the radical left-wing Defense of Labor organization.
A pilots’ strike at Bashkir Airlines in 2004 gained national attention. It proved that the Labor Code could be flouted without exposing striking workers to retaliation. As so often happens with bad laws, the Labor Code is not only repressive in the extreme, it also contains obvious internal contradictions and conflicts with other laws already on the books. The pilots at Bashkir Airlines took advantage of these loopholes. Successful strike action at the Ford plant was made possible thanks to an exchange of information between activists at Ford and Bashkir Airlines.
The crisis in the labor movement is obvious. Membership in alternative unions has fallen off dramatically. Union leaders left over from the 1990s have proven incapable of meeting the new challenges facing their members. Some have been removed from their posts, while others have lost the support of union activists.
A new generation of leaders has begun to emerge, including Pyotr Zolotaryov at AvtoVAZ and Alexei Etmanov at Ford. In 2005, members of the All-Russia Confederation of Labor elected a new leader, Boris Kravchenko.
Change was in the air at a meeting of trade union activists from the automotive and food industries and the service sector in late February. Most of the participants represented enterprises opened in Russia by multinational companies such as Caterpillar in Tosno, Ford in the Leningrad Oblast and Heineken in St. Petersburg. Trade unionists from more established concerns such as AvtoVAZ and the Likinsk Bus Plant, or LiAZ, a major producer of buses and other heavy-duty vehicles, were also in attendance.
Kravchenko believes that the only way out of the current systemic crisis is to organize workers in new sectors of the economy that are not already unionized. An aggressive policy of expansion, coupled with greater democracy within unions themselves, could make the difference.
What FNPR officials have failed to grasp is that new enterprises provide optimal conditions for trade union activities. Unlike the old, often moribund plants left over from the Soviet era, the new enterprises are largely run along Western lines. Trade unions can operate effectively in this environment, and the leaders of alternative unions see little point in working together with the FNPR.
The rebirth of the trade union movement is underway, and it could signal the beginning of the end for the FNPR.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute for Globalization Studies.

TITLE: The Secrets of the Cuban Missile Crisis
AUTHOR: By Michael Dobbs
TEXT: U.S. government secrecy will not be an issue, I told myself optimistically, as I began to research a history of the Cuban missile crisis.
After all, the classic showdown of the Cold War occurred more than four decades ago, well outside the 25-year period established by the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the automatic release of everything but the most sensitive government documents. The Soviet Union has been consigned to the ash heap of history, and ‘60s-era defense technologies, such as the U-2 spy plane, are no longer considered secret.
How wrong I was.
It turns out that most government documents on the missile crisis — including the principal Pentagon and State Department records collections — are still classified. Hundreds of documents released to researchers a decade ago have since been withdrawn as part of a controversial — itself secret — reclassification program. And the backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Archives has grown to two, three or even five years.
Six months traveling across the United States in pursuit of missile crisis records — from the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to the Air Force Historical Research Agency in Montgomery, Alabama — spawns conflicting impres-sions.
On the one hand, these institutions are part of a national treasure trove of archival riches. On the other, the system of declassifying government information has become so chaotic in recent years that it is difficult for outsiders, and even many insiders, to understand the logic behind it.
Thanks to the White House tapes declassified in 1996, I have eavesdropped on intimate conversations between President Kennedy and his aides as they struggled to respond to the deployment of Soviet rockets less than 150 kilometers from Key West. I have perused top-secret signals intelligence released by the National Security Agency, and page after page of U.S. invasion plans for Cuba, down to the gradient of the landing beaches and the Cuban “most wanted” list.
On the other hand, Air Force records describing the inadvertent penetration of Soviet air space by a U-2 at the very peak of the crisis are still secret.
The files of former Kennedy military adviser Maxwell Taylor are full of withdrawal slips marked “Access restricted.” An archival turf war between competing agencies has blocked access to the records of the State Department intelligence office.
The extent of the reclassification program (www.gwu.edu/(tilde)/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEB B179/) only became clear late last month after a historian noticed that dozens of documents that he had previously copied from the National Archives had mysteriously disappeared from State Department boxes. The withdrawn records included several documents that had already been published in official government histories, such as a 1948 CIA memo on using balloons to drop propaganda leaflets over communist countries.
While the reclassification drive is intensely irritating to historians, an even bigger problem is the ripple effect such efforts have had on declassification.
The routine declassification of government records has ground to a virtual standstill over the past few years because of the diversion of resources to reexamining previously released records. Documents that would have been released routinely a decade ago are trapped in a bureaucratic twilight zone.
On March 2, the National Archives announced yet another initiative to respond to the flurry of bad publicity about reclassification — this time to check whether documents have been improperly withdrawn from circulation. While the initiative has been welcomed by historians, it also carries dangers. A vast amount of energy, time and tax-payer money is being wasted reviewing and re-reviewing the same documents.
If the missile crisis is any guide, the whole laborious process could be greatly speeded up by better coordination between agencies, improved data management, and what one frustrated National Archives records officer terms the application of “a little common sense.”
Some agencies — the Air Force is a prime example — lack an effective system for tracking documents previously declassified under the Freedom of Information Act.
By contrast, the CIA, which is often accused of dragging its feet, has found a way to make declassified documents instantly available to all researchers.
The agency has a public database that includes day-by-day intelligence analyses on the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, based on reconnaissance flights by U-2s and low-level planes.
Archival work is a little like tackling a giant jigsaw puzzle. If you are patient enough, you can eventually make out the picture, even if many of the pieces are missing. In the case of the missile crisis, I have assembled enough of the puzzle to be confident that few, if any, of the missing pieces contain national security information that could be useful to an enemy — the criterion established by both Bush and Clinton for continuing to classify more than 25-year-old secrets.
So why, if the puzzle is largely resolved, am I and other researchers making such a fuss? Because history is not just about the big picture. It is also about the small stuff, thousands upon thousands of individual acts of bravery and skill and, yes, foolishness.
To make sense of the anguished White House debates between Kennedy and his advisers in October 1962, you need to understand how the Cold War was actually fought, by the generals, the spies, the reconnaissance pilots. It is the details that make history come alive — and in far too many cases those details are still being hidden from us.

Michael Dobbs is a Washington Post reporter on
leave to write a book about the Cuban missile crisis.
He wrote this piece for The Washington Post.

TITLE: The Khruschev Generation
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: Last Friday, I turned 50. Growing up, I always knew that the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party — the one that denounced Stalin’s personality cult — took place in 1956. But only this year, after a spate of articles in the English-language press commemorating its 50th anniversary, did I realize that I was born just two weeks after Khrushchev’s famous secret speech.
Although not printed in full in the Soviet Union until 1989, the speech became the defining event in the life of a generation born during the Khrushchev decade. My mother’s experience of seeing childhood playmates disappear into state orphanages as their Bolshevik parents were unmasked as enemies of the people was completely alien to us. We grew up free of the fear of an unfounded political arrest — and without the hysterical mass adulation of the Great Leader or the paranoid hatred of the Enemy.
The spy mania and Soviet Russian nationalist vainglory were less intense in our time. Although contacts with them had to be cautious, foreigners became a tangible presence in Moscow. Actually, we were the first generation to raise rock ‘n’ roll, blue jeans, Hollywood movies and other forms of Western popular culture into a status symbol and an object of adulation and craving across the Soviet Union.
Our economic situation also improved. Born in communal apartments, barracks-like structures and decaying pre-revolutionary housing stock, we gradually moved into newly built separate apartments — albeit in atrocious prefabs on drab outskirts. Even the ownership of a private car — if only a threadbare Lada or a ramshackle Moskvich — was something a Khrushchevian Baby Boomer could reasonably aspire to.
And yet, for all its promise, our generation seemed to be always falling through the cracks. We were too busy being born during the cultural thaw of the late 1950s and the early 1960s. We missed out on the dissident movement, which began after the Daniel and Sinyavsky trial and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. 
Instead, our youth and early adulthood coincided with the bleakest Brezhnevite stagnation. The Khrushchev boys were the poor sods reaching the draft age in 1979-82, in time for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Even Gorbachev’s perestroika was largely a Khrushchevian project. It was devised by the 1960s generation — those who still believed in Lenin and communism, but wished to correct some excesses. However, it was the guys in their early 30s who implemented Gorbachev’s reforms and stood to benefit most from the transition to the market economy. The first post-Stalin generation seemed finally to be coming into its own. Most of the post-Soviet oligarchs, both currently in exile and not, were born in the 1953-64 period. But so, give or take a year, was Vladimir Putin and his entourage — Vladislav Surkov, Dmitry Medvedev, Sergei Ivanov and others. 
This is no surprise. The liberation of political prisoners, the rehabilitation of victims, greater political openness and more attention to the civilian economy were but the silver lining of Khrushchev’s reforms. The big cloud was that Khrushchev never actually intended to introduce real democracy or tolerate dissent. The 50th anniversary of another basic event of his rule, the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution, will be observed later this year.
The Khrushchev generation reflects this fatal flaw. When communism collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was simultaneously overjoyed and horrified. In the end, after a flirtation with democracy in the 1990s, the horror has prevailed. So much so that the anniversary of Khrushchev’s speech was ignored in Russia. 
It is a shame, really. Looking at Putin’s vertical of power, it occurs to me that Khrushchev wanted his Soviet Union to look something like this. Just as Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” to use Dostoyevsky’s famous phrase, Russia’s post-Soviet political system has been shaped by the six-hour-long piece of clumsy Soviet oratory delivered from the podium in the Kremlin just over half a century ago.

Alexei Bayer, a former Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.

TITLE: A Mystery Malady Strikes in Chechnya
AUTHOR: By Kim Murphy
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: SHELKOVSKAYA, Russia — It started just after the midafternoon recess. As they lined up to return to class, Zareta Chimiyeva saw a girl in front of her collapse and begin convulsing wildly. Only a few minutes later, Zareta was at her desk when she smelled “a bad smell,” and started feeling ill.
She rushed out of the classroom but made it only as far as the stairs. “Darkness surrounded me, and there was darkness in my eyes, and I fell,” said the 12-year-old from this small town in eastern Chechnya.
When Zareta woke up in a hospital, it took three adults to hold her down. She was thrashing and clutching her throat, unable to catch her breath, screaming in terror. She wasn’t alone. Thirteen other girls were in nearby hospital rooms, also saying they were unable to breathe, many of them shrieking and crying.
The next day, 23 students and seven teachers in a neighboring village fell ill with similar symptoms. About the same time, four dozen children in two towns a little farther away also began clutching their throats, screaming and convulsing.
They have yet to get better. The outbreak began Dec. 16, and doctors and parents say the children are still suffering fits day and night. The list of victims has grown to 93, including several teachers and janitors, with a small number of cases reported as far away as the Chechen capital, Grozny, and Urus-Martan, 60 miles to the southwest.
With the diagnosis caught up in the suspicion, politics and fear that surround most of what happens in this fractured separatist republic, the answer to what happened to Shelkovskaya’s children may never be fully known.
What is clear, officials say, is that a new generation has fallen victim to the unexpected and devastating effects of a war that began before many of them were born.
After exhaustive chemical and radiation tests, authorities with the Moscow-backed government announced that the culprit was not poison, but a form of mass hysteria. The whole episode was triggered, most doctors now believe, by the extreme and chronic levels of stress among children who have experienced a war with Moscow that lasted more than 10 years and its devastating economic aftermath.
Yet with Chechen rebel leaders issuing proclamations that the Russian military has secretly poisoned the schools with nerve gas, and public health officials at a loss to explain why after months of treatment the children are only getting worse, parents — and some local physicians — are not ready to accept the official diagnosis. Very few are willing to send their children back to the schools where they were first afflicted.
“The fact is that the children are getting worse. No treatment helps them,” said Khazman Bachayeva, principal at School No. 2 here, where only 30 of 998 students showed up for school recently. “And as of today, nobody has given us a concrete explanation. All they say is, it’s psychological stress. Well, the parents don’t buy that, and I don’t buy it either.”
Sultan Alimkhadzhiyev, Chechnya’s deputy health minister, said it was difficult to explain to parents that their children had become living specimens of what it means to grow up with the constant threat of violence and chronic joblessness and poverty.
“Our children have seen bombings, artillery attacks, large-caliber bombardment. They saw houses, schools and hospitals burning. They lost parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors,” he said. “And they still see tanks and armored vehicles every day in the street.
“In this case, what we have seen are not symptoms of poisoning... but of psychosis. A state of panic. Children are feeling constant fear, a premonition of tragedy.”
The ability of the human mind to convert psychological stress into physical symptoms, officially known as “mass sociogenic illness” or “conversion disorder,” is well documented but not completely understood. Why, for example, are chiefly girls affected? Only four of the Chechen victims were boys. And why were there families in which one girl was afflicted, but a sister who was in the same room with her showed no symptoms?
Through the centuries, mass hysteria has been a medically accepted but publicly doubted diagnosis. Young nuns at convents in medieval France who began twitching and shouting were thought to be diabolically possessed.
In recent years, scientists have recorded cases in Rhode Island, Washington, California and elsewhere in which people exposed to harmless smells or food were suddenly beset with real but baseless symptoms of poisoning, often brought on by hyperventilation.
The most acute outbreaks involve victims who are already suffering unusual levels of stress and living in “intolerable social settings,” Australian and British researchers Robert E. Bartholomew and Simon Wessely concluded in a 2001 study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The issue of wartime stress was documented during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, they said, when many Israelis reported symptoms of chemical weapons exposure even though the Scud missiles fired at Tel Aviv contained no chemical warheads.
The two researchers also saw a possible link between the respiratory symptoms reported by rescuers and lower Manhattan residents after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and a form of psychogenic illness.
In Grozny, where Shelkovskaya victims were transferred in December, doctors tried music therapy and set up concerts in the basement of the main children’s hospital for as long as seven hours a day for two weeks. The fits improved, but when a television journalist began filming one of the sessions, 12 girls immediately fell into new seizures.
Next, the victims were moved to a clinic in Stavropol, outside Chechnya. Doctors there treated some of the patients with medication they refused to identify that caused some of the girls to gain as much as 19 pounds in three weeks. For many patients, the number of fits was substantially reduced, or even eliminated. But many others returned home in mid-February only to begin having nosebleeds and hallucinations, in addition to their twitching and asthmatic fits.
On Feb. 22, just when parents were beginning to feel confident enough to send their children back to School No. 2, three teachers fell ill with symptoms slightly resembling those of the original victims. The school quickly emptied again, and 11 new people showed up at a hospital with breathing difficulties. Three were admitted.
“If it was merely stress, this case would be the starting point for a massive spread of the illness, creating a chain reaction. But it’s not spreading to those outside the schools,” said Ruslan Kokanayev, regional head of administration. “I think the government doesn’t want to get to the bottom of this, because if they do, they know they will be facing a level of public indignation that they’re not prepared to handle.”
Complicating the psychology diagnosis are blood tests showing the presence in five victims — three in Shelkovskaya, two in a neighboring village — of ethylene glycol, a highly toxic substance used in antifreeze, glass sterilization and a variety of industrial processes.
Doctors can’t explain how the children might have been exposed to the chemical, although the general level of environmental pollution in Chechnya is so high that it is perhaps not surprising. Still, health officials believe the traces were so small that they could not have been a factor.
Parents are not convinced.
“It’s a clear case of chemical poisoning,” said Elim Nogamevzuyev, a resident who showed up for a meeting last week with senior Chechen health officials at School No. 2. “They tested new chemical weapons on our children here.”
Principal Bachayeva said she was at a loss to explain why nothing was found when investigators pulled up the floorboards, scanned the basement and tested the air around the school.
“I would agree with the psychological diagnosis. But I have just one question: Why didn’t children get sick on that day in the first shift? Why did the children get sick only during the second shift?” she said. 
“That’s why I can’t agree with that opinion.
“The children went out into the yard for a break between classes, they were healthy. And when they got back, they started to collapse.”
Shelkovskaya has escaped much of the war’s violence. But health officials say many of its residents are refugees from war elsewhere. The region is one of the most economically depressed in Chechnya, with large numbers of families living on government stipends and handouts from humanitarian organizations.
Fourteen-year-old Dinara Damayeva was 8 when her family fled Grozny under artillery fire during the separatist republic’s second war with Moscow. They took refuge in what appeared to be a safe village, only to come under repeated missile attack, including one strike that killed a boy next door.
Uprooted again, Dinara and her six sisters moved with their parents into a rented house in Shelkovskaya.
Dinara was already having frequent epileptic seizures, said her father, Beslan Damayev, but had never experienced anything as violent as the fits that began when she went to school on the afternoon of Dec. 19.
The girl said she felt a powdery substance in her throat after coming in from recess, and smelled an odor in the hallway that resembled a mixture of gasoline and the chlorine-based fluid that is commonly used for washing floors in Chechnya.
“I couldn’t breathe, it was so bad. I didn’t have enough air,” Dinara said.
Some of the other students reported memory loss and hallucinations, along with panic attacks.
“At one point, she didn’t recognize her father when he came into the hospital room,” said Zareta’s mother, Aiza Askhabova. “She asked me, ‘Who are you?’ And she came out onto the balcony of the hospital with me and she’s looking at the street and she sees a dog, and she says, ‘What’s this?’ This lasted four days.
“She was having a fit almost every hour, up to 25 times a day, from 20 to 25 minutes each, and they tell us it’s — here, look at this paper they gave us: ‘Conversion reaction of psychogenic genesis.’
“Let me tell you, we don’t understand head or tail of this diagnosis.”
Authorities in Grozny and Moscow say the Shelkovskaya events highlight years of inattention to the psychological effects of the war.
Even now, Chechnya’s only children’s psychological rehabilitation center lies in a cramped, donated apartment in Grozny with no room for residential care. Its outpatient clients include children who sit in the corner and do not communicate at all, some who have strong aggressive streaks and some who are convinced that they are responsible for the deaths of their loved ones.
“We have children who witnessed the death of their own parents. There are children who were strongly traumatized by the first war, and then they had to live all over again through the second war, which was even worse,” said Milana Dashayeva, a psychologist at the center. “It has been layer upon layer of extreme stress.”
Doctors at the government-run Serbsky Forensic Psychiatry Institute in Moscow have organized emergency training programs in Moscow for Chechen psychologists and will begin mental health training for regional doctors in Chechnya next month.
“You see, it would have been much easier to have found some toxicological problems,” said Zurab Kikalidze, the Serbsky Institute’s deputy director, who traveled to Chechnya to help diagnose the victims in the Shelkovskaya area. “It is much more difficult to rebuild the system of psychological support in Chechnya.”

TITLE: Civil War Fears Grow Amid Killing Frenzy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Police found four hanged men dangling from electricity pylons in a Baghdad Shiite slum Monday, hours after car bombs and mortars shells ripped through teeming market streets, killing at least 58 people and wounding more than 200. 
The grim scene underscored fears that Sunday’s bloody assault on a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would plunge Iraq into another frenzy of sectarian killing.
Bomb blasts in Baghdad and north of the capital — many of them targeting Iraqi police patrols — killed at least 11 more people Monday and wounded more than 40. They included a U.S. soldier killed in a roadside bombing in east Baghdad, the military said. A U.S. Marine was reported killed the previous day in the western insurgent-plagued province of Anbar.
The deaths brought the number of U.S. military members killed to at least 2,308 since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
President Jalal Talabani said terrorists bent on igniting a civil war were taking advantage of a vacuum in authority caused by tangled negotiations to form a new government.
“The way in which this bloody act was conducted leaves us with no doubt that the terrorists have targeted this peaceful neighborhood in order to ignite civil strife and stoke the fire of civil war,” Talabani said in a statement. “So, it is the duty of the political groups to accelerate efforts to form the government, and the armed forces and security bodies should act swiftly to eliminate such crimes.
Addressing reporters in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, al-Sadr avoided blaming Sunni Muslims for the attacks and appealed for unity Monday. The anti-American cleric instead blamed feared terror group al-Qaida in Iraq and U.S. forces.
“Sunnis and Shiites are not responsible for such acts,” al-Sadr said. “National unity is required.”
Sunni leaders quickly condemned the attack on Baghdad’s Sadr City.

TITLE: Rice Slams Milosevic As ‘Malign Force’
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RIO DE JANEIRO — Slobodan Milosevic leaves a legacy as “one of the most malign forces in Europe in quite a long time,” even though he died before the end of his four-year U.N. war crimes trial, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday. 
“Perhaps it would have been better” if he had lived to see a verdict in court, Rice said. “But history is going to move on ... toward resolution of these crises in the Balkans and the evolution of the people of the Balkans toward their European identity.”
Milosevic, who died Saturday in The Hague, was reviled by the United States as “the butcher of the Balkans.” He was a hero to many Serbs, despite losing four wars and impoverishing his people in the 1990s while trying to create a “Greater Serbia” linking Serbia with Serb-dominated areas of Croatia and Bosnia. 
He was on trial for orchestrating a decade of conflict that killed 250,000 people and tore apart the Yugoslav federation. No verdict will be issued now.
“I do think there is a sense in which some feel that they wish there had been the opportunity to bring him to justice and to have the final verdict of history be in the courts, but I think the final verdict of history about Milosevic is pretty clear,” Rice told reporters on a flight from Santiago, Chile, to Rio de Janeiro, where her plane was refueling for a trip to Indonesia.

TITLE: Republicans Look to Future Without George Bush
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
WASHINGTON — U.S. Republicans jockeyed for political advantage as they weighed the results of a “straw poll” of party faithful that provided an early test of several would-be contenders in the 2008 presidential election. 
Some 1,500 movers, shakers and donors gathered in Memphis, Tennessee for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, with half a dozen prominent Republicans positioning themselves for the coveted top prize in U.S. politics.
The field of Republican contenders for the White House is an unusually crowded one, with President George W. Bush ineligible to run again after two terms in office.  The 2008 campaign also marks the first race in a half-century where neither party has an heir apparent, setting the stage for a wide-open contest with a greater than usual degree of uncertainty over the outcome.
The Republican majority leader in the U.S. Senate, Bill Frist, decisively won a straw poll of party heavyweights held Saturday, although the significance of that victory was diminished by the fact that he was the heavily-tipped, home state favorite.
Frist scored a solid 36.9 percent of the vote, more than twice as many as the runner-up, moderate Republican governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who ranked a surprising second with 14.4 percent of the tally. .
Surprisingly, Arizona senator John McCain, deemed by many political observers as the odds-on GOP frontrunner at this early stage, and who waged a pitched battle against then-candidate George W. Bush for the 2000 nomination, finished a disappointing fifth with just 4.6 percent of the ballot.
Another party star, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who skipped the conference entirely, was in 11th place with 1.1 percent.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has vehemently denied any party political aspirations but is being aggressively courted by party moderates, finished ninth with 2.2 percent of the vote. 
A heart transplant surgeon, Frist has deep roots in the traditional Republican stronghold of the South, but lacks the passion, charisma and crossover appeal of McCain, an independent minded lawmaker whose name is usually preceded by the qualifier “maverick.”
Taken more than two years before the presidential contest, the straw poll was non-binding and dismissed by many as a premature, empty exercise.
Still, some experts study it for sign of trends within the party, particularly by wealthy Republican donors, who are mulling which candidates to back.
Some top Republicans said the real concern was not 2008, but mid-term congressional elections later this year, which could see Republicans lose their hold on the Congress.
“We’re a party in fear right now. We’re a party worried deeply about losing,” said conservative Senator Lindsey Graham, who is not running for the White House.

TITLE: At Least 10 People Dead As Tornados Hit U.S. Midwest
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SPRINGFIELD, Illinois — Swarms of tornadoes killed at least 10 people across the Midwest, shut down the University of Kansas and damaged so much of Springfield on Monday that the mayor said “every square inch” of town suffered some effects.
The violent weather started during the weekend with a line of storms that spawned tornadoes and downpours from the southern Plains to the Ohio Valley.
On Monday, a second line of storms raked the region, with rain, hail and fierce wind tearing up trees and homes from Kansas through Indiana, and blizzards to the north cutting off power to thousands and shutting down schools in South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Illinois’ capital was hit hard twice in 24 hours, first by a tornado and then strong wind early Monday that blew debris through the city. Power lines were down across Springfield, trees uprooted and windows blown out.
Mayor Tim Davlin said he expected “every square inch of Springfield” will have suffered some effect from the storms.
“It’s just unreal,” Davlin told The Springfield State Journal Register early Monday from the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
Most major roads into the city were closed, and one man was reported missing after his home was destroyed. The roof was torn off a Wal-Mart store, and police were searching damaged homes and businesses Monday for people who could be trapped, said city spokesman Ernie Slottag. At least 19 people were treated for minor injuries.
Most of Springfield was without power, and thousands of homes outside the city were blacked out elsewhere in Illinois.

TITLE: Italy’s Aging Rulers Fail To Inspire Ahead of Election
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: ROME — “Time and age have no effect on me,” Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently boasted, showing off the wonders of a face-lift and hair transplant that make him look younger than his 69 years. 
His political rival Romano Prodi also looks good for his 66 years — although he has not had any nips or tucks — and in December he ran his first marathon.
Meanwhile, Italy’s 85-year-old President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi travels the country with great vigor pursuing a punishing schedule that would test a man half his age.
The trio’s resilience is admirable, but no amount of cosmetic surgery or jogging can disguise the fact that Italy’s political leaders are among the oldest in the world and show little inclination to make way for the younger generation.
The same phenomenon is reflected across Italian society, with an aging elite guiding an increasingly aged population in a country with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
A report prepared by the Rome-based think-tank Glocus says 54 percent of public leaders in Italy, defined as the 5,500 people listed in the 2004 edition of “Who’s Who,” are over 60, up from 46 percent in 1998, with 23.4 percent over 70.
“The great Italian problem is our fear of our own resources and a lack of faith in the future,” said Vera Slepoj, president of Italy’s national association of psychologists.
“Every lobby in Italy builds a defensive system. There is no generational renewal, there is no courage to risk change.”
This defensive system is most visible in politics where the upper echelons have barely changed in a decade, surviving crushing defeats, crises and scandals with astonishing ease.
Berlusconi and Prodi are challenging each other to become prime minister in 2006 just as they did in 1996.
And today, just as 10 years ago, all the main leaders of the center-right coalition parties are the same, including Umberto Bossi, the head of the Northern League, who suffered heart failure in 2004 and walks and talks with difficulty.
It is a similar picture on the center-left with only a couple of new faces managing to fight their way to the front.
“It seems that when people get power here, all they are interested in is accumulating more power and holding onto it,” said Filippo del Corno, a 36-year-old composer who has started a campaign to promote young people in the arts world.
“How can young people get interested in politics? Who can they relate to?” he says, pointing enviously to Britain, where Tony Blair became prime minister aged 43, and to Spain, where Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was also 43 when he became prime minister. 
Judging by the insults that ricochet around politics, you could be forgiven for thinking that Italy was still entrenched in the Cold War and had not yet crossed into the 21st century.
Barely a day passes without politicians accusing each other of being Stalinists or Fascists, while Berlusconi himself is particularly obsessed by the “red menace,” regularly warning that the Communists are threatening to bury democracy in Italy.
Del Corno says anachronistic thinking is also rife in his own field and he wants to see a quota system introduced that will give under-40s a chance to run top arts events. 
“We are only going to overcome our economic crisis by making better use of younger people,” Corno said, referring to a decade of under-achievement by Italy’s hidebound economy. 
n Facing the possibility of a new trial, Berlusconi denounced Italy’s judiciary as a danger to democracy and promised changes to the system as he tries to hold on to the premiership in next month’s election. 
Italian prosecutors are “the disease of our democracy,” Berlusconi said on a late-night talk show that ended early Saturday.
The judiciary “should be changed,” said the conservative leader, who for years has blamed his legal troubles on magistrates he contends sympathize with the left.
Only hours earlier, Milan prosecutors sought the indictment of the media mogul on corruption charges. Prosecution efforts stemming from other investigations of his business empire dealings either have ended in acquittal or been thwarted by the expiration of statute of limitations.
Berlusconi has denied any wrongdoing. It could take weeks for a judge to rule in the request.
Parliamentary elections are scheduled for April 9-10.
(Reuters/AP)

TITLE: U.S. President Suffers From Voter Discontent
AUTHOR: By Ron Fournier
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — More and more people, particularly Republicans, disapprove of U.S. President George Bush’s performance, question his character and no longer consider him a strong leader against terrorism, according to an AP-Ipsos poll documenting one of the bleakest points of his presidency. 
Nearly four out of five Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, believe civil war will break out in Iraq — the bloody hot spot upon which Bush has staked his presidency. Nearly 70 percent of people say the U.S. is on the wrong track, a 6-point jump since February. 
“Obviously, it’s the winter of our discontent,” said Representative Tom Cole.
Republican Party leaders said the survey explains why GOP lawmakers are rushing to distance themselves from Bush on a range of issues — port security, immigration, spending, warrantless eavesdropping and trade, for example.
The positioning is most intense among Republicans facing election in November and those considering 2008 presidential campaigns.
“You’re in the position of this cycle now that is difficult anyway. In second term off-year elections, there gets to be a familiarity factor,” said Senator Sam Brownback, a potential presidential candidate.
“People have seen and heard [Bush’s] ideas long enough and that enters into their thinking. People are kind of, ‘Well, I wonder what other people can do,’” he said.
The poll suggests that most Americans wonder whether Bush is up to the job. The survey, conducted last week of 1,000 people, found that just 37 percent approve of his overall performance. That is the lowest of his presidency.
Bush’s job approval among Republicans plummeted from 82 percent in February to 74 percent, a dangerous sign in a midterm election year when parties rely on enthusiasm from their most loyal voters.
On issues, Bush’s approval rating declined from 39 percent to 36 percent for his handling of domestic affairs and from 47 percent to 43 percent on foreign policy and terrorism.

TITLE: Dalai Lama’s China Request
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DHARMSALA, India — The Dalai Lama said Friday that he has asked China to let him to visit the country for the first time since he fled Tibet nearly a half-century ago. 	
His comments came in an address to thousands of followers on the anniversary of the 1959 uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule, which marked the beginning of his exile.
The supreme Tibetan spiritual leader, 70, did not specify an itinerary, but said he wanted to make a pilgrimage. His envoys, who recently returned from talks with officials in China, had conveyed his request to the Chinese government, he said.
“As a country with a long history of Buddhism, China has many sacred pilgrim sites,” he told his followers. “As well as visiting the pilgrim sites, I hope I will be able to see for myself the changes and developments in the People’s Republic of China.”
In Beijing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman reached by telephone had no immediate response.
China has claimed Tibet as part of its territory for centuries, and its forces occupied the region in 1950. Branded a separatist, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharmsala in 1959 where he formed a government-in-exile. He hasn’t been back since. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said he wants autonomy, not independence, for Tibet.
“[But] I will seek its future within the framework of the Chinese constitution,” the Dalai Lama said.

TITLE: ‘Cartoons Were Right,’ Says Expert
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG — Denmark’s leading media law expert has described the cartoons which set off uproar in the Muslim world as “a magnificent specimen of Danish culture and newspaper tradition.”
Oluf Jœrgensen gave his view of the 12 drawings of the prophet Mohammed that led to deadly riots worldwide in an interview with Illustreret Bunker, a Danish student monthly.
An article published in the March edition asked Jœrgensen if the dozens of casualties and attacks on Danish embassies were a reasonable prize for the promotion of press freedom. He agreed it was.
“If it was not possible for [Danes] to say that religion is used to legitimize political acts, we would be moving in the direction of a totalitarian regime,” Jœrgensen added.
He said the controversy sprang from a misunderstanding that some Muslims have of the Danish tradition of satire. 
“When somebody says that we would never do such a thing to Jesus — then try to rerun Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’,” Jœrgensen said.

TITLE: Queen Elizabeth Takes Her ‘Last Big Tour’ Down Under
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
SYDNEY — Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II began the first official function of her 15th visit to Australia with a visit to Sydney’s harbor that she described as rich in memories and symbolism.
The queen’s four-day visit, which will culminate Wednesday when she opens the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, has been touted as the 79-year-old monarch’s last major tour.
Wearing a lime-green suit and matching hat and accompanied by her husband Prince Philip, the Queen was greeted by hundreds of well-wishers as she arrived at the iconic harborside Sydney Opera House.
She was presented with armfuls of flowers by those among the Australian flag-waving crowd after meeting with Prime Minister John Howard and her representative in Australia, Governor General Michael Jeffery.
In welcoming the Queen, New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma noted there had always been “robust and healthy debate about Australia’s constitutional arrangements.”
But he added: “We remain united in our admiration of Your Majesty’s example of duty and service, and your undiminished dedication to the Commonwealth and its people.”
Australia voted to remain a constitutional monarchy in 1999.
The Queen was at the Opera House to open the first new exterior extension to the building since she opened the internationally renowned building in 1973.
The new western colonnade opened Monday, built to allow more light into an area originally designed to house utilities but since changed to accommodate theater seats, was the work of the building’s Danish architect Joern Utzon.
Utzon has never returned to Australia since quitting the project in 1966 over differences with the New South Wales government over the construction of the Opera House.
His architect son Jan said his 87-year-old father was delighted that the Queen had agreed to open the colonnade and disappointed that he was unable to travel to Sydney for the event.
“He and my mother are truly sad they cannot be here for the celebrations but the journey is just too much for them,” Jan Utzon said.

TITLE: Spartak Thrashed By CSKA
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian champions CSKA beat last year’s runners-up Spartak 3-2 in a Moscow derby on Saturday to win the Supercup, the annual curtain-raiser to the season. 
The army side, who also won the UEFA and Russian Cups last year, twice came from behind to beat their arch-rivals, CSKA’s Brazilian newcomer Jo scoring the winner eight minutes from time.
But their victory was overshadowed by clashes between rival fans in two separate incidents, involving hundreds of supporters.
The first spot of trouble occurred three hours before the match in the north-east of the city. Three people were admitted to hospital with serious injuries while some 30 others suffered cuts and bruises, Russian news agency Interfax reported. No arrests were reported.

TITLE: SKA Suffer At Home And Away
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: SKA St. Petersburg continued its late season skid by self-destructing in a 2-1 loss to Khimik Voskresensk in the final game of the regular season of Russia’s Professional Hockey League at St. Petersburg’s Ice Palace on Friday. 
The Petersburg team dropped to 13th in the standings and traveled to Omsk on Monday to face 4th ranked Siberian powerhouse Avangard in the first round of best-of-five playoffs.
That game ended late Monday with SKA losing 3-0 to Avangard. 
Game two was scheduled for Tuesday night, also in Omsk.
“We’ve had to make a number of changes to account for injuries... but we’re going to fight to the finish,” SKA Acting Head Coach Sergei Cherkas said Friday before traveling to Omsk. 
Just a few thousand fans attended Friday’s regular season finale against Khimik because it was held early at 5 p.m. in accordance with a league decision that all teams would play their final games simultaneously across four different time zones. 
After a scoreless first period SKA started strongly, but Khimik’s Alexei Skotov broke through the SKA defense and slapped one past SKA goalie Maxim Sokolov in the 26th minute. 
SKA’s Fyodor Polishchuk answered right back by tipping in a shot by Igor Misko past Khimik netminder Dushan Salfitski at 34:48. Yevgeny Pupkov was credited with an assisted for setting up the play. 
Khimik took control of the game 1:12 into the third period when Jan Hejda scored with a slapshot from the top of the circle during a power play. 
SKA began to disintegrate and commit errors as they struggled to level the score. 
SKA knew entering the game that a tie or win could set them up against a potentially easier first round opponent such as CSKA from Moscow, or a rematch against Khimik.
But Avangard, along with Ak Bars Kazan, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, and Metallurg Magnitogorsk are considered favorites to advance to this year’s finals. 
“There is nothing good about having to play Avangard in the playoffs,” Cherkas said Friday. “Lately we’ve been winning tough games on the road. It’s almost like we’re more at home on the road and I hope this trend continues.” 
But that trend abruptly ended Monday with SKA’s 3-0 loss in the series opener. After Tuesday’s game in Omsk, teams will play game three in St. Petersburg on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Yubileiny Sports Palace.
The Thursday game coincides with FC Zenit St. Petersburg’s second-leg match against Olympique de Marseille in the final 16 of the UEFA Cup — played across the street from Yubileiny at Petrovsky Stadium. 
Yubileiny is also due to host game four, if necessary, on Friday at 7 p.m.
SKA has been in a slump since head coach Nikolai Solobiyev left the team in late January in a mutual decision between him and team management. 
Cherkas was named acting head coach and given the challenge of achieving the team’s goal this season of reaching the second round of the playoffs.

TITLE: Rooney Hungry For More Goals
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Wayne Rooney scored two goals in the first 12 minutes Sunday, and Manchester United beat Newcastle 2-0 in the English Premier League. 
Rooney picked up an errant pass in the eighth minute and lobbed the ball over Newcastle goalkeeper Shay Given.
Four minutes later, Louis Saha and John O’Shea carved through the Newcastle defense with a series of passes, leaving Rooney to shoot past Given for the second goal.
“We could have scored more — we should have,” Rooney said. “We should have taken a lot more of our chances.”
United, which has won four straight league games and has 60 points, is 15 points behind leader Chelsea, which beat Tottenham 2-1 Saturday.
The loss was Newcastle’s first since Graeme Souness was fired two months ago. Thierry Henry also scored two goals, leading Arsenal to victory over Liverpool 2-1. Henry scored the winning goal in the 83rd minute, taking advantage of a poor back pass from Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard.
Henry also scored in the 21st minute, but Luis Garcia tied the score in the 75th. Arsenal moved up to fifth place with the win, while Liverpool stayed in third.

TITLE: Alonso Resists Schumi’s Threat
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
SAKHIR, Bahrain — Defending world champion Fernando Alonso resisted the reinvigorated threat of legendary former title-holder Michael Schumacher to win the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.
The 24-year-old Spaniard, the youngest champion in F1 history, steered his Renault through the torrid heat of a perfect sunny day in the Gulf to secure the ninth victory of his career.
Schumacher, 37, veteran of a record seven drivers’ titles and 84 triumphs in 232 races, finished second Sunday in his Ferrari after starting from a record-equalling 65th pole position of his career.
The German came home second just 1.2 seconds behind Alonso but 19.3 seconds ahead of Finn Kimi Raikkonen who carved through the field from the back of the grid in his McLaren to take third place.
Alonso’s win was a repeat of his victory last year as he picked up where he had left off in the final race of last season, a great win in the Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai where Renault clinched the constructors’ title.
Briton Jenson Button came home a competitive fourth for Honda, close behind Raikkonen, with Colombian Juan-Pablo Montoya in fifth.