SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1153 (19), Friday, March 17, 2006
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TITLE: NGOs Try To Advise G8 States
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich and Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: International NGOs struggled to agree on their message for Group of Eight leaders, with participants at a major conference on March 9-10 split on policy recommendations and the health of Russian civil society.
About 350 activists ended a meeting of the so-called Civil G8 on March 10 after two days of discussions and an unprecedented meeting with all eight sherpas, or government point men, from the club of rich democracies. Many activists insisted the event had been a success despite delays drafting its final documents.
“Everyone came with different opinions, and the fact that we came together on as many points as we did is a fantastic success,” Tanya Monaghan, head of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Moscow office, said at a news conference after the discussions.
The main task of the Civil G8, a coalition of dozens of Russian and foreign nongovernmental organizations, is to try to put civil society’s concerns to G8 leaders. 
But on the critical topic of energy security — Russia’s stated priority during its G8 presidency this year — organizers said the group’s recommendations to G8 governments were at least a week away.
“It’s a very big document, and it’s still very raw,” Leonid Grigoryev, president of the Institute of Energy and Finance, said at the news conference. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to distribute it in its current form.”
Grigoryev said the document recommended the use of alternative energy sources and an end to government subsidies for nuclear power.
“We’re not so naive as to think that, as of tomorrow, atomic and other ‘dirty’ energy sources shouldn’t be used anymore,” Greenpeace Russia director Sergei Tsyplenkov said at the Civil G8 conference. “That’s why we consider it very important that the G8 leaders support the development of alternative, ecologically pure energy sources.”
But environmentalist Alexander Nikitin, who runs the St. Petersburg branch of the Norwegian ecological organization Bellona, spoke about the document in a much more positive tone.
“This is a very strong document,” he said at a news conference in Rosbalt news agency on Wednesday. “It’s a call for an immediate end to the construction of new nuclear reactors and updating of old ones in all of the G8 countries. We are also demanding a complete shutdown of all nuclear industry projects in these countries, except for  safety measures.”
Until 1985, Alexander Nikitin served as a naval captain in the Soviet Northern Fleet, where he worked as a chief engineer on nuclear powered submarines. In 2000, Nikitin won a legal battle against the country’s FSB security services body after being accused of high treason and espionage. Nikitin had written an analytical report for Bellona on the potential environmental hazards of radioactive waste and decommissioned Russian nuclear submarines, specifically, in Northern Russia.
The list of recommendations for G8 also contains a request to stop the international transportation of nuclear waste, including spent nuclear fuel.
“Nuclear industry in its current form has compromised itself,” Nikitin said. “We have to end the unethical practice of certain countries producing nuclear energy but then getting rid of the waste by sending it to other countries.”
Alexander Sungurov, president of the St. Petersburg Center for Political and Humanitarian Studies “Strategia”, said he was encouraged to see that the forum’s section on education devoted much attention to civil education programs.
“Things like teaching human rights to the police are crucially important in Russia today,” Sungurov said. “An international council is needed within the Civil G8 to exchange such programs between the eight participating countries and evaluate each country’s efforts.”
In Sungurov’s opinion, police violence and ethnic hatred are the two major problems facing Russia’s civil society at present.
“Civil education programs must target these issues as a priority,” he said. “We have much to learn from the other members of G8 about efficient ways of explaining to citizens why they need to take part in elections or confront racism or religious intolerance.”

TITLE: G8 Eyes Energy Policy
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Energy ministers from the world’s richest countries called Thursday for market-oriented approaches to increasing supplies and said significant investments would be needed in the production, transportation and processing of resources. 
The ministers from the Group of Eight nations, meeting against the backdrop of high oil prices and uncertainty about supplies, also called for investment policies that encourage development in the sector. 
“We recognize that to attract investment it is essential for countries to have open and favorable investment regimes,” they said, “including stable and predictable regulations, clear tax laws, and efficient administration procedures as well as fair and reciprocal access to markets along the energy value chain.” 
Though they conceded that fossil fuels “will remain the basis of the world energy industry for at least the first half of the 21st century,” the ministers urged a diversification of energy sources, suppliers, consumers, routes and delivery methods as a means of reducing energy security risks. They noted in particular the importance of nuclear energy. 
“For those countries that wish, wide-scale development of safe and secure nuclear energy is crucial for long-term environmentally sustainable diversification of energy supply,” they said, according to a statement released by Russia’s Ministry of Industry and Energy. 
The ministers called for increased energy supplies to less-developed countries, and said the development of low-carbon technologies will be “crucial” to long-term global environmental sustainability. 
They also said better communication and information exchanges between energy producers, transit, and consumer countries was necessary. 
Russia is the world’s No. 1 gas producer and the biggest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, but Moscow’s recent behavior has fueled concern among Western oil companies about investing in Russia and increased EU worries about the dependability of supplies from state-controlled monopoly Gazprom. 
President Vladimir Putin, who hosted the energy ministers in the Kremlin on Thursday, promised that in the next few months Russia’s parliament will pass a key bill regulating taxes on mineral extraction along with new legislation on using subsoil resources, including cases with the participation of the foreign capital. 
The changes were “aimed at making energy business in Russia as transparent and predictable as possible,” Putin said. 
Russian Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said Thursday that $17 trillion needed to be invested by 2030 “to create an effective global energy system that is resilient to shocks.” Stable legislation, a clear tax regime and flexible administration are key to realizing this goal, Khristenko said. 
Putin also said Russia’s gas exports rose by 8 percent and oil exports by 2.4 percent last year compared with 2004. 
The focus on the security of energy supplies was heightened at the start of the year, just as Russia was assuming the chairmanship of the Group of Eight industrialized nations. 
A gas price fight with Ukraine saw Russia cut supplies to its neighbor, a move that temporarily disrupted deliveries across Ukrainian territory into Europe. 
“It’s been kind of a wake up call for European nations that have been dependent on Russia for a number of years,” U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Wednesday. 
“I think it’s also stimulated the thinking about the question of energy security and the impact of problems of any sort.” 
Rose Gottemoeller, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the ministers sent a “very balanced message” that reflected the interests of both Russia and the United States. 
She noted that the United States has been pressing for diversifying methods and routes for delivering energy, while Russia has called for diversification of sources — meaning its partners should be using Russian oil and gas to wean themselves of a dependency on supplies from the volatile Middle East.

TITLE: Bush Derides Russia’s Declining Democracy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — U.S. President George W. Bush said Thursday that recent trends in Russia “regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment” to democratic freedoms and institutions. 
“We will work to try to persuade the Russian Government to move forward, not backward, along freedom’s path,” Bush said in his National Security Strategy report, his plan for protecting America and directing U.S. relations with other nations. 
Bush said that Russia has great influence not only in Europe and its own immediate neighborhood, but also in many other regions of vital U.S. interest: the broader Middle East, South and Central Asia, and East Asia. 
“We must encourage Russia to respect the values of freedom and democracy at home and not to impede the cause of freedom and democracy in these regions,” Bush said. 
Bush’s comments came as the United States was pressing both Russia and China in a high-stakes effort to sign on to a UN Security Council statement calling on Iran to halt uranium enrichment. 
Bush said the strengthening of U.S.-Russian relations depends on the foreign and domestic policies that Russia adopts. 
The relationship cannot prosper if Russia attempts to prevent democratic development at home and abroad, he said.

TITLE: Policemen Tried in Beslan Case
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Russian court on Thursday opened the trial of three police officers accused of negligence facilitating the bloody school hostage taking in the southern town of Beslan that left 331 people dead. 
But relatives of the victims accused the government of singling out local police officials as scapegoats while covering up mistakes and negligence by federal authorities. 
“The policemen were guilty of negligence, but what happened afterward was the fault of other people — those who made decisions. It is they who should be held accountable,” said Emma Betrozova of the Voice of Beslan, one of several survivors’ and victims’ groups in the small southern Russian town. 
The officers, who held senior positions in the regional police force, went on trial in Beslan’s district court. They are charged with “criminal negligence” that let a truckload of heavily armed attackers drive unimpeded across the southern province with many police checkpoints, and seize Beslan’s School No. 1 on Sept. 1, 2004. 
If convicted, the officers face up to seven years in prison, the regional Supreme Court said in a statement. 
A parliamentary panel that investigated the raid has blamed regional police officials for failing to step up security in schools in North Ossetia, the province where Beslan is located, despite orders from the Russian interior minister. 
Only a single policewoman was posted outside the Beslan school, and she was taken hostage by raiders demanding that Russian troops withdraw from the nearby republic of Chechnya. 
The militants herded 1,128 hostages into a gymnasium rigged with explosives, where they suffered in hot, unsanitary conditions and were denied water during the three-day ordeal that ended in explosions and gunfire; 186 children were among the dead.

TITLE: Migrants Given Legal Status
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — More than 7,000 illegal migrant workers have been granted legal status by Russian authorities in a policy experiment, and the Interior Ministry considers a plan to legalize hundreds of thousands of illegal workers “beneficial,” Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Chekalin said Wednesday.
Addressing the State Duma on Wednesday, Chekalin said more than 7,000 illegal migrant workers in 10 regions received legal status between September and November and that the Interior Ministry advocated a one-time legalization of migrants.
“The Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Federal Migration Service have practically worked out techniques to help legalize migrant workers,” in other regions, Chekalin said, RIA-Novosti reported. Chekalin hesitated to call the plan an “amnesty.”
“But helping foreigners come out from the shadows and receive legal status and putting them on migration and tax records would be mutually beneficial for the government and the foreigners,” Chekalin said.
Also speaking at the Duma session, FMS head Konstantin Romodanovsky said more than 20 million migrants come to Russia each year, primarily from former Soviet republics, and that around 10 million of them do so illegally. Romodanovsky said Russia’s economic losses due to immigration totaled $7 billion annually, RIA-Novosti said.
“It incurs huge damages to the country,” Romodanovsky said, RIA-Novosti reported. 
The State Duma is set on Friday to consider two bills aimed at liberalizing Russia’s migration policy, the news agency Rosbalt reported Tuesday.

TITLE: Milosevic’s Body Flown To Belgrade
AUTHOR: By Aleksandar Vasovic
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro — Slobodan Milosevic’s body returned to his homeland on Wednesday, flown to Belgrade from the Netherlands where he died last weekend at a UN detention center near the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. 
After arriving on a commercial JAT Airways plane at Belgrade’s airport, the coffin was loaded into a dark blue minivan belonging to a private funeral parlor, which prepared to take the body to a morgue in the Serbian capital. A public viewing of the body was arranged for Thursday and Friday before the burial Saturday in Milosevic’s hometown of Pozarevac. 
Members of Milosevic’s Socialist Party stood at the airport in a light snowfall, holding a large wreath decorated with red roses, the party symbol. A red ribbon on the wreath read: “Slobo the Hero.” 
Serbian television carried the arrival live, repeatedly zooming in on airport workers unloading baggage and a baby stroller before the black coffin — wrapped in clear plastic and packing tape — emerged from the plane’s cargo bay. 
Serbia’s government refused to hold a state funeral for Milosevic, but his Socialist allies — determined to lay him to rest with as much private pomp as possible — organized Wednesday’s arrival ceremony and the funeral and burial. 
Socialist Party official Milorad Vucelic could not say if Milosevic’s widow, Mirjana Markovic, or his son, Marko Milosevic, would attend. Both live in Moscow in self-imposed exile. 
A Belgrade court on Tuesday suspended a warrant for her arrest for charges of abuse of power — but ordered her passport seized upon arrival, which would prevent her from leaving the country immediately after the burial.
 The Russian State Duma unanimously approved a statement Wednesday that accused the war crimes tribunal of being “extremely politicized and biased” in its inquiries. 
It said the tribunal failed to provide qualified medical care to Milosevic. It also said that for the tribunal, “further activities will be unfeasible.”

TITLE: Calls for Renaming of Street for Milosevic
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic scheduled to take place in Serbia on Saturday, a group of local communists has put forward a proposal to name one of the city’s streets after the controversial Serbian politician.
The regional organization, named Communists of St. Petersburg, issued a statement on Wednesday calling for Belgradskaya Ulitsa in the south of the city to be renamed Ulitsa Slobodana Milosevica.
Comparing the Balkan leader to the ex-president of Chile Salvador Allende, the German communist leader Ernst Telman and the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, the proposal’s supporters blamed the Hague tribunal for Milosevic’s death and declared the late politician one of the greatest patriots ever.
“The image of Slobodan Milosevic as a patriot, socialist leader, and outspoken anti-globalist will become one of the symbols of our organization, alongside Lenin, Che Guevara and other great revolutionaries,” Sergei Malinkovich, first secretary of the organization, told reporters on Wednesday. “The courageous leader of Serbian socialists exposed the hypocrisy of the tribunal, which had no evidence against the Serbian authorities.”
The proposal has been sent to President Vladimir Putin and Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
Technically, all decisions on the naming of local streets or landmarks are taken by the St. Petersburg Toponymical Commission, though this body must consult with the local authorities.
An official response to the request has yet to be received, but Mikhail Brodsky, the representative of the St. Petersburg governor in the city’s Legislative Assembly, was skeptical, calling the proposal an untimely move.
“The political turbulence has to calm down,” Brodsky said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “We really have to wait for a more objective picture to emerge and let time heal any wounds. Even in Serbia, opinions vary dramatically about Milosevic and his policies.”
Brodsky said the renaming of a street or a monument in honor of Milosevic in St. Petersburg is not out of the question in principle, but warned that such a discussion is pointless at the moment.
“Milosevic ruled his country in a very tough, even tragic historical period, during the NATO bombings,” Brodsky said. “Of course, his policy was controversial, but I suppose, given the circumstances, any political leader would be bound to take debatable decisions. As regarding the importance of this politician for Russia, he still has to pass the test of time.”
Yuly Rybakov, head of the St. Petersburg anti-fascist center and a prominent human rights advocate, was sarcastic about the initiative.
“If we continued with this logic, we’d need an Augusto Pinochet Street and a Pol Pot Avenue as well,” Rybakov said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Alternatively, our city can pay tribute to all of them by creating a Dictators’ Street. I do feel that our country is heading toward fascism, but we haven’t yet reached the point when a Milosevic Street has become a reality.”
Mikhail Tolstoy, a veteran democrat and one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg branch of the Union of Right Forces, said that the city is bound to reject such a proposal by a local bylaw.
“Even a memorial plaque to a political or cultural leader can’t be installed until thirty years have passed since their death,” Tolstoy said in a telephone interview on Thursday. 
“All exceptions have to have a lot of support. Renaming a street involves even more responsibility,” he said.
“No controversy should be allowed, because we must think of the people who live there and would have to accept the new title. The question is, just how many people would want to live under Milosevic’s name,” Tolstoy said.
Rybakov said he finds it alarming that so many Russian politicians are trying to exploit the death of the Balkan leader.
“Milosevic Street isn’t a public initiative, it’s a political initiative,” Rybakov said. “It shows that the Russian people are governed by leaders who use all opportunities and any material available to get attention and boost their careers.”
The Communists of St. Petersburg have said that they will begin collecting signatures if their proposal is ignored. They also suggested the renaming of neighboring Yablonevy Gardens as an alternative and the installation of a monument to the late Serbian leader.

TITLE: Ultra Star Eyes 300 New Stores
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Ultra Star, owner of mobile phone retailer Ultra, is planning to raise between $20 million and $40 million to finance expansion, the company said Monday in a statement.
The company plans to find a strategic investor to fund its growth from 200 to 500 shops by the end of the year, a move that would make Ultra one of the five largest mobile retailers in Russia, the company said. 
As well as opening new outlets in the regions, Ultra will create mono-brand shops in cooperation with Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other handset producers.
According to data supplied by Ultra, the level of mobile coverage in Russia has increased from 51 percent to 87 percent over the last year, stimulating sales of handsets and accessories.
Founded in 1988 as a cell phone retailer in St. Petersburg, Ultra Star now has offices in almost all large Russian cities, and has also become involved in the retail of complex electronic security systems. The company’s revenue exceeded $300 million last year.
To take the business to a new level, the company is looking for “a partner interested in fast entry to the Russian mobile retail market and ready to invest $20 million to $40 million into the Ultra chain. One of the ways of speeding up development would be the acquisition of other market players,” Temur Amidzhanov, Ultra Star president, said in a statement.
As its financial advisor Ultra Star has chosen Scandinavian investment bank Trigon Capital, a company which has attracted over $1 billion worth of investment into Eastern European companies over the last ten years. The bank manages over $400 million through its investment funds and over 50 million euros ($80 million) through direct investment.
However, Trigon Capital will not invest its own resources into Ultra Star or any other Russian mobile retailer, a bank representative said.
“We started talks with Ultra Star about attracting investment in 2003. Since that time the company has completed the restructuring of its assets. The retail side of the business was converted into a separate company. A SAP system of software solutions was installed. The company became more transparent for international audit,” said Gleb Ognyannikov, managing director of Trigon Capital in St. Petersburg.
Ognyannikov highlighted the factors that will help the company attract investment: a well-known brand; a transparent ownership structure; a SAP system allowing day-to-day management of all shops in St. Petersburg and the regions; a business easily adjusted to scale; and experienced managers. 
Leaders in the Russian mobile retail market are attractive for potential investors, said Yelena Yegorova, Senior Executive of Transaction advisory at Ernst & Young.
She recalled the market’s “tremendous growth rates” over the past few years.  
According to Euroset, the country’s largest mobile retailer, the mobile phone retail market amounted to $5.5 billion in 2005, a 28 percent increase on 2004, Yegorova said.
However, there remains the question of how mobile retailers will do business over the upcoming years.
“In Western Europe, the largest mobile retailers like Carphone Warehouse, Germanos and others, started as pure mobile retail companies back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But now these players have become fully-fledged service providers and telecom operators providing fixed line and mobile services,” Yegorova said.
Yet another market analyst spoke skeptically of the company’s ambitions.  According to Eldar Murtazin, leading expert at Mobile Research Group, the Euroset mobile phone retailer controls 32 percent of the mobile retail market in Russia, while Ultra’s share is some 30 times smaller. “Ultra Star is an important player in St. Petersburg. At the national level the company is unknown. You could promote a new brand in an emerging market, but in a stagnating market it is unrealistic. It demands a lot more resources than Ultra Star has planned for,” Murtazin said.
Ultra Star’s managers, however, are aiming at efficiency, not scale.
“Turnover in the Russian mobile market has reached $4.6 billion. That size of market is very attractive to foreign strategic investors and Russian mobile operators. Because market growth has slowed, quality and efficiency are becoming more decisive factors for a retail chain than the number of shops opened,” Amidzhanov said.

TITLE: Smolny Unveils $300M ‘Petersburg-City’ Plans
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Smolny has announced the construction of a 300,000 sq. meter office complex to house the national giants intent on registering in the city, vice-governor Alexander Vakhmistrov said at a press briefing Tuesday.
“The largest companies, including Sovkomflot, VTB, Sibneft and Transneft, have appealed to us for land plots with engineering infrastructure where they can locate their offices. That’s why we have decided to create a kind of Petersburg-City for major tax-payers,” Interfax quoted Vakhmistrov as saying.
The office complex, to be completed by 2016, would be constructed near the Peter the Great bridge, on the right bank of the Neva river, on the land where state oil giant Gazprom had intended to build its own office complex. 
Although the high-rise center “Gazprom-City” was originally scheduled to be started in April 2007, documentation for the project is yet to be developed and Gazprom is now likely be included in City Hall’s plan, Interfax reported Tuesday. 
The city budget is ready to cover up to $200 million of the project’s total cost, with an additional $100 million to come from private investors, the vice-governor said.
“But in the future we hope that non-budget sources will become the main source of funding,” he explained.
Victoria Kulibanova, development manager at Astera real estate consultancy, said that both the proposed duration and cost of the project were credible, since something of this scale wouldneed at least five years to complete.
 “Such a business center would become the largest in the city. However, 300,000 sq. meters is too much space, especially if offered to the market all at once. This volume of office space is a killer for the market,” Kulibanova said.
According to Astera, 100,000 to 150,000 sq. meters of office space is created in the city annually.
Alexei Chizhov, director of office real estate at Becar Consulting, said that development of the plans could take up to two years, and construction would need another eight to nine years.
Chizhov agreed that taking into account the cost of consultants, projection, preparation and construction works, as well as the provision of engineering infrastructure, the center would cost around $1,000 per square meter, with the cost of the land itself on top.
He suggested that the project could be realized in several stages.
“Such a complex would not have a huge effect on the market for office space. Relative to the scale of the city, 300,000 sq. meters is not that much space. Besides, part of this office space in all likelihood already has tenants,” Chizhov said.
The Becar analyst was confident the building would find tenants, since many companies would like to be neighbors with famous “giants.”
One of the country’s largest banks, VTB, confirmed its interest in any such office development.
“Vneshtorgbank is certainly interested in finding additional office space in St. Petersburg. At the moment we are discussing several of Smolny’s proposals,” Vneshtorgbank press service said in an official statement. However the bank press service refused to comment on any proposal in particular.
Given its size, the project will require pools of investors to finance it.
“The project could be split into lots, with each lot offered to corporate co-investors separately. The cost of participation will be determined by City Hall after developing a plan and analyzing the return on investment,” Chizhov said.
He did not exclude spreading the risk among investors, so that particular buildings would be financed by one group and sold to another after completion.
“During the next ten years it is possible that the market for completed real estate, allowing a change of investor at the stage of completion, will develop in the city,” he said.
With other large projects on the horizon in the years ahead, the challenge for local authorities is to “support the construction of business areas and increase the scale of such projects by developing the economy and stimulating business activities.”
“It is relatively easy to construct buildings, but you need to understand who will use them, how much they will use and in what way,” Chizhov said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: GM Plans 
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — General Motors, the world’s largest automaker, plans to build a factory in St. Petersburg, joining rival Ford Motor Co. in manufacturing cars in Russia’s second-biggest city, Vedomosti said, citing city officials.
GM spokeswoman Irina Kalashnikova wouldn’t confirm or deny the report. 
“We don’t have any announcement to make at the moment,” Kalashnikova said in a phone interview from Moscow on Thursday.

IKEA Contractor
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — IKEA has signed an agreement with Turkish company Renaissance Construction for completion of the MEGA shopping center in the Parnas district of St. Petersburg, Interfax reported last week. IKEA’s agreement with previous general contractor Lemcon was terminated last week because Lemcon did not observe the terms of the contract, IKEA’s press service said. The project is already half complete and the store plans to open in December.

TITLE: Bodman Calls for Market Approach
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman called Wednesday for renewed energy ties and new joint projects with Russia, saying he would push the Group of Eight energy ministers to liberalize markets as they began two days of talks in Moscow.
“We are stressing the need for all G8 nations to employ a market-based approach to achieving greater energy security that encourages production, that encourages competition,” Bodman told reporters ahead of the talks.
His comments came a day after Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko dug in his heels against European calls for gas market liberalization and accused the United States of blocking Russian bids for U.S. energy projects.
Russia and the West appear to be increasingly at loggerheads over global energy security — the stated priority of Russia’s G8 presidency this year — as ministers met for the second major event leading up to July’s G8 summit in St. Petersburg.
Joining the G8 ministers for talks were energy officials from China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, as well as representatives of OPEC, the International Energy Agency and the World Bank.
Khristenko on Tuesday dismissed renewed European calls for Russia to ratify the Energy Charter, a treaty that forbids member countries from cutting energy shipments during price disputes.
Ratifying the treaty would prohibit Russia from unilaterally cutting off gas supplies, as it did to Ukraine and Moldova in January, and would allow foreign companies to dispute Gazprom’s exclusive use of Russian gas pipelines in international arbitration court.
European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso plans to push President Vladimir Putin on ratification of the treaty when the two meet this Friday, Reuters reported.
Forty-six of the charter’s 51 signatories, which include virtually every country in Europe and northern Asia, Japan, and Australia, ratified the charter between 1995 and 2002.
Andre Mernier, head of the Brussels-based Energy Charter Secretariat, said Tuesday at a Moscow conference on international energy security that the treaty was based on “national sovereignty over energy resources.” 
He acknowledged, however, that “when Russian companies approach the Secretariat and ask whether they can protect their interests under the Energy Charter Treaty, we can provide only a cautious response.” 
Khristenko’s response was far from cautious when asked at a news conference Tuesday whether Russia planned further liberalization of its energy markets.
“As far as liberalizing the market, the question must be answered: What does this mean? Free access for whom? You don’t plan on liberalizing your home,” Khristenko said.
Khristenko said Russia had already done enough to liberalize its gas market by lifting the so-called “ring fence” that had restricted foreign investment in Gazprom until this year.
When asked whether he would push Russia to ratify the Energy Charter and liberalize Gazprom, Bodman said, “I would not encourage the Russian government or the Russian people to do anything they don’t believe is in their interest.”
Bodman rejected Khristenko’s claim that U.S. regulators were making it “virtually impossible” for Russian energy companies to work on projects in the United States involving the re-gasification of liquefied natural gas, or LNG.
LNG is the cornerstone of Russia’s plans to expand energy supplies to the United States, but the United States currently has limited capacity to re-gasify imported fuel for industrial or household use.

TITLE: $1.5Bln LNG Project Launch
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CALGARY, Alberta — Petro-Canada and Gazprom agreed on Tuesday to proceed with initial engineering on a liquefied natural-gas plant near St. Petersburg, worth up to $1.5 billion, that would supply Petro-Canada and other customers by 2010.
The two companies will go ahead with preliminary engineering studies for the proposed Baltic gas liquefaction project to provide cost and timing for the plant, Petro-Canada said in a statement.
The gas produced by the proposed plant would be shipped to the planned Gros Cacouna re-gasification plant in Canada owned by Petro-Canada and TransCanada.
That facility, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River outside Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, will supply up to 500 million cubic feet a day of imported natural gas to Eastern Canada and the U.S. Northeast.
Ron Brenneman, chief executive of Calgary-based Petro-Canada, said Gazprom will be offered an equity interest in the Canadian re-gasification plant, while Petro-Canada expects to own half of the Baltic liquefaction facility.
The operation would chill as much as 750 million cubic feet of natural gas a day into a liquid, which can be shipped by tankers.
“Notionally what we are talking about is a 50-50 interest,” Brenneman said on a conference call. 
“But the ultimate partnership is part of what needs to be determined between now and the end of the year.”
Gazprom, one of the world’s largest natural-gas producers, would initially supply all the gas for the plant. However, Brenneman said Petro-Canada also wants to invest in Russian natural-gas fields.
“We have an interest, ultimately, in acquiring the upstream resource that would back the supply coming out of the Baltic LNG project, but at this stage we’re just talking about taking gas off the general grid...that Gazprom can supply,” he said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Tracking Oil 
BEIJING (Bloomberg) — Russia, the world’s largest energy producer, aims to increase crude oil exports 25 percent by rail to China this year to tap rising demand.
Deliveries may rise to 15 million metric tons, or about 301,000 barrels a day, Russia’s Ambassador Sergei Razov said in Beijing Thursday. The oil is worth more than $6.5 billion at current prices.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will visit Beijing next week to discuss an $11.5 billion project to boost oil exports by building a pipeline from Siberia to China’s border. 

Military Orders
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia, the world’s No. 2 arms exporter, may win $9 billion in military orders from India, Interfax reported Thursday, citing Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov.   
Russia has sold India more than $10 billion of arms in the last five years and is negotiating orders worth another $9 billion, Zhukov told the news service.

TITLE: A Self-Defeating Political System
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: March is election time in three former Soviet republics. Many Russians went to the polls last weekend to vote in regional elections. Voters in Belarus will almost certainly hand Alexander Lukashenko a third term as president on Sunday. And finally, Ukraine will hold a national parliamentary election.
Of the three, only the election in Ukraine has the potential to radically alter the political landscape. No surprises are expected in Belarus. But while last Sunday’s regional elections in Russia produced no earthshaking results, their significance should not be underestimated.
The sheer scale of the elections is noteworthy, for a start. More than 17 million voters went to the polls in 68 regions. Regional parliamentary elections were held in the republics of Adygeya and Altai, the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district, and in the Kaliningrad, Kirov, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod and Orenburg regions. Voters in 22 regions elected new heads of major municipalities, including the mayors of regional centers such as Cherkessk, Kazan, Makhachkala, Oryol and Perm. State Duma by-elections were held in many regions, including Moscow, to fill vacant seats. Sunday’s vote was also the first nationwide test of major changes in the electoral system introduced last year.
Preliminary results indicate that the Kremlin scored another Pyrrhic victory on Sunday, winning the battle and losing the war. United Russia reported that it had received 40 percent of the party-list votes, giving it control of all eight regional legislatures that were contested. Average voter turnout was just 35 to 40 percent in these regions, however, which means that just 15 to 16 percent of residents actually backed the party.
The Communist Party slightly improved its showing from previous elections, in large part because the Kremlin had helpfully removed the Rodina party from the ballot in most contests. In the one region where it remained on the ballot, the republic of Altai, Rodina placed second after United Russia, edging out both the Communists and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party. It would be counterproductive for the regime to get rid of such a valuable political brand name. Instead, Rodina will probably go the way of the Pensioners’ Party: The Kremlin will replace its leadership and exploit the brand.
Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov’s Party of Life, a potential alternative to United Russia as the party of power, and Gennady Semigin’s left-wing Patriots of Russia party both made progress in several of Sunday’s elections, but have yet to emerge as serious political powers.
Democratic parties avoided stepping on one another’s toes in this latest round of elections, but they nevertheless failed to make it into the eight regional legislatures that were up for grabs. You could blame the parties’ leadership for this fiasco, but to my mind it demonstrates liberal voters’ lack of confidence in the electoral system. This should set off alarm bells in the Kremlin primarily, since it indicates declining confidence in the political system as a whole. The result also provides food for thought concerning the country’s political elites. By removing liberal voters from the political arena and denying them the opportunity to contest parliamentary elections, the Kremlin is pushing them not into political opposition, but into opposition to the political system itself.
Voters reacted rather passively to unprecedented levels of electoral engineering in the run-up to Sunday’s vote. Election commissions and courts at various levels struck unwanted political parties from the ballot in a huge number of contests. 
In a few places, such as the Kaliningrad region, nearly 20 percent of voters cast their ballots “against all” of the candidates. Turnout rarely exceeded two-fifths of registered voters, even though in many cases the elections were hotly contested and governors often headed the United Russia party list.
If the electoral system in its current form survives into 2007, the next State Duma will look a lot like the current one. It will be dominated by United Russia along with one or two minor partners. The Pensioners’ Party could replace Rodina in this role, or there may be room for both parties. The Communists will offer the only token opposition. But unless something changes, voter turnout in the next State Duma election will be low, and the real political life of the country will continue elsewhere, maybe even in the streets. The Kremlin fears such spontaneous political activity more than anything, but it is doing everything possible to make it happen.

Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: Dead Friends Speak Volumes
AUTHOR: By Masha Gessen
TEXT: Say nothing of the dead but good.” This Roman dictum can, in English, be pronounced in a variety of ways — as most cynics know, you can say, “Say nothing of the dead but, ‘Good!’” Which is what the Russian political establishment should have said about the recently departed former president of Yugoslavia, accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.
Dying is the only good thing this politician ever did for Russia. Just weeks before his death, he had petitioned the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague to allow him to travel to Moscow for medical treatment. He argued that the heart clinic in Moscow was the only place where he could adequately be treated — a wild claim on the face of it, since Russia has long been a late adopter in medicine: Many of the heart treatments and related surgeries that are exotic here have become routine in Western Europe, including the Netherlands. What the tribunal found more relevant is that Moscow is where Milosevic’s wife, son and brother already live. The judges decided there was too high a risk that Milosevic would try to stay in Moscow.
The tribunal’s decision not to let Milosevic travel to Moscow was a frank, and well-founded, slap in the face for the Russian government, which guaranteed Milosevic’s return to the hearings. Moscow’s word, the tribunal ruled, was not good enough. Milosevic’s death saved Moscow the embarrassment of pursuing this topic further and the potential far greater embarrassment of harboring an accused war criminal.
But instead of breathing a sigh of relief, the entire Russian political establishment, including television, has shifted into full-blown dirge mode. Lyubov Sliska, first deputy speaker of the State Duma, has accused the Hague tribunal of having killed Milosevic. Her colleague Vladimir Zhirinovsky seconded her, adding that the tribunal had been helpless to sentence Milosevic and may have been compelled to acquit him. These two politicians are, by today’s standards, as mainstream as they come — and so is their rhetoric, as blatantly paranoid as it is anti-Western.
Here is another mainstream talking head, political scientist Vyacheslav Nikonov, who now heads the international cooperation committee of the Public Chamber: “It would have been rather difficult to prove Milosevic’s guilt,” Nikonov told NTV. “If the case had gone to trial, Milosevic may have used it as a considerable pulpit for the propaganda of his ideas, which Europe certainly doesn’t need right now.” He seems to be implying that the European public would go crazy if only it were exposed to something so contagious and compelling as Milosevic’s hatred of Albanians and other member peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
In its report, NTV concluded that the Hague tribunal on the former Yugoslavia would now fall apart — a conclusion unsupported by any evidence in the report or out in the real world. And to top off this orgy of grief and outrage, a delegation of Russian medics flew to The Hague to observe the autopsy performed on the prisoner’s body.
Some of the lowest points of Russian foreign policy in recent years have stemmed from this country’s historically unyielding support of Serbia and its leader. Perhaps the most embarrassing and damaging moment in this story came seven years ago, when Yevgeny Primakov, then the prime minister, turned his U.S.-bound plane around, abandoning diplomatic talks to protest the start of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. The predominance of knee-jerk nationalism in Russia’s politics today dates back directly to that moment.
And how did Milosevic repay Moscow for its support? Most recently, by involving it in the farce he staged around his health. When a friend like this dies, all you can say is, “Good.” The fact that Russia’s politicians didn’t — that they did, in fact, just the opposite — speaks volumes. Tell me who your dead friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. It’s true, if you think about it: Russian politicians are becoming more and more like Milosevic every day.

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

TITLE: Lords of the dance
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A reconstruction of a 19th-century French classic, a new cutting-edge piece set to music of Dmitry Shostakovich with the plot inspired by Nikolai Gogols’s “The Overcoat” and a delicious cocktail of the choreography of Marius Petipa, George Balanchine and William Forsythe are at the heart of the Sixth International Mariinsky Ballet Festival which opened Thursday with Pierre Lacotte’s revival of Jules Perrot 1843 “Ondine.”
The event, launched by the Mariinsky’s artistic director Valery Gergiev in 2001 as a counterweight to Gergiev’s other brainchild, the “Stars of the White Nights” festival which runs each June, assembles a pantheon of ballet stars from London’s Covent Garden, the Opera de Paris, the New York City Ballet, the Bavarian State Ballet and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. The summer event, “Stars of the White Nights” emphasises opera and symphonic concerts, and balletomanes sometimes feel hard done by. But with this week’s sumptuous ballet fiesta nobody has cause for complaint.
During last year’s event, the Mariinsky restored the lost tradition of tribute evenings to its brightest ballet stars. 
Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Imperial Ballet organized annual tribute performances to the company’s brightest dancers and its corps de ballet. In 2005, the company’s three principal ballerinas — Diana Vishnyova, Daria Pavlenko and Ulyana Lopatkina — took center stage to be honored in this way.
At this year’s festival, all eyes will be on male principal dancers: Igor Zelensky and Farukh Ruzimatov will be celebrated on Thursday and Friday (March 24) respectively. Perhaps due to the lack of a third obvious Mariinsky star, keeping them a company will be Bolshoi Theater principal Nikolai Tsiskaridze who occasionally comes from Moscow to guest at the Mariinsky. Tsiskaridze will be honoured on Wednesday.
Tsiskaridze will appear in Balanchine’s “Rubies,” Petit’s “Le Jeune Homme et La Mort” and Forsythe’s “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.” 
Zelensky opted for Balanchine’s “Apollo” and “Diamonds” as well as a modern work to be announced later. The New York City Ballet ballerina Maria Kowroski will partner Zelensky in “Apollo.”
Svetlana Zakharova, who after parting ways with the Mariinsky was the company’s biggest recent loss, returns to take part in the festival by partnering  Zelensky in Balanchine’s “Diamonds” on Thursday. 
After the long-limbed Mariinsky principal dancer left to join the troupe of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, her schedule has been too tight to allow for more than two appearances in St. Petersburg  each season.
Meanwhile, Covent Garden’s Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg, who made their debut at the Mariinsky during the ballet festival in 2003 in Giselle, are making a third visit to the St. Petersburg festival. 
Cojocaru dances in Petipa’s “Sleeping Beauty” with Mariinsky’s Andrian Fadeyev on Sunday and then again with Kobborg in the closing gala performance the following Sunday (March 26).
Cojocaru, a 24-year-old principal dancer with a Thumbelina-like appearance, who often says she feels her life has much in common with the story of Cinderella, is one of the festival’s most eye-catching names.
Born in Bucharest, Romania, into a family of market-stall holders, Cojocaru expressed an early interest in gymnastics, but quickly switched to dance. At the age of nine, she was invited to the Kiev Ballet School, where she studied for seven years. In 1997, Cojocaru’s career had its first rapid twist, when the dancer, then 16, won the prestigious Prix de Lausanne, and subsequently took a six-month scholarship at the Royal Ballet (Covent Garden) which came with the prize. When the course finished, she had two drastically different options open to her: stay with the Royal Ballet — in the corps de ballet — or return to the Kiev Opera and Ballet Theater as a principal dancer. It was a difficult choice and the relative standards of living between the U.K. and Ukraine notwithstanding, Cojocaru returned to Kiev, where she danced an array of top roles — including Cinderella — in a single season. 
By the end of the 1998-1999 season, she felt it was time for a change, and moved to London to join Covent Garden’s corps de ballet. The speed of Cojocaru’s rise to the top in London — she made a dazzling transition from corps-de-ballet member to first soloist in just one season — shocked even her. 
She is now famous for her lead roles in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” and “Romeo and Juliet” as well as Marius Petipa classics such as “Giselle” and “Don Quixote.”
On Tuesday, the Mariinsky unveils an evening of cutting-edge contemporary choreography. 
The event features three one-act ballets created by two Russian choreographers Alexei Miroshnichenko and Nikita Dmitriyevsky, and by Noa Gelbert, a counterpart from the U.S.
Miroshnichenko’s work, titled “Du cote chez Swan” and set to a score by St. Petersburg composer Leonid Desyatnikov, makes literary as well as a choreographic, references. The balletmaster alludes to Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way” and Michel Fokine’s and Camille Saint-Saens’s “The Dying Swan.” Miroshnichenko said he was inspired by Desyatnikov’s unorthodox score. 
“His music deliciously bridged these two worlds, and the challenge facing me as a choreographer was to visually connect the dying Swan experience with Proust’s twisted reality where the time category doesn’t exist, through Desyatnikov’s talented, razor-sharp, witty music,” the balletmaster said. “So in my piece, just like in Proust’s prose, dreams blend with reality, real events mix with the imagined, the beginnings are confused with the endings.” 
In line with this philosophy, Miroshnichenko’s ballet starts with the finale and goes backward.
Dmitriyevsky, whose ballet to Richard Strauss’ music is loosely based on Moliere’s “Le Bourgeois Gentil Homme,” opted for a more traditional approach.
“For me, Jourdain is a stranger among his own,” Dmitriyevsky said about the ballet’s leading character. “Every comedy has a tragic offshoot, and Jourdain’s character has a tragic element as well.” 
Describing the mood of his ballet as ironic, Dmitriyevsky said stylistically the work presents a hybrid of classical and modern choreography.
Noa Gelber defines his own choreography as “intuitive,” “complex,” “multi-layered,” and “painstakingly attentive to detail.” The U.S. choreographer has turned his attention to Gogol’s classic short story “The Overcoat.”
“My ballet is metaphoric although I seek to avoid metaphors which are easily guessed,” Gelber said, adding he aims to avoid obvious interpretations.
“I analyzed Gogol’s key sentences on an emotional as well as on a physical level and sought to embody the writer’s thoughts in my choreography,” he said. “Because I am myself an author, I have invented a female character. But the woman doesn’t serve as an object for sexual desire but rather as a personification of all things absent in the life of the main character. For Akaky [Gogol’s anti-hero], the new overcoat becomes a passport to the world of stability and prosperity, where he always strived to be, but once he gets there he begins to wonder deep inside whether he really belongs to the club.”
The festival concludes on March 26 with a traditional gala performance, which this year pays tribute to great Russian emigre ballerina Natalya Makarova and assembles an array of top-flight international talents including Cojocaru and Kobborg, Paris’s Opera Agnes Letestu and Jose Martinez and Munich’s Bayerisches Staatsballett’s Lucia Lacarra. Joining them will be Mariinsky’s own stars Ulyana Lopatkina, Darya Pavlenko, Leonid Sarafanov and Farukh Ruzimatov.
www.marrinsky.ru

TITLE: Splendid isolation
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The State Russian Museum two weeks ago opened, within just a day of each other, a couple of impressive exhbitions: one by the classical 20th century art figure Lucio Fontana (see page iv), and one by the young and promising art photographer Anastasia Khoroshilova. 
Khoroshilova, who was born in Moscow in 1978, belongs to an emerging generation of Russian artists and can justifiably be considered a discovery among them. 
The photographer studied at the Photographic Department of Duisburg-Essen University in Germany,  allowing her to follow European trends while taking her first steps on the international art scene comfortably and confidently. 
Khoroshilova’s exhibition, at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum, represents four different series of photographs that together form the artist’s portfolio to the present day. 
It was Khoroshilova’s earliest and largest series, “Islanders,” that first brought her success and recognition in the art world. 
Taken as metaphor, the “islanders” in her photographs are the pupils of the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, youngsters living in the children’s home of the Savino-Storozhevsky Monastery (in Zvenigorod, 60 kilometers outside Moscow) and the inhabitants of Women’s Shelter No. 6 in Essen, Germany, among others. 
These subjects have all been uprooted — freely or violently — from the usual social environment and the natural order of things.  
At first sight, Khoroshilova’s main genre is portraiture. However, she makes only full-length portraits, where often a great proportion of space in regard to human figure plays a crucial role in the composition of the picture. 
These are not portraits in a traditional sense since the settings are as important as the subjects. The photographer seems to be looking for is a sort of correspondence between them. The viewer’s evaluation of each subject benefits from each setting: their human scale and states of mind. 
In photographs of the pupils of the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, the beauty of their fragile ballet-trained bodies, their dignity and the self-confidence of their poses, is purified and amplified in relation to the gigantic flowers, decrepit furniture, masses of air and empty walls. 
In photographs of the Savino-Storozhevsky children, the emptiness and order of the rooms with their strict quantity of toys, intensifies the sensation of transition: the small inhabitants are aware that they are only guests. 
A boy’s hesitant pose in front of a white wall with the thin crack in it is one of the good examples of how Khoroshilova uses artistic means to effortlessly produce such disturbing feelings. 
Khoroshilova’s next two series “Bezhin Lug” (Bezhin Meadow) and “Baltiysk,” although separate, in fact, are based on the same island metaphor. 
“Bezhin Lug,” which alludes to Ivan Turgenev’s novel of the same name, portray’s Russia’s deserted countryside, whereas “Baltiysk” uses the residents of a closed military zone located in Kaliningrad as its subject.  
As with “Islanders,” Khoroshilova’s countryside landscapes and open-air portraits are full of significant pauses no matter whether she is dealing with people or objects.  
In Khoroshilova’s latest, and absolutely bewitching work — “9.5 % plus” — features portraits of military women: Capitan N., Sergeant K. Major S., and so on. The photographer smartly captures the often touching gulf between the women and their professions. 

Anastasia Khoroshilova at the Marble Palace.www.rusmuseum.ru, www.khoroshilova.net

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: John Cale’s concert last week was expected to be a straightforward rock and roll gig, judging by the Velvet Underground legend’s interviews and concert reviews, but in the event turned out to be disappointingly strained. 
In an account of rock musicians in their 60s, headlined “Sexagenarians, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” the British newspaper The Guardian last week singled out Cale as an “exception [to the rule of past-it musicians], having found a new lease of life playing ‘dirty-ass rock ‘n’ roll,’ as he calls it, in sweaty clubs, almost 40 years after changing the course of rock in his capacity as the viola player with the Velvet Underground.” 
Cale’s St. Petersburg show gave a different impression.
Cale started out with banning smoking in all the rooms of  PORT club where the concert was held, and had the promoters put warning posters on the walls. 
“He won’t come on stage until everybody stops smoking in the toilet,” a bouncer said, trying to reason with  hardcore smokers who gathered in the bathroom.
Taking photographs was banned, for some reason, too. Fans had their bags searched by the bouncers and were sent to the cloakroom, but there was no proper place there for keeping valuable cameras. 
“We have a safe for firearms but not for cameras,” a bouncer explained.
A local television crew came to interview Cale and shoot some footage from the concert, but was sent away.
Although Cale started the show with “Venus in Furs,” the Velvet Underground’s classic from the 1967 album “The Velvet Underground and Nico” (and also played another Velvet gem, “Femme Fatale,” as well as “Pablo Picasso,” a cover of a Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers song), the concert somehow did not work, and ended up like any other show given frequently in St. Petersburg by the “world’s rock legends.” 
Poor sound quality and the bad vibes at PORT club, a former Soviet “palace of culture” turned into a techno club then into a goth- and death-metal venue, did not help the mood.
Concert-goers were probably jaded after three big concerts last weekend — by local favorites ska-punkers Leningrad, rock crooner Chris Rea and New York hip-hoppers/rockers Fun Lovin’ Criminals — and very few turned up for Cale’s concert. Cale skipped the encore, but not many fans asked for more.
Refreshingly, a much younger band called I Am Kloot will perform in the city this week. Hailing from Manchester, it was chosen by the British Council to represent the contemporary British music scene in Moscow and St. Petersburg this year. I Am Kloot will perform at Red Club on Friday. See interview with John Bramwell, the band’s singer/songwriter and guitarist, page iii.
Mad Professor (born Neil Fraser) went from being a engineer for mixing desks to an artist seen by some people as the British equivalent of Jamaican dub legend, Lee Perry. He performs at Platforma on Friday.

TITLE: The legend becomes truth
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: International artists may stop by St. Petersburg more often than they used to, but bands on the current British music scene are still an extremely rare sight in the city. This makes Friday’s gig by I Am Kloot a refreshing departure from the boring ration of burnt-out rockers and dance-oriented entertainers usually dished up in St. Petersburg.
Fronted by singer/songwriter and guitarist John Bramwell, the Manchester band deliciously combines interesting, melancholic pop music driven by guitars and keyboards, with twisted, clever lyrics permeated by dark humor. 
“Schadenfreude, I think the Germans would call it,” said Bramwell, speaking about his songwriting from the band’s rehearsal room in Manchester last week. 
“We’ve just watched a DVD of [an I Am Kloot] gig in Berlin, I introduced a song by saying ‘This is about love — and disaster’ and then I said ‘This one is about drinking — and disaster.’ So it’s humorous! But it’s not ‘funny ha ha,’ it’s just... we’re aware of the ups and downs of life and try to reflect that.”
Small wonder that as a lyricist Bramwell has more than once been compared to another Mancunian wordsmith, Morrissey, who revolutionized songwriting with The Smiths and as a solo artist.
“I think it’s because I’m from Manchester,” said Bramwell.
“I mean, to me the lyrics are very, very important, and for a lot of bands they’re not so important. And I think because I place a lot of emphasis on a lyric and I am from Manchester, then inevitably the Morrissey thing came up. 
“But although [The Smiths’] John Peel sessions album, ‘Hatful of Hollow,’ is one of my favorite LPs, I wouldn’t say I’m an enormous fan of that band, but that LP is fantastic. And I suppose also there’s a kind of downward, melancholic beauty that we share.”
I Am Kloot was formed at the beginning of 1999 when Bramwell, who worked putting bands on at a club called Night and Day in Manchester with bassist and keyboard player Peter Jobson, stole drummer Andy Hargreaves from one of the bands that played there.
“I was very into Leonard Cohen, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Pixies,” said Bramwell.
“The ‘White Album’ by The Beatles always had a big influence on me. My older sister, when I was a kid, was listening to T. Rex, David Bowie, and so a kind of glam rock [influenced me], mixed with depressing Leonard Cohen. A strange mix. But that’s me — Andy was always a lot more into garage stuff from America, the 13th Floor Elevators and also a lot of hip-hop stuff.
“But, to be honest, we listen to a varied amount [of music]. A lot of new bands send us stuff. It has got to the point now that I wouldn’t say there’s any kind of specific music we listen to, it’s more like we get excited by any genre as long as it’s good.”
The band’s debut, “Natural History,” came out in 2001 to be followed by “I Am Kloot” in 2003. The band’s latest effort, called “Gods and Monsters,” was released in August. 
“Our first album is a very straightforward representation of just us as a three-piece, singing songs with a very sparse arrangement, and the lyrics come out very strongly, like in the song ‘Twist’: ‘There’s blood on your legs, I love you,’” said Bramwell.
“On the second LP, the songs were in a similar vein but there’s much more lush production and a kind of a bigger romantic feel. And the third LP, ‘Gods and Monsters,’ is our least romantic, it’s more psychotic, really, if you think of the songs, and more neurotic as well.”
The origins of the band’s  whimsical name remain a well-kept secret. 
“We never say,” said Bramwell.
“If we told you, we’d have to kill you. It does mean something, but it’s just part of our mystery.”
However, Bramwell admits it might have something to do with “Klute,” Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 film noir starring Donald Sutherland as small-town detective John Klute who falls in love with a New York call-girl played by Jane Fonda.
“I’m a big fan of that film,” he said.
“It was one of the reasons, I love the sound of the word, but then we found our own meaning for it and our own spelling.”
I Am Kloot had a strange year in 2005. It was dropped by its label, Echo, but also played its biggest gigs in the U.K. and Europe. Bramwell is positive about the current stage in the band’s career.
“It was a strange time when we parted company with the label, as you said, and at the same time we were playing the biggest gigs we’ve ever done, in Berlin and London, and then we’d just done our third gig at Glastonbury. So gig-wise it was very happy and successful. 
“We’re not on the radio an awful lot, so it’s taken us a while to get lots of crowds coming to our gigs. But now they’ve started, it’s put us in a really nice position, really, where we can do what we want. It’s not as if we’re revolving around the media.”
Although the current music scene in the U.K. appears to be healthy, the New Musical Express, the leading British music publication, does not cover it in its entirity, according to Bramwell.
“I think it covers a narrow band of a certain type of music at the moment, but I think it’s always been like that,” he said.
“It is a quite fashion-orientated thing. I mean there were times in the last six years when they’ve written a lot about us, and then not. But I think it’s always important to keep your own identity and let your music come to you through your soul, I suppose, rather than pay much attention to what everyone else is saying.”
However, Bramwell said he likes Arctic Monkeys, the band that received the “Best British Band,” “Best New Band” and “Best Track” NME awards last month.
“I think it’s terrific that we actually have a band that’s got some great lyrics and are doing well. So I like them very much, actually. And I think it’s great that all this success came before radio and the press really got onto them. I mean they all are talking about them now but they had already kind of made a huge impact before that. That’s how things should be, that’s how culture grows and moves without it being dictated to by fashion keepers.”
I Am Kloot is performing twice in Russia: at Red Club in St. Petersburg on Friday and at Moscow’s Apelsin Club on Saturday.
The band’s brief Russian tour is promoted by the British Council as part of the program of bringing current British pop acts to Russia that included Stereolab in 2004 and Franz Ferdinand in 2005.
“They wanted a British group that played at Glastonbury last year, which we did,” said Bramwell.
“We just found out about it six weeks ago. And we’re just rehearsing and recording a new LP at the minute, so we’re taking a week out to come to Russia. That’s about how much I know. I’m kept in the dark. I write songs and play and then just turn up where people tell me to.”
Bramwell said the band is planning to perform some new material in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
“We just finished a European tour last November, and we are watching the film and listening to the live recordings from that now, and we’re taking the best out of that, plus, hopefully, the five or six new songs that we’re working on.
“We’ll be playing for about 1 hour and 10 minutes at each gig, I think, and we’ve got two musicians coming with us to do some songs that previously we haven’t been able to do a lot because it needs instruments. So as well as being an adventure because it’s the first time we’ve come to Russia, it’s an adventure for us to play, I think, eight or nine songs altogether that we’ve never done live before.”
Apart from Morrissey, Bramwell pays his dues to another great Mancunian, Mark E. Smith of The Fall.
“My favorite Fall LP is ‘Shiftwork,’ he said.
“I just think the whole feel of it is terrific, and again it’s a slightly psychotic and romantic album about, you know, working shifts, and what it’s like to be disorientated from sleeping by day, working at night, losing perspective. In fact, on the inner cover of the last Fall LP, ‘Fall Heads Roll,’ there is a picture of a few people and one of them is me! I have no idea why that is. I have to ask Mark E. Smith about that.
“Maybe it’s an attack on me, I don’t know. Maybe not. Or maybe it’s an accident.
“And again, with both Mark E. Smith and Morrissey, it’s terrific that you can have great music but you can have someone who can make a real connection with the lyrics as well, which... maybe it’s something in the water of Manchester. It is very rainy here, it’s the wettest place in Europe. I think we stay inside a lot and make music.”
Bramwell is enthusiastic about “24 Hour Party People,” Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 saga that follows the legendary Factory Records head Tony Wilson during some pivotal moments in Manchester’s musical history, from punk to rave, saying it has captured the essence of the city’s music and art perfectly.
“A brilliant film. I watched it six or seven times, it’s terrific,” he said.
“‘24 Hour Party People,’ it summed up the Manchester attitude to making music and art. You do it yourself, then romanticize and make a legend of yourself, and then the legend becomes truth.” 

I Am Kloot performs at Red Club on Friday. www.iamkloot.com

TITLE: 20th century classics
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 15th International Festival of Arts “From the Avant-garde to the Present Day,” running through March 25 at the Shostakovich Philharmonic, the Hermitage Theater, and the Sheremetyev Palace, is subtitled “Shostakovich’s Galaxy” this year. It’s in memory of Dmitry Shostakovich, a distinguished Russian composer whose centenary is celebrated this year.
Founded by St. Petersburg composer Igor Rogalyov, the festival takes place annually and is supported by the City Cultural Committee, the Mariinsky Theater, the State Hermitage Museum, and the “Music and Contemporaneity” charity fund.
Among the participants of the ten-day festival are the Mariinsky Theater stars, the Shostakovich Philharmonic orchestra, the Emerson Trio as well as musicians from Germany, Denmark, Finland and Tajikistan. Besides the ten concerts, exhibitions of modern art are also being held around the city as part of the festival.
At the “Nadezhda 4” exhibition, more than 400 paintings by the young artists are on display at the Union of Artists Exhibition Hall. Twenty-one works by Yevgenia Fedina-Penkrat are being shown at the Sarai Gallery at the Anna Akhmatova Museum. 
This year, by tradition, music lovers will enjoy many of works by old favorites as well as young composers.
“From the very beginning the festival has aimed to convey an educative message to the audience,” festival director Rogalyov said. “It is high time to think about the cultural life of St. Petersburg. The provinciality of the city is progressing. We got the bug of having different get-togethers from Moscow but just few real cultural events are held in the city on a regular basis.” 
Surprisingly, Rogalyov said the 100th anniversary of the birth of Shostakovich was not, in fact, the main reason the festival is addressing his musical heritage this year. 
Rather, he said, Shostakovich was “the greatest composer of the 20th century” who reflected in his music the tragedy and complexity of his era — reasons to celebrate him at any time. 
Through the prism of Shostakovich’s music, compositions by his contemporaries and other distinguished composers of the previous century, such as Alexander Mosolov, Boris Arapov, Alfred Shnitke and Arnold Shoenberg convey a retrospective world view and “show that even absolutely contrary musical compositions merge into one integral picture of that complicated time,” Rogalyov said.
The festival’s opening concert on Wednesday was held at the Large Philharmonic Hall. Harpist Irina Donskaya  and the Mariinsky Theater’s youth orchestra, conducted by Alexander Titov presented compositions by Tolib Shakhidi, Josef Schillinger, Shostakovich, Mosolov and Nikolai Roslavets.
On Thursday, Oleg Malov, Anna Shakina, Maria Murileva and Irina Berezhanskaya presented a piano concerto of the compositions by Shostakovich and his contemporary composer Boris Arapov.
On Friday, the Andreyev Orchestra of Russian Folk Instruments conducted by Dmitry Khokhlov performs at the Large Philharmonic Hall at 7 p.m. At the same time at the Small Philharmonic Hall, Olga Kondina, Boris Kondin, Igor Uryash present a program called “The Lofty and the Earthly.”
On Saturday, a chamber music concert will be given at the Sheremetyev Palace where compositions by young Danish composers Niklas Schmidt and Piter Helms, Finnland’s Mikka Kalio and Russia’s Ilya Kuznetsov will be performed.
At the Anna Akhmatova Museum, a concert by young composers from Russia and Finland will take place on Saturday, while at the Shalyapin Museum, a concert called “Shostakovich and his Traditions” will be given.
On Monday, “New Babylon” (“Noviy Babilon”), a film made in 1929, will be presented at the House of Journalists (Dom Zhurnalista), with a reconstructed score by Shostakovich. 
A concert called “From the Baroque to…” will be given at the Small Philharmonic Hall on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, composer Boris Tishchenko will make an appearance at the Anna Akhmatova Museum. 
Classical compositions will be interpreted in a humorous way at a “kitsch” concert on Thursday at the House of Journalists. The festival’s closing event is a performance of the opera “The Messiah, the son of Man” by Grayr Khanedanyan  which will take place at the Hermitage Theater on Saturday, March 25. 
One of the missions of the festival is “to redress an injustice” and to present the compositions of “undeservedly forgotten” musicians, Rogalyov said.
In its 15-year history, the festival has brough back to life many works by 20th-century composers including “The Nightingale” by Igor Stravinsky (at the Mariinsky Theater), Sergei Prokofiev’s cantata “For the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution,” and Mosolov’s piano concerto and opera “The Hero.”

TITLE: Holes and slashes
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Almost a year after the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trento contributed to “Futurism. The Novecento. Abstraction. Italian Art of the 20th Century,” a hit show at the State Hermitage Museum, the Italian museum has continued the theme at the State Russian Museum with the new exhibition, “Lucio Fontana. The Poetics of Space between Creation and Representation.”
It is the first retrospective in Russia of the work of the most internationally acknowledged Italian artist of the middle of the 20th century
Fontana, who was half-Argentinean and half-Italian, spent most of his life (1899-1968) shifting between the two countries. He took part in Italian campaign of World War I and escaped World War II in Argentina; he studied and worked in both Argentina and Italy; he participated in different Argentinean and Italian art groups, worked with European abstract and expressionist painters, and joined the Italian Art Informel exhibitions. However, he is not steadily or solely associated with any of these art groups or trends. 
The four-part exhibition at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace includes 38 works and covers the artist’s principle legacy — works produced after 1949 when Fontana, a former sculptor and ceramics master, addressed canvas as his medium. The turning point came when the artist wanted to realise the spatial explorations he had set forth in his Spazialismo (“Spatialism”) theory. 
The first Spatialist manifesto was produced in 1947, and there were four editions from 1947 to 1954. 
Spatialism describes dynamism in art, an attempt to overcome the difference between the abstract and the figurative and to demolish borders between sculpture and painting by transcending the confines of the two-dimensional canvas surface. 
It is remarkable that Fontana gave to almost all his works the generic title Concetti spaziali (“Spatial Concepts”) in order to avoid associations with traditional easel paintings. 
Much of these spatial experiments are divided into two types: the Buchi  (“holes”) works and the Tagli (“slashes”) pieces. Appearing in 1949, the “holes” in the artist’s works demonstrate material presence of space in painting, which direct the viewer to a three- or even four-dimensional spatial experience. 
The canvas surface ceases to be solely a bearer, but wants to become its own autonomous substance. In this sense the “holes” on the surface, like pores on human skin, allow for the canvas to breathe, suggesting fresh and new circulation of things and our experience of it. With time these punctured biomorphic forms on the canvas surfaces were decorated with bits of colored glass where light became substantive and material along with holes and expressive dabs. 
Fontana’s marvelous “Spatial Concept Sun in the San Marco Square” is one of the later examples of his technique. 
A random configuration of colored, irregularly shaped objects on an intensive yellow background contains equal associations with Venice’s “Byzantine” tradition and the image formed in a child’s kaleidoscope in which, whatever the combination of shapes and colors, it remains “chaos,” and “nothing,” as a critic describing Fontana’s work once put it.
In the mid-1950s Fontana made perhaps his most famous and profound gesture — a slash on a surface of a canvas. The “slashes” works — the cycle “Spatial Concept Expectations” — became his last spatialist claim. Here expressiveness and brightness of his early spatialist works is replaced by a calmness and purity. Monochrome planes with delicate slashes varying in quantity and size ask the viewer to consider canvas not only as surface but as an object in its own right.   
 
“Lucio Fontana” runs through April at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum. www.rusmuseum.ru

TITLE: Australia Thanked By Rice
AUTHOR: By Sue Pleming
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SYDNEY — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began a three-day trip to Australia on Thursday to thank one of America’s closest allies for keeping troops in Iraq and to discuss China’s emergence as an Asia-Pacific power. 
With sectarian violence rising in Iraq, the United States is anxious to retain as many foreign forces as it can there. Australia has promised to keep troops in Iraq into 2007.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said before his meeting with Rice that it would be wrong to abandon Iraq now and leave the country in the hands of “terrorists” and loyalists of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
“I think we see it through — it’s difficult but I think we can succeed,” Downer told Australian television on Wednesday.
Australia’s involvement in Iraq has been unpopular among many Australians and opinion polls have shown dwindling support for the mission there.
As an original member of the “coalition of the willing” that supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Australia was one of the first countries to commit forces and still has about 1,300 troops stationed there, mostly in the south.
Later on Thursday, after having lunch on a U.S. warship on a port call to Sydney, Rice gave a speech on Iraq.

TITLE: U.S. Launches Massive Strike Against Iraq
AUTHOR: By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — The United States on Thursday launched what was termed the largest air assault since the U.S.-led invasion, targeting insurgent strongholds north of the capital, the military said. 
The U.S. military said Iraqi troops also were involved in the operation aimed at clearing a “suspected insurgent operating area northeast of Samarra.”
“More than 1,500 Iraqi and Coalition troops, over 200 tactical vehicles, and more than 50 aircraft participated in the operation,” the military statement said.
The move was announced just hours after Iraq’s new parliament was sworn in Thursday, with parties still deadlocked over the next government, vehicles banned from Baghdad’s streets to prevent car bombings and the country under the shadow of a feared civil war. 
The long-expected first session, which took place within days of the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, lasted just over 30 minutes and was adjourned indefinitely because the legislature still has no speaker.
Adnan Pachachi, the senior politician who administered the oath in the absence of a speaker, spoke of a country in crisis.
“We have to prove to the world that a civil war is not taking place and will not take place among our people,” Pachachi told lawmakers. “The danger is still looming and the enemies are ready for us because they do not like to see a united, strong, stable Iraq.”
As Pachachi spoke, he was interrupted from the floor by senior Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, who said the remarks were inappropriate because of their political nature.
Even the oath was a source of disagreement, with the head of the committee that drafted the country’s new constitution, Humam Hammoudi, protesting that lawmakers had strayed from the text. After brief consultations, officials agreed the wording was acceptable.
Meanwhile, a top Iranian official said his country was ready to open direct talks with the United States over Iraq, marking a major shift in foreign policy a day after al-Hakim called for such talks.
Ali Larijani, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator and secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, told reporters that any talks between the United States and Iran would deal only with Iraqi issues.
“To resolve Iraqi issues and help the establishment of an independent and free government in Iraq, we agree to [talks with the United States],” Larijani said after a closed meeting of the parliament Thursday.
Larijani said the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, also had invited Iran for talks on Iraq.
Washington, which repeatedly has accused Iran of meddling in Iraq’s affairs and of sending weapons and men to help insurgents in Iraq, had no immediate response.
The statement marked the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that Iran had officially called for dialogue with the United States.

TITLE: Chinese President Unveils List of 8 Do’s and Don’t’s
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
BEIJING — President Hu Jintao has a message for Chinese who are greedy, lazy or unpatriotic: Be ashamed, be very ashamed. Hu’s list of eight do’s and don’t’s was unveiled during the meeting of parliament that ended this week.
It aims to douse the excesses of China’s 27-year-long economic boom with a bucket of cold virtue.
On Wednesday, the aphorisms were issued on a $1 poster with plain, black Chinese characters above a photo of the Great Wall.
Hu’s virtues are blandly apolitical, with none of the radical vigor of founding communist leader Mao Zedong, who declared: “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.”
“Love, do not harm the motherland,” says Hu’s list. “Uphold science; don’t be ignorant and unenlightened.”
Hu’s virtues add to efforts by communist leaders to assure the public they are fighting corruption and trying to close the gap between an elite who have profited from China’s economic reforms and the poor majority.
The list also appears to be a tentative step toward legacy-building for Hu, who is general secretary of the ruling Communist Party and was appointed to the largely ceremonial post of president in 2003.
For centuries, Chinese leaders have tried, usually in vain, to mold public and official behavior with poetic maxims.
“In our socialist society we must not allow the boundaries to be blurred when it comes to right and wrong, evil and kindness, beauty and ugliness,” Hu told a March 4 parliamentary seminar, according to the Communist Party newspaper.
“What we support, what we resist, what we oppose and what we promote all must be crystal clear,” he said, adding that his “socialist concept of honor and disgrace” should be promoted to the masses, especially young people.
But countering lawlessness and greed with phrases extolling plain living is like trying to put the genie of economic reform back in the bottle, says one China watcher.
“The overwhelming majority of Chinese people don’t want to go back to the simple life. They want the good life like the people in the cities have,” said Merle Goldman of Harvard University, author of the book “From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China.”
The official Xinhua News Agency hailed the list as “a perfect amalgamation of traditional Chinese values and modern virtues.”

TITLE: Host Nation Belly-Flops at Commonwealth Games
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
MELBOURNE — Australia’s superstar swimmers endured a nightmare start to the 18th Commonwealth Games as their dreams of a record gold medal haul suffered a devastating early blow.
The host nation’s problems were then compounded when their weighlifting team found itself at the center of a drugs row leaving Asian lifters to seize the opportunity with a double gold strike.
Australia did manage to repair some of the damage to their reputation with two golds out of three in cycling but it was not enough to ease the pain of what happened in the pool with Scotland dishing out the unexpected mugging.
Caitlin McClatchey smashed Australian favorite Libby Lenton’s dreams of winning a record seven golds by capturing the 200-meters freestyle in a Games record.
“I had actually never heard of the Scottish girl before today and she did a fantastic swim, and ultimately tonight was all about racing and I think I did pretty well tonight,” Lenton said.
David Carry then completed an exhilarating night for Scottish swimming with victory in the men’s 400m freestyle.
Olympic champions South Africa rounded off the opening night by touching out Australia to claim the men’s 4x100m freestyle relay for Australia’s first defeat in the event since the 1978 Edmonton Games.
McClatchey, the first Scottish woman to win an individual medal at the world championships with bronze in the 400m freestyle at Montreal last year, overhauled the fast-starting Lenton in one minute 57.25 seconds.
“I didn’t really expect to win the 200m. When I turned at the last 50m I knew I could win if I put my head down,” McClatchey said. “It is just fantastic and a bit of a shock.”
Lenton finished with silver. England’s Melanie Marshall took bronze.
Carry took gold in the next final, pulling away to win in 3:48.17 from Canada’s Andrew Hurd with David Davies of Wales third.
Carry went into the event as the top-ranked 400m swimmer in the Commonwealth after Australia’s world champion Grant Hackett withdrew to have shoulder surgery.
New Zealander Moss Burmester joined in the Scottish and South African celebrations by leading from the start to win in the men’s 200m butterfly in a Games record 1:56.64 from Australians Travis Nederpelt and Joshua Krogh.
Stephanie Rice won Australia’s only swimming gold to lead a home cleansweep of the medals in the women’s 200m individual medley.
Rice swept home to trump team-mates Brooke Hanson and Lara Carroll.
India had the honor of winning the first gold of the Games when 38-year-old Kunjarani Devi beat off rivals half her age to successfully defend her women’s 48kg weightlifting title.
The veteran overcame a poor start before edging out the teenage challenge of Marilou Dozois-Prevost of Canada and Australia’s Erika Yamasaki who settled for silver and bronze respectively.
She finished with a combined score of 166kg for a Games record with the Canadian on 165kg while Yamasaki lifted 153kg.
Malaysia also got off the mark with Mohd Faizal Baharom winning the men’s 56kg gold ahead of India’s Vicky Batta and compatriot Matin Guntali.
The 24-year-old Baharom, a bronze medal winner in 2002, put in a commanding performance with a snatch of 115kg followed by 140kg in clean and jerk.
Australia drew first blood in track cycling when world-record holder Anna Meares claimed gold medal in the women’s 500m time-trial.
Meares edged out English hope Victoria Pendleton in a time of 34.326 seconds while reigning Commonwealth champion Kerrie Meares, the winner’s sister, claimed bronze.
Ben Kersten of Australia won the men’s 1km time trial ahead of favorites Jason Queally of England and Scotland’s Chris Hoy.
England’s Paul Manning won gold in the men’s 4000m individual pursuit with an English cleansweep completed by Ron Hayles and Stephen Cummings.
Canada got off the mark when their men’s gymnastics team retained the title they won in Manchester placing ahead of Australia and England.
The host nation found themselves at the center of an embarrassing and potentially damaging drugs storm on Thursday.
Australia’s sports minister claimed that pills, syringes and vials were found in several rooms used by the country’s weightlifting team at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in Canberra.
A cleaner discovered the needles on Tuesday while a second forensic sweep of rooms at the Canberra institution on Wednesday uncovered the tablets.
Meanwhile, Jamaica’s 100 meters world record holder Asafa Powell received a huge boost in his bid to win the Commonwealth Games title as defending champion Kim Collins withdrew because of injury.
Collins failed to recover in time from a long term groin injury forcing the 2003 world champion to give up hope of competing here.
Collins is only recently back to full-time training and his presence in Melbourne for the Games which started on Thursday was always in doubt.
The 29-year-old St Kitts and Nevis sprinter picked up the injury at last summer’s world championships in Helsinki.
Collins failed to defend his global title in Helsinki, but his bronze medal behind Justin Gatlin and Michael Frater again emphasised his world class ability and proved him to be the man for the big occasion.
He only returned to serious training in January and has set his sights on preparing for the summer season - and the lucrative IAAF Golden League and Grand Prix circuits.
His withdrawal along with the absence of the top Americans gives Powell a great chance of capturing not only his first ever major title but also his first ever individual medal.

TITLE: Sharapova, Andreyev Advance
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: INDIAN WELLS, California — Third seed Maria Sharapova overpowered Germany’s Anna-Lena Groenefeld 6-1 6-3 on Wednesday to reach a mouth-watering semi-final with Martina Hingis at the Pacific Life Open. 
Former Swiss world number one Hingis earlier eclipsed another Russian Dinara Safina 6-3 6-4 to reach the last four. 
In the men’s field, Andy Roddick’s slump in form continued when he was knocked out in the fourth round by 24th-seeded Russian Igor Andreyev.
The world number three went down 6-4 6-7 6-1 and his conqueror will next face American James Blake, who advanced when Germany’s Tommy Haas retired with food poisoning while trailing 6-3 3-0. 
Top seed Roger Federer raced past France’s Richard Gasquet 6-3 6-4 to book his place in the last eight, while number two Rafael Nadal of Spain overcame a twisted ankle to beat 20th seed Sebastien Grosjean of France 6-4 6-2. 
Federer will face sixth seed Ivan Ljubicic after the Croatian out-classed compatriot and 21st seed Mario Ancic 6-3 6-4.
Nadal — who pulled out of the doubles because of his injury — will face Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus, who continued his fine form, defeating Tomas Berdych of the Czech Republic 6-4 6-1 to reach the quarter-finals. 
In another upset, Thailand’s Paradorn Srichaphan upended fourth seed David Nalbandian of Argentina 6-7 6-3 6-2.
Paradorn will face 22nd seed Jarkko Nieminen of Finland, who ended former world number one Marat Safin’s run with a 6-4 6-3 victory.

TITLE: Hard Week For Russian F1 Team
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — One driver retired with mechanical trouble and the other finished 17th out of 18 in a reserve car Sunday in a season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix that drove home just how steep a learning curve Russia’s first team in Formula One history faces.
While the established order of the Formula One world — Renault, Ferrari and McLaren-Mercedes — picked up where they left off last season by dominating the podium, Russian-owned Midland had made its baptism-of-fire debut in the world’s premier auto racing competition.
Its Dutch driver Christijan Albers suffered a driveshaft failure at the start of the race and was forced to retire, and teammate Tiago Monteiro had a gear transmission problem beforehand and had to switch the team’s reserve car, or T-Car. That the Portuguese finished at all in an unfamiliar car was an achievement.
“Obviously, it wasn’t an easy weekend. The T-Car wasn’t really set up for me. … [It was] fairly uncomfortable to drive throughout the race,” the team’s web site quoted him as saying.
“We had our share of trouble, but, you know, that’s racing. Let’s hope we got all our bad luck out of the way here so that we can look forward to better results for the rest of the season.”
Albers was philosophical about the problems that can affect a team before a race.“It’s really unfortunate, because we’ve never had that [driveshaft] problem before and it’s just one of those things that’s impossible to predict. What makes it even more frustrating is that I think our capabilities were much better than what we showed in qualifying, and, had we not suffered such bad luck, I think we might have run a reasonable race,” he said on the web site.
Midland, known by the acronym MF1, was spawned out of the Jordan team founded in 1991 by Irishman Eddie Jordan when St. Petersburg-born Canadian Alex Shnaider bought it out in January last year for a reported $50 million.

TITLE: Russia’s ‘Queen of Athletics’ Says She’ll Break More Records
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — She has been hailed as the queen of athletics and Russia’s newest sweetheart, but life does not get any easier for Olympic pole vault champion and world record holder Yelena Isinbayeva.
After adding the world indoor title to an already glittering medal collection, the 23-year-old Volgograd native was probably expecting to receive new accolades.
Instead, she faced a barrage of questions from demanding local press, more interested in a possible tie-up with Chelsea billionaire owner Roman Abramovich’s oil company than her sporting triumphs.
To her credit, she took the media blitz in her stride. 
Only once Isinbayeva lost her cool when a reporter asked her if she had spoken to former coach Yevgeny Trofimov. 
The Russian dropped a bombshell last November, dumping her long-time mentor and hiring Vitaly Petrov, the former coach of pole vault great Sergei Bubka. 
Trofimov was spotted in the stands of the Olympic sports complex over the weekend openly cheering for Isinbayeva’s main rival Svetlana Feofanova. 
The 2003 world champion and Olympic silver medallist won bronze in Moscow — her first international competition following an 18-month absence through a back injury. 
Another journalist wanted to know about Isinbayeva’s icy relationship with her fellow Russian. The two, sitting side-by-side, hardly looked at each other during a news conference. 
“You see, we’re not fighting with each other,” Isinbayeva said sarcastically while Feofanova just smiled. 
“We’re not friends but we don’t have to be enemies either.” 
Isinbayeva was also asked about her apparent slump in form after failing to break her own indoor mark for a third consecutive meet in Moscow. “Well, I’m not a machine, I’m human after all. But I’ll soon prove that I’m capable of breaking records again,” she said.

TITLE: Middlesbrough Plays Its Greatest Ever Match
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Middlesbrough withstood a pulsating fightback from AS Roma to reach the UEFA Cup quarterfinals for the first time on Wednesday. 
Boro, 1-0 up from the first leg, doubled their advantage through Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink at the Olympic stadium before two goals from Brazilian Mancini set up a thrilling finale.
Roma, who had Philippe Mexes sent off in stoppage time, threw everything at the English side in the final 25 minutes but Boro held on to go through on away goals after a 2-1 defeat.
“It has to be the greatest night in the club’s history,” Boro defender Gareth Southgate told Channel Five TV.
“Guts got us through. We knew they were a good side and they showed it. We knew we’d have to score and we did.” 
In another upset Romania’s Rapid Bucharest went through on away goals at the expense of former European champions Hamburg SV, despite a 3-1 defeat in Germany, while Sevilla put out Lille 2-1 on aggregate after a 2-0 home win.
Since breaking the Serie A record for successive league wins last month Roma have faltered and the capital side appeared up against it when Dutch striker Hasselbaink headed Boro ahead on 32 minutes.
Hasselbaink beat French defender Mexes to Stewart Downing’s left-wing cross and headed powerfully past Gianluca Curci into the far corner.
The goal left Roma, who hit the bar early on through Cesare Bovo, needing three goals to turn around the tie and Mancini rifled in three minutes before halftime to give the hosts hope.