SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1157 (23), Friday, March 31, 2006
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TITLE: Youths In Tajik Case Sent to Jail
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: A judge sentenced seven youths to prison terms Thursday in the stabbing death of a 9-year Tajik girl and the beating of her father in attacks human rights activists say were racially motivated. 
Judge Tatyana Yegorova sentenced Roman Kazakov, 16, to 5 and a half years in prison on charges stemming from the February 2004 death of Khursheda Sultonova. Though Kazakov initially had been charged with murder, a jury later reduced his charge to hooliganism — a decision that outraged rights activists who accuse authorities of failing to make strong efforts to combat and prosecute racially motivated crimes. 
The teenager had pleaded innocent, arguing that an earlier confession to police was made under duress. 
The other six defendants received up to two years in prison for the attack on Sultonova’s father. 
Sultonova bled to death after being stabbed 11 times. Her father survived the beating, and her cousin escaped. 
Prosecutors told reporters before the case opened that a dozen youths between the ages of 14 and 20 had gathered in a park the night of the killing and had drunk alcohol before seeing the Tajik family. Knives, brass knuckles, chains and bats were used in the attacks, authorities said. 
Earlier Thursday, St. Petersburg prosecutors opened an investigation into a white supremacist web site that offers detailed instructions on how to conduct street attacks against minorities. 
Investigators are studying the site of the so-called Freedom Party for possible action under laws banning extremism, said Yelena Ordynskaya, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office. 
The site’s text offers instructions for conducting what it calls “white patrols.” 
It describes how to organize attacks, and recommends waiting for victims in deserted places near dormitories where foreign students live. 
Rising xenophobia in recent years has led to hundreds of racially motivated attacks in Russia — many of which have targeted dark-skinned immigrants from former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains region. 
Human rights groups say extremists are emboldened by the lack of will on the part of authorities to act. They complain that literature from neo-Nazis and other extremists is sold freely. 
Activist Desire Deffo, the deputy head of the African Unity group in St. Petersburg, said the site is proof that “nationalists still felt rather free in the city and in the country.” 
“If there was enough done in the city and in the country to stop this phenomenon, there would not be such manuals on the internet,” Deffo said.

TITLE: Iran Gets 30 Days to Clear Nuke Suspicions
AUTHOR: By Edith Lederer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS — The UN Security Council gave Iran 30 days to clear up suspicions that it is seeking nuclear weapons, and key members turned their focus on what to do if Iran refuses to suspend uranium enrichment and allow more intrusive inspections. 
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Berlin on Thursday for discussions between the five permanent council members — the United States, Russia, China Britain and France — plus Germany, on how much and what kind of pressure to exert on Iran if it refuses to comply. 
After three weeks of intense negotiations, the 15-member Security Council approved a statement Wednesday asking the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to report back in 30 days on Iran’s compliance with demands to stop enriching uranium. 
The statement, made available to The Associated Press, takes into account Russian and Chinese reservations about too much toughness, while meeting U.S., French and British calls for keeping the pressure on Tehran. 
It “notes with serious concern Iran’s decision to resume enrichment-related activities ... and to suspend cooperation with the IAEA under the additional protocol” — an agreement allowing agency inspectors wide access on short notice to Iran’s nuclear program. 
The statement also calls on Iran to return to “full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related ... activities.” 
Rice called the statement an “important diplomatic step” that showed the international community’s concern about Iran. Before meeting with her counterparts, she was consulting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 
“We are very close today to taking the first major step in the Security Council to deal with Iran’s nearly 20-year-old clandestine nuclear weapons program,” John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in New York. “It sends an unmistakable message to Iran that its efforts to deny the obvious fact of what it’s doing are not going to be sufficient.” 
Iran remained defiant, maintaining its right to nuclear power but insisting that it had no intention of seeking weapons of mass destruction. 
On Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki condemned “unjustified propaganda” about its peaceful nuclear program. “Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful and has never diverted towards prohibited activities,” Mottaki told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. 
But, he added, Iran is willing to continue talks with the IAEA over its nuclear program. 
“We are willing to continue with negotiations and also continue with our sincere and constructive cooperation with the agency,” Mottaki told reporters after the conference session. “Our cooperation with the agency will continue.” 
Security Council members described the statement, while not legally binding, as a first step to pressure Iran to make clear its program is for peaceful purposes. It also calls on Iran to ratify the IAEA’s additional protocol, which allows unannounced inspections. 
The Security Council could eventually impose economic sanctions, though Russia and China say they oppose such tough measures. 
The Europeans initially proposed a much stronger statement but accepted a milder one to secure the support of Russia and China. Western countries agreed to drop language that proliferation “constitutes a threat to international peace and security.” Also gone is a mention that the council is specifically charged under the UN charter with addressing such threats. 
Russia and China had opposed that language because they wanted nothing in the statement that could automatically trigger council action after 30 days. 
“For the time being we have suspicions,” Russia’s UN Ambassador Andrei Denisov said. “So from that point of view, it is like a ladder. If you want to climb up, you must step on the first step, and then the second, and not try to leap.” 
The West has refused to rule out sanctions, and U.S. officials have said the threat of military action must also remain on the table. 
Negotiations between Iran and France, Germany and Britain collapsed in August after Tehran rejected a package of incentives offered in return for a permanent end to uranium enrichment. Its moves to develop full-blown enrichment capabilities led the IAEA’s board to ask for Security Council involvement. 
Beyond giving formal blessings for the council statement — and using it to reflect a show of unity — Rice and the ministers from France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany were not likely to accomplish much at Thursday’s meeting formally set to last only 90 minutes. 
While the officials were expected to touch on ways to engage Iran diplomatically, major differences persist on that approach. 
In a confidential letter earlier this month, Britain argued for including the other permanent Security Council members in talks with Iran. In exchange, they hoped to secure Russian and Chinese support for increasing pressure on Iran through binding council resolutions that could be enforced militarily. 
A senior European official said on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to speak to the media that Britain’s “proposal is not off the table.” But a U.S. official, who also requested anonymity for the same reason, said Washington opposed including more countries in the negotiations. 
“From the beginning, our position has been that we don’t think it’s helpful to have other countries joining the EU-3 in the dialogue because it has the potential of diluting the Western position on Iran,” he said. 
The U.S. official did not, however, rule out direct discussions between the United States and Iran, suggesting they could be a spinoff of the U.S. administration’s decision earlier this month to talk to Iran about Iraq after a nearly three-decade break in diplomatic ties. 
The U.S. administration has publicly emphasized those talks would not touch on the nuclear issue. But the official said that “if some understanding emerges from those discussions, then the one side or the other might say, ‘Let’s have some follow-up.’”

TITLE: Schroeder Gets Chairman Job With Pipeline
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was appointed chairman on Thursday of the consortium building a strategically vital gas pipeline linking Russia’s vast reserves with German markets — and awarded a $300,000 salary. 
Schroeder joined executives from the Russian and German companies Gazprom, BASF AG and E.On AG in Moscow for an inaugural meeting of the consortium. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller announced the appointment, as well as that of Mathias Warnig, the former head of Dresdner Bank AG’s Moscow office, as the consortium’s managing director. 
Schroeder’s nomination had provoked a storm of criticism that he allegedly used his official position for personal gain. A close ally of President Vladimir Putin, Schroeder had been a strong advocate of the project while in office. 
Putin reportedly was acquainted with Warnig while working for the KGB in East Germany. 
“I am not pleased about the criticism, of course, but I am happy with this new job,” Schroeder said through a translator. He said the criticism was something he could “live with,” but insisted he had been independently appointed by the consortium’s shareholders. “I played no role in the companies’ decision,” he said. 
Gazprom holds a controlling 51 percent stake in the consortium, while BASF and E.On each have 24.5 percent. 
The former German leader said the pipeline’s construction was critical to cover Europe’s demand for natural gas. He dismissed suggestions that the new project would siphon off supplies traveling through an existing pipeline taking Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine. 
“It’s not aimed against anyone,” he said. 
The more than $4.8 billion project envisions two parallel pipelines — each with a capacity of 27.5 billion cubic meters per year, stretching 1,200 kilometers under the Baltic sea between Russia and Greifswald on the German coast. Construction of the on-land Russian leg began in December and the first pipeline is due to be completed by 2010. 
With both pipes operative, the route will satisfy 10 percent of the European Union’s total demand, said Burckhard Bergman, the chairman of the management board of E.On Ruhrgas. 
In Berlin, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier defended the pipeline plan and the former chancellor, and said Schroeder’s appointment was “useful from a German perspective.” 
In an interview in Thursday’s Handelsblatt newspaper, Steinmeier said many Western countries had expressed interest in joining the pipeline. “This really justifies the project,” said Steinmeier, who served as Schroeder’s chief of staff when he was chancellor. 
Russia began building the Baltic Sea pipeline in September to diversify supply routes, especially to Germany, the largest foreign customer of Gazprom. BASF and E.On are the German partners.

TITLE: Gazprom Chief: Belarus Must Pay Euro Rates
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s natural-gas monopoly Gazprom said Thursday that Belarus must pay European rates for its gas — an apparent bargaining ploy to win control over its neighbor’s gas pipeline system and one that could stir trouble between the allies. 
Pro-Moscow Belarus currently pays a rock-bottom price of roughly $47 per 1,000 cubic meters of Russian natural gas. 
Gazprom said in a statement that its Chief Executive Alexei Miller had told the Belarusian energy minister at a meeting in Moscow that Russian gas “must be supplied at prices equivalent to the European level.” 
The Belarusian side was due to present its proposals on April 30, the statement said. 
Oil and gas analyst Oleg Maximov with the Troika Dialog investment bank in Moscow called Gazprom’s stance a “bargaining chip” to acquire control over Belarusian pipeline operator Beltransgaz, which also carries Russian gas to lucrative Western markets. 
Acquiring the Belarusian pipeline system would see Gazprom achieve a goal of cementing control over its transit routes, he said. 
“It’s a political question. At the end of the day it will be decided between the two presidents at the political level,” Maximov said. 
Toward the end of last year, Russia renegotiated its gas contracts with its neighbors — bringing them closer to European prices, which have soared in line with record oil prices. 
Russia’s move to sharply increase gas prices for Ukraine in January was widely seen as politically motivated pressure on Ukraine’s new, Western-leaning government in the run up to parliamentary elections held last Sunday. The spat ended in doubling the price, and it appeared to have hampered the performance of Western-leaning president Viktor Yushchenko’s party, which came in third. 
Meanwhile Belarus, which has close ties to Moscow, was allowed to keep an old 2004 contract in place. Its hardline president Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected with a landslide majority this month in an election international observers have called flawed. 
The two allies could now be headed for a fight over Gazprom’s new demands. 
A February 2004 dispute over gas prices saw Gazprom halt supplies to Belarus — a step Lukashenko called “terrorism” at the time. That dispute was diffused after Belarus agreed to raise the price it pays from $30 to the current rate. Gazprom is due to deliver 21 billion cubic meters of gas to Belarus this year.

TITLE: Fashion Show Sparks Debate
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As the most significant regional fashion event, Defile na Neve, prepares to open its 13th season in April, industry experts are surprised by the absence of graduates’ debuts at the show.
“We expected interest from the graduates of Russia’s colleges with their degree collections, but this season we won't have any of them at all,” said Irina Ashkinadze, head of Defile na Neve, speaking at a press conference last week.
Alexander Shumsky, general producer of the largest fashion event in Eastern Europe, the Moscow-based Russian Fashion Week, regards the reluctance of young designers to participate in the city’s fashion week as “very surprising”.
“For a designer, any fashion show is a big promotional opportunity,” he said, speaking at the press conference. 
Fashion specialists said the standard of the city’s fashion shouldn't be blamed for the situation.
“If there are any traditions in Russian fashion, then they come from St. Petersburg,” Shumsky said.
“The modern fashion industry sees a lot of repetition, but over the generations the city’s designers have been producing very original collections that can be rightfully considered to amount to a Russian style,” he said. 
“Designers specifically from St. Petersburg create collections that can be attributed to a so-called Russian style, inspired by Russian culture and arts, but at the same time having nothing in common with lubok, [cheap popular prints based on imitation of folk art]. That’s exactly   what foreigners expect from Russian fashion,” he explained. 
According to Shumsky, although the notion of Russian fashion is only at the beginning of its development, if it is to be formed, it will be “formed here, on the banks of the River Neva.” 
Vladimir Sanzharov, head of the design faculty at the State University of Technology and Design, one of the most prominent design universities in the city, said his graduates do not participate in the show for financial reasons. 
“In our opinion, this festival is designed for professionals, not for students, and therefore the participation cost is quite high,” Sanzharov said in a telephone interview Thursday. 
According to Ashkinadze, the participation fee, which currently amounts to $850, is “not unrealistic” for newcomers. “With every show in which young designers participate, they make it easier for themselves to find investors,” Ashkinadze said.
She noted, however, that the fee doesn’t cover all the expenses. Along with other costs such as the printing of tickets and payments to models, the cost of entry can rise to $1,200.
“For students, $1,200 is pretty expensive — it would even be expensive for us at the university if we decided to sponsor some of them,” Sanzharov said. 
“Of course, Defile na Neve is a well-known brand in industry circles, and therefore it has the potential to boost young designers’ careers, but unfortunately their spending potential just doesn’t match their ambitions,” Sanzharov said. 
Anastasia Ivanova, a designer who entered her graduate collection in the event in 2005, said she spent over $2,000 on her participation in Defile na Neve.
Ivanova said that designers also have to significantly enlarge their university collections if they are to participate in any serious industry event, and this can cost as much as $5,000, making it very difficult for graduates to afford. 
Nevertheless, despite the high costs, young designers should make every effort to take part in professional events such as the Defile, Ivanova said. “It's one thing to sit at home and dream about a successful professional future, and another to get a chance to jump into that professional life.”

TITLE: Rice Asks Lavrov To Probe Report
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that she had asked Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to investigate a report that Russian intelligence fed U.S. battle plans to Saddam Hussein.
“I have talked with the Russian foreign minister and asked them to look into this and to take it very seriously,” Rice told a Senate hearing.
General Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the claim of Russian collusion might be “disinformation,” which could mean that U.S. commanders had sought tos pread false information to deceive Hussein.

TITLE: Eight Jailed in Novosibirsk For Attacking Immigrants
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Novosibirsk regional court on Tuesday found eight skinheads guilty of carrying out four racially motivated attacks on Tajik and Uzbek immigrants, but threw out charges they had incited ethnic hatred.
Five defendants were sentenced to six to 10 years in prison in Novosibirsk, while the other three were given suspended sentences, Interfax reported.
The suspected leader of the group, Mikhail Rodoshkevich, 21, will be tried separately later. He is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment in a hospital.
The young men were arrested in November 2002 after an attack on a Tajik citizen who worked at a Novosibirsk outdoor market.
Investigators found Nazi-themed books and extremist videotapes in the apartments of the men, aged 18 to 22.
The court ruled that the men belonged to a 20-member group called White Brotherhood, and that the group staged attacks on dark-skinned migrants in Novosibirsk and the surrounding region.
The other members of the group have not been charged with wrongdoing.
“The aim of the group, which claimed to belong to ‘a nation of clean Aryans,’ was to clear the cities of non-Russians. They wore black leather jackets with white stripes and a clenched fist,” the verdict said, Interfax reported.
The group used chains, knives, electroshock and canes against their victims. After the assaults, they stole the victim’s money and clothes and ordered them to leave the region, the verdict said.
Attacks on dark-skinned foreigners and natives of the North Caucasus have grown, and some extremist sites have posted a combat manual for skinheads.
Fontanka.ru, a St. Petersburg news web site, reported Sunday that recent attacks on migrants had followed instructions from a text entitled “Manual of Street Terror.”
The manual, which has been posted on several Russian web sites, advises aspiring skinheads on how to carry out attacks and where to find victims, Fontanka.ru said. It also instructs readers to wear gloves and shoe covers to avoid leaving clues for investigators, and to wear normal clothes to fool victims.
The Fontanka.ru report was picked up by the national media, prompting web masters to pull the booklet’s teachings from their sites this week. Repeated searches of Russian web sites on Tuesday failed to turn up a copy of the manual.
Oleg Nikolayev, a journalist with Fontanka.ru, said, however, that “it is not difficult to find the instructions on the internet and on the streets. They are often printed as leaflets and distributed on the streets of St. Petersburg.”
Fontanka.ru said the stabbing of a 9-year-old girl of mixed Russian and African heritage in St. Petersburg on Saturday was carried out according to the manual’s instructions.
Two young men wearing normal clothes followed the girl into her apartment building and stabbed her in the stairwell. She was hospitalized but said to be in a satisfactory condition. 
The attack came just three days after a St. Petersburg jury cleared a teenager of murder charges in the stabbing death of a 9-year-old Tajik girl in 2004.
Fontanka.ru and Noviye Izvestia reported that St. Petersburg police knew that the manual was being distributed around St. Petersburg and on the internet but chose to turn a blind eye to it.

TITLE: 2 Policemen Convicted Over Suspect’s Death
PUBLISHER: mt
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Wednesday convicted two police officers of negligence in the death of detainee Alexander Pumane, who was picked up driving a car rigged with explosives in 2004.
The Presnensky District Court convicted Andrei Semigin, former head of the Presnensky district police precinct, and Iosif Smerek, a duty officer at the precinct, for their role in Pumane’s death.
Semigin was given a two-year suspended sentence, while Smerek was sentenced to two years in a labor colony, Interfax reported. 
Prosecutor Alexander Dementyev had asked that both men receive three years in prison.
Pumane was detained Sept. 18 near Patriarch’s Ponds with two land mines and 200 grams of TNT in his car. 
Pumane died several hours later in the hospital after being interrogated by law enforcement officers. Doctors said he suffered severe brain injuries from a brutal beating.
Prosecutors said Semigin handed Pumane over to interrogators without written authorization and that Smerek illegally issued a billy club that was used to beat the suspect.
Semigin and Smerek both told the court that they were following orders from superior officers, Interfax reported.
The man charged with beating Pumane to death, Major Vyacheslav Dushenko, a counter-terrorism police officer, is at large and being sought by authorities.

TITLE: On Eve of Conscription Draft, Ryzhkov Asks Ivanov to Resign
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Days ahead of the spring draft, liberal State Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov walked into a Defense Ministry office on Wednesday to submit a letter urging Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to resign over a hazing that forced the amputation of a conscript’s legs and genitals.
Valentina Melnikova, a fellow co-leader of the opposition Republican Party, also got inside the ministry’s mail department at 19 Ulitsa Znamenka, which is within sight of the Kremlin, but guards behind the door pushed out activists and reporters who tried to follow. 
Minutes later, 12 conscripts came running to the front door, carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, and lined up to block the entrance.
The letter was the latest in a series of demands for Ivanov’s resignation, and it came three days before the start of spring conscription on Saturday. Ryzhkov and Melnikova, who also heads the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees, a human rights group, plan rallies across the country on Saturday to urge potential conscripts to stay away.
Some of the conscripts sent to block the Defense Ministry entrance read with curiosity a copy of the resignation demand, which an activist held out. Their superior, an officer, turned away when he realized what the letter was about.
“Sychyov fell victim to the military system,” the letter said, referring to Andrei Sychyov, whom older conscripts in the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy beat so badly that doctors amputated his legs and genitals in January. “In this system, a soldier’s life is worth nothing.”
Activists at Saturday’s rallies will advise conscription-age men to write to President Vladimir Putin, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov and their regional governors that they will not serve unless they are offered a guarantee that they will not be abused, Melnikova said by telephone. Rallies are planned in Moscow and 30 other cities.
Calls for an end to the abuse of conscripts have grown louder after the case of Sychyov, who is still undergoing treatment in a Moscow hospital.

TITLE: Trademark Amendment Protects Owners’ Rights
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: New legislation is set to prevent the unauthorized use of registered trademarks on the internet. Although designed to protect property rights, experts said the reforms would lead to a number of contradictions.
If amendments to the fourth part of the Civil Code are approved, a domain will become a legally protected item.
Since 2002, according to the Law on Trademarks, Service Marks and Indication of Product Origin, the unauthorized use of trademarks on the internet is regarded as a legal infringement, and Russian courts have investigated over 40 such cases, said Victor Naumov, Head of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Protection Group at DLA Piper in St. Petersburg.
“If a trademark was used on the internet in connection with similar goods and services, it was regarded as abuse of property rights. If this fact was not proven, the owners of trademarks usually lost their cases,” Naumov said.
The new draft of the Civil Code, to be approved by the State Duma within the next few months, directly forbids the unauthorized use of trademarks as domain names, but contradicts to a separate new amendment.
“Another amendment concerning domain names stipulates the predominance of trademarks over domain name, something currently absent from existing law. But the article on trademarks stipulates the opposite norm, prohibiting the registration of trademarks identical to existing domain names,” Naumov said.
“Trademarks demand more time and money to be registered, and the mass registration of domain names could decrease the status and importance of trademarks,” he said.
According to Ru Center, the largest domain register in Russia, 446,730 web sites were registered in the .ru zone by the end of 2005.
Ru Center’s annual report indicates trends potentially dangerous to trademark owners.
“An annual growth rate in registrations of 46 percent is one of the highest in the world. The number of companies owning domains continued to fall in 2005. By the end of the year they accounted for 44 percent of all owners, though about three years ago they accounted for 60 percent,” the report said.
Obviously, for individuals the reselling of domains to interested companies could prove a rather profitable venture, since the registration of a domain in the .ru zone costs only $20 with annual extensions costing $15.
A lawyer from the Linia Prava law firm, Vitaly Tokarchuk, was optimistic about trademark protection. Both the Law on Trademarks, Service Marks and Indication of Product Origin and amendments to the Civil Code give more rights to the owners of trademarks, he said.
“Domains are not an exception. Owners could prohibit others from using their trademark at any moment by filing an appeal to the court to cancel domain registration,” Tokarchuk said.
However it is a complicated and time-consuming exercise. In January 2001 the Istman Kodak Company appealed to the Arbitration Court to prohibit a Moscow-based entrepreneur from using the Kodak trademark in a domain name. The district court, Court of Appeal and Court of Cassation rejected the demand. Only the Supreme Arbitration Tribunal decided in favor of Istman Kodak, Tokarchuk said.
Sergei Spasennov, head of corporate and real estate practice at Pepeliaev, Goltsblat & Partners in St. Petersburg, said that sometimes unauthorized persons use famous trademarks just to increase the number of site hits, but in most cases they offer trademark owners the chance of buying up the domain.
“They often threaten to post information on the site that is potentially damaging to the respective company,” Spasennov said.
If approved, article 1482 of the Civil Code would establish the exclusive right of trademark owners to use their property, including domain names, on the internet.
“This norm should be approved as soon as possible. In the rare cases where a domain has become very popular, we can only advise the owner to register it as a trademark, which would protect it from unauthorized use and might result in license payments in the future,” Spasennov said.

TITLE: Putin: U.S. Delaying WTO Entry
AUTHOR: By Neil Buckley in Moscow and Frances Williams in Geneva
PUBLISHER: Financial Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday accused the U.S. of “artificially” holding back progress in talks on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, adding to a chill in relations between the two countries.
Putin made his comments during an annual meeting with Russian business leaders, otherwise largely devoted to domestic policy.
“Unfortunately we have received a list of questions from our American colleagues that require additional agreements that we thought had been settled long ago,” the Russian President said, without specifying what areas the U.S. demands covered. “The negotiation process is being artificially set back.”
He added that Russia was still interested in WTO membership but “only on economically beneficial conditions”.
The U.S. rejected Putin’s claim. Robert Portman, U.S. trade representative, said: “The remaining issues with Russia’s accession...are not new problems and they are not dissimilar to those issues addressed by others who have acceded to the WTO.”
President George W. Bush on Wednesday acknowledged pressure not to attend the G8 summit in Russia later this year, but said that would be a mistake. “I need to be in a position where I can sit down with him [Putin] and be very frank about our concerns ... I haven’t given up on Russia. I still think Russia understands that it’s in her interest to be West, to work with the West, and to act in concert with the West.”
Moscow had hoped to wrap up its 13-year-old talks on joining the WTO by the end of last year, then, after that deadline was missed, at least before it hosted the G8 summit in St Petersburg in July.
But Alexander Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists, a lobby group, said after the meeting with Putin that the July deadline looked doubtful. He said Putin’s comments were “news both for members of the government and for business.”
Russia has become impatient over the past year or so as targets for WTO entry have slipped. Moscow now says it is aiming for the end of 2006 — but even this is threatened, not only by failure to wrap up bilateral market access talks with the U.S. but by sluggish progress in multilateral negotiations dealing with Russia’s compliance with WTO rules.
Agreement with Washington has been held up over U.S. demands for Moscow to allow foreign banks to open direct branches, not just Russian subsidiary companies as now. Russia says its financial sector could not withstand the competition and that it has security concerns about foreign banks opening branches. The U.S. has also said Russia must clamp down on video and software piracy and cut import duties on aircraft.
The recent WTO accord between Ukraine and the U.S. has rubbed salt into the wound, raising the prospect that Ukraine may join the trade body before Russia.
Russia is the biggest economy not yet to be a member of the 149-nation WTO, but has struck all necessary bilateral deals with other members apart from the U.S., Australia and Colombia.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Sibneft Center
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg’s legislative assembly has approved a law on the construction of a business center for the use of Sibneft, the oil giant bought last year by Gazprom for $13.1 billion. In contrast to previous proposals, the project will be entirely financed by the city budget, Regnum news agency reported Wednesday.
According to the law, Sibneft will own the business center and receive $2.16 billion in city budget grants to realize the project.

Sea Port Loan
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) —The National Reserve Bank has opened a two-year, $12.9 million credit line for the Baltdraga company, one of the contractors for the development of the city’s sea port, the bank said Tuesday in a statement.
After winning the tender in June last year Baltdraga became one of the contractors responsible for sea channel works and the creation of a passenger ferry complex on Vasilievsky island. This year the company will begin deepening the channel. Baltdraga completed similar works at the Ust-Luga port in the Leningrad Oblast, as well as at ports in Qatar, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

Stadium Bids
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A total of 17 companies have applied to construct a new $200 million stadium on Krestovsky island, including firms from Germany, Japan, Britain, France and Russia, Interfax reported Wednesday.
The five best proposals will be awarded contracts and about $100,000 from the city budget to prepare a final project for the 50,000-seat stadium over three months.

CyberPlat Deal
MOSCOW (SPT) — Money transfer outlet Unistream signed an agreement to cooperate with payment system CyberPlat, a press-release announced on March 22.  CyberPlat’s clients will now be able to pay bills through Unistream service points. Currently the Unistream money transfer system operates over 22,000 service points worldwide, while CyberPlat is Russia’s first universal multi-bank payment system, with a 2005 turnover of $1.2 billion.

TITLE: SUAL to Invest $6Bln into Plants
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — SUAL plans to pump $1 billion into factory upgrades and up to $5 billion into construction of new facilities in a bid to almost double aluminum production by 2013, company vice president Dmitry Yudin said Wednesday at a metals conference.
The world’s sixth-largest aluminum producer, which is controlled by billionaire Viktor Vekselberg through his Renova holding, will build one large 500,000-ton plant and several smaller operations that could raise the company’s annual production by 1 million tons to 2.04 million in five to seven years, Yudin said.
The company is currently in talks with utilities monopoly Unified Energy Systems, UES’s hydroelectric subsidiary HydroOGK and state nuclear power concern Rosenergoatom to secure long-term energy supplies at fixed prices. The outcome of the talks will determine the sites and timeline of the plans, Yudin said.
“We hope to start building the large plant in 2008,” Yudin said on the sidelines of the conference. The site will be picked from eight locations, he said.
“Some of the smaller projects could start earlier. No one will invest in an aluminum factory without knowing the long-term energy tariffs,” Yudin said.
The country’s two aluminum producers, SUAL and Russian Aluminum, see global demand for the metal rising, mainly due to China and India.
Russia is the world’s second-largest aluminum exporter after China, holding a 12 percent share of the global market, Victor Zhirnakov, deputy head of RusAl’s aluminum division, said at the conference. RusAl accounts for 75 percent of aluminum output in Russia.
RusAl and SUAL on Wednesday also did not rule out a merger, with talks between the two reportedly under way. “A merger will be possible when an agreement is reached among the shareholders,” Zhirnakov said.
RusAl is wholly owned by Oleg Deripaska through his En+ energy holding. The two companies began cooperation this year on a Komi alumina mining project that has reserves estimated at 260 million tons.
After raw materials, which account for about half of aluminum’s production costs, energy ranks as the second-biggest expenditure. In the United States and Europe, a 150 percent hike in global energy tariffs over the last four years led to several factory closures in 2005.
A number of foreign producers, including Norway’s Norsk Hydro and U.S.-based Alcoa, are currently eyeing Russia as a place to set up primary aluminum-smelting operations, with both companies in talks with HydroOGK about energy tie-ups for factories in Siberia and northwest Russia.
In a bid to outpace its rivals, SUAL hopes it can also gain support from the state. 
The company has appealed to the Regional Development Ministry and the governors of the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk regions, which SUAL has earmarked as potential locations for new factories, to lobby the government to introduce regulations allowing energy, transport and railway tariffs to be set for up to 25 years.
Denis Nushtayev, an analyst with Metropol, said the diversity of SUAL’s projects, in terms of both location and type of energy supply, was its greatest guarantee of success. 
“The more choices, the higher the chances of realization,” he said.

TITLE: Report Forecasts Booming Decade for Tourist Market
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Over the next ten years the country’s tourism market will boom, making it a world leader in the field and acting as a catalyst for wider economic and social development, a recently published report has claimed. The research on Russia’s tourism industry was presented by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) at the Astoria Hotel last week.
Having quantified all aspects of travel and tourism demand, from personal consumption to business purchases, capital investment, government spending and exports, the WTTC report translated the findings into macroeconomic concepts of production, such as GDP and employment. According to the research, the positive trends forecast for the next decade have already started to appear. The wider travel and tourism economy is expected to contribute 7.8 percent to Russia’s GDP — as opposed to 11.8 percent in Europe — and it should account for 4.5 million jobs, representing 6.6 percent of total employment, compared to 11.8 percent in the EU.
However, employment in the tourism sector will rise slowly, with an annual increase of only 1.5 percent — the same rate as in Europe’s developed markets. By 2016, the tourism sector’s share of employment will be 7.7 percent, compared to 13 percent in Europe. Nevertheless, according to the report almost all other market growth rates will exceed European ones. 
The report found government expenditure on travel and tourism, which is currently estimated at 2.7 percent of total spending and not expected to grow over the next few years, “sorely inadequate for a fast growing industry.”  
Among WTTC recommendations were the elaboration of a new action plan for tourism development; identification and investment in a ‘Russia brand,’ promoted both internationally and domestically; the identification of special economic zones for tourism to encourage investment; and the easing of visa requirements for visitors. 
Also mentioned in the report was the low general level of tourist infrastructure in terms of transport and accommodation, the latter overpriced and lacking mid-range hotels and youth hostels. 
“The night I spent at a five-star hotel in Moscow yesterday was the most expensive in my life,” said Richard Miller, executive vice president of the WTTC.
Product diversification was cited by the report as one of the most important ways of developing the country’s tourism market — it stated that only 20 percent of the country benefits from tourism, and 80 percent of foreign tourists visit only two main cities — Moscow and/or St. Petersburg. 
“St. Petersburg can join Paris and Rome as one of the world’s leading city destinations,” said WTTC president, Jean-Claude Baumgarten. “And if it will take about 5 years for St. Petersburg to develop, in Russia’s regions it will need more time.” 
Baumgarten appealed to the St. Petersburg government and local industry to work together and take advantage of events such as the upcoming G8 summit to increase St. Petersburg’s profile and to raise awareness of the tourism opportunities it offers. Nevertheless, he warned that a lack of facilities will mean the city won’t capitalize on such high profile events. City Hall has allocated around $5 million for development of the industry, but the city really needs another $2 million, he said.

TITLE: The Trick to Understanding Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Anders Aslund
TEXT: Ukraine has held its first elections after the Orange Revolution. Without any qualification, they were free and fair with a high participation of 67 percent, showing that Ukraine has matured as a democracy. At the same time, Ukraine has become a parliamentary system, which will reinforce democracy in the country. The Communists have been further marginalized, and party consolidation has proceeded well, with only five parties likely to make it into parliament. 
The main results of the vote reflect an amazing constancy. In December 2004, Viktor Yushchenko defeated Viktor Yanukovych with a margin of 8 percentage points, which will probably be the balance between the orange and blue, or more accurately western and eastern, coalitions. The geographic dividing line runs exactly where it did in 2004, or where it has gone for most of the last 300 years. 
International media have focused on Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions becoming the largest single party, but what matters in proportional elections is which parties can form a ruling majority, and that is the Orange coalition.
The surprise is what happened within the Orange coalition, with Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc trouncing Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine. It is easy to understand why that happened. Our Ukraine ran an inept campaign and put its least popular representatives, such as discredited businessman Petro Poroshenko, in the spotlight, while the president and his prime minister, Yury Yekhanurov, kept a low profile. 
Tymoshenko is an outstanding campaigner, and she seems to have chosen the right political themes as well. Her main slogan was “justice,” reflecting Yushchenko’s unfulfilled promise from 2004: “Bandits to prison!” Once again, revenge against the old regime became the dominant line. 
Her victory over Our Ukraine elevates moral issues over economic policy, and her rhetoric looks backward to the Orange Revolution, further cementing the east-west divide. 
She also defeated Pora-PRP, the new liberal bloc, which tried to offer a decent alternative to Orange voters appalled by both populism and corruption.
Since the campaign became a rehashing of the Orange Revolution, nothing but an Orange coalition appears natural, that is, Tymoshenko’s bloc, Our Ukraine and the Socialist Party. The Lytvyn Popular bloc will not enter parliament. Today, nobody but Tymoshenko appears the natural prime minister. The job is hers to lose. 
All three potential coalition partners have already started to hold talks on the formation of a new government, and one influential Our Ukraine deputy predicted that an Orange coalition government would be formed within two to three weeks. The uncertainty about the nature of the next government has diminished.
The big question is what policy a Prime Minister Tymoshenko would pursue. As deputy prime minister for energy in 2000, she surprised us positively by going after other oligarchs and cleaning up the energy sector. As prime minister last year, by contrast, she surprised us negatively by focusing on re-privatization, which had not been part of her government program. Now she has received a greater popular mandate than ever before, so we can only wonder how she will amaze us this time. 
The natural starting point is her bloc’s pre-election program. Even by the standards of such documents, it is stunningly diffuse. The most substantial part is the section on “just power.” It declares that under a Tymoshenko-led government, judicial immunity for politicians would be immediately abolished, regional governors would be elected and local self-government would be strengthened.
Tymoshenko calls her economic credo “solidarism,” referring to a century-old socialist creed, but its meaning remains fuzzy. Her section on economic policy is small and empty. In a populist vein, it states that enterprises as well as people “will pay taxes without any coercion.” Just in case, the value-added tax is to be abolished as well. Fortunately, the social section is suitably vague. The time of expensive social benefit promises appears over. 
Most important, re-privatization is not mentioned, though nor are property rights guaranteed. After she was ousted as prime minister in September, Tymoshenko declared that she had never advocated re-privatization, which is not necessarily true but definitely helpful. She is not likely to put herself in the same bind once again. Moreover, Our Ukraine cannot possibly join a coalition with her without her giving credible guarantees not to launch another re-privatization campaign.
One of Tymoshenko’s most successful campaign themes was her persistent attacks on the Russian-Ukrainian gas deal of Jan. 4, which will undoubtedly be undone. RosUkrEnergo has never been accepted by the Ukrainian public, and the existence of six attachments to the January agreement, purportedly giving away Ukraine’s pipelines and gas reservoirs to RosUkrEnergo, appears unacceptable to just about any Ukrainian. 
Early Russian comments have emphasized the relative victory of the Party of the Regions, but the Kremlin leaders will probably be all the more upset when they realize that a new Orange coalition under Tymoshenko is budding. The Kremlin reaction is likely to be all the greater if Tymoshenko sticks to her election promise to break the gas agreement with Russia and render RosUkrEnergo transparent. Though you never know with Yulia. On Ekho Moskvy last September, she congratulated the Russians upon their “wonderful” president.
Regardless of the exact train of events, Ukraine is a democracy, while Russia is not. Therefore, the Kremlin finds it difficult to understand Ukraine. Whatever the Ukrainian leaders do to satisfy one constituency or another is incomprehensible to authoritarians, and if some Ukrainian action does not suit the Kremlin, it will be perceived as dictated by Washington and criticized accordingly. 
Such Russian rhetoric can do nothing but drive Ukraine into the arms of the West, and as the European Union is not open, Ukraine will have to run all the faster toward NATO, not because of Western overtures, but because of Russian intimidation.

Anders Aslund is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

TITLE: Even Cats Can Be Dangerous
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: As she was walking to her car from the office of the United Civil Front last Tuesday, Marina Litvinovich, a top aide to Garry Kasparov, was attacked from behind. Litvinovich, a 31-year-old political activist and public relations specialist, was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. Her assailants then set to work on her face. When she came to about 40 minutes later, two men were standing over her. “You need to be more careful, Marina,” one of them said. When Litvinovich asked how the man knew her name, he replied: “You told us yourself.” 
No, this isn’t another article about the brutality of a bloodthirsty regime. During the terror of the late 1930s, they wouldn’t have stopped at knocking out a couple of Litvinovich’s teeth. I’m struck by something else. You attack someone from behind when you’re afraid that your victim will either recognize you or turn out to be stronger than you. The first motive doesn’t apply in Litvinovich’s case, because her attackers waited around until she woke up to deliver their message.
The government has defeated an enormous number of enemies lately. It exposed those infamous British spies and their magic rock. It stuck it to all those nongovernmental organizations bankrolled by foreign powers that were spying on us. In the Khabarovsk region, counterintelligence agents rounded up — count ‘em — 40 spies working for China, the very country President Vladimir Putin is working so hard to befriend.
When it comes to foreign enemies, the Kremlin is taking care of business. But it’s enjoying less success in dealing with its domestic adversaries. 
Putin wanted to reform the armed forces, so he put a civilian, Sergei Ivanov, in charge of the Defense Ministry and gave the green light for the trial of former Colonel Yury Budanov, who was convicted in 2003 of kidnapping and murdering a Chechen woman. Military reform is essential for the physical survival of the country, but it ran into stiff resistance from the top brass. The reform program was over before it had begun.
Early in his first term, Putin got together the top prosecutors and announced a sweeping reform of the Prosecutor General’s Office as if it were a done deal. The idea was to provide independent supervision of criminal investigations, which was essential simply to prevent the appetites of the defenders of law and order from destroying the economy. By then the prosecutors had become a cross between janissaries and SS storm troopers, however. Even the Kremlin was afraid to cross them.
Putin launched a program of administrative reforms aimed at strengthening the checks and balances between agencies and ministries and reducing their number. The program was implemented. The number of agencies tripled.
We’re not talking about incomprehensible concepts such as democratization of the country and liberalization of the economy. These reforms were essential for the country’s survival, they were backed by the president himself, and they went absolutely nowhere.
The regime’s decision-making process is no different from the approach taken by the thugs who beat up Litvinovich. Whenever the Kremlin finds an adversary blocking its path — the military brass, the prosecutors or the bureaucracy — it backs down. And you can’t say these are fearsome foes. What does the Kremlin have to fear from a bunch of generals who steal by the trainload, drink by the gallon and lose one campaign after another? 
The weaker people are, the more they need to beat up on someone who’s even weaker. A fifth-grader who gets pummelled for squealing on his classmates needs nothing more than a cat he can torture. 
But even cats can be dangerous. So you only attack in numbers, from behind, and only when the woman is alone. Not because you’re afraid she’ll see your face, but because she might scratch you.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy.

TITLE: Rebel in the desert
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Scottish band Simple Minds, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and influenced such bands as The Killers and The Bravery, is to perform in St. Petersburg on the strength of what singer and songwriter Jim Kerr describes as a “landmark” new album.
Having grown out of a Glasgow punk group called Johnny and the Self-Abusers, Simple Minds was a cool art band boasting such fans as David Bowie and Brian Eno before they went on to rival U2 in stadiums in the late 1980s. 
In the 1990s and 2000s the band stepped out of the spotlight but  never really went away, producing a new album every two or three years. 
Simple Minds’ concert in St. Petersburg on Monday, is part of the tour in support of its album “Black & White 050505” (the digits refer to the last day spent in the recording studio) and will be the band’s only gig in Russia.
Kerr spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by telephone from a Berlin hotel between concert appearances in Germany.

Judging by the press, the British part of the tour was a big success.
It’s continuing, really. I mean, we’re very happy. We got off to a good start and that positivity has continued on a nightly basis, so there’s a good feeling. 

Can you say a few words about the new album, “Black & White 050505”?
First of all, I have to say we’re incredibly satisfied with the album. Believe me, that’s not often the case in our career. Like everyone, if you have a long career, you make many albums. But sometimes you come up with an album, that [can be called] a landmark album, it stands apart because of its quality or its completeness. 
First of all, we felt that we needed a landmark album, we really needed to stretch ourselves and come up with a quality of songs that we haven’t had for a long time... And I think with the new album you really find Simple Minds back to their strengths.
The band has gone through different periods and its style has changed a few times. At one point it was more pop, at one point more experimental… Where are you now?
Well, alright, if I was to describe the new album, I would say it’s big emotional pop songs, I think it’s intelligent pop music. 
I think it’s music of beautiful atmospheres and ambiance, with drama, with poetry, but above all with very good melodies. 

You wrote songs for the album while living in Italy. Has the location affected the way you write?
Yeah, it’s true. I’m obviously a Scotsman, but for the last six or seven years Italy has given me rejuvenation. You know, not just go and have sunshine or go to the beach, but more importantly, to a new challenge, a new language, to integrate, to develop a part of me that wasn’t there before. I think part of that rejuvenation has also come in to my approach to work, to music. 
For instance, five or six years ago, I have to be honest, I wasn’t sure I had any more music in me. Now currently I feel I can write a new song almost every day and I think Italy has been a big part of that energizing, and so therefore to that extent it played a big part in the album. 
[But] I still gravitate around Scotland, and it’s a kind of co-existence.

What is the meaning of the image of hands forming a heart that appears on the cover of your new album?
Well, you know, it means a lot and it means nothing. There’s many interpretations, of course. ... Simple Minds used this heart element for many decades so it’s a kind of a new slant on that, but, more importantly, we think it’s a striking image.

Simple Minds released a political album, “Street Fighting Years,” in 1989. Have you written any political songs recently?
Well, it’s strange. When you say “political,”... I think politics is everywhere, especially now… You know, the clothes we wear are politics, the food we eat is politics, and, of course, when I think of the album, there are some issues that you could say are political in a sense. For example, there’s a song like “A Life Shot in Black & White.” It’s not obvious, perhaps, but [it is about] people who want to deny, for instance, the Holocaust, or people who don’t want to face up to events. 
A song like “Stay Visible” is a dialogue between two illegal immigrants.
[And] a song like “Kiss the Ground” is... not an anti-God song, but it’s kind of an anti-religion song. So these big issues, political, social, I think they still permeate the music.

Do you feel there is new interest in music from the 1980s and is there some sort of 1980s revival?
Well, when you say “revival”... we have a 30-year career that has continued. Sometimes it’s been much more fluent, sometimes much stronger than other periods. But it’s no revival for us, it’s just continuity. But yes, I would have to agree with you that in the sense that I think until fairly recently no-one seemed to have very many good things to say about the 1980s, but the last one or two years there seems to have been, I don’t know, a reevaluation. You know there’s a lot of new bands who mention the 1980s as their influence, so in that sense I think your question has some credibility, yes. 
When you were starting out, there were not many well-known bands in Scotland. What was the scene like from the inside at that time? Was it a desert or was there something going on?
I think you put it right, exactly, it was a desert. Unfortunately for us, because we were, you know, 17 or 18, it was a desert. We had loud mouths, we were complaining [about bands that were] playing covers of The Eagles [and] all the bands were cover bands. 
We would go and tell them they were shit and that they should write their own songs and finally someone said to us: “Well, you know, you talk, all you do is talk, when will you do it?” And in a sense that kind of desert gave us energy… I suppose it was kind of punk to rebel… to rebel against the desert, to create something. It’s easy to criticize but then [we did] something alternative for ourselves... But you are right, there was nothing. 
And now in Scotland, Glasgow, every year seems to throw up an interesting or a great band.

What do you think about the Scottish scene now, with such bands as Franz Ferdinand?
Yeah, well, part of me being a Scotsman [means that] I always want Scottish bands to do well and it feels good when you see them coming through. 
I think [Franz Ferdinand] have a wonderful imagination. I think for a band to arrive like that [is great], but ask my opinion in about five or six years’ time. I think these days it’s not easy but there’s many glorious debuts and two years later you say: “Now, what happened?” So I think for a band like that it’ll be really interesting to see how they develop in five years. 

Have you heard any interesting new artists recently?
Well, like most people, I think, in the last few years [there has been] a lot of young energy going on.  Arcade Fire is a good band and Kaiser Chiefs made a good, really good album. I love [American-English artist] Anthony and the Johnsons. [He made] a wonderful record. Yeah, it seems to be quite a productive period again.

It’s interesting how the Arctic Monkeys became so popular without the involvement of a major record label, and just by using the internet. Do you think it’s important for the development of music?
It’s interesting in a marketing sense, yeah.

What do you feel about artists’ use of new technologies to promote themselves?
I have opinions, but I am not excited about it either way. All I care about is fucking melody and the lyrics. The rest is… I am not saying bullshit, it’s obviously important, but I just don’t think about it very much. I’m so obsessed with the melodies and the lyrics, I prefer to focus on fundamentals and let other people think about those things. But you’re right, again there’s no way to get away from it, it’s part of what is going on. But I don’t really have that strong opinions either way... You know, after these interviews today, we have a day free, I want to go and work on a new song.

What songs will you perform in concert in St. Petersburg?
Well, I think the tour has been getting very good reviews, great reviews, in fact. I think part of the reason is because of the different mixture of songs. I think we have a good balance in the sense that we really give a strong view of the journey that Simple Minds have taken through the years, so we manage to play, of course, a lot of the big songs, but we play also some of the obscure songs. Obviously we play songs from the new album that we think are really good... We play for nearly two hours, and by the end people seem to feel they have been on a journey. 

You will be playing for the first time in Russia. Have you ever been to this country? 
No, I have not. Sometimes in the past we looked at going, but it didn’t happen. But of course, it will be a very special occasion for us, in fact. 
I can tell you my father is coming with me and he grew up fascinated by Russia. I took some of his enthusiasm for Russian literature, and, of course, St. Petersburg has a special appeal. My all-time favorite book is by a Russian:  [Mikhail] Bulgakov [“Master and Margarita”]. So all in all it won’t be just another concert for us. It’s a big thing in my life. 

Simple Minds performs at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Monday. 
www.simpleminds.com

TITLE: Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006)
AUTHOR: By Ben Sisario
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Stanislaw Lem, a Polish science-fiction writer who, in novels like “Solaris” and “His Master’s Voice,” contemplated man’s place in the universe in sardonic and sometimes bleak terms, died Monday in Krakow, Poland. He was 84.
The cause was heart failure, his secretary, Wojciech Zemek, told The Associated Press.
Lem was a giant of mid-20th-century science fiction, in a league with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. And he addressed many of the themes they did: the meaning of human life among superintelligent machines, the frustrations of communicating with aliens, the likelihood that mankind could understand a universe in which it was but a speck. His books have been translated into at least 35 languages and have sold 27 million copies.
What drew the admiration of many of his fellow writers was the intensity with which he studied the limitations of humanity, in ways that could be both awed and pessimistic. 
In “Solaris,” a densely ruminative novel first published in 1961 — and made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002) — contact is made with a dangerous and unknowable alien intelligence in the form of a plasma ocean surrounding a distant planet. As they attempt to understand the organism, astronauts aboard a space ship are plagued by hallucinations drawn from their own memories.
In “His Master’s Voice,” published in 1968, scientists in a Pentagon-sponsored project are similarly perplexed by a superior alien communication, this time from a pulsating neutrino ray. But the failed experiment gives the ill-tempered narrator, Peter Hogarth, a sense of wonderment: “The oddest thing,” he says, “is that defeat, unequivocal as it was, left in my memory a taste of nobility, and that those hours, those weeks, are, when I think of them today, precious to me.”
Born in 1921 in Lviv — then part of Poland but now in Ukraine — Lem began to study medicine as a young man, but his education was interrupted by World War II. He worked as a mechanic during the war and later returned to his medical studies but did not take his final exams out of fear that his services would be needed in the military. His first literary works were poems and short stories.
He emerged as a major science-fiction author in the early 1950s with works that he later disavowed as simplistic, and he sometimes ran afoul of the Communist censors. In one early book, “The Cloud of Magellan,” he had wanted to write about cybernetics, a banned concept. “In order to get the novel through,” he told The New York Times in 1983, “I had to rename the field ‘mechanioristics’ — I created a new term.” An editor wasn’t fooled, and for a time, Lem said, the book remained unpublished.
Among his other works are “The Invincible” (1964) and “The Cyberiad” (1967). Some, like “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub” (1961) and “The Futurological Congress” (1971), are darkly satirical pictures of cold war-era life, involving technocratic societies that have broken down under the weight of their advanced machines.
Lem sometimes ridiculed his chosen genre. In “His Master’s Voice,” Hogarth, in an effort to come up with new ideas, tries reading some science-fiction stories but dismisses them as “pseudo-scientific fairy tales.”
Some of his most ambitious works drifted into experimental and philosophical territory. “Summa Technologiae” (1964) is a speculative survey of cybernetics and biology, and “A Perfect Vacuum” (1971) is a self-conscious experiment in meta-fiction, a set of reviews of 16 nonexistent books. One of the books reviewed is “A Perfect Vacuum” itself. “Did Lem really think,” the review reads, “he would not be seen through all this machination?”

TITLE: Something old, something new
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A troika of new one-act ballets and a reconstructed 19th century classic were highlights at the Sixth International Mariinsky Ballet Festival which concluded last week.
The quintessential 19th-century romantic French ballet, “Ondine,” originally created by Jules Perrot for London’s Covent Garden in 1843, has been successfully revived at the Mariinsky Theater by French choreographer Pierre Lacotte, Europe’s ultimate restorer of 19th century choreographic relics.
“Ondine” was performed at the opening of the Sixth International Mariinsky Ballet Festival on March 16 and 17 to highlight the strengths of French dancing school and challenge modern audiences with a long-lost ballet antique.
With the open naivetÎ of the plot and its old-fashioned flat painted scenery, the freshly restored “Ondine” is a triumph of romanticism. As with every reconstruction of a piece that has been gone from the stage for decades, there was the risk that the revival would be an artistic failure. It was a risk that the Mariinsky and Lacotte willingly took on.
“Ondine” tells the story of a mermaid (Ondine) and her doomed love for a Sicilian fisherman (Matteo) who is betrothed to another. The fisherman falls in love with Ondine, and the ballet enacts the conflicts of this love triangle. The two-act ballet was originally choreographed by Jules Perrot at London’s Royal Opera House in 1843.
The Mariinsky’s restored “Ondine” has the appeal of a dried butterfly: crystal clear lines, whimsical patterns and distinct colors — in a seemingly lifeless body. 
Leonid Sarafanov, who performed the male lead, almost overcame the work’s apparent conventionality. The dancer soared effortlessly across the stage, exuding romantic flair, and proved to be the most fascinating element of the production by far. Sarafanov’s movements were smooth and light, yet expressive.
Rising star Yevgenia Obraztsova brought a note of foxy slyness in her interpretation of the title role of Ondine. The mermaid, unlike her fragile sisters that made up a shoal in the ballet, was well aware of her charms and showed some signs of stamina.
Unusually, Sarafanov and Obraztsova danced the ballet on both nights. No replacement for Sarafanov was considered, and prima ballerina Diana Vishnyova, due to take over the role of Ondine on the second night, was laid low by flu.
“Ondine” is demanding technically: the piece is a tightly woven fabric of nonstop variations. It is a visual feast that showcases the Mariinsky’s impeccable foot training — an essential requirement in French ballet. The strong point of the Russian school is back and arm movement but the Mariinsky dancers navigated the choreographic maze safely with poise and vigor.
Unfortunately, the seemingly endless cascade of variations gave the performance the feel of an exercise, as if the audiences were attending a final exam at a top-notch ballet school.
If these antique charms can find a new home these days, the Mariinsky, with its taste for reconstructions, is perhaps the best bet for “Ondine.” In choreographic and stylistic terms, the ballet is on the same plane as Mariinsky favorites such as Marius Petipa’s “Giselle” and “La Sylphide.”
At the same time as cherishing its venerable 19th century legacy — the Mariinsky meticulously reconstructed original versions of Marius Petipa’s “The Sleeping Beauty” of 1890 and “La Bayadere” of 1900 — the company also shows impressive stylistic versatility by tackling modern works by living choreographers including John Neumeier to William Forsythe with stunning success.
But conventional ballet relics sell much better at the Mariinsky than cutting edge ballets by Forsythe, which are often performed to half-empty houses. This fact hints at the general audiences’ perception of the troupe and its mission — as well as people’s willingness to acknowledge or ignore various trends in the Mariinsky’s continuing development.
Nevertheless, on March 21, the Mariinsky unveiled a mixed bag of new choreography as part of the festival.
Moscow choreographer Nikita Dmitriyevsky offered a playful one-act take on Moliere’s “Le Bourgeois Gentil Homme” set to the music of Richard Strauss.
The audiences had trouble grasping the connection between the plot and the moves, but, to the ballet master’s credit, he found a comprehensible means to express the frivolous frolics of Moliere’s famous play.
Noah Gelber, an assistant of William Forsythe, staged his new ballet version of Nikolai Gogol’s novella “The Overcoat” with reverence and care for the Mariinsky’s traditions and troupe’s performing style to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich. Against some critics’ expectations, he refrained from working in Forsythe’s style. The Mariinsky dancers were clearly comfortable with the moves. 
Gelber created a series of bright and distinct characters, which embodied the qualities and issues that Gogol analysed in his famous story: humility, hypocrisy, lost hopes, and servility. But the ballet lacked Gogolian irony which the choreographer replaced with a Dostoyevskian phantasmagoria.
Alexei Miroshnichenko’s work, titled “Du cote chez Swan” and set to a score by St. Petersburg composer Leonid Desyatnikov, is a masterful choreographic fusion that juxtaposes classical traditions against deconstructivism. The choreographer referred to Fokine’s “The Dying Swan,” while incorporating a bird’s impulsive movements. This reflexive ballet has an ironic twist, even in its modern scenery. A giant barcode takes up the entire back of the stage, while miniature versions of the sticker are wrapped around soloists ankles, as if to hint to an unknown dark force observing — or controlling — the liberty of their movements.

TITLE: Looking for Ivan
AUTHOR: By Lewis H. Siegelbaum
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Far from a single type, the soldiers who fought for the Soviet Union during World War II were as unlike each other as the civilians they defended, historian Catherine Merridale shows.
“We all wanted to defend it,” veteran Ivan Gorin remarks midway through “Ivan’s War,” Catherine Merridale’s utterly gripping and beautifully written account of World War II as experienced by the Red Army soldiers who lived and died at the front. “I think that the criminals felt more devotion, more love for their native soil than the higher-ups in the leadership, the bosses.” 
Gorin was the lone survivor among 330 shtrafniki, or members of a penal battalion, sent over the top to storm an enemy position during the battle of Stalingrad. In setting out to tell his story, as well as the stories of all the other “Ivans” who fought in the war, Merridale, a professor of contemporary history at the University of London, has taken on a challenge no less daunting than in her previous book on death and bereavement in Soviet Russia. Her aim is to “find the true Ivan” beneath the incrustation of official myths about the patriotic, self-sacrificing Red Army and survivors’ own “need to tame the clamor of their past.” 
Finding Ivan more than 60 years after the end of the war was no easy task. Merridale did track down and interview some 200 veterans, but, as she notes, they comprised a small, dwindling elite. Atypical by their very survival into the 21st century, they were all too typical in another way. They tended to filter their experiences through the prism of wartime preconceptions, and, even more so, through images constructed by postwar Soviet propagandists. Oft-quoted tropes like the great communal struggle, the sacrifice for the motherland (or at least for one’s buddies) and the pain of separation from loved ones at home had crowded out the more mundane memories of untreated toothaches, frequent hunger and chronic fatigue. And then there was the problem to which Kurt Vonnegut, himself a World War II veteran and prisoner of war, alludes in “A Man Without A Country”: Veterans from any country are reluctant to speak about war simply because “it’s unspeakable.” 
No one kind of source contains the truth. Archival documents — military and secret-police reports, letters and diaries — have both pitfalls (self-censorship, for example) and advantages. Merridale draws heavily on the massive amount of archival material that has been published since the early 1990s, but she also turns to central repositories in Moscow; to Communist Party and state archives in Kursk and Smolensk, where some of the heaviest fighting occurred; and to the German military archive in Freiburg. She makes good use of classic works by Alexander Werth, John Erickson and Lev Kopelev, as well as more recent books by Antony Beevor, Richard Overy and Amir Weiner. And she provides a signal contribution to one of her most important sources: the school of historical literature that imaginatively reconstructs the mentality of the soldier as a way of understanding the psychosis of war and its long-lasting effects on those who practice its arts. The doyenne of this school, Yelena Senyavskaya, defined this “historical-psychological” approach in three books published between 1995 and 1999.
The Ivan who emerges from Merridale’s investigations was not, of course, a single individual or type, but a panoply of groups as unlike each other as the civilians they were supposed (but often failed miserably) to defend. Soldiers in regular units were in a different world from shtrafniki and partisans, yet similarly separated by a gulf of privilege and authority from their own officers. Communists, and especially political officers, had special responsibilities that set them apart. Equally distinct within the armed forces were tank troops (an astonishing three quarters of whom did not survive the war) and those, termed “rats” by the frontoviki, who served as office functionaries and manned the support battalions in the rear. 
There were those who mutilated themselves rather than face near-certain death in one of Stalin’s futile offensives, and those who were fatalistic about their survival; those who defected to the enemy and those who served in the secret police’s motorized infantry brigade or in one of the units assigned to fire on soldiers fleeing battle. Another gulf separated those who fought — and, most likely, died — in the first two years of the war and those who defended Stalingrad, experienced the intoxication of victory in Kursk, participated in Operation Bagration in 1944, or chased the Germans back to Berlin. Finally, nationality mattered. Merridale points out that western Ukrainians, in light of their recent and forcible annexation into the Soviet Union, did not make the most loyal “Ivans.” By contrast, Jews, despite their reputation for shirking, “were among the keenest volunteers for every kind of army service” and “among the most determined combatants on every Soviet front.”
Some “Ivans” inevitably are overlooked or given less attention than readers might like. Merridale has virtually nothing to say about Soviet pilots, and she devotes a mere three pages to the 800,000 women who served at the front. Little is said about the battle for Moscow, and the “Road of Life” that tenuously connected besieged Leningrad to the rest of the country goes without mention, perhaps because these subjects have received extensive coverage elsewhere. The author does give a clear-eyed, if jaundiced, view of those actions that until recently were written out of accounts of the war and that, for the most part, veterans excised from their memories. These include the theft of army supplies, looting from “liberated” civilians, and, in an entire chapter that is really hard to read without one’s stomach turning, the extensive raping and killing of German women that Merridale not implausibly attributes to “the desire to avenge [combined] with the impulse to destroy.” 
Yet there was much that bonded the soldiers together, and Merridale provides insightful commentary on the prodigious quantities of vodka that were distributed and consumed, the importance of collective singing, the cruel humor that masked insecurity, and the general fear of death and, even more so, mutilation. For some, defending the motherland was the driving force; for others, that which was called ideology but was probably closer to faith was paramount; for still others, it was a matter of fear and of choosing between several bad alternatives (what the author calls “taming the nightmares”). By distilling these and other motivations, Merridale humanizes the Ivans who gave their youth and lives to a cause that both church and state elevated to myth. It is the least these soldiers deserve.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is a professor of history at Michigan State University and the author, together with Andrei Sokolov, of “Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents.”

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Chumbawamba, the British radical pop band, performs in the city this week. According to singer and trumpet player Jude Abbott, the set will be largely based on the band's latest album, “A Singsong and a Scrap,” a folky collection of songs that includes Italian WWII song “Bella Ciao” and an unlikely a cappella cover version of “Bankrobber” by The Clash.
The album’s cover features what looks like a 19th century photograph from the Wild West showing two men and two women, one man holding a fiddle and another a shotgun, while the band’s photo session for the album shows Chumbawamba members with the same musical instrument and weapon (see page viii).
“We found this old photo and we wanted to give the album a bit of an old feel,” Abbott said.
“We wanted something that kind of represented the idea of the album and the title of the album, ‘A Singsong and a Scrap.’” Abbott said. “A ‘scrap’ means a ‘fight.’ It encapsulates the idea of singing and fighting. We just thought it looked really good.”
“We like playing on contrasts. You got [band member] Lou [Watts] looking very sweet in a white dress holding a gun. It’s a powerful image. It reflects the ‘scrap’ side of the title. You know, we’re not advocating personal ownership of firearms or anything. It’s just a good provocative image.”
Chumbawamba started out living in the “Chumbawamba house,” a squat in Leeds, which is no longer the case. “We don’t all live communally anymore, though most of us live quite close to each other in Leeds, and we see each other a lot,” Abbott said.
“But you know people have met, people have fallen in love, and they’ve got children, so living all together in a house is something that belongs to that particular point in time, and that time passed now. You know, the ‘Chumbawamba house’ is like the whole of West Leeds now, really.”
With half of Chumbawamba’s electric eight-piece lineup on a “lengthy sabbatical,” writing books and plays, Chumbawamba will perform as an acoustic four-piece outfit, featuring Lou Watts on vocals and keyboard, Boff Whalley on vocals and guitar and Neil Ferguson on bass.
Although Chumbawamba will not perform its biggest hit “Tubthumping,” since it does not sit well with the acoustic set, Abbott said it will feature some older, well-known songs such as “Timebomb” and “Enough Is Enough.”
Chumbawamba perform at Platforma on Friday.
This week’s highlights also include The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review performing at Red Club on Friday and the punk band Posledniye Tanki v Parizhe, also at Red Club (Saturday).
Simple Minds will play its one-off Russian concert at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Monday. Vocalist Jim Kerr will be backed by co-founding member Charlie Burchill on guitar, Mel Gaynor on drums, Eddie Duffy on bass and Mark Taylor on keyboards. See interview, pages i and ii.

TITLE: Former Liberian President Taylor Captured
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — A handcuffed Charles Taylor was flown to Sierra Leone on Wednesday after he was captured carrying sacks of cash, opening the way for the former Liberian president to become the first African head of state tried for war crimes by an international court. 
Looking dejected, Taylor was led behind a razor-wired gate to the holding penitentiary at the UN-backed Sierra Leone court that has indicted him on 11 counts of crimes against humanity for supporting brutal rebels.
On Tuesday night, police caught Taylor in northern Nigeria, wearing a safari suit and carrying sacks full of dollars and euros in his car, which bore diplomatic plates. He was trying to cross the border to Cameroon. He was captured nearly 600 miles from the villa in southern Calabar where he lived in exile and from which he reportedly disappeared Monday night.
Taylor’s imprisonment was a watershed moment for the tribunal and for West Africa, a region long shaken by Taylor’s warmongering.
“Today is a momentous occasion, an important day for international justice, the international community, and above all the people of Sierra Leone,” said Desmond de Silva, chief prosecutor of the tribunal called the Special Court.
“His presence in the custody of the Special Court sends out the clear message that no matter how rich, powerful or feared people may be, the law is above them.”
De Silva said Taylor had been read his arrest warrant and would make his first court appearance by the end of this week.
Taylor, a bombastic speaker during his time in the bush and as Liberia’s president, made no comment.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that Washington is seeking to move the war crimes trial of Taylor from Sierra Leone to the Netherlands for security reasons.
Taylor was initially charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity stemming from his support of the Revolutionary United Front rebels that terrorized the civilian population for years, chopping off the arms, legs, ears and lips of their victims. But De Silva said in a statement Wednesday on the tribunal’s web site that the number of charges was reduced to 11 earlier this month. “This will ensure a more focused trial,” he said.

TITLE: AIDS Pill On The Horizon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATLANTA, Georgia  — Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases jolted the world, scientists think they soon may have a pill that people could take to stop them from getting the virus that causes the global killer. 
Two drugs already used to treat HIV infection have shown such promise at preventing it in monkeys that officials last week said they would expand early tests in healthy high-risk men and women around the world. 
“This is the first thing I’ve seen at this point that I think really could have a prevention impact,” said Thomas Folks, a federal scientist since the earliest days of AIDS. “If it works, it could be distributed quickly and could blunt the epidemic.”
HIV spreads to 10 people every minute, 5 million every year. A vaccine remains the best hope but none is in sight.
If larger tests show the drugs work, they could be given to people with the  highest risk of HIV  — from gay men in American cities to women in Africa who catch the virus from their partners.

TITLE: Bombs Are Out, Business is In, As Mob Stays Out of Elections
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PALERMO, Italy — Years ago, when the Mafia wanted to influence elections in Sicily, it did not think twice about setting off a bomb or leaving a headless goat on a doorstep as a not-so-subtle message about whom to vote for.
Now, as Italy approaches April’s general election, the Sicilian Mafia has kept a low profile, a wait-and-see attitude aimed at not drawing attention to itself.
“The Mafia is paying attention. It is watching,” said Antonio Ingroia, a top anti-Mafia magistrate in Sicily.
“It realizes that this is a delicate moment which could lead to some changes that might affect it,” Ingroia said in an interview in Palermo’s heavily protected main court building.
Magistrates and other anti-Mafia experts say the Mob is doing just fine these days. It is making money hand over fist without getting its hands bloody.
The Mafia, realizing that the spotlight is not good for business, has stopped killing its enemies — police officers, magistrates and politicians. “The Mafia is continuing in its strategy of keeping a low profile, a truce: weapons are out, business is in,” Ingroia said.
The Mafia makes its money from ensuring that companies it controls directly or indirectly get a share of services and construction contracts, especially public works contracts.
To counteract this, the Interior Ministry announced last month that it would start a new data bank on public works contracts to prevent Mafia-tainted companies from getting a piece of the pie.
Mafia money also comes from the illegal drugs trade, human trafficking and that old, ubiquitous cash flow booster — extortion and protection, which investigators say most businesses in Sicily pay.
“The Mafia has returned to dominate the landscape and become more of an economic presence instead of an armed presence. It has returned to make its presence known in the social circles that count,” Ingroia said.
Ingroia chooses his words carefully. He realizes he is speaking in a pre-electoral period in which the center left has accused the center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of being too soft on the Mafia.
In the 2001 general election, all of Sicily’s 61 seats in the national parliament went to Berlusconi’s supporters.
Ingroia and others say that central government has reacted to the Mafia’s low-profile, non-violent strategy by becoming less vigilant and less committed.
“We used to say that the struggle against the Mafia had slid to the bottom of the political agenda. Today, we can say that it has totally disappeared from the political agenda,” he said.

TITLE: Americans Grow Immune to the F-word and Other Curses
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Nearly three-quarters of Americans questioned last week — 74 percent — said they encounter profanity in public frequently or occasionally, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. 
Two-thirds said they think people swear more than they did 20 years ago. And as for, well, the gold standard of foul words, a healthy 64 percent said they use the F-word — ranging from several times a day (8 percent) to a few times a year (15 percent).
Just ask Joe Cormack. Like any bartender, Cormack, of Fort Dodge, Iowa, hears a lot of talk. He’s not really offended by bad language — heck, he uses it himself every day. But sometimes, a customer will unleash the F-word so many times, Cormack just has to jump in.
“Do you have any idea how many times you’ve just said that?” he reports saying from time to time. “I mean, if I take that out of your vocabulary, you’ve got nothin’!’”
And it’s not just at the bar. Or on TV. (Or on the Senate floor, for that matter, where Vice President  Dick Cheney used the F-word in a heated argument two years ago.) 
At the community college where Cormack studies journalism, students will occasionally inject foul language into classroom discussions. Irene Kramer, a grandmother in Scranton, Pa., gets her ears singed when passing by the high school near her home.
“What we hear, it’s gross,” says Kramer, 67. “I tell them, ‘I have a dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus, and I don’t see any of those words in there!’ I don’t understand why these parents allow it.”
For Kramer, a major culprit is television. “Do I have to be insulted right there in my own home?” she asks. “I’m not going to pay $54 a month for cable and listen to that garbage.” And yet she feels it’s not a lost cause. “If people say ‘Look, I don’t want you talking that way,’ if they demand it, it’s going to have to change.”
In that battle, Kramer has a willing comrade: Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated Miss Manners column.
“Is it inevitable?” Martin asked in a recent interview. “Well, if it were inevitable I wouldn’t be doing my job.” The problem, she says, is that people who are offended aren’t speaking up about it.
“Everybody is pretending they aren’t shocked,” Martin says, “and gradually people won’t be shocked. And then those who want to be offensive will find another way.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, profanity seems to divide people by age and by gender.
Younger people admit to using bad language more often than older people; they also encounter it more and are less bothered by it. 
The AP-Ipsos poll showed that 62 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds acknowledged swearing in conversation at least a few times a week, compared to 39 percent of those 35 and older.
“That word doesn’t even mean what it means anymore,” says Larry Riley of Warren, Michigan.
“It has just become a part of our culture.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Woman PM Sworn In
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Jamaica’s first woman prime minister took office Thursday, pledging to tackle a crime rate that has made the Caribbean island one of the most dangerous places in the world. 
Portia Simpson Miller, a longtime parliament member who represented some of Jamaica’s poorest neighborhoods, faces high expectations for change as she succeeds P.J. Patterson, who stepped down as prime minister after 14 years on the job.
“Because she’s a woman from the grass roots the expectation is higher and it’s going to be tough,” said Rupert Lewis, a political science professor at the University of the West Indies in Kingston.

Immigration Talks
CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) — The thorny issue of immigration will likely dominate the agenda as the leaders of Mexico, Canada and the United States gathered for a summit in Cancun on Wednesday. 
Mexican President Vicente Fox, U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will also tackle trade disputes at the meeting of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) partners.
Bush arrived in Cancun late Wednesday as a fierce debate raged in the United States over proposed immigration reform, and after hundreds of thousands marched in U.S. cities demanding humane treatment for undocumented migrants.

Thai Vote Protested 
BANGKOK (AFP) — Thousands of Thai protesters have marched on the offices of the country’s election commission demanding the last-minute cancellation of this weekend’s polls. 
The latest protest in two months of political turmoil followed a Bangkok sit-in overnight that drew around 50,000 people onto the streets calling on Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to step down before Sunday’s vote.
“This is a very critical moment. Only people power can force Prime Minister Thaksin to quit,” rally leader Chamlong Srimuang told the crowd, which waved banners calling the commission members “political criminals.”

TITLE: Jagr Breaks Record In Assist Feast
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Jaromir Jagr played his way into the New York record books on Wednesday, notching four assists in the Rangers 5-1 win over the cross-town Islanders to set the club’s single-season points record.
Jagr, who started the game tied for the record with Hall of Famer Jean Ratelle on 109 points, assisted on four straight goals to set a new mark at 113.
Jagr’s assist on Petr Prucha’s powerplay goal at 7:23 in the first broke Ratelle’s record set in the 1971-72 season. Jagr is also tied with Adam Graves for the club’s single-season goals record on 52.
“It’s a big honor for me,” Jagr told reporters. “I’m just glad I did it in the first period.”
Jagr went on to assist on three straight goals by Martin Straka to help the Rangers take a 4-0 lead before Alexei Yashin scored the lone Islanders goal with just three seconds left in the second period.
Blair Betts then completed the scoring for the Rangers at 14:50 of the third. 
The win moved the Rangers four points ahead of the idle Philadelphia Flyers in the Atlantic Division standings. 
Finishing first in the division would give the Rangers a higher seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs, probably the No. 3 seed, while finishing second would likely result in a first round match-up against the Buffalo Sabres. 
The Rangers outshot the Islanders 22-19, with Henrik Lundqvist having a relatively easy night, making just 18 saves.
That was enough to give the rookie goalie his 30th win of the season, setting a club record for wins by a first-year goalie.
“It’s a big number for me, especially in my first season,” Lundqvist told reporters.
“We played a very good game tonight and that’s good with the playoffs coming along.”
Rick DiPietro made 17 saves in goal for the Islanders, who saw their slim playoff hopes fade further. The Islanders trail the eight-seeded Canadiens by 10 points.
In Buffalo, J.P. Dumont scored twice as the Sabres beat the Boston Bruins 4-3. Maxim Afinogenov and Chris Drury scored the other goals for the Sabres, while Ryan Miller made 24 saves. 
David Tanabe, Brad Stuart and Marty Reasoner scored for the Bruins.

TITLE: Girl Golfer Grasps Golf Tour
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RANCHO MIRAGE, California — Michelle Wie’s final practice round for the Kraft Nabisco Championship, her first LPGA Tour major as a professional, began at 6:20 a.m., giving her enough time to squeeze in nine holes at Mission Hills before the pro-am came through.
Her fourth full swing was a 4-iron from 204 yards on the par-5 11th, struck cleanly and with such control that it stopped 15 feet away to the right of the pin.
Each tournament is an evaluation of her game, and her decision to turn pro last October, six days before her 16th birthday. And each tournament brings the question of when she will win.
Still two years from high school graduation in Honolulu, Wie does not feel rushed to fulfill everyone’s expectations.
“I’m only 16,” she said, stating that more as a fact than an excuse. “I want to be better when I wake up in the morning, but I know that’s not going to happen. Some days, I’ll feel I’m on top of my game. Some days, I won’t. I’m trying to learn that some days won’t be as good as others.”
Wie made her LPGA Tour debut in 2006 by closing with a 6-under 66 while paired in the final round with Morgan Pressel at the Fields Open, finishing one shot out of a playoff.