SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1160 (26), Tuesday, April 11, 2006
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TITLE: Sex Fiend Caught In Moscow
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Police have detained a French psychotherapist who is wanted in France after being convicted in absentia last year of sexually abusing several female patients. He has lived and worked in Moscow for seven years.
The psychotherapist, Jeannot Hoareau, believes the case is politically motivated and is hoping to be granted asylum in Russia, his lawyer, Igor Trunov, said Monday.
Hoareau, a specialist in forensic psychiatry and sexual disorders, had been treating people at the European Center for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, which he opened in Moscow last year. He had previously worked at the European Medical Center for six years.
A French court convicted Hoareau last May of sexually abusing five patients and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Interpol then issued an international warrant for his arrest, and Moscow police detained him in his office on Friday.
“The French authorities are demanding Hoareau’s extradition. We are waiting for the decision of the Russian authorities,” a French Embassy spokesman said Monday.
Russia signed an extradition treaty with EU member nations in 1999. Extradition cases usually take at least six months to be decided, Trunov said.
Interpol’s Moscow office would not comment on the case Monday.
Trunov said his client believed the charges were retribution for his family’s ties to the French Communist Party. Hoareau’s father was a Communist official from Reunion, a French island off the coast of Madagascar, he said, adding that he could not elaborate on his client’s arguments because he had not had much time to speak with him.
Hoareau graduated from the medical department of the People’s Friendship University in 1975. He has a Russian wife and two children.
Trunov said he would argue that Hoareau could not be extradited because he had been tried in absentia.
“He was sentenced in absentia and was not even given the opportunity to defend himself. This is a clear violation of his rights,” he said by telephone.
He said Hoareau had been unaware of the court ruling.
Agence France Presse reported, however, that Hoareau had known about the trial and had not attended on the advice of his French lawyers.
Hoareau, speaking to AFP on Friday, maintained his innocence, saying he was guilty of nothing more than “stupidity” and that “five complaints in a 15-year career is nothing.”
Hoareau acknowledged having consensual sex with one patient, but he said the other four had imagined he had abused them because of their psychological problems, the report said.
The five complaints were filed between 1993 and 1995. One woman said she was sexually assaulted after Hoareau gave her sleeping pills.
French police detained Hoareau in September 1995, and he was held for seven months in a prison in Fresnes, in the Paris region. He was released after signing a pledge not to treat patients pending the outcome of a trial.
Hoareau then made his way to Russia, and he worked at the European Medical Center from 1999 to 2005.
The center’s chief doctor, Leonid Pechatnikov, said Monday that the news of the charges and trial came as a surprise to the center’s staff.
“When he was hired, we checked with the French Embassy, and they never said anything about him being under investigation in France,” Pechatnikov said. “He had all the necessary work permits to practice in our center, and everyone was happy with his skills.”
Pechatnikov said Hoareau had often traveled to France without any problem.
Trunov said he did not know whether Hoareau had visited France.
He stressed that Hoareau had broken no Russian law because he had met all the requirements to practice psychiatry in Moscow.
Hoareau is being held at the police headquarters at Petrovka 38, instead of at the usual detention center for foreigners, because of a problem with paperwork, said Trunov, a high-profile lawyer whose clients have included relatives of those killed in Moscow’s Dubrovka theater attack in 2002 and the Transvaal Park roof collapse in 2004. 
Hoareau graduated with a degree in psychiatry from Paris University in 1981, AFP reported. 
He worked for 18 years in various Paris hospitals as well as in private practice. In 1993, he was elected president of the European Hypnosis Association.

TITLE: African Student Gunned Down
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor and Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An African student was fatally shot on Friday with a weapon bearing a swastika symbol, raising the hate crime murder toll in St. Petersburg to six in seven months.
The fifth year student of the St. Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, Lamzer Samba, 28, from Senegal died instantly of two bullet wounds when he was shot from behind by an unidentified man in the early morning on his way home from the Apollo nightclub where he and his friends had been celebrating the university’s anniversary.
An electrician with a previous conviction on arms charges has been detained in connection with the shooting death, prosecutors said Monday.
The suspect, Alexei Kutarev, 28, was detained Friday after investigators found his fingerprints on a beer bottle in a trashcan near the place where the student was killed, St. Petersburg news web site Fontanka.ru reported Monday.
Kutarev, who lives in a nearby apartment building, has a conviction for the possession and sale of firearms, Fontanka.ru said, citing investigators.
“It’s too early to reveal the details in the initial stage of the investigation,” said Yelena Ordynskaya, a senior aide to the City Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev. “We think we will solve the murder soon given the evidence at our disposal,” Ordynskaya said. 
“Lamzer was not a frequent visitor to night spots.  I can hardly remember a day he went to a nightclub,” said the head of the city’s Senegalese Students Union, Jean Valery, adding that “he was so dedicated to his studies and such an active anti-fascist campaigner that he was involved in the proactive awareness campaign.”
Samba was running to catch up with a group of five friends in front of him when a gunman hiding on the corner of 5th Krasnoarmeiskaya Street shot him in the back and sneaked away unnoticed.
The murder weapon was found at the scene of the incident and its swastika symbol gave the City Prosecutor’s Office grounds to classify the case as a hate crime, though they have not ruled out other motives.
Samba, who was due to defend his degree thesis this year, was also engaged in an anti-fascist awareness campaign jointly run by the Russian youth movement Nashi and the St Petersburg African Union to which he belonged.
“Samba was one of us, a devotee to the anti-fascist cause,” Leonid Kurzan, head of Nashi’s St. Petersburg branch, told a number of activists who gathered at the Mayakovskaya Public Library to mourn Samba’s death on Saturday. 
“He  was appealing both to us and to the schoolchildren he lectured on the spirit of tolerance and friendship,” Kurzan said.
On Tuesday the Nashi movement is expected to hold an anti-fascist public demonstration to be attended by human rights activists from various organizations, ethnic minorities and members of the public on Dumskaya Ulitsa, close to Gostiny Dvor, in a show of protest against the city’s recent wave of violent hate crimes.
However, Dmitry Dubrovsky, head of Ethnic Studies at the St. Petersburg European University, frowned on the demonstration, saying, “It’s a chance for political organizations to boost their public image.”
“They use the tragedy to meet their political ends, but you can hardly find anyone among them who is really committed to fighting fascism,” said Dubrovsky.
“It’s appalling to realize that the worst is yet to come as fascists will be celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday in April,” said Desire Deffo, deputy head of the St. Petersburg African Union.
“It’s equally alarming that the fascists are achieving their goal of inspiring terror in anyone who is not with them,” he added, saying, “It is in St. Petersburg that the real ‘terrorists’ should be annihilated.”
But Kurzan said it would be wrong to look into the problems of fascism, xenophobia and racism from the St. Petersburg contextual point of view without paying heed to its national scale. 
“Fascists are the same, regardless of the place or the historical period they operate in; be it in the World War II era or in peacetime in Russia,” he said.
According to City Hall’s statistics, the number of foreign students dropped down to about 13,500 this year from about 15,000 last year.
Professor Tamara Smirnova, one of the heads of the Petropol Research Center at the House of National Cultures, said the drastic fall in the number of foreign students in the city was “mainly due to the alarming rate of hate crimes.”
Samba was gunned down less than two weeks after a racist knife attack on a nine-year-old African-Russian girl and about six weeks after a 33-year-old Ivory Coast man was stabbed in attacks. Both survived.
“Perhaps that’s why they have resorted to guns now, as knives would spare some of our lives,” said Deffo.

TITLE: Immigration Blamed For Hate Crimes
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ill-conceived immigration policies are stoking xenophobia and racism, fueling corruption and ignoring the country’s growing demographic crisis, rights activists and analysts said Friday.
A group of experts, speaking at a news conference, also said media were fanning anti-immigrant attitudes and hardening stereotypes, particularly against dark-skinned migrants from the North Caucasus and Central Asia.
Vladimir Mukomel, a researcher and author of a new study on immigration policy in Russia, said the population had dropped by roughly 1 million people annually since the Soviet breakup in 1991.
“Only through migration can we deal with the loss of able-bodied working people,” he said. “Without able-bodied, working migrants, we can’t avoid this problem.”
The activists said the government immigration policies were disjointed and form a patchwork of ill-conceived regulations, such as Soviet-era requirements that foreigners register with local authorities within three days of arriving in a city or town. Such regulations encourage police corruption and enable criminal groups to take advantage of immigrants, activists said.
A recent United Nations-backed report compiled by Russian researchers estimated there were 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants in Russia.

TITLE: U.S. Senators: Stance on Iran, Democracy Barrier to WTO
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Visiting U.S. senators said Monday that Russia’s democracy record and the Kremlin’s stance in the Iranian nuclear crisis would influence the U.S. Congress as it considers Moscow’s bid to join the World Trade Organization. 
“We support Russia joining the WTO, but we have discussed over the last several days differences in where we can work together on our bilateral progress,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who led a group of senators on a trip to Russia, said at a news conference. 
Frist and others said that Russia and the United States need to tackle differences in the enforcement of intellectual property rights and opening Russian markets, but they also emphasized that progress in the political field would help create a positive attitude toward Moscow’s WTO bid among congressmen. 
“Russia’s position on the issues such as Iran’s nuclear program ... and democracy promotion issues such as freedom of the press and expression by NGOs will affect how Congress handles lifting the current Jackson-Vanik restrictions,” Frist said in a reference to the Soviet-era trade restrictions, the lifting of which is important for opening the way for Russia to join the WTO. 
Russia has resisted a U.S. push for international sanctions against Iran, an important economic partner. The Kremlin also has faced strong Western criticism for backtracking on democracy — accusations it has denied. 
“Whether WTO is approved, I think we will go back to specific issues involving making sure the intellectual property rights question is resolved and the agricultural question is resolved, said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg. “Those I believe can be resolved, and I think there is a good will to resolve them.” 
U.S. officials have urged Russia to make stronger anti-piracy efforts and give American companies broader access to its insurance and financial markets. Opinions also differed on the issue of Russian agricultural barriers and other trade issues. 
Russia, whose export-oriented industries stand to profit handsomely from the freer access to Western markets that WTO membership would bring, has been negotiating to join the 149-member global commerce body since 1994. 
It has had to embark on a major set of legislative reforms to fall in line with WTO rules, including introducing a new customs code. Russia has signed agreements with the European Union, China and Japan, but has yet to reach deals with the United States, Colombia and Australia. 
Under WTO rules, each member has the right to seek its own trade deal with a candidate before approving that candidate’s membership. The bilateral deals negotiated by individual members are eventually consolidated so that all members trade with the new member under the same conditions.

TITLE: Former PM Steps Up Kremlin Bid
AUTHOR: By Anastasiya Lebedev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Saturday launched a liberal movement called the People’s Democratic Union — ratcheting up his long-shot bid to be elected Russia’s next president in 2008.
“We are witnessing a clear trend of the rolling back of political freedom and the destruction of the foundations of a free-market economy,” Kasyanov warned Saturday at an inaugural meeting of People’s Democratic Union delegates from 31 regions across the country. 
The meeting, held at Moscow’s Izmailovo Hotel, included more than 100 delegates and scores of journalists and sundry guests. Prominent attendees included the Union of Right Forces’ former chief, Boris Nemtsov, also a former deputy prime minister, and chess-giant-turned-liberal-activist Garry Kasparov.
Kasyanov further accused President Vladimir Putin’s government of intimidating successful business owners, censoring the media, applying the law selectively and steering money away from the relatively impoverished provinces and toward Moscow.
Kasyanov is joined by many former Democratic Party members in his bid to turn the People’s Democratic Union into a major political force. Former presidential candidate Irina Khakamada also sits on the board that runs the new group.
As of Saturday, the group was an officially recognized movement. Over the next 1 1/2 years, Kasyanov and his allies will seek to build an extensive infrastructure of supporters outside Moscow.
By late 2007, the group hopes to have achieved party status and be in a position to run candidates in the State Duma elections. And by the time of the presidential election in 2008, Kasyanov is expected to run for the top job.
Kasyanov’s kick-off speech Saturday comes after failing to secure the leadership in December of the Democratic Party. That occurred after Kasyanov rivals blocked his entry into the building in Moscow where the party was holding a meeting. Party delegates subsequently elected Andrei Bogdanov, the chairman of the Democratic Party’s central committee. Khakamada, a former presidential contender and liberal opposition leader who attended the meeting, said Bogdanov and his associates would be “toys of the Kremlin.” 
Kasyanov, by contrast, is a prominent liberal leader known for instituting the nation’s flat tax and presiding over strong economic growth when he was prime minister, from 2000 through early 2004.
Khakamada said Russians had forgiven liberal reformers for the errors of the past. Now, she added, is the time for courage as democratic activists stand up against a government viewed as increasingly authoritarian.
Musa Sadayev, a leading Chechen liberal and a delegate to the People’s Democratic Union congress, said the opposition should aim to secure support in the North Caucasus, which he called the Kremlin’s weak spot. 
As Yeltsin’s prime minister, Putin launched Russia’s second war of the 1990s in Chechnya, in 1999.
Today, Sadayev said, the government is blamed for the violence and corruption that affect the region. He added that the democrats’ economic flops of the 1990s did not hurt people in the North Caucasus as much as elsewhere.
Kremlin supporters portrayed Kasyanov and his supporters as American stooges. Outside the hotel the youth groups Nashi and Rossiya Molodaya ridiculed the congress, with both featuring Uncle Sam look-alikes in stars-and-stripes hats.

TITLE: Lukashenko Blasts Press at Inauguration
AUTHOR: By Yuras Karmanau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, sworn in Saturday for a third term, lashed out at the West with accusations it was trying to foment unrest in Belarus.
During a pomp-filled inauguration ceremony, a somber-looking Lukashenko accused Western nations of trying “to humiliate our nation and turn it into another testing ground for a color revolution” — a reference to the Orange and Rose uprisings that helped oust unpopular governments in Ukraine and Georgia.
Several thousand officials and lawmakers filled the Palace of the Republic, a huge concrete Soviet-era congress hall, hailing Lukashenko with a standing ovation after he took his presidential oath.
The building in downtown Minsk was tightly encircled by police, who also blocked the public from other central areas of the city in an apparent effort to prevent the opposition from mounting rallies. 
On Friday, riot police broke up a demonstration by dozens of opposition activists in Minsk’s central square.
Following the inauguration ceremony, Lukashenko donned a military uniform and went out onto the same square to receive an oath of allegiance from the military and security troops. 
“We won’t allow anyone to speak to us in a posture of force,” Lukashenko told the troops. He accused the West of trying to “plunge the nation into chaos and anarchy.”
“Their principle is the same: divide and rule. Only the forms are different — war and aggression for some, a virus of color revolutions for others,” he said.
Lukashenko has faced international condemnation of the March 19 election, which he won with 83 percent of the vote, according to official results.
The main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, who received about 6 percent, has claimed fraud.
“Lukashenko grabbed victory through force and lies,” Milinkevich said Saturday by telephone from Lithuania, where he was traveling. “The civilized world doesn’t recognize Lukashenko, and he will find it hard to convince the Belarussian people of his victory.”
Milinkevich met Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and expressed gratitude for support in the struggle against Lukashenko. 
Another opposition leader, Alexander Kozulin, who also ran to challenge Lukashenko, has been in jail since leading an opposition march last month. 
On Friday, authorities released former Polish Ambassador Mariusz Maszkiewicz from custody, allowing him to leave a hospital Friday without returning to prison to finish a 15-day sentence for participating in a post-election rally. Maszkiewicz left for Poland. 
The European Union is expected this week to approve a visa ban for 31 top Belarussian officials, including Lukashenko, in protest of his re-election. The Belarussian Foreign Ministry warned the EU Saturday against the move, describing it as “irresponsible.”
Lukashenko’s office said President Vladimir Putin called him on Saturday to congratulate him on taking office.

TITLE: Moscow Court Keeps NGO Open
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Monday refused an official request to shut down a major human rights umbrella group, in what the rights group’s head called an important decision for non-governmental organizations facing a “crude” campaign of persecution. 
An arm of the Justice Ministry had asked the court in January to order the liquidation of the Russian Human Rights Research Center, a respected organization that has existed since shortly after the Soviet collapse, claiming it had not filed required reports on its activity for more than five years. 
The center’s head, Valery Borshchev, said the Basmanny district court rejected the request, which he dismissed as “absurd.” 
He said the center found copies of the reports and provided them to the court, and claimed its opponents’ case was “so weak that the representatives of the agency failed to appear in the court.”

TITLE: Putin Scolds Governors, Minister
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused regional leaders and the education and science minister of lacking initiative and dragging their feet on implementing at least two of his pet projects, housing and education.
Putin, who gave the tongue-lashing at a meeting of a council formed to oversee the implementation of the so-called priority national projects, said the reluctance of the governors to get involved personally in the projects was hindering their implementation.
“They simply pass [the projects] down to their deputies and aides, preferring not to get involved personally. But they have to get involved personally,” Putin told the council members in the Kremlin. The council is composed of Cabinet ministers, governors, mayors and lawmakers.
Under the program that Putin announced last fall, the government would spend more than $4 billion this year on agriculture, education, health care and residential housing, on top of the usual amount set aside for those areas.
The additional money will go toward salary increases for doctors, nurses and teachers, much-needed residential housing construction and state-sponsored mortgages for young professionals, as well as the construction of new medical centers and the purchase of new equipment for hospitals, clinics and ambulance services.
One after another, Putin reviewed the performance of each of the four projects on Friday, saying that he was generally satisfied with how the Cabinet was handling them. Those comments could be interpreted as a compliment to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the coordinator of the national projects in the Cabinet and a possible candidate to succeed Putin in 2008.
Putin then criticized the governors for not allocating land to build residential housing. Governors have argued that it would cost too much to auction land and prepare sites for construction. 
Putin reminded them that the regions were receiving 14.2 billion rubles ($514 million) to cover those costs.
“This is a lot of money,” the president said.
Putin then told the lawmakers to draw up legislation that would make it possible to seize land from municipal officials deemed corrupt.
Putin’s criticism echoed remarks by Medvedev last month that corrupt officials were making a profit by preventing the open auction of land, and at the same time endangering Putin’s goal of making housing more affordable to the public.
“They have found a loophole in the legislation allowing them to make money out of the land they are sitting on,” Putin said.
Putin then grilled Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko for failing to increase salaries for all teachers who have homeroom duties in addition to their regular teaching load.
Fursenko could not say why 80,000 teachers had not received more money.
“I don’t think it was done intentionally,” the minister said.
“Oh really! How are you answering?” Putin exclaimed. “I think you should know for sure. You are the minister, after all.”
Fursenko said the teachers who had been left out would receive higher salaries starting with the next school year, in September.

TITLE: Thousands Nationwide Protest Housing Prices
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of demonstrators rallied across the country on Saturday to protest hikes in rent, utilities and housing maintenance fees, which are a result of the Cabinet’s efforts to reduce subsidies.
The Interior Ministry said 74,000 people participated in the demonstrations in about 250 cities and towns.
The protest in Moscow, organized by the Communist Party and several other opposition groups, was held on Teatralnaya Ploshchad just a few hundred meters away from the Kremlin and drew more than 5,000 mostly elderly demonstrators.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov urged the government to use some of its windfall oil revenues to pay for the long-needed overhaul of aging utilities and apartment buildings. “The money for the overhaul must come from the huge state reserves, not from the impoverished population,” he said.
The rally ended peacefully under heavy police escort. Police did not intervene, even though the demonstrators walked about one kilometer from Pushkin Square along Bolshaya Dmitrovka to Teatralnaya Ploshchad, ignoring the authorities’ refusal to allow a march.
A rally under the same slogans attracted about 3,000 in Voronezh and 2,000 in Krasnoyarsk, while smaller demonstrations were also held in Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Stavropol and other cities.
Protesters said that the quality of maintenance services was not increasing along with the rates.	

(AP, SPT)

TITLE: Russian Biologist Suspected Of Spying Cleared by Swedes
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian biologist Andrei Zamyatnin was released from a Swedish prison Friday after authorities concluded he was not a spy who posed a national security threat.
Zamyatnin, a guest researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, was arrested Feb. 15.
His release was greeted by his family and Russians officials with relief, and anger at the Swedish government.
Swedish Prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand said Zamyatnin, prior to his arrest, had been collecting information about current and past researchers at the institute, which he then passed to the Russian Embassy in Stockholm, Interfax reported.
Also, Zamyatnin is accused of having forwarded to Russian officials materials dealing with biochemical engineering and gene modification, Lindstrand said, according to The Associated Press. But Swedish officials determined that the lost information did not jeopardize the nation’s strategic or commercial interests. “I have concluded that this does not hold up,” Lindstrand told AP. “If there is no threat to national security, one of the requirements [to charge him] falls. Then we have to let him go.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov welcomed the release. “His guilt wasn’t established, the accusations were far-fetched and no one gave us anything specific,” Lavrov said.
It is unclear what Zamyatnin will do now.
The 29-year-old scientist received a $200,000 Swedish grant last year to spend four years in the country to research how to protect potatoes from viruses. 
Zamyatnin received the money after defending his thesis at Moscow State University’s Beloyzyorsky Institute of Physical and Biological Chemistry, said his father, Alexander Zamyatnin.
“I don’t know if he’ll want to stay,” he said, referring to his son.
Zamyatnin was in good condition following his release but was apparently tired after speaking with the press, said the embassy’s spokesman, Anatoly Kargapolov.
Alexander Zamyatnin, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Bakh Biochemistry Institute in Moscow, said the family was happy Andrei Zamyatnin had been released but was upset about how much he had suffered. 
“He didn’t do anything like that,” Alexander Zamyatnin said by telephone of his son and the suggestion that he might be a spy. “It’s not possible in principle.”
Alexander Zamyatnin added that his son was “in a humiliating position for 52 days.”

TITLE: Oil-for-Food Probe Unlikely
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia indicated Friday that it would not open investigations against companies or individuals accused of illicitly benefiting from the United Nations’ oil-for-food program in Iraq.
“In the documents given to the Russian side by the Volcker Commission, there is no base of evidence, and they [the documents] could not be the basis for starting an investigation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said. 
“Moreover, individual materials cast doubts as to their authenticity.”
Moscow appears to have toughened its stance since November, when its UN ambassador, Andrei Denisov, said the allegations would be investigated “in one way or another.” Even then, though, officials rejected the report as “one-sided.”
The October 2005 report alleged that Russian companies had received almost one-third of oil sales under the oil-for-food program, worth some $19 billion, and that they had paid $52 million in illicit surcharges to Hussein’s government in 2001-02. Russian officials latched onto findings that one of the documents uncovered, which bore the signature of one-time Kremlin Chief of Staff Alexander Voloshin, appeared to have been fabricated. But the report named many others, including LUKoil and the Emergency Situations Ministry.
Also Friday, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia, Abdul Karim Hashim Mostafa, said his country intended to demand compensation.

TITLE: U.S. Secret Service Trails Local Hacker ‘Zo0mer’
AUTHOR: By Tom Zeller Jr.
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: You’ve probably never met Sergey Kozerev, a former student at the State University of Technology and Design in St. Petersburg, but it’s possible that he’s mugged you.
In the online world, he operates under the pseudonym Zo0mer, according to American investigators, and he smugly hawks all manner of stolen consumer information alongside dozens of other peddlers at a web site he helps manage. 
“My prices are lowers then most of other vendors have and I will deliver them in real time,” reads a typically fractured Zo0mer post. 
At the same forum, another user, tabbot, offers “any U.S. bank accounts” for sale.
“Balance from 3K and above: $40,” he writes. “Regular brokerage accounts from 3K and above: $70.” 
Tabbot also offers full access to hacked accounts from credit unions. One, with a $31,000 balance, is being sold for $400. “I can try search-specific info such as signature, ssn, dob, email access,” tabbot writes. “Account with an extra info will be more expensive.”
The online trade in stolen financial data is thriving. So the news last week that the United States Secret Service has been Hoovering up identity thieves, document forgers and other members of online “carding” sites — web forums that have become outposts for peddling hacked account numbers, bank passwords and PIN numbers, as well as the viruses, scripts and phishing scams designed to steal them — seemed a coup.
But however deserving those caught in this most recent sweep might be (20 have been arrested across the United States and one in Britain over the last three months, the agency said), the fact remains that in the transnational, Internet-driven market for stolen financial and consumer data, some thieves are simply easier to nab than others.
And while Russians and Eastern Europeans like Zo0mer have become the top bananas in the stolen data trade, the English-speaking — particularly American — players are really the lowest-hanging fruit. 
“I deal with them only from an intelligence perspective,” said Gregory Crabb, an investigator with the United States Postal Inspection Service and the economic crimes division of Interpol, referring to English-speaking carders. “And only to know if the big players in Eastern Europe and Russia are recruiting. They are a dime a dozen, and relatively easy to track down and pop.”
Not surprisingly, despite ruling like dark knights behind their own cryptic pseudonyms, American traders are often exposed under harsh light as middling rubes or barely post-adolescent power-trippers who were easily duped by undercover agents working the same boards. 
Even Operation Firewall, the Secret Service sledgehammer that managed to infiltrate and shatter the largest English-language crime board, Shadowcrew.com, in October 2004, has done little, two years later, to slow the global data trade. 
“The Secret Service says the defendants are part of a ‘highly organized international criminal enterprise,’ “ blogged Brian McWilliams, the author of “Spam Kings” and a keen follower of cybercrime, at the time of the Shadowcrew arrests. “But I have a hard time believing that we’re talking about a real sophisticated group of criminals here. One of the defendants, 20-year-old Paul A. Mendel Jr., aka Mintfloss, lives with his grandparents in Albany, New York.”
To be fair, prosecutors estimated that Shadowcrew had done damages in excess of $4 million over its two-year history. That’s not pocket change, and the true tally is surely much higher. And those arrests have led to others, which no one can argue is a bad thing. 
But consider that just one young American, 22-year-old Douglas Cade Havard, using real contacts with the Russian underworld, managed to steal, along with a Scottish accomplice, more than $11 million in two years, according to investigators. 
In one scheme, the pair, now in British prisons, encoded stolen account numbers onto blank cards and withdrew over $1.3 million from various Western banks in just 10 months. Of course, they were receiving the stolen account data from — and were kicking most of the proceeds back to — Russian hackers, who are presumably still at large.
There are other recent American arrests. Seventeen-year-old Hunter Moore of Manchester, New Hampshire, was nabbed in a Secret Service sting and pled guilty in August to identity fraud and making counterfeit credit cards while living with his grandmother. 
And a Virginia Tech student, Benjamin W. Pinkston, was among seven people arrested in last week’s return of Operation Rolling Stone. According to The Roanoke Times, he was released to the custody of his parents on Tuesday and told to stay off the Internet. A judge eased that restriction, when it was suggested it would make it hard for the young man to do his homework. 
Meanwhile, American law enforcement can often only watch the real kingpins like Zo0mer (which he spells with a signature zero) from afar. 
“It’s a big job to navigate the treaties and the rights to privacy in disclosing information to foreign law enforcement,” Crabb said. 
And that’s just the beginning. Even when banks and credit card companies are willing to share the details of a breach (and many would prefer to keep mum rather than risk publicity), it is equally daunting to try to win the attention and cooperation of foreign investigators, Crabb said. 
This is particularly true in parts of the former Eastern Bloc, where law enforcement is often facing down more immediate local problems — organized crime, tax schemes, corruption — and might understandably place the plight of American banks and consumers a bit lower on their priority list. 
Indeed, in some countries, Crabb suggested, law enforcement officers responsible for combating online data thieves may have never owned a credit card themselves. 
“That is actually one of the first things I tell financial institutions when I’m educating them about this,” Crabb said. “Take that credit card out of the equation. Those law enforcement officials don’t have one. They don’t understand the power of one. It’s a hurdle that we have to overcome.” 
And even when a big fish is caught, as happened last summer with the arrest in Ukraine of Dmitro Ivanovich Golubov, aka Script, according to authorities, there is little that can be done when he is released. 
Golubov’s capture was described in The Wall Street Journal by Larry Johnson of the Secret Service, as “one of the most significant apprehensions of a high-level Eastern European responsible for criminal activity on the Internet.”
Still, to the dismay of American law enforcement officials (and some of their Ukrainian counterparts), Golubov was quietly released from prison in December while awaiting trial.

TITLE: Doing Battle Over Wine, WTO
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The khachapuri keeps on coming as Guriya fills up on Saturday afternoon. But the people who flock to the popular Moscow restaurant for a taste of Georgia may soon discover that the only Georgian drink being served is Borzhomi mineral water.
Russia banned imports of all Georgian and Moldovan wine on March 27, leaving restaurant managers as surprised as the stuffed bear that greets visitors to Guriya on Komsomolsky Prospekt. Last week, the ban was extended to include cognac and sparkling wine.
The Federal Consumer Protection Service has said that pesticides, heavy metals and other harmful substances were found in wines from Georgia and Moldova, which account for about half of Russia’s wine market.
“Do you really think our wine is poisonous?” said one of Guriya’s senior waitresses with a sarcastic smile. “We’ve been operating for 18 years and no one has complained about it yet.”
The ban came just days after Georgia and Moldova began making new demands on Russia as it attempts to join the World Trade Organization. The two smaller former Soviet republics, both already members of the WTO, have strained relations with Russia, which supports separatist regions within their borders. 
“This ban on wine, which people have been drinking for centuries, is very sudden,” Georgy Kakabadze, executive director of Georgia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said by telephone from Tbilisi on Friday. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were about politics.”
At the Moldovan Embassy, Commerce Department chief Stepan Lupashko was quick to stress on Friday that he was not accusing Russia of political motives. But he added that proposals for creating a joint Moldovan-Russian group to test wines and carry out other initiatives aimed at resolving the situation had gone unanswered by the Federal Consumer Protection Service. 
During Russia’s latest round of WTO negotiations last month, Georgia demanded that Russia open two customs checkpoints in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and that Russian mobile telephone service providers stop operations in those regions, a spokeswoman for the Economic Development and Trade Ministry said Friday.
Russia has sided with the two regions in their efforts to break away from Georgia. On March 22, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity announced that he would petition the Russian Constitutional Court to recognize that his region belongs to Russia.
Moldova raised questions about Russia’s customs tariffs during last month’s WTO talks in Geneva, saying they needed to be addressed before a bilateral agreement with Russia could be signed. The Russian ministry spokeswoman said this was “strange” because there was free trade between the two countries.
Russia has backed Transdnestr, a breakaway region in Moldova, which has come under pressure since Ukraine tightened customs regulations on March 3, demanding that all exports from Transdnestr be certified by Moldovan authorities. 
Countries must negotiate the terms of their WTO accession with each of the 149 members of the trade club. Russia has not signed a formal agreement with Moldova, but it has already sealed a bilateral agreement with Georgia.
“Technically, it is not against the rules to voice new demands after a bilateral agreement has been signed, but it is not usually done,” said Alexei Portansky, the head of the government’s information office on WTO accession. Agreements can be renegotiated, he said Friday.
Boris Makarenko, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, said Moldova and Georgia were making demands that did not have much to do with the WTO, and Russia was retaliating by issuing bans that were unrelated to wine quality. 
“This is a political game,” Makarenko said Friday.
Gennady Onishchenko, Russia’s chief epidemiologist who heads the Federal Consumer Protection Service, denied any political motives. “The only thing that my organization is concerned with is taking care of consumers and their health,” he said Saturday, Interfax reported. 
“Right now, it is important, together with the Georgian and Moldovan sides, to figure out how to avoid shipments of fake and unsafe products,” he said.
Moldovan and Georgian producers have denied the claims that their wines are harmful. Wine importers threatened last week to take Onishchenko to court unless Russian authorities provided proof of toxicity in the wine and gave a clearer explanation of the ban by April 15.
A Georgian government delegation, headed by Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli, is due in Moscow this week, Interfax reported Friday. Georgian Embassy spokesman Vaghtang Tatunashvili said he could neither confirm nor deny the report. 
Moldovan Prime Minister Vasiliy Tarlev sent a letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov last week, asking for a resolution of the wine problem, Lupashko said. 
Business Analytica estimated that Georgian and Moldovan wine accounted for some 44 percent of all in-store wine sales in Russia last year.

TITLE: Briton Detained, Faces Deportation
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A British citizen who was allegedly collecting information in Russia’s troubled North Caucasus region has been detained and will be deported for violating border rules, migration officials said Monday. 
Andrew Harker had a UN identity card but official inquiries made through Russia’s Foreign Ministry established that he was not in Russia on official UN business, Federal Migration Service spokesman Konstantin Poltoranin said. 
The spokeswoman for the UN office in Russia, Viktoria Zotikova, said that Harker was in Russia on a UN-supported research mission, as part of a global study aimed to provide information about security environments for humanitarian activity. 
Poltoranin said that Harker, who was taken into custody Sunday in the province of Ingushetia which neighbors war-shattered Chechnya, had failed to register with local police as required within three days of his March 30 arrival and an Ingush court had ordered him to be deported.

TITLE: Foreign Firms in Driving Seat
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As continuing media coverage testifies, more and more foreign car companies are considering increasing their presence  in Russia, either through the location of production facilities, or through cooperation with local firms. 
Last week federal authorities officially confirmed the latest interest, with Japanese car manufacturer Nissan deciding to construct an assembly plant in Russia. At the moment the company is considering three possible locations, one of them being St. Petersburg.
Earlier media reports suggested that both General Motors and Daimler-Chrysler would build plants in Russia.
At the moment the Russian government is in negotiations with about ten foreign companies about industrial car assembly. However, after joining the WTO Russia will stop signing new contracts for industrial assembling, Interfax reported Monday, citing minister for economic development and trade German Gref.
“Whether we’ll manage to sign the contracts by that time or not will largely depend on the position of the companies,” Gref said.
A contract with Volkswagen is to be signed by the end of April, which will involve the German company investing 400 million euros in the production of 115,000 cars a year.
An industry expert said that the changes announced by Gref would not have a dramatic impact on cooperation with foreign companies, with carmakers not having to rush to sign contracts.
“After Russia joins the WTO and the transition period is completed, custom fees will be abolished. Those producers who were not quick enough to sign contracts could wait before starting local production anyway,” said Yelena Sakhnova, car industry analyst at UFG.
So far very few foreign companies have risked building their own plants in Russia.
The Ford plant in the Leningrad Oblast has been in operation since 2002. Last year the company sold 60,654 cars in Russia and decided to increase the production capacities of its plant from 40,000 cars a year up to 60,000 cars, investing $30 million into the project.
Toyota is investing $150 million into the construction of a plant in the Leningrad Oblast which from 2007 will produce 50,000 cars a year.
Scania has produced buses in the Leningrad Oblast since 2002, and Volvo has assembled trucks in the Moscow Oblast since 2003. According to Moscow-based brokerage Troika Dialog, annual sales of cars in Russia should almost double by 2010, reaching about 2.8 million units.
Yelena Sakhnova of UFG said that about 931,000 foreign cars were sold in Russia last year. About 17 percent of cars sold were assembled in Russia.
“The share of locally-produced foreign cars in the total number of sales will definitely increase in the future. They are cheaper than imported cars — producers do not pay custom fees, as a result of which the price differential could reach 15 percent,” Sakhnova said.
Increasing the number of locally-produced foreign cars would not only replace imports but force out some Russian producers and saturate the growing Russian car market, Sakhnova said.
Another way of producing cars in Russia is to start joint ventures or to use national carmakers to carry out assembly.
GM vice-president Robert Lutz said that the company is focusing on expanding production in Russia through wider cooperation with AvtoVAZ and Avtotor and does not have any plans to create its own plant in Russia, considering it “untimely,” Interfax reported last week.
GM has cooperated with Avtotor since 2004. The Kaliningrad-based plant produces Cadillac, Hummer and Chevrolet models.
This year Avtotor will expand its range of Hammer models and also produce four new GM models: Chevrolet Aveo, Lacetti, Rezzo and Evanda, Interfax reported last week.
Avtotor will invest about $50 million into the production of GM cars. The total number of GM branded cars produced by Avtotor will reach 20,000 units this year.
By 2007 GM plans to localize part of the production of its most popular models, which at the moment are simply assembled from large units.
Avtotor also announced it would start construction of a new plant near Kaliningrad in cooperation with Chinese automotive company Chery, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Total investment in the plant could be between $150 million and $250 million depending on the range of models produced, Interfax cited Vladimir Shcherbakov, Avtotor CEO, as saying.
Avtotor is interested in assembling all six models of Chery, which are currently produced in China. The new plant will produce 150,000 cars a year. This year Avtotor plans to produce 17,600 Chery cars.
Another Russian carmaker, Severstal-Avto, will start producing Fiat Doblo and Albea models by the end of 2006, the company’s head of PR and promotion Andrei Koterev said Wednesday, Interfax reported.
By 2008 Severstal-Avto plans to produce about 40,000 cars to replace the national model Oka.
“There is no universal agreement about whether it is better to cooperate with Russian companies or to build a plant from scratch,” said Denis Orlov, analyst for metallurgy and industrial construction at Veles Capital investment company.
“Joint ventures look more attractive for manufacturers producing inexpensive cars (like GAZ and Mahindra). The development of one’s own production facilities could be beneficial for expensive brands like Volkswagen,” he said.
As well as clear advantages — proximity to markets, cheap and qualified labor, privileges for “industrial assembly” plants, economies on transportation — foreign carmakers are faced with considerable legal risks — a recent example is the court hearing involving Ford and the tax authorities of the Leningrad Oblast, Orlov said.
Given the low quality of locally produced components, carmakers import most components from abroad, which increases production costs, he said.
Low average incomes still hamper the production of luxury brands in the country, he said. Low and mid-price cars such as Hyundai (Accent, Getz, Lantra, Elantra), Renault Logan, Ford Focus, Daewoo (Nexia, Matiz) and the Mitsubishi Lancer, remain the most popular on the Russian market.
Orlov said that European Russia was the most appropriate location for car plants. “The Leningrad Oblast is interesting because of its convenient location for importing components and because of its disposable workforce,” he said.

TITLE: National Giant Acquires Petersburg Health Insurer
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One of the country’s largest national insurance companies, ROSNO, announced Friday its acquisition of St. Petersburg-based insurer Rusmed, as another step towards its goal of controlling 15 percent of the compulsory health insurance market.
ROSNO acquired 100 percent of Rusmed shares, Interfax quoted the former’s deputy director Vladimir Gurdus as saying. He refused to indicate cost of the deal so as “not to create market price guidelines.”
Operating since 1992, Rusmed specializes in personal insurance services, including compulsory and voluntary health insurance.
In February ROSNO bought another specialist in medical insurance, Medexpress, and it is now looking to acquire several regional insurance companies based in cities of over one million people. It will thus increase its client base to 20 million people and control 15 percent of the compulsory health insurance market, Gurdus said.
“The regions nearest to Moscow will be a priority. But if we get interesting proposals from other regions, we will not simply ignore them,” he added.
At the moment ROSNO has licenses for 95 different types of insurance service and operates 100 representative offices across Russia.
Sergei Kharchenko, expert in Mergers and Acquisitions at the FINAM investment company, estimated the deal between ROSNO and Rusmed at $500,000 to $600,000.
“Rusmed’s cash flow is positive, but acquisition entails large risks because the company depends on one large client,” Kharchenko said.
He considered it reasonable that the acquisition of small regional companies might increase ROSNO’s share in the compulsory health insurance market to 15 percent. 
“With a budget of $30 million to $40 million they can reach this target,” he said.
A similar market share could be acquired by the purchase of one large company, but cost of that deal would be over $100 million, he said.
Kharchenko said ROSNO is aiming at one of the most promising segments of the insurance market, though it is difficult to estimate precise profitability, varying as it does according to each company.
“Three out of the ten largest insurance companies in Russia specialize in compulsory health insurance. It provides over 20 percent of insurance premiums. It is attractive because of the low risks involved: insurance companies are in fact redistributing money from the state budget,” he said.
According to the Regional Fund for Compulsory Health Insurance, $280 million was spent in St. Petersburg on insurance last year. This year the Fund is planning to spend $332 million.
Another expert said that the compulsory insurance market should not be assessed in terms of profitability but as an “entry ticket,” allowing firms to offer other types of insurance to clients, said Sergei Kovalchuk, CEO of Progress Neva insurance society are  director of the St. Petersburg office of Renaissance Insurance. He indicated another important aspect of the insurance market.
“St. Petersburg has never seen such a large number of mergers and acquisitions as it has recently. A focus on fast business growth is a new trend,” Kovalchuk said.
Earlier this year Progress Neva merged with Renaissance Insurance.
“High-quality insurance companies that have a transparent system of accounting and operate with respect to international standards are attractive for acquisition,” Kovalchuk said.
Companies participate in mergers and acquisitions regardless of their turnover, Kovalchuk said. During the last few months companies with turnover of between $10 million to $50 million and small firms with turnover of between $1 million to $2 million have been involved in this process. As a result the market is increasingly consolidated. 
“If the 15 largest market players collected slightly over a half of insurance premiums in 2004, last year they collected over 70 percent,” Kovalchuk said.
He suggested that Russian insurers could use the advantages of consolidation — exchange of information and technology and economies on scale — to withstand competition from foreign rivals.

TITLE: Baltic Pipeline System Set To Reduce Transit Dependency
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: PRIMORSK, Leningrad Oblast — The Baltic Pipeline System (BPS) has been launched to its full design capacity of 1.3 million barrels a day, RIA Novosti quoted Russia’s industry and energy minister as saying Friday. 
“The facility is brilliant for Russian infrastructure in terms of all parameters,” Viktor Khristenko told journalists. 
Earlier, Khristenko promised the pipeline, which vastly reduces Russia’s dependency on transit countries, would reach design capacity in mid-April. 
The first stage of the BPS was opened in 2001 with a 240,000 bbl/d capacity. 
The Baltic Sea port of Primorsk, which has also been expanded, is one of Russia’s biggest projects, coming in at an estimated cost of $2.2 billion. The port’s cargo turnover in 2005 was more than 50 million metric tons (1 million bbl/d) and the opening of new capacities will mean four tankers with a displacement of 100,000 tons each can be received simultaneously. 
Khristenko said state-owned oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, which is the operator of the BPS project, had paid off almost all its loans attracted for the project, RIA Novosti reported.
“All investment, all the loans taken out for the project have been returned,” the news agency quoted him as saying. 
President Vladimir Putin said the completion of the BPS was an important step for Russia and other countries in energy sector development, Interfax reported Friday.
“This is a major step forward in the development of the infrastructure which will increase Russia’s opportunities on the world markets and is a contribution to global energy security,” Putin was quoted by Interfax as saying at a meeting with Semyon Vainshtok, the head of  Transneft.  	
(RIA Novosti, Interfax)

TITLE: Court Sanctions Yukos Arrest
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Friday sanctioned the arrest of Yukos’ executive vice president, a day after he was charged with embezzlement and money laundering. 
Vasily Aleksanyan’s arrest is the latest in a string of legal assaults against the embattled oil company, once Russia’s largest.
Aleksanyan said he would appeal the decision by Moscow’s Basmanny District Court and would begin a hunger strike. “From today, I am on hunger strike, and will only drink water until my release,” RIA-Novosti reported Aleksanyan as saying on Friday.
Aleksanyan was detained by the Prosecutor General’s Office on Thursday, just days after his appointment as Yukos vice president. He was charged with stealing 8 billion rubles ($290.3 million) in property and 3.6 billion rubles in shares belonging to companies tied to the Eastern Oil Company.
Aleksanyan, who had previously served as the head of Yukos’ legal department and as the company’s most senior Moscow-based official, was to be in charge of finding ways to save the embattled oil firm from bankruptcy. 
In a statement Friday, Yukos called Aleksanyan’s arrest a “brutal and unjust attack on the company’s attempts to secure a fair bankruptcy process.” 
“We can only assume that this action ... is a direct result of his accepting a position to work to protect Yukos Oil Company and its legitimate stakeholders,” it said.
At the end of March, Yukos was placed under observation by an external manager — the first step in the bankruptcy case backed by state-owned oil major Rosneft. Bankruptcy hearings are due to start on June 27 and are expected to lead to the dismantling of the company.
In an interview with Kommersant, conducted in early April and published Friday, Aleksanyan said in recent months he had been frequently called in for questioning at the Prosecutor General’s Office.
“During the questioning on March 22, a [woman] investigator told me that I should stay away from this company,” Aleksanyan told the daily.
Aleksanyan said he had been followed by agents in four cars constantly since about the end of March. 
“By now, I recognize those cars,” he said.
Aleksanyan told Kommersant that the charges against him were based on the testimony of another senior Yukos official, Svetlana Bakhmina. 
Bakhmina, former deputy head of Yukos’ legal department, was arrested in 2004 on embezzlement charges similar to those facing Aleksanyan. Prosecutors have asked for Bakhmina to be sentenced to 10 years in jail.
Yukos has been the target of Kremlin-orchestrated legal onslaught which dates back to mid-2003. Authorities have demanded that Yukos pay $30 billion in back taxes and penalties. The company’s founder and former CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was last year sentenced to eight years in jail.

TITLE: Official: Helium Likely To Delay Kovykta Work
AUTHOR: By Yelena Kokhanovskaya
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: IRKUTSK — Gazprom on Friday again dashed the hopes of BP’s Russian unit of exporting gas to China from the giant Kovykta field, saying its reserves would not be needed before 2015. 
Gazprom, which has a monopoly over gas exports, said the east Siberian field contained large volumes of helium, a strategic product for military needs, and Russia should first pass a law on helium before approving Kovykta’s development. 
The field is controlled by TNK-BP, half owned by BP, and industry analysts have said its development could be spurred after Gazprom agreed last month to supply large quantities of regular methane gas to China from the next decade. 
“We believe that full development of Kovykta could come no earlier than 2015,” Gazprom deputy chief executive Alexander Ananenkov told an industry conference. “Kovykta contains 50 percent of Russia’s helium reserves, and the feasibility study does not give an answer on how to solve this problem. ... It does not say how to store helium.”
“Therefore, it is unacceptable to start developing the biggest fields in East Siberia and [the Sakha republic] with high helium content only to produce simple gases for heating needs — methane,” he said. 
He was speaking at an industry conference in the east Siberian town of Irkutsk, the closest big town to Kovykta. 
TNK-BP’s executive director and one of its key Russian owners, Viktor Vekselberg, told the same conference that he believed the issue of helium was an artificially created problem. 
“There is no such problem as helium,” he said, adding that Russia was already producing much more than it could consume. 
Gazprom controls several fields near Kovykta as well as massive deposits in the Sakha republic, formerly Yakutia, but they are located much further from China than Kovykta and require billions of dollars in initial investments. 
TNK-BP has been developing Kovykta for several years and will soon start supplying local consumers. But it says the field’s reserves of over 2 trillion cubic meters justify much larger production for export to China and South Korea. It has proposed ceding control of the field to Gazprom and using Kovykta for export needs to help the monopoly meet its long-term goal of supplying China with 60 billion to 80 billion cubic meters of gas per year.
Helium, which is used in the aviation, space and nuclear industries, is considered a strategic product in Russia, which controls over one-third of the world’s helium reserves of 28 bcm, according to Gazprom’s estimates. 
The world’s helium production amounts to 140 million cubic meters per year, with 70 percent produced in the United States. The United States and Europe are the main consumers, and Gazprom claims Russia could become one of the largest producers of helium by 2030, when global demand is expected to rise to 300 mcm per year. 
But Vekselberg said he believed the world did not need a large boost of helium production, and even if demand unexpectedly soared, there were enough reserves to last the next several thousand years.

TITLE: Buying Wine Takes a Delicate Nose for Fraud
AUTHOR: By C.J. Chivers
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: TBILISI — Dry young Saperavi, a wine so tannic that Georgian winemakers often call it not red but black, can be one of the great pleasures of the former Soviet world.
It is a wine with origins reaching back thousands of years, and whose rich and varied flavors have been newly coaxed by a generation of post-Soviet winemakers who are reviving the Caucasus’ ancient culture of grapes and wines.
The trick has always been to find a bottle — a real bottle.
Since late March, Russia has barred the import and sale of Georgian and Moldovan wines, citing concerns over pesticide content that both Georgia and Moldova insist were a pretext to punish the former Soviet nations for aligning more closely with the West.
But long before the trade dispute with those countries, it was a challenge to find many of their most common and delicious wines. The problem was not bans, but fakery.
Officials and importers in Russia say that half to 80 percent of the wine sold as Georgian is cheap wine with counterfeit labels or not wine at all, but alcoholic cocktails laced with dyes and flavors, and perhaps a trace of fermented grape to try to fool the inexperienced nose.
In the tale of post-Soviet wine fraud can be found many of the hustles and de-ceptions that have characterized this region’s shift from a listless planned economy to a corrupted brand of capitalism.
Georgia regards itself as the cradle of winemaking and has a wine culture dating back at least several thousand years.
Many of its varieties and blends are distinct, and small plots have earned names of their own, like Mukuzani in the Alazani Valley, where some of the finest Saperavis are harvested.
But the Soviet system emphasized quantity, not quality, and during the decades when wine was made to the plan, communist winemakers cheated, spiking grape juice with sugar to increase its alcohol content after fermentation, then cutting the wine with water to increase production volume.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Georgia’s vast valleys of vineyards were left struggling to find cash flow, fresh expertise and new equipment.
And yet the soil and climate were still capable of producing fine vintages, and the new market wanted them.
Georgian wines had always been the most popular in the Soviet Union and demand continued into the mid-1990s, when Georgian wineries were barely able to produce.
“This is when the falsification really began,” said Tengiz Javakhishvili, direc-tor of the Telavi Wine Cellar, one of the top wineries to open since the Soviet period and to begin reclaiming the Georgian name.
The first fakes were simple, Javakhishvili and Russian and Georgian officials said. Vats of low-quality table wine from Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania and Russia were bottled under false labels and passed off as famous Georgian wines. “It ruined the reputation of high-quality Georgian wines,” Javakhishvili said.
What followed was worse. As demand for wine grew in Russia, Russian and Georgian businesses began mixing grain alcohol with fragrances and dyes to make a cocktail faintly resembling wine, or fermenting concentrated juice and bottling it as if it were a vintage. Then a Georgian label was applied.
Such crude fakery has endured, wine importers say, because many Russian consumers have limited experience with wine. In Russia, vodka is still king. The frauds are highly profitable. Per capita wine consumption has been climbing as much as 25 percent per year in Russia as the middle class grows and new habits take hold, Peter Kanygin, chairman of Vinny Mir Holding, one of Russia’s largest wine importers, said last month.
Although many of the early frauds were committed by Georgian businesses, the Georgian government has moved against the falsifiers in recent years, and last year forced at least two wineries to dump their supposed vintages when inspectors found fake wines. Inspections are now common, said Mikhail Svimonishvili, the agricultural minister, and Georgia has begun registering all of its vineyards, assigning them registration numbers, known as passports, and compiling data on their yields. One of the stranger and perhaps counterproductive elements of Russia’s recent ban on Georgian and Moldovan wines is that it overlooks the fact that a large fraction of the faked wines bearing Georgian labels come from inside Russia, Georgian and Russian officials said.
These wines, and their risks, are not affected by the new policy, while the best wines from the region are blocked. Kanygin said the Russian fake wines, principally made in vodka plants, were among the most dangerous and unregulated, because they passed no borders and, consequently, had no natural check-point for inspection.
Svimonishvili said his registration system had shown that the Mukuzani region produces enough grapes to make about 1.4 million bottles of wine each year bearing the Mukuzani name.
But each year in Russia, he said, more than 10 million bottles sell.
“Most of these falsified wines come from within Russia, under our name,” he said. “We would like to see Russia work against that.”

TITLE: Youth Proves No Barrier in the Language of Success
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It took only eight years for 26 year-old Alexandra Kashleva to build a career and start her own business. Having gained work experience at different companies in Russia and abroad, just over a year ago she set up Language Studio.
Born in 1979 in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan into the family of a professional military officer, at the age of three Kashleva moved with her family to Leningrad, as it was then called, the place that has become a real “home city” for her. “I grew up in St. Petersburg and always associated myself with it,” she says. 
A professional master of rhythmic gymnastics, Kashleva got her first job when she was only fifteen. “I’ve always wanted to be independent and to earn money. Sport has always played a key role in my life and I started working as a fitness coach,” she says.
Having entered the English department at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Kashleva managed to combine study with work from the first year. “I was hired as a translator-interpreter at a company that specialised in exclusive building services,” she said. “As a newcomer in business it was a huge learning curve and I took a lot from that experience.” 
Having worked in administrative positions at several other companies as well as providing interpreting and translation at different business exhibitions held in Italy, France and Spain, Kashleva says that she appreciates all the different experiences she gained and is grateful to all the managers under whose direction she worked. 
In 2001, Kashleva received a diploma in linguistics and interpretating and translating and joined the Linguistic Center of the Institute of Foreign Languages where she started teaching English. 
“It was a big challenge for me. Having just graduated and with no work experience in that field, I had to teach people, many of whom were much older than me,” she said. “I always tried to do my best to make my lessons interesting for them. And I was really very pleased when, at the end of the course, most of them thanked me and were eager to join my group the next semester.” And although she was teaching the courses for only a few months, Kashleva said that she always recalled that work as an intensely interesting and satisfying period of her life.
In the desire to satisfy her inexhaustible thirst for knowledge, just after graduating from the Institute, Kashleva entered the International Management Institute of St. Petersburg (IMISP) to take an eight-month course in management. “At that time I was working as a marketing manager and wanted to get the relevant training for it,” she said. Equipped with her diploma in business, Kashleva wanted to put the knowledge she had obtained and creative ideas into practice. 
Rather than go back to her old routine, Kashleva decided to step back to consider her options. Over the next year she began learning German again, took Italian lessons, read and traveled a lot. “I’d been going straight from one thing to the next since I was at school. That’s why I wanted to take stock and get some perspective,” she said. 
It was at that time that Kashleva realised that she wanted to work in the consulting business. Soon she got an offer from the German consulting company CIBER Novasoft — which provides the ERP product SAP — to take a three-month internship at their head office in Heidelberg, Germany. Having completed her internship, Kashleva became business development manager for the Baltic region and CIS countries at CIBER Novasoft. 
“I was eager to develop professionally and it was a good chance to gain work experience in a Western company, to learn their management style, business approach, and customer relations philosophy,” she said.
 “During the time I worked there I learned all about their ERP product and went on lots of interesting business trips to London and Moscow where I worked with top managers from the major retail companies,” she said. Despite having been offered a move to the company’s office in London, Kashleva was ready to return to Russia and start her own business.
Kashleva said that she had always dreamed of starting her own business but first wanted to gain enough work experience and practical knowledge to apply it. It appeared to be quite easy for her to choose the business field she wanted to work in. “I realised that I’d been learning foreign languages all my life, and I’d been teaching them as well. So I had learned from my own experience what both learners and teachers need to achieve a successful result in the language learning process.”
 Having researched the market for language courses in the city, Kashleva decided to set up Language Studio, a full spectrum foreign language services company – individual and group teaching, translation, guide services, Russian language classes for foreigners and so on. She believes that a “comfortable working environment as well as a personalised approach to all the students, highly professional teachers and the innovative methods they apply to the language learning process will bring them business success.”
As a Managing Director, Kashleva recruited many of her former colleagues from the Linguistic Center of the Institute of Foreign Languages, and even her former teachers. For example, her first major appointment at Language Studio was to bring in Polina Belimova, Kashleva’s teacher at the Linguistic Centre of the Institute of Foreign Languages, as Language Studio’s Director of Studies.  
“From the very beginning we aimed to set up premium class language courses, firstly aiming to attract the business audience, and we are glad to say that, as well as open classes, we provide in-company foreign languages training at many of St. Petersburg’s leading companies, such as Gillete, Pepsi, Multon, Lenta, Intersport and others.” 
Although she already has a thriving business, Kashleva doesn’t rest on her laurels. She works continuously to develop her business and often spends the weekend at the office. In spite of all the challenges, she believes that “success is certain for those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Many of Kashleva’s colleagues talk of her unique business acumen. “When something doesn’t work, Alexandra is remarkably quick to analyse, acknowledge and change. She easily assimilates ideas that she has picked up while overseas and adapts them to the local market,” said James Wilson-Fish, Director of Business Development at Language Studio.
After a busy day’s work Kashleva likes to relax by doing indoor climbing, fitness or playing tennis. “I love sport and most of all I like indoor climbing. Unlike other sports, when climbing you can’t stop just because you are tired. It’s like in business – you have no choice but to overcome all the difficulties in order to reach the top.”

TITLE: Gazprom’s Looming Crisis
AUTHOR: By Nadejda M. Victor
TEXT: Three months ago, the Russian energy giant Gazprom forced Ukraine to pay dramatically higher prices for natural gas. At the time, the story was portrayed as a political struggle for control in Kiev. But last week Gazprom announced it was tripling gas prices in Belarus, a country that is politically close to the Kremlin. Moldova has been forced to accept a doubling of prices over the next three to four years, and the other former Soviet republics are already paying market prices for Russian gas.
The truth is that these price increases are not political. Rather, they reflect worrisome economic and geological facts about Russian gas fields. The Kremlin is not simply trying to use Gazprom to reassert authority in Belarus, Ukraine or anywhere else. There are in fact deep problems with Gazprom — problems created by its inefficient management and a looming decline in gas production.
Russia controls more than a quarter of the world’s gas reserves — more than any other country. Most of the known Russian reserves (about 80 percent) are in west Siberia and concentrated in a handful of giant and super-giant gas fields. Since the early 1970s the rate of discovery for these new fields has been declining. Moreover, output from the country’s mainstay super-giant fields is also steadily falling.
Huge investments are needed to replace this dwindling supply, and all the options for new production will prove costly and difficult. New fields in the far north and east of the country are distant from most of Russia’s people and export markets, requiring wholly new transport systems such as pipelines. Moreover, most of these fields are found in extremely harsh environments where it is technically and financially difficult to operate.
Gazprom controls neither the capital nor the technology that will be needed. The state-controlled company is already deeply in debt and burdened by many expensive obligations, such as supplying Russia’s population and friends with cheap gas. The company has to work with foreign partners.
So far Gazprom has been able to forestall crisis. Economic stagnation across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since 1990 dampened gas demand. Russia, which had a surplus at the time, sharply increased its gas exports and made contractual commitments that will remain in force for many years.
But following the long stagnation, Russia’s internal gas consumption is rising again as the economy expands. And new Russian policies to promote development of the country’s eastern regions will, in the next few years, require large new commitments to supply gas to that region (along with spending on railroads, airports and other infrastructure).
Even when the Russian economy was in the doldrums the country was notable as a large gas consumer because of its extremely inefficient energy system. Today Russia is the world’s second-largest gas user after the United States, although its economy is only one-twentieth the size of the U.S. economy.
Electricity in Russia is produced for the most part by gas, but the country’s gas-fired electric generators work at 33 percent efficiency on average, compared with 50 to 55 percent in Europe. More than 90 percent of residential and industrial gas consumers don’t have meters. Gas is even cheaper than coal — Russia is the only large country where that is true — so incentives to switch to an abundant fuel are weak.
In recent years Russia has boosted gas supplies by squeezing Turkmenistan to sell gas to Russia at a big discount. But Turkmen gas production is poised to decline, and Turkmenistan’s gas industry is barely functional because the country’s political environment is scary for long-term investors. Other Central Asian suppliers, notably Kazakhstan, are unlikely to be able to bridge the gap.
Caught between growing internal consumption of gas, continued inefficiency and mounting external obligations, Russia’s gas industry faces a looming crisis. Given the country’s vast resources, it seems that many producers could fill the void. But a series of policy decisions created two roadblocks that Gazprom has been happy to reinforce. One is the lack of access to the Gazprom-controlled pipeline network, which explains why few companies even bother to look for gas: They know they can’t get what they find to market. The other barrier to investment is the low internal prices, which make gas production uneconomic except for companies that can sell their products outside.
Gazprom needs cash — much more cash — for investment. At the same time, it needs a strong incentive for former Soviet republics to cut their own very inefficient consumption.
Analysts have ignored the risk that Russia’s supplies could fall short because they focus on Russia’s vast gas resources and the new Western investors who are — albeit cautiously — entering into joint ventures with Gazprom. But those resources and ventures are for the long term, and the looming crisis of supply is unfolding now.
The gas shortage is likely to become most acute over the next few years. If there is an unusually cold winter in 2008, the year of Russia’s presidential election, then Gazprom will face a politically unpleasant choice: whether to cut off internal customers (voters) or the Western customers who are the firm’s main source of hard cash.

Nadejda M. Victor is a research fellow at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. She is co-author of “Axis of Oil” and of a forthcoming comprehensive review of Russia’s gas pipelines. She contributed this comment to The Washington Post.

TITLE: A Warning Against ‘Irrational Exuberance’
AUTHOR: By Andrew E. Kramer
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Russian stocks, buoyed by high oil prices and a surge of foreign investment, have been soaring. After an 83 percent gain in the RTS stock index last year — the best stock market performance outside the Middle East in 2005 — the index is up nearly 33 percent so far this year.
That market boom has multiplied the already apparent signs of wealth in the Russian capital. A Lamborghini dealership has opened. Airline travel has picked up. A trade fair for companies aimed at millionaire customers came to Moscow.
Amid the optimism and enthusiasm, one man is striking a discordant note.
Oleg V. Vyugin, Russia’s top market regulator, has repeatedly taken to issuing dour warnings.
Recently he has cautioned that the Russian market is showing some “alarming signs” of becoming too expensive compared with other emerging markets that have been the darlings of global investors for the last year.
“Russia was considered a desirable object for investment,” he said. “This drove the market up. But that flow will not last forever.”
Institutional investors, he noted, have already snapped up most of the bargains in oil, telecommunications and consumer companies. Future growth will come slower, he cautioned.
Vyugin, the head of the Federal Financial Markets Service, emphasized that he did not believe that the stock market was overheated or overvalued relative to the profitability of the companies listed. Rather, he said, the potential problem lies in the volatility of the huge flows of money from Western emerging-market funds.
Foreign money, he said, “flows in and it will flow out.”
Emerging markets from Asia to South America have done very well for institutional investors in the last year, and Russia has been a particular favorite. In the first three months of this year, through March 29, investors put more than $3.4 billion into Russia out of a total flow to emerging markets of $24.2 billion, according to Brad P. Durham, managing director of Emerging Portfolio Fund Research, a company based in Cambridge, Mass.
Russia’s weighting in global emerging market funds, known as GEM funds, rose from 4 percent at the beginning of 2005 to 6.6 percent at the end of the year, he said, indicating growing interest compared with other markets.
Vyugin, 53, a lanky, bespectacled man who wears drab charcoal suits and has a shock of unruly gray hair, seems to relish the role of reclusive naysayer in a garish boomtown.
Analysts praise his grasp of economics and staid mannerisms, and take his past as a Soviet-trained mathematician as a sign of intellectual rigor. In a city of scandals, intrigue and overnight fortunes, where businesses are sometimes raided by masked gunmen, Russia may need a market regulator who by his own admission rarely leaves his apartment except to go to work, they say.
“He has a scientific background, and people appreciate that,” said Anton A. Strochenovsky, an economist at Troika Dialog bank, where Vyugin worked as a banker in the 1990s. “He’s quite reasonable. His views are solid.”
Russia passed an obscure but important barrier this year, Vyugin and analysts say. For six years after the economic crisis of 1998, Russian companies traded at a price-to-earnings ratio that was lower than those for most other emerging markets.
Now, Russia is projected to trade at a ratio of 13.3 in 2006, compared with an average of 12.3 in emerging markets, according to calculations by Mr. Durham’s company.
This winter, Gazprom began trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than Exxon Mobil, according to a report by Hermitage Capital, a Moscow-based fund with investments in Gazprom.
“Russia has been a market like Brazil that traded below the average,” Durham said. “That has changed.” Russia is no longer cheap.
Chris Weafer, the chief analyst at Alfa Bank, said, “Certainly, there’s an element of foreign money chasing the BRIC scene,” referring to the emerging market category of Brazil, Russia, India and China. “It is the type of money that would reverse out if Russia was getting too expensive or there was a problem.”
Still, Peter Westin, an economist at MDM Bank in Moscow, said Russian companies do not look overpriced compared with Indian and Chinese companies. 
“We might be getting into that period, but we’re not there yet,” he said.
Back in his office, Vyugin said that for now oil prices and United States interest rates were working in Russia’s favor. His warnings, he said, were meant only for new private investors in Russia who risk buying in at the top of the market. He switched into English briefly to recall Alan Greenspan’s caution against “irrational exuberance.”
Then he glumly admitted he did not think his warning would have much effect. “I can’t teach brokers whether the market is overheated,” he said. 
“They know better than us, I hope.”

TITLE: Global Politics as a Zero-Sum Game
TEXT: By James Goldgeier
and Michael McFaul

The debate is over: Russia is not a democracy. President Vladimir Putin has weakened checks and balances within the state, diminished political and legal transparency, and made it impossible for independent media, political parties or nongovernmental groups to flourish. 
Even the Bush administration’s newly released National Security Strategy finally acknowledges this, concluding that “recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions” in Russia. 
And yet the U.S. president still holds out unwarranted hope. “I haven’t given up on Russia,” George W. Bush said in a speech last month at Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization. “I still think Russia understands that it’s in her interests to be West, to work with the West and to act in concert with the West.” 
Unfortunately, an authoritarian Russia is less inclined to act in concert with the West. The bad news emanating from Russia just over the past month proves that Moscow’s increasingly autocratic leadership will clash often with Washington in world affairs. 
Of course, no two countries will ever have identical interests. Even some of America’s oldest democratic allies in Europe have crossed the Bush administration on foreign policy. Overall, though, democracies cooperate in ways that advance mutual interests. By contrast, current Russian foreign policy — and Russia’s policy toward the United States in particular — reveals that Moscow views global politics as a zero-sum game: What’s good for the United States is bad for Russia, and vice versa. 
Consider the events of the past month. In mid-March, Alexander Lukashenko — the “last dictator in Europe” — orchestrated another fraudulent election in Belarus, and then sent his police to arrest and beat hundreds of peaceful demonstrators. Putin was one of the few world leaders to praise this election victory. That same week, Bill Browder, the largest Western investor in Russia, with about $4 billion invested in Russia’s major companies, revealed that Russian authorities had denied him a visa. (The official reason: Browder posed a national security threat.) A few days later, the Pentagon published a study asserting that Russian intelligence officials had informed Saddam Hussein about U.S. troop movements during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And just a few days after that, State Department officials expressed dismay with Russia’s foot-dragging over a UN Security Council statement censuring Iran and its nuclear weapons program. 
Would some of this be taking place even if Rus-sia were a democracy? Perhaps. But most of it would not. 
In Belarus, Putin continues to prop up Lukashenko’s regime, at considerable cost to Russian taxpayers, because Putin and his advisers regard the advance of democracy in the former Soviet space as a U.S. gain and a Russian loss. In the Kremlin’s eyes, Washington scored points in Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution and Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, while Moscow chalked up victories in Uzbekistan last summer — when it supported Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s slaughter of unarmed civilian protesters — and now in Belarus. (The Tulip Revolution that led to the over-throw of President Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 is counted in Moscow as a draw.) 
Democracies do not see the world in such terms. Few Western democracies have strategic interests in Belarus, but they still regard the advance of liberty there as good both for Belarus and for global stability. If Russian leaders sought to integrate Russia into the community of democratic states, they would have denounced Lukashenko’s thuggish ways. 
Browder’s saga is equally revealing. The denial of his visa is an obvious attempt to obstruct his business in Russia. All countries, of course, can regulate foreign investment as they see fit; the recent Dubai Ports World fiasco in the United States showed that democracies are hardly immune from xenophobic investment decisions. But although a democratic Russia would pass legislation defining what foreigners can and cannot own, a corrupt and autocratic Russia makes it easy for a local business competitor to deploy special state ties to keep Browder out. Moreover, Browder has pushed for minority shareholder rights in Russia’s major companies, including the gas giant Gazprom. Given Gazprom’s mammoth share of the world gas market, the United States has a clear interest in making the company more responsive to shareholders and less beholden to politicians. 
A less open Russia also increases the potential damage to the United States and its allies from new global threats. With the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster approaching, does anyone concerned with environmental hazards believe U.S. interests are unaffected when Russia clamps down on a free press that could broadcast critical information if a new transnational health threat emerged? 
Finally, if true, the revelations about Russian intelligence-sharing with Hussein before the war would be the most disturbing indication of how regime type affects foreign policy. Not all the world’s democracies supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but no democracy went so far as to aid Hus-sein in the war. In 2003, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder denounced the U.S.-led invasion, but his government shared intelligence on Iraq with its democratic allies. Putin appears to have done the opposite, possibly costing American lives. Also, before the war, Russian companies with ties to the state sold antitank missiles, night-vision goggles and equipment that jams global-positioning systems to the Iraqi armed forces. No European democracies did the same. 
There will always be so-called realists who argue that democracy is a secondary priority for American foreign policy in dealing with major powers such as Russia. Forget about the internal politics, they say, and just engage these countries on major strategic interests, such as nonproliferation or energy security. But how a country defines “strategic interest” depends on its regime; democracies have one set of definitions, autocracies another. 
A return to a more democratic path would serve U.S. interests by reducing dangers to democracy throughout Eurasia, enhancing property rights for American investors, providing a more reliable energy supply to the West and producing a more cooperative partner in addressing threats from terrorist groups or rogue regimes. 
But during the same week that the Kremlin backed Lukashenko, denied Browder his visa and was accused of sharing intelligence with Iraq, the Putin government also froze the bank accounts of Open Russia, the first major Russian foundation  to support the development of genuine civil society. And Marina Litvinovich — a spokeswoman for democratic activist Garry Kasparov — was brutally beaten, in what Russian human rights groups consider a grim warning to those who would challenge the government. 
Let’s stop pretending that Russia’s deteriorating domestic politics are unrelated to Russia’s increasingly antagonistic and anti-American foreign policies. The same autocratic regime is responsible for both. 

James Goldgeier is a professor of political science George Washington University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Michael McFaul is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and associate professor of political science at Stanford University. They contributed this com-ment to The Washington Post.

TITLE: Locals Step Into Ring With Developers
AUTHOR: By Perry Friesen
TEXT: The current federal government is trying to nip the bud of any movement in the general direction of a democratic revolution.  Governors will be appointed, not elected.  Non-governmental organizations spreading democratic ideals are being pressed like olive oil.  The average person on the street doesn’t want a revolution – he simply wants to live better.  People don’t even like to use the word “revolution”, because in Russia revolutions are red, and not just because it was the color of Communism.  While roses bloomed in Georgia, and orange flags waved in Ukraine, the question must be asked if, when and where a democratic revolution will come to Russia.  Maybe it already came and went.
A few months ago, largely unnoticed, seeds of a long overdue Russian resistance movement surfaced in the front yard of our apartment building.  Builders appeared out of nowhere and started to build a fence.  They planned to dismantle the one children’s playground for an apartment building of 550 families.  That night a meeting was called and residents decided they’d had enough.  They weren’t going to put up with it anymore.  Some years ago, they allowed a meat packing plant to be built a few meters behind our complex and have regretted it ever since.  The stench is suffocating.  Last year, residents acquiesced when a new 20-story apartment tower was built adjacent to the existing wing.  But when the last piece of open sky, the children’s playground, was threatened, residents said: “Enough!”  The angst necessary for a righteous Russian revolution raised its right hand and said, “We’re not putting up with this anymore.”  The result of the evening meeting was the tearing down of a shabby little plywood fence.  The guard box that the builders had lowered on a crane was pushed over and rolled to the road by the collective anger of sober men, surly grandmas and defiant children.  The builders turned tail, and there was great rejoicing.  It was suspected all along that they didn’t have the proper papers and permits to build.  The papers they did have were undoubtedly bought by backroom bribes.  The residents had won a temporary victory.
As any boxing fan knows, the first round doesn’t always determine the winner.  And, as anybody who is familiar with building projects in Russia knows, nobody is going to invest a lot of money in bribes to acquire a piece of land and then let a little children’s playground stand in the way.  Of course they came back.  
One fall day, about a month after round one ended, the builders came back with a corrugated metal fence.  In one day, they managed to fence off hundreds of square meters — not only the children’s playground but also the entire territory in front of our apartment building.  They planned to cut down trees that residents had planted with their own time and money.  
That fence didn’t last more than a few hours.  It was pushed over and taken apart by angry children, teens, adults and pensioners who were protecting their home.  
Round three began in the courts.  Two of the bravest and most active residents filed an official protest.  The builders were ready to bribe them to drop the case, but there are still people in this country who value principles over money.  
In court, they hope to show gross violations of building norms.  But getting city officials to show up for a court date proved harder than getting a date with Julia Roberts.  Rather than show up in court to face a losing position, the builders sold the property from one corporation to another with the blessing of the city, with the deal signed the very day the court had subpoenaed them.  The protestors met with the vice governor of St. Petersburg, who himself had signed a document saying there wasn’t enough room to build on such a territory.  But he wasn’t willing to lift a finger to get involved.  
One level of government contradicts another, one official contradicts himself, and court dates regularly get postponed.  The deeper you go into the court system, the clearer it becomes the only winners will be the lawyers and any judge with a moral code lower than the sewer system.  This round is a draw so far.
Spring arrived, and the builders came back with a bigger and better plan.  They must have read the story of the three pigs, because they didn’t come back with straw or sticks.  They came with ready made concrete slabs, a crane, and an escort of police officers.  They started dropping the slabs onto a service road where tens of cars vainly look for parking spots every night.  
But once again the crowds came out to meet them.  People’s deputy of the 45th Okrug, Oleg Anatoliovich Nilov, came to the aid of the protestors.  He is a government official too.  It soon becomes clear that various levels of government don’t work well together.  One level makes laws; the other finds ways to work around them.  Television cameras come.  Nilov says, “You’ve got to follow some kind of plan.  This just isn’t intelligent.  This destroys the conditions for a civilized city.”  He and the people are begging for the governor to come and face them.  They want Valentina Matviyenko to come and see with her own eyes the dreadful result of building progress in this city.  Teens like Anna, Sasha and Daria join the fight because they grew up here, played football here, some day want to have families here.  Pensioners join the fight because they don’t need another bank or casino built; they want a place to walk and sit, one last piece of open sky they can still see.  When I asked one local what he wants, he said, “We want to breathe.”  
Eventually the trucks all left.  They didn’t bother to pick up the concrete slabs.  Hired workers are content to leave litter on someone else’s property.  They’ll come back another day — you can be sure of that. 
Yet in the darkness, after standing in the cold all day, the people’s resistance forces started pulling down the concrete wall.  One man started to smash it with a sledge hammer.  And as he stood on top of the enemy’s concrete slab with a hammer in his hand, surrounded by a throng of cheering babushkas and children, it conjured up pictures in my mind of the Berlin wall almost two decades ago.  And I wonder: Is this resistance the seed of a righteous Russian revolution?  
P.S.: To the governor and other interested parties: the concrete slabs are on display at Komendantskiy Prospekt 32/1.  

Perry Friesen is a freelance journalist living and working in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: The Capital of Russian Fashion
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Muscovites, with their taste for “golden button” collections, are not ready to appreciate the “new European” fashion being offered in St. Petersburg, according to young designers from the city returning from the Russian Fashion Week which concluded last Thursday.
For the first time in its history, the Moscow-based Russian Fashion Week, or RFW, dedicated an entire day to St. Petersburg fashion on April 1. 
Designs from five local labels that are virtually unknown in Moscow — Princess and Frogs, Kogel, Pirosmani, Kiaby and Leonid Alexeev — were presented on the catwalks of the RFW, which, according to its organizers, is the largest fashion industry event in Eastern Europe. 
RFW has established a tradition of devoting special days to fashion from specific countries, featuring British, Spanish and Italian industries in 2004 and 2005. 
Explaining the special attention being paid to the city’s rag trade, RFW’s general producer, Alexander Shumsky, and Irina Ashkinadze, head of local fashion event Defile na Neve, said that St. Petersburg’s designers shape Russia’s emerging fashion industry for the foreign market.
According to Shumsky, interest in Russian fashion has grown dramatically over the last few years, and the West is anticipating something of “a Russian miracle.”
The Moscow-based designers Nina Neretina and Donis Pupis (of the Nina&Donis fashion label), whose collections are stocked in boutiques in New York and London, confirmed this trend. 
As quoted on Fashion Capital, a British industry portal, Donis said: “First there was a wave of Japanese designers, then came the Belgians, now the fashion world is experiencing a minor crisis, everyone’s waiting to see who is next. For some reason, many people hope that the new wave will come from Russia.”
“There’s no doubt that, sooner or later, we [the Russian fashion industry] will enter the international fashion arena with a Russian style and some new fashion vision,” Shumsky agreed. 
“After analyzing fashion shows and reading the press, I can definitely say that St. Petersburg designers have a decisive advantage,” said Shumsky. “What St. Petersburg’s designers have to offer is an adaptation of the city’s cultural traditions combined with a new European vision,” said Yevgenia Malygina, one of the designers behind the Pirosmani label and a participant in the St. Petersburg Fashion Day at the RFW.
Asya Kogel of the Kogel label, the only fashion house of the above-mentioned group to have previous RFW experience, said that she preferred showing her collections as part of a St. Petersburg team rather than going it alone. 
“When you appear on RFW as a single fashion house, it’s hard to get much attention, as there are a lot of designers from around the world at the show,” she says.
“The much talked-about Petersburg style certainly helped us to get noticed,” she says.
“It was also nice to see familiar faces backstage, people who you can ask for help, whether it’s a needle you’re looking for or just moral support,” she added.
Leonid Alexeev, another member of the St. Petersburg fashion team and the chief designer for the label of the same name, said the fact that the designers were united as a team, although helpful in some ways, presented the greatest difficulty.
“Not only did we see ourselves as a team, everyone else regarded us as a whole. I wouldn’t be surprised if the organizers [of RFW] even thought we lived together,” he says.
“We only brought our collections, not the Mariinsky [Theatre] to the week, and we weren’t ready to answer all the questions from various journalists that were solely based on the connection with St. Petersburg,” he said. 
 “We can be associated with the city only in terms of our registration address — St. Petersburg is just a place we all happen to have lived in,” Alexeev said. 
Ashkinadze said that there is a certain St. Petersburg aura to be found in every collection coming from St. Petersburg designers. 
She said that the city’s designs have a distinct “St. Petersburg” feel, though they also manage to remain elusive. “That’s probably what constitutes the St. Petersburg style — you can feel it, but you can’t describe it,” she said.
St. Petersburg’s designers may indeed have some special vision but, according to them, Moscow looks at fashion in a different way. 
“Our aim is to make clothes that can be sold and worn, which doesn’t seem to be the aim of the majority of designers in Moscow,” Yelena Tikhonova of Princess and Frogs said.
“Moscow has a slightly different approach to fashion,” Malygina said. “Our arrival in the capital was unexpected [for the Moscow audience], our vision is new to them, and they are not yet ready to appreciate it.” 
“Moscow brands form pop-culture, their shows feature some strange people, so-called ‘freaks’, and other people with piercing all over their bodies,” Alexeev said, describing his impressions of the event.
“Their collections are made for the catwalk and won’t see life beyond fashion magazines,” he added.
Alexeev may have a point if some of the attention from abroad is anything to go by. Diane Pernet, a Paris-based American fashion critic, uploaded a host of pictures featuring Marilyn Manson look-alikes on the RFW catwalk to her day-by-day blog account of the event.
Though fashion weeks have long since lost their “trade only” character, gaining an important entertainment component, many of St. Petersburg’s designers do not regard this change as an advantage. 
According to Alexeev, “there are only a few fashion professionals in Moscow — the majority of the audiences are the type of people who like ‘grandiose theatrics.’” 
However, it’s clear that Russian Fashion Week is an event capable of providing a major stepping stone in the development of a young designer, potentially providing a launch pad to an international career.
Asked if there are any objective criteria by which the work of a designer can be judged at the event, Alexeev said that the quantity of offers designers receive at the showroom — a special exhibition and shop floor facility where all the collection items can be viewed by buyers at the end of the fashion week — is all important.
Alexeev said that his self-supporting design studio has already reached a turnover of around 1,000 items (including accessories) per season and that he’s eager to produce more.
“We decided to go to Moscow because we have a steady income and are now ready to support our future progress,” Alexeev said.
As Ashkinadze puts it, “We did the best we could to demonstrate our abilities at RFW, and now it’s time to continue our work.”

TITLE: Exit Polls: Prodi Defeats Berlusconi as Italian PM
AUTHOR: By Crispian Balmer
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ROME — Center-left leader Romano Prodi looks set to beat Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’s general election, winning a majority in both houses of parliament, according to exit polls released on Monday. 
A poll by the Nexus research institute predicted that Prodi’s alliance would win between 50 and 54 percent of the vote in both the lower and upper houses of parliament.
Berlusconi’s center-right bloc was shown winning 45 to 49 percent of the vote in both houses according to the poll, broadcast by state television RAI.
A separate poll by Piepoli, shown on Sky Italia television, showed former European Commission president Prodi winning 52 percent of the vote in the lower house, to give it 340 of the chamber’s 630 seats.
Official results were due by the end of Monday.
Prodi’s center-left alliance, which stretches from Roman Catholic centrists to communists, had led in opinion polls for the past two years, benefiting from widespread voter discontent over the stagnant economy.
Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man who created the country’s biggest media empire, dominated the often ill-tempered election campaign with a string of outbursts, gaffes and last-minute promises to cut taxes.
But pollsters said his House of Freedoms coalition always faced an uphill battle to win over voters who felt the ever-optimistic Berlusconi had failed to deliver on pledges to revolutionize hidebound Italy and revive the economy.
The Piepoli poll suggested the prime minister’s own Forza Italia party had suffered a pummeling with support dropping to 21.0 percent from 29.4 percent in 2001.
Prodi, 66, beat Berlusconi in a 1996 general election, but his government lasted only two years before it was brought down by disgruntled communist allies.
Critics say any new government headed by the occasionally prickly Prodi will suffer a similar fate because of the gaping ideological divide within his multi-party alliance.
But Prodi insisted throughout the campaign that his coalition could last a full five-year term, noting that unlike in 1996 his allies had signed up to a 289-page manifesto that will serve as a road map for any center-left government.
The manifesto pledges to cut labor taxes, provide bigger handouts for families with children, reintroduce an inheritance tax, scrap plans to raise the age of retirement to 60 and launch a crackdown on tax evasion.
Berlusconi has warned that the left will bring tax misery to the middle classes and said last week that only “coglioni” would vote for Prodi. “Coglioni” means testicles and is often used as an insult meaning “asshole.” 
Whatever the result, the next government is not expected to take office for at least a month, with Berlusconi set to stay on in a caretaker capacity until parliament nominates a successor to President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, whose mandate expires in May. 
The president must name the new prime minister and Ciampi says he wants to leave the task to his successor.

TITLE: Chirac Dumps Youth Jobs Law
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Pineau
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — France will scrap a planned youth job contract that has provoked weeks of protests and a political crisis, President Jacques Chirac said on Monday. 
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who has championed the job law and seen his poll ratings plunge as a result, said in a televised statement he regretted that events had shown the contract could not be applied.
He did not spell out the implications for his own political future, put at risk as a result of his handling of the dispute.
“The president of the republic has decided to replace article 8 of the equal opportunities law with measures to help disadvantaged young people find work,” said a statement from the presidency.
One student leader said the First Job Contract (CPE) was effectively dead.
The new measures in the law would address the problem of 22 percent youth unemployment, quell the protests and also find a way of saving face for Villepin, commentators said.
Details of the measures were expected later in the day and new legislation could enter parliament as early as this week.
“The necessary conditions of confidence and calm are not there, either among young people, or companies, to allow the application of the First Job Contract,” Villepin said in his brief televised statement after meetings with Chirac and other senior ruling conservatives.
Villepin said the contract would be replaced by proposals aimed at helping disadvantaged young job-seekers and he said he would open a discussion “without preconditions” with social partners on how to provide youth employment.
The protests, and a perception that Villepin has been unresponsive to voter sentiment over the contract, has damaged the popularity of the prime minister and his hopes of becoming the ruling party’s candidate for presidential elections in 2007.
A poll for Liberation newspaper showed Villepin’s popularity stood at 49 percent in the first week of January but had fallen to 25 percent this weekend. Negative opinion of Chirac rose from 56 percent to 64 percent over the same period.
Chirac and Villepin were careful in their statements to say the CPE was being “replaced.” Others said it was dead.
“The players in the crisis have difficulty pronouncing the words repeal. The CPE is dead, the CPE seems to be finished ... and I think they must have the courage finally to say it clearly,” Julie Coudry, president of the student confederation, said on LCI television.
Asked if she was satisfied, Coudry replied: “Of course. I think we have a mobilization that has been organized for two and a half months by 12 organizations, with one main aim, which is the withdrawal of the CPE.
“Today I think we can say that they have finally understood and that we are satisfied.”
Dominique Paille, a UMP deputy considered close to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who had for weeks called for a compromise on the contract, said: “The president of the republic is withdrawing the CPE. It’s a measure that corresponds with what the entire population has been waiting for.”
Sarkozy, vilified by many protesters, is the head of the ruling party and a rival with Villepin for the party’s candidacy next year when Chirac is expected to step down. The Socialist Party has yet to name its candidate. 
The “easy hire, easy fire” CPE would have allowed firms to sack workers under 26 without giving a reason during a two-year trial period. 
Students were planning fresh protest marches on Tuesday. Hundreds marched through Paris on Sunday to demand that classes resume and students end a blockade that has brought many high schools and universities to a standstill.

TITLE: 8 Killed in Canada Bloodbath
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TORONTO, Canada — Eight men found murdered in a rural Ontario town were from the Toronto area, but police refused to say on Sunday if an organized gang was responsible for the mass killings, among the worst in Canada’s recent history. 
Police believe the victims found on Saturday were acquainted. But investigators released few other details, such as the men’s names, and said the number of bodies was slowing the autopsy process.
 The victims, all white men, were found in or near three cars and a tow truck in a farmer’s field and adjacent dirt road in Shedden, a southwest Ontario town about 130 miles from Toronto — midway between that city and Detroit.
“At this point in time we are confident that the victims were known to each other and from the greater Toronto area,” Detective Superintendent Ross Bingley of the Ontario Provincial Police told a news conference.
It was the largest number of bodies at a single murder scene that he could remember in nearly three decades as a policeman.

TITLE: Queen Elizabeth Used ‘The Royal E-mail’ 30 Years Ago
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: LONDON — Queen Elizabeth II sent her first e-mail as long as 30 years ago, according to a list of 80 facts about the monarch released by Buckingham Palace to mark her 80th birthday on April 21. 
No details of the e-mail were included, except that it was sent from a British army base in 1976.
The 40th monarch since William the Conqueror, she has undertaken over 256 official visits overseas during her 54-year reign and has received some bizarre gifts, the list revealed.
They included jaguars and sloths from Brazil, two black beavers from Canada, a grove of maple trees and 7 kilograms of prawns.
The queen traveled on the London underground for the first time in 1939 and attended her first FA football cup final in 1953, two experiences she never showed much appetite for repeating.
But dogs and horses were a different matter: she has owned more than 30 corgis in her reign, starting with Susan who was an 18th birthday present in 1944. Her first pony, Peggy, was given to her by her grandfather King George V when she was four years old.
Meanwhile, the queen’s son and heir Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, marked their first wedding anniversary privately Sunday at the Scottish estate where they spent their honeymoon. 
The couple, who recently returned from a trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India, were relaxing at the royal Balmoral estate in Scotland. They planned no public celebration. 
The wedding had originally been scheduled for April 8, 2005, but was postponed a day so that Charles could attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II.

(Reuters, AP)

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: 120 Feared Drowned
ACCRA, Ghana (Reuters) — Some 120 people were feared drowned after a boat packed with passengers and goods capsized on Ghana’s Lake Volta, police in the West African country said on Monday. 
“There were 150 passengers on board but only 30 have been rescued. The rest are feared dead,” police spokesman Kwesi Ofori said. He said the accident happened on Saturday and that a search party was still looking for survivors.
Ofori said the boat was probably overloaded. He said it hit a stump as it traveled across the lake, which covers an area more than three times the size of Luxembourg. 

Presidential Runoff 
LIMA, Peru (Reuters) — Ollanta Humala, a former army commander who campaigned to put Peru’s economy in state hands, clung to a slim lead on Monday in a tight three-way race for president, official results showed. 
With 53 percent of votes counted, Peru’s election authority said Humala — who has vowed a revolution to redistribute Peru’s wealth to the Andean poor — had 27.8 percent.
Pro-business conservative Lourdes Flores was second with 26.3 percent, followed by left-of-center former President Alan Garcia with 25.6 percent. No candidate had the 50 percent support to needed avoid a runoff between the top two finishers.

White House Intruder
WASHINGTON D.C. (Reuters) — An unarmed intruder with a history of jumping the White House fence was subdued at gunpoint on Sunday after entering the grounds of the executive mansion while President George W. Bush was at home. 
The bearded man, wearing a ragged T-shirt that said “God Bless America,” scaled the White House fence and ran onto the front lawn, waving his arms and screaming “I am a victim of terrorism,” before Secret Service officers chased him down. 
Bush was inside the White House at the time after attending church.

$218 Trillion Phone Bill
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A Malaysian man said he nearly fainted when he was sent a $218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to pay up within 10 days or face prosecution, a newspaper reported Monday. 
Yahaya Wahab said he disconnected his late father’s phone line in January after he died and settled the 84 ringgit ($23) bill, the New Straits Times reported.
But Telekom Malaysia later sent him a 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit ($218 trillion) bill for recent telephone calls along with orders to settle within 10 days or face legal proceedings, the newspaper reported.
It wasn’t clear whether the bill was a mistake, or if Yahaya’s father’s phone line was used illegally after his death.

TITLE: Mickelson Musters U.S. Masters Victory
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: AUGUSTA, Georgia — Left-hander Phil Mickelson sealed his third major title and second green jacket with a two-shot victory in the U.S. Masters on Sunday. 
One shot clear after the weather-hit third round was completed earlier in the day, the 35-year-old American fired a closing three-under-par 69 to finish on seven-under 281 in late afternoon sunshine at Augusta National.
Mickelson broke clear of a tightly bunched leaderboard with birdies on seven and eight and effectively secured his second Masters crown in three years by picking up further shots on 13 and 15.
He could afford to bogey the last, after missing the green to the left with his approach, before collecting his 29th PGA Tour title.
“It was a really fun day and I had an incredible time playing the final 18 holes,” a smiling Mickelson told reporters after following up his 13-stroke victory at last week’s BellSouth Classic in nearby Duluth.
“It’s been a long day but a wonderful day and I will cherish that final round.
“The stress-free walk up 18 was incredible. It was a great feeling knowing that I had the tournament in hand.
“I’m having so much fun now competing for major championships,” added the Californian, who ended a 12-year wait for a major breakthrough with a one-shot victory at the 2004 Masters.
Winner of last year’s U.S. PGA Championship at Baltusrol, Mickelson became the first player to clinch successive majors since Tiger Woods at the 2002 U.S. Open. 
South African Tim Clark spectacularly holed out for a birdie-three from a greenside bunker at the last for a 69 which earned second place on 283.
Holder Woods, the world number one, had to settle for a share of third position, four birdies in the last six holes giving him a 70 and a four-under total of 284.
Level with Woods were Spaniard Jose Maria Olazabal, who shot a best-of-the-week 66, world number three Retief Goosen (69) of South Africa and Americans Fred Couples (71) and Chad Campbell (71).
When Mickelson rolled in an eight-footer on 15 for his fourth birdie of the day, it put him four clear as his closest rivals repeatedly failed to take advantage of birdie opportunities.
Playing partner Couples was two strokes back after a birdie on 13 before he three-putted from four feet for a bogey-five on 14.
Couples, aiming to become the oldest Masters champion at 46, was in excellent form from tee to green but missed several close-range putts as his victory hopes faded.
“My putting wasn’t horrible but it was mediocre,” said Couples, whose last PGA Tour victory came at the 2003 Houston Open.
“But I liked the way I played today and it was a lot of fun.” 
Twice former winner Olazabal reeled off five birdies and one bogey to race to the turn in four-under 32.
Masters champion in 1994 and 1999, the Spaniard then struck a superb second shot from 245 yards to three feet for an eagle on 15 to briefly join Couples in a tie for second. 
Although he slipped back with a three-putt bogey at the par-three 16th, he parred the last two holes to finish at four under. 
“I thought I needed to go six (under) to put pressure on these guys,” Olazabal said. 
“When I three-putted 16, I tried to force the situation on 17 and 18 and made two pars in the end.” 
Woods, chasing a fifth green jacket, clawed his way into a share of second place with his third birdie of the day at the par-three 16th, but then bogeyed 17 before holing a 20-footer at the last. 
Like Couples, the 30-year-old American was badly let down over the opening holes by his putter in his bid for an 11th career major. 
“I hit it great today but I putted atrociously,” said Woods. “I feel like breaking the putter into eight pieces. I didn’t know what was going on.”

TITLE: Russia Defeats France to Meet U.S. in Semis
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — The United States, Argentina and Russia joined Australia on Sunday in reaching the Davis Cup semifinals while defending champion Croatia was eliminated. 
Andy Roddick sent the Americans into the next round by beating Fernando Gonzalez of Chile 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, 6-2 in Rancho Mirage, California. The Americans were up 3-1 with one match remaining.
In the semifinals in September, the United States will play Russia. Argentina will host Australia.
Argentina held on to oust Croatia 3-2, with Juan Ignacio Chela rallying to beat Sasa Tuksar 3-6, 6-4, 7-6 (6), 7-6 (5) in the final match. 
Russia beat host France 4-1 after Dmitry Tursunov downed Richard Gasquet 6-1, 3-6, 6-7 (4), 6-3, 7-5 in the deciding match.
In Pau, France, Tursunov saved a break point in the fourth set and then dominated Gasquet in the first reverse singles.
“I played well, but I came up against a player who just played like crazy,” Gasquet said. 
“Tursunov played the level of someone in the top 10. He felt no pressure in the fourth and fifth sets. I thought he would crumble, but he didn’t.”
Tursunov played in place of Nikolai Davydenko, who had leg cramps from his win over Arnaud Clement on Friday. Mikhail Yuzhny downed Michael Llodra 6-2 4-6 7-6  in the final match.
Russia defeated France in the quarterfinals for the second straight year. The last time the French team beat Russia was in 1983.
In Melbourne against Belarus, Wayne Arthurs and Chris Guccione completed the sweep for the hosts, putting Australia in the semifinals for the fifth time in eight years. 
With the outcome already settled, Arthurs topped Sergei Tarasevich 7-6  6-2 and Guccione beat Alexander Zotov 6-1 6-3 at Kooyong.

TITLE: Gold Goes To Sweden At Tourney
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Sweden won the gold medal at the Bolshoi Priz junior ice hockey tournament with a 4-3 win over Russia at the Yubileiny Sports Palace on Sunday. 
Anchored by goaltender Johan Thalberg, Sweden held on through fierce pressure from the Russians during the final five minutes. 
With 2:51 left in regulation Nikita Mikhno scored a powerplay goal but his efforts came too late. Russia continued attacking and with 57 seconds on the clock Sweden’s Martin Johansson was sent to the penalty box for high sticking. Russia pulled goaltender Alexander Tryanichev to give them an extra attacker, but Thalberg stood on his head and Sweden held on to win. 
“We played our best game tonight. I’m glad that we saved it for the final match,” Sweden coach Torgny Bendelin said. “This is my fourth year at this tournament and I can say that it is second only to the World Junior Championship. There is a great hockey atmosphere and lots of tough competition so for me this is a great honor for us to win the gold.”
This is the first year a non-Russian team has won since the Swedes won in 2000. Russia has won every year since with the exception of 2004 when Team St. Petersburg, made up of local players, edged Team Russia for the gold.
It seemed at first that Russia would keep the streak alive after Vyacheslav Buravchikov threaded a pass through traffic to Alexander Aksyonenko, who scored at 2:30 during a two man advantage, to take an early lead. 

SWEDEN STEPS UP
Patric Hornqvist answered for Sweden during a powerplay, scoring at 6:09 with a wrist shot that eluded Tryanichev. 
Tempers flared at 8:36 in a scuffle involving most of the players on the ice and six players — three from each team — were penalized for roughing. 
At 9:14 Russia retook the lead after Alexander Loganov scored during a 4-on-3 situation. 
Tension was high and play was chippy throughout the rest of the first period.
“Hockey is a very emotional sport,” Russia coach Vladimir Popov said. “[Our play was] aggressive, tough and [had] spirit, but our opponents were just a little bit stronger. We got out to a good start but our top line hasn’t been performing as well as it should and in the end it just wasn’t enough.”
Indeed, this year’s class of Russian players, born in 1987, lacks promising stars, particularly in offense. 
“With each game we’ve gotten progressively better. We’ve corrected a number of defensive problems and really game together, but we really lacked [power up front]. I don’t expect many of these players to make the team going to the World Juniors,” Popov added. 
Sweden played smart hockey during the second frame and Magnus Isaksson, who was named the competition’s best forward, leveled the score at two, tipping in a rebound during a two man power play at 28:00.

TITLE: Dinamo Relinquishes FIBA Title
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Dinamo St. Petersburg came fourth and last in the FIBA Eurocup Final Four  on Sunday in Kiev, Ukraine, failing to repeat last year’s success when the club won the tournament just a year after it was formed.
The St. Petersburg club lost in a semifinal to Russian side BC Khimki on Friday in a reversal of a semifinal last year in which it had been victorious. Khimki’s revenge came as it won 63-61 on a buzzer lay-up by Oscar Torres.
In the fight for third place, Dinamo was beaten in another close game Sunday which ended 83-81 in favor of Ukranian side BC Kiev. This match was a replay of last year’s final in Istanbul which Dinamo won 85-74.
“We were not lucky in this tournament,” Dinamo coach Fotis Katsikaris told FIBA Europe’s website on Sunday. “In any game you need luck sometimes. Besides the technical part of the game, we lost today the same way Khimki beat us.” 
“I told my players today that we are one of the best 10 teams in Europe. We belong in that group and I am very proud of my team,” he added. 
Although disappointed at not winning the title again, Katsikaris saw positive elements in Dinamo’s Final Four defeats.
“I was satisfied with the way we played [on Sunday] because we only had one day to recover from Friday’s loss. It looked like we would lose the game but we came back which showed real character and this is important for our upcoming league games,” Katsikaris said.
DKV Joventut of Spain won the Final Four after crushing Khimki 88-63 on Sunday.
As well as losing the title, Dinamo also missed out on the chance of playing in one of the two better-known European leagues, the ULEB Cup and the Euroleague. If it had won any of its games Dinamo would have taken a step up Europe’s basketball ladder.
But sports director Igor Rubin has not called off the chase for the ULEB league. He said Monday that if Dinamo can win or come second in the Russian domestic league, the team will participate in one of the larger European tournaments next year.

TITLE: Swiss Win ‘Hell’
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ROUBAIX, France — CSC rider Fabian Cancellara handed the Swiss only their second win in 104 editions of the Paris-Roubaix one-day classic Sunday in a day of drama and disqualification.
Cancellara proved too strong for world champion Tom Boonen in the final 30 kilometers, stylishly ending the Belgian’s dream of becoming the first rider to win the Tour of Flanders and the Paris-Roubaix two years in a row.
Another of the main contenders, America’s runner-up from last year George Hincapie, failed to finish, crashing out with just under 50 kilometers to go in the race known as the “Hell of the North.”
More disappointment was to come for the Discovery Channel team as officials disqualified runner-up Leif Hoste and Russian Vladimir Gusev.

TITLE: Down a Man, Chelsea Thumps West Ham to Consolidate Lead
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Ten-man Chelsea roared back from a goal down to trounce West Ham United 4-1 and move closer to a second consecutive Premier League title on Sunday, despite a 2-0 win for Manchester United over Arsenal. 
With five games left, champions Chelsea have 82 points — seven more than second-placed United after England striker Wayne Rooney scored one and made the other for South Korean Park Ji-sung in a pulsating clash at Old Trafford. 
Third-placed Liverpool stay five points behind United, having played a game more, after striker Robbie Fowler celebrated his 31st birthday with the winner in a 1-0 victory over Bolton Wanderers.  
United’s victory provided a rousing finale to the weekend’s action and dealt a bodyblow to sixth-placed Arsenal’s hopes of qualifying for next season’s Champions League. 
But Chelsea remain on course for a second league title, despite going a goal down on Sunday and facing a crunch match at home to United on April 29. 
James Collins headed West Ham into a 10th minute lead and Chelsea’s Portugal midfielder Maniche was red-carded six minutes later for a rash tackle on Lionel Scaloni. 
Jose Mourinho’s 10 men rose to the challenge, with Ivorian Didier Drogba levelling in the 29th minute and Argentine strike partner Hernan Crespo putting them ahead two minutes later. 
Goals from defenders John Terry and William Gallas put the London derby beyond doubt in the second half.