SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1168 (34), Friday, May 12, 2006
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TITLE: Mariinsky To Close Next Year
AUTHOR: Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The famous sea-green building which has been home to the Mariinsky Theater since 1860 is closing for a major renovation in Jan. 2007 and will reopen in May 2008, said the company’s artistic director Valery Gergiev at a news conference before the official opening of this year’s “The Stars of the White Nights” festival on Wednesday.
“In 2008, our summer festival will be back within these walls,” Gergiev said.
To prevent the world-renowned opera and ballet company from becoming homeless, the maestro, whose artistic talent and charisma are the heart of the theater’s fundraising campaigns, has attracted $20 million of sponsorship money to build a new concert hall on Ulitsa Pisareva, a short walk from the Mariinsky’s current home. 
The concert hall, built from scratch at the site of the theater’s former warehouse which was damaged by fire in 2003, is scheduled to be opened this summer.
The pace of the construction matches Gergiev’s hectic working schedule — a morning rehearsal in Britain, an afternoon rehearsal in Germany and a performance in St. Petersburg, as the joke has it.
“After just eleven months, the venue is practically finished,” the maestro said. “During the reconstruction, the troupe will perform there as well as move some shows to the Lensoviet Palace of Culture and the Musical Comedy Theater.”
The new spacious venue on Ulitsa Pisareva, which seats up to 1,100 people, will accommodate nearly all of the Mariinsky’s shows, with several exceptions, including Andrei Konchalovsky’s opulent rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera “War and Peace” and a reconstruction of the original version of Marius Petipa’s “The Sleeping Beauty.”
Mariinsky II, a new theater to be built behind the 1840 original to comprise a modern cultural quarter and designed by French architect Dominique Perrault, will be complete by 2009. The costs of the construction have been reduced, as was the building’s size, Gergiev said.
“Last time I looked at the suggested costs, I was bewildered,” he said. “No theater, no matter how successful it is, can cost 1 billion euros. I am determined to keep the costs within 200,000 euros. The building will be on a smaller, more chamber scale. It would be wrong to allow the new construction to outshadow the entire neighborhood, including the historical venue.”

TITLE: Putin To Give Cash For Babies
AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin offered women cash to have more babies on Wednesday as he tackled a decline in population that is leaving swathes of the country deserted and threatening to strangle economic growth.
In his annual address to the nation, Putin said each year Russia’s population fell by about 700,000 — or about the same as the population of San Francisco. He proposed new financial incentives to nudge up the birth rate.
His measures had echoes of the Soviet Union, when the Kremlin saw increasing the population as a key front in the Cold War. Women with large families had the title “Hero Mother” and were given medals and expensive gifts.
“Let’s talk about the most acute problem facing Russia — demography,” Putin said. “Broadly speaking we are talking about the preservation of our people.”
“We must resurrect our time-honored traditions of treating the family, home and hearth, with special care,” he said. But some young families said having even one child is a financial struggle and more fundamental changes are needed before they would risk rearing a second or third child.
Putin proposed more than doubling monthly payouts to families for their first baby to 1,500 rubles ($55) — over half the average wage. 
Many Russian parents choose to stop at only one child. But if they have a second then that child, under Putin’s proposals, will merit 3,000 rubles a month.
And he said the state should pay women who give up work to have a child not less than 40 percent of what they used to earn. Since the Soviet collapse, Russia’s population has nosedived. Demographers blame low life expectancy as well as the low birth rate.
A World Bank report in December said as the pool of workers shrinks, Russia’s strong economic growth could be threatened. Villages and towns are falling empty in many parts of the vast country as the residents die out and are not replaced.
A small sample of young parents and would-be parents said on Wednesday that Putin’s proposals did not go far enough.
“The amounts of state assistance [Putin] is talking about are laughably small,” said Oleg Bryukhanovsky, a 28-year-old lawyer whose wife is expecting their first child.
“Prices for everything to do with children are going up ... We will probably put off having a second child for as long as possible ... for material reasons.”
Andrei Karmadanov, 23, from Russia’s Far East, has a two-year-old child. He said it was almost impossible to get a nursery place for his son. 
His one-room apartment was too small to have a second child and there was little prospect of getting a bigger one, he said.
Karmadanov said Putin’s proposals would only encourage freeloaders who will have children to qualify for state handouts. “To be frank, this money will just go on vodka.”
Anna Mikhailova, 24, and her computer specialist husband are expecting their first child next month.
“We think that if the state’s policy remains the same we will stick to just having two children,” she said. “You cannot be sure that you will be able to put food on your child’s plate.”
According to official data, Russia’s population has dropped from 145 million in 2003 to 143 million. Officials say if the trend goes unchecked the population could be down to 100 million by the middle of the century.
Putin also proposed better healthcare and diet to help Russians live longer. The average Russian lives for 66 years, some 12 years less than the average German. 
Factors like poor diet and heavy drinking shorten the lifespan of the average Russian man to 58 years.

TITLE: Veteran Recalls Agony and Ecstasy of War
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Six years and one day. It seems nothing compared to the long life of St. Petersburg pensioner David Ilych Altshuller, who celebrated his 90th birthday on May 1. Nothing — if you do not know what this period signifies for Altshuller: a commission in the Red Army and service throughout World War II, which ended 61 years ago this week. 
Although Altshuller has a lot in his life to be proud of, for example, the turbine which he engineered at an atomic power station in Obninsk, these six years are imprinted on his memory forever.  
“When I speak about these days, everything stands alive in my eyes,” said Altshuller.
By 1939 Altshuller was already working at the Nevsky Plant in Leningrad (he works to this day as a mechanical engineering consultant), had graduated from the Polytechnic Institute and was married. He met his future wife on preparatory courses for the institute. 
But he had to leave his beloved soon after the marriage to serve in the Red Army for two years. 
“There was not even a thought not to serve. It was impossible,” Altshuller said.
Nobody then imagined that war was just around the corner.
During his service Altshuller was sent to Moscow, tried the profession of army press photographer, then later found himself in Leningrad where he taught and wrote political news items. 
“I was sitting in the office, so it gave me the opportunity to call home. It was very important for me,” Altshuller said.
In 1941 the courses were disbanded. 
“Now I understand it was because of the approach of the war. But at that time nobody thought about it.”
Altshuller asked if he could go to Luga, a town some 140 kilometers south of Leningrad, with his wife for the summer. But it did not happen. 
Sunday, June 22 1941 began like any other day. Reveille at 8 a.m., formation, line song. 
“You could go to breakfast only if you sang well, otherwise you had to go another circle. That day we came late. We sang badly.” 
Altshuller remembers every small detail of that day.
“We had buckwheat porridge with cod for breakfast. And also bread roll and tea. Others were still on the drill square.” But Altshuller did not have time for his bread roll and tea — the alarm was raised. 
“You never know if it is a real alarm. We had such training alarms before. But that time I noticed that in the most important place in the regiment — the so-called Lenin room — everything had been removed. It was the first serious sign.”
At midday they listened to a report by Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister and mouthpiece of the Soviet Union. Hitler had attacked. The war had begun.  
“I remember there was makhorka [an inferior kind of tobacco]. It was the first time I had smoked...”
And on July 1 came Altshuller’s first battle. The regiment was near Pskov, south of Leningrad, and 13 days after war had begun the men were begging to be sent to a forward position. Everything was ready for action. 
“It was a ‘White Night.’ 5 a.m. Suddenly a shout rang out. Tanks, German! On the left! Confusion set in. The enemy onslaught was so strong that our regiment was falling back... But it was  really impossible to hold out... The dismay was too strong.”
The retreat was contrary to the men’s patriotic upbringing.
“It was morally difficult. It never even crossed our minds, the thought that we could retreat.”
All Altshuller could think about was his family. 
“It sobers you so strongly. They were in Leningrad. What was happening to them? The enemy was rushing to the city. We did not have any information where the German forces were. They were much nearer then we were told.” 
That evening Altshuller and the regiment arrived at Luga. Everywhere there was chaos, crying, and terror. That night he called home and talked to his wife for the last time to bid her farewell. 
“Later, during all that time, I could think about only one thing. The enemy had come to Leningrad. I did not have any contact with my family, I did not know what had happened to them.” 
Confidence in victory finally gathered momentum in 1943. The Red Army was re-equipped with weapons, tanks, machinery and the belief that the war would be won.
In 1943, Altshuller’s regiment had to cross Lake Ilmen in the Novgorod Oblast. Like the artillery, the regiment used horse-drawn vehicles pulled by small Mongolian horses. The village on the other side of the frozen lake was occupied by the Germans. 
“We had to cross the lake. We moved and suddenly bright searchlights were turned on us. They lit our backs — and the Germans’ faces. The Germans fired at us and we had losses but in spite of everything many of our men managed to get by. A sudden change came.”
It was the beginning of the offensive attack of the Volkhov front. 
Altshuller still remembers the appearance of “Katyusha,” a truck-mounted multiple rocket launcher, which proved so disastrous for the Germans. 
“We were in the dug-out. It was night. Suddenly we heard a horrible crash. The orderly dropped in and a machine had come! That was our Katyusha.”
Altshuller’s story includes terrifying battles and at the same time he remembers with humor fishing in Lake Ilmen, wartime life in Germany and celebrating his birthday. 
But among these stories Altshuller immediately returns  to the horrors of war. 
“It was May 8,” Altshuller recalled. The deputy chief of the artillery division told him in confidence the war was over. Suddenly Altshuller saw a barefoot 15-year-old girl. She was running along the street and trying to explain something to soldiers with signs. She seemed to call them somewhere. 
“We followed her and discovered a whole weaving factory full of frightened, hungry and ill women. One of them heard the war was over but they were afraid to go out. The day before the commandant had beaten them unmercilessly and escaped. There were also Russian-speaking women.” 
The pictures that remain in Altshuller’s memory of May 8, 1945, evoke trees on the highway heavy with cherry blossom and feelings of joy that soon he would see his family and his wife. To this day the veteran keeps the photograph he carried with him throughout the war. He has been married for 72 years.
Altshuller had kept a diary of his war years but he forgot his notes on the train after returning from the front. 
“When I saw from the train window my father and my wife, I forgot about everything. When I went back, my bag had gone,” Altshuller sighs, adding “but… it doesn’t cause me any pain — I came back alive.
“When I returned, I saw my daughter for the first time. She was born in the beginning of the war without me.”
Altshuller went through the war in one regiment. At the beginning it was made up of 600 to 700 men, but at the end there were only 25 to 30 of the men left alive. He often asks himself what saved him during those terrible years. He was on the front line, his friends were killed and yet he survived with just one minor injury.
“If I were a believer, I would say God. But I am not a believer and I say my wife saved me, I am sure of it, she was my guardian angel. It was fated so.”

TITLE: Victory Over Fascism Honored
AUTHOR: By Anastasiya Lebedev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the parade for the 61st Victory Day anniversary on Tuesday, said the Soviet defeat of the Nazis should be a warning to those seeking to revive fascism today.
Speaking against a backdrop of rising intolerance and racially motivated violence in Russia, Putin linked today’s extremism and xenophobia with the fascist menace of World War II.
“Those who are once again trying to raise the defeated banners of Nazism — those who are planting racial hatred, extremism and xenophobia — are leading the world toward a dead end,” Putin said in televised remarks on Moscow’s Red Square. “The downfall of fascism should become a lesson and a warning that retaliation is inevitable.”
Putin noted the sacrifices made by Russians during the war and thanked the veterans who attended the parade for their service. More than 6,000 servicemen marched in the parade. The veterans, growing frailer and fewer by the year, have not taken part in the parade since 2004.
Putin met with approximately 30 decorated veterans on Monday, promising to solve veterans’ housing, health care and transportation issues. 
The troops on Tuesday sang the Russian national anthem a cappella, and the performance is to be submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records, news agencies reported.
Communists, National Bolsheviks, members of the Red Youth Vanguard and members of other left-wing and ultranationalist groups marched from Belorussky Station down Tverskaya Ulitsa and on to Lubyanskaya Ploshchad.
Marchers touted portraits of Lenin and Stalin and a banner reading “We won’t relinquish victory. We will defend our fatherland.” 
About 11,000 people participated in two rallies on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, Ekho Moskvy radio reported, citing Moscow police. The majority of participants were elderly, the radio station noted.
More than 500,000 people gathered at the Poklonnaya Gora war memorial to hear a classical music concert conducted by Mariinsky Theater artistic director Valery Gergiev, Russian media reported, citing a figure provided by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.
Other celebrations, featuring decorated war veterans singing and dancing, took place across the country. In Vladivostok, French sailors paid their respects to Russian veterans.
Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, commemmorations remembering the 27 million Soviets who died during the war were held.
Chechens, meanwhile, spent Victory Day mourning their late president, Akhmad Kadyrov, on the second anniversary of his death. Kadyrov was killed in an explosion at Grozny’s 2004 Victory Day parade.
A rally was held in Grozny, thousands of people paid their respects in the village of Tsentoroi, where Kadyrov was buried, and a foundation named after Kadyrov distributed humanitarian aid to orphanages, retirement homes and hospitals, Interfax reported. Victory Day celebrations in Chechnya were held May 6 and 7.
In the Dagestani town of Kaspiisk, more than 40 victims of a May 9, 2002, blast were remembered along with war victims in a somber ceremony.
Television stations broadcast war movies. Channel One said it did not broadcast any advertisements on May 9.
Tuesday’s commemoration on Red Square was in marked contrast to last year’s 60th-anniversary celebration, when the heads of state of numerous countries, including the United States and Germany, joined Putin.
In this year’s speech, Putin stressed the role played by Russians in the war and made no mention of other countries, similar to Victory Day speeches before last year’s.

TITLE: Erotic Art by Eisenstein On Display at Cannes
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A collection of forty erotic drawings by the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein will be featured in an exclusive exhibition during the forthcoming 59th International Cannes Film Festival.
An unlikely collection from the man behind Soviet classics such as “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), “October” (1927) and “Ivan The Terrible” (1945/6) the exhibition is called “A Mischievous Eisenstein.”
Eisenstein, who died aged 50 in 1948, revolutionised the language of film with editing techniques he developed in the silent-era, which eventually became known to scholars as Soviet Montage. The famous Odessa steps sequence from “Battleship Potemkin” is a much-copied example.
Erotic drawings by Eisenstein are sure to raise interest because he was openly homosexual at a time when social values were in flux in the U.S.S.R.
The event in Cannes is a joint project between producer Andrei Deryabin and St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Bridge Studio, and the Festival de Cannes with the support of the Open Russian Film Festival Kinotavr.
The works on display — open to the public from May 17 to 28 (with the official opening on May 19) — will be copies of original drawings from the vast collections of the Russian State Historical Archive of Literature and Art. 
“Eisenstein lived in a period of time that granted an unprecedented diversity and depth of material: a human destiny and a country’s fate at a tragic, pitiless moment,” Deryabin said. “The destruction of values, idols and God, the idea of happiness for everyone and human lives torn to pieces... At this exhibition, Eisenstein is making one more editing of contrasting clips, with his own life serving as the documentary, where the revolutionary blends with erotica and agressive arbitrary rule fuses with sensual irony, a meditation on life and open sexuality on the edge of pornography.”
The resulting pictures, the organizers believe, will be free of lies, tricks, hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness and idolatry.
Eisenstein’s presence in this year’s programme will be enhanced with the screening of two of the director’s hits, including “October” and “Bezhin Meadow” (1937) in the Un Certain Regard section.
The Hermitage Bridge Studio accompanies the exhibition with presentation of a unique album – “A Mischievous Eisenstein” – comprising over 150 playful drawings by Eisenstein that have never been published before.

TITLE: Putin Compares US to a Wolf
AUTHOR: By Judith Ingram
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin took a swipe at the United States in his state of the nation address Wednesday, bristling at being lectured by Vice President Cheney and comparing Washington to a wolf who “eats without listening.”
During an emotional moment in the nationally televised speech, Putin used a fairy-tale motif on building a fortress-like house to illustrate Russia’s need to bolster its defenses. He also suggested that the United States puts its political interests above the democratic ideals it claims to cherish.
“Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here, it seems, everything is allowed, there are no restrictions whatsoever,” Putin said, smiling sarcastically in the address to both houses of parliament.
“We are aware what is going on in the world,” he said. “Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he’s clearly not going to listen to anyone.”
Putin’s speech came nearly a week after Cheney took a verbal slap at the Russian leader, saying on May 4 that the Russian government was trying “to reverse the gains of the last decade.”
Putin pointed out that Russia’s military budget is 25 times lower than that of the United States. Like the United States, he said, “we also must make our house strong and reliable.”
“We must always be ready to counter any attempts to pressure Russia in order to strengthen positions at our expense,” he said. “The stronger our military is, the less temptation there will be to exert such pressure on us.”
Putin said the government would work to strengthen the nation’s nuclear deterrent as well as conventional military forces without repeating the mistakes of the Cold War era, when a costly arms race drained Soviet resources.

TITLE: The St. Petersburg Times at 13
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Times celebrated its 13th annivesary Thursday marking the day on May 11 1993 when its predecessor The St. Petersburg Press was launched as the city’s first post-Soviet independently owned English language newspaper. 
“We are the city’s independent voice — we are not sponsored by political parties and the information in the newspaper is entirely factual — never our own opinion,” Tatyana Turikova, the newspaper’s publisher, said on Thursday. 
Turikova, who has worked for The St. Petersburg Times for 10 years, congratulated all the newspaper’s past and present staff and reaffirmed its position as the first and best English-language publication in the city.
Turikova said The St. Petersburg Times has managed to stay on top because it has the ability to renew itself.
“Last year we came out in color, and before this nobody would have thought of the paper in color,” she said, adding that the newspaper’s target reader has changed over the years.
“Primarily the paper was made for expatriates in the city, but now it is an independent source for all English speakers, providing city news and information as an independent source.”

TITLE: Rumsfeld Expresses Concerns
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — The United States is concerned about Russia’s use of its energy resources as a political weapon and China’s lack of transparency over military spending, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying.
In an opinion piece printed in France’s Le Figaro daily on Thursday, Rumsfeld said the U.S. focus was currently on Iraq and Afghanistan but that in the future, its policies would be determined by choices made by other powers such as China and Russia.
“Russia, a country with vast natural resources ... is a partner of the United States on security,” Rumsfeld said.
“But on certain issues, Russia has not been very cooperative and has used its energy resources as a political weapon.”
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney provoked an angry reaction from Russia earlier this month when he said its President Vladimir Putin was backsliding on democracy and using energy reserves to “blackmail” Moscow’s neighbors.
Russia drew international criticism earlier this year when it briefly turned off its natural gas taps to Ukraine in a pricing dispute that disrupted supplies to Europe.
Rumsfeld said China’s lack of transparency over military spending complicated the relationship between the two countries.
“Some aspects of the Chinese attitude are worrying and complicate our relations,” he said. “A notorious lack of transparency [on military spending] is of course worrying for China’s neighbors.”
China says it has been open about its military spending and that as a share of gross domestic product and the government budget it is fairly low by international standards.

TITLE: Dollar Slide Leads To Currency Conundrum
AUTHOR: By William Mauldin
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Central Bank has a money problem most people would die for: too many dollars.
“It’s sort of caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Peter Westin, chief economist at MDM Bank, referring to the delicate balance Russia faces in investing what this last week became the world’s fourth-largest foreign currency reserves.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday that he expected large trading partners such as China and India to include rubles in their own foreign currency reserves, but the more pressing problem for the Finance Ministry is what to do with its own $226 billion in international reserves, most of which is in dollars and euros.
In the last month, the dollar has dropped 2.5 percent against the ruble, and since December the greenback has slid almost 7 percent, representing a drop of several billion dollars in the value of the Russian foreign currency reserves, in ruble terms.
The dollar problem heated up when Sweden’s central bank announced last month that it would decrease its dollar holdings from 37 percent to 20 percent. The same day as the Swedish announcement, Kudrin told a New York meeting of the International Monetary Fund that the dollar was losing its position as the world’s stable reserve currency, and the greenback immediately weakened in response. 
In recent months, the Central Bank has been making available less information about how much of the foreign reserves are in dollars and euros.
“Markets become more sensitive when there is a lack of information,” said Yevgeny Gavrilenkov, chief economist at Troika Dialog. “Eventually everything that they attempt to hide will be known. If there is an unexpected change, the market could be surprised.”
In the past, the Central Bank has said it would decrease the dollar ratio of foreign currency reserves to $60 for every 40 euros (from $65 for every 35 euros previously), but there have not been any more announcements along these lines in more than a year, Gavrilenkov said.
Kudrin’s attack on the dollar in New York was probably politically motivated, Gavrilenkov said, adding that it was a mistake because it had the effect of reducing the value of Russia’s dollar reserves.
Some experts say the foreign reserve, which has doubled to $226 billion since November 2004, is simply too large: Some of the money could be invested more profitably, or it could be spent on government programs such as education. Russia and other emerging economies are not getting the best deal on investments in their huge currency reserves, and they may be putting too much in the bank, Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, said in a March speech at the Reserve Bank of India.
According to a rule of thumb developed by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, countries should only keep as much in reserve as they would need to cover foreign debt payments for the next year. By that reckoning, Russia has more than $100 billion in excess currency reserves.
“Global reserves of emerging markets are far in excess of any previously enunciated criterion of reserve need for financial protection,” Summers said in the March speech.
Of course, not everyone agrees that the Central Bank is holding too much cash. Gavrilenkov said Russia needed large reserves because the country’s money supply was relatively low as a percentage of its gross domestic product.
But regardless of the size of the reserve, upping the percentage of euros in the Russian reserve makes sense — after all, the lion’s share of Russia’s imports come from the euro zone, not from the United States. Also, there is a growing feeling among economists that the strength of the dollar is poised to suffer as the U.S. Federal Reserve stops raising interest rates and the deficit continues to expand.
But if Russia tried to exchange billions of its dollar reserves into euros, the downward pressure on the dollar would further decrease the value of the dollar holdings, defeating the purpose of such a transfer. After all, short-term currency trading is for speculators and traders, not for governments looking for insurance against an economic crisis, Gavrilenkov said.
“I see no economic sense in Russia buying more euros than dollars,” Gavrilenkov said. The best solution, he said, would be to diversify the foreign currency reserves by adding Japanese yen as Japan’s economy stabilizes, and even the Chinese yuan when it floats more freely — that is, when its value starts to depend less on the value of other currencies.
One of the biggest wildcards facing the world’s capital markets is the possibility that some nations will start selling oil for euros or other currencies, rather than for dollars, which have been the world standard for decades. On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin said Russia should sell oil and gas in rubles, and leaders in Norway, the world’s third-largest oil exporter, have suggested trading oil in euros there. Meanwhile, Iran is in the process of setting up an exchange to trade oil in euros.
Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations, said he was confident Russia would eventually trade oil — and, more importantly, gas — in euros.
“Oil producers are looking at where their oil goes and where their imports come from, and they think that if they’re importing stuff from Europe, they don’t need a heap of dollars,” said Chris Cook, a former head of the London-based International Petroleum Exchange who is a consultant working on the Iran exchange project, now in its early stages.
International observers say it would be hard for Iran to trade oil in euros without the cooperation of the Gulf states, but that could be difficult for them since abandoning petrodollars could be disastrous for relations with Washington.
“Such a move will be seen by the United States as close to a declaration of economic warfare, causing the dollar to sink seriously and provoking a chain of events that will profoundly impact on the world economy,” Youssef Ibrahim, managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group, said in response to questions sent by e-mail. “I do not see it now, but should it happen we would be entering a whole new ball game.”

TITLE: EU-8 to ‘Graduate’ by 2010 as EBRD Moves Focus East
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: LONDON — The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development will cease funding in Baltic and central European nations after 2010, turning its focus on Russia, southeast Europe, the Caucasus and central Asia.
The bank’s board took the unanimous decision Thursday as it drew up its five-year plan, EBRD President Jean Lemierre said.
Overall funding will total 3.9 billion euros ($4.99 billion) in 2010, compared with 3.7 billion euros this year, he said.
The EBRD plans to phase out loans to the eight newcomer countries in the European Union, or EU-8, as capital markets are increasingly able to provide funding for businesses and projects, without aid from the state-backed EBRD.
“These EU-8 will graduate from the operations of the bank by 2010, segments of the economy are financed in the normal way by the private sector, without the need of a risk taker like us,” Lemierre said in London.
The EBRD was set up by western governments in 1991 to help build market economies in eastern European and ex-Soviet states.
The bank’s total funding in 2001 was 3.6 billion euros.
Bank funding for projects in the EU-8 nations plus Croatia, will drop to less than 250 million euros, or 6 percent of the total, in 2010, compared with 45 percent back in 2001. Funding for Russia will rise to 1.6 billion euros in 2010, or 41 percent, from 22 percent in 2001.
More funding will also go to the Caucuses, including Ukraine and Armenia, and central Asian nations, including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with those regions collectively expected to get more than 2 billion euros of loans, or 53 percent of the total in 2010, compared with 33 percent in 2001.
The EBRD expects to open two new offices in Russia, another in Ukraine this year, and possibly one in Montenegro, Lemierre said. EBRD staff in Russia will double to 90 people.
The economies of central European nations will be closer to those of Western Europe by 2010, adding that accession to the European Union has improved this but is not the only reason.
“We talk about transition and graduation, not convergence,” Lemierre said. “We are very proud of this, it shows progress in these countries.”
Lemierre vowed to continue to push for democratic values, free markets and freedom of the press in eastern Europe and central Asia, limiting funding in places where those values are restricted.
The bank’s annual meeting later this month will focus on energy policy, with special emphasis on promoting energy efficiency rather than simply boosting energy supply, Lemierre said. Former Soviet countries, including Russia and Ukraine are “not good” at energy efficiency, he said. 
“They burn a lot of energy per unit of GDP.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Paris Club Talks 
PARIS (Bloomberg) — Russia won an agreement from Paris Club creditor nations to begin talks on the reimbursement of its entire $22 billion debt ahead of schedule, the group said in a statement.
“A majority of creditors have already indicated their willingness to accept Russia’s proposal,” a statement posted on the group’s web site said Wednesday.
Paris Club members will start negotiations in June after holding preliminary talks on Russia’s offer to repay the debt at a meeting Wednesday, the statement said. The June talks will aim to establish a multilateral agreement including the main conditions of the proposed prepayment.

Iranian Nuclear Plant
DUBLIN (Bloomberg) — Russia, which is building Iran’s first nuclear power plant, is ready to build another two plants in the Islamic Republic, the Tehran Times reported, citing an Iranian official.
Iran has paid Russia as much as $1 billion to build a plant capable of generating about 1,000 megawatts of electricity in Bushehr province. Construction has faced numerous delays and buildings work may be completed by the end of this year.
Russia is interested in building a two more light-water nuclear power plants generating 1,000 megawatts each, Mohammad Saeedi, Iran’s deputy nuclear chief, told the newspaper. Saeedi left for Moscow yesterday to discuss progress and fuel supply for the Bushehr plant, the newspaper said.

TITLE: Russian Ban on Georgian Mineral Water
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has banned imports of Georgia’s Borjomi and Nabeglavi mineral water, a little more than a month after clearing the country’s supermarket shelves of Georgian wines.
Russia’s chief epidemiologist, Gennady Onishchenko, revoked the sanitary certificates for Borjomi and Nabeglavi starting from May 7 and May 10 respectively, according to a letter posted on his agency’s web site Saturday. 
In the letter, Onishchenko also asked the Federal Customs Service to enforce the ban on Georgia’s mineral water, citing poor quality and inaccurate nutritional information on the labels. 
Sergei Rybak, a spokesman for Borjomi’s producer and distributor, Georgian Glass and Mineral Water Company, said Tuesday that it was “an odd coincidence” that the mineral water ban followed so soon after the wine ban. 
The Federal Consumer Protection Service banned wine from Georgia and Moldova on March 27, citing health concerns. The move was widely seen as politically motivated, given Russia’s support of separatist regions within Georgia and Moldova and other factors contributing to strained relations with the two former Soviet republics.
The import and sale of Borjomi and Nabeglavi would be resumed when the companies addressed “the reasons behind and the environment for” the violations, Onishchenko said.
After Onishchenko announced the water ban late Thursday, Georgian and European officials on Friday rapped Russia over the move.
“The decision to ban Borjomi mineral water from Russia is undoubtedly political because it does not have any real basis,” Georgian Parliament Speaker Nino Burdzhanadze told reporters in Tbilisi, Interfax reported. The head of NATO’s parliamentary assembly, Pierre Lellouche, said the boycott of Georgian goods was alarming not only to Georgia, but also to the whole of Europe, RIA-Novosti reported.
Vakhtang Tatunashvili, a spokesman for the Georgian Embassy, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
As much as 70 percent of Borjomi exports, accounting for about 35 percent of GG&MW’s 2005 sales of $120 million, goes to Russia, Rybak said. Smaller Borjomi shipments go to 28 other countries, including the United States, Israel and Germany, he said.
GG&MW, managed by French CEO Jacques Fleury, Dutch CFO Ruud Van Heel and Georgian president Mamuka Khazaradze, is controlled by the company’s managers and Salford investment fund. Salford is believed to have links to exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.
Nebeglavi mineral water’s manufacturer, Tbilisi-based Healthy Waters, exports about 10 percent of its products to Russia, according to media reports. But it has a significantly smaller Russian market share than Borjomi.
Rybak said the water ban was unlikely to have as much of an effect on Georgia’s economy as the wine ban because wine exporters poured far more into Georgia’s coffers than water exporters.
Rybak did not provide an exact estimate, but said the bulk of GG&MW’s tax payments, including customs and VAT payments, went to Russia, where the company employs the majority of its workers. The ban may prompt GG&MW to cut some of its more than 2,000 jobs in Russia, the company said.

TITLE: State Prepares To Sell Black Sea Airport
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government is gearing up to sell off Sochi’s main airport as part of its plan to boost tourism at the country’s main Black Sea resort. 
The sale became possible after President Vladimir Putin signed a May 3 decree that excluded the airport from a list of strategic state assets. A copy of the decree was posted on the Kremlin web site.
Coincidentally, the decree was signed in the hours after the Armavia airplane tragedy, in which an Airbus A-320 crashed in the Black Sea as it approached the airport, killing all 113 people on board. 
“The main task is to attract strategic investments into [the airport’s] modernization and completion,” Igor Kochukov, an official with the Economic Development and Trade Ministry in charge of preparing state property for privatization, said on Wednesday. 
Vedomosti on Wednesday cited Igor Grechukhin, a senior official at the ministry, as saying the state would sell 100 percent of the airport, which is known as Adler Airport, for the town where it is located. 
Contacted Wednesday by telephone, however, Grechukhin pointed out that the state would probably want to retain some of the airport. 
“If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll secure a golden share,” Grechukhin said, referring to a nominal controlling share in a state company that has been privatized.
Grechukhin told Vedomosti the airport would be transformed into a joint-stock company within six months. 
Kochukov said Wednesday that the airport was unlikely to be sold off this year.
Boris Rybak, head of aviation consultancy Infomost, said the decree was the result of lobbying by a company looking to snap up the airport, but added that on purely economic grounds it was not as attractive as a larger transit hub would be.
“It’s not as good as they would like us to believe,” Rybak said. “It’s a small airport that doesn’t have any further ambitions.” 
With 1.2 million passengers in 2005, Adler was the sixth-largest airport by passenger turnover in European Russia, according to Infomost.
Viktor Gorbachyov, general director of the CIS Airports Association, said Wednesday that billionaire Oleg Deripaska was the most likely bidder for the airport. With Adler, Deripaska would “encircle the North Caucasus,” Gorbachyov said. 
Deripaska currently owns airports in Anapa and Krasnodar and is building an airport in Gelendzhik.
The 1950s-era Sochi airport is in poor condition and will require between $50 million and $60 million in investments, Gorbachyov said. Up to $15 million of that amount would be needed to complete an unfinished terminal whose construction was halted in the early 1990s, he said.
The Kremlin is backing Sochi’s bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. With an eye on the Games, the government earlier this year approved a $11.7 billion plan to turn the area into a year-round mountain and Black Sea resort. The government is hoping the annual flow of tourists to Sochi and the surrounding mountains will triple to 6 million by 2015.
A spokeswoman for Russian-Asian Investment Company, an investment fund in which Deripaska is an investor, confirmed the fund’s interest in the airport, but declined to comment further. 
Other potential bidders include Aviation Oil Company, or ANK, and billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who co-owns Yekaterinburg airport, Vedomosti and Kommersant reported Wednesday.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Steely Index
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s Gazprom and Novolipetsk Steel will be added to Morgan Stanley Capital International Inc.’s Emerging Markets Index, the index’s managers said in a statement released on Thursday.
Gazprom is the world’s largest natural gas producer and Novolipetsk Russia’s fourth-biggest steelmaker. 
The changes will take effect at the close of trading on May 31 and can increase a company’s share price by attracting money from managers whose funds track the measures.
MSCI makes decisions on membership and weightings based on a company’s market value, the average number of shares traded and the free float, or the percentage of shares available to investors. 
It also takes into account the representation of a company’s industry group and country in the indexes.
MSCI is majority-owned by Morgan Stanley, the world’s third-largest securities firm.
Baltia Air Package 
NEW YORK — Baltia Air Lines is predicting 25 percent of revenues will be derived from unique, personal care courier services between New York City and St. Petersburg.
Igor Dmitrowsky, president of startup Baltia Air Lines, scheduled for nonstop passenger service between New York and St. Petersburg later this year, said they will be the only company offering guaranteed, same day package delivery between these two major cities. He said this special service will play a very significant role in the company’s bottom line profits.
“We will have our own Baltia Express Vans in both cities ready to hand deliver packages within hours of arrival,” Dmitrowsky stated. “This will facilitate businesses, banks, hospitals, private parties and any organizations that require immediate service and personal care handling of their packages and documents.” He went on to say that he anticipates these special Baltia Courier programs will also be utilized by the U.S. and Russian postal services as well as established package delivery companies.

TITLE: Myths and Realities of the Great Patriotic War
AUTHOR: By Walter C. Uhler
TEXT: More than sixty years have passed since the last of some 8.6 million Soviet soldiers, collectively known as “Ivan,” died to defeat Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War. (American and British forces suffered less than 250,000 deaths each.) Of the more than 30 million Soviet soldiers mobilized between 1939-1945, they made their ultimate sacrifice in order to avenge the invasion of Soviet territory and the racist war of extermination unleashed by Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht. And although revenge was their primary motivation, in the process of taking revenge they also rescued European civilization — and, perhaps, the world — from the scourge of Nazism. 
Obviously, Ivan did not earn his glory merely by dying — or suffering wounds or illnesses, as another 18 million Ivans did — but also by annihilating the “Fritz,” as he called Nazi soldiers. And annihilate them he did, at least when compared with America’s GI Joe and Great Britain’s Tommy. Consider the numbers: The Nazis suffered approximately 13,488,000 total losses (deaths, wounds, captures and illnesses) during World War II. Fighting with Ivan in the East caused 10,758,000 of them (Glantz & House, “When Titans Clashed”).
Unfortunately, before rallying to ultimately defeat Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Berlin, Ivan’s army suffered numerous devastating setbacks inside the Soviet Union.  First, it nearly collapsed within weeks of the Nazi’s June 1941 invasion. By October, Red Army defeats and retreats caused more than ninety million people to suffer Nazi occupation behind German lines. And by February 1942, nearly three million Ivans had been captured and more than 2.6 million had been killed. Finally, nearly three years of fighting on Soviet soil killed approximately 19 million of the Soviet Union’s civilians.
Astoundingly, more than sixty years later the world knows shamefully little about Ivan’s heroics or sacrifices — and even less about Ivan and his fellow Ivans as genuine human beings. Presumably, the reason for such ignorance is not because, as Stalin put it, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” A more persuasive reason is provided by Catherine Merridale  whose unprecedented research into the lives of Red Army soldiers for her recent book “Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” demonstrates that such widespread ignorance about Ivan is the consequence of distortions — widespread anti-Russian stereotypes in the West and equally self-serving heroic myths in the Soviet Union and Russia.   
Thus, for example, in 1950 the U.S. Army prepared a pamphlet that described “the peculiarities of the Russian soldier.”  Borrowing from the racist descriptions provided by captured Nazi officers, it described Ivan as “semi-Asiatic,” “primitive and unassuming,” and “innately brave but morosely passive when in a group.”  Ivan acts on “instinct,” and “is subject to moods which to a westerner are incomprehensible.”
As Merridale observes, “Cold War commentaries like these, racist parentage and all, helped shape the image of Red Army soldiers for English speakers of the later twentieth century.”
But, if Western racism rendered Ivan less than human, the Soviet Union’s “hero myth” transformed Ivan into a sanitized hero almost totally devoid of the many human failings that have afflicted soldiers at war since the beginning of time.  As Merridale interprets the myth, Ivan “is simple, healthy, strong and kind, far-sighted, selfless, and unafraid of death. He almost never dwells on the dark side of war. Indeed, his gaze is turned toward the future, a bright utopia for which he is prepared to sacrifice his life.” 
Utilizing recently declassified secret police reports, the Red Army’s internal notes about its soldiers’ wartime morale, bundles of soldiers’ letters, diaries, her travels to battle sites and nearly two hundred interviews with surviving veterans, Merridale has uncovered significant new evidence that shatters the hero myth. 
That’s not to say, of course, that Ivan performed no heroic deeds. For example, Merridale salutes the courage of the steadfast Ivans, who defended Stalingrad for months during late 1942. 
She especially notes the fate of a marine called Pankaiko. “As the doomed man prepared to lob a gasoline-filled bottle at a line of German tanks, a bullet ignited the fuel, turning him into a pillar of flame. But the marine was still alive, and somehow, with some last reserve of rage or maybe some grim reflex, he managed to reach for a second missile [and] run right up to the German tank, and smash the bottle against the grille of the engine hatch. A second later an enormous sheet of flame and smoke engulfed both the tank and the hero who had destroyed it.” 
Ivan loved to drink samogon (moonshine), which also served as currency. He smoked cheap tobacco (makhorka) and cursed with imagination, “piling the profanities in stacks.”
He sang while he marched and at festivals and parades.  And he composed the short folk poems (chastushki) that peasants had been composing for generations. But, because the poems were often satiric, erotic or subversive, they were not mentioned in any of the official hero myths constructed by Soviet propagandists. 
Those myths also failed to mention the battle stress and trauma that so many Ivans were shamed into repressing. But Merridale does her greatest damage to the hero myth when she substantiates her assertion that “whole areas of wartime life, including desertion, crime, cowardice, and rape, were banned from public scrutiny.” 
Desertion? Even during the decisive battle at Kursk in 1943, “defections increased sharply from 2,555 in June to 6,574 in July and 4,047 in August.” 
Crime? In June 1944, tank officers serving on the First Ukrainian Front stole “15,123 kilos of meat, 1,959 kilos of sausage, 3,000 kilos of butter, 2,100 kilos of biscuits, 890 kilos of boiled sweets, 563 kilos of soap, a hundred winter coats, a hundred greatcoats, eighty fur gilets, a hundred pairs of valenki, and a hundred pairs of boots.”  According to Merridale, “Reports of this kind were a weekly, if not daily, event for the military courts.” 
Cowardice? “Tank fright” and self-inflicted wounds were two unquestionable forms of cowardice. More questionable, but considered cowardice nonetheless, were retreat and surrender. Which is why, in August 1941, Stalin signed Order no. 270, which stated, “Any officer or political officer who removed his distinguishing marks in battle, retreated to the rear, or gave himself up as a prisoner would count as a malicious deserter.” It also stipulated that families of deserters would be liable to arrest. 
Far more draconian was his 28 July 1942 Order no. 227, which prohibited officers from allowing their men to retreat without specific orders. Violators would be “arrested on a capital charge,” and offending Ivans would be consigned to the penal battalions and, thus, certain death. 
Rape?  Rape was one form of “people’s justice” that his political officers exhorted Ivan to exact as he advanced into Germany. According to Merridale, “tens of thousands of German women and girls undoubtedly suffered rape at the hands of Soviet troops; the figure may well have reached hundreds of thousands.” Moreover, she provides some very disturbing evidence to support her allegations. (Allegations that American soldiers raped 10,000 women in Europe and 10,000 at Okinawa await their own Merridale.)
Destroying myths, especially myths about war, is serious business. Yet, by destroying the Soviet hero myth, Merridale inadvertently has buttressed America’s “Saving Private Ryan” myth.  How? By failing to recognize Ivan’s singular contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.  
Rather than meekly concede that “Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin were real victories, and not for Moscow only, but for its allies too,”  Merridale might have added the opinion of esteemed historian, John Erickson: “The portents of the outcome at Kursk were enormous. Demonstrably the Red Army could strike for Berlin ‘with no outside assistance,’ setting off alarm bells in the West.  The ‘Second Front’ was finally agreed in November,” (John Erickson, Journal of Military History, July 1998, p. 665).
Moreover, a balanced myth-shattering history of Ivan might have included the opinion of America’s foremost expert on the Eastern Front, David M. Glantz:  “Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken 12 to 18 months longer to finish off the Wehrmach: the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France’s Atlantic beaches,” (Glantz  & House).
Thus, a truly myth-shattering history of Ivan would have demolished not only the Soviet Union’s sanitized hero myth, still very precious to many Russians today, but also America’s equally specious “Saving Private Ryan” myth that credits the United States for the defeat of Nazi Germany. Only when that history is written, will human, all-too human, Ivan receive his just recognition.

Walter C. Uhler is president of the Russian-American International Studies Association, which will co-sponsor the 15th Annual Russian-American Seminar, to be held during May 16-23, at St. Petersburg State University.

TITLE: Having Babies the Soviet Way
AUTHOR: By Masha Gessen
TEXT: Some of us took an hour-long trip back to the future Wednesday afternoon. All one had to do was turn on the television and listen to President Vladimir Putin give his state-of-the-nation address to members of parliament and a slew of other officials. It looked contemporary enough, with a slick middle-aged president in a multithousand-dollar suit giving a speech in a well-lit, albeit apparently sparsely populated hall. Aside from the president’s microphones not working for the first five seconds or so, the show went off without a glitch.
But if you actually listened to what the president said, you were very nearly transported to a time about 30 years ago, when the speech would have been given by a feeble old man who mangled words that he barely seemed to understand. The effect was amplified if you actually followed the camera and the message it was intended to transmit. Here we had a shot of Dmitry Kozak, once a supposed presidential successor, now exiled on a suicide mission as the president’s envoy to the North Caucasus. To say he looked grim would be to say nothing. He very nearly scowled. Here we had a shot of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, a current potential heir to the throne. He sat there smiling, looking happy to the point where his skin seemed to have a special oily sheen. The president singled him out during the speech, too, letting him literally speak from his seat and rewarding him with a pleased, “At the Defense Ministry they know what’s most important.”
Most important, according to the president’s suddenly jocular remarks, is love, family and children. In other words, the demographic threat facing Russia, which, he said, is losing 700,000 people each year. To solve the problem, he said, Russia needs to reduce death rates, institute reasonable immigration policies, and grant financial and social support to women choosing to have children. He quickly passed over the first two points — a surprising move, considering that it is life expectancy rates and weak immigration that distinguish Russia from other developed countries.
Most Western countries have low birth rates similar to Russia but maintain their population because they welcome immigrants and because their male citizens do not tend to die at an age when they would still be considered employable and capable of reproducing, as they do in Russia. But Putin’s proposed solution to Russia’s demographic woes is to increase the amount of money paid to women who have small children — to just over $50 for the first child and a bit over $100 a month for the second. This is exactly the sort of thing they used to do in the Soviet Union, where financial stimuli for reproduction were put in place in the early 1980s. The result: A high number of women chose to have their second child right after their first, followed by reproductive retirement and what scholars call a “demographic pit.”
Demographics was the official high point of Putin’s speech. The unofficial one was his second apparent departure from the written text. When he came to the issue of foreign policy, the president suddenly began to smirk and gesticulate. After pointing out that the United States spends 25 times as much as Russia does on defense, Putin said, “This is what defense professionals call ‘their home is their castle.’ And good for them, good for them.” But, he continued, apparently ad-libbing, that means an ever greater threat to Russia, because the United States’ human rights rhetoric goes right out the window when it comes to protecting its interests abroad. But no fear: Russia has two new nuclear submarines, the first two constructed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is developing new strategic nuclear weapons. In other words, the new arms race has been officially declared, and we are off.
The president’s speech ended fittingly: with the Soviet national anthem. Strictly speaking, it is the music that’s Soviet while the lyrics have been renewed to drop references to the Communist Party and Lenin and to insert God. Putin may or may not know this, however: Observers have noted that he never actually sings along. 

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

TITLE: The diva’s dilemma
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Anna Netrebko speaks out about being called a ‘traitor’ by the Russian media
The fascinating Mariinsky Theater opera singer Anna Netrebko has decided to halt her application for Austrian citizenship following a wave of criticism in the Russian media questioning the diva’s patriotism and accusing the charming soprano of being a traitor.
“I am both upset and frustrated,” the star told The St. Petersburg Times in an interview at the Mariinsky’s Backstage restaurant on a fleeting, one-day visit to the city last week. “It turns out I can’t afford to make my own decisions anymore.” 
The singer, who is popular in Austria and Germany, said her citizenship application had been considered favorably by the Austrian authorities but she has had second thoughts and suspended it. 
Being branded a renegade in her home country was more than the singer could bear. 
“There is more to it than some reporters calling me a defector, as if we are at war; even some of my fellow Mariinsky musicians would approach me, and whisper dramatically, ‘How could you do this?’, ‘Oh, I can’t believe it’ or something equally disapproving,” Netrebko recalled.
“I am not a deserter,” repeats the singer, who was granted the State Prize of Russia, the country’s most prestigious cultural award, in 2004. “My idea was to retain Russian citizenship while getting an Austrian one as well. Dual citizenship doesn’t exist between the two countries but the authorities were willing to make an exception.”
“I am a singer, I have an international audience, and I shouldn’t be going through this humiliation, these endless applications [for visas] and waiting [for papers] with a sinking heart,” she said. 
“I have concerts in Austria next week, and I still haven’t received a new Schengen visa. I don’t deserve this disgrace. The audiences want me there, all the tickets have been sold but I still have to sit and wait for a visa.”
The singer, whose international engagements include regular performances at the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), the Vienna Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Bavarian Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has to carefully calculate each stay in Schengen-visa countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. All these countries except Norway and Iceland are European Union members). 
As a Russian citizen Netrebko is limited to staying in these countries for only up to 180 days a year. 
The visa regime between Russia and EU countries is strongly criticised by ordinary travellers, who often describe the process of getting a visa as “humiliating.” 
The complaints come from both the Russians travelling abroad and EU citizens planning a trip to Russia.
But don’t international performers such as Netrebko have a way around the bureaucracy?
“No, we all go through this — and [the Mariinsky’s artistic director] Valery Gergiev duly submits his application to be reviewed [like everyone else], until people get the chance to get a second citizenship and decide to go for it,” Netrebko said. “It is not a question of being disloyal to your home country. It just helps to make our hectic and pressurized lives a little bit less stressful.”
So when Netrebko, whose performing schedule is packed with shows in Europe, and in Austria specifically, was asked by her agent to consider applying for Austrian citizenship several months ago, she felt she was ready for the move.
In normal circumstances, it takes ten years to obtain Austrian citizenship but Netrebko would have been naturalized within six months should she have proceeded with the application.
A number of the Mariinsky Theater’s soloists have made a second home abroad. Tenor Vladimir Galuzin, for example, lives in Luxembourg.
The Russian soprano feels very close to Austria for many reasons.
“Vienna is the most charming place; it feels natural and some of its districts remind me of St. Petersburg,” she said. “I need to be there for work quite a lot but I fancy the city as a place to live. I was thinking about buying an apartment there one day.”
The turning point in Netrebko’s career came after she was a tremendous success as Donna Anna in “Don Giovanni” directed by Nikolaus Harnoncour at the opening of the prestigious Salzburg Festival in the summer of 2002.
“Neither myself, nor anybody around me had envisaged a big success, apart from the director who had a great faith in me as Donna Anna,” Netrebko remembers. “Basically, I learnt my lines and score and went on stage without particularly high expectations.”
But the performance won her an array of flattering reviews, a list of plum contracts with the world’s major operatic companies and a welcome place at every Salzburg Festival ever since and at least until 2010.
Salzburg Festspiele, a magazine for friends and patrons of the festival, called Netrebko “the miracle of Salzburg.” 
“Salzburg was not prepared for this: no CD, no poster, no limousine,” wrote Festspiele. “And yet she and her voice are the sensation of Salzburg.”
The admiration is mutual.
“I adore Salzburg, it is galvanizing to be there during the festival,” Netrebko said. “I am thrilled to be there. Every day the most distinguished musicians perform in front of the snobbiest, most sophisticated audiences, and you can just see all the snobbery melting down or the opposite, manifesting itself in a revolt — sometimes both during the same show!” 
Netrebko is excited by the Salzburg’s atmosphere, with “boos” and “bravos” crossing over in controversial productions. 
The captivating soprano, a rare opera singer who is gifted with not only a stunning voice — pure in tone, rich in colour and velvety in timbre — but also with charismatic artistic talent, obviously enjoys the effects that her performances have on people. 
“Of course, it is exciting to feel power over the audience,” she admits, adding that at the peak of her operatic career she still dreams of being able to hold even more of the viewers’ attention. “I need to feel that I am professional and strong enough to make [the public] happy and desperate for the show to go on. When I am able to do such things, giving new energy to the people, I am happy.”
Netrebko came to St. Petersburg from her hometown of Krasnodar at the age of 16 to enter the Rimsky-Korsakov Music College, and then the Conservatory, dreaming of becoming an operetta singer. A few visits to the Mariinsky convinced her that she was moving in the wrong direction. Netrebko joined the world-famous company at the age of 22, simultaneously dropping out of the Conservatory in her fourth year there.
There was little glamour in Anna Netrebko’s first years on the banks of the Neva river. She lived in a notoriously horrible dormitory belonging to the St. Petersburg Conservatory on Ulitsa Doblesti and worked as a floor cleaner at the Mariinsky Theater where she dreamt of performing.
In 2004, Salzburg’s Festspiele placed Netrebko second in a list of divas with prima donna criteria, like charm, style, manners, social habits, appearance and dress, after Angela Georgiu. Renee Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Karita Mattila and Deborah Voigt were placed lower down in the ranking. 
The glamour rating may have been flattering but with public appetite for details about her life both on stage and behind the scenes becoming voracious, Netrebko feels she needs to assert her independence.
“It is not only that everyone discusses what I do, people start making their own — questionable and speculative — conclusions, and spread them around,” she said. 
“So for the moment, the only option left is to freeze the citizenship application, unless I want to live with the reputation of a defector. And I don’t. So here I am, waiting to get my next Schenghen visa approved.”

TITLE: Slick images
AUTHOR: By Brian Droitcour
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The fifth annual KomMissiya festival illustrates the growing professionalism of Russian comic books.
MOSCOW — Now in its fifth year, the KomMissiya comics festival in Moscow has helped bring the once-obscure subculture of Russian comics into the mainstream. The festival’s organizer, who goes by the name of Khikhus, measures this by the change in attitudes toward comics since he put together the first KomMissiya in 2001. 
“When we started, if you asked for comics at a store or kiosk, they’d laugh at you,” Khikhus said in a recent interview at the M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art. “But now they say, ‘Over there.’”
Khikhus also noted that the quality of submissions to the festival’s competition has steadily risen over the years. 
“I see guys who have been sending stuff to the festival since it started, and every year they look more professional,” he said. “And the foreigners who come say it looks really professional.”
The competition entries take up much of the first floor of M’ARS, where the festival is taking place. None of the artists have made superheroes in the Marvel tradition, but all other genres are represented, from science fiction and fantasy to gritty urban tales and children’s stories. Manga-inspired works account for about one-quarter of the entries. 
“Speckled Hen,” from an artist who goes by the name of Adha, defies the conventions of mainstream comics, retelling the folk tale with flat planes of color and lettering that suggest the avant-garde of the 1920s, and with a plot twist that has the title heroine laying a nuclear bomb instead of a golden egg.
While the entries in the competition — as well as the French, Swiss and Czech works displayed on the second floor — easily fit the festival’s definition of comics as “drawn stories,” some projects explore other relationships of words to pictures, or of comics to culture at large. 
One room is devoted to “Nuclear Spring,” featuring large-format reprints of Soviet instruction booklets on what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Alexander Dvoryankin of Lin Art design studio, which presented the project, said “Nuclear Spring” showed where Russian comic book artists might have found inspiration as kids in the Soviet era, when Western-style comics were banned as a bourgeois form of entertainment.
“Formally, they aren’t comics because there’s no narrative,” Dvoryankin said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “But they have the texture of comics because the pictures show a fantasy world, an anti-utopia that would result from a nuclear attack.”
Dvoryankin described his own childhood reaction to the booklets. “When I saw those instructions, I would make up a story,” he recalled. “I saw the people not as pictures, but as animated characters, and thought how the story could continue if maybe they did something wrong.”
A display on the second floor features Qee, vinyl teddy bears decorated in styles from manga to graffiti to sadomasochism. Qee started in Hong Kong, but the ones at KomMissiya were made by the Moscow company Urban Vinyl, and Khikhus said most of them were designed by comic book artists.
In a more literary part of the festival, there are illustrated phone conversations from the prominent author Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, known for her apt renditions of the banal and her command of the vernacular. 
Petrushevskaya creates her characters with a few broad strokes: big-haired women speaking about the minutiae of everyday errands with such urgency that the comics are almost exhausting to read. 
While Petrushevskaya’s talking heads may not be drawn with the virtuosity of the urban wastelands or spaceships in the competition, they could be a lesson for the younger artists about the economic use of words and pictures to provoke an emotional response. 

“KomMissiya” runs to May 14 at the M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Tel. +8 495 623-5610.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: The Rolling Stones will perform in St. Petersburg on June 13 as scheduled, the local concert’s promoter PMI said in a statement this week.
PMI confronted press reports that the local concert, which is the only Russian show on the band’s current tour, may be canceled due to an accident involving the Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards.
Richards, 62, underwent surgery on Monday to relieve pressure on his brain. The operation involved drilling a hole in his skull to drain blood from the brain, the New Zealand Herald reported on Thursday.
According to the paper, his spokeswoman, Fran Curtis, said Richards would be staying in Auckland as an outpatient and would be returning to the hospital for check-ups. 
Richards injured his head when he fell out of a coconut tree while on holiday in Fiji at the end of the Stones’ tour of New Zealand and Australia. 
“The only changes in the previously planned schedule will affect Spain,” said PMI, adding that the concerts in Barcelona and Madrid, originally due to be held on May 27 and 29, respectively, will be postponed.
“The band has confirmed that the European leg of the tour will start on June 1,” said PMI. “Before that, on doctors’ advice, Keith Richards is not to strain himself physically and should have several weeks’ rest.” 
Tickets were available from the local box offices this week costing between 1,500 (standing) and 4,000 rubles ($55 to $148.)
Meanwhile, another promoter announced a concert this week to honor the upcoming summit by the heads of state of the G8 group of industrialized nations and, at the same time, fight counterfeit CDs and DVDs. 
Scheduled to be held on  Palace Square on July 13, the open-air event will feature the German hard-rockers Scorpions, the Swedish alt-pop band Cardigans, the Canadian pop singer Bryan Adams and Finnish glam rockers Rasmus and HIM. The Russian acts will include pop band Zveri and vocalist Zemfira Ragazanova.
The apparently random choice of acts is reminiscent of the lineup for the concert thrown by President Vladimir Putin for 40 foreign heads of state on a beach on the Gulf of Finland during St. Petersburg’s official 300th anniversary celebrations in May 2003, that featured veteran Greek pop singer Demis Roussos and, once again, the Scorpions.
All of a sudden, the lush nightclub Jet Set called it quits this week. Scheduling the farewell party on Friday, the management said in a statement that both the club and its restaurant called Don Corleone will go out of business on Saturday.
Though Jet Set claimed to “have brought the finest international artists that one could only dream of before Jet Set came into existence,” the club also caused a series of scandals last year by advertising a former Orbital member's DJ set as the band’s reunion concert and an obscure British hip-hop act as a concert by the best-selling band Gorillaz.

TITLE: Adult entertainment
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Platforma, St. Petersburg’s leading art music club, is under new management and seeking to define itself on the city’s nightlife scene.
Platforma, the city’s leading art rock venue, which was at first run by a local businessman and a team of Moscow promoters/art directors, has recently become a totally locally-run club. 
Opened in Sept. 2004 and initially managed by a group who had helped to launch Moscow’s popular Project OGI club, Platforma said it has changed its directorship and artistic policy to better serve St. Petersburg requirements.
“We are attempting to clear the format and orient toward more adult audiences to occupy the niche which is vacant in the city — a club for adults, but not a jazz club at that,” said Denis Rubin, Platforma’s art director and a native St. Petersburger. Rubin’s previous jobs include managing the now hugely popular ska-punk band Leningrad in its early stages and art directing the now-defunct Saigon club.
“Everybody orients toward youth here, because it’s easier,” said Rubin, who has worked with Platforma since Dec. 2004. 
“With all my real love of [local music clubs] Moloko, Griboyedov and Fish Fabrique, I understand that they get packed by youth automatically, 
especially during weekends, while adults are actually deprived of a place to go.”
The club’s once-eclectic music program that included loud alternative rock bands and avant-garde artists has recently been changed to feature mainly “name” Russian artists and international acts to make it appeal to an adult listener. 
“There are some wonderful young bands in the city but they draw mostly young fans who wouldn feel uneasy and wouldn’t come again, but that will scare our own public,” said Rubin, defining Platforma’s target group as the “accomplished intelligentsia,” which means “intelligentsia with money.” (The word “intelligentsia” in Russian often vaguely means anyone not involved in manual labor, from artists and authors to journalists and office clerks.)
Some of the original idea, which comes from Moscow’s Project OGI, has remained; live concerts are combined with literary and theatrical events, while Platforma’s bookstore has been recently reopened after a year-long hiatus, but Rubin said the club still has to find its own audience.
Rubin said that the former management that came from Moscow expected the success of Project OGI would automatically be repeated in St. Petersburg, but Moscow ways do not necessarily work in St. Petersburg, because of the differences in the club-going public between the two cities.
“In my view, the reason is not only the banal fact that there is more money in Moscow, but also in the fact that the locals here are not in the habit of spending money,” said Rubin. 
“There is also a difference in approach. When a Muscovite sees a new name on the program, he or she goes to the show not to be an idiot and miss out if it happens to be good. In St. Petersburg, it’s just the opposite; I see an unknown name and don’t go not to be an idiot if it happens to be crap.”
In Moscow, it is not a rare thing to see well-to-do people in such egalitarian clubs as Project OGI, while in St. Petersburg the same kind of public appears to prefer lush restaurants or overpriced nightclubs, Rubin argued.
“It might have something to do with our dance club history,” he said. 
“There is a pseudo-glamorous scene where people are not surprised by crazy amounts of money and overall flashiness, but the idea that live music can be good, pleasant and in the end trendy doesn’t take root here for some reason. Strange as it may seem, people are scared of egalitarianism even if it is a European standard, in my view.
“In Moscow, I know many people who take off their jackets and ties when leaving the office and go to have fun, because they like the scene and the atmosphere. Here the people tend to be very tense.”
Another problem is that, unlike in Moscow, local fans are often not prepared to pay to get into a club gig, something that Platforma strictly opposes, Rubin said.
“The people tend to try to get in for free, because they think that if they can’t, that means that either they don’t know musicians or somebody in a club so they are again complete idiots. I think that the thing is not money, it’s in people’s heads, because they still have no culture of spending money but understand that artists should get paid.”
Over the past couple of years Platforma, which can hold 350 to 500 fans, acquired the reputation as the city’s premium venue to listen to some of the most interesting international artists, including New York songstress Nina Nastasia, British anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba and U.S. guitarist Arto Lindsay, among many others.
For Rubin it is a combination of pragmatism and idealism.
“We are attempting to orient toward international artists to form some sort of exclusive program, often at a loss,” said Rubin. “We have a lot of healthy enthusiasm. Sometimes I have a childish desire to bring a certain artist even if I can’t really balance the budget. But I want it so much and the artist comes, though we have to deal with the expenses afterwards. But I understand that it is exclusiveness that can draw people to Platforma.”
Although occasionally criticized for charging hefty ticket prices, with the recent Chumbawamba concert costing 800 rubles ($30) on the day of the show and 600 rubles ($22) in pre-sales, Rubin said the high prices help to pay decent wages to the artists.
“Eight hundred rubles was the highest price here, while the minimum is 150,” said Rubin. “I’ll reveal a secret: we use the Moscow system of working with artists — in most cases they receive 100 percent of the door sales, while the club gets what is spent at the bar,” he said.
“The people should understand that everything they pay at the door goes to the musicians. It would be easier for us to make the entrance fee as low as 100 rubles, so that people would spend more money at the bar, but we want musicians to make adequate money, so that they don’t work elsewhere. It’s a small club but I’m proud that [the popular local art band Auktsyon’s frontman] Leonid Fyodorov makes more money with his solo concerts here than he does even in Moscow.”

Platforma is located at 40 Ulitsa Nekrasova. M: Ploshchad Vosstaniya/Chernyshevskaya. 
Tel.: 719-6123, 719-6304. See gigs for events. www.platformaclub.ru

TITLE: How high the moon
AUTHOR: By Slava Gerovitch
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Behind the frontlines of the propaganda battle, some of the biggest setbacks in the lunar race were inflicted by the United States and the Soviet Union on themselves.
In “Space Race,” a wonderfully written account of the Cold War dash to the moon, BBC television producer and historian Deborah Cadbury unveils the public and private lives of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolyov, the two men most responsible for turning the dream of exploring space into rival state-supported programs. What for politicians became a propaganda battle for ideological supremacy was, for these top U.S. and Soviet engineers, a highly personal affair, in which each had to wrestle with his own government’s officials and agencies as much as with each other. Cadbury skillfully weaves together politics, technology and biographical detail to produce a gripping tale of the moves, countermoves, bluffs and intrigues that defined this ruthless struggle.
“Space Race” starts off in a small Baltic village in 1945 with a chilling account of the Nazi missile program, Adolf Hitler’s last hope for saving the Third Reich. There, under von Braun’s direction, some 5,000 scientists were charged with developing the V-2 rocket, Hitler’s so-called Vengeance Weapon. The V-2s themselves were manufactured in Germany, at Mittelwerk, a giant underground factory and concentration camp where one-third of some 60,000 prisoners died before liberation. At the end of the war, von Braun narrowly escaped capture by Soviet troops and negotiated his transfer to the United States, along with hundreds of other engineers and their families. U.S. authorities turned a blind eye to von Braun’s membership in the Nazi Party and the SS, as well as to his possible responsibility for war crimes at Mittelwerk. Though von Braun forever denied such charges, Cadbury cites documents that prove his involvement in the selection of qualified workers from other concentration camps. She also provides a fascinating account of a U.S. mission to snatch German blueprints and missile parts from under the noses of British allies and advancing Soviet troops.
The Soviets sent their own expert mission to Germany, bringing back loads of equipment and missile parts, and thousands of engineers and technicians. Korolyov, who took part in the mission, was put in charge of duplicating the V-2 design with the eventual goal of developing an original Soviet rocket. Like von Braun, he was familiar with labor camps, only from the inside: In 1938 he had been arrested, accused of sabotage and sent to the notorious Kolyma camp complex, where he had nearly died of hunger and exhaustion. Released in 1944, he had met with a cool reception from his wife, and his marriage had eventually collapsed. Quoting from Korolyov’s unpublished family correspondence, Cadbury opens a window into the injured soul of this apparently tough and hardened man, who never showed his feelings in public. “I am anxious to talk to you and just listen to you, dearest,” he wrote to his wife upon his release. “I have not heard your voice for three years now.”
Von Braun’s human side comes through less clearly. A popular figure, he hosted a Disney television series about space exploration in the 1950s. Cadbury sharply contrasts his public persona with Korolyov’s role in the shadows as an unnamed “Chief Designer.” Yet her account of their efforts to overcome the same political, bureaucratic and financial barriers shows considerable similarity between them. Both designed combat missiles but were distrusted by their military superiors, who suspected them of harboring dangerous dreams of space exploration. Both successfully lobbied their governments to launch satellites into Earth’s orbit during the 1957 International Geophysical Year. Korolyov was able to squeeze ahead with Sputnik and later with the first manned flight in 1961, but the race began in earnest when U.S. President John F. Kennedy decided to meet the Soviet challenge with a national commitment to send a man to the moon by the end of the 1960s.
In a detailed account of the lunar race, Cadbury compares the unprecedented level of financial support the U.S. government provided for the Apollo program with the underfunding, scattering of resources and frequent shifts in policy endemic to the Soviet side. Nikita Khrushchev was perfectly willing to use Korolyov’s spectacular achievements for propaganda, but he wavered in his support under pressure from the military, which strongly resisted the diversion of funds. Cadbury’s sympathies are clearly with the underdog: She describes Korolyov as “a diminutive and untried David facing the legendary might of Goliath as he was ranged against America, the world’s industrial giant.”
Cadbury introduces a vivid host of characters who teamed up against Korolyov, from his sometime-friend Valentin Glushko, who refused to build engines for his lunar rocket and “endlessly criticized him behind his back,” to rival rocket designer Vladimir Chelomei, “a master at diplomacy” who mesmerized Khrushchev and dragged away the circumlunar flight program, to the military top brass, who were interested only in whether the rockets were ready for combat. Korolyov’s public rhetoric in Pravda about “the bright dawn of Communism” and “triumphal achievements in Soviet science” are cleverly contrasted with his private confession, in a letter to his second wife, that “every step to something new and unexplored is achieved by a narrow margin with a high price to pay.”
A nitpicking historian might find the portraits of Korolyov’s opponents somewhat caricatured. After all, Chelomei did not owe his success entirely to his “exquisite attire.” As Korolyov’s deputy Boris Chertok recalled, Korolyov himself acknowledged the quality of Chelomei’s work and believed that it stemmed from a high professional culture of design and production, rather than from Khrushchev’s alleged patronage. As more historical records about Glushko and Chelomei come to light, the neat division of characters into heroes and villains may have to be revised.
Still, Cadbury has managed to do what a rare book on space history can boast: show the human side of the story while explaining crucial technical issues in clear, plain language. We learn how Korolyov agonized over his estrangement from his daughter, Natasha, even as we discover how he was forced by lack of funds to cancel full-scale ground tests of the first-stage rocket engine cluster, a fateful decision that resulted in several failed launches of his lunar rocket and critically delayed the Soviet lunar landing program. 
As “Space Race” underscores, the competition between the two countries actually ended up helping both sides. The United States’ Apollo program spurred the Soviet enterprise, while the spectacular Soviet missions compelled the Americans to speed up their efforts. It is not entirely clear whether either party would have reached the moon if the other had not been in such hot pursuit. A large share of credit is thus due to Korolyov for the United States’ triumphant lunar landing in July 1969, some 3 1/2 years after the Soviet engineer’s untimely death in the wake of an unsuccessful operation. There is a ring of historical truth to Cadbury’s suggestion that Korolyov’s spirit might have hovered next to Neil Armstrong on the moon. 

Slava Gerovitch is a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of “From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics.” He is currently working on a book about the technopolitics of automation in the Soviet space program.

TITLE: Ahmadinejad Ready For Nuclear Talks
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JAKARTA, Indonesia — Iran’s president on Thursday intensified his attacks againstIsrael, calling it a “a tyrannical regime that will one day will be destroyed,” but also said he was ready to negotiate with the United States and its allies over his country’s nuclear program. 
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has previously said Israel should be wiped off the map, told a cheering crowd of students in the Indonesian capital that it is every country’s right — not just the United States — to use new technology to meet energy needs.
He said his country was willing to negotiate, but that the United States first must drop its “bad attitude.”
“We are not only defending our rights, we are defending the rights of many other countries,” he said. “By maintaining our position, we are defending our independence.”
Ahmadinejad, known for his fiery rhetoric, is visiting Indonesia amid a deepening standoff over his country’s nuclear program and suspicions it is developing nuclear weapons. This week, key U.N. Security Council members agreed to present Tehran with a choice of incentives or sanctions in deciding whether to suspend uranium enrichment.
The move will delay a draft U.N. resolution that could lead to sanctions and possible military action if Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment.
The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies, saying it aims only to generate energy.
The Iranian leader told Indonesia’s Metro TV station earlier Thursday he was unconcerned about the possibility of U.N. sanctions, saying the West had more to lose than Iran did if the country was isolated.

TITLE: Retrial of HIV Medics in Libya Adjourned
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TRIPOLI, Libya — Libya abruptly adjourned on Thursday the retrial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of deliberately infecting hundreds of children at a Libyan hospital with the virus that causes AIDS. 
“The retrial case was postponed and will resume on June 13, with the defendants remaining in detention,” judge Mahmoud Chaouissa said. 
Lawyers for the six medics, who have been in jail since 1999, had asked the court to release them on bail but the judge dismissed the demand. 
Lawyers and representatives of the children families’ voiced confidence that the delay would not adversely affect the case. 
“It is a good start and the postponement underlined the court’s eagerness to better check the facts and the evidence of the case,” medics’ lead lawyer, Othman Bizanti, told Reuters. 
Idriss Lagha, a spokesman for the families of the infected children said: “The start of the retrial is good and the postponement is a normal court decision.” 
The medics first stood trial in 2004 on charges they infected 426 Libyan children with the HIV virus when they worked in a Benghazi hospital. Around 50 of the children have died and the case has fuelled outrage among the families of the victims. 
The five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death in May 2004. 
Bulgaria and its allies, the United States and the European Union, insist the nurses are innocent, citing evidence they were tortured to confess and testimony by world AIDS experts that the spread of AIDS started before they began work at the hospital. 
Libya’s supreme court overturned death sentences for the six medics in December and ordered a retrial at a court in Tripoli chaired by Mahmoud Ghouissa. 
Going into the start of their retrial on Thursday, doctor Ashraf Alhajouj complained of what he called official bias against him.
“The authorities are treating better the nurses than me. They have access to international phone to contact families, not me. They are allowed to be visited by their families, not me,” the Palestinian doctor told the court.

TITLE: Early Lead for Communists in Indian Polls
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW DELHI — Indian communist parties took early leads on Thursday as votes were counted after polls for five state assemblies, the biggest electoral test of the ruling Congress party since it came to power two years ago. 
The communists had established clear leads in the eastern state of West Bengal, a stronghold for three decades, and the southern coastal state of Kerala ahead of Congress, TV stations showed.
Congress was locked in a close contest to retain power in the troubled northeastern state of Assam while its ally, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), was way ahead in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The trends were largely as forecast by pre-poll surveys and exit polls. Communist parties, which support the Congress-led central government coalition but are competing with it in Kerala and West Bengal, were expected to sweep the two states.
“We will cross 200 seats and the party will also win in the city (Kolkata),” said Gurudas Dasgupta, a Communist Party of India lawmaker, referring to the 294-member West Bengal state assembly.
The communists held 196 seats in the previous assembly. They have been in power there for 29 consecutive years, making it the longest-serving elected communist government in the world.
Some activists hosted feasts in front of huge TV screens which showed live election results while others flocked vote counting centers and applied red vermillon on each other’s foreheads.
Gandhi is seeking re-election to parliament after she quit in March. The opposition had accused her of violating the constitution by being an MP as well as head of the National Advisory Council.

TITLE: 7/7 Bombers In Al-Qaeda Link
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Two of the suicide bombers behind last year’s deadly London transport attacks likely had contacts with Al-Qaeda, but British security services lacked resources to prevent the atrocity, an official report has concluded. 
The report, by an influential parliamentary committee, pointed out that investigations were underway to establish the precise degree of any Al-Qaeda involvement in Britain’s worst terrorist attack, which killed 56 people. 
In the first full official account of the events leading up to July 7 and its aftermath, the report said Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22 — two of the four bombers — were known to have been in Pakistan from Nov.  2004 and Feb. 2005.
“It has not yet been established who they met in Pakistan, but it is assessed as likely that they had some contact with Al-Qaeda figures, the 44-page report by the Intelligence and Security Committee said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Nightclub Fire Case
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) — Though a former rock band tour manager is now behind bars for his role in a nightclub fire that killed 100 people, prosecutors say they are not finished with the criminal case stemming from a disaster that devastated the state three years ago. 
Daniel Biechele was sentenced to four years in prison Wednesday for setting off the pyrotechnics that triggered the Feb. 20, 2003, fire at The Station nightclub in West Warwick.
But charges remain against Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, the brothers who owned the club where the band Great White was performing that night. Both have pleaded not guilty to 200 counts each of involuntary manslaughter.

Bear Hybrid Discovery
IQALUIT, Nunavut (AP) — Northern hunters, scientists and people with vivid imaginations have discussed the possibility for years. 
But Roger Kuptana, an Inuvialuit guide from Sachs Harbour, North West Territories, was the first to suspect it had actually happened when he proposed that a strange-looking bear shot last month by an American sports hunter might be half polar bear, half grizzly.
Territorial officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid — possibly the first documented in the wild.

Singer Soraya is Dead
MIAMI (AP) — Colombian-American singer Soraya, who won a Latin Grammy for best female album in 2004 and worked to educate Hispanic women about breast cancer, died Wednesday after battling the disease. She was 37. 
She died in a Miami hospital, said Lorena Oriani, a spokeswoman for her record label, EMI Latin.

TITLE: CSC Edges T-Mobile in Time Trial
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: CREMONA, Italy — CSC won the team time trial fifth stage of the Giro d’Italia from Piacenza to Cremona on Thursday.
CSC leader Bjarne Riis had said previously that nothing but first place would be satisfactory and that the time difference was not important. He can be satisfied with Thursday’s race, as CSC stole victory from T-Mobile by one second.
CSC set a time of 36 minutes and 56 seconds for the 35-kilometer course.
The T-Mobile team finished second with a time of 36 minutes 57 seconds and the Discovery Channel was third with 37 minutes 35 seconds. T-Mobile had a dramatic last kilomter as their fifth racer crossed the line a second after the first four, a technical flaw which could have given the German team a split victory over their Danish arch rivals.
T-Mobile’s Serhiy Honchar is the new overall race leader with a six-second advantage over Jens Voigt of CSC. Tour favorite CSC rider Ivan Basso is fifth, 11 seconds behind Gonchar.
Friday’s 227-km sixth stage is from Busseto to Forli.

TITLE: Hingis Demolishes Dementyeva in Germany
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN — Martina Hingis beat fifth-seeded Yelena Dementyeva 6-3, 6-2 Thursday to reach the quarterfinals of the German Open.
Hingis used a mix of precision shots for a surprisingly easy win on the clay court. Dementyeva had routed her 6-2, 6-0 at Tokyo in February — the only final for Hingis since she came back in January from a three-year injury retirement.
It was the second time this week that Hingis avenged a previous loss. In the first round, she ousted Italy’s Flavia Pennetta — the first player she lost to in her comeback.
“This is becoming the week of revenge,” Hingis said. “Last time, I didn’t have a chance. This is one of best matches I have played.”’
The unseeded Hingis needed only 75 minutes to oust No. 8 Dementyeva from the French Open warmup. Her only real trouble came when she fought off three break chances while leading 2-1 in the second set. 
The Swiss had trouble with Dementyeva before injuries forced her temporary retirement. In 2001 and 2002, the Russian beat her in two lopsided matches.
Hingis has two wins over top five players and reached the quarterfinals at seven of nine events on her comeback, including the 
Australian Open. Although ranked No. 23, Hingis is looking for her first title and a seeding at bigger events. 
“It hasn’t really happened for me yet,” Hingis said. “But I need a higher ranking to stop meeting such tough players in the early rounds.”
Hingis next faces the winner of top-ranked Amelie Mauresmo and Russia’s Anna Chakvetadze, who played later Thursday. Other top players in action are Nadia Petrova, riding an 11-match unbeaten streak on clay, and defending champion Justine Henin-Hardenne.

TITLE: Juventus Accused Of Wearing Biased Black
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ROME — Juventus have for many years been accused by their rivals of lining the pockets of referees to influence results, and the latest scandal to rock Italian football only adds weight to their suspicions. 	
The Turin club is at the centre of an investigation by the Italian football federation (FIGC) after telephone conversations recorded last season between two Juventus directors and high-ranking FIGC officials were published.
In the conversations, Juve’s general director Luciano Moggi tells Pierluigi Pairetto, who at the time was responsible for selecting referees for the FIGC, which officials he would like assigned for his team’s Serie A matches.
Juventus ended the season by winning the championship for a 28th time.
Also implicated in the scandal are another Juve director, Antonio Giraudo, and FIGC vice-president Innocenzo Mazzini.
The transcripts of the telephone conversations were passed on to the FIGC by Turin prosecutors in March, but Italian football’s governing body inexplicably failed to take action.
They then found themselves in a highly embarrassing position last week when the transcripts were leaked to the press and splashed over the front page of every newspaper in Italy.
On Monday, Franco Carraro quit as FIGC president, saying it was in the best interests of the game with the World Cup a month away and Italy hoping to stage the 2012 European championships.
“Nothing indicates I did anything wrong in either my personal or institutional behaviour,” said Carraro, who was mayor of Rome from 1989-93 and head of the Italian Olympic Committee from 1978-87.
“The tasks facing the FIGC in the next few months are so numerous and serious that it requires the federation’s directors to be totally focussed.”
If things weren’t bad enough for Moggi, he and his son Alessandro, head of GEA, who act as agents for many Italian footballers, are being investigated by prosecutors in Rome and Naples for unfair competition and abuse of market position, including threats of violence.
Moggi has been at Juve for 12 years, during which time the club has won six league titles. They need only a point from their final match against Reggina on Sunday to retain the Scudetto.
Juventus’ rivals cried foul play in the 1997/98 season. One point separated leaders Inter Milan from Juventus with four games remaining, when the teams met for a crunch showdown.
Juventus won 1-0, and would go on to become champions, but referee Piero Ceccarini caused controversy by turning down claims for what looked like a blatant penalty when Inter’s Brazilian striker Ronaldo was shoulder-charged to the ground by Mark Iuliano.
“It was a match in which everything was at stake. A year of work, a career,” cried Inter manager Luigi Simoni after the match. “Ceccarini was the only person in the world not to have seen the penalty.”

TITLE: Coachless Zenit Continues to Lose, Falls to 11th
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: FC Zenit St. Petersburg has dampened speculation that it is seeking a new foreign coach to replace Vlastimil Petrzela, the Czech coach who was fired last week, after press attachÎ Andrei Tanner told reporters om May 4 that he was sure that the next Zenit coach would not be Russian.
“We cannot say whether it is going to be a foreigner or a Russian who will be the next Zenit coach,” Zenit spokesman Fyodor Pogorelov told the St. Petersburg Times on Wednesday. 
Pogorelov added that Zenit is not negotiating with potential coaches because the club is not in a rush to replace Petrzela before the fall.
Assistant coach Vladimir Borovicka has taken charge of the squad and has since Petrzela’s departure lead Zenit to two straight defeats against Moscow teams.
Last Saturday Torpedo Moscow avenged its Russian Cup quarterfinal defeat by thrashing Zenit 3-1 at home in the Russian Premier League.
On Wednesday Zenit met CSKA Moscow in the second leg of the Russian Cup semifinal. To advance to the final, Zenit had to overcome a 0-1 deficit from the first leg played in Moscow a week before. 
But at Petrogradsky Stadium in St. Petersburg, Zenit failed to capitalize on its home advantage and handed CSKA a 3-0 victory with goals by Wagner, Dudu and Sergei Ignashevitch scored in the first half. Zenit face Rubin Kazan, the Russian Premier League leader, at Petrovsky Stadium on Sunday. 
Zenit is 11th in the league.

TITLE: Sevilla Secure UEFA Cup with Biggest Margin in History
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: EINDHOVEN, Netherlands — Sevilla thrashed Middlesbrough 4-0 to win the UEFA Cup on Wednesday, kickstarting a Spanish fiesta in the Philips Stadium after the largest victory since the competition went to a one match final. 
The Andalucians turned their first European final into a procession. Leading at halftime through Luis Fabiano’s 26th, minute header, they added three goals after the break to deflate the English side playing their last game under coach Steve McClaren, who is leaving to become England coach.
Italian Enzo Maresca scored twice in a six-minute spell with substitute Frederic Kanoute rubbing salt in Boro’s wounds with a fourth a minute from time to hand Sevilla their first trophy since a domestic cup win in 1948 and the perfect way to celebrate their centenary season. 
Sevilla are the third Spanish side to win the UEFA Cup following triumphs for Real Madrid (1985 and 1986) and Valencia (2004). 
“It worked out perfectly and we achieved our aim of winning the trophy in the year of our centenary,” Pep Marti told Spanish TV. “For the fans and at least half of the city of Seville this will be a great day of celebration.”
McClaren could not inspire another comeback reminiscent of Boro’s rollercoaster ride to the final as the English side failed to spark in their first appearance at such a level. Not even the halftime introduction of Italian striker Massimo Maccarone, hero from the astonishing four-goal comeback victories in the quarter and semi-final victories could lift a side playing their 64th game of a long and demanding season.
“We could have played better but credit to them they were a class side and deserved it,” Boro captain Gareth Southgate told ITV.  In a bright opening Brazilian rightback Daniel sent a shot fizzing past Mark Schwarzer’s far post early on. 
It was Sevilla who settled the better, Adriano and Luis Fabiano giving Boro some early scares. In quick succession they were allowed to get in crosses from the byline requiring last-ditch clearances as Javier Saviola lurked. 
The Argentine, who has flourished at Sevilla during a season-long loan from Barcelona, was then allowed too much time on the edge of the box to fire a well-struck shot which cannoned into Southgate.

TITLE: Russia Advances At Worlds
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RIGA, Latvia — Russia beat Slovakia 4-3 for its third straight win and Ukraine topped Italy 4-2 Wednesday to qualify for the second round of the World Ice Hockey Championships. 
Alexei Mikhnov’s power-play goal broke a 3-3 tie at 6:02 of the third period, securing a first-place Russian finish in its qualifying group.
Ukraine got goals from Kostiantyn Kasianchuk, Roman Salnikov, Iurii Gunko and Yuriy Dyachenko. Italy’s Giuseppe Busillo scored at 12:25 of the second period to cut the lead to 2-1.
Trailing 3-1 with a power play at 15:13 of the third period, Italy coach Michel Bernard Goulet gambled by pulling goalie Jason Muzzatti to give his team a six-on-four advantage.
The move initially paid off when a shot by defenseman Christian Borgatello deflected off a Ukrainian stick, cutting the lead to 3-2. But Ukraine’s Dyachenko scored into an empty net at 17:56 of the third.
With about eight minutes left, Ukraine defenseman Denys Isayenko was taken to a hospital after hitting his head against the boards.
Slovakia played Russia without forward Marian Hossa, of the Atlanta Thrashers, who injured his knee against Kazakhstan. 
Russia’s Denis Kulyash scored the first goal on the power play 3:56 into the game with a slap shot that beat Slovakia goalie Karol Krizan. Tomas Surovy equalized 2:04 later and Andrej Kollar’s shorthanded goal at 9:03 gave Slovakia a 2-1 lead.
Russia’s Yevgeny Malkin tied it at 2-2 with a goal at 17:26 of the period, and Denis Zaripov gave Russia the lead back with a power-play goal at 7:23. Slovakia’s Ivan Ciernik drew his team even with a power-play goal at 16:45 in the final period.

TITLE: Kuznetsova Defeated By Clijsters on Clay
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW, Poland — Top-seeded Kim Clijsters defeated Svetlana Kuznetsova of St. Petersburg 7-5, 6-2 Sunday to win the clay court J&S Cup. 
The victory avenges a semifinal loss to Kuznetsova in last year’s J&S Cup.
“She’s a very good clay-court player,” Clijsters said. “I was aggressive and tried not to give her the opportunity to play her game.”
Serving at 5-5 in the first set, Kuznetsova pushed a forehand wide to give Clijsters the break. Kuznetsova had two break points in the next service game, but couldn’t take advantage.
On her first break point, Clijsters’ serve kicked high, forcing a forehand error. Kuznetsova then pushed a two-handed backhand wide on the second break point. Kuznetsova netted a backhand on the fourth deuce, and Clijsters hit a forehand winner to take the set.
“I think I built up my points really well and was patient,” Clijsters said.

TITLE: Clippers Whack the Suns And Heat Burns Nets in Game Two
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: PHOENIX, Arizona — The Los Angeles Clippers pounded Phoenix 122-97 here to seize home court advantage from the Suns in their National Basketball Association Western Conference semi-final series. 
Elton Brand and Chris Kaman dominated the paint as the Clippers leveled the best-of-seven series at one game each.
Sam Cassell and Cuttino Mobley scored 23 points apiece for the sixth-seeded Clippers, who abandoned the idea of trying to keep pace with the running, gunning Suns and instead flexed their muscles.
Sparked by Cassell, the Clippers raced to a 20-6 lead in the first six minutes and never looked back. They led by double digits for all but 26 seconds thereafter, and their largest lead was the final score.
Los Angeles maintained its big lead by going inside to its big men.
Brand and Kaman — who was neutralized by the quick pace of game one — led an inside assault that had Phoenix physically intimidated, particularly in the first half.
Brand totaled 27 points and 10 rebounds and Kaman added 14 and 16 for the Clippers, and Vladimir Radmanovic added 10 points and nine boards.
Raja Bell scored 20 points and Leandro Barbosa added 18 for the Suns, while NBA Most Valuable Player Steve Nash had a quiet night with 14 points and eight assists.
TheMiami Heat notched an emphatic 111-89 victory over the New Jersey Nets to level their National Basketball Association Eastern Conference semi-final series at one game apiece.
Dwyane Wade scored 17 of his 31 points in the decisive first quarter as the Heat rebounded from a dismal performance in game one.
Shaquille O’Neal scored 21 points for the Heat, who dominated on both ends of the floor.
“The real playoffs start now,” O’Neal said. “We have to get one out of two up there and take care of business down here. We gave one away, but tonight we showed what we are capable of. It’s up to us now.”