SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1180 (46), Friday, June 23, 2006
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TITLE: Plug Pulled For a Year On City’s New Film Festival
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Producer Mark Rudinshtein has lost the battle. 
The first St. Petersburg International Film Festival was set to take place on Palace Square during the last ten days of July, but the controversial event has been postponed until next year because of a lack of sponsorship.
The ambitious initiative has faced fierce opposition from Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum located on Palace Square, ever since the idea was first proposed in August 2005.
Piotrovsky claims that such large-scale, popular entertainment projects aren’t suitable for the historic square.
The event’s organizers invested much time and effort in international promotion, including a grand presentation at the International Film Festival in Cannes last May. 
The festival had a strong French connection and even employed Jean-Pierre Vida, the technical director of the Cannes International Film Festival. But the international element could not save it.
“Potential sponsors were turning their backs on us, saying that they would not like to invest in a scandal,” Rudinshtein said. “I somewhat over estimated my abilities, and we faced too much opposition.”
Rudinshtein said there will be a presentation in St. Petersburg to replace the actual festival, but it will not be held on Palace Square. Neither the location nor the exact date has been announced, but the producer mentioned international celebrities Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu and Sophie Loren as being among the event’s confirmed guests.
The festival’s financial situation worsened when Rudinshtein fired Renate Roginas, the festival’s artistic director. This week, with only one month left until the event, the festival’s founders admitted they weren’t able to generate enough funds to make their brainchild happen.
Roginas told reporters that she and her staff had not been paid for several months. But Rudinshtein showed the press two receipts for $10,000 each signed by the ex-director. Roginas countered by saying she had thought the money was meant for expenses.
The festival, supported by Governor Valentina Matviyenko and lobbied for by Russia’s Tourism Industry Union, was striving to create an exciting new niche.
Aimed at becoming the world’s first and only event devoted entirely to European films, it was expected to rival international festivals in Berlin, Venice and Cannes in terms of the quality of films shown and celebrities attracted. 
Calling St. Petersburg a new Silicon Valley, Silvio Uhlfelder, former manager of Lufthansa’s North-Western region branch and now its regional manager in Ghana, said the film festival would give St. Petersburg’s hospitality industry a major boost.
“The idea to hold an international film festival here is a great idea, and there’s been much interest in the event in Germany,” Uhlfelder said. “Hollywood is desperate for new locations, and St. Petersburg offers so many amazing opportunities. Fashion designers should be queuing up to shoot their videos here.”
The award-winning Russian filmmaker Alexei German, the festival’s artistic director, said the event had a noble goal of showcasing masterpieces of the European film industry and giving center stage to leading French and British films and to up-and-coming talents from Eastern Europe.
“This city is inhabited by people who need to be shown high quality films to have something to compare with the trashy blockbusters they see on television,” German said.
Most locals had expressed enthusiasm about the glamorous initiative.
According to a poll taken in St. Petersburg by the Agency For Social Information in December 2005, fifty-five percent of respondents said they would definitely attend the St. Petersburg International Film Festival.

TITLE: Russia Remains Pragmatic on Arms Trading
AUTHOR: By Oliver Bullough
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Missiles to Syria and Iran, warplanes to Venezuela and Myanmar, helicopters to Sudan — Russia goes its own way when it comes to selling arms, seemingly immune to ethical debates that affect the industry elsewhere. 
While European Union members argue over whether to lift a weapons ban against China, almost half of Russia’s $6 billion arms sales last year went to Beijing.
As the White House struggles to persuade Congress to approve a U.S.-India nuclear deal that some lawmakers fear could spark an arms race, Moscow is completing two atomic plants for New Delhi.
Russia’s arms industry is one of the few national manufacturers that can compete with Western firms on equal terms, and it is a source of prestige and key to Moscow’s drive to gain new markets for its exports.
“Let’s have no illusions: if we stop sending arms to export, then someone else will do it,” Sergei Chemezov, head of state arms export monopoly Rosoboronexport, said in a rare interview with Itogi business magazine last year.
“The trade in weapons is too profitable for the world to refrain from it. Happily, Russia has understood this. The period of democratic romanticism has changed into a period of business pragmatism,” said Chemezov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin since they served together in the KGB.
But this pragmatism has drawn international criticism, and some experts say the apparent health of Russia’s arms exports actually conceals an industry in decline, still making money from the leftovers of the Soviet military past.
Russia earns around $5 billion a year from the weapons trade — a figure dwarfed by its exports of energy, metals and timber. Its main clients are India and China, but Iran, Syria, Venezuela and the Palestinians — buyers some Western countries shy from dealing with — have also placed some orders.
Russia says it abides strictly by international embargoes, and does not engage in trade with banned regimes. But rights groups criticize it for not unilaterally limiting itself.
The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) says Russia has sold weapons to states whose forces have committed abuses. 
“In Russia’s export control system, there is virtually no reference to controlling arms exports for reasons connected with respect for international human rights and humanitarian law,” the network of agencies said in a June briefing paper.
Rosoboronexport officials declined requests for an interview, but customs figures show Russia’s arms exports — of which it controls 90 percent — have grown by almost 70 percent since Putin established the agency in 2000.
The Kremlin hopes the increasingly aggressive consolidation of the industry at home will make the export trade a cornerstone of its system of state capitalism, before the post-Soviet decline that has plagued production becomes irreversible.
Some experts say that point has already been reached.
“The industry is in deep, terrible crisis. I believe it is beyond recovery because no components are produced. They use old components. The industry has disintegrated, and they have sold the equipment,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent analyst who closely follows the Russian arms trade.
Very few new weapons are being designed and — more importantly — component factories have closed for a lack of new orders and their skilled workers have dispersed, he said.
“This is not an industry, it is a trade. There is no growth in this industry.”
Felgenhauer said the Soviet stockpiles were large enough to keep selling for years to come, but the trade was not creating employment or any long-term growth. 
“This is a sell-off. These are good weapons for Sri Lanka, say, or Africa. They are easy to use for badly trained personnel,” he said. 
General Yuri Baluyevsky, head of Russia’s General Staff, said last year he feared the domestic weapons industry might not be large enough to supply the armed forces by 2011. That, experts say, has led the Kremlin to forge a state arms champion out of Rosoboronexport, originally an export agency. 
It has taken control of Russia’s top carmaker, AvtoVaz, has been eyeing truckmaker Kamaz and is in talks to buy into VSMPO-Avisma, the world’s top titanium maker — reportedly to get hold of Russian firms with easy access to a metal that is key to the aerospace industry. 
“It is a kind of state capitalism. Rosoboronexport controls all military exports and we compete well in this sphere, but we need to keep working at it,” said Gennady Raikov, a member of parliament who has worked in rocket design and aviation. 
He said the new consolidated system — reinforced in March when Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov was put in charge of the whole industry — was a return to the Soviet system of having a single overseer of the military-industrial complex. 
“To perfect our technology, we need to pull together,” said Raikov, who said Russian scientists could create systems as good as Western powers but greater investment was needed.

TITLE: EU, U.S. Voice Concerns Over Russia’s Policies
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: VIENNA — The United States and the European Union have voiced concern over recent developments in Russia, in their final declaration published after a summit in Vienna.
The U.S. and EU administrations, meeting less than a month before a G8 meeting of global powers which Russia will host in St. Petersburg, criticized what they said was a degradation of civil liberties in Russia.
They also noted that Russia’s international policies too often ran contrary to theirs, citing the debate over sanctions against Iran, the question of dealing with the radical ruling Hamas movement in the Palestinian territories and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko.
“We attach great importance to our relationship with Russia and are pursuing deeper cooperation on a range of issues of common interest, including some important foreign policy issues, non-proliferation and counterterrorism,” said the text adopted during a visit to Vienna Wednesday by U.S. President George W. Bush.
“We are concerned about some recent developments in Russia and the region and will work with Russia to promote energy security, the application of the rule of law, an independent judiciary and full respect for human rights, including free and independent media and a vibrant civil society, and a resolution of frozen conflicts in the region,” the communique continued.
The United States and European Union leaders said they attached great importance to the relations with Russia and want stronger ties in international policy and the fight against terrorism and arms proliferation.
And the western nations will continue to collaborate with Moscow on Iran and the Middle East.
In the aftermath of Russia’s oil row with Ukraine, which led to the tap being briefly turned off, Bush is concerned at Russia’s strategic influence over the United States’ European allies through its energy reserves.
Last month U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney accused Russia of using its massive oil and gas reserves as instruments of manipulation and blackmail, a charge to which Russian President Vladimir Putin reacted angrily, describing the U.S. as a wolf.

TITLE: Rights Group Claims Rebel Killed by Chance
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Chechen rebel leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was killed accidentally by a grenade a police officer happened to throw into a house, not in a well-planned police raid, the Memorial rights group said Thursday. 
The report appeared to contradict the official version of Saturday’s killing, which was a victory for federal forces and their local collaborators and a blow to efforts by rebels to spread the increasingly Islam-inspired insurgency. 
Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov said his paramilitary police had been given a tip on Sadulayev’s whereabouts in the eastern city of Argun and killed him when he resisted the arrest. He said a close associate of Sadulayev tipped police to his whereabouts for the equivalent of $55 to buy a dose of heroin. 
Memorial disputed that claim, saying that Sadulayev died accidentally as a result of a short gunbattle during a routine check of a suspicious residence. 
“Sadulayev’s death was not the result of some kind of pre-planned, large-scale operation. Moreover, there was no sort of ‘betrayal’ by militants as officially announced,” the group said. 
Memorial said its own investigation showed that officers from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, accompanied by local police went to check a house in Argun. About 10 law enforcement officers calmly entered the house’s courtyard when they were fired on from the house and one FSB officer was killed. As they fled, returning fire, one police officer managed to throw a grenade into the house. 
Military and security forces surrounded the house roughly about 30 minutes later and discovered Sadulayev’s body inside, Memorial said. Two other heavily armed fighters were driven from Argun by a local man and they later fled on foot, disappearing, the organization said. 
Memorial also cited local police officials as saying that two other armed men and a young woman wearing clothing splattered with blood fled the house carrying three large sacks. 
There was no immediate response to the Memorial report from the Moscow-backed Chechen authorities.

TITLE: Report: Moscow Impolite City
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Moscow is one of the least polite cities in the world, according to a survey of 36 cities released Wednesday.
The Russian capital ranked 31st, ahead of only Seoul, South Korea; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Bucharest, Romania; and last-place Mumbai, India, according to the survey by Reader’s Digest magazine. 
The most polite people live in New York, followed by Zurich and Toronto, the survey found.
The magazine sent out a team of reporters — half of them men, half of them women — to assess the politeness of residents in big cities in 35 countries. 
The reporters gauged the politeness of strangers by carrying out three tests: Each followed people into public buildings 20 times to see whether the door would be held open for them, each bought small items from 20 stores and recorded whether sales assistants said thank you, and each dropped a folder filled with papers in 20 busy locations to see whether anyone would help pick up the fallen papers.
The survey found that people were just as courteous in rich countries as in poor ones and that people acted nearly as politely during rush hour as at other times of the day.

TITLE: Web Site Says Four Envoys To Be Killed
AUTHOR: By Maggie Michael
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAIRO, Egypt — An al-Qaida-led insurgent group said in a web statement Wednesday that it had decided to kill four kidnapped Russian Embassy staffers after a deadline for meeting its demands passed. The statement did not say whether the decision had been carried out. 
Hours after the statement was posted, a sister of one of the hostages — a Muslim — pleaded on Arab television for his captors to spare the men. 
“I beg you to pardon them and release them. You are Muslims, and Islam, before anything else, is a religion of peace and justice,” Aliya Agliulin, wearing an Islamic headscarf, said on Al-Jazeera television, according to an Arabic voiceover of her statement. 
“I, as a Muslim like all other Muslims in Russia, feel sympathy for what is happening in Iraq,” said Agliulin, the sister of hostage Rinat Agliulin. “Please act wisely and think of the feelings of the families of the hostages and their children who are waiting for their return. … My brother is the lone provider for our family.”
In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry called on the kidnappers to spare the four men’s lives. “We once again strongly urge [them] not to take an irreparable step and preserve the lives of our people,” said ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin. 
 
He said Russia “has never and nowhere waged a war against Islam.”
The statement from the Mujahedin Shura Council said Moscow had failed to meet its demands for a full withdrawal of troops from Chechnya and that a 48-hour deadline set in a statement issued Monday had run out. 
“Therefore, the Islamic court of the Mujahedeen Shura Council decided to implement God’s law sentencing them to death,” the group said in a statement on an Islamic militant web site where it often posts its messages. The statement’s authenticity could not be confirmed. 
The four embassy workers were abducted on June 3 in an attack on their car in which a fifth Russian was killed. The captives include the embassy’s third secretary, Fyodor Zaitsev, and three other staffers, Agliulin, Anatoly Smirnov and Oleg Fedoseyev.
The targeting of Russians in the kidnapping was unusual, since Moscow opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, winning it favor in the eyes of some Sunni Arabs, who now form the backbone of the insurgency. 
But memories of that stance may be fading three years on — and many Islamic militants despise Russia for its military campaigns in Chechnya, seen by radicals as a battleground for jihad, or holy war.

TITLE: Russians Cool On Visiting Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Despite St. Petersburg’s image as Russia’s cultural capital, the majority of Russians said they had not paid the city a single visit over the past decade, according to a recent poll. 
At least 56 percent of Russians taking part in the poll, conducted earlier this month by the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center, have not traveled to St. Petersburg for at least 10 years, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Unsurprisingly, the proportion of Russians that have not visited the city in that period is significantly lower in the neighboring regions of Central and North-Western Russia. In these regions, only 28 percent of respondents said they had not been either to St. Petersburg or Moscow over the period.
However, in the rest of Russia, the results of the poll were significantly different. Only one fifth of the population in Russia’s Far East and Siberia saw the northern capital in the last decade.
Inhabitants of the Southern Russia, Ural and Volga regions don’t seem to be in a hurry to travel to the Northern capital or, in fact, to any sort of capital. Up to 73 percent of the respondents answered negatively when asked whether they traveled to St. Petersburg or Moscow within the past ten years, Interfax reported.
The North-Western branch of Russia’s Council for Tourism said they were surprised by the findings. According to their data, Russians have started to travel more within their own country. 
“I am not sure how unbiased such statistics are. Although St. Petersburg in 2005 saw a fall in tourist numbers overall, many tour operators have noted the growth of internal tourism,” said Tatyana Demeneva, the deputy head of the council in the North-West branch in a telephone interview on Thursday. 
“Russians want to visit the foreign counties they could not even dream about in the past, and at the same time, their interest in the heritage of their own country is growing,” said the council’s website. 
But the views of many in the industry are not so optimistic. Experts note that the cost of traveling as a visitor to St. Petersburg is continuing to grow. The city today is much more expensive than many destinations in Europe, with some of its hospitality services still lagging behind in quality and availability in comparison with those offered in the West.
“Only very rich people can travel to St. Petersburg these days. And this is a very dangerous trend. Russian children will know Rome, Paris and Prague, but they might stop traveling to Petersburg soon,” said Igor Mazulov, the general director of St. Petersburg-based Petrotour Service.
“And we already see this happening. For people in Kaliningrad [the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania] it’s much cheaper to visit European capitals than St. Petersburg or Moscow,” Mazulov said.

TITLE: Foreign Minister Pressures OSCE Chief Over Reform
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Reform of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe topped the agenda at Wednesday’s meeting between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and OSCE Secretary General Marc Perrin de Brichambaut.
Russia says the multinational group, and especially its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights must stop applying a double standard when it comes to monitoring elections in former Soviet republics.
Most recently, Russia has opposed OSCE election-monitoring in Belarus, where President Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected in March to a third term and OSCE monitors declared the election rigged.
“OSCE member-states understand the need for reform,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Wednesday, Itar-Tass reported.
OSCE spokesman Martin Nesirsky responded that the ODIHR “applies the same standards whenever it is invited to monitor.”
The Foreign Ministry wants the OSCE to adopt a code of regulations, give more power to the secretary general and make the financing of its projects more transparent.
Russia has slashed its annual contribution to the 55-member group to $7.5 million from $11.4 million and has threatened to cut it further.
The United States has accused Russia of trying to block the OSCE’s democracy-building projects. 
During their meeting, Lavrov and de Brichambaut also discussed the ongoing conflicts in Transdnestr and Nagorno-Karabakh. Lavrov said Russia wanted “to continue the dialogue to increase the efficiency” of the organization.

TITLE: Orange Allies Announce Coalition Deal
AUTHOR: By Mara D. Bellaby
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV — Ukraine’s pro-Western reformist parties announced an agreement on Wednesday, after nearly three months of protracted bickering, on a coalition government reuniting the team that led the 2004 Orange Revolution. 
But the deal, which proposes giving ousted Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko her job back, could still fail. 
The candidate that Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s party nominated for parliamentary speaker — Petro Poroshenko — could face significant opposition from the other parties. 
Poroshenko’s hostile relations with Tymoshenko led to the Orange team’s original breakup last year amid mutual allegations of corruption and incompetence. 
Under the 103-page agreement, Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc, Tymoshenko’s bloc and the Socialist Party would hold 243 seats in the 450-member parliament — a narrow majority that could cause them problems when it comes to divisive votes such as cooperation with NATO. 
The pro-Russian Party of the Regions, which is the main opposition and holds 186 seats, would be parliament’s biggest faction. 
The deal could be ready to be signed on Thursday when parliament reconvenes. 
“We won democracy for Ukraine,” Tymoshenko told the parliament. “The very creation of the coalition defines Ukraine’s course for many years ahead and will move Ukraine into the European community.”
 Leaders from the three parties announced the agreement — which offered the Socialists the deputy speaker’s post — during an open parliament session. But the announcements were uncharacteristically low-key, and all looked more worn out than ecstatic. 
The final deal can only be signed after all six parties that make up the Our Ukraine bloc give their formal approval, said bloc spokeswoman Tetyana Mokridi. 
But that seemed to be a formality as the bloc’s parties began meeting later Wednesday, pledging support. 
“People are giving the coalition about half a year and then Yushchenko’s team will throw [Tymoshenko] out again and lay all the blame at her feet,” said Ivan Lozowy, president of the Kiev-based Institute of Statehood and Democracy. 
Vadym Karasyov, head of the Institute on Global Strategies, disagreed, predicting the Orange team would do all it could to make the agreement last.
The announcement of a deal was met with apathy in Kiev, where people long ago grew tired of the political horse-trading. 
Disappointment, however, was plainly visible on the faces of Party of the Regions lawmakers, who had hoped to share power with Yushchenko’s party.
“Ukraine has no future under one color,” Party of the Regions lawmaker Evhen Kushnarev told parliament. 
“Each of us expresses the interest of only part of the Ukrainian people. Separately we won’t be able to unite Ukraine, bolster the economy or improve Ukrainians’ lives.”

TITLE: Ukraine Scrambling To Crisis Over Gas Supplies
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ukraine is scurrying to form a government coalition and head off a gas crisis that could hit July 1, when its controversial supply deal with Russia expires.
Leaders of Orange Revolution factions announced Wednesday they had reached a last-minute coalition deal. But with just two days left to collect signatures before parliament must be dissolved, Turkmenistan announced it could cut off gas supplies.
Turkmenistan’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday it could turn off the taps if Gazprom did not agree to nearly double the price it pays for gas to $100 per 1,000 cubic meters. Gazprom sells on most of the gas it buys from Turkmenistan to Ukraine.
“Ukraine is in a very tough spot,” said Olexander Chaliy, an independent energy expert, who led Ukraine’s gas negotiations with Russia as deputy foreign minister from 1998 to 2004. “An energy crisis could develop within the country and internationally in the next six months to one year.”
The Ukrainian economy is already struggling with the effects of a gas price hike in January that followed a politically charged standoff in which Russia briefly turned off the taps to Ukraine. Cheap Turkmen gas supplies were crucial in bringing down the price from the $230 per 1,000 cubic meters that Gazprom was demanding. Under the January deal, Ukraine ended up with a final price of $95 after mixing in Central Asian supplies also sold to it by Gazprom.
A hike in the price of Turkmen gas could tip the balance when the deal expires at the end of June. 
“Ukraine can’t afford to pay more for gas,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank. “A lot of issues are now coming to a head. They are reaching a crisis point.”
A spokeswoman for Yushchenko, Irina Gerashchenko, declined to comment on the proposed price hike, and said Ukraine intended to send negotiators to the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, next week.
Ukraine’s government has been in political limbo since January, when the gas deal prompted parliament to fire the Cabinet. During parliamentary elections in March, the gas deal was a central campaign issue between blocs headed by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. The two former allies have been deadlocked over how to form a new government ever since.
At stake is not only Ukraine’s economy but also its bid for greater integration into Europe and independence from Russia — issues that lay at the heart of the Orange Revolution. Ukraine is a transit country for 80 percent of Russian gas supplies into Europe, and the gas standoff has provoked fears over energy security in capitals across the continent.
It was unclear Wednesday whether Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc and Tymoshenko’s faction would be able to build their coalition on time, despite an announcement the two sides had struck a deal late Tuesday after nearly two months of talks. 
Relations between the two leaders have been strained. Tymoshenko has insisted on scrapping the gas deal, calling it a national security threat. 
A spokesman for Tymoshenko’s bloc said the two sides had two days to collect the 226 signatures — a majority in the parliament — necessary to form the coalition and push ahead with the formation of a Cabinet. 
“It’s too early to celebrate yet,” said the spokesman, Taras Pastushenko. Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, which won 30 percent of the vote in the March elections, could still spoil the coalition, Pastushenko said.
Delays in forming the government mean that Ukraine may not be prepared for the next round of gas talks when the current deal expires. 
“The Ukrainian government should have been very actively developing a strategic position on gas negotiations with Russia and the European Union in the context of the future of our country,” Chaliy said. “But there is no one to do this.”
“It is just weeks before the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, and we haven’t heard anything from Ukraine’s leaders on what they want to say to the G8 about energy security.”
Turkmenistan briefly cut off gas supplies to Russia in January 2005 over a price dispute. Analysts said the call for a price hike started a round of price increases across the CIS, which have underlined the arbitrary and opaque way prices are set in the former Soviet Union, where the costs of extracting gas can be as little as $5 per 1,000 cubic meters.
It is unlikely that Turkmenistan will go ahead with its threat to turn off the gas for long. When the Central Asian republic turned off gas supplies in the late 1990s, it nearly went bankrupt.
Gazprom’s demand that Ukraine pay $230 per 1,000 cubic meters has had a domino effect, sparking a race for Turkmen gas that could upset the gas balance across the entire region. 
Gazprom could be forced to pay more, analysts said.
Following the deal, China began courting Turkmen President Sapurmurat Niyazov in an effort to persuade him to send gas east instead of west. When Niyazov made a five-day trip to Beijing earlier this year, he came back with an agreement to ship gas.
“Turkmenistan is unhappy selling gas at such a low price. It’s pretty clear that it has been made a better offer by China. It’s now in a position to raise the stakes,” Weafer said.
The standoff could affect security across the region. Russia also relies on supplies of cheap Central Asian gas to make up for shortfalls in its own production. Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais on Tuesday said that Gazprom was not supplying enough gas to Russian power stations, even during the summer months.
The International Energy Agency warned recently that a lack of investment by Gazprom in boosting production could mean it will be unable to meet its supply contracts by 2010.

TITLE: Ford Faces $25M Customs Bill
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — New customs rules may cost Ford about $25 million in tariffs on imported car parts over the next three months, a senior executive at the carmaker said Wednesday.
Earlier this week, officials at the Federal Customs Service said they had revoked the duty-free status on Ford Focus models being assembled at the U.S. carmaker’s factory near St. Petersburg, citing a contract requiring that 40 percent of the factory’s car parts be produced in Russia this year. 
Ford, the first foreign carmaker to build its own factory in Russia, set up shop under the condition that by 2007, 50 percent of its parts would be produced here. 
Ford Russia president Henrik Nenzen said the factory would reach the target of 40 percent by late August — a deadline he said had been agreed with the Economic Development and Trade Ministry.
But following a change in customs regulations, the carmaker will have to pay $2,500 per car in duties before it can prove it that it has reached 40 percent localization at the end of August, Nenzen said by telephone from Finland. The factory will produce about 10,000 cars in that time, he said. 
Ford will try to get a refund on the $25 million, and will not increase its prices in the meantime, Nenzen said.
The customs service said it charges 140,000 rubles ($5,200) in import duties for each Ford Focus, while Nenzen said Ford prepays a value-added tax on each vehicle.
The service said Ford had already paid 124 million rubles ($4.6 million) in duties out of the 400 million rubles ($14.8 million) it owed. 
In May, the customs service was taken out of the control of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry and became its own agency. Soon after, the new rules were introduced, Ford spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko said. The customs service said in a statement Monday that it had withdrawn the duty-free status for Ford cars as of June 16.
“It’s not convenient for us, but there are no hard feelings,” Nenzen said, adding that Ford had experienced problems with the quality of its local car parts. 
In April, Ford asked the Economic Development and Trade Ministry for a reduction to 36 percent but the parties failed to agree, Nenzen said. 
Theo Streit, director of the Ford factory, declined to comment when contacted Wednesday. 
The new head of the customs service, Andrei Belyaninov, reiterated in a briefing to reporters Wednesday the service’s position that Ford had violated its agreement with the ministry.
Changing the customs rules did not look good, especially now that other carmakers have announced plans to set up shop in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, said Kirill Chuiko, an automotive analyst with UralSib brokerage. But he said the situation was understandable. “The ministry feeds the cow while the customs service milks it,” he said.

Staff Writer Valeria Korchagina contributed to this report.

TITLE: State Should Buy Up Yukos, Says Board Chairman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Yukos’ board chairman said Wednesday that Rosneft should buy the remainder of Yukos, Russia’s once-biggest oil producer, if it was declared bankrupt. 
“I think the most reasonable solution to the situation that has emerged might be to sell the whole of Yukos to state oil company Rosneft directly,” chairman Viktor Gerashchenko said, Interfax reported. 
“It would be best for the country to preserve Yukos, to keep its specialists and not to allow it to reduce its output.”
Yukos is in receivership after it was brought to its knees by multibillion-dollar demands for back taxes that began in 2003. 
Some observers say the claims were orchestrated to give the state control of a section of the oil industry and punish the political ambitions of Yukos’ jailed founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. 
Creditors are due to decide Yukos’ future July 27.

TITLE: Mordashov Placates Investors in Arcelor
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Severstal’s Alexei Mordashov said Wednesday that he would accept only 25 percent of steel giant Arcelor, not the 32.2 percent he earlier proposed, if the merger between the two companies went through.
Mordashov’s proposal, posted on Severstal’s web site, is the latest attempt to placate Arcelor’s shareholders, many of whom have voiced opposition to a deal they call rushed and opaque.
Shareholders and analysts now expect rival bidder Lashkmir Mittal to up his takeover bid for the steelmaker this week. 
Meanwhile, Arcelor’s board announced Wednesday that it would make a final decision Sunday about Mordashov’s latest offer. The board also indicated that, if it picks Mordashov, it may change the way the merger is structured. 
Under the new offer, Mordashov agrees to bid for the whole company if his Arcelor stake rises above one-third. But it also frees him from an obligation to vote with the company’s board of directors. And it allows him to increase or diminish the size of his stake in the company in the near future. 
The offer also scraps a key strategic committee, which Mordashov would have chaired, but it retains for Mordashov the right to nominate half of Arcelor’s board.
The offer further stipulates that in exchange for contributing his steel and mining assets, Mordashov would now receive 210 million, not 295 million, shares of Arcelor.
Given the reduced share, Mordashov says he would drop $1.5 billion in cash he was to bring to the merger alongside his assets. The new proposal lowers by almost a fifth Severstal Group’s enterprise value —a figure that takes into account debt, minority interest and cash balance — to $11.3 billion from $13.4 billion.
The lowered valuation reflects the current slump in emerging markets, although the original deal did not price Severstal’s assets based on its market capitalization. 
Andrei Litvin, an MDM Bank analyst, said the new offer addressed a key shareholder concern — that Mordashov could gain too much control of Arcelor.
“From the start, the question was not over valuation, but the size of Mordashov’s stake,” Litvin said.
Several European brokerages and investor consultancy groups have criticized the speed with which Arcelor’s management arranged the Severstal merger and the lack of information provided about the company and its majority owner.
“We have expressed strong reservations about the corporate governance issues raised by the agreement between Arcelor and Severstal,” the London-based Centaurus Capital hedge fund said Wednesday in an e-mail. A spokewoman for the fund, which holds a minority Arcelor stake, declined to comment on Mordashov’s new offer.
Francois de Rambuteau, fund manager with the $2.3 billion Cholet-Dupont Gestion, also an Arcelor shareholder, welcomed the new proposal but saw few benefits in it.
“In rediscussing its agreement with Severstal, Arcelor shows its good will,” Rambuteau said. But he added that the proposal “does not seem to be, at first glance, a better deal for shareholders.” 
Now, Rambuteau noted, Mordashov will not be bringing any cash to the company.
Mittal’s response — as well as that of Franco-Polish financier Roman Zaleski — to Mordashov’s new offer will shape investors’ thoughts about the new offer, investors interviewed Wednesday said.
Last Friday, Zaleski acquired another 1.9 percent of Arcelor to become the steelmaker’s largest shareholder, with 7.4 percent, overtaking the government of Luxembourg’s 5.6 percent stake.
After all the wrangling, Arcelor’s board could decide Sunday to jettison Mordashov’s merger proposal altogether in favor of simply acquiring Severstal for cash and stock.
Spanish entrepreneur Jose Maria Aristrain, who owns 3.7 percent of Arcelor and has a representative on the board of directors, began pushing that option Tuesday.
Aristrain called for Arcelor to buy Severstal for about 11 billion euros, with 7 billion of that to be paid in cash, the Financial Times web site reported Wednesday.
According to Aristrain’s plan, Mordashov, who owns close to 90 percent of Severstal’s shares, would use the cash from the sale  to buy a one-quarter stake in Arcelor on the stock market.
Such a deal would mean Mordashov pays for Arcelor’s shares at market value. This would calm some investors’ fears that Severstal had been overpriced.

TITLE: Democracy and Reform for New Customs Chief
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — He identifies himself as a democrat. He wants his subordinates to earn at least $1,000 per month. He holds a doctorate in economics and worked for the KGB in East Germany at the same time as Vladimir Putin. 
Meet Andrei Belyaninov, the new head of the Federal Customs Service.
Belyaninov, 49, a tall, bulky man with huge fists and a sense of humor, was appointed head of the agency on May 12 — a day after President Putin fired its chief and two days after he used his state-of-the-nation address to assail corruption.
The appointment came as a surprise, Belyaninov said Wednesday, meeting with a group of reporters for the first time in his new capacity.
“Right after the state-of-the-nation address, I actually had a chat with the then-head of the service, Alexander Zherikhov. ... He said things were going well and that the collection of duties was on the rise,” he said. 
“Two hours later, the president called me into his office and offered me the post of the head of the service.” 
The conversation with Putin was seven minutes, Belyaninov said, refusing to provide any details. He said, though, that the conversation ended with Putin saying, “Go to work.” 
In an apparent gesture to make his service more transparent to the public, Belyaninov was surprisingly frank during the two-hour meeting with about 15 reporters. He also spoke about reforms that he was planning for the customs service.
Belyaninov dismissed speculation that he had close ties with Putin that dated back to when they both worked in East Germany in the 1980s.
“There were about 800 people working there at the time. I was based in Berlin, working for a finance department. He was an agent and was based in Dresden. We probably shook hands a few times, but I’m not even sure we were formally introduced,” he said.
But Belyaninov, a major general in the Federal Security Service, noted that his relations with Putin had grown much closer since Putin became president in 2000. “This is the third major post for me since 2000, so I can no longer say I don’t know Putin,” he said.
Belyaninov, who also is a colonel general in the customs service, served as the head of the Federal Service for Defense Contracts from April 2004 until May of this year. From November 2000 to 2004 he headed Rosoboronexport, the state arms-trading monopoly.
The shakeup at the Federal Customs Service — which previously answered to the Economic Development and Trade Ministry and now answers to the prime minister — prompted speculation that Belyaninov’s appointment might be a sign that the influence of the siloviki clan in the Kremlin is growing.
Asked whether he would describe himself as a silovik or a liberal, Belyaninov forcefully replied, “I am a democrat. I am not a silovik, and God forbid I ever become one.”
As for his relations with Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff Igor Sechin, who is believed to play a leading role in the siloviki clan, Belyaninov said, “I know he exists.” 
Turning to the customs service, Belyaninov said his main goal was to bring it under the state’s control by securing better equipment for border checkpoints and obtaining across-the-board salary hikes for customs officials.
“The money that is paid in salaries is no match for the temptations that exist,” he said, noting that border officials are often paid 8,000 rubles ($300) per month and they sometimes deal with a combined $300 million in customs and export duties on a daily basis.
Belyaninov said a starting salary of $1,000 per month would be reasonable. He is holding negotiations with the government and hopes to be able to offer some raises starting January.
Another major change in the offing will affect the warehouses where goods waiting for customs clearance are stored. There are some 900 of them across the country, and nearly all are privately owned.
Belyaninov said the state would this year start buying into the companies that own the warehouses, with the aim of acquiring a blocking stake of 25 percent plus one share in each.
“Customs is a state function, so if you want to participate in a state function, allow the state to be a part of it,” he said. 
“I am purposefully saying this now so that when it happens, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone.”
He also said he wanted to reduce the number of customs terminals, saying each region now has at least one terminal and “having one appears to be a matter of pride for each regional leader.”
Other priorities include a crackdown on the practice of illegally reclaiming value-added tax through schemes involving fake exports, and an increase in spot checks on goods that are being offered for sale in stores.
While promising to tackle corruption, Belyaninov said his agency was sometimes unfairly criticized. “If things were really as bad as they are often presented, customs most likely wouldn’t be able to deliver 42 percent of the budget’s revenues,” he said. “There are 68,000 people working [in customs], but that doesn’t mean they are 68,000 rascals.”
Belyaninov said Putin’s decision to put the agency under Fradkov was already resolving some problems and making the decision-making process faster.
He refused to comment on the recently reopened Tri Kita case, a high-profile investigation into the suspected smuggling of at least 400 tons of furniture and other goods into the country in 2000. He said the case was now in the hands of prosecutors and all questions should be directed toward them.

TITLE: The High Cost of Fighting Inflation
AUTHOR: By Vera Medvedeva
TEXT: Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin recently said that when inflation exceeds 3 percent there is no point even discussing investment policy. His remark served as a reminder that the government’s main priority was, is and always will be to bring inflation under control.
Economic theorists have come up with a sixteenth type of inflation. Statisticians argue about the weaknesses of the various methods for calculating inflation. Politicians don’t sweat the details, however. In their battle against inflation, they resort to the tried-and-true strategy of curtailing government spending.
This approach is in line with the European and U.S. reliance on monetary methods for stimulating the economy. But such methods are no longer regarded as a panacea in the West, and the triumph of monetarism has more than once ended in catastrophe.
The passion of politicians for Milton Friedman’s monetarist approach is partly explained by the fact that it is the simplest and most straightforward economic theory around. You don’t have to study math or stuff your head full of theories to make sense of it. It requires no professional economic training, yet it allows you to make categorical statements about global issues.
Monetarism arose as a response to galloping inflation in the United States in the 1970s. It held that the rate of inflation was determined automatically by the quantity of money, which is fixed by the government. From this principle it follows that curtailing government spending should shrink the money supply, thereby curbing inflation and spurring economic growth thanks to the natural functioning of the free market.
Friedman’s successors have gone even farther, turning a blind eye to his caveats about the free market. And monetarism, a theory that arose in the context of one of the world’s most flexible economies, soon began to be implemented in countries with a very tenuous connection to the free market.
Even the staunchest backers of President Vladimir Putin’s so-called power vertical would hesitate to describe the Russian economy as a free, self-regulating market, or that state intervention in the economy is declining — both key factors in Friedman’s theory.
If the Kremlin wants to increase the state’s role in the economy, it should defend this position against its critics. This may not even be the worst policy for Russia. The question is why of all the economic theories out there the leadership has latched on to monetarism, which rose to prominence under completely different conditions.
This is probably a reflection of Russia’s eternal attempt to make its own way. In order to lower inflation with monetarist methods, some countries have to restrict the government’s involvement in the economy. But not here, where the Keynesian idea of bolstering the role of the state is combined with monetarist methods for regulating money supply.
Russian politicians love to accuse one another of not understanding the basics of various economic theories. Yet none of the great economists ever pretended to have a thorough understanding of how economies work. Many of the economists who helped to turn their countries into economic powerhouses relied on intuition.
As for straightforward monetarism, it failed almost everywhere after its initial triumph in the United States, and even there many believe that the Chicago School got it wrong, and that implementing its theories seriously weakened the U.S. economy. Supply-side economics did not produce an economic miracle; it just helped the rich get richer.
Friedman maintained that giving away huge amounts of money would not enrich the population because inflation would rise proportionally. The current situation in Russia presents a paradox: The spending of the rich does not drive up inflation, but the growth of doctors’ wages does. Here we also have Friedman to thank for including not just the growth of bureaucratic spending in his list of factors that drive inflation, but the entire social infrastructure as well, including measures intended to reduce unemployment.
When you get rid of all the verbal trappings, monetarism maintains that inflation is driven not by luxurious living, but by assistance to those who need it most. Gucci dresses, Dior handbags and Versace bathroom tiles do not carry the same weight in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation as do kefir, fresh fruit and shoes for the children.
In his day, Keynes suggested that inflation would result in the “euthanasia of the rentier,” since it led to capital loss. Now many economists, particularly in Europe, maintain the opposite — that the lower strata of society suffer most from inflation.
The issue of how to calculate inflation is now hotly contested among statisticians. The definition of inflation itself runs for pages. Economists have only questions, but the politicians seem to have all the answers.
The 3 percent ceiling for inflation was probably derived from European and U.S. practice, particularly of the European Central Bank, which from day one has tried to hold inflation under 2 percent with money supply growth under 4.5 percent.
The experts know that measuring inflation is hardly an exact science. Nonspecialists in Europe can’t figure out how to combine 2 percent inflation with unrestricted price increases in the real estate market. The answer is simple: The growth of financial assets and the rising cost of real estate are not figured into inflation calculations because they are considered to be investments, not expenditures.
Annual 4.5 percent growth of the money supply has also come under fire. It is often pointed out that in 2005 alone the rate of money supply growth was up by 8 percent, and that 20 percent of the money in the European economy as a whole is “excess.” You can argue with the calculations that show that inflation in the United States is twice as high as the official level, but you can’t ignore them altogether.
In his 1911 book “The Purchasing Power of Money,” Irving Fisher proposed that calculations should be based not just on a shopping basket of products and basic services, but also factored in the dynamics of financial assets and the real estate sector. Otherwise you end up with a situation in which a stock market bubble does not indicate inflation, and rapid growth in the value of housing is also not associated with inflation. So how do you get rid of inflation? You raise wages as little as possible, and ideally you don’t raise them at all.
Whether intentionally or not, Russian economic policy is currently based on extremely contentious concepts. Even Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men and hardly an altruist, has repeatedly warned that the United States is in danger of becoming an “aristocracy of wealth.” He believes that building a society in which tomorrow’s leaders will all be the children of today’s wealthiest people is as absurd as selecting the team for the 2020 Olympic Games from the children of medal winners at the 2000 Games.
In Russia, this issue has been resolved once and for all. The lower strata of society are being presented with the opportunity not just to serve the elite, but also to help improve the country’s inflation numbers by cutting back on their own spending.

Vera Medvedeva is a graduate student in economics at the Sorbonne. This comment first appeared in Vedomosti.

TITLE: A Troubling, Repetitive Premise
AUTHOR: By Masha Gessen
TEXT: Sitting in a movie theater the other night, I found myself fuming. No, it was not the cell phones going off all around me, showcasing their polyphonic rings for half a minute or so before someone deigned to theater-whisper, “Sasha, I am at the movies.” Nor was it the couple right behind me, who insisted on commenting on every event on screen as though they were watching a football match. Rather, it was an insistent sense that I had been duped: I had been sold an expensive ticket to sit in a very comfortable chair and look at a very large screen and listen to high-quality sound, all in the name of a half-baked script treatment masquerading as a movie.
Now, of course, there are lots of bad films out there and many of them are shown at fancy movie theaters that sell expensive tickets. What made me mad was that the shameful — and shameless — quality of the film was entirely consistent with the worldview it represented: that all things Russian are hopelessly pathetic but they are our hopelessly pathetic things so we had better love them. And what made me even angrier was that this worldview is evidently representative of the entire Russian movie establishment.
The film I watched was called “Ìíå íå áîëüíî.” It repeats the plotline of “Love Story,” “Autumn in New York,” and countless other melodramas: He and she meet, she has a fatal disease she hides from him, he finds out but sticks by her anyway, and in the end she dies. Fair enough. It is the plot details and secondary characters that are telling. 
There are six recurrent sympathetic characters in the film, and five of them are drinking themselves to death. Only one of the six is a hard worker who is actually good at what she does and who does not drink, and in the end she leaves Russia, thereby betraying her friends, who are useless and broke without her. This, we learn, is an unpatriotic act, while some examples of patriotic acts are: spending all of your and your friends’ money on a useless plot of land in the remote Russian countryside; going to war in Chechnya; getting falling-down drunk and singing war songs. Now note that this is not a film from the recent crop of avowedly patriotic war movies like “Proryv” or “Svolochi”; this is a melodrama.
How can I be so certain that this world view reaches beyond the brain of one single film director? It’s not even the fact that the film was directed by one of Russia’s larger stars, Alexei Balabanov; it’s the recent episode with the Moscow International Film Festival. Earlier this month, Austrian film director Michael Haneke stepped down as chair of the festival jury, explaining that he could not free up the time from his own directing projects. His unfortunate decision was by no means unprecedented: Five years ago Jodie Foster pulled out as chair of the Cannes festival after accepting a last-minute film offer. The Cannes organizers were gracious about it, calling it a delay rather than a cancellation.
The organizers of the Moscow festival, on the other hand, wrote an open letter to Haneke calling his act “dishonorable” and adding, “You have insulted not only the Moscow film festival but have shown disrespect for our country.” 
The Moscow film festival is an international one. Imagine how absurd it would sound if the Cannes organizers accused Foster of insulting France.
A letter like that could come only from people who have a deeply ingrained inferiority complex and really do not believe the stature of their festival commands the respect of international figures. 
It fits right in with the view that everything that is made or done in Russia is of poor quality but patriotism requires us to love it and be faithful to it anyway.

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

TITLE: A soprano’s song
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The sensational Renee Fleming, America’s favorite soprano. 
Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky Theater company are spearheading a revival of Russian opera in the West, according to one of the world’s greatest singers, the U.S. soprano Renee Fleming.
“There used to be just [Tchaikovsky’s] ‘Eugene Onegin’ but Valery Gergiev and the Kirov [the former name of the Mariinsky] have done enormous work changing that,” Fleming said by telephone from New York in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times. “They are the greatest musical ambassadors, because they have brought the finest performances of Russian operas to the entire world, and they do it so well. The situation is changing very quickly.”
The two-time Grammy Award-winning singer, sometimes called “America’s favorite soprano,” is appearing in concert at the Mariinsky Theater on Tuesday as part of the “Stars of the White Nights” festival.
Both colleagues and the media have been generous to Fleming, complimenting the distinguished singer, renowned for her unrivaled soaring pianissimos, with an array of praise: “an inspired scene painter,” “mood setter,” “storyteller,” and “risk taker.”
Fleming was one of the Associated Press’ top ten classical singers of the 1990s and was listed among the world’s 25 most intriguing people by People Magazine in 2000.
She has starred in Rolex watch advertisements, had a flower named in her honor and inspired Ann Patchett’s bestselling novel “Bel Canto.”
“Bel Canto” was also the name of the record that netted Fleming her second Grammy Award in 2002 for Best Classical Vocal Performance. The singer had previously won a Grammy for her record “Beautiful Voice.” 
Born in 1959 in Pennsylvania, Fleming had a wealth of vocal training, and studied at the State University of New York (SUNY), the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and the prestigious Juilliard School’s American Opera Center, which she attended from 1983 to 1987. 
Fleming, who gained international recognition in the bel canto repertoire as well as through the work of Massenet, Mozart and Strauss, made her debut in 1986 as Konstanze in Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” at the Landsestheater in Salzburg, Austria.
The singer’s signature role is the lead character in Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s romantic opera “Rusalka” inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic tale about a mermaid’s doomed love for a human. The haunting and ecstatic lyric aria “Song To the Moon” has become Fleming’s globally recognized calling card.
Part of the story is a family connection: Fleming’s great-grandparents were born in Prague, and Czech was a language she was exposed to in her early years.
“When I was very young I also had a teacher, who gave me this aria to learn, and at the time it wasn’t very well known; I learnt it in English and in Czech, and it was the aria itself that brought so much success, and it has become a signature aria for me,” the singer said. “I love the music and the power, and I have done the role so many times now and recorded it, and it is just one of those special things: every time I go to it, I feel deep at heart that it could have been written for me.”
During the St. Petersburg concert on Tuesday the renowned soprano will sing a new repertoire that includes Richard Strauss, as well as some Italian and possibly Russian works.
Learning operas in a foreign language is part of the job but Fleming is frank on the topic. 
“I am absolutely free to explore the repertoire,” she admits. “But the problem is that I am not fully authentic in anything. I always do my best and I work very hard but it is still not the same as being the native speaker.”
Fleming is the author of “The Inner Voice,” an autobiographic take on the various sides of her artistic self.
“The book is meant to tell the audience and the young singers on how one becomes a singer,” she said. “Mine is not a path that would work for anybody else but it just gives the people an idea of how difficult it is and what is involved. People are very surprised usually at the many things we have to learn.”
The biggest surprise to readers of the book, Fleming says, is the amount of work and dedication being an opera singer takes. 
“Many people are under the impression that we are born with this glorious voice and a romantic aura, so the truth was so hard to get people to understand,” Fleming said.
The singer once described the book as “the autobiography of my voice.” She made the distinction between her personality and her vocal ability to give the audience a hint that she was not writing a personal memoire or an anecdotal expose, packed with gossip and juicy details.
“I wanted to make sure in saying that, that people know that the book is not an autobiography of Renee Fleming per se, it is not fully my story. Yes, professionally and vocally it is, but not personally.”
Fleming says that intuition is a crucial quality that artists must possess.
“Everything we do is so intangible and without a sense of intuition we would fail,” Fleming said. “Just learning how to sing is a very mysterious process, the teachers do not know what is going on inside our bodies, we are not always fully aware of it. We totally need to have that other part of us saying yes that feels right.We have to go on that to a degree.”
A combination of factors can lead to careers going downhill but Fleming said that failing to trust one’s intuition is often the key. 
“It is not the same for everyone,” Fleming explains. “It is singing the wrong repertoire, singing certain repertoire too soon, too high, too low, too heavy. It is losing one’s nerves to the pressure, and personal problems...”
Modern vocal careers have a tendency to sky-rocket early and then burn out. But Fleming’s first major international breakthrough was in 1988, when she was 29.
That year, she sang the countess in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at the Houston Opera. She is grateful for the relatively late stage in her life at which she found fame and success.
“The people who get early careers are the most talented people; the rest of us have to wait until we are ready,” she said. “For anyone who is ambitious it is very difficult to hold off. Culture loves youth, it loves beauty and if people get into that and they seem to be able to do what they need to do, then they are pushed very quickly.”
In “The Inner Voice,” Fleming discusses the problems she has had with stage fright, a surprising admission from someone who appears so accomplished and who has achieved so much.
“I am always afraid; stage fright haunted me all the time, and I have to be very careful about vibration [in her voice] and fight against it,” she revealed. “It has been with me since I was a child. I am not a natural performer, it is not natural for me to get in front of many people singing. I had to learn how to do it and create a stage persona.”
Fleming came from a family of professional musicians, and this too became a source of insecurity. Both her parents were high school vocal music teachers, and she spent her first years listening to her mother’s vocal classes at home.
Fleming sang even before she was able to speak and was not able to ask herself whether she really wanted to devote herself to classical music. 
The famous soprano said that in a way it felt preordained, like not really having a choice at all. Singing was, like household chores, something she couldn’t  avoid. She said this didn’t help in building her confidence.
“It only made it worse,” the singer admits. “I started performing at such a young age, I did not really get a chance to come to it myself.”
With the recital on Tuesday, Fleming will be making her third visit to the city, following a performance in 2003 that was part of St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary, and a joint concert with renowned Russian baritone Dmitry Khvorostovsky in February this year.
Now, the American soprano is looking forward to playing tourist and enjoying the warmer time of year.
“I love the city, I think it is incredibly beautiful, and the culture for classical music here is very high,” she said. “It is terrific to come some place where you feel appreciated and where people understand the music. Now that it is warm, I want to be a tourist here, definitely. Museums... I did not have enough time at the Hermitage, I need to go back. I want to visit more monuments. There is so much to see.”
Fleming’s near future sees an expansion of her Russian repertoire.
“I am learning some new Russian operas, and if I have enough courage, I will try that during the concert in St. Petersburg,” the diva promised.
An impressive array of Russian-born singers have made a second home abroad. Many of them admit that their repertoire has shrunk since they left their home country and are longing to sing a greater variety of Russian operas but too few Western companies venture staging something beyond “Eugene Onegin,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Maid of Pskov” and Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina.”
The renowned Mariinsky tenor Vladimir Galuzin, who lives near Brussels, Belgium, feels there is a lobby against Russian operas in Western Europe.
“Audiences rave about those tuneful, languid, romantic, sometimes cloying Italian operas, and everyone is comfortable with the status quo,” he told The St. Petersburg Times in 2005. 
But in Fleming’s opinion, the major obstacle that keeps Russian opera away from Western stages comes back to the problem of language.
“It has always been the language, that Western singers were not willing to invest that much time in such a difficult language,” the soprano said. “But with my generation it has completely changed and everyone sings in Russian now — as well as in Czech and many other languages. I have just seen an incredible rendition of Mazeppa. They have now done so much Russian opera in the West.”
Admiring a recent staging of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” Fleming said the opera has become part of a standard repertoire at an international level.

TITLE: Music, romance and sultry White Nights
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The second International “A White Night of Romantic Music” Festival begins Saturday aiming to attract a young audience and show them the romantic side of classical St. Petersburg as an alternative to night clubs and discos. 
The festival, which runs through July 7, has an upbeat motto — “From the young to the young” — and during its two weeks the most “positive and bright” classical music will be performed by many young musicians at five concerts.
“Our main purpose is to show the gorgeous romantic White Nights of St. Petersburg, the main symbol and character of the festival, and to combine the unique classical architectural style of the city with wonderful romantic music,” said Alyona Sakhno, art director for festival organizers “Art-Assemblies.” 
The idea of the festival came about in the spring of 2005 when Sakhno heard that musicians from the Shostakovich Philharmonic often hold late-night rehearsals during White Nights. 
“They said that it was bright as day at the hall, so they could even read the notes without any electric lighting, and that the music ‘melted’ in the air leaving an unforgettable and inexpressible impression,” said Sakhno.
In order to combine old classical traditions with modern innovations, all the concert venues hosting the festival will be lit naturally from open windows and also illuminated by colorful shimmering artificial lighting, while the musicians performing on the stage will be displayed on big screens installed on stage. 
“Such screens are widely used at  rock and pop concerts but almost never at the classical performances. We decided to change habits and give people the opportunity to see the musicians’ spiritual faces during the concerts,” said Sakhno.
The festival’s opening concert on Saturday, named “A Night of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Music,” will be performed by the St. Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Philharmonic and violinist Alyona Bayeva, who is coming to St. Petersburg from Paris to take part in the festival, and conducted by Gintaras Rinkyavichus at the Grand Hall of the Shostakovich Philharmonic .
On Sunday at the Capella a concert devoted to the music of late-Soviet composer Mikael Tariverdiev will be hosted by his widow Vera  and performed by pianist Alexei Goribol and vocalist Olga Zusova. 
On Wednesday, the Terem-Quartet, Petropolitana band and Mariinsky ballet dancers present a “surprise” show, also at the Capella. 
On July 1, a Gala Concert takes place at the Grand Hall, while on July 7, there will be a night of Romance singing at the Small Hall of the Shostakovich Philharmonic. All the concerts finish before midnight. Then the audience is invited to enjoy the view of St. Petersburg at night at St. Isaac’s Cathedral’s Colonnade or take a trip on the Neva river and city canals.
The cost of the festival concert tickets range from 150 to 500 rubles. The tickets provide free entrance to St. Isaac’s Cathedral’s Colonnade and a 50 percent discount on river trips starting from 12:30 a.m.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Tracy Chapman, the Grammy Award-winning U.S. singer/songwriter, will perform at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Friday, with a small band including guitar player Joe Gore and drummer Quinn, who both played on her most recent album, “Where You Live.”
In St. Petersburg, Chapman will draw on songs from all her records, starting from her 1988 eponymously named debut album with such hits as “Fast Car,” “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” and “Baby Can I Hold You.”
With a new album under its belt, Barcelona-based Brazzaville will play at Platforma on the very same night. 
The band, which had a song called “Night Train to Moscow” on its 2004 album “Hastings Street,” has continued its interest in Russia by covering “Zvezda Po Imeni Solntse” (Star Called Sun), the 1980s anthem by Kino — still a favorite with street musicians and school students. The status that Kino’s legendary frontman Viktor Tsoi, who died in a car crash in 1990, enjoys in Russia is comparable to that of Kurt Cobain.
“I used his chords and melodies and wrote my own lyrics,” wrote Brazzaville’s frontman/songwriter David Brown in his online diary.
“Although his lyrics were beautiful, I felt that they would lose a lot in the translation when trying to fit them to the music so I wrote a song about my mother’s death while preserving the theme of stars and the sun. The refrain of my version is ‘There’s one million stars for every little grain of sand down there.’ That was a concept that had been obsessing me ever since I heard about it on the BBC. I was happy that I was finally able to work it into a song.”
Brown’s enchantment with Russia can also be traced in the album’s track called “Ugly Babylon,” which was how a Russian girl asssisting the band during its stay in Moscow a couple of years ago refered to her city.
Stereoleto, a series of dance music events, will open this Saturday. Appropriately, the event, which was scattered around different venues for the past two years, has returned to its original site, the pleasant gardens of the Molodyozhny Theater on the Fontanka embankment.
The first of the three nights will be headlined by the French band Gotan Project, but things really start rolling on July 1 with the British electro-rock band Ladytron. Then Sparks, the Los Angeles legends, perform on July 8. 
Saturday will see both Finland’s RinneRadio performing at Platforma and Moscow’s notorious gangsta-rappers Krovostok at Red Club. 
Jethro Tull will perform at the Lensoviet Palace on Thursday. The veteran U.K. band will perform with 22-year-old U.S. violinist Lucia Micarelli, whose contribution to the set includes a couple of unlikely covers. See interview, page iii.
Local acts performing this week include the soul-funk ensemble J.D. and the Blenders (Red Club, Friday) and the alt-rock band Kirpichi (Orlandina, Friday).

TITLE: Rock of ages
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Jethro Tull was among the first Western acts to make it big in the Soviet Union, and the idiosyncratic band has stayed on top.
Jethro Tull, the British classic rock band that returns to St. Petersburg to perform a concert with U.S. violinist Lucia Micarelli on Thursday, first toured Russia in 2003, but vocalist and flautist Ian Anderson’s relationship with this country encompasses two decades, dating back to the heady days of perestroika. 
In the late 1980s and early 1990s he visited the city a few times, rubbing shoulders with the local elite including the late Mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak and the future Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“There’s a picture of me on our website that someone gave me last time I was there that pictured me meeting Sobchak... and just in a corner of the photograph you see this rather hostile face of his kind of bodyguard, a minder and assistant, sort of standing at the side,” said Anderson, 60, in a telephone interview with The St. Petersburg Times last week.
“It is, of course, Mr. Putin, who was working for Sobchak at that time. It was kind of funny seeing this little face at the side of the photograph staring in, looking at me disapprovingly. It is, of course, your glorious leader, Mr. Putin, who went up in the world since then.”
The photograph, which can be found at www.j-tull.com/fans/surprise/index.cfm, dates back to 1992, when Anderson was in the city with Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre and played an impromptu set with local musicians. The trip has been documented on a bootleg DVD called “First Time in Russia” that used  local television footage.
But even if it had little to do with music, Anderson first came to St. Petersburg in the heyday of perestroika in the 1980s, when the communist state’s hold on the economy had loosened and joint ventures were all the rage. Anderson, who runs several salmon farms as well a smoking and processing factory which employs about 250 people in the Highlands of Scotland, arrived with a plan to set up a fish farm near St. Petersburg.
“I was in St. Petersburg a couple of times because when things changed in the academic world in Russia, much of the pioneering work done by Russian scientists in aquaculture was trying to find a new opportunity in the real economy in the West,” said Anderson.
“I went out there to talk to a few scientists and see if there’s some opportunities to use this technology in the West in the commercial way, but after three or four visits by me and my staff we had to conclude that we didn’t really think that there was anything commercially viable to offer, which is sad, because those men, some of them quite old men who spent their lives trying to develop technology in isolation from the West, had very naive ideas about technology and how it could be made to work. 
“We were also a little nervous about setting up a business at the time when the so-called Russian mafia was quite aggressive in attempts to control new businesses, and there were examples that we know of, where a lot of intimidation and threats were being issued, and we didn’t really want to get mixed up in that kind of a world, so regretfully we had to withdraw from our hoped-for attempt to set up a partnership in aquaculture close to St. Petersburg. It ended up not happening, which is sad, but maybe it’ll be different now. It’s just back then it was a difficult time, the big transition between the old way and the new way and a little too scary to me, I’m afraid.”
This early trip to Russia inspired a song called “Said She Was a Dancer” on Jethro Tull’s 1987 album “Crest of a Knave.”
“That’s kind of a little Russian,” said Anderson.
“Not musically, but just in terms of story material. But, you know, most of my songs do come from something real, but I never make them completely real. I use something real as a starting point, then I turn it into a fiction. I never write real songs about real people. I think it would be a great betrayal of a relationship or even just knowing something about a person. But I think it’s OK to use a person as a basis for a song, so as long as you don’t name names or tell real stories.”
Even if his business plans did not work out, Anderson kept an eye on Russia in years to follow. One of Anderson’s instrumental pieces is called “Boris Dancing” and deals with desperate efforts that the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin undertook to win over the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov in the 1996 elections.
“It’s just me writing a piece of music in honor of Boris Yeltsin’s famous dance in Red Square when he was on stage getting very out of breath trying to dance to a Russian rock band,” said Anderson.
“[Yeltsin] was obviously campaigning for re-election and tried to look good in front of the world’s media, so he got on stage and boogied to a rock band, very badly, and he looked, as we say, like he had three left feet. So I wrote a piece called ‘Boris Dancing’ and made it in compound time signatures, odd time signatures to convey his very unrhythmic sense of dancing. It’s not based on any specific Russian folk melody, it’s just a piece of music that I think it is sort of in keeping with Eastern European or Central European kind of motifs. It’s just me having fun with a little piece of music dedicating it to one of history’s cartoon heroes, because Boris was a great guy for all the cartoon artists all over the world. He was a wonderful person for them to have fun with.”
On its current tour Jethro Tull performs with violinist Lucia Micarelli, 22,  who brought arrangements of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” to the set even if the band is not famous for covers.
“That’s Lucia’s arrangements of other pieces, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Nocturne,’ that was on her first album, and ‘Kashmir’ is the piece that she’s been doing with Jethro Tull, so we did an orchestration for that, and so that’s featured in our concerts at the moment, too.
“It’s not the first time I ever play a Led Zeppelin piece because I actually played ‘Whole Lotta Love’ on the David Letterman show with the Paul Shaffer Band a few years ago. So it’s my second time to play something by Led Zeppelin. But since it’s one of my favorite groups, that’s fine.
“I like a good tune. I don’t find it easy to sing other people’s songs, but I enjoy playing them sometimes. So some classical music, some folk music, it’s enjoyable to play, but I don’t enjoy singing it. 
“For instance, last year I played ‘House of the Rising Sun’ with Eric Burdon and a string quartet. And I played flute on ‘Smoke on the Water’ with Jon Lord. And ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’ with Lou Gramm from Foreigner. And I played — God help me! — I actually really did play one of the pieces of music I hate more than anything in the world, ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,’ I actually played that, with Scott McKenzie, the guy who sang it. Jesus! I must have been… I was bullied into it by a television producer. This is one of the pieces of music I hate most.
“I just hate hippies. I never liked hippies and I don’t like them now. If there are any about, tell them keep away from me. I don’t like hippies. I am exaggerating but only a little bit. But I’m a nice guy, I try to be friendly, even if I don’t like their music.”
Anderson is aware of Jethro Tull’s phenomenal underground popularity under the communist rule, when Soviet fans treated the band almost religiously, but does not see the Soviet Union as unique in that respect.
“Not just Jethro Tull, but very many British and American rock bands became icons for a kind of Western freedom, and the idea of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and of politics, many of these rock bands became a symbol, not only in the former U.S.S.R. countries, but also in South America and Central America, which of course was composed of either fascist, ultra-rightwing countries or those flirting with Marxism,” he said.
“But also in India … In India in the ‘70s there was a quite repressive government, again flirting with communism and flirting with Russia. So in those countries young people who were going to college were anxious to learn about other things, you know. For them the symbols of Western rock music were quite important. It was quite an emotional way of coming to meet some of those folks, who then were probably in their 30s, rather than in their 20s. These days the people are probably in their 50s, who were in college back then. 
“Rock music was a safety valve for the frustrations that were being felt within society. 
“When I met Mr. Gorbachev a year or so ago, and we talked about this, you know, he was well aware that rock music was around. In fact, the first officially released [rock] music ever on the state-owned Melodiya label, first records officially released from the West were a Beatles album and a Jethro Tull compilation album.”
“[Gorbachev] was aware that it was better to let that music become officially sanctioned, than to try to repress it. He realized that there had to be a process of change and in order to have that change happen, you have to release some of the pressure that was building up in society, particularly for young people. He was part of a process. He wasn’t fully in control of that, but he was a very important part of that process that brought about a period of change that could only come about by slackening the reins, letting go of the tight reign that was run.”
Anderson feels that the world owes a great deal to “old Gorby,” as well as to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, for being able, he quotes Thatcher’s words, “to do business together.”
“[Gorbachev] understood the need for change. He wanted to control the pace of change to make sure things didn’t get out of hand, and of course they did. But he understood the need for change and in that way he was the first Russian leader who was prepared to give something to the people that had intellectual value as opposed to merely materialistic value or idealistic value. He gave something that had to do with the intellect and the soul. He was responsible for setting in motion the series of changes. And he didn’t know back then what was happening. He was just powerless ultimately to control it. So some people hate him for that. I personally think he was a very, very important man, he will be remembered in history hundreds of years from now as a very important, pivotal figure in a transition from one millennium to another.
“But I don’t expect you to agree with me. Not many Russians like poor Mr. Gorbachev. He’s an OK guy, trust me. He’s an important person, and thank God for Mr. Gorbachev.”

Jethro Tull and Lucia Micarelli perform at Lensoviet Palace of Culture on Thursday. www.j-tull.com

TITLE: The people’s poet
AUTHOR: By Benjamin Paloff
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Anna Akhmatova is presented as a symbol of Russia’s tragic history in a new biography of the poet by Elaine Feinstein.	
Anna Akhmatova was indisputably one of the most important poets of the last century, a literary artist whose work remains beloved of even casual poetry readers the world over. It also happens that she survived the most turbulent years of Russia’s modern history, and that the facts of her social and sexual adventures read like a British gossip column. It is no wonder, then, that sketches of Akhmatova’s life have proliferated in several languages since her death in 1966, including one Ukrainian biography from the late 1990s that, like Elaine Feinstein’s new effort, is called “Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova.” It just goes to show that there may be only so many ways to tell the same story.
Akhmatova’s own story bears retelling. Born Anna Gorenko in 1889, she published her earliest poems while still a teenager, adopting the name of a Tatar princess. (The Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky would later call this choice of pseudonym “her first poem.”) In 1910, Akhmatova married the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, and though they were divorced eight years later, she would always lament his 1921 execution by Soviet authorities. Their son, Lev Gumilyov, spent nearly 20 years in the labor camps, largely because of his parentage, and Akhmatova herself was prevented from publishing her verse in the Soviet Union until near the end of her life.
This precis has long been familiar to Akhmatova’s admirers. The rest is a matter of filling in the details: the obligatory slew of lovers, friendships with the likes of Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and the terrible hardships and humiliations of life under Stalin. In her biography, Feinstein untangles the many threads of Akhmatova’s complex existence in tight, rapid-fire prose, matching Akhmatova’s often self-referential lyrics to the people and events that seem to have inspired them. The book’s simple organization and straightforward style make it easy to read on a bus or in a crowd, and the melodrama of Akhmatova’s life makes it a worthwhile escape. For those who may have been waiting patiently in line at the airport, daydreaming about one of Russia’s pre-eminent modern poets, here it is: a literary biography for the chronically distracted.
This is, in fact, a serious virtue. Akhmatova has long been available in English translation, and those with a casual interest in knowing more about her life should have recourse to sources written with the general reader in mind. Roberta Reeder accomplished this in 1994 with her “Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet,” which synthesizes a vast stock of sources and, as such, can be long and dense in places, though it is scrupulously researched, elegantly written and in nearly every respect superior to Feinstein’s book.
And yet Feinstein is to be commended for her extensive conversations with Anatoly Naiman and Yevgeny Rein, two poets who knew Akhmatova well at the end of her career and the beginning of theirs. She also draws extensively from the memoirs of Nikolai Punin, one of Akhmatova’s great loves, which were published in English in 1999. But Feinstein is more interested in a fast digest of Akhmatova’s life than in delineating the bitterly contested accounts and recollections that inevitably spring up around even minor Russian writers. In the end, she works from a modest set of sources and frequently does little more than state basic facts. As a result, “Anna of All the Russias” provides hardly any authorial insight beyond pop psychology, as when Feinstein tells us that “it may well be the case that [Akhmatova’s] promiscuity sprang from the same insecurity that kept her dependent on men who abused her.” This may or may not be a valid point — many of the notables in Akhmatova’s social milieu were sexually profligate — but since Feinstein rarely formulates her own arguments, such offhand suggestions tell us little about Akhmatova’s psychology or, more importantly, about her poetry.
Instead, Feinstein merely recycles the clichÎs of the poet’s popular reception, drawing her as a prophetess and the voice of national suffering. Feinstein tells us that, in the face of Russia’s entry into World War I, Akhmatova’s “Cassandra-like intuition that a whole world was ending in the catastrophe of war was soon to prove true.” This biographer is not the first to compare Akhmatova to Troy’s doomed prophetess; Mandelstam famously addressed Akhmatova in a poem called “Cassandra,” and Reeder and others have remarked a prophetic quality in Akhmatova’s work. But if the poet’s charge is to create myths, the biographer’s is to shed new light on what they mean, a test Feinstein generally fails.
While she does not conceal her heroine’s egotism, Feinstein is reluctant to allow for the possibility that, for all her posturing, Akhmatova’s poetry is more about herself than about her countrymen. The notion of artistic self-interest is, of course, conceptually redundant and not particularly shameful, especially when the work itself has such broad social and emotional resonance for its audience. It is therefore incongruous that Feinstein would call Alexander Solzhenitsyn “curmudgeonly” for remarking that Akhmatova’s major cycle “Requiem” “represented personal grief rather than the suffering of a whole nation.” 
Incongruous, but unsurprising, since Feinstein is too quick to see a damaged saint in the poet once described by Andrei Zhdanov, an important ideologue of Socialist Realism, as “half nun, half whore.” When the Stalinist Terror forces Akhmatova to memorize her poems rather than commit them to paper and risk their discovery, Feinstein remarks that Akhmatova’s “transformation ... into the voice of a whole people’s suffering had begun.” A critical reader cannot help but bridle at such presumptions. Russians tend to romanticize the lives of their great writers (whereas Americans tend to ignore them), and Feinstein does not cut through this hagiographic impulse so much as perpetuate it.
Along the way, she makes several unfortunate, if minor, factual errors, most of them concerning writers other than Akhmatova and generally spun to heighten the drama of otherwise trivial details. Feinstein tells us, for example, that Anna Bunina, the aunt of Akhmatova’s grandfather, was “the first woman Russian poet,” though others, such as Yekaterina Urusova, preceded Bunina by decades. And when Feinstein tells us that Boris Pasternak faced special scrutiny in 1958 not only for winning the Nobel Prize, but for being “the first Slav writer” to do so, one might feel some annoyance at Henryk Sienkiewicz and Wladyslaw Reymont (both Poles), to say nothing of Ivan Bunin (a Russian), for diminishing her point. One at least hopes for the trivia to be accurate.
What is really troublesome about this biography, however, is not what Feinstein does to Akhmatova’s life, but what she does to her poems. The book is riddled with Akhmatova’s verse in Feinstein’s own anemic renderings, which provide nary an inkling of the grace and inventiveness of the original, as we see in these lines, which refer to Isaiah Berlin’s 1945 meeting with Akhmatova: “As if on the edge of a cloud / I remember all you said / And because of my words to you / Night became brighter than day.” This is a shame, since an unsuspecting reader could easily come away from this book thinking the life of the poet more engaging than the poems themselves. Then again, Feinstein’s telling of Akhmatova’s life is less a tragedy than a soap opera, and the last thing we would want is for a stunning poem to spoil our voyeuristic pleasure.

Benjamin Paloff is a poetry editor at Boston Review.

TITLE: North Korea Missile Irks China
AUTHOR: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — China issued its strongest statement of concern yet Thursday over a possible North Korean long-range missile launch, while Pyongyang warned of possible clashes in the skies as it accused U.S. spy planes of repeated illegal intrusions. 
Beijing is the North’s last major ally and key benefactor, and Washington has urged China to press the North to back down on its potential missile test.
“We are very concerned about the current situation,” Jiang Yu, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official, said at a regular briefing in Beijing. “We hope all parties can do more in the interest of regional peace and stability.”
Jiang said China would “continue to make constructive efforts.”
President Bush praised China on Wednesday for “taking responsibility in dealing with North Korea.”
Worries over a potential North Korean launch have grown in recent weeks following reports of activity at the North’s launch site on its northeastern coast, where U.S. officials say a Taepodong-2 missile — believed capable of reaching the United States — is possibly being fueled.
There are diverging expert opinions on whether fueling would mean a launch was imminent — due to the highly corrosive nature of the fuel — or whether the North could wait a month or more.
A North Korean diplomat said in reported comments Wednesday that the country wanted to engage in talks with the U.S. over its concerns of a possible missile test. But the Bush administration rejected the overture, saying threats aren’t the way to seek dialogue.
“You don’t normally engage in conversations by threatening to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles,” U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said.
The U.S. instead called on the North to return to six-nation talks on its nuclear program.
Bolton said he was continuing discussions with U.N. Security Council members on possible action, and had met with Russia’s U.N. ambassador. Washington is weighing responses to a potential test that could include attempting to shoot down the missile, U.S. officials have said.
China said Thursday that all parties should focus on finding a peaceful solution to the issue and also urged the North to return to the nuclear talks.
The sides should “be determined to realize a nuclear-free Korean peninsula and ... the notion of the process of the six-party talks,” Jiang said. “China stands ready to work with relevant parties in the international community to press ahead with the process.”
The North agreed at those talks in September to abandon its nuclear program in exchange for security guarantees and aid, but no progress has been made on implementing the accord.
North Korea has issued repeated complaints in recent weeks about alleged American spy flights, including in the skies off the coast where the missile test facility is located.
“Military provocations by U.S. warmongers against [North Korea] are reaching their extreme,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said Thursday. 
“The series of illegal infiltration and spying by reconnaissance planes of U.S. aggression forces is creating a danger of military clash in the skies,” the state-controlled News Agency continued.
The U.S. has sent ships off the Korean coast capable of detecting and tracking a missile launch, a Pentagon official said Wednesday. 
South Korean aircraft have also been flying reconnaissance over the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, said the military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.

TITLE: Al Qaeda’s No. Two Urges Afghans to Fight
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DUBAI — Al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri urged Afghans in an Internet video to fight foreign troops in their country whom he said had a history of denigrating Islam.
The 3-minute video, which was posted on Thursday on a web site often used by militant groups, showed Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man speaking directly to the camera with an automatic rifle propped up behind him.
There was no indication when it was made, but its posting coincides with some of the bloodiest violence in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in 2001, with almost 1,000 violent deaths this year, including 47 American troops and 18 other foreign soldiers.
“Muslim brothers in Afghanistan, and especially in Kabul, stand as one with the mujahideen [Muslim fighters] so that the invading forces might be expelled,” he said, referring to the Islamist militias such as the Taliban and al Qaeda that are battling U.S. and other foreign troops in Afghanistan.
In the video, Zawahri cited unspecified U.S. “aggressions” in Afghan cities as examples of foreign “crimes against Islam” and mentioned what he called the “ridiculing of our holy Prophet by the Italian, Danish and French,” referring to the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.

TITLE: In Budapest, Bush Marks Fifty Years Since Hungarian Revolt
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BUDAPEST, Hungary — U.S. President George W. Bush is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Hungary’s bloody revolt against communist rule one month before traveling to Russia for a summit of industrial democracies that could prove awkward for the American president.
Bush, arriving in Budapest on Wednesday night from meeting with European Union leaders in Vienna, Austria, planned to hold up this relatively new central European democracy as an example of freedom’s power.
In an open-air speech Thursday in the picturesque one-time cultural capital of central Europe, the president was urging other nations to celebrate the hard-won freedoms in former Iron Curtain countries by helping to nurture new democracies in places like Iraq. Bush recalled the difficulty of the transition to democracy in Hungary and other nations as a way of urging patience at home and abroad with the fits and starts of Baghdad’s transition to democracy.
“It’s kind of a tone poem about the 1956 revolution,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said. “This is mainly about visiting the Hungarian government and paying homage to what they went through 50 years ago.”
The president was beginning his day in Budapest with a greeting from a military guard, followed by meetings with Hungary’s leaders that started with President Laszlo Solyom at the understated Sandor Palace. Later, Bush was visiting the spectacular Parliament building along the Danube River to meet with other Hungarian officials, including representatives of several political parties.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Iran Prepared to Talk
GENEVA (Reuters) — U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said after talks on Thursday with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki that Iran was seriously considering an offer of incentives aimed at halting nuclear work.
After a nearly hour-long meeting, Annan said that Iran was prepared for talks “without preconditions” which he presumed included the issue of its nuclear enrichment programme.
“They are considering the package very, very seriously,” Annan told journalists. 
U.S. President George W. Bush said on Wednesday in Vienna that Iran was taking too long to respond to an offer of incentives to stop nuclear work that could lead to atomic weapons, and urged Tehran to reply within weeks.

Gore Wins Prize
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” will receive a rare recognition from the Humanitas Prize, which honors screenwriting that helps “liberate, enrich and unify society.”
“An Inconvenient Truth,” which chronicles Gore’s quest to draw attention to global warming, will receive the organization’s first Special Award in over 10 years, president Frank Desiderio announced Wednesday.
“It’s a very important film,” he said in a statement. “We want to shine a light on it.”
The documentary’s director, Davis Guggenheim, said he was “thrilled” with the recognition, adding that Humanitas “supports the achievements and sacrifices of filmmakers trying to change the world.”

BA Pricing Probe
LONDON (AP) — British and U.S. agencies are investigating alleged price-fixing by British Airways and other airlines on passenger fares and fuel surcharges, BA said Thursday.
In a brief statement, BA said it was assisting the Office of Fair Trading and the U.S. Department of Justice with their investigations, but it provided no details.
Two other airlines — Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines — said they were cooperating with the investigation.
BA said Martin George, its commercial director, and Iain Burns, its head of communications, have been given leaves of absence during the probe.

Olmert, Abbas Meet 
PETRA, Jordan (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met at an informal breakfast in Jordan on Thursday, embracing and shaking hands and pledging to meet again within weeks.
The Israel leader, however, cautioned that serious negotiations were unlikely until the Hamas-led Palestinian government recognized Israel.
It was the first meeting between top Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a year.

TITLE: Laywer Slams Murder Charges Against Marines
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAMP PENDLETON, California — A lawyer for a sailor charged along with seven Marines with premeditated murder in the shooting death of an Iraqi man called the allegations “shocking” and said his client was innocent.
“Believe me, there are two sides to this story,” said Jeremiah Sullivan III, who represents Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Melson J. Bacos.
Bacos and seven Marines were charged Wednesday in the death of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, who was pulled from his home and shot while U.S. troops hunted for insurgents. They could face the death penalty if convicted.
All eight also were charged with kidnapping. Other charges include conspiracy, larceny and providing false official statements.
Colonel Stewart Navarre, chief of staff for Marine Corps Installations West, announced the charges at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, where the eight are being held. The troops are members of the Pendleton-based 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines Regiment.
The case is separate from the alleged killing by other Marines of 24 Iraqi civilians in the western Iraqi city of Haditha last November. A pair of investigations related to that case are still under way, and no criminal charges have been filed.

TITLE: Rivals Hope to End Federer’s Supremacy
AUTHOR: By Bill Barclay
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — After failing in his bid to snatch Rafael Nadal’s claycourt crown, Roger Federer will try to mimic the Spaniard by breaking a record and then retaining one of his own Grand Slams this coming fortnight at Wimbledon. 
Last month Nadal opened his successful defence of the French Open by beating Guillermo Vilas’s record of 53 consecutive wins on clay and Federer will surpass Bjorn Borg’s grasscourt streak of 41 wins in a row if he wins his first round match on Monday. 
Nobody sensible would bet against either that or the Swiss going on to join Borg and Pete Sampras as the only men in the professional era to win four consecutive titles at the home of lawn tennis. 
Federer’s dominance on grass is absolute and the series of close shaves he survived last week at Halle — notably saving four match points in the quarter-finals against Belgian Olivier Rochus — will only have enhanced his aura of invincibility. 
That tournament allowed the Swiss to ease the psychological damage of his defeat in Paris by Nadal, a loss that prevented him becoming only the third man to hold all four grand slams at once. 
“Now when I go to Wimbledon people will not ask me about Paris, but about Halle,” Federer said. “That’s great mentally. It paid off that I came and that makes me even more happy.” 
Ever modest, Federer likes to point out that Borg’s 41 wins were all achieved at Wimbledon, while his own run includes four victories at the less competitive Halle event. 
He is also taking nothing for granted in the first round. 
“It’s very difficult to open the tournament in Wimbledon,” he said. “It’s maybe a privilege and an honor, but at the same time you can be the first guy out of the tournament. So, there’s a lot of pressure.” 
Such talk will be of little comfort to his chief rivals at the All England Club, led by Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt. Roddick has been knocked out of Wimbledon for the past three years by Federer, once on the semi-finals and in each of the last two finals. Hewitt, the 2002 Wimbledon champion, has lost nine in a row against the Swiss, including in last year’s semi-finals at Wimbledon and in the quarter-finals in 2004. 
“No one’s been able to do it the last three years and no one’s really come that close either,” said Hewitt who impressively won his fourth Queen’s Club title on Sunday. 
“It’s going to take someone to play an awfully good match, especially over five sets, to beat him at Wimbledon.” 
Roddick lost in the semi-finals at Queen’s to compatriot James Blake but believes he is playing the way he needs to if he is to challenge his Swiss nemesis. 
“I feel like I’m serving well, I feel like I’m returning well,” he said. “I feel prepared for Wimbledon, which obviously is the big goal.” 
Nadal’s lack of familiarity with slippery grass means he has never been beyond round three at Wimbledon.

TITLE: No Favorite in Women’s Draw
AUTHOR: By Bill Barclay
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — An air of wild unpredictability hangs over this year’s battle for the women’s singles title at Wimbledon. 
The fact was summed up when world number one Amelie Mauresmo slumped to a shock defeat by French compatriot Nathalie Dechy in her first match at the Eastbourne warm-up event on Wednesday. 
Wimbledon’s top seed seems not yet to have flushed from her mind the trauma of her defeat at the French Open nearly three weeks ago when she was upset in the fourth round by Czech teenager Nicole Vaidisova. 
“There is a lot of work to do,” Mauresmo admitted after losing to Dechy. “It wasn’t my greatest match but I also lost here last year and went on to the semi-final at Wimbledon.” 
All four women’s Grand Slams are presently held by different players. Aside from Australian Open champion Mauresmo, American Venus Williams is the defending Wimbledon champion, Belgian Justine Henin-Hardenne holds the French Open title and her compatriot Kim Clijsters is the U.S. Open champion. 
None can present a compelling case to be favorite at the All England Club. Mauresmo appears out of form and Venus, seeded seventh, also succumbed to Vaidisova in Paris and is short of both match practice and consistency. 
Seeking a fourth Wimbledon singles title, the older Williams sister has the added pressure of being the only American seed after last year’s losing finalist Lindsay Davenport joined Venus’s sister Serena and long-term absentee Jennifer Capriati on the injury list.

TITLE: Ghana Ousts U.S., Italy Beats Czechs
AUTHOR: By Philip Blenkinsop
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NUREMBERG, Germany — Ghana won a place in the last 16 of the World Cup with a 2-1 victory over the United States in a Group E decider on Thursday they largely controlled. 
A stoppage time penalty just before the break converted by captain Stephen Appiah secured the required three points after the United States’ Clint Dempsey had cancelled out Ghana’s initial goal by Haminu Dramani. 
The U.S. struck the post midway through the second half, but otherwise, with a lone striker for much of the match, caused the Ghanaian defence few problems. 
The Africans, who lost 2-0 to Italy in their first match, finished second in Group E and are likely to play Group F leaders Brazil for a place in the quarter-finals but will be without midfield inspiration Michael Essien. 
His crunching tackle on Reyna in the first half brought his second consecutive yellow card of the tournament. 
Ghana were the more combative for most of the match, although they struggled to find their rhythm early on against a United States team missing key centre back, Eddie Pope, and holding midfielder Pablo Mastroeni through suspension. 
They also lost captain Claudio Reyna towards the end of the first half. 
Ghana took the lead in the 22nd minute when midfielder Haminu Draman dispossessed Reyna and strode into the penalty area to curl the ball past a diving Kasey Keller. Reyna appeared to pick up a leg injury in the process. 
Midfielder Dempsey fired the U.S. back on level terms two minutes from the break after DaMarcus Beasley cracked in a low cross from the left following a defensive mix-up among three Ghanaians. 
But within four minutes Appiah had cracked the spot kick into the top left corner after Razak Pimpong had been pushed in the area. 
U.S. coach Bruce Arena threw on forward Eddie Johnson to join striker Brian McBride for the last half hour, a move that kick-started a series of U.S. assaults on the Ghanaian goal. 
McBride struck the post in the 66th minute with a header from an Eddie Lewis cross. 
Oguchi Onyewu rose above the Ghanaian defense from a corner only a minute later, but his header passed just above the crossbar.
In the other Group E match Thursday Italy clinched the top spot in Hamburg, eliminating the 10-man Czech Republic with a 2-0 victory. 
A 26th minute header from substitute Marco Materazzi gave the Italians the lead before the Czechs were reduced to ten men just before the break with the dismissal of Jan Polak. 
Substitute Filippo Inzaghi rounded goalkeeper Petr Cech to roll home the second in the 87th minute as the Czechs threw everyone forward. The Czechs sorely missed injured forward Jan Koller and suspended striker Vratislav Lokvenc and it was left to midfielder Pavel Nedved to provide the attacking inspiration. 
Twice in the early stages Nedved tested his Juventus club-mate, Italy keeper Gianluigi Buffon with long-range efforts. 
Buffon dealt well with a dipping drive but could only parry out another Nedved effort — although the Italy keeper did well to smother Marek Jankulovski’s follow-up. 
Italy’s problems increased in the 17th minute when they were forced into a change — Alessandro Nesta, suffering from what appeared to be a recurrence of his troublesome muscle injury, limping off to be replaced by Materazzi. 
Nine minutes after entering, the big central defender headed the Azzurri in front with his first goal for the national side leaping superbly above Polak to power a header past Petr Cech. 
The Italians’ grip on the game got tighter just before the break when Polak was dismissed for a second bookable offence for a foul from behind on Totti. 
That left Karel Brueckner’s side down to ten men for a second half in which they needed to score twice to keep themselves in the World Cup.

TITLE: Sven Remains Confident As England Loses Owen to Injury
AUTHOR: By Trevor Huggins
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BUHLERTAL, Germany — England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson said on Thursday he had no regrets about his squad selection after Michael Owen’s injury left him with only three World Cup strikers. 
Owen’s ruptured cruciate ligament has left England with Wayne Rooney, who broke his foot on April 29, Peter Crouch and teenage novice Theo Walcott for Sunday’s second round game with Ecuador. 
Asked about his squad, which left no room for proven striker Jermain Defoe, Eriksson told a new conference: “I don’t regret it, because I think we are very well covered. 
“Rooney’s getting better and better, and fitter, and that’s the positive thing... I’m quite sure I picked the best squad. 
“You can never know if a player is going to get injured, whether a centre-haf, a midfielder or in this case a striker. 
“I’m not worried about the situation today — absolutely not.” 
As for Owen, Eriksson said: “It’s a great pity for everyone — our team, Newcastle United, for Michael of course and fans of England and Newcastle. 
“It’s sad, but that’s football, unfortunately.” 
Eriksson was annoyed on Tuesday night after England conceded two goals to set-pieces in their 2-2 Group B draw with Sweden, a corner and a long throw in. 
The Swede remained waspish on Thursday, when asked why they appeared to mark zonally, saying: “We shouldn’t.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Annan Misses Match
GENEVA (Reuters) — United Nations chief Kofi Annan missed out on watching his native Ghana as they played a decisive World Cup match against the United States on Thursday. 
“I think it is going to be a fun game,” Annan told a news briefing in Geneva before leaving for New York, where he lives. 
“Unfortunately, I shall be trapped in a plane as the game goes on and it is really very sad,” the U.N. secretary-general said. 

South Korea’s Secret
BENSBERG (AFP) — Like a conquering army, South Korea are marching towards the knock-out stages of the 2006 World Cup on their stomachs.
Their secret weapon in their quest for glory is chef Jung Ji-Choon who has been whipping up traditional Korean dishes on request at the team’s luxurious lodgings here.
Even healthy, toned South Korean footballers can be fussy eaters and Jung’s job is to keep them happy with staples like kimchi (fermented cabbage) and pap (boiled rice).

Adu For 2010
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Freddy Adu dreams of hoisting a World Cup trophy for the United States one day, but the football phenom left the door open to playing for his native Ghana and plans to play for a European club.
The 17-year-old midfielder, who plays for U.S. Major League Soccer’s DC United, said that he feels he could make the U.S. squad in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa after being left out in Germany this year.
In the meantime, he plans to move on to a European powerhouse in the next couple of years and said his agent has been talking with English champions Chelsea.

Van Nistelooy Out
FREIBURG, Germany (Reuters) — Netherlands striker Ruud van Nistelrooy could be left out of the starting lineup for Sunday’s second-round World Cup match against Portugal, coach Marco van Basten told reporters on Thursday. 
“The central position up front is a point of discussion and the chance that Dirk [Kuijt] will start on Sunday has increased,” Van Basten told reporters. 

Ivorians Consoled
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (Reuters) — Ivorian street vendors hawking T-shirts in the national soccer colours packed up their wares after the squad exited the World Cup, while fans took solace on Thursday from a final victory over Serbia & Montenegro. 
Ivory Coast’s national football squad, the Elephants, were eliminated from the World Cup finals after two games but fans enjoyed a flamboyant 3-2 victory over Serbia & Montenegro in their final game on Wednesday.