SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1181 (47), Tuesday, June 27, 2006
**************************************************************************


TITLE: New Justice Minister Job For Ustinov
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov was appointed justice minister on Friday, stoking fears that the authorities might adopt a tougher stance on dissent.
President Vladimir Putin appointed Ustinov just hours after the Federation Council approved his nomination of former Justice Minister Yury Chaika as the new prosecutor general.
As justice minister, Ustinov will oversee the registration and activities of political parties as they prepare for State Duma elections next year. His ministry will be able to deny registration to parties with less than 50,000 members.
Ustinov will also supervise nongovernmental organizations, which will have to start filing cumbersome financial reports next year under a restrictive law that came into effect in April. NGOs have expressed concern that even a small glitch in their reports could prompt authorities to seek their closure.
Finally, Ustinov, a staunch supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church, will oversee religious organizations, the prison system and court marshals.
Lev Ponomaryov, a leading human rights advocate, warned that the Justice Ministry could become more punitive under Ustinov.
“This is a big threat for the country and society,” he said.
Critics have accused the prosecutor’s office under Ustinov of prosecuting opponents of the ruling elite. Under Ustinov, prosecutors led the legal onslaught against Yukos and its owners.
“Restriction of political freedom is a fitting job for Ustinov,” said Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. 
She called Ustinov more intimidating than Chaika, who won praise as justice minister for working with NGOs on prison reform.
Ustinov’s support of the Orthodox Church could affect the impartiality of his decisions on interfaith matters, Ponomaryov said, noting that Ustinov has tried to apply religious views to secular life.
Prosecutors under Ustinov accused Moscow’s Sakharov Center of instigating religious hatred by displaying a controversial art exhibition. The high-profile case ended last year with a court levying fines on the center’s director and a colleague.
As prosecutor, Ustinov also advocated the assignment of Orthodox priests to the armed forces and urged local prosecutor’s offices to set up prayer rooms for staff.
But Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent State Duma deputy, predicted that little would change at the Justice Ministry. “It was a repressive agency under Chaika, and it will be a repressive agency under Ustinov,” he said, pointing to the ministry’s refusal last year to recognize the legitimacy of a congress of his liberal Republican Party.
Both Chaika and Ustinov are “career prosecutors and have absolutely identical backgrounds,” he said. As such, he said, the swap had left him puzzled. “No psychologically healthy person is able to explain this reshuffle,” he said. “I hope the president will explain it somehow.”
Putin made no public comment about Friday’s appointment. He also remained silent when Ustinov abruptly resigned early this month and when he picked Chaika to replace him last week.
Communist Duma Deputy Oleg Kulikov agreed with Ryzhkov that the Justice Ministry would not face any sweeping changes under Ustinov. Decisions on how to treat political parties, for one, are made “elsewhere,” he said, in an apparent reference to the Kremlin.
Ustinov did not immediately comment on his appointment. Calls to the Justice Ministry’s press service went unanswered Friday afternoon.
Chaika, after being sworn in on Friday, promised personnel changes but not purges in prosecutors’ offices across the country.
“Our course is an upgrade and modernization of prosecutors’ offices in every dimension,” Chaika said in an interview with Interfax. “New people must work under new conditions.”
In the Federation Council, he said prosecutors needed to become better at their jobs. “Contemporary trials have become really competitive, and they don’t forgive mistakes and slipshod work,” he said.
Prosecutors have lost several high-profile cases in recent years. In May, for example, a jury acquitted two suspects in the killing of Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine.
Chaika said his other priorities would include fighting nationalism and extremism and cooperating with NGOs. Protecting human rights “is the backbone of the system,” he said, RIA-Novosti reported. 
“The level of people’s education regarding human rights protection is low, and people are facing the arbitrariness of local authorities.”

TITLE: WTO Entry Agreement Expected in Weeks
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina and Stephen Boykewich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — After a protracted, highly politicized struggle between Russia and the United States over Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization, Russian negotiators and two people familiar with the U.S. position said a bilateral agreement could be just weeks away.
“I am willing to bet that the agreement will be signed right before, or during, the Group of Eight summit,” said a source familiar with the U.S. negotiating stance. “It would be a victory for both presidents. It will be signed.”
Over the weekend of July 15-17, President Vladimir Putin will host U.S. President George W. Bush and other world leaders at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg. From all indications, the Kremlin would like to mark the event by announcing that another major international organization had opened the door to Russian membership.
Bush has also indicated he wants Russia in the WTO sooner rather than later — a position reiterated by outgoing U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow at a G8 finance ministers’ meeting in St. Petersburg earlier this month. Bush still faces stiff resistance, however, from an increasingly rebellious U.S. Congress at a time when his approval ratings are at an all-time low.
A U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a deal could happen sometime in July.
Russian officials expressed similar optimism.
“The negotiations are progressing and we are very optimistic at this point,” an Economic Development and Trade Ministry spokeswoman said Thursday.
Sources in the ministry also said the talks had been very intense, with Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and some of his staff regularly traveling abroad for talks with U.S. officials.
Russia appears, at least partially, to be responding without much fuss to key U.S. demands .
Signing a bilateral agreement with the United States remains the last obstacle for Russia before it can begin the formal part of joining the WTO by signing a multilateral agreement with the WTO’s 149 member countries.
Russia has been seeking to join the WTO for the last decade.
The United States has long insisted Russia strengthen protection of intellectual property rights, as well as make concessions in the agricultural and financial sectors.
Some results appear to be visible in the first sphere. The government recently adopted a new strict licensing procedure for businesses involved in publishing audio and video products. Further legal changes to the copyright laws are also due to be submitted to the State Duma soon.
“There has certainly been some progress on the IPR front,” the U.S. diplomat said.
Progress may also have been made on agriculture, where the dispute between the two sides was revived a few months ago after apparently being resolved.
In a March 29 speech to the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Putin said the United States was “artificially pushing back the negotiating process” by submitting a list of areas for “additional negotiations.”
U.S. officials, meanwhile, said the dispute was over agriculture import rules that the United States considered unduly harsh. Over the years, a particularly sensitive issue has been the importation of chickens into Russia, which is the United States’ biggest poultry export market.
In an apparent concession, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov recently ruled that Russian food safety officials had the option of applying international standards to agricultural imports rather than use the stricter domestic standards.
“That was something the Americans had been pressing the Russians to do for months, and they finally did it three or four weeks ago,” said Andrew Somers, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia.
Though it remains unclear which standards Russian inspectors will ultimately use, “the fact is it shows movement by the government” toward addressing U.S. concerns, Somers said.
The financial sector, however, appears to be an area in which Russia has no desire to back down. The U.S. is demanding Russia drop protective measures that bar foreign banks and insurance companies from operating wholly owned branches. Russia maintains its still young and fragile financial sector would be devastated if foreign competitors were allowed into the country without barriers.
“There are certainly some concrete issues that are yet to be resolved,” Arkady Dvorkovich, an economic adviser to Putin, said on the sidelines of an investors conference in Moscow last week. “The American side is insisting on direct access to the Russian market for banks and insurance companies through [wholly owned] branches. We are against it, strictly against it.”
“At least the overwhelming majority of American banks say they don’t need it either,” Dvorkovich added.
Sources familiar with the mood of American financial institutions confirmed this.
Dvorkovich dismissed media speculation that bilateral negotiations had been soured by a scandal involving Russian customs officials’ confiscation of a large shipment of Motorola cell phones, which later turned up on the black market.
The scandal “is not connected to the WTO,” Dvorkovich said. “In general we try to separate the routine issues from the strategic ones that are related to the WTO agenda.”
It may be that both sides have now managed to put behind them some of the flashpoints that soured the atmosphere in recent months in the interests of concluding the WTO deal. 
Two such notable incidents were when a senior Russian official drew a link between the WTO deal and U.S. companies’ participation in the Shtokman gas project, and when U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney criticized Russia over democracy at a summit in Lithuania.
U.S. domestic politics, however, remain a significant stumbling block — regardless of Bush’s attitude toward Russia joining the WTO.
Though Congress has no direct legal control over the U.S. government’s decision to sign a bilateral agreement with Russia, its vote will become crucial following Bush’s signing, when it would have to vote on the removal of the Jackson-Vannik amendment, a key irritant in Russian-U.S. relations.
The amendment was enacted in 1975 as a tool to soften the Soviet Union’s tough emigration policies, particularly toward Jewish dissidents, with the threat of trade sanctions. Since 1992, the amendment has been suspended annually after a review conducted at the request of the U.S. president. The existence of the amendment, however, is incompatible with WTO rules, which oblige member nations to extend permanent normal trade relations, or PNTR, to all other members.
The problem is that Russia “has no friends in the Congress or Senate,” said Viktor Kremenyuk, assistant director of the USA and Canada Institute, a Moscow think tank.
“There are those who at best don’t care, and then there are enemies,” Kremenyuk said. “We don’t have any lobbying power there.”
Anti-Russian sentiments in the U.S. Congress have left Bush — whose previously unshakable Republican base is softening in the run-up to Congressional elections in November — with a dilemma.
“If Jackson-Vannik stays, the U.S.  itself would be in violation of the WTO rules” if it signed off on Russia’s WTO bid, then refused it PNTR status, one source familiar with the situation said.

TITLE: Nationalist Leader Visits Jewish Grave
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Notorious anti-Semite Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant leader of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, has made a pilgrimage to his father’s grave in Israel.
“For 60 years, I didn’t know anything about my father,” Zhirinovsky told reporters in Tel Aviv, adding that he had been looking for him for a half-century.
Zhironovksy’s father, Volf Eidelshtein, died in 1983, at the age of 76. He is buried in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Zhirinovsky also met his cousin, Isaac Eidelshtein, in Tel Aviv.
“Now all Russian Christians can vote for me,” Zhirinovsky said inexplicably.
Volf Eidelshtein was born in 1907 in Kostopol, which was then part of Poland and is now in Ukraine.
The Nazis invaded Kostopol in 1941, killing most of Zhirinovsky’s family. His father managed to escape to Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, where he eventually met Zhirinovsky’s mother, Alexandra Zhirinovsky. 
After the war, under Stalin’s orders, Volf Eidelshtein was sent to Poland. Zhirinovsky was a few months old at the time. 
In 1949, Zhirinovsky’s father and uncle left for Israel.
Despite Zhirinovsky’s Jewish origins, he is known for his many anti-Jewish proclamations — accusing Jews of ruining Russia, selling Russian women abroad as prostitutes, hawking healthy Russian children and organs to Western bidders and provoking the Holocaust. 
Zhirinovsky conceded in a 2001 book of having a Jewish father, though because his mother was a Gentile, Zhirinovsky is not considered Jewish under Jewish law 
Nevertheless, Zhirinovsky refused to honor a moment’s silence for the Nazis’ Jewish victims in the Russian parliament. 
He said that honoring the moment’s silence would have been an insult to the millions of Russian victims of World War II. 
Now Zhirinovsky plans to sue Germany for having killed his family. 
Zhirinovsky also said he would sue Israeli doctors for failing to save his father after he was critically wounded in a bus accident. 
And he hinted at legal action against Ukraine, saying his family had a timber factory in Kostopol and he wants it back.

TITLE: Blaze Kills Six Naval Cadets at Academy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: A fire broke out Saturday in a naval academy dormitory in St. Petersburg, killing six cadets and injuring 18, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
The fire erupted early in the morning at the Makarov Naval Academy. Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said that in addition to the six killed — two of whom died from their burns in hospital — another 18 cadets were hospitalized and 57 evacuated.
Sheets dangled out of third-floor windows of the five-story building were tied together to allow people to lower themselves down to jump onto mattresses.
Leonid Belyayev, head of the Emergency Situations Ministry’s branch in St. Petersburg, said the fire broke out in the corridor and spread to four dormitory rooms, where four bodies were found.
There was no immediate information on possible causes of the fire, which Beltsov said was contained within about an hour.
Meanwhile, a fire early Sunday gutted a dormitory housing foreign laborers in the Khanty-Mansiisk region, killing five and injuring 11, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. 
The blaze hit the one-story wooden building in the town of Beloyarsky. 
The dormitory was home to about 80 laborers from Ukraine and Belarus, said ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov. There was no information on possible causes of the fire.

TITLE: Tourists to be Saved By City’s New Angels
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Foreign tourists may have less trouble on the streets of St. Petersburg when an “Angels Service” begins to patrol the city on Wednesday, according to City Hall.
Having spotted Angels in “I Can Help”  T-shirts, tourists will be able to approach them and receive qualified help on how to get to places, where to shop and what to do in emergency situations.   
“The service employees work on the streets of St. Petersburg in pairs,” reads a press release from the tourism department of the city’s committee on investment and strategic projects, the initiative’s organizer. “They speak foreign languages, are competent, efficient and, most importantly, provide information to tourists free of charge,” it continues. 
The project is part of the St. Petersburg 2005-2010 development program, on the completion of which the city hopes to receive 5 million visitors every year, said Nana Gvichiya, deputy director of the city’s tourist information center.
Maria Chernobrovkina, the executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce, which acted as an advisor to the city administration on the launch of the initiative, said that their motivation was primarily based on concerns over the security of foreigners visiting St. Petersburg.
“The security of foreigners [in the city] is one of a number of burning issues,” Chernobrovkina said Monday in a telephone interview. 
The issue of language is also a major concern, she said.
“If, say, [a tourist’s] purse is stolen, very often the foreigner just doesn’t know what to do and who to go to for help. The procedures exist but, very often, nobody seems to be able to provide any information on how to use them,” Chernobrovkina said.
“The service’s aim is not, of course, to drive off criminal attacks, but to provide information to tourists concerning what to do in such cases so they don’t feel neglected and lost,” Chernobrovkina added.
The initiative’s organizers stress that their service will be available to Russian travelers as well as foreigners. 
The Angels were named after the city’s most prominent symbol, the golden angel crowning the top of the highest building in St. Petersburg, the Peter and Paul Cathedral.

TITLE: 13 Governors Sign Letter on Extremism
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and 12 other regional leaders are calling for the church, media and authorities to join forces to counter “extremist” figures such as Dmitry Rogozin and Eduard Limonov, as well as Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, whom they accuse of bankrolling extremism.
The powerful regional leaders — all of whom are members of United Russia — made the appeal in a letter released late last week, just days before the State Duma was to vote on amendments to anti-extremism legislation that would allow courts to shut down parties and news organizations for slandering government officials or threatening possible mass protests.
“Extremist calls and actions are not compatible with the norms of a civilized society, and they look especially cynical in a country where millions of people gave their lives to fight fascism,” said the appeal, addressed to “all branches of power” and “all structures of civil society.”
The appeal accused Rogozin, the former head of Rodina, and National Bolshevik Party leader Limonov of “actively exploiting extremist slogans” and said “those who support them must be denied access to public activities.”
It singled out Gusinsky, Berezovsky and Leonid Nevzlin as wealthy patrons of “the radical opposition.” 
Berezovsky and Nevzlin have acknowledged funding the opposition.
All three live abroad in self-imposed exile and are wanted by Russia on multiple charges, including fraud and tax evasion. The three say the charges are politically motivated.
In addition to Luzhkov, the signatories of the letter, which was posted on United Russia’s web site, include Moscow region Governor Boris Gromov, Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev, Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Khloponin, Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev and Bashkortostan President Murtaza Rakhimov.
Limonov and other opposition leaders said Friday that the appeal was part of a Kremlin effort to weaken the opposition ahead of Duma elections next year and the presidential vote in 2008.
“The Kremlin probably knows some poll results that we will never know,” Limonov said. Otherwise, it would not pull out “heavy artillery like governors.”
“In any case, this is recognition of what we do,” he added.
The National Bolshevik Party, known for its theatrical anti-Kremlin demonstrations, claims to have nearly 56,000 supporters across the country. The group has been stripped of its registration as a nongovernmental organization, and the Justice Ministry has refused to register it as a political party.
A United Russia deputy, Gennady Gudkov, expressed dismay that the appeal had identified individuals by name. “There is no legislation and cannot be any that is drafted for certain people,” he told Kommersant in remarks published Friday.
A United Russia spokesman, Leonid Goryainov, said the appeal was meant to coincide with the 65th anniversary Thursday of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
However, Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent Duma deputy, said the appeal aimed to give more weight to the anti-extremist amendments, which the Duma is to vote on in a first reading this week.
“A semblance of broad public support is necessary to impose these amendments,” he said.
Ryzhkov and other opposition politicians sharply criticized the amendments as an attempt to silence them and reduce their chances in Duma elections.
He said that while the Kremlin and United Russia were busy targeting the opposition, real fascist organizations were flourishing and the number of hate crimes was growing. A total of 18 people have been killed in racially motivated attacks since the start of the year, he said.
Meanwhile, liberal politicians and prominent human rights activists on Friday announced the formation of the Anti-Fascist Front, a group designed to fight fascism and xenophobia, RIA-Novosti reported. Its members include Union of Right Forces leader Nikita Belykh, Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Holocaust Fund chairman Alla Gerber.

TITLE: Foreign Minister Questions Authenticity of Murder Video
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday expressed doubt over the authenticity of a web video purportedly showing the execution of three Russian hostages kidnapped in Iraq earlier this month. 
An al-Qaida-linked group on Sunday posted a web video apparently showing the graphic killings of three Russian embassy workers. An accompanying statement by the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization linking seven insurgent groups including al-Qaida in Iraq, said the fourth kidnapped diplomat was also killed. 
“We saw that footage ... it is not fresh, it is dated sometime mid-June. ... It also contained a scene of execution of several people, but we are not 100 percent sure that these are our employees,” Lavrov said on Ren-TV television. 
The 90-second video, posted on an Islamic web site that frequently airs militant messages, showed two blindfolded men being beheaded and the shooting of a third man. 
“Experts possessing the necessary equipment and experience are now studying the footage as thoroughly as possible,” Lavrov said. 
Moscow vehemently opposed the U.S.-led military campaign and has continued to keep its distance from Washington on the issue of Iraq. Four Russian workers were killed in ambushes in Iraq in 2004. 
Leonid Slutsky, first deputy head of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, said Moscow would “respond adequately” if the diplomats’ death is established, Interfax reported. 
He added that any action would be directed against terrorists, rather than against Iraq or its citizens.

TITLE: Belarus to Develop Military
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday vowed a military buildup in response to what he said was a threat from the West, and said the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons could not be ruled out. 
Lukashenko said in comments broadcast on state television that, in his view, Belarus did not need strategic weapons on its territory. 
“I don’t think there will be a situation that would require the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons,” he said during military exercises between Russian and Belarussian forces — the largest ever for the two countries. 
However, he qualified his remarks by saying: “If a threat to security existed, there is no need to rule anything out.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry declined comment on Lukashenko’s remarks. 
In an apparent desire to downplay relations with Belarus, President Vladimir Putin declined an invitation to attend aviation exercises Saturday.

TITLE: Special Relationship With Italy in the Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The famous Putin-Berlusconi romance is apparently on life support. 
With voters having tossed Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from office and President Vladimir Putin busy meeting Berlusconi’s successor, one of the best-known — and most controversial — relationships between two heads of state looks to be unraveling.
Now, Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Berlusconi was driven to tears when he glimpsed his “grande amico” Putin warmly greeting the new Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, at the Kremlin last week. Prodi’s center-left coalition narrowly beat Berlusconi’s center-right coalition in April parliamentary elections.
The Kremlin denies that Putin has deserted his old friend, who repeatedly defended the Russian president against charges of human rights violations in Chechnya and mishandling the case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Yukos founder.   
Presidential administration spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Putin’s generally positive meeting with Prodi had no bearing on his ties to Berlusconi.
“The president has relations with many foreign leaders, but nobody is jealous,” Peskov said. “I think that this [Italian] paper made up the story. This is just an emotional fantasy of the paper and has nothing to do with reality.”
Paolo Guzzanti, a senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and a journalist, shrugged off talk of a Putin-Berlusconi split, saying the relationship was strictly professional. “Berlusconi is not crying,” Guzzanti said.
This much is beyond dispute: When he was in office, Berlusconi enjoyed a warm relationship with Putin exceeding the closeness of other well-known matchups such as Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton in the 1990s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and, more recently, Putin and Gerhard Schroeder.
In 2003, Putin, his wife Lyudmila and their two daughters, Masha and Katya, spent three days at Berlusconi’s 2,500-square-meter villa in Sardinia. The trip featured 400 cactuses specially planted for the Russian leader and a performance by tenor Andrea Bocelli.
A year earlier, Masha and Katya spent a month summering at Berlusconi’s villa. Last summer, Lyudmila Putin visited Italy while Berlusconi met with Putin in Sochi. The former prime minister can perhaps take some solace in knowing that Prodi has yet to be invited to the president’s Black Sea retreat.

TITLE: New Form of Transport Hits City Streets
AUTHOR: By Cori Weiner
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In sync with the worldwide trend, St. Petersburg has adopted a new mode of transportation.  Since the end of May and continuing through the summer, cycle rickshaws have been rolling the streets of Petrodvorets.  The budding business is manned by a handful of boys, aged from 18 to 20.  From 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays as well as holidays, they earn money the old fashioned way:  through hard work.  Peddling their way around the area, with a seat for customers that fits two, these young entrepreneurs can also point out landmarks to Russian-speaking clients.  
Unlike many tourist attractions, one price fits all, Russians and non-Russians alike.  Posted on a small card is the “official” cost: 150 rubles for 10 minutes.  But, as usual, the price is negotiable, if you can negotiate in Russian.  Despite any language barriers, you can certainly make a deal, pay your money and hop right in. You can then select a particular destination or ask for a round-trip tour.  Either way, the experience is unique, and because it is a new phenomenon, you’ll get lots of attention from passersby.
Viktor, one of the older drivers, enjoys various modes of transportation and feels comfortable on pedestrian walkways and small side streets alike.  His driver’s license gives him a bit more security on the street, as does his other hobby, scootering.  Aware of his surroundings, he follows road signs and rides at a steady, slow pace. The quality of the cycle itself adds to the experience: sturdy, but basic in an endearing way.
Viktor is so industrious that he has taken on velo taxis as well. A close relative to the cycle rickshaw, velo taxis run on the same principle, but with the help of an electric motor.  The price is 100 rubles per kilometer, and while it may not be as endearing or exotic as the rickshaw, it’s more secure and protects you from the rain. Velo taxis can currently be found at various points along Nevsky Prospekt in the center of town.
The price and build are not the only differences between cycle rickshaws and velo taxis.  Viktor feels that managing the cycle rickshaw is more burdensome physically for the driver; velo taxis are easier to manipulate across the wide range of obstacles in urban life.  As a result, “they’ve created some serious competition for the cycle rickshaws,” says Viktor. The clientele also differs: the cycle rickshaw attracts younger passengers interested in a fun ride while the velo taxi appeals to an older crowd, tourists and locals alike, according to Viktor.  
The rickshaw, predecessor to the cycle rickshaw, gives this new mode of transportation an interesting history. Originating in Japan, according to some, its name stems from the Japanese, meaning human-powered vehicle.  And, indeed, the vehicle was originally pulled by a man on foot.  As human labor was less expensive than using horse-powered vehicles, rickshaws began to spread throughout many Asian countries in the late 1800s. They were used for various practical purposes from carrying goods to transporting people.  
However, over time, they were banned in many cities, perceived as being degrading, and today only cycle rickshaws or motor rickshaws remain in use.  
As for St. Petersburg, only time will tell if this arrival will become a staple for transportation as it has become in much of Asia.

TITLE: No Sparks Expected At U.S. Talks
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — U.S. President George W. Bush is expected to skirt a Russian clampdown on the opposition and hostility toward nearby pro-Western governments when he meets President Vladimir Putin on June 14.
While Washington last week sent signals that it was upset with Moscow, those were intended for the United States’ East European allies, not Russia, political analysts said Friday.
The Bush-Putin meeting, which immediately precedes the St. Petersburg G8 summit, is expected to focus on nonproliferation, terrorism and energy security.
Alexei Makarkin, a Center for Political Technologies analyst, called U.S. foreign policy pragmatic.
Alluding to Washington’s support for populist uprisings in former Soviet states in 2003 and 2004, Makarkin added: “Everyone understands that Washington does not have any alternative to Putin in Russia, like, for example, it had in Georgia and Ukraine.”
Recent rhetoric critical of Russia — including, presumably, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s highly publicized comments in Vilnius — is meant to cheer up the Georgian and Ukrainian regimes, said Sergei Markov, another analyst with Kremlin ties.
Both governments have suffered setbacks in recent months, with Georgia facing more trade sanctions from Russia and liberals in Ukraine having barely managed to cobble together a fragile coalition government.
 Still, Bush, who has made the spread of democracy the centerpiece of his second term, has not shied away from speaking his mind about Russia.
On Thursday, Bush met with Hungarian leaders in Budapest. That meeting was largely devoted to discussing how to persuade Russia to embrace democracy, U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters.
Just before visiting Hungary, Bush took part in a summit in Vienna that adopted a declaration lamenting the “degradation of civil freedoms in Russia” and called on Moscow to withdraw troops from breakaway regions in Georgia and Moldova.
And on July 4, a day that for Americans symbolizes freedom and independence, Bush will meet in Washington with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, one of Moscow’s least favorite leaders of a post-Soviet country.
Bush’s actions have been more measured than those of several Republican and Democratic U.S. lawmakers, including some presidential aspirants, who believe Russia should be punished for, they say, abandoning democracy and free-market capitalism.
Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman and Representatives David Dreier and Tom Lantos on Tuesday sent a letter to Bush and other G8 leaders — except Putin — accusing the Russian president of steering his country down an authoritarian path. 
Ringing a similar tone was a Foreign Policy Center report published Sunday saying Russia did not belong in the G8 and that its presidency of the club of rich, democratic nations risked stripping it of legitimacy. The British think tank is supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair. 
Bush avoided direct confrontations with Putin in his last two one-on-one meetings with him, in Bratislava and Moscow. But Russia could return fire if need be, bringing up the treatment of Latvia’s sizable Russian minority and the United States’ Guantanamo Bay prison, Makarkin and Markov said.

TITLE: Emigre Fans Gather to Bang On Ukraine’s Drum
AUTHOR: By Kevein O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: BERLIN — When Andriy Shevchenko scored a penalty for Ukraine, putting it into the second round of the World Cup, cameras in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium cut to a delirious Ukrainian crowd.
Toward the bottom of the picture stood a strange figure with a bowl cut, the sides of his head shaven and sporting a bushy moustache and a big smile.
Two hours later, the same man could be seen marching down the platform of the stadium’s U-bahn subway station, thumping a large drum.
“This is a traditional Cossack costume,” said Roman Hnatyshyn, dressed in a white smock and baggy trousers, his face daubed in blue and yellow paint.
The Baltimore native admitted he wasn’t a big football fan, but said he and other second-generation Ukrainian-Americans had been waiting for the World Cup for a long time.
“I have got caught up in the whole World Cup thing,” said Hnatyshyn, an engineer who had grown his hair for a year so as to cut it the traditional Cossack way.
“The World Cup is bigger than the World Series or the Super Bowl,” he said, in reference to the baseball and American football championships, respectively.
Hnatyshyn is among the hundreds of sons, daughters and grandchildren of Ukrainian emigres who have made the trip from the United States, Britain and Australia to support their motherland at the world’s premier sporting event.
Meeting in Germany, they have formed a musical band that has been singing and beating drums at all three of Ukraine’s matches thus far. Also in traditional Ukrainian dress was Wolodymr Hnhew, a hefty gas worker from Coventry, England, who was singing loudly in Ukrainian onboard the train while Hnatyshyn beat a drum.
Ukraine’s failure in its first group match — a humiliating 4-0 loss to Spain — had been disheartening. 
“We played garbage against Spain. All the guys went to the bar for the second half,” Hnhew said.
But subsequent victories against Saudi Arabia and Tunisia mean Ukraine played Switzerland in the second round on Monday.
Although most native Ukrainian fans have embraced the antics of their foreign counterparts, some have voiced dismay at the strangely dressed foreigners who speak Ukrainian — and they all speak Ukrainian, rather than Russian — with thick accents.
“Most of them are OK, asking for pictures,” said Hnhew, speaking in a broad Midlands accent. “There have been one or two problems.”
A group of fans from Donbass challenged the ethnic Ukrainians, calling them fascists and asking why they didn’t speak Russian.
“It’s a traditional dress,” said Hnhew, insisting that it was not a nationalist symbol.
“I haven’t come here for politics,” he added.
His family moved from Galicia, in western Ukraine, to England after World War II.
After Friday’s game against Tunisia, a fight broke out between the two sets of Ukraine fans, showing the complicated emotions that football can unleash — especially in a country where the political and linguistic divide remains tense.
Football in Ukraine is far more popular within the Russian-speaking community. The two major clubs, Dynamo Kiev and Shakhtar Donetsk, are in predominantly Russian-speaking areas, and virtually all of the players on the Ukrainian national team speak Russian as a first language — as does trainer Oleg Blokhin. Consequently, most of the Ukraine fans at the World Cup are Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Russian is the football lingua franca in Ukraine, said Savik Shuster, host of the Ukrainian World Cup chat show “Trety Taim,” or “The Third Half,” in an interview before the start of the tournament.
Repression of the Ukrainian language in Soviet times meant it failed to develop a football vocabulary, said Shuster, who used to host a talk show on freedom of speech on NTV television.
It was only recently that matches started to have Ukrainian commentary — “but it sounds awkward,” he added.
Even so, most native Ukrainians who spoke Ukrainian joined in with the foreign Ukraine fans as they sang songs.
Alexander Denderakh, 40, who was wearing a spangly blue-and-yellow wig that looked as if it had been on his head for days, did not have a bad word to say about the marching, singing second-generation Ukrainians. “They’re great, better than the others. They just sit there and do nothing,” he said.
Meanwhile, Hnhew began chanting Ukrainian songs with a flourish. The drums boomed, somebody set off a claxon, and the train car turned Ukrainian. Ukrainian Ukrainian, that is.

TITLE: U.S. Criticizes Some Central Asia Leaders for ‘Selling Souls’
AUTHOR: By Roman Kozhevnikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — The United States accused certain Central Asian leaders of trying to “sell their souls” for personal gain Friday and denied Washington was seeking undue influence in the region.
In a sharply worded statement, the U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan said Washington had no intention of creating its own blocs in Central Asia, where analysts say Russia is vying with both the United States and China for influence.
“Some clear-eyed leaders in this region desire strongly to build their nations’ independence and sovereignty,” Ambassador Richard Hoagland said.
“Some others are willing to sell their state and even their own soul to the highest bidder for their own and their family’s short-term personal and political gain.”
Hoagland did not specify which of the five countries in Central Asia — Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan — he was criticizing, but at least some of his comments appeared to be aimed against Uzbek President Islam Karimov.
Hoagland said his statement was prompted by events earlier this month at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which groups together Russia, China and four Central Asian nations.
 Karimov made a veiled criticism of the United States at the summit, saying some countries wanted to shape the region to suit their own interests by dubbing some democratic and others not.

TITLE: Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in Storage
AUTHOR: By Dan Shea
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: ALABUSHEVO, Moscow Region — Lidia Fedorenko loved life. There were her friends, family and, of course, all the former math students she had taught over the decades. 
So when the 79-year-old St. Petersburg native suffered a stroke in September, dying a week later, her grandson, Daniil Fedorenko, knew what to do: freeze her brain.
“She wanted to extend her life by another 200 to 300 years,” Fedorenko said.
Today, Lidia Ivanovna’s brain sits in a metal container in a former schoolhouse in the village of Alabushevo. Her last wish was resurrection. Kriorus, a recently founded cryonics outfit, guards over her cerebral matter and that of a wealthy Moscow businessman’s 60-year-old father, who died of throat cancer in 2002. Kriorus declined to name the deceased man.
“We founded the company because human life is the most important thing there is,” Kriorus’ managing director, Alexei Potapov, explained. “To lose a life without putting up a fight is a crime.”
Potapov and his co-founders say they are Transhumanists, who believe technology can be used to transform human life and postpone death indefinitely. They founded Kriorus, the world’s first cryonics company outside the United States, in 2005 so that they and their family members would have a place to stay until medicine found a way to bring them back to life.
Now, for $9,000, anyone can spend eternity, or some portion of it, in cryonic stasis.
Cryonics has been hotly debated since the 1964 publication of American physicist Robert Ettinger’s book “The Prospect of Immortality.” But as far as Potapov and others at Kriorus are concerned, the debate is over: By mid-century, they predict, the technology should exist to give dead people a second life.
“In America, dogs have been frozen for eight hours and revived,” said Potapov, 29, a former computer programmer. “By exploiting nanotechnology, we’ll be able to manipulate cells and revive them.”
In the United States, 150 bodies are frozen in cryonic slumber, 74 of them at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, which Ettinger founded in 1976 and still runs. 
When some of the bodies were frozen 30 years ago, there was speculation that they would be revived at about this time. But there is no sign that anyone is going to be resurrected anytime soon.
Ettinger, now 88, noted there had been recent advances in freezing techniques and other cryonics-related areas but said he did not foresee great medical advances on the horizon. He conceded that Americans — and, presumably, Russians — are skeptical. “There will be a major shift in public sentiment at some point, but I’ve given up on predicting when that will happen,” he said.
Among cryonics’ foes are professional scientists.
“It’s complete nonsense,” said Adelia Koltsova of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Higher Nerve Activity and Neurology. “There are methods of treating organs by freezing them, but this is totally different. We have no idea what will happen in 100 years.” 
The science of cryobiology — the study of what happens to cells when subjected to extremely low temperatures — had a long and proud history in the Soviet Union, which after its fall bequeathed the country’s premier research facility, Kharkov’s Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine, to Ukraine.
Yury Pichugin, the chief research scientist at Ettinger’s Cryonics Institute, worked at the Kharkov institute for 20 years before moving to the United States in 1999. He said he first became interested in cryonics in 1975 when, as a student in Tomsk, his professors showed him a film on cryonics.
“They showed everything negatively: ‘These American fools are trying to freeze people, which is impossible,’ but I didn’t think it was impossible,” Pichugin recounted. 
Pichugin was criticized when he shared his cryonics ideas with his Komsomol peers. He voiced surprise that the communists, who professed love for the people, didn’t want them to live forever. The party — responsible for the gulag, collectivization and the Ukrainian famine — apparently preferred to use people as postmortem political symbols: hard-working proletarians, cosmonauts or collective-farm managers.
Not defeated, Pichugin began work in 1978 at the Kharkov institute, where he researched cryoprotectors, chemicals that help freeze tissue with minimal cell damage.
While he was unable to delve deeply into cryonics at the institute, Pichugin said cryobiology, with its advanced freezing techniques, contributed significantly to cryonics. 
Still, Grigory Babiychuk, the institute’s current deputy director, called the ties between cryobiology and cryonics strained. “Between us, there’s a lot of money to be made in cryonics,” he said.
Ettinger attributed lingering doubts about cryonics to “cultural inertia.” Humankind, he said, has accepted the inevitability of death, with the major monotheistic religions pinning their hopes for everlasting life on the soul, not the body. 
Robert Kastenbaum, an Arizona State University psychologist, said that surveys conducted in the United States revealed that many associate cryonics with live burial or being in a coma.
Back in the schoolhouse, Vladimir Alexeyevich, Kriorus’ elderly security guard, unlocked a rusted gate to reveal a yard littered with old bicycles and children’s toys. A German shepherd at his side was barking.
The brains reside inside the schoolhouse, at the end of a cramped corridor. There are no signs indicating where the brains are kept; across the entrance from the room containing the 1-meter-tall vat where the cerebral matter is stored is an unhinged door with faded letters reading Accounting Office.
Vladimir Alexeyevich, who lives with his family in a series of rooms adjacent to where the brains are, checks in on them at weekends and other odd hours to make sure everything is okay. The security guard declined to give his last name. 
In the event of an electricity outage — a serious concern since last May’s brownout, in which thousands of tons of sausage in Moscow-area meat processing plants spoiled — Kriorus is ready: The brains require three to four liters of liquid nitrogen daily, Potapov said. Given its storage capacity, Kriorus could go for 10 days without a problem. After that, the brains could be moved to dry ice, which doesn’t need electricity.
Before his grandmother’s death, Daniil Fedorenko had spoken to Lidia Ivanovna about her possible resurrection. After her grandson told her about the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, she willed her brain to him.
At the time of her death, Kriorus was still a dream.
Given the unexpectedness of her death, Lidia Ivanovna’s body could not be sent to the lab in the United States. Instead, it dispatched its representative in Russia, future Kriorus founder Danila Medvedev, then 25, to help Fedorenko.
Lidia Ivanovna died on a Friday evening. The next day, Fedorenko and Medvedev found the capital’s shops closed and were unable to buy the chemicals to carry out a perfusion, or oxygenation of the blood, which precedes a full-body freeze.
His grandmother’s remains in the morgue, Fedorenko, with Medvedev, asked an employee to remove her brain and put it in a container of dry ice as a stop-gap measure. For seven months, Lidia Ivanovna’s brain lay in her grandson’s apartment. Daniil Fedorenko cared for his grandmother’s brain, which was kept in her former bedroom, packing it in dry ice every four to five days.
Kriorus’ other brain was also frozen and as a last resort kept on dry ice in a private apartment for three years before the Alabushevo schoolhouse facility opened.
“Of course, these situations are not optimal,” Medvedev admitted. “The chances of resurrecting these patients is much lower.” In Fedorenko’s case, the formation of ice crystals set in when her brain was put on dry ice.
Daniil Fedorenko is hopeful. “When she is resurrected, she’ll be able to choose her own new body,” he said, adding that he hoped microscopic robots would have been invented by then to transmit detailed information from her neurons to a computer. It is hoped that eventually that information would lay the groundwork for a new brain, body — and life.
“We can put our brains in better, stronger bodies,” Potapov said. These new bodies could feature harvested organs and robotic body parts. “Transhumanism tells us it’s probable human beings will be smarter in the future. I want to be able to access that.”
Both Potapov and Daniil Fedorenko stressed that an individual’s soul would remain intact because their memories and thoughts would be preserved.
But the equation of memory with the soul, or “essence,” raises sundry questions — especially in Russia, where spirituality and the soul have for hundreds of years been given special status. 
The Russian sense of soul has been largely shaped by the Russian Orthodox Church, said Yury Afanasyev, a historian and rector of the Russian State Humanities University. 
After Tsar Alexander I’s troops beat Napoleon back to Paris, giving Russians a first glimpse of the West, many in Russia began to conceive of the country as spiritually superior to mercantilistic, Catholic France, Afanasyev said. Russians’ tendency to think of themselves as highly spiritual persists to this day, he said.
Given the Church’s growing prominence, its hostility to cryonics could have a debilitating impact on public perceptions. Father Vladimir Vigilyansky, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, explained the “technological resurrection of man ... contradicts God’s word about man.”
Pichugin, of the Cryonics Institute, rejected the Church’s exegesis. Just as Christianity offers human beings everlasting life, so, too, does cryonics, he said. “I don’t know if the soul is preserved when a person is frozen, but there’s a point where the difference between the physical and the spiritual is unclear,” he said.
Pichugin added that cryonics’ future is in Russia. “From Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, writers and philosophers have argued that it is Russia’s place to save mankind,” he said. Then, somewhat enigmatically, he added: “Russians have a more communal mindset than Americans and understand the idea of community better. Their mentality is more inclined to cryonics.”

TITLE: Renault Mulling Tie-Up
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — France’s Renault wants a blocking stake of 25 percent plus one share in the country’s No. 1 carmaker, AvtoVAZ, and set up a joint venture that would produce 450,000 Logan cars per year in Russia, Vedomosti reported Friday.
Vedomosti said the deal, which would have to be approved by the Kremlin, was discussed when AvtoVAZ chairman Vladimir Artyakov visited Paris last week. Officials from both companies were not immediately available for comment.
Vedomosti said Renault was seeking a blocking stake and wanted to be the manager of the joint venture.
“The French have warned this will be possible only if the Kremlin approves the deal,” Vedomosti quoted an AvtoVAZ source as saying.
Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn told Vedomosti in an interview published last week that he would cooperate with AvtoVAZ only if the Russian government gave its unconditional approval and support to a venture.
Ghosn told a news conference in Moscow on June 14 that a Renault delegation had visited AvtoVAZ in Tolyatti, on the Volga River, but said Renault was in no hurry. “I think the other party is not in a hurry,” he added. “We’ve yet to study possible synergies.”
Rosoboronexport, the country’s state arms agency, took over AvtoVAZ last year and plans to spend billions of dollars to develop new models and increase production.
Renault is seeking a bigger slice of Russia’s booming market, with its $250 million Avtoframos venture in Moscow set to boost output to 80,000 cars over a couple of years.
Renault’s Logan, one of the latest super-budget cars, has won popularity in Russia, and media reports say Russians sometimes have to wait for two months to buy the model. 
The French manufacturer currently produces Logan models through its Avtoframos venture, but a possible tie-up with Russia’s No. 1 carmaker would allow it to significantly increase the production of the popular car.
Ghosn, who is also CEO of Japan’s second-largest carmaker, Nissan, signed a deal with the government Tuesday, committing itself to building a $200 million plant in St. Petersburg.
Nissan aims to produce 50,000 cars at its Russian plant by 2009.
AvtoVAZ would greatly benefit from the agreement and would gain access to modern technology, Deutsche UFG said in a research note Friday. 
 GAZ, controlled by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, concluded a 57 million euro ($72 million) agreement with Renault trucks on producing 11-liter heavy diesel engines in Yaroslavl, Russian media reported last week. 

(Reuters, SPT)

TITLE: Arcelor Succumbs To ‘Generous’ Mittal Bid
AUTHOR: By Justin Carrigan and Matthew Craze
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: LUXEMBOURG — Mittal Steel agreed to the steel industry’s biggest takeover after Arcelor SA accepted an increased offer valued at 26.9 billion euros ($33.7 billion), ending a bitter five-month feud.
Mittal raised its bid for a second time, by 10 percent to 40.40 euros a share, Arcelor Deputy Chief Executive Officer Michel Wurth told reporters 
Sunday after a board meeting in Luxembourg. Rotterdam-based Mittal, already the world’s largest steel producer, previously offered 23.5 billion euros.
Chairman Lakshmi Mittal “was jubilant” about the deal, director Wilbur Ross said in a telephone interview. Ross, the U.S. billionaire who sold his International Steel Group to Mittal for $4.5 billion last year, received a mobile phone call from Mittal while on his way into central Paris Sunday. “He just said: ‘We got it, we got it’ about 20 times.”
Arcelor must now halt a deal with Russian steelmaker Severstal that was intended to block Mittal and drew protests from investors by giving a controlling stake to billionaire Alexei Mordashov. 
The union of Mittal and Arcelor will create a company that controls 10 percent of world steel production, three times more than its closest rival, and may prompt a new round of acquisitions across the industry.
“It’s a generous” offer, said Gavin Wendt, a resources analyst at Fat Prophets Ltd. in Sydney. “Some of Arcelor’s major shareholders haven’t been necessarily positive about the deals Arcelor had been doing, for instance, the tie-up with the Russian steelmaker. They should be fairly happy with the terms of this bid.”
Mittal’s bid is worth 5 times historical earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, based on Arcelor’s four most recent quarters. It paid 5.7 times Ebitda for Ross’s ISG in April 2005.
The 18-member board of Arcelor, the world’s second-largest steel producer, voted unanimously to recommend Mittal’s offer after more than eight hours of deliberations, Chairman Joseph Kinsch said. The companies will make a statement in Luxembourg today and hold a press conference attended by Lakshmi Mittal.
“We still have to go through a few steps, but we are very confident now,” Ross said.
Investors will have about two weeks extra to tender their shares into the Mittal bid as a result of Arcelor’s decision, he added. The offer had been scheduled to close July 5.
“Arcelor fought hard and long for this,” said Philippe Gijsels, head of European equity strategy at Fortis Bank SA in Brussels. “It’s the best match.”
The new company, to be called Arcelor-Mittal and based in Luxembourg, will have more bargaining power with suppliers and customers such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Ford Motor Co. Mittal will own about 40 percent of the combined company, while current shareholders will retain the rest, Wurth said.
“We are absolutely happy,” Wurth told reporters as he drove out of the company’s headquarters Sunday evening in a black BMW. Wurth, smiling and accompanied by Chief Finance Officer Gonzalo Urquijo in the passenger seat, declined to say what role Arcelor Chief Executive Officer Guy Dolle would have in the new company.
Dolle had sought to repel Mittal by agreeing to buy most of Cherepovets, Russia-based Severstal from Mordashov, which would have created a steelmaker even bigger than Mittal.
“Shareholders in Arcelor have become very vocal” against the Severstal deal during the past 10 days, said Stephen Pope, head of equity research at Cantor Fitzgerald LP in London.
“That is probably what lanced the boil.”
Severstal, in a PRNewswire statement, said its agreement with Arcelor is legal and binding, adding that it is “reviewing all its options.” Mordashov still stands to collect a 140 million-euro break fee if Mittal acquires Arcelor.
Billionaire Roman Abramovich may help Mordashov raise his offer, Russia’s Vedomosti newspaper reported Monday, citing an unidentified person familiar with the plans. John Mann, a spokesman for Abramovich’s holding company, Millhouse Capital Ltd., declined to comment.

TITLE: Moscow Replaces Tokyo As World’s Priciest City
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — Moscow and Seoul leapfrogged Tokyo to become the world’s most expensive cities, a survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting showed. Tokyo, which ranked first in the past two years, dropped to third place.
Moscow jumped to first place this year from fourth in 2005 as the costs of accommodation surged. Seoul rose to second from fifth, while Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, remained the cheapest city to live in, the survey said. New York was the highest-placed U.S. city, rising three places to 10th.
“It can now be more expensive to send employees to work in Russia and Korea than places like Japan or Switzerland, which are often perceived to be more costly,’’ Rebecca Powers, a senior consultant at Mercer, said in an e-mailed statement.
The survey, conducted by New York-based Mercer in March, measures the costs of more than 200 items in 144 cities.
Companies and governments use the information to gauge the purchasing power of employees transferred abroad.
A cup of coffee plus service costs the equivalent of $3.07 in Moscow and $2.94 in Seoul, compared with $2.26 in New York and $1.90 in London, the survey showed. A music CD costs an average $13.29 in Moscow, while in New York it costs $10.77.
“The euro has weakened against a number of currencies, reducing the cost of living for expatriates in many European countries,” Mercer senior researcher Anna Krotova said. The euro dropped 9.6 percent against the dollar from March 1, 2005, to March 1 this year.
 Using New York as the base cost of living, the survey also compared rent prices. Rent, on average, for a luxury, two-bedroom unfurnished apartment in Tokyo is $2,352 a month, compared with $1,999 in New York and $1,700 in London.
Four Asian cities are in the top 10, with Seoul in second place, Tokyo third, Hong Kong fourth and Osaka sixth. Beijing is 14th, Singapore ranked 17th and Shanghai is in 20th place.
“Chinese cities have moved up slightly in the rankings as the value of the yuan renminbi is now pegged to a number of currencies rather than just the U.S. dollar,” Krotova said.
Other U.S. cities ranked include Los Angeles, in 29th place, San Francisco, at 34, Chicago, in 38th position, and Washington DC, ranked 83rd. Winston Salem remains the cheapest U.S. city, rated at 124th.

TITLE: Rostelecom to St. Petersburg
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Rostelecom, Russia’s dominant long-distance telephone provider, will move its tax address to St. Petersburg, following other state-run companies in giving President Vladimir Putin’s hometown a financial boost.
The move to Russia’s second-biggest city from the capital, Moscow, is stipulated in a new company charter that the government and other shareholders approved two days ago, Rostelecom spokesman Anton Klimenko said via phone Monday.
“The company wants to stay closer to the center of economic growth, St. Petersburg,” Klimenko said. 
“Many companies have moved their offices to St. Petersburg, this is the place of many economic summits and we, as a national operator, cannot ignore this tendency.”
Russia holds the rotating presidency of the Group of Eight nations for the first time this year and Putin chose St. Petersburg as the site of next month’s G8 summit. Vneshtorgbank, the country’s second-biggest lender, and Gazprom Neft, the oil unit of state gas company Gazprom, are among companies that have moved their tax address to the former tsarist capital.
Rostelecom will officially register in St. Petersburg by the end of the year, Klimenko said. He declined to say how many employees Rostelecom will have in St. Petersburg or how much tax it expects to contribute to the city budget.
Rostelecom employed more than 25,000 people at the start of last year.

TITLE: Extension to Avoid Liquor Drought
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government has agreed to allow more time for the switch to new excise labels for imported wine and spirits, potentially averting losses of hundreds of millions of dollars to importers and retailers. 
With only days to go before the July 1 deadline, the proposed change was in apparent chaos, with many retailers running short of stocks of legally imported wines and spirits, and importers warning of a parched summer of empty shelves ahead.
Dmitry Shablinsky, an official at the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, told an alcohol industry forum on Friday that the government would give importers until Dec. 29 to acquire the new labels, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported Saturday.
It was not immediately clear, however, when the extension would become law, how it would work or whether shortages would be avoided. 
One temporary solution suggested by ministry officials was that new labels be pasted over the old ones at licensed warehouses around the country.
So far, less than 2 million bottles of imported liquor with the new labels have been sold, while many liquor stores and supermarkets have gaping empty shelves as legal supplies run out. 
Only 70 of 126 licensed importers have the new labels and the accompanying software, Vedomosti reported Friday. 
As of last week, the Federal Customs Service said it had issued 81 million excise labels, about half the number applied for by importers, Vedomosti said.
Under a law passed last year that came into force April 1, all wines and spirits imports were required to carry new, larger excise stamps upon entering the country. Beginning on July 1, retailers would be barred from selling imported liquor with the old stamps. 
The legislation required to extend the deadline has been agreed upon by various government ministries and should be signed into law “shortly,” Interfax reported. 
Alcohol importers and business lobbies have repeatedly warned that supplies of foreign wines and spirits, which make up the bulk of the top end of the market, would dry up by July 1.
Because of the new labels, importers stand to lose up to $500 million and foreign liquor may not return to the stores before September, said Vadim Drobiz, a spokesman for the National Union of Wine and Spirits Producers and Distributors. 
One customs official, Alexander Sorvachev, told the alcohol industry forum that the “question of providing importers with the new excise stamps has been closed; there are enough stamps,” Interfax reported.
“The labels have been printed. It takes time to give them out,” Irina Sazonova, a customs service spokeswoman, said by telephone Friday.

TITLE: Rosneft Set to Raise $11Bln at Offering
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian state oil firm Rosneft said on Monday it would go ahead with its $11 billion initial public offering, potentially the world’s fifth biggest, despite falling stocks in emerging markets and litigation risks.
Rosneft, Russia’s No. 3 oil firm, said it had agreed with banks involved in the IPO to value the firm at $60 billion to $80 billion, or up to 33 percent more than the market value of Russia’s No.1 oil firm, Lukoil. Those valuations imply between 13 and 19 percent of Rosneft would be floated.
“We see great interest in the transaction and have already received requests for a substantial share of the offering, including from several large strategic players,” Rosneft’s Chief Executive Sergei Bogdanchikov said in a statement.
“We look forward to meeting with investors over the coming weeks and in the future becoming one of the world’s largest publicly traded energy companies.”
Bankers say the placement could take place on July 14, days before Russia hosts a summit meeting of the G8 leading nations, as the Kremlin wants to present the IPO as its contribution to global energy security.
But some fund managers were sceptical as the road show kicked off in Moscow.
“The question is why get Rosneft when I have Lukoil,” said Mark Mobius, one of the world’s biggest emerging market players, who manages $30 billion of assets at Templeton. “If the price comes down we might look at it,” he told Reuters.
The company statement said Rosneft and its IPO coordinators have agreed on a price range for the issue, to take place in London and Moscow, of between $5.85 and $7.85 per ordinary share and per Global Depositary Receipt.
The base offering would amount to $8.5 billion and include an additional “greenshoe” option of further shares or a possible convertible bond worth up to 400 million new shares, which could boost the IPO to between $10.8 billion and $11.6 billion.
Banks’ assessments of Rosneft’s value ranged from as low as $35 billion to as high as $120 billion, showing the gulf between doubters and believers in the IPO, London’s biggest this year.
The four lead banks in the deal are ABN AMRO, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
Some investors have voiced concerns about the premium Rosneft wants despite recent falls in stocks in emerging markets. The market value of Lukoil, which produces and refines more crude, for instance, has declined to $59 billion from over $77 billion at the beginning of May.
“The success of the IPO will crucially depend on Russian investors,” said Florian Fenner, a Moscow-based fund manager at UFG Asset Management. “U.S. investors will be very sceptical because of litigation risk. International investors who’ve had a large exposure to Yukos will also be sceptical.”
Lukoil trades at 5.6 times EV/EBITDA — a profitability ratio — while Rosneft would trade at over 12 times if valued at $80 billion.
“If the markets don’t recover in the next two weeks, they’ll have to bring down the price,” said a London banker.

TITLE: Companies Slam New Tax Bill
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The country’s business lobby slammed a new tax bill Friday, saying it failed to protect entrepreneurs from overly rigorous taxmen and contradicted President Vladimir Putin’s call to end “tax terror.” 
“An adoption of this law will bring a significant worsening of the quality of the tax inspectorate’s work,” said a joint statement by the country’s three leading business lobbies. “Taxpayers will entirely depend on officials who will obtain unlimited powers over the tax-collection process.” 
The State Duma’s Budget Committee discussed the bill Thursday and recommended its adoption.
Pro-business lobbyists say the recommendation violates an earlier agreement reached with the government and lawmakers to take business interests into account. 
“The president’s order to avert ‘tax terror’ through legal means has thus been ignored,” said the statement, issued by the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Delovaya Rossiya and Opora. 
The tax service is known for slapping back tax claims on businesses. The toughest campaign to date was a $27.5 billion back tax demand against fallen oil firm Yukos, which was forced to sell a core asset to settle part of the debt. Frequent tax inspections can also paralyze businesses for weeks, giving competitors time to take over their market niche.
The bill extends the maximum time limit on a tax inspection to 15 months, while rejecting a proposal by business lobbies to revoke inspection results if taxmen violate time limits.

TITLE: Urals Miner Denies Deal With China
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Urals Mining and Metals, the country’s second-largest copper producer, said Friday that it had not signed a deal with Aluminum Corp. of China to bid for the huge Udokan copper field in eastern Russia.
An official at the Chinese company had earlier told an industry meeting in Shanghai that Aluminum Corp. had signed a letter of intent with the Russian firm to take half of a consortium planning to bid for the state-owned deposit.
A press secretary for Ural Mining and Metals, or UMMC, said the company did not conduct any talks with Aluminum Corp. “Until the state outlines clear guidelines on the Udokan auction, we consider any talks with foreign partners to be premature,” the press secretary said.
Dai Fangjun, director of mining resources at Aluminum Corp., said earlier that the Chinese giant had signed the letter of intent as part of its drive to source raw materials overseas. The company’s target was to take a 50 percent interest in the $1 billion Udokan project, Dai said.
The official’s comments, however, were later downplayed by Aluminum Corp. A speech by Dai represented “his personal views” and the remarks were “not authorized or factual,” the company said without elaborating further.
The Udokan deposit is one of the world’s largest potential mines. The government has said it will hold an auction for Udokan. But the delayed implementation of a new subsoil law, which could bar foreign investors from “strategic” mineral deposits, has held up plans.
(Reuters, Bloomberg, MT)

TITLE: Gambling Millions on Building Sites of Success
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Yevgeny Gurevich, vice president and one of the founders of the Adamant holding company, gives the impression of being a truly self-made man. Having started his career as a foreman at a building site twenty years ago, he’s achieved phenomenal success, amassing a fortune of some 1,4 billion rubles ($50 million) in the process.
Born in 1964 in Leningrad, as a child, Gurevich dreamed of becoming an actor. But although at university he actively participated in stage comedy contests, his education was already pushing him away from such a profession. From a school specializing in physics and maths, he entered, in 1981, St. Petersburg State University of Railway Communications. 
After graduation, he worked for two years as a foreman. He then joined a building co-operative, Industriya, where he was head of their commercial activities. 
“I was always interested in commerce,” Gurevich said. “It was in the beginning of the 1990s when there was enough labor but a shortage of building materials. Only builders with their own materials were on demand on the market and I was in charge of providing our workers with construction materials.”
In 1992, Gurevich and his partners Igor Leitis and Mikhail Bazhenov founded the Adamant company. The company began with around 100 staff, it sold alcohol, both wholesale and retail, building materials and household appliances. It soon shifted its focus to the large-scale retailing of clothes. 
“We opened the first trade fair at SKK (Sport Concert Complex) gallery in 1992, but for the first two months it was not particularly popular and there was almost no customer feedback,” said Gurevich. “Then we started advertising on the American soap opera Santa Barbara, an extremely popular show in Russia at that time and things worked out — after only two commercials, over 23,000 people came to our trade fair.”
As the founders of St. Petersburg’s first trade fair area at SKK, Gurevich and his partners then took the fairly natural step of actually building the commercial centers themselves. Adamant constructed a series of new, Western-style malls with many different stores in one building — something that had never been seen before in St. Petersburg. 
In 1994, the company opened Balkanskaya Square, a range of stores near Kupchino metro station and the Vasilyeostrovskaya trade fair on Vasilievsky Island. 
Adamant has now constructed over a dozen shopping and entertainment complexes with a total area of 597, 239 square meters. They currently have several other huge complexes under construction. Besides building the complexes, Adamant is involved in their management. It also owns, among others, several industrial plants, restaurants, hotels, travel agencies and beauty salons. 
Gurevich said that it is a top manager’s responsibility to build good relations among the staff. He is self-taught, developing his business skills from hands on experience, and does not consider programs like MBAs suitable for all spheres of Russian business. 
“Of course, it can be useful for high-class specialists to get an MBA degree in order to improve their professional knowledge but, in Russia MBAs are not exactly a vital ingredient of success. Alongside the financial and highly technical industrial spheres, formal management technologies are not as widespread as in the West,” Gurevich said. 
The crucial thing for businessmen, in his opinion, is not just to want to make money but the desire for professional self-fulfillment. “As for myself, I wanted to carry out a global project, to create something fundamental,” he said. He is always seeking to develop his business and broaden its horizons beyond St. Petersburg.
An experienced negotiator, Gurevich thinks that it is very important for a businessman to “sense” the moods of others, their desires and inclinations. 
“You need to have tolerance, sanity and be competent in order to communicate efficiently with your business partners and colleagues,” he said. “In business it is very important to assess the real situation, getting rid of any possible illusions.”
According to Gurevich, among the major problems facing Adamant is the lack of blue collar workers. “It is the big problem for the whole of Russian business. Most people in Russia just do not want to work. It is often quite difficult to recruit a worker even for a high salary. Moreover, with such a bad demographic situation, soon there will almost be no supply of labor available on the market. Even if, due to favorable governmental policy, we see some kind of baby boom, in ten years time there will still be a need for migrant workers,” he said.
Gurevich said that, in general, Russian business does not copy any other country’s model of development and follows its own course. “At the moment, Russia is showing exceptional growth in the retail sector, even more than China, so, of course, it has great potential,” he said.
When he’s not working, Gurevich likes to travel, particularly to Northern Italy. He plays tennis and, always adventurous, gambles at casinos. 
“There is no business without risk,” he said with a smile.

TITLE: Local Firms Throw Their Nets Out for the Wireless
AUTHOR: By Alexander Yankevich
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Given that wireless technology is not particularly widespread and that the quantity of regular users comprises only several thousand people, the market for public Wi-Fi access to the internet is yet to be really established. Nevertheless, Wi-Fi providers are in the process of developing new areas of access. This year, in addition to those classic “hot-spots,” such as restaurants or hotels, access is appearing at service stations, in retail chainstores, cinemas, libraries and even in the metro and at the sea port.
As a standard of wireless communication, Wi-Fi technology is meant for transmitting data and providing access to the internet over short distances (from 100 to 500 meters). To use this service a user should have a correspondingly equipped portable computer (laptops are now often equipped with Centrino technology, which allows Wi-Fi access without additional interfaces). 
The first hot-spots appeared in St. Petersburg in 2001, around the time that this technology gained popularity in the West, and were set up by the provider ComSet, a company no longer in existence. 
Later this technology was promoted in two main directions. 
Firstly, public hot-spots were developed by several large Petersburg providers. At present these include PeterStar (around 20 hot-spots), MegaFon (13 hot-spots) and Kvantum (more than 20 working places of access). All of them have targeted the same types of places — restaurants, hotels, cafes, train stations and airports. Their main competitive advantage is a unified payment card. 
Secondly, many public places (including restaurants and hotels) install hot-spots by themselves if they are not satisfied with the conditions which the above-listed providers offer. There are approximately around 200 such independent hot-spots. 
It’s difficult to give the precise number of users in St. Petersburg. However, according to statistics provided by the company PeterStar, one hot-spot is used on average by several tens of people a day.
This year is set to become a turning point for the market. Wi-Fi services will become available in places that up until  now were not even considered. Observers consider this trend as a sign of market development, although in most cases the installation of a hot-spot is related to a company’s image, at best acting as an introduction to an additional service.
At the beginning of this year hot spots appeared in the cinema chain Kronverk — one of the largest players on the Petersburg cinema market. This project was realized with the assistance of vendor USRobotics, which provided its equipment MAXg for the installation of the wireless format. Organizers of the project are hoping to attract and retain a new category of clients — Wi-Fi access is free in the cinema, a fact advertised on posters in each Kronverk Cinema. “Our company got involved in this project to promote the product line. This idea found support in Kronverk, which allowed us to develop our network in the shortest amount of time,” said the project manager of the company USRobotics Russia Alexey Stanovoy.  
All of this only confirms that in the entertainment industry each company tries to take original steps to attract new clients and maintain a loyal customer base. As a package offering free access to the internet, it’s obvious that  Kronverk has accomplished such a task. Now one can often see clients with notebooks or pocket PCs in the entrance halls and cafes of such ‘connected’ cinemas, looking through the schedule of a cinema or video reels of new films. 
“For us the results of the project are more than satisfying. It’s difficult to tell the precise number of clients who have used this service but the dynamics of growth of ‘wireless clients’ is undoubtedly positive. In Kronverk cinemas Wi-Fi services are used by several thousand people a month, according to the most modest calculations when traffic is measured by gigabits,” said Stanovoy.
Moving on, Russia’s first petrol station hot-spot was installed by the company Lukoil in association with MediaSeti (Unitline), which develops wireless access services on a base of pre-WiMax technology. Having tried this out for the first time in St. Petersburg, the company hopes to offer the service to other participants of the fuel retail market. Lukoil also hopes for a more global development of hot-spots across its Russian chain. 
It’s interesting to note that because Lukoil’s local network developed for the most part by the acquisition of competitors, the service stations are of different formats. The first hot-spot was opened at the service station on Pulkovskoe road (near to the airport). 
“Our expectations for this hot spot were justified — there is demand for these services and the numbers of users is growing,” said a Unitline representative. 
This year the library segment has also started to develop more or less actively in St. Petersburg. If in Moscow large libraries were among the first to attract the attention of Wi-Fi providers, here these establishments have managed without wireless services, although a few unsuccessful attempts were made on a municipal level. 
The Library-Information center of the International Bank Institute (on Nevsky Prospekt) became the first provider of Wi-Fi, a project realized by the company Orange System. 
“If it is necessary to create a system of video surveillance, provide access to the internet or an opportunity to download large volumes of information to a PC, then of course Wi-Fi would be very appropriate. Moreover, if it is an old library, it will be quite difficult to neatly install cables and Wi-Fi without doubt would be the most convenient solution. In my opinion, if a library has an electronic edition it is very convenient to download materials, books, documents through Wi-Fi into a laptop. In this way people have an opportunity to work with this material not only inside a library but in any other place,” said the Orange System Director general Dmitry Zuev. 
Other such projects are being closely examined in the city’s Central Library and in the Russian National Library. 
“The testing of wireless technologies is being carried out, issues concerning demand, the amount of necessary lines, issues of data protection etc. are being studied at the moment. It remains in the stage of planning but in the nearest future we plan to use Wi-Fi,” said the head of automation department of Russian Science Library Sergey Gorbunov. 
Continuing the theme, hot-spots are currently being installed in several educational institutions and is also available in the dormitories of, for example, the St. Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics and at the St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics.
Of course, Wi-Fi services are also attracting the attention of retail networks, for example, a test hot-spot was installed in one of the Bukvoyed book stores. This is not the first retail experience — in its day Quantum installed hot- spots in Computerny mir stores and the computer stores Key. However, these are currently out of order (although they are nominally on the provider’s list) because of a lack of demand. 
In the case of Bukvoyed the situation is different. The chain positions itself as premium class stores, with some shops promoted as readers’ clubs. In conditions of high competition, owners of service, sales and entertainment-related firms are looking for new methods of attracting people to their stores. “The growth of interest in Wi-Fi services confirms this,” noted the head of sales at the company United Nets Dmitry Petrov.
Finally, the installation of a hot-spot by the same Comstar in the metro station Technologichesky Institute has become the last and one of the most controversial projects. 
Such a move can be considered the first in a row of similar projects, because an exclusive right to lay the lines of communication in the underground belongs to Metrocom, 45 percent of which belongs to Comstar-OTS. 
Yet the initiative provokes skepticism in other players.
“At the moment providing public access to Wi-Fi is to a greater extent an image thing. The number of users is not that high, though interest is increasing. That’s why it can be said that the majority of market players are investing money in networks for the future. At the same time one still needs comfortable conditions when accessing the internet, which is why Wi-Fi is popular mainly in hotels, cafes, airports. And it’s difficult to tell for the time being whether there is going to be much demand for this service in the metro,” press secretary of the company MegaFon Northwest Maria Georgievskaya said.
Installation of Wi-Fi in port mooring zones is the last in a row of such experiments. Works are being carried out at the moment by local departmental provider TK Konvey Plus. But as its commercial manager, Aleksandr Suzdalev, has noted — demand in this case is almost guaranteed because the installation is being made on the request of the Russian union of sailors and is unique on the Russian territory. Following its realization, ship crews and passengers will have an opportunity, during their stay in port, to have high-speed and cheap access to the internet directly from their cabins.

TITLE: Iran Won’t Wait for the West
AUTHOR: By Flynt Leverett
TEXT: As the world watches the political maneuvering over restarting nuclear talks with Iran — this time with American participation — few are paying attention to a broader strategic competition that has started between the United States, Russia and China. Ultimately, this competition will decide not only the direction of Iran’s nuclear activities but also its economic, political and military role in the Middle East and beyond. The outcome hinges on which countries will assume dominance in developing Iran’s enormous oil and natural gas reserves.
Unfortunately, by refusing to consider a “grand bargain” with Iran — that is, resolution of Washington’s concerns about Tehran’s weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism in return for American security guarantees, an end to sanctions and normalization of diplomatic relations — the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is courting failure in its nuclear diplomacy and paving the way for Russia and China to win the larger strategic contest.
Iran has the world’s second-largest proven reserves of conventional crude oil, after Saudi Arabia, and the second-largest reserves of natural gas, after Russia. Its relatively low production levels make it one of the few states with the potential to increase greatly its exports of both oil and gas over the next two decades.
As the world economy during this period will rely increasingly on the Middle East and the former Soviet Union for its energy needs, Iran’s putative status as a hydrocarbon superpower will take on ever-greater strategic importance. Add in its location, its population of nearly 70 million (the largest in the Middle East) and its ambitions to regional leadership, and the significance of Iran’s future international role is undeniable.
However, to expand its energy exports, Iran needs a great deal of capital and advanced technology from outside — at least $160 billion over the next quarter century according to the International Energy Agency. Washington of course does all it can to block exactly such investment — barring American energy companies from seeking business in Iran and threatening European and Japanese companies with fines and cutoffs of American components.
These measures — along with repressive Iranian policies that scare off foreign investors — have had an impact: Since the Islamic Republic opened its oil and gas sectors to foreign energy companies in the early 1990’s, it has attracted only $15 billion to $20 billion in European and Japanese investment. And as the nuclear issue has heated up, prospects for substantial increases in Western investment have virtually evaporated.
A senior Iranian diplomat told me this month that Iran can no longer “wait for the West,” and Tehran is now looking for alternative investors. In recent years, China has emerged as a potential large-scale partner. But while China can provide capital, its state-owned energy companies are not much more technically capable right now than Iran’s. It will be a decade at least before China can fill all Iran’s technical gaps.
This is where Russia comes in. Although Russian energy companies could not offer quite the same level of expertise as Western firms in the complexities of managing Iran’s older oil reservoirs, they could in the next several years help the Islamic Republic develop its newer oil finds and, more significantly, realize its huge potential as a gas exporter.
In fact, the two countries have already held talks on possible “coordination” of Iranian gas exports with Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas and oil behemoth. Iranian officials have told me that their government does not think Gazprom would be the ideal partner, compared with Western companies, but it deems such a deal preferable to continued stagnation.
From a Russian perspective, such a deal would have many benefits. Many industry experts feel that within just a few years, the amounts of gas that Gazprom is contracted to provide may exceed what the company on its own can bring to market. It has been trying to close the gap by purchasing additional gas from Central Asian states that rely on Russian pipelines to export their oil and gas. But at the same time, the United States is trying to help those ex-Soviet states build oil and gas pipelines that are outside of Moscow’s control — an effort the Kremlin interprets as a deliberate attempt to isolate and weaken Russia.
Russian officials and commentators have complained to me in recent weeks about a new “double standard” in American policy — one that criticizes the centralization of power in Russia but overlooks authoritarian abuses in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The involvement of Russian energy companies in Iran would not only support Moscow’s external energy strategy but would push back against perceived American efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in Central Asia.
Together, Russia and Iran control almost half of the world’s proven reserves of natural gas. If they coordinated their production and marketing decisions, these two countries could be twice as dominant in international gas markets as Saudi Arabia is in the global oil market.
And as China looks to deepen its own involvement in Iran, there would be opportunities for Chinese-Russian cooperation in developing Iranian resources, and collaborating against what both Beijing and Moscow see as excessive United States unilateralism in world affairs. By working together, Russia and China would further establish themselves as rising players in the Persian Gulf, where America has grown used to something like hegemonic status.
Against this backdrop, the Bush administration’s approach to nuclear diplomacy with Iran is strategically shallow. The decision to encourage direct talks with Tehran generated many headlines but was really only a limited tactical adjustment to forestall an embarrassing collapse in coordination with the United States’ key international partners.
By continuing to reject a grand bargain with Tehran, the Bush administration has done nothing to increase the chances that Iran will accept meaningful long-term restraints on its nuclear activities. It has also done nothing to ensure that the United States wins the longer-term struggle for Iran. Such a grand bargain is precisely what is required, not only to forestall Iran’s effective nuclearization in the next three to five years, but also to position the United States for continued leadership in the Middle East for the next decade and beyond.

Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, is director of the Project on the Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Energy Security at the New America Foundation. This piece was published in the New York Times.

TITLE: The Great Game, Part II
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie
TEXT: It has become fashionable to refer to the current jockeying for influence and resources in Central Asia as the new Great Game. Is there a “Great Game II” as there was a World War II? And is that a useful template for understanding that part of the world today?
The original Great Game was the rivalry between the Russian and British empires for the markets of Central Asia. There was an overlay of ideology — bringing Christianity and civilization to the heathen who, then as now, displayed a proclivity for beheading. But the real issue was whether Central Asians “shall be clothed with the broadcloth of Russia or of England” and purchase “implements of steel from St. Petersburg or from Birmingham.” Great Game I began in 1807, when Napoleon proposed a joint attack to Tsar Alexander I on the jewel of the British Empire, India, and ended in 1907, when the two sides formally agreed on spheres of influence. That century of suspicion and deception resulted in some bloodletting, but the two great powers, though they came close, never went to war with each other
Some see the Cold War as an extension of the Great Game, but if anything it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that brought the game to life again. Great Game II has some familiar aspects, some utterly new. The main players are Russia, China, the United States and Iran. As in the 19th century, ideology plays a secondary role, as the real stakes are gas, oil and strategic advantage. Unlike the 19th century, the Central Asian states are now primarily sellers rather than buyers. As always, these states prove adroit at playing the great powers off one other.
The complicated politics of Great Game II — Turkmen gas is shipped to Europe through Russian pipelines that pass through Ukrainian territory — is magnified by terrorism. Uzbekistan, the Belarus of Central Asia, granted the United States rights to use an airbase to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida but withdrew those rights when the United States criticized Uzbekistan for the still-murky slaughter in Andijan in May 2005. Russia deftly moved to fill the vacuum. By September Russia and Uzbekistan held joint military exercises and two months later signed a treaty promising mutual military assistance in case of aggression.
Some observers doubt the existence of any new form of the Great Game. In a summer 2006 Washington Quarterly article titled “Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia,” Richard Weitz wrote: “Concerns about a renewed great game are ... exaggerated. The contest for influence in the region does not directly challenge the vital national interests of China, Russia, or the United States.” The point is not well taken. No vital interests were directly at stake in the original Great Game either. In fact, Europe needs gas and oil from Russia and Central Asia more than England ever needed to sell broadcloth in Bukhara.
Besides, more than energy resources are at issue. The political fate of Central Asia is at stake. Is there an authoritarian Moscow-Tashkent-Beijing axis forming? Russia, Uzbekistan and China are all key members of the suddenly prominent Shanghai Cooperation Organization. All the same, their repressive natures give these states an inherent instability that makes competition volatile and dangerous.
The United States now has troops in an arc from the Caucasus to Kyrgyzstan and has made no secret of its position on Caspian oil and the Baku-Tbilisi-Cejan pipeline, its ambassador to Azerbaijan, Ross Wilson, saying, “The oil will never go through Russia.”
Alexander Maryasov, Russia’s longtime ambassador to Iran, has said, “As soon as our economy regains its strength, we will re-establish our old relations with Central Asia and the southern Caucasus, and reassert our sphere of influence in that region.”
Sounds like rivalry to me. Great or not, the game is afoot.

Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”

TITLE: Choosing a Home Team Can Be Tough
AUTHOR: By Sean Wilsey
TEXT: In 1990, PelÎ predicted that an African country would soon win the World Cup. Sixteen years, two Brazilian and two European champions later, Ghana, ranked 48th in the world, behind even Trinidad and Tobago, has defeated both the Czech Republic, ranked second, and the United States, ranked fifth, and will meet Brazil (ranked, reasonably, first) on Tuesday.
Ghana is the lone African nation still in contention. During the Ghanaians’ crucial game against the United States, as the American team struggled to come back but couldn’t score despite some beautiful deliveries into the six-yard box, I found myself thinking that the situation was weirdly paradoxical, that both the United States and Ghana needed the same thing — a small, wily, dexterous sort of player up front, a player who could whirl and tap those passes into the goal for the Americans, a player who could dance through the soon-to-be-faced Brazilian defense for Ghana — and this player existed. His name is Fredua Koranteng Adu, but he wasn’t playing on either side.
Seventeen-year-old Freddy Adu was born in Ghana and lives and plays professionally in the United States. Ghana’s coach offered him a spot but Adu turned it down in order to be eligible for the American squad. Then he failed to make the cut, supposedly because he’s too young, too short, too small — and it was too late to change his mind, even if he had wanted to join his homeland Black Stars.
Few sane Americans would give up United States citizenship for Ghanaian citizenship. Why play soccer for a nation that had never qualified for the World Cup before now? On a continent where just six years ago a national team (Ivory Coast’s) was locked up in a military prison for two days as punishment for losing in the African Nations Cup?
But four years from now, when Adu will almost certainly be on the American squad, the World Cup finals will be held in Africa for the first time and Ghana will have the always-compelling continental advantage. What looks like sanity today might turn out to be lack of imagination.
Shortly after the 1990 World Cup I went to Africa with an Italian tour group that used me as an English translator, and I experienced a sort of soccer epiphany. I was in Zambia, where the main industry is copper mining and the main pastime kicking a ball (every copper mine has a team). I tried very hard to become semi-assimilated. I could call someone a liar in the local dialect —”Boza!” — and I ate dinner, with my hands, out of a plastic bucket shared with half a dozen villagers.
We talked about soccer. Zambia was about to play Zaire in the neighboring nations’ first post-World Cup match, an early African Nations Cup qualifier, and the country was full of outsized optimism. The future of soccer was going to be in Africa. Zambia and Zaire were ascendant.
A few days later I was in the capital, Lusaka. Having missed the big match by a day (Zaire won), I decided to watch a league game between a mining town team, the Konkola Blades of Chililabombwe, and the Red Arrows, the Ministry of Finance squad. These were the young players who had a chance to make the next Zambian national team and win the World Cup in 1994. Or that’s what PelÎ and I thought.
I took a cab to a stadium outside the city, bought a ticket and sat in the concrete bleachers. As they filled up, the space around me remained empty, in a zone some 20 feet across, like a penalty box. Subconsciously, I felt like a goalie, but I didn’t really think much about it.
The Arrows wore red (I think) and the Blades wore blue. The game started, I got caught up in the fever, and ignored the empty space. This was attacking soccer, running soccer, the sort of soccer you see when both teams want to win but neither has an advantage of age or experience or talent or fan support. The players were fun and serious and beautiful. No score at the half. I went to the bathroom, figuring I might lose my seat, and not caring: I could squeeze in somewhere. When I came back, the empty space was still there, so I sat in its center again.
A few minutes after the restart, at around the 50-minute mark, I noticed a shift in the crowd’s attention, a collective wavering that amplified into a change in focus. Suddenly everyone on the other side of the field was looking in my direction, and the rows in front of me started turning around, too. Soon even the closest spectators, right at the edge of my empty radius, turned and looked at me. Then they started moving away. The whole stadium was looking at me, and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening. I started to feel uncomfortable.
I mumbled “hello” — “boza” seemed like a bad idea — to a man who was looking straight at me but for some reason wouldn’t quite focus his eyes on mine. He didn’t answer.
Then I saw something in my peripheral vision, close to my back. I turned around. A tall man in a yellow track suit was looking over my head at the game. The peripheral object was his knee. I was virtually in his lap. Where had he come from? On either side of him sat several other men in identical track suits, their knees equally impressive. I’d been so engrossed in the game that I hadn’t noticed their arrival. More began to sit beside me.
This was the victorious Zairian national soccer team. They had stuck around Lusaka, come to see the local league game and now sat remarkably still, with no tension in their bodies; a stillness that seemed to come of spending their lives running. I stared. They didn’t care. Everybody else was staring, too. When they’d arrived and sat down around me — the space had apparently been reserved for them — the crowd applauded. We all watched the game together. I have never been in better company. I was on a national team.
When the Arrows and the Blades ended the game in a scoreless tie, the crowd jumped onto the field. As the Zairian national team stood to go, a boy in shorts kicked the game ball into the goal, then leaped in celebration.
Perhaps Freddy Adu will lead the United States to victory in South Africa four years from now. But he will never have the experience of playing on the Ghanaian national team on the continent of his birth. Nor, I suspect, will he have an experience like I did that day in Lusaka. He will not sit with members of his team and feel a sense of national and continental hopefulness moving through a crowd, a city and an entire populace. It was my own brief encounter with the particular beauty and exhilaration of African soccer that turned me into that very strange creature: an American soccer fan.

Sean Wilsey is the author of “Oh the Glory of It All,” a memoir, and the co-editor of “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup.”

TITLE: New Siloviki Customs
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: When Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov was dismissed on June 1, some argued he had been too aggressive in his campaign against corruption, others that he had been too soft. But the reason for Ustinov’s resignation was mundane. President Vladimir Putin had selected First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, but the siloviki clan led by Ustinov and Igor Sechin, the presidential administration deputy chief of staff, decided that Ustinov was the man for the job. Ustinov was pushed out of his job because his clan had become too powerful.
Last week, Sergei Zuyev, owner of Russia’s largest furniture retailers, Tri Kita and Grand, was arrested on charges of tax evasion. It’s a sign of the times. It began as an ordinary turf war between Mikhail Vanin, who was customs chief until mid-2004, and the man once expected to replace him, Yury Zaostrovtsev, head of the Federal Security Service’s economic security department.
In an attempt to hold on to his job, Vanin demanded the companies involved in smuggling furniture into the country for Tri Kita double what they were paying the customs service to legalize their shipments. But when his agents approached the companies, they got the brushoff. Vanin’s boys figured that Zaostrovtsev was backing the smugglers. They opened a criminal investigation and sold the confiscated furniture for a song to their own companies.
What happened next was something else. Interior Ministry investigator Pavel Zaitsev, who headed the original case against Zuyev, was put on trial for abuse of office. Sergei Pereverzev, Zuyev’s former business partner and a witness in the case, was shot dead in an apparent contract hit. State Duma Deputy and journalist Yury Shchekochikhin, who was looking into the Tri Kita affair, died in a suspected poisoning. Moscow City Court Judge Olga Kudeshkina, who acquitted Zaitsev, lost her job.
And Putin knew everything. He even appointed his personal investigator, Vladimir Loskutov, to work on the case, which already involved a dead witness, a poisoned Duma deputy and a jailed investigator. So what happened? Not much. Nearly everyone who pressured the Prosecutor General’s Office to close its original probe into Tri Kita in July 2002 — for lack of evidence — was also a player in the assault on Yukos.
Now the case against Tri Kita has been reopened. Some have even suggested that Ustinov’s ouster was related to the case. As if Loskutov, after four years of investigative work, finally discovered the truth and reported to the president.
The Tri Kita case is extremely significant, because the words “Kremlin” and “murder” have rarely been found in such close proximity. But in terms of Kremlin infighting, Tri Kita is nothing out of the ordinary. In May, a Moscow court banned all operations and trading in preferred shares of pipeline monopoly Transneft, citing an ongoing investigation. Heads rolled in the corruption-ridden Federal Customs Service, and the tax authorities went after state-owned long-distance provider Rostelecom.
The renewed investigation into Tri Kita was not an excuse to get rid of siloviki associated with the case. It is indicative of the changing situation in this country. The so-called power vertical has been completed, and now those who built it are being purged. The original Tri Kita case posed a threat to the very foundation of the power vertical. The new case is just business as usual.
It’s all about business. Why should the new boys in charge of customs leave anything for their predecessors? Tri Kita is even better than Yukos in this regard. After all, who’s going to shed a tear if people like Zuyev are locked up?

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: The Alchemists
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: This week an interesting story appeared in The Washington Post — buried on page 16, of course, lest anyone think it was of the slightest importance. It revealed that documentary proof has now emerged confirming the fact that in the spring of 2003, the regime of President George W. Bush — flush with its illusory “victory” in Iraq — spurned a wide-ranging peace feeler from Iran that offered “full cooperation” on every issue that the Bushists claim to be concerned about in regard to Tehran: “nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.”
In other words, everything that Bush says he wants from the Iranians now, he could have had for the asking — three years ago. What then can we conclude from the rejection of this extraordinary initiative? The answer is obvious: The Bush faction is not really interested in curbing nuclear proliferation or defusing the powder keg of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the regional and global terror that it spawns. 
What are they interested in? This answer too is obvious, to anyone who’s been paying the slightest attention to the faction’s words and actions over the years: They are interested in loot and dominion. What they want from Iran is nothing less than its return to quasi-colonial control by the crony conquistadors of the West. And they’re willing to play a (reasonably) long game to get it.
 In the meantime, it serves their interests well for the entire Middle East to seethe and boil. War and rumors of war are engines of limitless profits for the crony-cons. It sends oil prices sky-high and keeps those pork-laden contracts for weapons and “military servicing” rolling in. And the terrorism that thrives in this deliberately created chaos is another massive money-maker, as vast armies of “security consultants” ply their political connections to gobble up tons of insider grease. Bush-regime minions have led the way in this alchemical transmutation of fear into gold: More than 90 officials from the Department of Homeland Security have stampeded through the revolving door from government service to lucrative private posts, with companies seeking — and getting — fat deals from, er, the Department of Homeland Security, The New York Times reports. 
Billions of dollars are being generated for the fortunate few by war and terror; why kill the golden goose of chaos by pursuing peace in the Middle East? Far better to keep the madness churning until you see a chance to grab complete control, as in Iraq; then you can start squeezing your conquest dry. And if it doesn’t work out, if it all blows up, who cares? You’re just back to the same old profitable chaos, biding your time, banking your wad — and squeezing your own country dry — until the next go-round. It’s the ultimate win-win scenario.
The only losers are the rest of us — but above all, the populations of the Middle East. It’s an indisputable fact, confirmed every day by every policy decision made in Washington, that the Bush faction doesn’t give a damn about the ordinary people in that tormented region — not even the Israelis. It doesn’t care about their freedom, their security, their children; it doesn’t care if they live or die; it only cares about their exploitable resources and their geopolitical usefulness to the faction’s openly stated desire for “full-spectrum dominance” over the political and economic life of the globe. There is no other conclusion to be drawn from the Bushists’ actual record — what they actually do, what they actually support and what they actually ignore — once you strip away their cynical, ever-shifting rhetoric.
If Bush really wanted peace in the Middle East, he would have pursued Iran’s unprecedented offer of “full cooperation” in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If Bush really wanted to eliminate the danger of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, he would have seized Tehran’s offer of “full cooperation” to do so. It’s as simple as that. But he chose not to take up the offers. These goals are not priorities for him. His interests lie elsewhere.
By the way, Saddam made a very similar offer just before the invasion, as The New York Times reported in 2003: acquiescence to any U.S. initiative on Israel-Palestine, full cooperation on WMD inspections, even internationally supervised elections, which would have almost certainly ousted him from power. Everything that Bush claimed he went to war for in Iraq — disarmament, regime change, reducing Middle East tensions, democracy for the Iraqi people — he could have had, for the asking, without war. 
But the Bushist crony-cons wanted war in Iraq, come hell or high water — or even Saddam’s surrender. Again, this is not supposition, it’s a fact. As we’ve often reported here, in September 2000 a “think tank” led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld published a report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stating that the imposition of a U.S. military presence in Iraq was a strategic imperative “transcending the regime of Saddam Hussein.” In this same report, the Cheney-Rumsfeld group also acknowledged that it would take a “new Pearl Harbor” to “catalyze” the American people into readily accepting their radical plans for military expansion abroad and vast new “defense” spending at home. Not only can these wizards turn fear into gold; they can apparently see into the future as well.
Now that same crystal ball shows them the wealth of Persia falling like ripe fruit into their hands. They may feign diplomacy for the moment, biding their time, profiting from chaos — but as in Iraq, no offer of peace will deter them from the inevitable smash-and-grab.

TITLE: The Global Trade In Life and Death
AUTHOR: By Jeremy Lovell
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — From Africa to Bosnia, back to Africa and on to the Middle East — the often-secretive flow of guns and bullets follows the world’s cycle of wars. 
In the middle are the faceless brokers who have facilitated the multibillion-dollar trade since the 1950s and 1960s when the United States and the Soviet Union used go-betweens to arm their allies to fight the Cold War by proxy. 
“Small arms in Europe are not as cheap as they used to be at the end of the 1990s … partly because the initial flood of weapons from former East bloc armories has slowed down,” said one European arms broker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from his small, tight-knit community. 
“But there are still ample supplies left around. For AK-47s particularly, all the old East bloc countries still have some surplus new weapons, and of course there are lots of used ones,” he said. 
The Soviet collapse unleashed not only a flood of cheap arms but also the giant aircraft needed to carry them to wars in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. 
From the steamy jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the dangerous streets of Baghdad and the drug-ruled favelas of Rio de Janeiro, guns acquired illegally spread terror, contribute to poverty and halt development. 
Ahead of a United Nations meeting in New York from June 26 to July 7 to discuss this global trade, calls are growing for tighter regulations — especially on the activities of brokers. 
“Arms supply networks are increasingly subcontracted and increasingly opaque and out of control,” small-arms trade expert Brian Wood said. 
“Some of the drivers of the international arms trade today are individuals with laptops, mobile phones, air tickets and shell companies. They travel around,” he said.  
The International Action Network on Small Arms, or IANSA, a group of agencies including Amnesty International and Oxfam, estimates the global gun trade is worth around $4 billion per year, of which up to $1 billion may be illicit. 
Prices for guns vary enormously, from the $350 to $400 per new Kalashnikov with three magazines, quoted as an example by the broker, to anecdotal stories of the same rifles changing hands for one-tenth of that price in African war zones. 
And if guns are available, they will be used. 
“In places like northern Kenya, we are seeing pastoralists using AK-47s to dispute access to the diminishing number of watering holes, whereas in the past they might have talked it out or at least used less lethal means,” said Anthea Lawson, a spokeswoman for IANSA. 
“It used to be said that the main victims of gun violence were women and children. That is not true. It is young men who are both the victims and the perpetrators,” she said. 
IANSA wants countries to draw up global standards to regulate the international transfer of weapons and gun possession among civilians. 
It also wants to incorporate armed-violence prevention into development projects and funding. 
“All guns start as legal weapons. … What happens after that [is] where the trouble begins,” said Lawson, adding that 60 percent of guns were in civilian hands. 
“Less than 40 countries have any laws regulating arms brokers — and most laws exclude extraterritoriality. That allows the brokers to operate with impunity because they rarely touch or take ownership of the arms,” she said. 
In a May report, Wood said weapons were increasingly either destined for or diverted to countries under arms embargoes or to insurgent and criminal groups. 
Complicating the picture, governments are cutting their armed forces and relying on private suppliers to transport their weapons with few controls.  
This movement tracks mayhem. 
“At the outset of the Bosnian civil war, the first flow of weapons was from Lebanon — where the fighting had slowed — to the Bosnian Muslims facing a well-armed Serbian army,” the European arms broker said. 
In his May report, Wood said after the war some 200,000 of those guns were shipped on behalf of the U.S. Defense Department to Iraq for the new army, with at least one shipment going astray, probably ending up with insurgents. 
“Iraq and Afghanistan are sucking in arms. The Middle East is a big problem,” the arms broker said. “Sudan is very active too — but they have also built up their own production.” 
The United States is the biggest exporter of guns, followed by Italy, Brazil, Germany, Belgium, Russia, China, Britain, Austria and Japan, according to IANSA. 
But then there is a vast grey area, not only with nations or their proxies trading third-party weapons but with others subcontracting production elsewhere in the world. 
“A country like China can argue it doesn’t need to control arms because all its production is for domestic use. But it licenses manufacture in countries like Zimbabwe, and those guns are then sold across the continent,” Lawson said. 
Wood said the United States also had “a loose interpretation of what they think are ethical transfers of arms.”
“They are basically out to get former Eastern bloc … equipment as cheap as possible to the people they regard as their allies,” he said. 
“Sometimes they are armed opposition groups like the Northern Alliance [in Afghanistan] and so on, and they have been using over the last decade or more the cheap surpluses in the Balkans — Albania, Bosnia, Serbia — and they have used other people in the region to move it,” he said. 
The United States says it is committed to stemming the flow of illicit arms. Earlier this month, the State Department said the United States had demonstrated this commitment through national practices and diplomatic engagement around the world.

TITLE: Global Spending Hits $1.12 Trillion
AUTHOR: By Patrick Lannin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: STOCKHOLM — U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to help push global military expenditure further up in 2006 after hitting $1.12 trillion per year, a research body said. 
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in its latest yearbook that the United States was behind 48 percent of total world arms spending in 2005 and had accounted for most of the year’s 3.5 percent overall gain. 
Several states, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, have used a sharp rise in oil prices to boost military spending. The biggest increase worldwide was in Georgia, where spending surged by more than 140 percent to $146 million. 
“Looking ahead, increasing trends in world military expenditure show little sign of abating,” the Swedish government-funded institute said. 
The United States, France and Britain were all involved in costly overseas operations, while China was carrying out a modernization of its People’s Liberation Army. 
“In these circumstances, there is a strong likelihood that the current upward trend in world military spending will be sustained in 2006,” the institute added. 
Britain, France, Japan and China accounted for 4 to 5 percent each of world arms spending, which overall equaled 2.5 percent of world gross domestic product, or $173 per capita. 
A concentration of spending continued in 2005, it said, as 15 countries with the highest spending accounted for 84 percent of the world total. 
The global rise in raw materials’ prices helped some countries spend more on weapons, particularly Algeria, Azerbaijan, Russia and Saudi Arabia. 
Saudi Arabia boosted its military spending by $4.6 billion in 2005 to $25 billion. This increase meant the Middle East as a whole showed a rise in defense outlays, which would otherwise have fallen, the institute said. 
Arms spending in Iran also rose in 2005 by around 3.9 percent to $7 billion. 
Elsewhere in the world, the institute noted massive arms spending rises in the Caucasus, with Georgia leading the region with 143 percent.

TITLE: AK-47s Referred to as ‘Credit Cards’ in Congo
AUTHOR: By David Lewis
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BUNIA, Congo — Some fight in flip-flops, others hope potions will turn their enemy’s bullets into water, and most take little time to aim, trusting in the theory: “He who makes most noise wins.” 
But the government soldiers, militia fighters and bush bandits in eastern Congo all have one thing in common — an AK-47 assault rifle. 
“At $20 to $50 each, it’s pretty easy to get your hands on an AK out here,” explained a source close to the militia groups in Democratic Republic of Congo’s lawless Ituri district. 
“There is no shortage of weapons; there are plenty of them,” the source said. “Of course ammunition is needed, but that comes in from Uganda easily.” 
Ituri is a particularly bloody corner of Congo, a mineral-rich but shattered country where 4 million people have been killed, mostly from war-related hunger and disease, since 1998. 
Far removed from central government authority, Ituri has long, porous borders with countries coveting its natural resources and a thinly stretched body of United Nations peacekeepers. The region highlights the challenges of controlling the flow of arms around Africa’s Great Lakes. 
Fighting between ethnic militias exploded in Bunia, Ituri’s main town, in 2003, and European soldiers were dispatched to restore order after UN peacekeepers failed to prevent hundreds of civilians from being killed. 
As Congo prepares for elections this year, thousands of militia fighters have signed up for disarmament programs, in theory swapping guns for school, training and jobs as civilians. 
UN peacekeepers ceremonially burned stacks of weapons, while serviceable guns seized off militia were given to the new army. An arms embargo is meant to stop fresh supplies from coming in. 
But, frustrated with the lack of opportunities in their new lives, angry at the excesses of poorly paid government soldiers and loath to stop looting civilians and plundering gold mines, many in Ituri have found it easy to take up arms again. “There are still weapons that are coming in, and this will continue so long as there are people who are willing to pay for them,” said Major Hans-Jakob Reichen, spokesman for the UN forces in eastern Congo. 
Ituri is a microcosm of the Congo, where, analysts say, the wealth in gold, timber, diamonds and other minerals needed by expanding Western economies has been plundered by local and foreign armed groups during years of chaos and instability. 
And thousands of gunmen continue to roam the lawless east armed with their AK-47s — known to some as the “Congolese credit card” — harassing and killing civilians.

TITLE: Russia Goes Its Own Way in Selling Arms
AUTHOR: By Oliver Bullough
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: 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 both 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 friend 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 per year from the weapons trade — a figure dwarfed by its exports of energy, metals and timber. 
Its main clients are India and China, but it has also received orders from Iran, Syria, Venezuela and the Palestinians — buyers some Western countries shy from dealing with. 
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 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 for this story, 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 were being designed and — more importantly — component factories had closed for a lack of new orders and their skilled workers had dispersed, he said. 
General Yury Baluyevsky, head of the General Staff, said last year that 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 carmaker AvtoVAZ, has been eyeing truckmaker KamAZ and is in talks to buy into VSMPO-Avisma, the world’s top titanium maker — apparently 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 State Duma deputy who worked for decades 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,” Raikov said.

TITLE: The West Gets Tough With Iran in Dispute
AUTHOR: By Louis Charbonneau
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BERLIN — Germany’s foreign minister said on Monday it was inconceivable that the six powers that made an offer of incentives to Iran to encourage it to give up uranium enrichment would wait another two months for a response.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last week Iran would deliver its answer on the package by August 22, prompting U.S. President George W. Bush to accuse Tehran of dragging its feet.
“They have had the offer for two weeks already,” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a Social Democrat (SPD) disarmament conference. 
“I hope a decision will be made soon in Tehran. I can’t imagine we would wait until August 22,” he said.
A package of incentives designed to resolve the standoff with the Islamic republic was drawn up by the six powers — Germany and the United Nation’s Security Council permanent members France, Britain, the United States, Russia and China.
The offer was presented to the Iranians by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana on June 6 and the United States has called for a response by a July 15-17 summit of leaders from the Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations in St. Petersburg.
Germany and other Western countries suspect that Iran is trying to develop atomic weapons. Tehran says it only wants to harness nuclear technology for use in power plants.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki met Steinmeier in Berlin on Saturday. Afterwards, Mottaki said there were “unclear points” in the offer and said Iran had questions. 
Steinmeier said Solana would hopefully answer all Iran’s queries later this week.
“I’m pleased that in the course of the week there will be another meeting between Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and the EU’s high representative Javier Solana. I hope that the allegedly unclear points can be cleared up with comments from Mr. Solana,” he said.
Steinmeier said earlier at the SPD disarmament conference that resolving the crisis with Iran was vital to prevent a Cold War-style nuclear arms race from developing in the Middle East. 
He said the same went for Asia if a clash with North Korea, which claims to have developed atomic weapons and is believed to be preparing a long-range missile test, is not resolved.
“If there’s no resolution to the North Korea and Iran conflicts, then there will be a new nuclear arms race in the Middle East and Asia,” he said.
In the case of Iran, it also concerned the protection of Israel, Steinmeier said. President Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and has repeatedly expressed doubt that the Holocaust happened.
After his weekend meeting with Mottaki, Steinmeier reiterated that the six powers would only open full-scale negotiations with Iran on the terms of the offer if Tehran first suspended its enrichment programme.

TITLE: Israel Prepares Massive Strike at Gaza
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Israel massed troops Monday along the Gaza Strip border in preparation for what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said would be a “broad and ongoing” operation against Palestinian militants following the abduction of an Israeli soldier. 
Three Palestinian groups purporting to hold the soldier demanded the release from Israeli prisons of women and those under age 18. A spokesman for one of the groups said the message was authentic.
Israel said it will not negotiate with the captors of Corporal Gilad Shalit.
“The release of our hostage must be unconditional and immediate,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
Israeli and Palestinian officials worked diplomatic channels for the release of Shalit, a dual French-Israeli citizen who was seized Sunday in a cross-border raid by Hamas-linked militants.
Speaking to a tourism conference in Jerusalem, Olmert said Israel's patience was wearing thin and that he held the entire Palestinian leadership responsible for Shalit’s safety.
“I gave the orders to our military commanders to prepare the army for a broad and ongoing military operation to strike the terrorist leaders and all those involved,” he said. “It should be clear. There will be immunity for no one.”
Israel was not expected to launch a large operation as long as there was a chance of bringing the soldier home, defense officials said. However, they said a limited operation could be launched much sooner.
Shalit’s father said he had been told the soldier was wounded, but apparently not seriously.

TITLE: Thousands of Americans Demonstrate Gay Pride
AUTHOR: By Adam Goldman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Hundreds of thousands of raucous parade-goers took to the streets from New York to San Francisco on Sunday for annual gay pride parades, just weeks after an attack on a popular gay singer in New York and 25 years since the start of the AIDS epidemic. 
Outrageous costumes were the norm along the parade routes. In New York, the floats and marchers turned Fifth Avenue into a sea of rainbows.
“Everyone else has a chance to express their affection freely, and for one day in New York, you can be free and not feel ashamed or embarrassed,” said Roberto Hermosilla of Miami, who was attending his ninth parade.
Thousands lined Market Street for San Francisco’s 36th annual Gay Pride parade. Marching bands, dancers and floats bearing corporate logos of such companies as Delta Airlines and Wells Fargo streamed by.
“There’s much greater acceptance in corporate America,” said Michael Crowe, 63, who said high-profile corporate sponsorship is new to the event.
One float carried a bearded man, wearing a white lace miniskirt and fishnet stockings, who sang Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” as a band backed him. A half-dozen men dressed in underwear and top hats danced behind him.
The New York parade marked the very public and triumphant return of singer Kevin Aviance, who rode atop a fake pachyderm and a circus-themed float weeks after the drag queen was viciously beaten. Police have charged four young men, aged 16 to 20, with assaulting the artist while yelling anti-gay slurs.
Wearing a top hat, jacket, red stilettos, and little else, Aviance waved to the crowds, his mouth still wired shut from a fractured jaw he suffered in the attack.

TITLE: Freedom Tower Foundation Stone Put Into Storage
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Even the symbol of new beginnings at ground zero wasn’t immune from the realities of redesign and renegotiation. The cornerstone of the Freedom Tower, the soaring skyscraper that will replace the fallen twin towers at the World Trade Center, was quietly and temporarily removed from the site Friday, nearly two years after it was laid with much fanfare. 
The July 4, 2004 ceremony was supposed to signal the start of construction. Instead, it initialized years of hand-wringing and argument over the building’s design.
Authorities finally concluded that the cornerstone would need to be moved. Its location was made obsolete by the building’s reconfiguration.
The 20-ton stone, laid near the temporary train station that now dominates the ground zero pit, was hauled away to Hauppauge, New York.
The 5 1/2-foot-tall block of granite was quarried from the Adirondack Mountains and inscribed with words calling it a “tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom” by stonemasons Innovative Stone. 
The company will store the stone for up two years before returning it to the World Trade Center site.
Innovative Stone plans to make it available for viewing by appointment.
The Freedom Tower was redesigned last year due to security concerns. 
Among them, police said it might not withstand a truck bomb. Its edge was shifted about 40 feet westward, which left the cornerstone outside the would-be building.

TITLE: Blair Says G8 Failed On Poverty
AUTHOR: By Kate Kelland
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Monday that the Group of Eight had failed to make progress on some of the commitments it made at a summit last year to tackle global poverty. 
Writing in the Independent newspaper, Blair said the problems of poverty and climate change could not be solved “overnight,” but urged more action, particularly on trade.
“These are long-term problems and the solutions will be long-term too,” he wrote in a joint article with his Finance Minister Gordon Brown and Development Minister Hilary Benn.
“But millions who campaigned in the run-up to the G8 summit [in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July 2005] have every right to expect immediate action to start to put things right.”
Blair singled out trade as the “one key element of the 2005 agenda where we have failed to make the progress we hoped” and urged World Trade Organization members to have the “courage and imagination to remove obstacles” to a deal.
WTO members are struggling to strike a deal on basic formulas for cutting farm subsidies and reducing agricultural and manufacturing tariffs after more than four years of talks.
In a speech later on Monday, Blair was due to say he has enlisted rock star Bob Geldof and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to track how G8 industrialized nations live up to their aid promises to Africa.
Blair will announce he is setting up an independent Africa Progress Panel, to be chaired by Annan and to include Geldof, organizer of a series of Live 8 concerts last year, and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, to evaluate progress.
Millions attended rock concerts around the world to press for action by the G8, which promised an extra $50 billion a year in total aid for all developing countries by 2010, including an expected $25 billion for Africa.

TITLE: East Timor Leader Resigns Amid Chaos
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DILI, East Timor — East Timor’s embattled prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, resigned on Monday, saying he would share responsibility for a political crisis that has gripped Asia’s newest nation for over two months. 
There was no immediate word on a replacement, but news of his departure was welcomed by thousands of people who have been demonstrating in the capital for the past week.
They cheered and beat drums in celebration as word of his resignation spread. A convoy of about 200 buses and vans drove through the seaside capital of Dili, their horns blaring.
Alkatiri said he was stepping down to avoid the resignation of the nation’s popular president, Xanana Gusmao, who had threatened to quit himself unless the prime minister left office.
Gusmao said in a statement he had accepted the resignation and had called for a meeting of the State Council, a presidential advisory committee, for Tuesday to discuss the next step.
Alkatiri told a news conference he was quitting “having deeply reflected on the present situation prevailing in the country ... assuming my own share of responsibility for the crisis affecting our country.”
He said he would remain as a member of parliament, but refused to answer questions.
The prime minister has been widely blamed for violence that erupted in May as fighting within the armed forces spiraled into rioting, arson and looting in Dili.
The violence ended only with the arrival last month of a 2,700-strong Australian-led peacekeeping force that has disarmed the army and police and taken responsibility for security.
Calls for Alkatiri’s resignation have been the rallying cry of protests by thousands of Timorese that peaked in the past six days after damaging revelations in an Australian news documentary linked him to a plot to arm a civilian militia.
“The important thing is that the East Timorese fix up these problems themselves and it does look like they are getting to a point of resolution,” Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said in Paris.
“You can’t expect us to carry the burden of security while you yourselves sit back in nothing but a state of impasse,” he told Australian television.
One of the country’s best-known political figures, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta, is being touted as a possible replacement for Alkatiri should Gusmao ask parliament to form a national unity government to rule until elections due by May 2007.
But Ramos-Horta told reporters: “I don’t want the job but I would do it if persuaded by all relevant parties.”

TITLE: Paper: Afghanistan President Karzai is Losing Foreign Support
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Afghan President Hamid Karzai is losing support from many Afghans and some foreign governments as a Taliban-led insurgency escalates and his government fails to stem endemic corruption, the Washington Post reported on Monday. 
“The president had a window of opportunity to lead and make difficult decisions, but that window is closing fast,” the Post cited an unidentified foreign military official as saying.
“President Karzai is the only alternative for this country, but if he attacks us, we can’t help him project his vision,” the official is cited as saying. “And if he goes down, we all go down with him.”
On Thursday, Karzai complained about what he called a lack of full cooperation from his foreign allies, saying U.S.-led forces had adopted the wrong approach in Afghanistan and urged the international community to provide more help in training and equipping the Afghan army and police.
The Post said Karzai had bristled at international criticism that greeted his recent naming of 13 police officials, some of whom have been accused of human rights abuses. Foreign officials and analysts said the appointments were intended to create ethnic and political balance and were not based on professional qualifications, the newspaper said.
“He’s making decisions for short-term stability that go against his own interests and the long-term interests of building the country,” an unnamed European official told the Post. “As a result, international support for him is eroding and it could become a real rift at the worst possible time.”
Several European governments are expressing serious concerns about Karzai’s leadership, the Post reported, without singling out the countries by name.
“There is an awful feeling that everything is lurching downward,” a Western diplomat told the newspaper. “Nearly five years on there is no rule of law, no accountability.”

TITLE: Kidman Weds Keith Urban, Begins Island Honeymoon
AUTHOR: By Meraiah Foley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SYDNEY, Australia — Australia’s hottest celebrity couple, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, jetted out of Sydney on Monday, likely bound for a secluded honeymoon getaway on the golden sands of the South Pacific. 
The Oscar-winning actress exchanged vows with the Grammy award-winning country music star in a tearful, candlelit ceremony overlooking the Pacific late Sunday.
The newlyweds kept a low-profile Monday, emerging only to have lunch with family at a luxury waterfront hotel.
The pair were spotted boarding Kidman’s private jet on Monday evening, prompting frenzied media speculation about where they might spend their honeymoon.
Kidman and Urban have been tight-lipped about their immediate post-wedding plans, but local media have widely tipped either Fiji or Tahiti as the most likely destinations.
Several reports have suggested the pair have spent up to 250,000 Australian dollars ($183,000) to hire out Fiji’s exclusive Wakaya Club Resort for a week.
The ultra-exclusive island resort is a preferred destination for superstars seeking to avoid the prying eyes of paparazzi and celebrity gawkers. It is also where Rolling Stones rocker Keith Richards injured his head after reportedly falling out of a palm tree in April.
However, Fiji was once a favored vacation spot for Kidman and her former husband, Tom Cruise, prompting speculation that she and Urban will opt instead for a luxury resort on Tahiti’s Bora Bora island.
Kidman married Urban by the light of around 1,000 candles at a small chapel overlooking Sydney’s iconic Manly beach.
The beaming bride wore a flowing white Balenciaga gown and pearl drop earrings. Her cream Rolls-Royce limousine drove from her waterfront mansion across the iconic Sydney Harbor Bridge, through streets lined with cheering fans.
Kidman, accompanied by her father, Antony, smiled and waved to well-wishers outside the Gothic-style St. Patrick’s College building, which was dramatically floodlit for the twilight ceremony.
After the wedding Urban serenaded Kidman with an acoustic rendition of his song, “Making Memories of Us,” which brought even more tears to the actress’ eyes.

TITLE: Rare Wild Bear Killed by Hunter After Rampage
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BERLIN — A rampaging wild bear, the first seen in Bavaria in more than 170 years, has been shot dead by a hunter, a spokesman for the local authority in the region of Oberbayern said on Monday. 
The young brown bear, known as “Bruno,” drew widespread media coverage and was initially welcomed after it wandered across the border with Austria.
But authorities gave hunters the green light to kill the 100-kilogram beast after it went on a rampage, slaughtering dozens of sheep and chickens.
Authorities said the bear’s hunt for food was taking it ever closer to inhabited areas and it was therefore a threat to the safety of residents.
Germany’s animal protection agency in Bavaria called the decision to shoot the bear “hysterical,” but a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund said the beast could not be left out in the wild as it was too dangerous.
Gabriel Schwaderer, director of the European Nature Heritage Fund, said on Monday he regretted the shooting.
“We consider the decision by the Bavarian government to be wrong,” Schwaderer said.

TITLE: Tennis Legend Agassi to Retire After Next U.S. Open
AUTHOR: By Howard Fendrich
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WIMBLEDON — Andre Agassi’s voice wavered and his eyes welled up. After years of dealing with injuries, after months of contemplation, he finally spoke the words he knew he had to, at the place he knew he had to. 
Turning what was expected to be a routine pre-Wimbledon news conference into something significant, Agassi announced Saturday he will retire after this year’s U.S. Open, leaving tennis after two decades during which he collected a career Grand Slam and morphed from an “Image Is Everything” youngster to elder statesman. 
“It’s been a lot of sacrifices the last few months, trying to get myself right to come back here and enjoy this tournament for the last time,” said Agassi, who has played only one match the past three months because of back trouble. 
“It’s been a long road this year for me, and for a lot of reasons. It’s great to be here. This Wimbledon will be my last, and the U.S. Open will be my last tournament.” 
The 36-year-old American is seeded 25th at the All England Club, where play began Monday. He intends to enter as many as four hard-court events between Wimbledon and the Open, in what will amount to a farewell tour for one of the most popular and successful tennis players in history. 
“He’ll go down as one of the guys who changed our sport in a lot of ways, not only the way he played the game, but also the way that he conducted himself on and off the court,” 2002 Wimbledon champion Lleyton Hewitt said. “There’s not too many more recognizable people in tennis. The sport probably owes a lot to him.” 
Agassi said he made up his mind a few months ago to leave at the end of 2006, but he wanted to make it public at the All England Club, where he won his first Grand Slam title. So there he sat Saturday, choking up, discussing his decision. 
The kid with the denim shorts, Day-Glo shirts and flowing hair is now a father of two with a shaved head who wore an all-white track suit Saturday. 
“I grew up in the public eye,” said Agassi, who married 22-time major champion Steffi Graf in 2001. “I sort of had to learn some tough lessons in front of a lot of people, one of which was to respect the greatest tournament in our sport.” 
He didn’t always feel that way. 
After a 1987 first-round loss, he didn’t return to Wimbledon until 1991. At the time, one of his justifications was that his outlandish persona and bright outfits were a poor fit for this most traditional of tournaments. His baseline game wasn’t the prototypical path to success on grass, either. 
But he changed his mind, beat Goran Ivanisevic in the 1992 Wimbledon final, and credits that victory with changing the course of his career. 
“It’s like it was yesterday, 14 years ago,” he said. “I imagine it’s that way when your child goes off to college. You say, ‘What the heck happened in all these years?’ It feels like yesterday for me, as vivid, as alive as ever.” 
A magician at the baseline and one of the game’s greatest returners, Agassi has won 60 singles titles. That includes eight at Grand Slam tournaments; he’s one of only five men with at least one championship at each. His rivalry with Pete Sampras helped boost tennis’ popularity in the 1990s; Agassi is the last active player from their tremendous generation of American men, a group that also included major champions Jim Courier and Michael Chang. 
“Andre announcing his retirement is truly the end of an era. He was one of the best players I competed against and, in turn, made me a better player,” said Sampras, who went 20-14 against Agassi, including a win in the 2002 U.S. Open final, Sampras’ final match. “His longevity and desire to compete at the highest level have been remarkable. He has brought a huge amount to our sport and will be missed.” 
Ranked No. 1 as recently as May 2003, at 33 the oldest man to hold the top spot, he made a stirring run to the U.S. Open final last year, the seventh time he was the runner-up at a major. 
“I had a lot of reasons to be motivated to shoot for another successful year, but for many reasons that hasn’t been the case, and I wanted to do everything I could just to get back here,” said Agassi, who missed Wimbledon the past two years because of injuries. 
He’s scheduled to play 69th-ranked Boris Pashanski of Serbia-Montenegro in the first round and could face French Open champion Rafael Nadal in the third. Said Nadal: “He’s a legend.” 
Agassi turned pro in 1986, reached his first major final at the French Open in 1990, and quickly drew attention for his tennis, togs and ‘tude; his celebrity was such that his two-year marriage to Brooke Shields and friendship with Barbra Streisand were fodder for the tabloids. 
Along the way, his “Image Is Everything” ad campaign for a camera company fostered a sense he was more about style than substance; years later, he distanced himself from the slogan. 
“I don’t think there’s one bad thing you can say about the guy,” said 2004 Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova. “I mean, that guy is just a champion. It’s amazing to still have someone around that’s achieved so much and that’s done so much for the sport.”

TITLE: Portugal Prep For England
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NUREMBERG — Triumphant in victory but licking their wounds at its cost, Portugal woke up on Monday wondering how to restructure against England without two, or possibly three, key players. 
In an ill-tempered 1-0 win over the Netherlands on Sunday, the Portuguese lost Costinha and Deco to red cards and winger Cristiano Ronaldo limped off the pitch in tears after a fierce challenge from Holland’s Khalid Boulahrouz. 
Yet coach Luiz Felipe Scolari, delighted with his side’s display of character in their “heroic, marvellous victory,” said he was not concerned. 
“I have 23 players and two cannot play. Cristiano Ronaldo has five or six days to recover and I still have other good players to prepare,” he said. 
“We will obviously have to change one or two things... but I have 23 players — well, 21 now — with a will that I have never seen in a Portuguese team,” he said. “Maybe that will can overcome England’s quality.” 
Portugal had a short training session on Monday as they began contemplating the quarterfinal clash against England in Gelsenkirchen on Saturday. 
Right back Miguel, who avoided collecting any of the nine yellow cards shown by referee Valentin Ivanov to Portuguese players, said there would have to be a rethink. 
Mindful of England’s strength in midfield, although David Beckham, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard have yet to reach their full potential, the absence of key playmaker Deco and the experienced Costinha could hit the side hard.

TITLE: British Newspapers Slam ‘Pitiful’ England Showing
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — England’s unconvincing 1-0 World Cup win over Ecuador has met with hoots of derision from the newspapers back home.
The London Evening Standard, which had more time to weigh up England’s performance than the British national morning papers, headlined its match report “Pitiful display fails to rattle Sven.”
Its veteran football correspondent Michael Hart wrote that the win, secured by captain David Beckham’s trademark free-kick on the hour mark, had done “nothing to disguise the true poverty of England’s performance.”
Hart added: “The first half was just about as pitful as it gets at this exalted level of the game.”
“Roodunnit” and “That’s Shut Roo Up” were the headlines Monday on the backpages of the Sun and the Daily Mirror respectively. 
The tabloid rivals were both reacting to the fact that England striker Wayne Rooney (nicknamed “Roo”), now playing for Beckham’s former club Manchester United, had been taunting the Real Madrid midfielder about the fact he’d gone 15 months without an international goal.
But the sight of Beckham vomitting on the pitch provided the cue for Britain’s tabloids to indulge their well-known love for a pun.
“We gut a result,” said the Sun, its report noting: “Watching England has been giving us all that queasy feeling for many years. It even made the captain sick yesterday.”
“One-Ill to England,” said the Daily Star, proclaiming it would be a “miracle” if the “luckiest country left in” beat Portugal in the quarterfinals.
There was no respite in the broadsheets. 
“How the world laughs,” said the Guardian while the Daily Telegraph reckoned it was “hard to see how England could go much further.”

TITLE: Germany Shakes Off ‘Black’ Mood Before Argentina Clash
AUTHOR: By Kevin Fylan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BERLIN — Germany has the strength to beat Argentina and bring a “black series” against top class opposition to an end, coach Juergen Klinsmann said on Monday. 
It is almost six years since Germany’s last win over one of the game’s major powers, a 1-0 victory against England at Wembley in October 2000. 
After four wins from four games at this World Cup Klinsmann is confident the sequence, known in Germany as the “black series,” will come to an end in Friday’s quarterfinal against Argentina and send the Germans through to the last four. 
“I’m very optimistic this is going to work out,” Klinsmann said at a news conference on Monday. “It looks like the time to end this series and get into the semifinals. 
“We are absolutely on a par with the top eight teams in this World Cup and we don’t have to be scared of anyone. Argentina are one of the giants but we will stand up to them.” 
Germany’s level of fitness has been noticeably higher than that of their opponents in their matches so far. 
They have come out playing a fast, aggressive game and have scored early in two of the three group matches, against Costa Rica and Ecuador, and again in the commanding 2-0 win over Sweden in the second round on Saturday. 
“We’re fully fit and I’m sure we won’t have to reduce our intensity on Friday at all,” Klinsmann said. “In fact, we’re going to step things up.” 
Germany have already brought one negative run to an end at this World Cup, when a 1-0 victory over Poland gave them their first win over a fellow European team at the finals of the World Cup or European Championship in 10 years. 
Germany captain Michael Ballack has recovered from a minor foot injury and is fit to play in the World Cup quarter-final against Argentina, Klinsmann said. Ballack missed training on Sunday morning because of the minor knock and the team’s next scheduled training session is not until Tuesday. 
“It’s all healed. He’s perfectly fit,” Klinsmann said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: New Coach Named
ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) — Dutchman Dick Advocaat has signed a two-and-a-half-year contract to coach FC Zenit St. Petersburg, the Russian premier league side said on Monday. 
Advocaat stepped down as South Korea manager after his team was eliminated from the World Cup last Friday. 
Zenit said on their website that the 58-year-old would arrive in the city next Monday. 
Advocaat will make his Russian debut next Thursday when Zenit hosts Dynamo Moscow in a league game. The announcment ended months of speculation since former coach Vlastimil Petrzela was fired in May. 

Italy 1:0 Australia
KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany (Reuters) — Francesco Totti scored a penalty in the last minute of stoppage time to give 10-man Italy a 1-0 win over Australia in the World Cup second round on Monday. 
Totti blasted home the penalty after defender Fabio Grosso had tumbled over Lucas Neill’s challenge. 
Italy was forced on to the backfoot throughout the second half after being reduced to 10 men on 50 minutes, defender Marco Materazzi harshly shown a straight red by Spanish referee Luis Medina Cantalejo for bringing down Marco Bresciano.
His dismissal took the total number at the tournament to 24.   

France: ‘Not Old’
HAMELIN, Germany (Reuters) — France are not too old to trouble a Spanish side blessed with young talent, defender Willy Sagnol said before Tuesday’s World Cup second round clash. 
France’s ageing team, relying on several players clearly past their prime, has looked sluggish so far and their fans fear they might struggle against their neighbours in Hanover. 
Sagnol, however, insisted all the players in the squad were fit. 

Dad: ‘Ref Did Well’
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russian referee Valentin Ivanov, heavily criticised for his World Cup performance on Sunday, has received full backing from his most loyal fan, father and former top international striker Valentin Ivanov Sr. 
Ivanov Jr. was given a resounding vote of no confidence by players, coaches and even FIFA President Sepp Blatter over his handling of Portugal’s 1-0 second-round win over the Netherlands. 
The referee handed out four red cards and showed eight other players yellows as both teams finished their second-round clash with nine men — a record for any World Cup. 
But the elder Ivanov, who played in two World Cups in 1958 in Sweden and 1962 in Chile, where he was the joint top scorer, said his son did a good job.