SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1182 (48), Friday, June 30, 2006
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TITLE: G8 Nations Give Iran Wednesday Ultimatum
AUTHOR: By Anne Gearan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The United States, Russia and other industrial democracies said Thursday they expect Iran to reply next week to an international offer to bargain over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program. 
“We are disappointed in the absence of an official Iranian response to this positive proposal,” said a statement from foreign ministers of the Group of Eight industrial nations. “We expect to hear a clear and substantive Iranian response to these proposals” at a meeting scheduled Wednesday between the European Union’s foreign minister and Iran’s nuclear negotiator.
Iran has told the EU it will reply at that session, a U.S. official said, but it is not clear whether Iran will give a definitive “yes” or “no.” Tehran could ask for changes, or for preliminary talks before any negotiations over the proposal could begin.
The clerical regime has sent conflicting signals so far about whether it will accept the package of economic incentives and other rewards in exchange for shelving disputed nuclear activities that the West fears could lead to a bomb. In a major policy shift, the Bush administration has offered to join the talks, which would be the first direct, high-level contact between the United States and Iran in more than a quarter century.
The statement said the international coalition that made the offer to Iran “will assess the situation before mid-July.” The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that refers to a hastily scheduled meeting among Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her counterparts from Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China on July 12 in Paris.
That meeting will immediately precede a separate gathering of President Bush and other leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations on July 15-17 in St. Petersburg, where the Iranian situation is expected to be a major topic.
The G8 diplomats also discussed a range of pressing issues. They condemned the abduction of an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip and asked the Palestinian government to “take immediate measures” to free him. And the group asked Israel “to exercise utmost restraint in the current crisis. The detention of elected members of the Palestinian government and Legislature raises particular concern.”
Israeli troops arrested dozens of ministers and lawmakers from the Palestinians’ elected Hamas leadership Thursday (see page 9).
The United States has not issued its own separate response, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed on to the joint statement, which contains coded criticism of Israel.
At a news conference following lengthy meetings with the diplomats from Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, France, Canada and Japan, Rice noted the call for restraint from Israel.
“With restraint, perhaps, we can get back to a place where there are hopes again for a peace process,” Rice said.
On Iran, the G8 diplomats called Tehran’s nuclear program “a source of international concern,” and endorsed the offer to Iran to accept economic incentives in return for swearing off disputed aspects of the program, which Tehran claims is peaceful.
“An agreement of this sort would allow the Iranian people to enjoy the benefits of modern civil nuclear power and would bring Iran many other long-term political and economic advantages,” the G8 ministers’ statement said.
The ministers also discussed world hotspots including North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. And they issued a call to international donors for new aid.
On Iraq, they offered support to the new permanent Iraqi government and commended its new national reconciliation initiative, which some U.S. politicians have criticized as too accommodating toward insurgents.
Russian Prime Minster Sergei Lavrov did not directly respond to a question about whether United Nations economic sanctions would follow if Iran fails to reply or rejects the proposed bargain. Russian and China, permanent veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council, have opposed harsh measures for their commercial partner Tehran in the past, but U.S. diplomats say those nations are expected to cooperate if the Iran case gets that far.
Lavrov said sanctions were not a part of Thursday’s talks
“We did not discuss anything beyond the offer,” he told reporters. 
The meeting between the European Union’s Javier Solana and Iran’s Ali Larijani on Wednesday will be the first since the EU official presented the incentive package to the Iranian negotiator in Tehran on June 6. Larijani said then that the proposals contained “positive steps” but talks were needed to clear up ambiguities.

TITLE: Putin: Terminate Killers of Kidnapped Envoys
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu and Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin ordered the security services Wednesday to seek and destroy the killers of four Russian hostages in Iraq.
The tough remarks indicate the Kremlin is no longer shy about carrying out extrajudicial executions of suspected terrorists and radicals abroad. They also suggest Russia’s security services are reclaiming the KGB’s global reach in covert operations. 
“The president ordered the special forces to take all necessary measures to find and destroy the criminals who killed Russian diplomats in Iraq,” the Kremlin press service said. 
Putin, speaking during a Kremlin meeting with Saudi Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, also said Russia would be “grateful to all its friends for any information on the criminals who killed our citizens in Iraq,” the Kremlin press service said.
The Foreign Ministry on Monday confirmed that four diplomats working at Russia’s embassy in Baghdad had been killed. An al-Qaida-linked group posted a video on a web site Sunday showing the execution of three of the four men, who were kidnapped June 3. The kidnappers had demanded the Kremlin pull federal troops out of Chechnya. 
Putin did not specify which security service would be assigned to spearhead the hunt for the kidnappers. But Nikolai Patrushev, director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, was the first senior security official to publicly promise to do all in his power to fulfill the order.
“We must work in such a way that no terrorists who commit crimes will evade responsibility,” he said. “We will work, no matter how much time and strength is required.”
Patrushev also made it clear that the order reflected the Kremlin’s vision of how the security services should be dealing with terrorists outside Russia. “This is no accidental order. It fits the logic of what we are doing,” he said. 
Currently, FSB operations abroad are limited mainly to the prevention of diplomats being recruited by foreign intelligence services. The FSB’s border guard service conducts intelligence operations within a 200-kilometer perimeter of the Russian border, according to Agentura.ru, which monitors the security services.
However, that will all change once legislation currently in the State Duma becomes law. The bill in question, which is to be passed in a second reading on Wednesday, gives the FSB the authority to dispatch commandos to strike terrorist groups and bases abroad. 
Currently, foreign operations are supposed to fall under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, or GRU. However, the SVR can use force abroad only to protect embassy personnel and visiting officials. 
Authorities previously have not admitted to participating in the extrajudicial killings of people labeled as terrorists by the Kremlin. Russia denied that two Russians convicted in Qatar in the 2004 assassination of former Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev had played a role in his death, saying they were only agents gathering intelligence. The two, Anatoly Belashkov and Vasily Bogachev, were later extradited to Russia to serve out their prison sentences. Their whereabouts are currently unknown.
The special services, however, have not hesitated in claiming responsibility for killings inside Russia, including the deaths of Chechen rebel leaders Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev and Arab warlord Khattab.
While targeting someone like Yandarbiyev would be relatively easy, given the fact he lived openly in Qatar, fulfilling Putin’s order to find the hostage killers in war-torn Iraq might be mission impossible.
“This is more of a statement meant for the public than a real order,” said Andrei Soldatov, head of Agentura.ru, noting that Russia’s once-formidable network of agents and informants in Iraq had shrunk when Russia faced financial difficulties in the 1990s and following the regime change in Iraq in 2003. 
Russian agents would need assistance from U.S.-led forces, the Iraqi government and the Saudi secret services, said Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Center for Defense Information. That Putin decided to announce the order in the presence of the Saudi prince indicated Russia was seeking the cooperation of the Saudi secret services, which are in a better position to spy on al-Qaida-linked groups in Iraq, he said.
Iraq’s ambassador to Moscow, Abdulkarim Hashim Mustafa, also said it would be very difficult to track down the kidnappers. He said the Iranian government, Hamas and the League of Arab Nations all tried to locate the kidnappers for talks earlier this month at Putin’s request, Gazeta.ru reported. 
While relying on foreign services to locate the executioners, the security services also face a formidable task determining who ordered the killings. Safranchuk speculated that Chechen rebels or their allies might have pushed for the killings to avenge the death of Sadulayev in mid-June.
He said violent separatists would not have gone after the Russians themselves, given the fact that Moscow vehemently opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. 
Safranchuk and Sergei Goncharov, a security service veteran, predicted the United States and Iraq would not have a problem with Russia’s hunting down the killers. “Above all, we should be thinking about our citizens. This is, by the way, exactly what the U.S and Israel always do,” said Goncharov, whose Alfa unit has conducted a number of special operations, including the storming of Afghan ruler Hafizulla Ammin’s palace in 1979.
Goncharov also said he believed Russian agents would be able to find and kill the kidnappers.
“Russia does have special services officers capable of implementing the assignment abroad,” he said.
The Duma, meanwhile, passed a nonbinding resolution Wednesday that accused U.S.-led forces of allowing the diplomats’ abductions and killings to happen.

Staff Writer Oksana Yablokova contributed to this report.

TITLE: Much-Maligned Ruble Finally Going Global
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — There used to be a popular Soviet-era joke about how to make the ruble a global currency. Easy, the joker would say, just place your rubles inside a konvert, or envelope, and the currency becomes “convertible.”
Yet the puns will finally be mothballed Saturday, when the ruble becomes a convertible currency, fully integrated into the global economy.
Able to be owned and traded by anyone, anywhere, the ruble may open the country to inflows as large as $25 billion by the end of the year, shoring up the stock market and attracting more international players to Russian bonds.
The pro-investment move promises to ease life as much for foreign investors and banks as for the man or woman on the street — the one who will no longer need to show his or her passport at a forex stand to buy some dollars.
“This lifts substantial psychological barriers,” said Mikhail Galkin, an analyst with Trust bank. “We expect a gradual appearance of a strong investor base, people who were previously inconvenienced by the local environment.”
The flipside is that convertibility adds fire to an already-burning issue: Large and possibly volatile inflows of capital could stoke inflation or lead to appreciation of the ruble. According to a UBS report, the ruble could strengthen to 24 against the dollar by the end of 2007.
Capital outflows and inflows were strictly controlled in the late 1990s. Immature stock markets and an almost nonexistent bond market meant a pullout of cash from the country would spell disaster, as demonstrated by the 1998 financial meltdown.
Since 2004, the state’s limits on foreigners buying into domestic markets and on Russians taking money out, including by exchanging rubles for foreign currency, have gradually eased in step with a growing confidence in the country’s fiscal sturdiness, said Yelena Matrosova, head of the Center for Macroeconomic Research at consultancy BDO Unicon.
The government is confident that it can allow the liberalization of capital accounts and make the ruble convertible due to various factors: the country’s substantial foreign currency reserves, now at $246 billion; maturing capital markets; stable export prices; and a forecast $97 billion in the stabilization fund by 2007. 
“This is a result of events that have already happened,” Matrosova said.
As such, ruble convertibility is first and foremost a symbol of national pride, UBS said in a report last Friday.
“Being able to stand abroad with rubles in your hand has a huge symbolic value for Russians,” the report said. “It is a sign of national pride where the state has the confidence to allow its citizens to take money in and out as they wish,” instead of worrying that cash will flee Russia.
The move also neatly comes two weeks ahead of the Group of Eight summit in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Galkin said.
A convertible ruble’s implications extend beyond pride, however.
Foreign and offshore investors will now be allowed to open ruble accounts in Russian banks. The ruble as a freely traded currency will also greatly increase forex trading, as brokers prepare to trade products based on the exchange rate of the ruble to the dollar and the ruble to the euro. 
New York-based Lava Trading said last week that it would begin ruble-to-dollar and ruble-to-euro trading on its own platform on July 1. “We look forward to working with the country’s leading financial institutions to make around-the-clock trading in this currency a reality,” the company’s CEO, David Ogg, said at a conference earlier this month.
According to financial markets association ACI Russia, forex trading jumped by 40 percent in Russia last year, with average daily and annual turnover hitting $30 billion and $7.3 trillion, respectively.
“People are very bullish on the ruble, as it’s one of the few local currencies that is set to strengthen,” Galkin said. “One way to express that confidence is to invest in the debt market.”

TITLE: Arms Amnesty Nets Weapons
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Workers installing an advertising hoarding on the southern outskirts of the city have discovered a Kalashnikov gun with several magazines full of bullets and a homemade grenade launcher.
The weapons were found in the attic of an apartment building on Moskovsky Prospect overlooking the highway that will be used by leaders of the G8 member states during the forthcoming summit in the city on July 15-17.
The police wrote in a statement issued on the Internet that the weapons were in a usable condition.
Experts from the Federal Security Service (FSB) are investigating the origins of the weapons, the statement reported.
The attic search was part of a large-scale city-wide campaign titled “Weapons” that urges locals to voluntarily hand in illegal guns to the police. The campaign is runs regularly in the city and also involves extensive searches which are carried out several times a year.
In return for the guns, the law enforcement agencies promise amnesties for those handing in weapons and monetary compensation: from 100 to 2,000 rubles ($3.70 to $74) for a rifle; from 100 to 1,500 rubles for a shotgun; from 200 to 500 rubles for each mine or missile. Bullets are taken at 5 rubles per item, while 2,000 rubles will be given for an illegally kept machinegun.

TITLE: Opposition Prepares Its G8 Summit
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Opposition leaders will hold an alternative summit in Moscow less than a week before the G8 meeting to protest what they call a clampdown on democratic and economic freedoms under President Vladimir Putin.
Organizers, including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and former presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, said Wednesday that the “Different Russia” summit would be held July 11-12 and bring together opposition leaders as diverse as former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and National Bolshevik Party head Eduard Limonov.
Dignitaries from other G8 nations, including two assistant secretaries of state from the United States and the British ambassador to Russia, were expected to attend, the organizers said.
“The model the official Russia is pursuing is the model of monopoly: a monopoly on the economy, on business, on politics and on so-called managed civil society and on ideology,” Illarionov said at a news conference. “There can be no such thing as a monopoly. ... We have to present the alternatives so that the country realizes it has a choice.”
Current policies to strengthen the Kremlin’s power over business, parliament and nongovernmental organizations are taking away citizens’ freedom of choice in the economy, politics and elections, he said.
Kasparov said the summit would discuss a growing risk that Putin would remain in power past 2008, in breach of the Constitution. “I don’t know when there will be an election in Russia,” he said. Putin has repeatedly denied he would seek to change the Constitution to run for a third term.
The alternative summit comes amid Western concern that democracy is being eroded under Putin. A number of Western politicians, including U.S. Senator John McCain, have called on Russia to be kicked out of the G8.
Illarionov and Kasparov agreed Russia did not fit the criteria imposed on other members of the club of the world’s most-industrialized nations, especially due to its lack of democracy. But a boycott of the July 15-17 summit in St. Petersburg would do little to improve matters, while merely attending the summit would give “a stamp of support to the Kremlin’s policy of destruction of civil freedoms,” Illarionov said.
Illarionov said other G8 leaders could pursue “a third way” of dealing with the problem. He declined, however, to disclose what that third way was.
No one at the Kremlin could be reached for comment on the alternative summit Wednesday.
Kremlin-linked political analyst Sergei Markov said the summit would be “another blow to the image of Putin abroad.” But inside the country it would serve to strengthen Putin’s drive to consolidate power, he said. “They are being funded by [businessman Boris] Berezovsky,” he said. “This will be another step to discredit liberalism in Russia.”
Alexander Osovtsov, an organizer and former director of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia, said the alternative summit would be held at Moscow’s Renaissance Hotel and was being funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and Russian groups, which he declined to identify. He said the conference would cost several million dollars.

TITLE: QWorld’s Largest Postcard Delivered in City
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With nearly 200 stamps on it, a giant 15-meter-long postcard designed by non-conformist artistic group Mitki looks set to become part of the Guinness Book of Records. The card was written last Friday at the Peter and Paul Fortress and has been delivered to the Alexander Popov Communications Museum this week to join its permanent display.
The massive card, weighing over 56 kilograms and occupying over 150 square meters, is meant to resemble an old-fashioned love letter. 
The brains behind the project are Mitki artist Dmitry Shagin and Maksim Isayev, an artist with the local avant-garde theatrical company Akhe. Isayev and Shagin started by designing a painting together. The work, titled “A Letter To Esthel”, depicted a young woman and a sailor writing her a love letter. The woman was painted by Isayev and the sailor by Shagin.
The legendary non-conformist group Mitki works in an eccentric style that fuses twisted social realism with a touch of primitivism. Sailors’ shirts are featured prominently in the group’s work and culture and are often worn by its members. 
Just as the laid-back sailor is Mitki’s trademark character, the girl Esthel, in turn, is the imagined heroine of the Akhe theater company. “Esthel is a ballerina to whom we often mentally appeal when we create our shows,” Isayev said.
The postcard will join the permanent collection of the Mail-Art department of Alexander Popov Communications Museum and is already being prepared for display.
Despite the rain, hundreds of people came to the Peter and Paul Fortress to sign the letter and contribute to the initiative.
“This is so encouraging to see lots of people coming and leaving their notes, their declarations of love for their closest and dearest people,” Mitki’s Shagin said, adding that he will join in by writing a note to his wife.
Alexei Svistunov, chief editor of the Guinness Book of Records Russia, said the postcard meets all the necessary criteria to be registered in the prestigious book. “All the rules have been fulfilled, with 198 stamps glued to the item being sent, and the Guinness experts present at the ceremony on Friday have decided to consider the application favorably,” he said.
Svistunov expressed hope that the local achievement will make it into the international edition of the Guinness Book.
The largest reigning postcard was added to the Guinness Book International in May 2003 and originates from the United Arab Emirates, said Svetlana Azernikova, one of the project’s curators. “The card was 12 meters long and 9 meters wide — smaller than the St. Petersburg effort — and took 9 months to produce.” 
Unlike the St. Petersburg card, inspired by imagined feelings for an imagined Frenchwoman, the UAE card was meant for a single real person, the country’s president, Sheikh Zayed Al Nahayan.

TITLE: Prosecutors Seek To Close 3 Teen Mags Over Sex
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Prosecutor General’s Office is seeking to shut three popular youth magazines that, it says, exploit teenagers’ thirst for sex and drugs.
Cool, Cool Girl and Molotok have violated laws pertaining to the media, narcotics and children, a statement posted on the Prosecutor General’s Office web site said.
The statement followed a complaint filed by Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky, who has demanded that the Federal Service for Media Law Compliance and Cultural Heritage seek the closure of the three publications.
Fridinsky was among 13 deputy prosecutors who submitted their resignations Tuesday. For now, he is apparently still on the job.
“The titles are widely popular among children and teens and are being sold without regard to age limit and at an affordable price,” the statement said. 
It added that despite not being registered as erotic or advertising publications, the magazines “systematically print promotional materials with color illustrations that exploit the teenage readers’ interest in sex.”
Cool and Cool Girl are published by Burda Russia, while Molotok is published by Kommersant Publishing House. Darya Samsonova, a spokeswoman for Burda Russia, declined to comment on the prosecutors’ statements, saying her office had not been officially notified of the complaint.
Yekaterina Mil, deputy editor of the Molotok publishing house, which prints Molotok, said the magazine did not violate any laws and that it was not advertising sex but merely educating teenagers on the subject, The Associated Press reported.

TITLE: Presidential Aide Counters Western Critics
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Secretive presidential aide Vladislav Surkov emerged from the shadows Wednesday to defend Russia’s political path, quoting foreign journalists’ articles back to them during a lengthy news conference marked by historical and literary references.
The goal of the nearly two-hour briefing seemed clear: to counter a growing tide of Western criticism of Russia’s authoritarianism just two weeks before Group of Eight leaders convene in St. Petersburg.
Still, Surkov appeared reticent to let too many journalists in on his thoughts: Some reporters were informed of the briefing just an hour in advance.
Addressing a question about a rollback of democracy in Russia, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff quoted from a 1997 New York Times article and a 1998 Independent article that described Russia as chaotic, criminal and undemocratic.
“That’s what you and your colleagues thought about Russian democracy in the 1990s,” Surkov said. “That’s what we’re rolling back from, and we’re going to roll back from it as far as we can.”
Surkov’s decision to quote reporters who may well have been in the room — a fact he acknowledged with a grin — was a bit of theater that showed how keenly aware the Kremlin is of the pre-summit criticism it faces from the West.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov opened the briefing by limiting questions to domestic politics, saying: “We don’t advocate exaggerating the significance of the G8 for Russian political life.”
But Surkov’s often-erudite remarks implied the opposite.
He stressed one theme that has earned much domestic attention: the need for a set of guiding principles.
“I believe its main components will be no different than common European values and models,” said Surkov, 41, who is credited with having masterminded the United Russia and Rodina parties and the youth movement Nashi.
“Russia’s version of European culture is of course a specific one, but no more specific than Germany’s, France’s or Britain’s.”
When a Swiss reporter suggested that Western democracies were formed from the bottom up, while Russia’s was top-down, Surkov countered with a quote from U.S. linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky, Surkov said, wrote that U.S. democracy only appeared to represent the will of the people. Grass-roots politics, he added, “is something we need to head toward, I agree. But in practice, everything is far more complicated.”
Elaborating on the frequent Kremlin claim that foreign critics apply double standards to Russia, Surkov said Germany and Japan saw decades of parliamentary rule by a single party. 
“Does [U.S. President George W. Bush] support the Republican Party or not? Does [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair support the Labor Party or not?” Surkov said. “We support the party that supports the president — how can we do otherwise? Are we the only ones not allowed to have a majority in parliament that supports the president?
“They frequently tell us that Russia has a managed parliament, but are we really the only ones? Is that really forbidden in a democracy? In the U.S. parliament, these same Republicans have a majority.”
Turning to Nashi, Surkov said: “We naturally contact and support those who support us.” He added that “it is important not to excessively control” the youth-movement phenomenon.
He declined to comment on a recent “astonishing story” in The Wall Street Journal that Nashi had helped organize a series of paid demonstrations in the United States, saying he knew only what he had read in the press.

TITLE: Uranium to be Unified
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s uranium exploration and mining assets at home and in the CIS will be combined into a single, purely state-owned enterprise, nuclear energy chief Sergei Kiriyenko said Wednesday, scotching hopes that private investors would be allowed to retain minority stakes in uranium enterprises.
The announcement follows President Vladimir Putin’s approval on June 9 of a plan to gather all civilian nuclear sector enterprises into a single, market-driven corporation along the lines of France’s Areva or Germany’s Urenco.
The corporation, named Atomprom, similarly to its gas industry counterpart Gazprom, will absorb all state atomic energy assets. Rather than dividing Atomprom into six sub-holdings in which private investors could retain shares, the state will acquire all of the assets, Kiriyenko said Wednesday on the sidelines of an industry conference.
“The unity of the sector cannot be under any doubt,” Kiriyenko said. “We have to compete with large multinational companies. ... If we enter [the civilian nuclear energy] market as separate companies, we’ll be torn to pieces.”
The uranium mining division of Atomprom will include Russian miners Priargunsk, Khiagda and Dalur, and two joint ventures abroad — one in Kazakhstan and another in Uzbekistan — and possibly fuel monopoly TVEL.
Uranium processing and enrichment facilities will not be included in the mining enterprise, Kiriyenko said.
A spokesman for TVEL declined to comment on the plans. 
Priargunsk, which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s uranium-ore output, currently has a 16 percent free float, with several major banks, including Citigroup, UBS and Alfa Bank among its minority shareholders.
How the minority shares would come under state control was not immediately clear Wednesday.
Priargunsk will issue new shares on June 30, a move that could be used to dilute the minority shareholders’ stakes, said Erik DePoy, an equity analyst with Alfa Bank.
“If they want to do it openly, they could announce a buyback or buy up shares on the market,” he said. 
Having a single uranium miner would not exclude partnerships with foreign companies, Kiriyenko said, adding that he had talked over possible projects with officials from Australian miner BHP Billiton in St. Petersburg earlier this month.
Russia, in turn, would like to “develop uranium deposits anywhere in the world where it is profitable to do so,” Kiriyenko said.
One plan being discussed would be for BHP Billiton to increase uranium mining at its Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, the world’s largest uranium deposit, in return for agreeing to sales contracts of at least 30 years. Russia would then process the uranium ore and sell nuclear fuel abroad, in particular to the United States, a source familiar with the Atomprom plans said Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
Russia hopes to build 60 nuclear reactors abroad in the next 30 years, with nuclear fuel supply forming part of construction contracts. Analysts say Russia could compete for up to 50 percent of the U.S. nuclear-fuel market if Washington allows Russia access. 
Similar talks have been held with Canada’s Cameco Corporation, the world’s second-largest uranium miner after BHP, the source said. 
One stumbling block to such deals may be laws in Australia and Canada that specify companies must check that all uranium supplies go toward civilian use. At present, many Russian nuclear facilities cater for both civilian and military orders.
A decree to split such facilities into those supplying civilian nuclear energy and those working for the military should be passed by the end of the year, the source said.
The nuclear industry has no plans to acquire a controlling stake in the country’s largest machine-building corporation, Power Machines, as it prefers to see competition in the sector, Kiriyenko said Wednesday. 
“We have a problem only when there are monopoly situations on the market. Power Machines is not an absolute monopoly now as we can also buy from [Ukraine’s] TurboAtom and a few other foreign producers,” Kiriyenko said. “Also, we are interested in there being more than one turbine maker on the Russian market,” Kiriyenko said.

TITLE: Mobile Phone Giant Hears Call to Pay
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Calling Party Pays (CCP) principle, which comes into effect for all Russia’s mobile operators from Saturday, will allow most subscribers to receive incoming calls free of charge. 
However, if the change is “consumer-friendly” on the one hand, on the other it will prove inconvenient for those with direct-dial numbers, most of whom will now have to pay to divert incoming calls. These and other changes resulting from an amendment to Russia’s telecommunication laws were discussed at a MegaFon press conference on Wednesday.
Having brought the CPP principle into effect, the new amendment will ban direct-dial numbers and therefore directly affect the interests of 700,000 of St. Petersburg’s MegaFon subscribers and 200,000 from other areas of the Northwest. 
According to the new law, from July 1 those direct-dial numbers with the city ABC code (812) will be given a “federal” DEF code (921) instead.
According to Alexander Volkov, director of MegaFon Northwest, direct-dial numbers have always been additional to DEF-code numbers but “maybe some subscribers just did not know that.” Having obtained a license as a local and intra-zone operator MegaFon will nevertheless continue to render services to their direct-dial clients. 
Starting from Saturday, subscribers who used to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of having a direct-dial number will also have to pay for the diversion of incoming calls, though the first 100 minutes are free.
“We offer a free 100 minutes of diversion each month. According to the statistics, now, on average, subscribers get only 30 minutes of incoming calls each month. We multiplied that number by three in an effort to ease the process for our clients, allowing them to receive all of their incoming traffic. 
A limit of 100 minutes was also introduced in order to prevent the inevitable cases of fraud,” Volkov said. 
MegaFon subscribers will have to pay for the diversion of calls originating from ABC numeration, while all incoming calls from mobile phones will be free to both direct-dial and DEF-codes. 
For text messages, only DEF-code numbers will be available, while call rates will remain the same, Volkov said.
“Nobody knows for sure how the new rules will affect the mobile market,” Volkov said.
 “Personally I believe that it is mobile operators who will suffer more than clients,” he said. 
Having invested $10 million in new equipment, MegaFon is aiming to enter the market of fixed-line telephony and provide their subscribers a full range of services and technological solutions, mainly focusing on corporate clients. 
Moreover, the company forecasts that demand for direct-dial numbers will rise because of a new economic factor — local telephone subscribers will only be able to call ABC-code direct dial numbers for free. 
In other cases, for their outgoing calls to DEF-code mobile numbers local subscribers will have to pay as for long-distance calls.

TITLE: Turkmen Talks Suspended
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — Turkmenistan and Russia’s Gazprom natural gas giant suspended talks Thursday on a 30 percent price hike being sought by the Central Asian nation for its natural gas supplies after failing to reach any progress.
 “No agreement was reached on the price and the talks have been suspended,” Gazprom chief Alexei Miller said after talks with Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov. Miller did not elaborate.
Gas-rich Turkmenistan intends to increase gas prices from the current $65 per 1,000 cubic meters to $100 starting next month and warned last week that it would cut exports if Gazprom doesn’t accept the new price.
Turkmenistan is the second-biggest gas producer in the former Soviet Union after Russia, and its vast gas resources are playing an increasingly important role in the geopolitics of the region.
Gazprom controls the only transit route for Turkmen gas exports to other ex-Soviet states and Europe.

TITLE: UES Chooses Alfa Bank, Merrill to Advise on IPOs
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Electricity monopoly Unified Energy System picked U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch and Alfa Bank as consultants to float its spun-off generating companies, the company said Monday. 
UES said in a statement that the banks, chosen after a tender, would come up with a strategy to attract investments to the generation companies and advise on additional share issues which will be a mix of IPOs and private placements. 
“The consultants will be responsible for elaboration of an optimal strategy for UES to attract investment in the generation companies’’ being spun off, UES said. 
Merrill Lynch, the world’s second-largest securities firm by value, and Moscow-based Alfa, Russia’s biggest non-state lender, beat out eight other bidders in a tender announced in April, one criterion of which was having successfully raised at least $300 million selling shares of a Russian company.
The UES board, dominated by state officials, endorsed a plan June 23 to issue new shares in five generating firms spun off from the monopoly through power sector reforms to raise money for much-needed investment. The five pilot firms slated for 2006-07 are OGK-3, OGK-4, OGK-5, Mosenergo and TGK-9.
The government, which owns 53 percent of UES, wants to raise as much as 208 billion rubles ($7.7 billion) selling shares in power assets by 2010. That is part of a plan to spend as much as 2.4 trillion rubles in state and private money to upgrade Soviet-era equipment, avoid blackouts and power cuts and help sustain economic growth.
The reforms call for the breakup of the UES-controlled industry into separate generation, transmission and sales units to introduce competition.
UES calculates that Russia’s ageing power network needs more than $500 million a year in investments just to keep the heating and lights on in Russian homes and businesses. 
(Reuters, Bloomberg)

TITLE: Europe Needs a Soft-Power Approach
AUTHOR: By Charles William Maynes
TEXT: In the decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europe was concerned but not worried about the decline of Russia. The European Union did not at the time regard its great neighbor as a political or economic problem; Russia was retreating from empire, and as it grew weaker it appeared less threatening. Over the past five years, though, the Russian economy has begun to revive and Russia’s government has made gains in policy coherence, if not always in directions to Europe’s liking. Today, the question is whether Europe has the policy tools to deal with this new phenomenon.
Europe has become the most successful peaceful power in history. It has rendered inconceivable the very idea of war in Western and Central Europe. In the Balkans, its strongest argument is that if the states of that region behave properly toward one another, they too can join the European Union.
Europe cannot, of course, expand indefinitely, and each country must secure its own future. Nonetheless, Europe must recognize that its soft power is substantially reduced when dealing with any country that is barred from membership. It must therefore seek new sources of soft power.
Where might the EU’s soft power lie in the case of Russia? Europe should consider three key steps: First, it should develop some middle ground between membership and rejection. Europe and Russia are today poised to pull Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine in two different directions. When the Orange Revolution took place in Kiev, major figures in Europe talked publicly about Ukraine now being on “their side.” Such an approach to the problems of Ukraine is disastrous. It is impossible to draw a new line between Russia and Ukraine without severe economic consequences for Ukraine, unless of course the European Union is willing to mount a major financial assistance program.
Last winter’s gas imbroglio also sheds light on this issue. Whatever the deficiencies of the Russian approach, and there were many, it was and is a delusion for Europeans to believe that any Russian government would subsidize through cheap energy Ukraine’s drawing away from Russia to move closer to Europe. If Europe wanted Ukraine on its side, it would have to mount an aid program that would compensate Ukraine for the loss of an energy subsidy worth more than $1 billion per year. By the same token, some U.S. strategists are misguided if they believe that Russia would want to maintain its energy subsidy to Ukraine so as to ease Ukraine’s entry to NATO. No government in the world would consent to such an arrangement, so why should we expect Russia to behave any differently?
Finding a place for Russia in a larger European design could do much to alleviate the tension that is building up. One solution might be to design a special trading regime of wide-ranging cooperation with the specific aim of developing more organic ties between Europe and Russia. Could the EU and Russia cooperate on a major development in aircraft design? Could they work together on nuclear energy, now that it seems to be entering a new phase of development? What is needed is not so much a laundry list of objectives but a time-structured negotiation that would make progress possible. If more organic links between Europe and Russia could be encouraged, then, were Ukraine or Belarus to join the European Union in years to come, it would be far less traumatic for Russia than today.
The West, for its part, should begin speaking up in favor of altering NATO practices so that any further expansion of the alliance seems less of a threat to Russia. When the Baltic states joined NATO, U.S. jets were soon flying along the Russian border only a few kilometers from St. Petersburg. There was no security reason at all for this provocative forward movement of American power. Today, 95 percent of the still enormous nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States are dedicated to the destruction of each other. It is as if the Cold War had never ended.
The Europeans should press the United States and Russia to enter into serious discussions about substantial further reductions in their nuclear arsenals, so that they no longer pose a threat either to one another or to Europe. They should press the Americans and the Russians to enter into negotiations that would lead to a pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons in Europe. Such a stance would be soft power with an edge. After all, who has a greater stake in the reduction of continental arsenals than Europe?
Second, Europe should want to recognize more openly than in the past its shared interest with the United States in Russia’s democratic development. Several years ago, I suggested to the former head of a European aid program that U.S.-European cooperation made sense when giving assistance to Russia, but received the answer that cooperation was impossible since America was the enemy because its real goal in helping Russia was to gain market share there.
That was a remarkably shortsighted view of the stakes involved in Russia’s political and economic evolution. Although Europe will of course want to fashion its own assistance programs, internal EU regulations in any case now make it very difficult for Europe to cooperate with fellow democratic countries in supporting civil society in Russia. Yet, in the difficult period through which Russian civil society is passing, a common approach, at times involving a measure of co-funding, could yield benefits. Together, we could show much-needed solidarity with the struggling civil society community in Russia. The aim would be to find a common dialogue to encourage partnerships between civil society in Europe and America on the one hand and in Russia on the other.
Third, Europe should develop a more audible policy voice on Russian issues. Many individual EU countries have special interests peculiar to their own circumstances that cause them to hesitate to address Russia’s larger political issues. Not every European country has the same degree of interest in these issues, and this lack of shared concern enables Russian officials to discount the importance of individual European voices and attribute allegedly anti-Russian feelings to criticisms from individual European states. A serious European policy could effectively short-circuit this tactic.
In developing more tools to deal with an emerging Russia, the stakes for Europe are enormous. What Europe has accomplished over the past 50 years should be the envy of the rest of the world, but much of that progress could be jeopardized if, as the Ukrainian government recently warned with respect to European efforts to disengage from some of its neighbors, we end up creating new devils to the east through policies of isolation or neglect.

Charles William Maynes is president of the Eurasia Foundation. This comment appeared in the magazine Europe’s World (www.europesworld.org)

TITLE: Today the Internet, Tomorrow the Shoes
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: At a recent meeting of the G8 security and justice officials, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said it was time to “stop terrorist access to the Internet.”
A few days later, Alexander Mikhailov, head of the Federal Drug Control Service information department, also shared his creative plans for fighting narcotics with the public. As you might have guessed by this point, he also said that we needed to fight against the World Wide Web.
I understand, of course, that the Internet is extremely important and that a terrorist with access to the Internet is much more dangerous than a terrorist without. But Internet access isn’t the most important thing for terrorists. What they really need access to is explosives. Or forged documents.
Let’s take a look at Dagestan. According to police reports, about half a ton of plastic explosives were detonated in the republic over the past year. I don’t know where terrorists got the explosives — perhaps from a Federal Security Service training center or from Interior Ministry troops in Buinaksk. I don’t know, but they got them somewhere!
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that before you fight terrorists’ access to the Internet, you’d be better off fighting their access to explosives.
Or take the case of Ingushetia, where on June 9 five armed men shot dead the acting head of the OMON riot police, Musu Nalgiyev, as well as his children. The attackers were seen by dozens of people. They drove slowly up to an intersection a block away from Nalgiyev’s house and then stood by their Zhiguli cars cracking jokes as they waited for him. It’s clear people assumed the men were part of what are officially called police mobile units, and unofficially labeled the “death cavalry.” But the important thing is this: Nazran, where the shooting took place, is crawling with security forces, and the armed men had to show their identification at dozens of checkpoints.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that before you fight terrorists’ access to the Internet, you’d be better off ending their access to ID cards.
There’s an easy way to tell a competent leader from an incompetent one. The competent leader solves the problem he has been asked to solve. The incompetent one tries to extend his authority to every other human endeavor. Even corruption takes second place to this.
If you have a competent defense minister, he’ll fight hazing. But if he isn’t competent, he’ll explain that it’s impossible to fight hazing because, first, there isn’t any hazing in the armed forces, and second, hazing begins in kindergarten.
If you have a competent head of the Federal Security Service, he’ll fight terrorism, cutting off the sale of explosives and documents to terrorists. But if he isn’t competent, then his subordinates will continue to sell terrorists fake IDs, and he will fight terrorism on the Internet.
If you have a competent head of the Federal Drug Control Service, he’ll fight the spread of narcotics. But if he isn’t competent, he’ll fight against all sorts of people: veterinarians, book publishers and Internet providers.
Really and truly, I do understand that the Internet is important. I know that terrorists and drug dealers use the Internet, along with every other resource that modern civilization has to offer. For example, running shoes. Terrorists wear running shoes. Why don’t we post an FSB agent in every sporting goods store to make sure that terrorists don’t buy running shoes?
Here’s the thing: Let’s say they put a padlock on the World Wide Web but traffic cops continue to escort trucks filled with hexogen in return for a sack of sugar. Or drug dealers operating with crooked cops continue to get heroin confiscated from their competitors and stored in evidence rooms for later sale on the street.
Will this decrease the number of terrorist acts or overdoses?

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

TITLE: A tale of two cultures
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Soviet culture fell into two categories, says Vladimir Paperny in ‘Kultura Dva.’ 
The leading publishing house on the Russian academic literature market, NLO (Novoye Literaturnoye Obosreniye, “New Literature Review”), has just reissued Vladimir Paperny’s “Kultura Dva” or “K2” (“Culture Two”), perhaps the most prominent of the Soviet intellectual bestsellers of the late 1970s. 
Officially, a PhD thesis — in fact, an overt provocation — K2 demonstrates the engaging choreography typical of dissident texts. Although the research for it was carried out at the Moscow Central Institute for Theory and History of Architecture, it was far away from the monotonous, tedious ideology of Soviet research standards. 
The typescripts followed the author’s immigration to the U.S. in 1981, where four years later it was finally published in Russian by Ardis (Ann Arbor), well known for its collaboration with Soviet cultural dissidents. It originally appeared in Russia in the NLO edition in 1996 and the first English version was piblished by Cambridge University Press in 2002.	
The book, or to be precise, the typescript of the thesis, produced sensation in the Soviet intellectual underground as it boldly questioned perhaps the most taboo and obscure spot on the Soviet research landscape: the strange mutation of the Soviet Avant-Garde of the 1920s into Socialist Realism of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. 
Narrowly, the author was engaged with the radical, genetically unmotivated, jump from constructivist to neo-classicist architectural thinking. No less innovative was the approach taken by the thesis itself since Paperny avoided a strictly historical method in favor of adopting structuralism, which was fashionable among Soviet intellectuals in the 1970s. 
Paperny’s employment of the concepts “Culture One” and “Culture Two,” with their suggested binary opposition, amounts to a sort of diagnosis for the 1920s and the 1930s-50s respectively. 
However, the two Cultures should not be taken very seriously as something that really existed — they are just tools of description and systematization; they were designed, like two magnets, to attract certain often invisible but arterial features — abstract or concrete, mental or substantial “symptoms” — of the invented Cultures: “Melting-Hardening,” “Movement-Immobility,” “Horizontal-Vertical,” “Uniform-Hierarchical,” and so on.
For instance: “Characteristic of Culture One is a horizontal quality. This means the values of the periphery become more important than those of the center. People’s consciousness and people themselves strive in a horizontal direction away from the center. Culture Two is characterized by the transfer of values to the center. Society ossifies and crystallizes.” 
These centrifugal and centripetal forces within society (as well as others described in the book) have a direct relation to the concept of architecture: whether it is means to submit to or dominate social and cultural environments as one of the effective ways for the manifestation of power.
Paperny loosely followed the famous idea of Heinrich WÚlfflin (who proposed a number of cultural oppositions to stress the difference between Renaissance and Baroque artistic thinking). But, unlike the Swiss art historian, this author is extensively involved in the broad analysis of art and society including people’s everyday habits and design preferences, political directives, discourse in architectural magazines, town planning and so on — and brilliantly reveals between all these components certain regularities for each of the two Cultures. 
The endeavor to mentally grasp prevailing cultural mechanisms leads to a profound interpretation of architectural transformations (far away from just “one man’s wish”), and suggests a more tangible comprehension of the victory of Culture Two over Culture One. 
Time has shown that the book, despite its being a little bit outdated and that it can be and was highly criticized for its simplified and far-fetched adherence to the binary-opposition approach, doesn’t lack value and relevence.
Firstly, the controversial theoretical construction of the book is perfectly balanced with superior learning and the skillful handling of a colossal amount of material, with witty, penetrating comments and a vivid style; the exciting text is rich with spicy details and anecdotes which always help to catch the intonations of a bygone time.
Secondly, and paradoxically, the vulnerable methodological side of the book is at the same time its most powerful and thought-provoking, capable of both serious and droll prognoses. 
“The work voices the hypothesis that a certain portion of the events in Russian history can be described in terms of the alternation of the ascendancy of Culture One and Culture Two,” Paperny wrote. 
Indeed, it seems that whatever the period of historical time with which the book is concerned with, in the Russian context it will always be pregnant for some keen and warning parallels: for example, Vladimir Putin’s much discussed “power vertical,” according to the book, is one of the chief symptoms of Culture Two (again, the book was written in the 1970s). 
But historical parallels are always risky and much of the coincidences could be easily opposed by dozens of no less convincing counter examples. 
Grigory Revzin, the prominent Kommersant cultural critic, questioning the book’s vitality, found in it a deep expression of the unconsciousness of the country that survived Stalin’s mortal regime. 
According to the critic, Paperny created a sort of “myth of the eternal return of Stalinism,” which is, perhaps, one of the principal and stable syndromes of the Soviet and present Russian intelligentsia. It is not by chance that the Russian version has had the always alarming title of “Culture Two,” whereas it is just a historical period in the Cambridge edition: “Architecture in the Age of Stalin.” 
The extent of the book’s significance grows with use. The second Russian edition above all, includes a number of comments by prominent scholars of Soviet and Russian studies from all over the world. Definitely, the book became a crossroads for the subsequent works, trends and theories around the period, which argue with or adopt the book’s assertions, and since then it has taken a reliable position in the bibliography of Russian 20th century studies.

“Kultura Dva (K2)” byVladimir Paperny. NLO, 2006. 2nd. ed. 408pp. 250 rubles ($9.25). (Russian-language edition)
“Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two,” byVladimir Paperny. Cambridge University Press, 2002. (English-language edition)

TITLE: Hip-hop allstars
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Hip-hop, the cultural phenomenon that was begun by inner-city youngsters in New York in the early 1970s, has gone mainstream in Russia. 
Thanks to MTV, Russians are getting used to graffiti, and youths sporting baggy jeans and doo rags tied around their heads, and the sound of hip-hop music.
Now in its third year, the Hip-Hop All Stars festival takes place in St. Petersburg on Saturday. This year, the event has moved from its former venue, Yubileiny Stadium, to the smaller Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa.
“After considering all the strengths and weaknesses of carrying out large music events in the summer, it was decided to focus on bringing star guests rather than on organizing a large-scale event,” Invox Publishing, the show’s organizer, said in a statement released Tuesday.
The festival will feature three events this year, including a “Special Edition” show featuring Guru, a veteran of  the American hip-hop scene. Guru and his crew will perform with Russian rap bands Kasta and Krec. 
St. Petersburg-based Krec is the youngest and least hardcore of the show’s participants but became famous after its song  “Nezhnost”(Tenderness) was chosen for the soundtrack of the film “Piter-FM” released earlier this year. Krec is expected to present its third album “Po Reke” (“Along the River”) at the event.
Rostov-on-Don-based Kasta is arguably one of the best rap acts in the country and the winner of the 2006 Best Hip-Hop project of the year award from Muz TV music channel.
The band has also received recognition from within Russia’s mainstream showbiz circles.
DJ Groove, one of Russia’s most prominent electronic musicians, told the Rap.ru web site at the awards’ ceremony that he was convinced Kasta would win.
“They are honest, they are honest with their words. These are true lyrics, true folklore,” he said. “Real hip-hop is not R ‘n’ B. It has to be free from gold (bling), expensive cars and all the rest of that nonsense. 
“Hip-hop is about the problems of the human race. Let pop music sing about how everything is good, but hip-hop, as well as rock, has to talk about problems,” he said, adding, “Kasta has the right attitude.”
The band said it has participated in Hip-Hop All Stars projects from the very beginning and are looking forward to perform at the event alongside Guru, a “legendary American rapper.”
Guru earned his underground celebrity as the mouthpiece of the duo Gangstarr and is now considered by many in the international rap community as one of the genre’s most original voices.
Rap-meets-jazz pioneer Gangstarr enjoys cult status in the hip-hop world. Classics include “Just to Get a Rep,” “Manifest” and “You know My Steez.” 
“Influenced by jazz, doo-wop and ’70s soul more than any other still-standing hip-hop act, Gangstarr understands better than any other the correlation between jazz and rap — two black art forms with similar cadences that thrive on spontaneous innovation,” a reviewer for the BBC wrote about “Ownerz,” the bands most recent album. 
“The group’s songs typically feature jazzy basslines, horn riffs, and obscure jazz samples that form the perfect foundation for Guru’s conversational, laconic vocals to weave their hypnotic spell,” the review continues. 
To be successful in the coming concert Guru will have to connect with audiences half his age, but the challenge of “exchanging information” with younger generations has never stopped the MC. Describing his revival as a solo artist in a 2004 interview with AllHipHop.com, Guru said: “I was able to look at the younger cats and see what they were doing and learn from them as opposed to being one of those bitter cats looking at the young dudes in a spiteful way. I could never be that dude.” 
“A lot of MCs can make a good record, but…do they have a stage show? It’s a total package of an MC is what you get with me,” the old school rapper said.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Stereoleto, a series of outdoor concerts continues this week with Ladytron, a Liverpool-based electropop quartet. Having taken its name from a Roxy Music song, the band has been around since 1998. After releasing a new album called “Witching Hour” (2005), the foursome now performs with eight synthesizers and one guitar on stage. Also performing on Saturday is the Dutch electropop band Who Made Who. 
The most exciting concert in the series, however, is expected on July 8, when Sparks, the highly influential pop-art band from Los Angeles, will come to perform its “greatest-hits” set complete with a selection of songs from the band’s inspired 20th album, “Hello Young Lovers.” Brothers Ron and Russell Mael will be backed by a band of two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer.
In a letter to the media, Stereoleto’s promoter promised to fix the opening night’s drawbacks such as a scarcity of toilets and bars. Now in its fifth year, Stereoleto is again being held in its original location in the gardens of Molodyozhny Theater on the Fontanka river.
The French-German arty pop act Stereo Total that performed at Stereoleto in 2003, will return for a show at a restaurant called Zimaleto on Saturday. The duo of Francoise Cactus and Brezel Goring has recently released its seventh album, “Discotheque.” Zimaleto is located at 24 Bolshhaya Nevka Nab. M.: Chyornaya Rechka. Tel.: 320-0860. The show starts at 10 p.m.
White Night’s Swing, a three-day jazz event put together by David Goloshchokin’s Jazz Philharmonic Hall, opens Friday. Apart from two concerts at the venue, it features an open-air daytime concert on Ploshchad Iskusstv near the Russian Museum at 1 p.m. on Saturday. See gigs for the lineup.
Another open-air event also held on Saturday is an all-day rock event called Okna Otkroi, or Open Your Windows, held at the Kirov Stadium. Focusing on no-frills Russian rock, its announced lineup features Alisa, Korol I Shut, Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Surganova I Orkestr and Aria as well as around 30 lesser known acts selected by a team of “experts” at auditions throughout the past year. 
The international stadium concert this week is the one by Billy Idol, who will perform at the Ice Palace on Monday. The former Generation X frontman, who moved away from punk into mainstream rock stardom in the 1980s, arrives to promote “Devil’s Playground” (2005), his first new studio album in nearly 12 years. The 50-year old ex-punk is expected to perform his solo hits “Rebel Yell” and “White Wedding,” some Generation X songs, as well as Elvis Presley, The Who and The Doors covers, among other songs.
The veteran local band Akvarium cancelled its “traditional summer concert” scheduled on Wednesday, as its frontman Boris Grebenshchikov was to undergo an eye surgery this week.

TITLE: Canada calling
AUTHOR: By Stephanie Patterson
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The work of Jean-Paul Riopelle, a painter and sculptor from Montreal and one of Canada’s most famous artists of the 20th century, is on display for the first time in Russia at the State Hermitage Museum.
When the show opened two weeks ago, the Canadian curator of the exhibition, Stephane Aquin, said that after exhibitions of other post-war artists, Riopelle, who died in 2002 aged 79, was the Hermitage’s logical next choice.
“They had de Stael and Soulages, and the Riopelle exhibit just made sense,” Aquin said. Nicolas de Stael and Pierre Soulages are both French abstract painters from the late 20th century.
The exhibition — a panorama of Riopelle’s career — begins with large canvas paintings from the 1940s, which he made by hurling paint at a canvas, and “Decalcomania No. 1.” Decalcomania is a technique of folding a piece of paper with paint on it, leaving the results up to chance.
In about 1954 Riopelle started making what is known as mosaics, squirting paint on the canvas and then sculpting it with a masonry trowel to create blocks and triangles that are set apart more by texture than color or subject.
One of the more imposing works is “The Ice Canoe,” from the 1990s after Riopelle had moved to Canada after spending much of his life in France. Officially described as “mixed media on wood,” it is a canoe with every surface painted, mostly with spray paint cans.
This work refers to an annual canoe race from Quebec city to Levis, with white geese painted on the bottom from a local myth that with the help of supernatural powers a canoe can fly.
Riopelle started among Les Automatistes, a group of artists under Paul-Emile Borduas, who experimented with automatism and its ties to the subconscious. In 1948 he signed the “Refus Global,” a manifesto written by Borduas that rejected institutions of religion and government, among other things.
Riopelle then moved to Paris where he studied with Marc Chagall and Natalia Goncharova. Although he is well known for lyric abstractionism, Riopelle said he did not intend to create abstract paintings.
“Abstract means to come from, I want things to return to,” he said, in notes accompanying “Back from Spain,” a painting whose long lines and dark swaths of color seem to be anything but concrete. His art is an attempt to understand nature, not to achieve distance from it, but in doing so he has found a new perception of his subject that comes across as abstract.
For all his evolution as an artist, from throwing paint to using trowels and spray paint, ever present is his concern to use paint to reveal the essence of a subject, not to disguise it. All of his paintings capture natural movement or tension, between colors, textures, or even materials.
The works are on loan from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Power Corporation of Canada. The Montreal museum recently hosted an exhibition of treasures from the Hermitage and speakers at the opening proudly demonstrated that art can bring people from across the globe together in friendship. Joe Friberg, chairman of the State Hermitage Foundation of Canada, praised the Hermitage as a “dynamic, forward-looking museum with very ambitious plans on a world stage.”
It is not just a “grand old museum,” he said, and cited the reconstruction of the General Staff building as one example of the museum making space for more modern art, promising the Foundation’s support for these endeavors.

“Riopelle” runs through Sept. 17 in the Aleksandrovsky hall (Room 282) at the Hermitage.

TITLE: Devotion to motion
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Open Look Festival of contemporary dance.
The Open Look Festival, which from Saturday provides the city with an eight-day-long contemporary dance fiesta, opens with an outdoor party featuring Swedish-Russian joint project Street EYES, and two U.S. dance troupes, the Illstyle Dance Company and ZviDance.
Over the course of the festival, the local artistic community will get to know contemporary dance troupes and choreographers from the U.S., Europe and Russia. 
Demonstrating the latest trends this year will be contemporary dance companies Nora Chipaumire (U.S.-Zimbabwe), Compagnie Linga (Switzerland), Routa Company (Finland) and Iguan Theater, the Sasha Kukin Theater, and Kannon Dance Company from St. Petersburg. Swedish choreographer Joaquin Perez is staging a joint project with the Russian dancers specifically for the festival.
ZviDance, led by choreographer Zvi Gotheiner is one of this year’s headliners.
This well-traveled ten-member troupe established in 1989, gained international recognition for their bold original works fusing an array of styles and blending together elements of modern, folk and traditional dance with exuberance and vigor.
“Gotheiner is one of those rare choreographers who is able to convey human dilemma and aspiration through movement and form and make traditional modern steps resonate with individuality,” reads a review from “The Village Voice.” It continued: “Gotheiner’s what people in the field refer to informally as a ‘real choreographer’.” 
The event ends with a gala performance on July 8 with most festival participants presenting joint projects.
The driving force behind the project is Kannon Dance, the oldest studio in town focusing on contemporary and jazz dance, contact improvisation and other forms of dance.
Switzerland’s Compagnie Linga is another group to look out for. Founded by Katarzyna Gdaniec and Marco Cantalupo in 1992, Linga established a permanent home in the outskirts of Lausanne one year later. Winner of a number of respected dance awards, the company is renowned for physicality and an unconventional performing style.
The Open Look Festival is one of Kannon Dance’s three major annual events, along with Kinodance Festival and a competition of young choreographers. This year’s festival is taking place at a new location, the Troitsky Cultural Center.
Kannon Dance’s old home, the monumental Soviet-era Palace of Culture Named After The First Five Year Plan — a fine example of Soviet architecture and its naming system — was demolished earlier this year to vacate space for Mariinsky II, a new theater to compliment the Mariinsky Theater nearby.
In contrast to the previous venue, the Troitsky Cultural Center, southeast of the city center, requires quite a trek but with an obvious shortage of available stage venues in town in general, nobody is complaining.
Vadim Kasparov, the festival’s director, believes the main task of the Open Look is to promote contemporary culture as a universal language, while integrating various directions of contemporary dance.
Contemporary forms of dance have been somewhat neglected — some would say suppressed — in St. Petersburg, the cradle of Russian classical ballet and home to the Imperial Ballet School, the oldest classical ballet academy in the country.
In 1997, when Kasparov and his wife Natalya, a dancer and choreographer, just started out, they ran around offering classes to local colleges and universities without success. 
The first students at Kannon Dance were much more concerned about their physical appearance than the philosophy of jazz or modern dance and attended the school to get fit or train for a job in a strip-club. 
“I knocked on the doors of all arts-related universities but kept getting the same reply: that ‘it is not part of our course’,” Kasparov recalls. 
“Musical theater in Russia was nonexistent then, but I swear I already knew there would be a boom. Now I see I was completely right.”

www.kannondance.ru, 
www.zviDance.com, www.linga.ch. The Troitsky Cultural Center, is located at 223 Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony. Metro Lomonosovskaya. 

For details, call 362 6271.

TITLE: A working relationship
AUTHOR: By Ronald Grigor Suny
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Muslim experience in tsarist Russia is often described as a cycle of repression, Russification and conflict. A new book by scholar Robert D. Crews tells a different story.
In her wisdom, the Empress Catherine II ordered that all religious faiths be tolerated in Russia. Herself a convert from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, Catherine was a true woman of the Enlightenment as well as a shrewd pragmatist. Through tolerance, she bound Russia’s Muslims to her regime, guaranteed their loyalty and established her own governmental institutions as the courts of appeal for disputes within the Muslim communities. From the late 18th century to the end of the Romanov dynasty, a precarious but surprisingly successful benign symbiosis developed between the tsars and their Muslim subjects. 
Historians have usually depicted tsarist Russia’s treatment of its Islamic peoples as a story of repression, Russification and constant conflict between Christian rulers and their tens of millions of Muslim subordinates. That indelible image continued to color the analysis of Soviet rule of the Central Asian peoples, and conflicts like the war in Chechnya only confirm the idea of the eternal clash of Orthodox and Islamic civilizations. Stanford professor Robert D. Crews tells quite a different story in “For Prophet and Tsar.” He demonstrates how tsars used religion as a foundation for popular loyalty to the autocracy and as a means of disciplining and regulating the heterogeneous population of their vast realm. Religion, rather than language or nationality, was the principal identification of peoples in the empire. The law required every subject to be a member of a confessional community and to obey the clerical authorities of that community. The faiths of Muslims, Jews and Buddhists, as well as the non-Orthodox Christians — Protestants, Catholics and Armenian Apostolics — were officially recognized and integrated into the system of local governance. Over time, Muslims and others adapted to the tsarist religious regime “as a potential instrument of God’s will,” accepted (though not without contestation) the clerics sanctioned by the state and used official institutions to help regulate their own members and settle disputes among them.
Tsarist Russia was an empire in the truest sense — an enormous state with a stunningly diverse population that was both distinguished officially from the ruling elites and compelled to accept its subordination to an imperial power that ruled by right of conquest and divine sanction. The Romanovs compared themselves favorably to other great empires — they believed they treated their Muslims better than the British did in India or the French in Africa, and they were disdainful of how the disintegrating Ottoman Empire dealt with its minorities. For Russia, Islam was never simply a domestic problem but had international ramifications. The regime worked hard to secure the loyalty of peoples living in its borderlands while competing with the British in the “Great Game” in Central Asia and with Persia and the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus. Its policy of tolerance paid off handsomely as Russia’s Muslims accepted the empire as the “House of Islam” (dar al-Islam), a country in which they were able to fulfill their religious obligations. The Ottomans tried, but generally failed, to convince Muslims in Russia that their primary loyalty should be to the Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul and not to Russia, the infidel “House of War” (dar al-Harb).
Tsarism not only recognized heterogeneity but sought to integrate the elites of diverse peoples into a collaborative relationship with the autocratic state. At times this meant the recognition and acceptance of local traditions. But St. Petersburg also had a modernizing agenda, and imposed conformity with Russian norms through bureaucratic regulation. Just as the Orthodox Church had a clerical hierarchy appointed by the tsar, so should the Muslims have a clergy separate from the laity. No matter that their customary religious practices had been much more informal. “To domesticate Islam in the empire,” Crews writes, tsarist officials “opted to introduce a churchlike organization among a population that had previously known no such institutions.” 
Eventually, the Orenburg Muhammad Ecclesiastical Assembly, with its mufti appointed by the emperor, became the principal authority over the Muslims of the Volga and Urals regions. As the empire expanded into the Caucasus and Central Asia, the state appointed other clerical authorities. Yet the close connection between the official clergy and government meant that other Muslim clerics, pious lay figures or Islamic scholars were outside the fold. In the consequent disputes among different claimants to the true faith or proper ritual, those who were able appealed to the state to resolve their differences, and were not above calling in the police. By examining court records, Crews paints a rich picture of how the state and its clerical allies penetrated into communities and even the home to regulate the most intimate of relations. Marriage and divorce, the proper disciplining of children and squabbles over property and inheritance all came to the attention of clerics and the courts. Integrated into the tsarist system as they were, Muslims seldom resorted to open conflict with the regime. The Catherinian system seemed to work.
Yet the series of Russian-Ottoman wars, particularly the Crimean War (1854-1856) and the War of 1877-1878, as well as a growing nationalism among Poles and other subject peoples, gave rise to Russian anxieties about the loyalty of the empire’s Muslims. Conservative Russian nationalists like Mikhail Katkov and Fyodor Dostoevsky questioned the policy of tolerance. As Russian Pan-Slav writers fantasized about the unity of all Slavic peoples, other observers imagined that parallel ideologies — Pan-Turkism or Pan-Islam — might seduce Muslims within Russia to support the Ottomans. While the policy of tolerance continued until the end of the empire, powerful voices proclaimed that Russia should follow the lead of European nation-states and strive toward greater homogenization of its population. Yet even in the revolution of 1905 and the period of constitutional monarchy from 1905 to 1917, Muslims continued to work within the system, electing representatives to the state dumas and petitioning for civil rights and equal treatment.
Crews provides an important corrective to the usual understanding of Russia’s imperial rule over its Muslim peoples, though his generous estimation of the tolerance and mutual benefits of tsarist rule plays down some of the more brutal confrontations between Muslims and the tsars. There is mention of the 1916 protests in Central Asia over conscription of Muslims but very little on the endless wars between the mountain dwellers of the Caucasus and the tsarist armies, the emigration of the so-called Circassians from the western Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire and the long-simmering quarrels over landholdings in Central Asia that would erupt ferociously during the Revolution. 
Yet Crews’ case for Muslim adaptation to a Christian empire is carefully and impressively drawn, and explains more than any previous history why Muslims, who have lived with Russians for 500 years, were not especially confrontational or antagonistic toward the “ruling nationality.” With this rich and subtle book, Crews forces us to rethink our current Manichean division of the world into us and them.

Ronald Grigor Suny is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan and editor of the forthcoming “Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III: The Twentieth Century.”

TITLE: War Looms as Israel Detains Hamas Leaders
AUTHOR: By Steven Gutkin
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli troops rounded up dozens of ministers and lawmakers from the Palestinians’ ruling Hamas party on Thursday, while forging ahead with a military campaign in Gaza meant to win the release of an Israeli soldier held by Hamas gunmen. 
Israeli warplanes also buzzed the summer home of Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, who harbors the hard-line Hamas leaders who Israel says ordered the kidnapping.
Adding to the tension, the body of a kidnapped 18-year-old Jewish settler who was shot in the head was found in the West Bank, Israeli security officials said. Palestinian militants said they executed Eliahu Asheri, whose body was found near Ramallah.
The soldier’s capture on Sunday by Hamas’ military wing and two affiliated groups, and Israel’s subsequent military incursion into Gaza threatened to bring the two sides to the brink of all-out war. Hamas, which took over the Palestinian Authority after winning elections in January, has resisted international pressure to renounce violence and recognize Israel.
An Israeli military official said a total of 64 Hamas officials were arrested in the early morning roundup. Of those, Palestinian officials said seven are ministers in Hamas’ 23-member cabinet and 20 others are lawmakers.
Palestinian parliament speaker Abdel Aziz Duaik and Religious Affairs Minister Nayef Rajoub were among those rounded up. There were conflicting reports about whether Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer, who has called for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, was arrested.
Officials will be questioned and eventually indicted, the Israeli army and government officials said.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said the ministers and lawmakers were not taken as bargaining chips for Shalit’s release, but because Israel holds Hamas responsible for attacks against it.

TITLE: In Rebuke to Bush, Supreme Court Blocks Guantanmo Trials
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President George W. Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees. 
The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions.
The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 to November 2001.
Two years ago, the court rejected Bush’s claim to have the authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers. 
In this follow-up case, the justices focused solely on the issue of trials for some of the men. The vote was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court's liberal members in ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan. Thursday’s ruling overturned that decision.
Bush spokesman Tony Snow said the White House would have no comment until lawyers had had a chance to review the decision. 
The administration had hinted in recent weeks that it was prepared for the court to set back its plans for trying Guantanamo detainees.
The president has also told reporters, “I’d like to close Guantanamo.” But he added, “I also recognize that we're holding some people that are darn dangerous.”

TITLE: Kuwaiti Women Get the Vote
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KUWAIT — Kuwaitis voted for a new parliament on Thursday with women running and casting ballots for the first time in a national poll in the Gulf Arab state. 
“I don’t know how to describe my feelings, I am so happy, it’s a beautiful day as women practice their right,” female candidate Hind al-Shaikh said. “I hope a woman makes it.”
Parliament passed a law in May 2005 giving women the right to vote and stand in elections for the 50-seat National Assembly of the oil-producing country.
Officials said about 250 candidates are standing, including 28 women determined to make headway despite daunting odds of beating seasoned male opponents, many of whom are former parliamentarians seeking re-election.
Men and women braved the scorching summer heat in the desert state, voting in separate stations across the conservative state as Islamists, who reject female suffrage, had demanded.
Campaigners handed out to voters roses or water bottles with candidates’ photos printed on them. Some wore scarves with candidates’ pictures.
“The participation of women has added a new spirit to the march of democracy in Kuwait,” Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah said during a visit to a polling station.
Women can vote and stand for election in four of the six countries in the largely conservative, patriarchal Gulf Arab region. They are banned in Saudi Arabia, where women’s rights remain limited, and there are no political elections in the United Arab Emirates.
The poll was called after Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah dissolved parliament last month following a standoff between the government and opposition over electoral reforms.
The opposition accuses some members of government of trying to turn parliament into a rubber-stamp assembly through vote-buying. But the government has dismissed the charges, saying it is committed to reform in U.S. ally Kuwait.
The opposition is a loose alliance of pro-reform ex-MPs, Islamists and liberals, tolerated in Kuwait, which bans parties.
Many experts say voting by Islamists and powerful, conservative tribes will hurt the chances of women candidates. But female candidates themselves say at least one of them may win as women are 57 percent of the 340,000 eligible voters.
“I feel I am going to cry of happiness because it’s a historic moment for Kuwait... I hope a woman can make it,” said Diaa al-Saad, 55, one of the first women to vote in Jabriya.
Experts say female candidates have a slim chance of being elected.

TITLE: Britney Spears Makes Nude Debut on Magazine Cover
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — A six-month pregnant Britney Spears has posed nude for the cover of the August issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine and an accompanying photo spread inside, much in the style of the famous 1991 Vanity Fair cover of a naked and heavily pregnant Demi Moore.
On the Harper’s Bazaar cover, a dark-haired Spears covers her breasts with her arms and crosses her legs at the knee, as she sits smiling into the camera.
Harper’s said pop singer Spears “was never more beautiful” than when it photographed her a week ago and that it was the first time it had printed a nude photo on its cover.
The magazine added, “Since word leaked out about the shoot on Monday, people have been desperate to get their hands on the exclusive photos which were posted on various Web sites without permission from the magazine.”
The former teen idol whose hit songs include “Oops, I Did It Again,” Spears has frequently complained that she is hounded by paparazzi and earlier this month appealed to them to leave her alone. She also recently came under criticism for driving with her baby on her lap while fleeing a photographer.
In an interview with NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer, she tearfully admitted to being “an emotional wreck,” and defended husband Kevin Federline from sniping in tabloids.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: ETA Talks Begin
MADRID, Spain (AP) — Spain officially announced the start of peace negotiations with the Basque separatist group ETA after formally informing parliament Thursday, and the prime minister warned that talks to end decades of bloodshed would be long and difficult. 
The talks had been widely expected since ETA declared a permanent cease-fire in March.
There have so far been no details about where and when the negotiations would be held, and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero gave little away in his brief statement, saying only that his interior minister would update congressional leaders in September on progress.

Rabbi Attack Arrest
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Police on Wednesday arrested a man suspected of attacking Poland’s chief rabbi in late May, describing him as a 33-year-old tied to neo-Nazi groups who confessed to assaulting the Jewish leader. 
The arrest comes nearly five weeks after Michael Schudrich, a New Yorker who became the nation’s chief rabbi in 2004, was punched and attacked with what appeared to be pepper spray on a street in central Warsaw on May 27. Schudrich was not injured in the attack.

New UN Member
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday unanimously admitted the newly independent Republic of Montenegro as the 192nd member of the world body. 
General Assembly President Jan Eliasson called for approval of the resolution by acclamation and when there was no objection he banged the gavel and said: “I declare the Republic of Montenegro admitted to membership in the United Nations.” Diplomats burst into applause.

Coast Guard Jailed
NEW LONDON, Connecticut — A military jury sentenced a Coast Guard cadet to six months in prison and kicked him out of the service Wednesday for extorting sexual favors from a classmate. 
Cadet Webster M. Smith, the first student court-martialed in the academy’s 130-year history, was acquitted of rape but had faced up to five years and seven months for extortion, sodomy, indecent assault and other charges.
Defense attorneys for Smith, 23, of Houston, asked the jury to spare him jail time, saying the stigma of his conviction will follow him forever. He will not graduate from the Coast Guard Academy and must register as a sex offender in Texas.

Brad Pitt Fraudster
DUBAI (Reuters) — A salesman tried to fleece a money exchanger in the United Arab Emirates by using an identity card bearing the picture of Hollywood heart-throb Brad Pitt, a local newspaper reported on Thursday.
The Gulf News said the 29-year-old Jordanian had been told by his brother, who worked at the Dubai money exchange, that more than $23,000 in cash had been transferred to the bureau for a client who had not picked it up for more than three months.
The Jordanian then forged an ID using the client’s name and a picture of Pitt. He hoped his brother would then be able to hand over the cash and keep a photocopy of the fake ID as record of the transfer.

TITLE: Sharapova Shrieking Through
AUTHOR: By Stephen Wilson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WIMBLEDON, England — Maria Sharapova overpowered Ashley Harkleroad 6-2, 6-2 in 67 minutes Thursday to reach the third round at Wimbledon. The match was slightly tougher than her 51-minute 6-2, 6-0 win the previous day over Anna Smashnova. 
The third-seeded Russian had too much power and consistency for the 76th-ranked American, who had reached the second round for only the first time in four attempts.
Sharapova, her shriek-like grunts carrying beyond the Court 2 stands, took control by winning 14 of 16 points at one stretch in the first set. She finished with 27 winners and 12 unforced errors. Harkleroad, mostly on the defensive, had four winners and seven errors.
Sharapova saved a break point — the only one she faced — and needed five match points before she closed out the contest when Harkleroad sent a backhand wide.
Defending champion and three-time winner Venus Williams was up later against Lisa Raymond, with top-seeded Amelie Mauresmo facing Samantha Stosur.
On the men’s side, 1992 champion Andre Agassi, 2002 winner Lleyton Hewitt, two-time runner-up Andy Roddick and French Open champion Rafael Nadal were all scheduled to play second-round matches.
Getting the day going was Roger Federer, who says he’s never been in such dominant form so early in the championships — a scary thought for any player planning to stop him from winning his fourth straight title on the All England Club grass.
“I’ve had a different kind of draw, where people are expecting me to struggle more,” the top-ranked Swiss star said. “That I came through that convincing obviously gives me a lot of confidence. Sends out maybe a little bit of a message for the other players.”
Federer looked untouchable Tuesday as he routed four-time semifinalist Tim Henman 6-4, 6-0, 6-2 on Centre Court to reach the third round, extending his grass-court winning streak to 43 matches. He dropped only seven games in his previous match against Richard Gasquet, who was coming off a grass-court tournament win in Nottingham.
“In beating two such great players so convincingly, I think it definitely gives you the feeling that you’re playing very well,” Federer said. “I have the feeling I’m playing excellent. And that is for me good to know. I don’t need to fight for rhythm or fight for this is or that. It’s all here already.”
Federer considers Roddick, the player he beat in the last two finals, and Hewitt as his most realistic challengers.
Federer showed no mercy against Henman, one of his closest friends on the ATP Tour.
“It’s not a lot of fun beating a friend like this, that’s for sure,” he said.
Federer strolled to victory after saving two break points — the only ones he faced in the match — at 4-3 in the first set. He won 11 straight games from the end of the first set through 4-0 in the third. He lost only five points in the second set, broke Henman six times and had 23 winners and only eight unforced errors.
“He’s such a good front-runner,” Henman said. “He gets better and better and makes life more and more difficult. I think he’s the best player I’ve ever played against, full stop.”
As far as anyone stopping Federer, Henman said he doesn’t see anyone who can.
“If you get into baseline rallies with the way he moves and how offensive he is, that’s where he is so difficult to beat on any court, but even more difficult to beat on a grass court,” he said.

TITLE: Cleveland Errors Help Cards End Losing Streak
AUTHOR: By R.B. Fallstrom
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ST. LOUIS, Missouri — Any win is exciting for the St. Louis Cardinals right now, no matter how it falls into their lap. 
Jonny Peralta’s throwing error, one of two by the Cleveland Indians in the ninth inning, allowed the winning run to score in the Cardinals’ 5-4 victory Wednesday night that ended an eight-game losing streak. The skid was the franchise’s longest since 1988.
“After all those games, you just want to find a way to win one,” said David Eckstein, whose routine grounder ended up producing the big run. “The bottom line is ending up winning.”
Backup catcher Kelly Shoppach, who entered as part of a double switch in the eighth, dropped So Taguchi’s pop fly just in front of home plate to start the inning for a two-base error. Aaron Miles’ RBI double off Bob Wickman (1-3) with one out tied the score. Miles was on third for Eckstein’s routine, two-out grounder to shortstop, and Peralta’s throw in the dirt eluded first baseman Victor Martinez.
Peralta admitted hurrying his throw to Martinez, who moved from catcher to first in the eighth.
“I know he’s running as fast as he can,” Peralta said. “I tried to throw it as fast as I could. It had a bad hop.”
Shoppach blamed himself for getting the rally going.
“It was my ball,” he said. “I’ve made that play before. I wanted that ball in that situation.”
When the winning run scored, fans tossed hundreds of seat cushions, the giveaway for the game, onto the field.
Jason Isringhausen (2-3) gave up Aaron Boone’s go-ahead sacrifice fly in the Indians’ three-run eighth. Isringhausen, who allowed two hits and no runs in 1 2-3 innings, was one of four relievers used by the Cardinals in the eighth.
Grady Sizemore had four hits and an RBI for the Indians, who ended a string of seven straight series losses by winning the first two games. Not that it was any consolation to manager Eric Wedge.
“It was a total defensive collapse,” Wedge said. “We gave it back to them a lot easier than we took it from them. It was an embarrassing ending to what potentially could have been a real big game for us.”
Chris Carpenter left with a 3-1 lead after working seven strong innings, getting his last out after medical attention for a cramp in his hand, and Scott Rolen homered for the Cardinals. Juan Encarnacion and Yadier Molina had an RBI apiece for St. Louis, which was outscored 68-28 during the losing streak, most of the games blowouts.
Todd Hollandsworth’s shallow pop fly with the bases loaded that fell between left fielder Taguchi, inserted as a defensive substitute in that inning, and shortstop Eckstein, was the key to the Indians’ eighth. Eckstein appeared to peel away and Taguchi had his glove out but missed the ball, then recovered too late for any play on a ball ruled a hit. 
Eckstein said Taguchi called for the ball. 
“I probably could have caught it, but So called it,” Eckstein said. “It’s one of those things that nothing just seemed to go our way.”
Sizemore singled off Randy Flores to start the eighth and Ronnie Belliard followed with a double off Braden Looper when Encarnacion missed a diving attempt in right. Martinez’s infield hit, a chopper that Tyler Johnson could not glove cleanly, cut the deficit to one.
Travis Hafner, making his first pinch-hit appearance of the season, walked against Isringhausen to load the bases. The misplay on Hollandsworth’s popup, ruled a single, tied it. Boone followed with a sacrifice fly to give the Indians their first lead. 
The Cardinals scored twice in the fourth despite a baserunning gaffe by Jim Edmonds that might have prevented a bigger inning. Edmonds overran third on a wild pitch by Jake Westbrook that would have put runners on second and third with one out, and was thrown out trying to get back by Martinez, the catcher. Encarnacion and Molina took Edmonds off the hook with RBI singles for a 2-0 lead. Sizemore’s RBI single cut the deficit to one in the fifth and Rolen restored the two-run cushion for the Cardinals with his 10th homer to straightaway center in the sixth.

TITLE: Top Golfer’s Get 10 Million Reasons to Play More Often
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — The winner of the U.S. PGA Tour’s new FedEx Cup competition will receive $10 million, the largest single sum in professional sports. 
The payout is the biggest element in changes both in golf’s schedule and how the sport determines the champion of its top circuit, starting next year. It also is aimed at attracting more television viewers with a season-long “points chase,” PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem said at a news conference in New York. 
The plan also is meant to encourage golf’s top players, including Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, to play more often, Finchem said, and coincides with the start of golf’s new network television-rights deals. 
“It’s certainly going to be more exciting for everyone,’’ Woods said in a statement. ``Not just us as competitors who will be bucking heads against the best more often, but also for the fans.’’ 
Golf doesn’t have a definitive season-ending champion under its current system. In addition to the money list winner and the overall world rankings, the U.S. PGA Tour’s Player of the Year is determined in a vote among fellow competitors. Those categories will remain. 
“Unlike every other sport, we don’t have playoffs,’’ Finchem said. 
Golf’s highest single-event purse this season was $8 million at the Players Championship, which will move to May from March. Stephen Ames received $1.4 million for winning this year’s edition. 
“It’s a big gamble,’’ Billy Andrade, a four-time PGA Tour winner, said in a telephone interview, ``Success in golf has always been measured by the money list, now its points. It’s a big change and it will be interesting to see if our fans embrace it.’’ 
The FedEx Cup season will pay a total of $35 million. 
Under the new format, players will compete for points in tournaments from January through late August. The top 144 players on the points list then qualify for a three-tournament playoff series, with the top 30 players combined from those events moving on to the season-ending Tour Championship, to be moved to September, putting an end to the season two months earlier.

TITLE: Italy Soccer Trial Opens, Abruptly Adjourns
AUTHOR: By James Eve
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ROME — Italy’s biggest-ever sports trial considered match-fixing charges against four top soccer clubs and 26 officials on Thursday before a string of procedural motions forced an adjournment until next Monday.
Champions Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio, four of soccer-mad Italy’s elite teams, risk being forced out of the nation’s Serie A league and European competition if found guilty of conspiring with referees to rig matches.
Tribunal president Cesare Ruperto opened the trial with a roll call of the accused who stood up behind rows of desks as their names were read inside a spartan, low-ceilinged room in Rome’s Olympic Stadium.
But defence lawyers quickly raised a list of objections that forced Ruperto to halt the trial after less than three hours.
“We will adjourn until Monday, July 3,” Ruperto said after allowing five Serie B teams hoping to be promoted — Bologna, Brescia, Lecce, Messina and Treviso — to take part in the proceedings and giving them until Monday to prepare their cases.
The Italian Football Federation (FIGC) has promised to finish the trial by July 9, the day of the World Cup final.
However, Thursday’s brief proceedings raised questions about whether the tribunal will meet the federation’s timetable.
Among the accused packed into the room were former FIGC president Franco Carraro, AC Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani and referee Massimo De Santis, who was barred from the World Cup after the “Clean Feet” scandal erupted in May.
Former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi, whose tapped phone calls with officials and referee designators triggered the scandal, was not present. He has said he does not need to answer to the tribunal because he has quit Juventus.
The accused are charged with sporting fraud and unfair conduct, which could lead to the teams being relegated and the individuals being either suspended or banned from football.
Juventus runs the greatest risk of being demoted, and the club appeared resigned to playing a year outside Serie A.
“We have worked to get things back to normal and prepare a team that in two years will return to being a winning squad,” Juventus CEO Carlo Sant’Albano said in a newspaper interview.
At a meeting of Juventus shareholders in Turin which elected a new board, one investor after another stood up and accused the outgoing board of turning a blind eye to dealings they said had tarnished the club’s history of 29 Serie A championships.
“If I think of the shares I bought and the season ticket that I had, I involuntarily participated in and financed ‘Moggiopoli,’” one shareholder said, referring to the widely used nickname for the scandal.
Juventus shares have lost half their value since the scandal erupted in early May, and were down 0.67 percent at 1.33 euros at 1134 GMT.
The trial will run for the duration of the World Cup in Germany, where 13 players from the four accused clubs play for Italy, who face Ukraine on Friday in the quarter-finals.
FIGC has said any appeals will be heard by July 20, giving it time before a July 27 deadline to submit the names of teams for next season’s Champions League and UEFA Cup competitions.
In a reminder that it is a sports tribunal, the judges wore suits instead of the robes that are worn in criminal trials. But prosecutors in four cities have launched criminal probes.

(Additional reporting by Riccardo Fabiani in Rome, Sophie Hardach in Turin)

TITLE: Victorious Veterans Amble on Agelessly
AUTHOR: By Raf Casert
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAMBURG, Germany — Anyone battling a mid-life crisis only needs to watch the World Cup. Plenty of people have been written off as washed up, only to play as if still in their prime. Zidane, Figo, Beckham — the list goes on. At the same time, many of those so-called prodigies are already watching the games on television. 
Ronaldo was not only supposed to be too old and creaky at 29, even Brazil’s president openly worried the once “Phenomenal One” was too fat and flabby for World Cup duty. Yet here the Real Madrid striker is, leading the charge of those over-the-hill veterans. Turns out they are suddenly at the top of their game, looking down on all those young challengers.
Ronaldo scored three goals in his last two matches to become the World Cup’s most prolific striker with 15 goals in three World Cups.
“He is again on top of every player in the world,” Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said.
Zinedine Zidane is close behind. The 34 year old is fighting off retirement with every game he plays for France, vowing to end his competitive career after the World Cup. True soccer fans can only hope he reaches the final so his skills will be on display for three more games.
Zidane already retired from national team competition once, but decided to give it a final go when it was evident his country was struggling without him in qualifying. He didn’t have a good first round, and soon enough the criticism about age and immobility popped up. Yet he silenced everybody by setting up the decider, then scoring a spectacular goal to seal a 3-1 win over Spain.
He will now face Ronaldo and Brazil in the quarters.
“You know what Zizou’s influence can be. We’re happy for him that he’s 34 and in the 90th minute he still had the legs to score,” coach Raymond Domenech said.
More impressive is that Ronaldo and Zidane are forwards, a position that depends on leg speed and the sudden burst of energy — two qualities that are all too often the first casualties of decline. On top of that, the physical quality and endurance of defenders has taken a major leap forward over the past decade, forcing them to stay even with, or outpace, their pursuers.
Even if the speed is no longer there, other qualities can still prevail. David Beckham was knocked as too old, too slow. At 31, he may be a reduced force, but he is still the best at free kicks.
When his younger teammates wilted in the afternoon heat against a mediocre Ecuador team, England once again turned to Beckham. With a masterful free kick, he put England in the quarterfinals.
“He’d been getting hammered in the papers and in the media by various different people, and he scores a goal. That’s his way of answering back,” defender Rio Ferdinand said.
Added midfielder Steven Gerrard, “The criticism he got before the game helped us because he went out with a point to prove.”
Now Beckham will face another of the game’s senior citizens when England plays Portugal on Saturday.
At 33, Luis Figo’s lightning speed has dulled. Some critics claimed they no longer knew if they saw him live on television or in slo-mo. But Portugal wouldn’t be making its first appearance in the quarterfinals since 1966 if not for his dazzling play against the Netherlands.

TITLE: Blatter Shares Blame For Card Frenzy
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Soccer governing body FIFA shares the blame with referees for the record number of red and yellow cards that are depriving teams of players at the 2006 World Cup, coaches and former players said. 
This week’s quarterfinals will be without four suspended players. Another 19 — among them France’s Zinedine Zidane and Brazil’s Adriano — are carrying a yellow card. A mistimed challenge, a time-wasting offense or an over-zealous official may earn them another card and a ban for the semifinal. 
“The standard of refereeing in this World Cup has been very poor and obviously FIFA is to blame,” former Paraguay goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert said in an interview. “It’s a shame because big players could miss a final because of a refereeing error.” 
Zurich-based FIFA, which runs the World Cup, told referees to target eight offenses including diving, elbowing and shirt- pulling. The guidelines, handed out after FIFA President Sepp Blatter called 2002 referees “a disaster,’’ prompted officials to resort to cards without using their discretion, coaches say. 
“Referees have to have a feeling for the game,” said Swedish coach Lars Lagerback after his side’s 2-0 defeat to Germany, in which defender Teddy Lucic got a second yellow card for a shove on Miroslav Klose. “Sometimes they want to show yellow cards too much.” 
The crackdown has yielded an average of 4.83 yellows a game — compared with 4.25 in 2002. In the 17 previous World Cups, three players were ejected in the same game on three occasions. It’s already happened three times in Germany. 
FIFA’s “mandate to have to show yellow cards is crazy,” U.S. coach Bruce Arena told reporters after his team exited in the first round. “It’s going way overboard.” 
Referees are giving out so many cards, they’re losing count. English referee Graham Poll showed Croatia’s Josip Simunic a second yellow and failed to follow the rules and give him a red card. Poll finally brandished a red after the third yellow following the final whistle. 
Russian official Valentin Ivanov set a record by dismissing four players and giving 16 yellow cards in Portugal’s 1-0 win over the Netherlands. Portugal’s Costinha and Deco were ejected, ruling them out of the quarterfinals. Costinha’s second yellow was for deliberate handball, while Deco was penalized for keeping the ball from Dutch players when they won a free kick. 
Blatter said Ivanov “was not at the same level of the players” and deserved a yellow card himself. He and Poll were both released from their World Cup duties Wednesday. 
“FIFA said it expected referees to get tough on players who used foul tactics, dirty play and their elbows,” Valentin Senior, the referee’s father who played for the Soviet Union at two World Cups, told the Guardian. “Valentin just tried to follow his orders. What else do they expect?” 
Blatter told the tournament’s official Web site yesterday that referees aren’t adhering to guidelines “consistently” and, if anything, are missing offenses. 
“And then there are the tackles from behind I’ve seen go unpunished and the violent conduct that has escaped sanction,” Blatter said.

TITLE: ‘Slow and Predictable’ England Need New Tactics
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: England must quicken its pace of play and reduce its reliance on long passes to beat Portugal and advance to the semifinals for a third time, former soccer World Cup players said. 
The teams meet in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, in two days in a repeat of the 2004 European Championship quarterfinal, when Portugal won on penalties  after a 2-2 draw. The Portuguese also beat England 3-2 at Euro 2000. 
England, the 1966 champion, last reached the final four of the World Cup in 1990 and may extend that run unless players stop ceding possession and inject more pace into their play, 1990 England midfielder Trevor Steven said. 
“Unquestionably the teams playing a quicker, shorter game will create more chances,’’ Steven said in an interview in Hanover. “You can only get away with it so far. England are slow and predictable and the quality is poor.’’ 
Coach Sven-Goran Eriksson agrees that his players have underperformed and says the team “can do better and play better.’’ Winning is more crucial than the style of play, he said at a news conference Wednesday. 
“You always like to play good football but the most important thing is to win or you are on the first plane home,’’ Eriksson said. “You haven’t seen the best of us yet. Hopefully it will come on Saturday.’’ 
The best won’t come unless Eriksson’s players work harder to keep possession, pass swiftly and rely less on David Beckham’s crosses, former Paraguay goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert said. 
England needed an own goal to beat Paraguay 1-0 and two goals in the final seven minutes to down Trinidad & Tobago. After a 2-2 draw with Sweden, England defeated Ecuador on a Beckham free kick after a display that former England coach Graham Taylor termed “the most disappointing so far.’’. 
“England need to be more aggressive and faster,’’ Chilavert said. “But that’s difficult because everything has to go through Beckham’s feet so he can deliver crosses.’’ 
Portugal beat the Netherlands, a two-time finalist, in the last round and has built four straight wins around passing moves prompted by playmaker Deco and the pace and skill of wingers Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Figo. 
England won’t have to cope with the Brazil-born Deco because he and Costinha will be suspended after getting red cards against the Dutch. Ronaldo, who plays for Manchester United, may also miss out because of a thigh injury. 
“England are a very strong team but they have not been showing what they can do with the good players they have in the side,’’ Deco told reporters. 
Argentina’s 6-0 win against Serbia & Montenegro included a goal after 24 straight passes. England had just four shots on goal against Ecuador because of the midfield’s failure to support striker Wayne Rooney, according to Alvin Corneal, a former Trinidad coach who analyzes games for FIFA. 
“England haven’t looked like a contender as lots of people said they were,’’ Chilavert added. “It’s a predictable team that could lose to anyone from now on.’’