SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times DATE: Issue #1192 (58), Friday, August 4, 2006 ************************************************************************** TITLE: Yanukovich Named PM In Ukraine AUTHOR: By Olena Horodetska PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: KIEV — Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovich, humiliated in the 2004 “Orange Revolution,” was set to be voted in as prime minister on Thursday after signing a commitment not to reverse the country’s pro-Western policies. President Viktor Yushchenko, architect of the revolution that overturned the old order in Ukraine, reluctantly chose “co-habitation” with the Moscow-leaning Yanukovich in the early hours of Thursday to end four months of political deadlock. Parliament was expected later in the day to approve Yanukovich’s nomination and cement a “grand coalition” uniting the president’s Our Ukraine Party with Yanukovich’s Regions group and smaller allies. Before that, Yanukovich and Yushchenko formally signed a declaration of principles on the formation of a coalition government which the Ukrainian president said would safeguard the ideals of the revolution. But a leading figure in the revolution said the agreement letting Yanukovich head the government betrayed those ideals. “I call this document a political capitulation of the Orange camp,” said Yulia Tymoshenko, an estranged ally of the president who is now in opposition. The document included a commitment to continue Ukraine’s drive toward NATO and EU membership and ensure the central bank and courts are independent from political interference. “With this document, Ukraine’s politicians are confirming that the current foreign and domestic policies are irreversible,” Yushchenko said at the start of a signing ceremony in the presidential administration. The new cabinet will be dominated by Yanukovich’s supporters but with ministerial posts for the Yushchenko camp in proportion to the number of seats it controls in parliament, said Yanukovich aide Taras Chornovil. “Our Ukraine will be offered some fairly key posts ... That issue has already been agreed,” he said. Yanukovich, who favors closer ties with traditional ally Russia, was expected to announce his cabinet on Friday. His Regions party has 186 seats in the 450-seat parliament. Our Ukraine has 86. The Communists and Socialists — Yanukovich allies — have 51 seats between them. Markets will hope for pragmatic economic policies under Yanukovich, who served as prime minister before the 2004 revolution. Mykola Azarov, a technocrat who oversaw economic and financial policy before 2004, could return to government. Yushchenko’s only other alternative to naming Yanukovich had been to dissolve parliament, prolong the crisis and risk new elections that could have destroyed him politically. See related story, page 2. TITLE: Hermitage Recovers Stolen Icon AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: One of the most valuable works of art from the haul the the State Hermitage Museum announced Tuesday had been stolen has turned up in a garbage can following what the local police named “an anonimous call.” It has been less than a week since Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of museum called a news conference to acknowledge the theft of 221 precious items from the collection’s Russian Art Department. The police received the call around midday on Thursday, and the item, an icon worth $200,000, was found in a garbage can outside 21, Ulitsa Ryleyeva, the police press service reported. Piotrovsky said Tuesday that the recently discovered theft of items, worth up to $5 million from the museum, was “a stab in the back.” “I would describe this situation as a stab in the back of the entire museum community and the Hermitage in particular, as we try to protect our autonomy and independence,” Piotrovsky said. Piotrovsky said the theft was discovered during an inventory of the museum’s Russian art department. The items were not insured, Piotrovsky said. Only exhibited art works are insured, he explained. The stolen items were housed in a storage facility. The stolen items include a selection of medieval and 19th-century Russian jewelry, silverware and enameled objects. A detailed list of the items was not available Tuesday, but museum officials promised to release the list in the near future. Piotrovsky also confirmed that members of the museum’s staff were suspected of involvement in the theft. “Regrettably, it is already clear to me that the criminals apparently used museum staff to steal the precious objects. We cannot yet determine the extent of the employees’ involvement, however,” Piotrovsky said. “The presumption of innocence and the atmosphere of absolute trust in curators that has reigned in the museum in the past will have to change,” Piotrovsky said. “The new economic reality has affected how people think, and money has begun to play a greater role.” Anatoly Vilkov, deputy head of the Russian Culture Preservation Board, told Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper that while the percentage of solved art thefts has doubled over the past years, the numbers of latent thefts, committed by the museum staff has been steadily growing, too. Only three curators had official access to the storage facility where the stolen items were kept, Piotrovsky said. The curator who oversaw most of the missing items died of a heart attack on the job shortly after the inspection began last October, said Irina Antonova, director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Antonova described the theft as a “tragedy for the country,” and cautioned against accusing Hermitage employees of complicity until all of the evidence was in. The Hermitage has released no information about the three curators who had official access to the storage facility. Police have opened a criminal investigation into the theft and are working to establish a time frame for the theft and a list of potential suspects. “At the moment, we are looking at a time frame that covers the last 30 years,” a police spokeswoman said. A list of the missing items with descriptions and photographs, where available, will be sent to Interpol as soon as possible, said Alexander Khozhainov, head of security at the Hermitage. Piotrovsky said most of the items were likely to have been stolen during the past few years. “A number of the items have been inspected, exhibited or photographed for albums in recent years,” he said. “Only a few of them have not been heard of for a long time. “Usually, if an item is missing, we eventually find it in another department,” Piotrovsky said. “That is why the inspection was extended. But unfortunately, it became clear that the artworks in question were no longer in the museum.” The inspection was completed on July 23. The Hermitage houses more than 3 million works of art. The collection is regularly inventoried, but because of its enormous size, many years can pass between inspections of any given department. The museum has only begun to build an electronic catalog of its holdings, and isotope identifiers, used by many Western museums, have only recently been introduced in the Hermitage. Not all of the missing items have photographs or electronic images of them available. The Hermitage spends 20 million rubles ($746,000) on security each year. No additional security measures for personnel will be introduced at the museum, but the system of records and controls will be overhauled, museum officials said. TITLE: Bikini-Clad Women Protest ‘Sadistic’ Treatment of Chickens AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: Two girls dressed in yellow bikinis took to the streets on Thursday to protest against what they call the ferocious and sadistic treatment of chickens by the international fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC. Waving people off the KFC outlet near 39 Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, the activists from the U.S.-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Russia’s Alliance For the Protection of Animals’ Rights, called for the locals to boycott the chain. “If your heart has not yet turned into a stone, you will surely find another place to eat,” read the leaflets distributed by the entrance to KFC. One of the bikini-dressed girls, Jodi Ruckley, a British activist who traveled to Russia to participate in the protests, said she and her fellow campaigners from PETA, have been traveling around the world for the past two years campaigning against the KFC. PETA’s campaigns have been supported by the Dalai Lama, Paul McCartney and Pamela Anderson. “KFC are a terrible company, responsible for over eight hundred million chickens dying every year,” she said. PETA activists have done investigations of KFC technologies all over the world, including in the U.S. and the U.K., Australia and France. “It turns out the same abuse over and over: hundreds of chickens cramped in large cages, where they are living in their own feaces; the only time when they see the light of day is when they are grabbed and cages are put in a transport truck,” Ruckley said. “The chickens have their throats cut and thrown into tanks of boiling water when they are still fully conscious.” The semi-naked women were clearly cold and had goose pimples but they exuded enthusiasm and bravado, shouting plucky, no-nonsense slogans “Boycott KFC” and “KFC Tortures Chicks.” The signs held by the Russian environmentalists contained similar rhethoric: “The colonel’s secret recipe: Live Scalding, Painful Debeaking and Crippled Chickens,” reads one of the posters. PETA ran similar campaigns against McDonalds and Burger King in 2000, and both companies have since agreed to improve animal welfare standards, Ruckley said. “Yes, I am cold in the bikini,” Ruckley admitted, flinching her shoulders in the chilly wind. “But unfortunately, a lot of the time people do not want to hear about animal cruelty because it can be really difficult to listen to. Doing little gimmicks and fun things attracts a lot of attention.” “Our cold is nothing compared to the sufferings of the chicken,” agreed fellow bikini-clad protester, Yevgenia Andreyeva, a recent graduate of the law faculty of the St. Petersburg State University. “I understand that some people would find our street action shocking but this stripping seems the best way to get people to listen.” The protest has been held with the permission of the Petrograd district administration. Noone from KFC or McDonald’s next door made any attempt to intervene or disrupt the protest. Galina Petrovna, a pensioner, who passed by the eye-catching protest, did not find the sight indecent. “Yes, I quite agree with what they say, and the girls look most adorable,” she nodded. “I would even encourage my grand-daugher to join in! But to be realistic, you cannot expect neither people to stop eating fast food, nor this giant industry to turn more human.” Clients at KFC and McDonald’s seemed undisturbed by the event. Nadya, a server at McDonald’s, said she was “amused” by the protesters. “I realize that they are trying to scare our customers away but the girls are kind of fun, jolly and harmless really,” she said, adding that she doesn’t eat at McDonald’s in any case. A similar action was held in Moscow earlier this week, with two female bikini-clad activists locking themselves in a cage across the street from a Rostik’s-KFC restaurant on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad. KFC’s spokeswoman Laurie Schalow denied the allegations of cruelty. “KFC is committed to the well-being and humane treatment of chickens,” she said in an email comment. Links: www.PETA.org.uk, www.AnimalRights.ru, www.kfc.com TITLE: Two Viktors Form Alliance AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: KIEV — Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko and his rival Viktor Yanukovich have almost nothing in common apart from their first name, but fate keeps throwing them together. Yushchenko reluctantly nominated Yanukovich as prime minister on Thursday, setting up an unlikely alliance between the two men whose rivalry has become the defining theme in Ukraine’s stormy political scene. The two Viktors have become a metaphor for the divisions in Ukraine itself: between the Ukrainian-speaking west that looks towards Europe, and the Russian-speaking east that links its destiny with Russia. They were on opposite sides of the barricades in the “Orange Revolution” two years ago. Then, Yanukovich was declared winner in a presidential election and Yushchenko mobilised thousands of protesters to have the result declared void. Yanukovich was humiliated but he staged a comeback. His party’s strong showing in a March parliamentary vote gave Yushchenko little choice but to work with him in running their ex-Soviet republic of 47 million people. Yushchenko is a smooth former central banker with an American wife who is most comfortable speaking Ukrainian and wants to take his country into NATO and — eventually — the European Union. Yanukovich, 56, is a rough-hewn man from the Donetsk region, a coal mining centre in the east and wants to maintain historical ties with Russia. Yanukovich, who stumbles when speaking Ukrainian, wants stronger rights for regions, especially those where Russian-speaking population forms a majority. The 51-year-old Yushchenko has a disfigured face: the result of poisoning just before the “Orange Revolution” that he says was carried out by his opponents. TITLE: Reality Show Puts Teens Into TV ‘English-Land’ AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: As English-Land, a television reality show in which teenagers must use English to compete for a prize, prepares to air, its creators say they want to shift viewers from voyeurism — the concept used in the majority of such programs — to learning and self-improvement. “The need emerged to think up something that would serve as a counter to Dom 2 (House 2) [a show in which contestants have to find partners and pair off to win a house] and other reality shows currently popular on Russian TV,” Alexei Lvov, England-Land’s creative producer said Wednesday. “Don’t be put off by the term ‘reality show.’ We rise in revolt against numerous reality shows that pester us on our screens and we are absolutely not interested in dirty laundry,” the project’s head Nikolai Desyatskov said at a press conference Thursday. The show will feature four teams of 13 to 15 year olds, living in an all-English speaking holiday camp on the Gulf of Finland. The producers said the show will be broadcast on consecutive Sundays on the TV3 television channel beginning Aug. 13. The aim of the show is not only to improve teens’ knowledge of English but also to help them boost their creativity, Desyatskov said. The contestants will have to prepare stage performances in the musical, cinematic, dramatic genres and to produce a final show in order to win the big prize — a trip to England. English, understandably, is to be the main language of the show but it will also be accompanied by Russian language subtitles and will be partly dubbed in Russian so as to attract wider audiences, the organizers said. Andrei Grigoriyev-Apolonov, a member of the prominent Russian boysband Ivanushki-International will be the show’s presenter. Grigoriev-Apolonov said he already had an experience in working for children’s shows as he hosted Polundra (“Batten Down the Hatches”), a show produced by STS television, and will be happy to perform in such a role again, he said. Asked whether he knows English himself the singer said he is able to converse at the “restaurant-and-shops level,” but his English is as not as good as it should be “to express his feelings.” “I will be delighted to dip into English together with the guys for a month,” he said speaking at the press conference Thursday. English is the most popular foreign language taught in schools in St. Petersburg, but Russian teenagers still lag behind their European counterparts in the knowledge of English. Yulia Fyodorova, program director of Department of Foreign Languages at Lingua Consult language center thinks the part of the problem is the low quality of English teaching in St. Petersburg schools. According to Fyodorova, English is taught in up to 75 percent of the city’s secondary schools, but “unfortunately, in many schools it is not taught very well,” and therefore the general level of English of local teenagers is not very high. “Sometimes the books are too old-fashioned, sometimes the teenagers are only taught to translate texts from one language to the other or to do numerous grammar drills. “Sometimes there are no good professional teachers who speak the modern language and are familiar with contemporary teaching methods,” she said in an emailed statement Thursday. English-Land’s co-creator, William Hackett-Jones, thinks the ability of local teens to speak English has significantly improved in the last five years but it is still takes a long time before they start speaking English well. “When I first came here five years ago, I was teaching kids and they couldn’t say anything, it was a real nightmare,” Hackett-Jones, who is also the chief editor of “Cool English,” a St. Petersburg magazine for learners of English. “Nowadays the kids are already at a certain level by the age of 13-14 and they already understand things and they want to learn,” he said. “They, however, still need some kind of stimulation to know why they should be learning English, because for lots of them it is highly unreal that they’ll ever go to Britain or America,” he said. A show in which “people [are] learning English], enjoying it, using it” will give them such stimuli, he said. “The only thing lacking in many cases is communication or speaking practice. And this project gives them what they need — a chance not to learn English as such, but to speak English, “ Fyodorova of Lingua Consult added. TITLE: Six Hurt on Paratroopers’ Day PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times TEXT: MOSCOW — At least six people were hospitalized in Moscow and the Moscow region during raucous celebrations of the Paratroopers Day holiday Wednesday. Thousands of former paratroopers took to the streets, splashed in the fountains and showed off their combat skills in brawls with one another and unfortunate melon vendors. The annual holiday honoring the paratroopers is regularly disparaged by violence as thousands of members of the elite fighting force flood the streets and parks in striped T-shirts and blue berets, drinking and carousing. Colonel General Alexander Kolmakov, head of the airborne troops, called on paratroopers to celebrate in a civilized fashion, RIA-Novosti reported. “Our people sincerely love the airborne units, who more than once have saved the country from internecine conflicts,” Kolmakov said. “I would not want this day to be marred by rowdy and indecent behavior.” In the Moscow region town of Kryukovo, four people were hospitalized with injuries sustained in a brawl involving a group of drunken airborne veterans and local market vendors, RIA-Novosti reported, citing police. Moscow police reported that two veterans were injured in a dust-up in Gorky Park, where a crowd of more than 800 had gathered. Several more received medical attention on the scene. Among them was a man who injured himself by trying to break a bottle on his head. Some 3,000 policemen and OMON special forces troops were deployed to maintain order in the capital, Interfax reported. The police presence was most prominent in Gorky Park, Poklonnaya Gora and the All-Russia Exhibition Center. TITLE: Three Men Sentenced To Death PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: BISHKEK — A court in Kyrgyzstan on Thursday sentenced to death three men charged with killing a member of the Central Asian state’s parliament. The penalty will not be implemented because Kyrgyzstan has a moratorium on executions. Instead, the men — Yevgeny Golovin, Azamat Zakirov and Rustam Abdulin — will be jailed on death row. Parliament member Tynychbek Akmatbayev was killed in October 2005 when inmates at a tuberculosis hospital inside a prison took him and his entourage hostage. The murder highlighted the impoverished country’s volatility after violent protests toppled veteran leader Askar Akayev earlier that year. The court also sentenced 35 people to jail terms in connection with the killing. One man got a suspended sentence. Despite the moratorium on executions, introduced in 1998, Kyrgyz courts continue to hand down death sentences, leaving many people with indefinite stretches on death row in Soviet-era prisons where disease and drug abuse are rife. In July, two men charged with killing another member of parliament, Bayaman Erkinbayev, were also sentenced to death. TITLE: Human Flesh Found in Toilet AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: MOSCOW — When a plumber responded to complaints about clogged pipes in an apartment building in northern Moscow last week, he made a gruesome discovery: chunks of human flesh. The chunks had been flushed down a toilet in an attempt to dispose of evidence in the brutal murder of 69-year-old filmmaker Yevgeny Zorin, police spokesman Viktor Maximov said Tuesday. “The plumber went to the police, and our guys managed to pick up the suspect rather quickly,” Maximov said. Police arrested the 29-year-old suspect about an hour later. At the time of the arrest, the suspect was carrying a plastic bag containing Zorin’s severed head, Maximov said. The suspect killed Zorin in unclear circumstances and chopped up the body to dispose of the evidence, apparently, flushing some of the remains down the toilet, Maximov said. “The suspect said Zorin had made unwanted sexual advances, and that’s why he killed him,” Maximov said. “But we only have his word. Hard to say if it’s true.” City Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko confirmed Tuesday that the suspect, whom she declined to identify by name, was detained Saturday for 10 days, but said he had not yet been charged in the murder investigation. Zorin began his career in the mid-1960s traveling around the Soviet Union and making films about village life for Soviet television, said his friend and fellow director, Vladimir Berman. Zorin later moved on to filming nature documentaries. “He had a great eye and was very talented,” Berman said Tuesday. Zorin fell on hard times during and after perestroika, however. “Studios began shutting down, and he lost his job,” Berman said. Berman said Zorin had long dreamed of making a documentary about Vasily Koren, a 17th-century wood-engraver whose works focused on religious themes. TITLE: Ford to Invest $250M More in Plant PUBLISHER: Bloomberg TEXT: U.S. auto giant Ford will invest $250 million to more than double output and assemble additional models at its St. Petersburg factory, where sales growth is outpacing other markets in Europe. The commitment is part of an agreement Ford signed with the Economic Development and Trade Ministry on Monday that upgrades Ford’s legal status. Forty percent of the components it uses by value are now locally made, allowing it to avoid customs duties, the ministry said on its web site. The investment more than doubles the $230 million Ford has spent on its plant near St. Petersburg since 2001 and will allow the company to boost output of its compact Focus sedan to 100,000 units per year, from 60,000 this year. Ford will also begin assembling the mid-size Mondeo sedan and Maverick sports-utility vehicle, with production targets of 30,000 and 20,000 per year, respectively. TITLE: Osborne Says Yukos Could Still Survive, If State Allows AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: MOSCOW — Yukos could still survive if the state allows it to, although the chances of that happening are “pretty close to zero,” Tim Osborne, director of Yukos majority shareholder GML said Wednesday. Osborne said GML, formerly Group Menatep, would support Yukos’ attempts to appeal the Moscow Arbitration Court’s decision Tuesday to liquidate the company. He expressed doubts that the remaining Yukos assets would be sold off at a fair price. The court declared Yukos bankrupt and ordered its assets auctioned off within a year to pay off more than $18 billion in taxes and corporate debt. Yukos has one month to appeal the ruling, but its previous lack of success in Russian courts suggests that its chances are slim. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that, if the sale was conducted fairly in a world where oil is $70 plus per barrel, the proceeds would far exceed the liabilities as so far identified,” Osborne said in a conference call Wednesday. Court-appointed liquidator Eduard Rebgun assessed Yukos assets at just under $18 billion, while lawyers for Yukos argued the company was worth at least twice as much. Yukos, while a shadow of its former self, still pumps some 600,000 barrels of crude per day and has substantial refining capacity and other assets. State-controlled energy firms Gazprom and Rosneft are believed to be the likely buyers of Yukos’ remaining assets. GML is trying to recover some $650 million plus interest as part of a loan to Yukos, but has been excluded from the creditors’ list in Russia. TITLE: Transneft Says Leak Won’t Dent Supplies AUTHOR: By Dmitry Zhdannikov PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: MOSCOW — Oil pipeline monopoly Transneft moved to calm Western customers Wednesday by saying a weekend leak on a spur off its major export route, feeding Lithuania, would not affect their supplies. But it did not say when Lithuania would get crude again, feeding speculation that it may be paying the price for antagonizing Moscow in a wrangle over ownership of the Maziekiu oil refinery. “The accident will not affect crude exports as the company has taken all necessary steps to maintain throughput,” Transneft said in its first comment about the leak, which halted some 250,000 barrels per day (bpd) of supplies to Lithuania from Saturday. Oil traders said Tuesday that Transneft had demanded they divert volumes from Lithuania to the Black Sea in August. Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the environmental agency at the Natural Resources Ministry, added to the worries Wednesday as he said it might take one year to repair the pipeline. Transneft “will have to fully shut down one line and lay a new pipe. Then a second pipe will be shut down, too,” he told Ekho Moskvy radio. Transneft declined to comment on Mitvol’s remarks. One of the two medium-sized Lithuanian spurs of the giant Druzhba -1 oil pipeline to Europe leaked over the weekend, causing a jump in oil prices amid confusion over whether the damage affected only the spur or the entire Druzhba network. On Wednesday, a spokesman at Lithuania’s Mazeikiu Nafta, which controls the Mazeikiu refinery and the export terminal at Butinge, said oil was still not flowing and he did not know when supplies might resume. He added that Mazeikiu had enough crude to maintain refining operations for six or seven days. Russian news agencies quoted unnamed port agents at Butinge as saying they had been told they would get no crude in August. The spur where the leak occurred supplies around 250,000 bpd out of the total 1.2 million bpd capacity of Druzhba’s northern section, with the rest going to Poland and Germany. Mazeikiu was bought in May by Poland’s PKN Orlen from stricken oil firm Yukos. Market players have said the Kremlin may want to punish Lithuania by cutting its oil supplies as it had hoped the Mazeikiu refinery would be bought by state-controlled Rosneft or Gazprom. The Kremlin used similar tactics several years ago when it completely stopped crude oil supplies to the Latvian port of Ventspils after saying that Riga had mistreated its Russian-speaking minority. Supplies to Ventspils have never been resumed. “What is happening with the pipeline is certainly worrisome. We think it is an accident. Information on the consequences of the leak seem contradictory,” said a source close to PKN. He said Mazeikiu would be under the full control of PKN no earlier than January 2007 due to procedural issues. PKN has said it had agreed with several firms on crude supplies but the source said their names would not be disclosed before 2007. Mazeikiu has been receiving about 120,000 barrels of piped crude per day, mainly from Rosneft, TNK-BP and LUKoil. Butinge was exporting around the same volume of pipeline crude mainly from Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Tatneft. In July, the Mazeikiu refinery started importing crude by sea via Butinge, buying one 100,000 ton-cargo of Urals crude from TNK-BP. Mazeikiu has said it will buy three more cargoes in August, while in September it will put Butinge on planned maintenance for about 12 to 15 days. TITLE: Management Companies Eye Better Class of Home AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: St. Petersburg’s housing committee has said that within four months all residential buildings not yet receiving the services of a management company would be offered to such firms at auction. Tenders for a total of 60 million square meters of residential area will be put on offer from September through November, Regnum reported Monday. Only 25 percent of houses in the city are currently serviced by management companies. “Only two out of the eight private management firms that won tenders for housing services last year, have failed to invest and carry out all necessary works,” Regnum quoted Yunis Lukmanov, chairman of the housing committee, as saying. Companies that fail to carry out the specified works will be excluded from the upcoming tenders, Lukmanov said. Despite the large size of the areas destined for auction, only a few located within certain districts will make attractive propositions for the management companies. “Not all citizens are ready and able to pay for housing services and maintenance. In the Komendantsky Aerodrome area, for example, you can get into trouble just installing a new front door,” said Igor Gorsky, director for development at Becar. “People living in ‘comfort-class’ and other improved types of home understand what they are paying for. All the others regard management and service companies as blackmailers,” he said. Places where overdue bills are the norm rather than the exception, may be limited in the opportunities they provide, Gorsky suggested. He indicated Primorsky district, Ozerki, Prosveschenia and Udelnaya metro stations as the areas management companies would compete for. “Some middle-class parts of the Vyborgsky and Petrogradsky districts will be most in demand. Avtovo and Prospect Bolshevikov are historically inhabited by people of a relatively high income, as are some parts of Vasilievsky island,” Gorsky said. Yevgeny Galeyev, director for development at the Central Real Estate Agency, indicated newly built areas of the Primorsky and Vyborgsky districts as most the attractive, because engineering and communal infrastructure in these buildings is in good condition. “Houses built 10 years or 15 years ago could also be a good option, since their networks are still viable. Generally speaking, any house that does not require a large outlay on repairs and reconstruction is attractive,” he said. Buildings in the city center that have not undergone complete overhauls, and much of the Admiralteisky district, are in the worst condition, Galeyev said. State-owned Zhilkomservices are expected to win a significant part of the tenders. “We might want to criticize Zhilkomservices, but only such companies, or very large private firms, are fit to manage the more ‘troublesome’ houses,” said Genrikh Ken, press attache to the Piter Dussmann company, which serves houses in the Admiralteisky district. Large private management companies do not number that many, Ken said, and most firms are interested in houses built within the last 10 years to 15 years. The mere winning of a tender does not necessarily mean the company will continue to service particular houses in the future, Ken said. “As the tenders assume the creation of associations of property owners in the serviced buildings, it would be interesting to see how Zhilkomservices and private companies will handle this problem. People will be in favor of such associations only if they’re going to get high-quality services,” Ken said. There has been a gradual increase in the prices of housing services, moving towards an adequate level defined by the market. Since Aug. 1 the average bill for housing services increased by 7.5 percent, prices for communal services — by 25 percent. Ken saw the price increase as a positive step. “The problem is that even after this increase in prices people will not cover 100 percent of property maintenance costs. Most of them are not ready to spend their money on general building works,” he said. “Only in two or three years time may it be possible to speak of 100 percent payments for housing services in St. Petersburg,” Interfax cited Lukmanov as saying. TITLE: IN BRIEF TEXT: Northwest premiums ST. PETERSBURG (SPB) —The Northwest filial of Ingosstrakh increased its insurance premiums by 55 percent up to 327.5 million rubles ($12.2 million) in the first half of 2006, RBC reported Tuesday. Personal insurance increased by 31 percent, property insurance — by 50 percent, liability insurance — by 134 percent. At the same time insurance payments accounted for 116.7 million rubles ($4.35 million). Shipyard Revenue ST. PETERSBURG (SPB) — Severnaya Verf shipyards reported a revenue of $471 million for 2005, according to International Financial Reporting Standards, RBC reported Tuesday. Severnaya Verf is the first company in the Russian shipbuilding industry to introduce IFRS reports. This year the company expects to increase revenue and operational profit. Fueling Talk ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Gazprom and Surgutneftegaz may build a terminal near St. Petersburg to store and distribute oil products, Interfax reported, citing Yuri Antonov, head of the St. Petersburg Fuel Co., which proposed the project. The complex would be built on a 700-hectare site near Lake Vysokinskoye owned by St. Petersburg Fuel, known as PTK, the news service said Thursday. Antonov has already met with Alexander Ryazanov, head of Gazprom’s oil unit, and Surgut Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Bogdanov about the proposal, Interfax said. The lakefront plot houses a research center with the kind of infrastructure an oil terminal would require, the news service said. Retailer Bonds ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Karusel Finance, operator of the St. Petersburg-based retail chain, issued bonds of 3 billion rubles ($112 million) total cost, Interfax reported Wednesday. The bonds will be in circulation for seven years. Earlier the company announced it would invest $300 million into development annually. At present the company operates seven stores. TITLE: Kazakh Financial Police Squeeze Out Winemaker AUTHOR: By Michael Steen PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Yury Wegelin, a German citizen who owns and runs a successful wine and juice company in Kazakhstan, spent five months in jail last year, three of them in solitary confinement in a small, windowless cell. Neither he nor Gold Product, the company he founded in 1997, has been found guilty of any wrongdoing, but the firm has faced repeated audits and is fighting two cases in the courts. Wegelin should be a mascot for economic reform in Kazakhstan, an ex-Soviet state with booming oil production that says it wants to root out corruption and diversify from oil and gas by letting small and medium businesses flourish. Instead, he says, he has spent nearly two years battling legal attacks from the Agency for Fighting Economic Crimes and Corruption — also known as the financial police — acting, he believes, on the orders of corrupt senior officials. The main details of Wegelin’s case, including the fact that he was arrested in a hospital, were confirmed by an independent witness who did not wish to be identified. Wegelin believes his success is the root cause of his woes. “The smaller a company is, the fewer problems it has,” he said. “Success is dangerous in Kazakhstan.” The 45-year-old businessman said his troubles started in 2004, when he got several phone calls telling him to give up his company. He did not want to name those who made the calls. “A week later we had the first audit,” he said in his office in a rundown industrial estate in Almaty. He was jailed in April after the financial police said Gold Product’s wine, which has won several awards in Kazakhstan and abroad, failed to meet health and safety standards. “I was in a hospital here in Almaty due to the stress involved in this case — I have high blood pressure and heart problems — and about 12 men marched in to arrest me,” he said. In June, he was moved to a new prison and placed in solitary confinement in a cramped cell, lit around the clock by a dim lamp. He was suddenly released in September with no explanation. Hearsay about corrupt officials extorting cash and even seizing companies is common here, but victims rarely speak out publicly so it is hard to quantify the extent of the corruption problem. Berlin-based Transparency International ranks Kazakhstan in the worst third of all countries in its Corruption Perception Index, although it also noted an improvement over the previous year in its most recent survey in 2005. Western lawyers in the country’s commercial capital, Almaty, say the courts are susceptible to both political pressure and bribery. And a World Bank project (www.doingbusiness.org) that assesses bureaucratic hurdles — but does not take into account corruption — ranks the country in the bottom half of 155 nations surveyed for the ease of doing business. The financial police did not reply to a fax sent in May seeking comment on Wegelin’s case and repeatedly deferred providing a spokesman. Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev, asked to comment, said: “This is not a very common case.” He said the financial police believed they had a strong case against Gold Product and he did not know why Wegelin was jailed. “The problem is how they were handling this case,” he said of the financial police, but declined to elaborate. Wegelin’s case may be extreme, but some analysts say it is not uncommon for successful companies in the vast central Asian state to change ownership under murky circumstances. “Kazakhstan has a complicated way of doing business,” Leonid Peisakhin, an analyst for London-based risk consultancy Exclusive Analysis, told a banking conference in June. “Lucrative enterprises are captured by structures close to the ruling family.” President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration has repeatedly said it wants to foster small and medium-sized businesses. Gold Product, which also makes vegetable conserves and has a metalworking plant, started as a collection of rusting Soviet-era warehouses and rapidly grew into a household name. Wegelin grew up as part of the ethnic German diaspora in Kazakhstan and emigrated to Germany in 1990 before returning in 1997. Now barred from leaving, he says he will fight on. He still faces legal worries: the original criminal case about the quality of the wine has been dropped, but a civil suit from the financial police is now underway. The financial police are also demanding 1 billion tenge (about $8.1 million) in back taxes. Wegelin said he paid the taxes but if he lost this case, it will bankrupt his company. He says he has no quarrel with the government, just the financial police. A photograph of Prime Minister Danial Akhmetov touring his factory hangs above his desk. Many of Wegelin’s staff have resigned after being put under pressure by the financial police. One who did not leave, wine factory director Vera Kravtsova, said she also spent three days in prison last year and was kept under house arrest until December. “They wanted me to testify against Mr. Wegelin and they wanted to scare me,” she said. TITLE: UES Income Up 34% As Economy Boosts Demand PUBLISHER: Combined Reports TEXT: MOSCOW — Unified Energy Systems second-quarter net income surged 34 percent from a year earlier as the country’s eight-year economic boom boosted electricity demand, the company said Wednesday. Net Q2 income rose to 7.05 billion rubles ($260 million) under Russian accounting standards, the company said in a regulatory filing, without giving the exact year-earlier figure. First-half profit jumped 54 percent, to 12.3 billion rubles. CEO Anatoly Chubais is seeking to break up the utility and raise as much as $50 billion for upgrades and expansion, partly by selling generating companies to private investors and freeing prices. Russia will spend $6 billion to boost power generation next year, more than twice this year’s figure, as it seeks to avoid blackouts amid surging demand for electricity, Economy Ministry German Gref said. “All forecasts for electricity demand in the country are being exceeded,’’ Gref told fellow ministers Tuesday in comments posted on the Kremlin web site. National electricity consumption rose 5 percent in the first half of the year, double the government’s forecast, Gref said. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or EBRD, said Wednesday it planned to invest more in Russia’s electricity sector over the next two years. Announcing its Russia strategy for 2007 to 2008, the EBRD said it wanted to take on increased risk in its biggest country of operation, particularly in equity and in the power sector. “In the power sector, the EBRD expects its portfolio of commitments to grow to between 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) to 2 billion euros thanks to a range of debt and equity investments by the end of the new strategy period,” it said in a statement. Russia has delayed the start of a new market for day-ahead power trading beyond its planned debut on Aug. 1, energy newsletter Heren said Wednesday, citing an unidentified UES spokesman. (Bloomberg, Reuters) TITLE: Heinz Launches Ketchup Offensive AUTHOR: By Erika Niedowski PUBLISHER: Bloomberg TEXT: THE BALTIMORE SUN When most Russians think ketchup, they think of Baltimor. Not Baltimore the American city, but the maker of the condiment gener-ously smothered here on foods that most Americans wouldn’t care to use it on, including rice, bread and boiled meat dumplings. It turns out Russians think ketchup a lot: Average annual consumption is estimated at close to 2 kilograms, and even more in Moscow and other big cities. Which has laid the groundwork for a ketchup war of sorts. The producer of America’s best-sell-ing ketchup, Heinz, has launched an ef-fort to squeeze more of its brand onto Russians’ dinner plates and challenge its Russian counterpart, Baltimor, as king of the condiments. H.J. Heinz Co.’s European division finalized a deal in April to buy a major-ity stake in Petrosoyuz, a privately owned St. Petersburg food manufacturer that is a major player in the world of ketchup, mayonnaise and other spreads. Heinz sells 650 million bottles of ketchup worldwide every year. And its name, to many, has become synonymous with the stuff — except here, where 80 percent of Russians associate the word ketchup with Baltimor, according to the company, and the firm controls about half the market. Still, officials at Baltimor, whose name comes from Baltic Sea, are keenly aware of the selling power of Heinz. The American company re-cently became the ketchup of choice for the nation’s perpetually packed Mc-Donald’s restaurants and is sold in many large grocery chains. “Of course, we are preparing,’’ Mi-lada Gudkova, Baltimor’s general man-ager, said in an interview, declining to offer any clues on how. “It always has to be a surprise. We don’t want Heinz to read it.” TITLE: IN BRIEF TEXT: Deripaska Gift MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Oleg Deripaska, owner of Russian Aluminium, paid himself $1.5 billion in dividends for 2005, almost the company’s entire profit for the year, Vedomosti said. Russian Aluminium, known as Rusal, said net income surged 56 percent last year to $1.65 billion, Vedomosti said. Record Reserves MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s foreign currency and gold reserves, the world’s third largest surged to a record $265.5 billion, as oil and gas prices hover near all-time highs.The reserves increased $2.7 billion in the week to July 28, the central bank said in an e-mailed statement today. TITLE: ‘Oops’ Doesn’t Get Israel Off the Hook AUTHOR: By Adam Shatz TEXT: In the West, Qana, a small Lebanese village southeast of Tyre, is believed by some to be the place where Jesus performed his first miracle, turning water into wine. In Lebanon and throughout the wider Arab and Muslim world, however, the village’s name has for the last decade been synonymous with something else: the killing in April 1996 of more than 100 men, women and children who had taken refuge in a UN compound, hiding from Israeli shelling directed at Hezbollah. Over time, Qana has been sculpted by Hezbollah into a symbol of martyrdom, a Shiite version of Sabra and Shatila. The Qana massacre, as it soon became baptized, sparked outrage throughout the Arab and Muslim world and raised the stature of Hezbollah. It also nourished the fury of al-Qaida. “The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory,” wrote Osama bin Laden in August 1996, in his first fatwa declaring war against the United States. Although Israel expressed “regret” for its “mistake,” it justified the attack as a response to Hezbollah’s firing of two Katyusha rockets and eight mortars from areas near the compound. The architect of Israel’s “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” Prime Minister Shimon Peres, argued that Hezbollah bore responsibility for the Qana disaster, claiming it cynically used civilians as human shields. History repeated itself Sunday with grisly precision when Israel, in the midst of another war with Hezbollah, bombed a residential apartment building in Qana, killing as many as 56 civilians, 37 of them children. Once again, Israel insisted that it had made a “mistake” for which Hezbollah was ultimately responsible because it was launching rockets toward Israel from the village of Qana. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a speech Monday announcing that Israel would not adhere to the 48-hour cease-fire to which it had agreed under American pressure, said, “I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for all deaths of children or women in Qana. ... We did not search them out ... they were not our enemies, and we did not look for them.” Let us assume for the sake of argument that Israel did, in fact, make the same mistake twice in Qana — or, to take another recent example, in Gaza, where a family of eight spending an afternoon on the beach was killed by an errant Israeli shell in June. If Israeli assertions are true that these killings of scores of civilians were unintentional, does that mean that Israel can claim the high ground in its battle with Hezbollah and Hamas? Is Israel’s accidental violence against civilians somehow better, or more morally acceptable, than that of a Hamas suicide bomber who steps into a pizzeria seeking to kill civilians? Or a Hezbollah guerrilla firing a Katyusha in the direction of a Haifa residential neighborhood? In short, do Israel’s declared intentions make a difference? To the victims in Qana and Gaza, the answer to these questions is obviously no. Nor will Olmert’s condolences be greeted with anything gentler than sarcasm in the Arab and Muslim world, particularly because Israel barely paused after Qana before resuming airstrikes against Lebanon. Of course, Israel is not really addressing its apologies to the Arab world but to the West, the club of “civilized” democracies in which it proudly claims membership. The argument Israel and its supporters make to this audience is that Hezbollah and Hamas deliberately target civilians, whereas Israel only accidentally kills them in the noble cause of antiterrorism. Israel may be guilty of manslaughter, but not of murder. But this distinction is meaningful only up to a point, and Israel, consistent with its history of violent raids in refugee camps and crowded cities, passed this point almost as soon as the offensive began. Rather than limiting its strikes to key Hezbollah positions and pursuing all available diplomatic channels, as might be expected of a mature regional power with nuclear weapons, Israel launched a vengeful war on Lebanon, which, it has since been reported, was planned over a year in advance. It has displayed a callous disregard for human life, for Lebanon’s infrastructure (which only in recent years had begun to recover from Israel’s 1982 invasion), for the stability of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s fragile government and for the country’s natural environment, now facing an ecological catastrophe from an oil spill caused by the bombing. An estimated 750 Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians and many of them children, have died, a dozen times more than the 50-plus Israelis (more than half of them soldiers) killed by Hezbollah. Israel’s “humanitarian intervention,” as Defense Minister Amir Peretz risibly characterized the war in Lebanon, has been far more costly in terms of civilian life than Hezbollah’s rocket attacks into Israel. Faced with mounting, televised evidence of Israel’s behavior, the country’s supporters abroad have taken great pains to portray the Israeli Defense Forces as a uniquely moral army, governed by a rigorous moral code yet forced to make tough decisions in a cruel environment. According to Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, for instance, Israel deserves praise for warning civilians to evacuate areas it has targeted for bombing. Those who remain may be civilians, he says, but they are less than innocent. This conveniently overlooks the fact that many people, particularly the elderly, are in no position to leave their homes at a moment’s notice. Moreover, a number of Lebanese civilians who have followed these warnings have been killed on roads that have come under constant Israeli fire. As a result, many Lebanese, including those in Qana, have chosen to stay put rather than brave the roads. Another argument made by Israel’s defenders is that it cannot be held responsible for killing civilians in militant strongholds. Michael Walzer, the influential Princeton moral philosopher and author of “Just and Unjust Wars,” recently opined in the New Republic that when Arab guerrillas “launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible — and no one else is — for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire.” One expects this rationalization of collective punishment from a defense minister; coming from a just war theorist it is most odd. (By this criterion, the French Resistance would have been responsible if the Nazis had destroyed a village sheltering anti-Fascist partisans.) In fact, Walzer’s logic is explicitly repudiated by human rights groups. They weren’t persuaded by this argument in 1996; in its damning report on the first Qana attack, Human Rights Watch concluded that the use in Qana of “deadly anti-personnel shells designed to maximize injuries on the ground — and the sustained firing of such shells, without warning, in close proximity to a large concentration of civilians — violated a key principle of international humanitarian law.” And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has rejected it again this time: The most recent strike on Qana “suggests that the Israeli military is treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone.” When Israel targets densely populated areas in hopes of killing one or a handful of militants, knowing that it may end up killing dozens of civilians, it can hardly claim to be showing concern for humanitarian law or civilian life. And by asking that we judge it by its professed intentions, rather than by its actions, Israel is asking too much of us and far too little of itself. Adam Shatz is literary editor of The Nation. This comment was published in the Los Angeles Times. TITLE: Universities Need to Hire From Outside AUTHOR: By Konstantin Sonin TEXT: The clowns finished their show, the circus rolled up its tents and left town, and the Group of Eight summit came to a successful close. But the public is still here. This means we can get back to discussing purely Russian problems. Take higher education, for example. One of the issues confronting Russian higher education is its integration into the international labor market. You can find Russian graduates everywhere, from New Zealand to Stockholm. But prominent foreign institutions of higher learning don’t only send their graduates into the international marketplace; they hire their professors there. Last year Spanish, Swiss, Brazilian, Mexican and Chinese universities — not to mention their counterparts in the United States, Britain, France and Sweden — hired dozens of young professors who had just received their advanced degrees from the world’s best universities. Russian universities, by contrast, didn’t hire a single professor from abroad. This may be one of those rare cases when the problem can be solved with money from the federal budget, but only if that money is not used to prop up the current system. Russian universities could be provided with funds earmarked for hiring young specialists, perhaps as part of the national project on education. These funds should not be used to raise salaries across the board, however. They should get used to hiring young specialists on a case-by-case basis. You might think that university rectors would find it advantageous to hire their own graduates. But imagine that the head of Moscow State University were to announce he had used these earmarked funds not to lure Harvard-educated professors on the five- or six-year contracts that are standard around the world, but to hire less-qualified local products. By offering starting salaries of 100,000 rubles ($3,720) per month, Russian universities could begin to compete for physicists and mathematicians trained at the world’s top schools. Salaries for historians and anthropologists could be slightly smaller, but economists would expect at least twice this amount. I’m speaking primarily about Russian specialists who have earned their doctorates both here and abroad. Foreign specialists of the same caliber would demand higher salaries, and those who would accept the lower salary would also be less qualified. This money would not necessarily have to be spent on luring professors from abroad. If you want to hire a Russian graduate, go for it — with one exception: Universities should not be permitted to hire their own graduates. This practice is currently widespread, but if we don’t put an end to it, we will never be competitive on the world market. We have to begin competing for academic talent here at home before we can compete globally. The Germans, from whom we borrowed this practice, managed to phase it out without compromising the continuity of distinct scholarly communities, such as the Frankfurt school of social theory. In today’s world of air travel, Internet and e-mail, these schools can thrive even when co-authors and students live on different continents. This plan does not apply to research scientists. Nuclear reactors for physicists, centrifuges for geneticists and field work for anthropologists can’t be financed by individual research grants. But we can’t fix everything at once. The problem of the Russian sciences, and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is the topic of another column. Konstantin Sonin is a professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR. TITLE: Music makers AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times TEXT: Musicians Igor Butman and David Goloshchokin were among the stars headlining the Jazz Q Festival in St. Petersburg two weeks ago, and to take advantage of the shared billing of two of Russia’s premier jazz stars, the St. Petersburg Times spoke to them to take the temperature of jazz in the country today. Butman, who came to St. Petersburg from Moscow to take part in the festival, performed with his big band and St. Petersburg-based jazz maestro Goloshchokin, artistic director of the Jazz Philharmonic Hall. He played at the St. Peter and Paul Fortress for an hour, presenting improvisations of jazz and classical compositions. St. Petersburg born Butman introduced Goloshchokin as his “first teacher and boss,” and they represent two generations of jazz in Russia. Their views on the subject reflect this difference. “The main advantage of Jazz Q festival is that it is held outdoors,” said Butman. “It gathers many high-class performances, many world-famous stars.” Besides foreign jazz celebrities, many prominent young Russian musicians took part in the festival. “Now, many Russian musicians have improved their professional skills while performing abroad, in the U.S., U.K., Germany and other European countries. Their musical level always gets higher and higher and soon it will be able to develop into something new and open a new stage in the world of music,” Butman said. Butman lived for seven years in the U. S. studying at the Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts. He’s highly appreciative of American culture but considers Russia home. “I do feel Russian and a patriot, I am proud that I was born in this country,” he said. “I like Russia, America, Italy, I just think that there are no borders in art, like human feelings have also no borders.” It is the mixture of cultures and nations that produces artistic talents, Butman said. “In Russia, we have such a mix of people and that’s why we have so many good music bands. When there are many cultures combined in one place, they compete and support one another at the same time. It produces an impressive outcome, especially in jazz improvisation.” In Butman’s opinion, now jazz is gaining wider appeal. “Jazz doesn’t take just one direction. Like many other musical genres, jazz improvisation is taking roots in other cultural and national musical experiences [in Russia].” Although his first love has always been only jazz, Butman said that he also likes some modern hip hop, rap and rock music as well as academic classical compositions. Butman is always involved in several projects at the same time. At the moment, besides performing, Butman is composing the soundtrack for Boris Kazakov’s new film “Lovers,” gives concerts with his big band and quartet in Russia and all over the world and runs his own jazz club, Le Club, in Moscow. “When I started a jazz club it was not easy to persuade my business partners that it would be a success. We had to find professional people, get into contact with the musicians, make them come to perform at our place. There was much work to do but it worked out.” Now, he has been asked to start a jazz club in Rostov and a new jazz festival in Astana, Kazakhstan. However, Butman doesn’t consider himself a businessman. “If it is so, I am more a producer, a creative businessman,” he said. Asked about the secret of his success, Butman said that he just does what he likes to do. “You just always need to improve your skills, to learn something new, and not to think that there are hidden enemies scheming against you. If you enjoy the taste of what you are doing then you are going the right way and luck will find you for sure.” Unlike Butman, Goloshchokin thinks that among the participants of the festival there were not jazz musicians but the representatives of absolutely different genres. “In my opinion, the name of the festival Jazz Q is irrelevant,” Goloshchokin said. “I think, besides, Butman’s Big Band and Eddie Palmeri’s band that performs Latin American jazz, all other musicians play different samples of the modern experimental fusion music. I think there is a need for such a festival but it really can’t be called jazz.” Goloshchokin said that he thinks that in Russia the organizers of musical festivals sometimes make the same mistakes that their foreign colleagues used to make. “There was a good North Sea Jazz Festival held in the Hague. Then, in Europe, they started to move gradually from jazz to fusion, jazz rock and ethno jazz . And now 80 percent of performers who take part in the North Sea Jazz Festival are pop and rock musicians. There is no reason for St. Petersburg to take the same wrong track.” In Goloshchokin’s opinion, most of the Jazz Q audience were young people who often get their first impressions of jazz at festivals. “It would be wrong if they think that it is real jazz not just modern fusion,” he said. Having run his own jazz festival, White Nights Swing, which takes place in St. Petersburg in the middle of June, Goloshchokin thinks that Russian jazz healthier than foreign jazz. “In the Soviet Era we got to jazz a bit later than America or Europe and have always been behind them. Maybe that’s why, in Russia, we have more mainstream jazz than abroad.” According to Goloshchokin, the most important thing for young musicians is to study jazz heritage in order to improve their skills. “Jazz is developing so fast that the young generation of jazz performers always tries new genres, not having yet found out about the old jazz music. And they can’t develop fast without that essential knowledge of jazz background.” However, not only jazz has problems, Russian popular music is in deep crisis too, Goloshchokin said. “Although most of all I love jazz, I like good music in other genres too. For me, there can be just good and bad music and nothing else.” Goloshchokin considers modern popular music “a typical commercial product made for discotheques.” “I just can’t take it seriously. Pop music is in deadlock now. I think later, we’ll inevitably get back to our classical roots. It is always bad when commercial interests interfere in the development of art. And that’s what we have now.” TITLE: The bible of booze AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times TEXT: A local author has published an anthology of alcohol-soaked memoirs touching on the philosophical. Writers muse on the meaning of hard drinking in their lives in a new anthology, “The Blue Book of the Alcoholic,” which includes short stories, biographical sketches of bohemian artists and an account of drying out at a U.S. rehab center. Put together by the St. Petersburg writer Pavel Krusanov, the book does not exclusively preach the benefits of sobriety, and its name comes from the affectionate term “sinyak,” or “blue person,” used to describe a lush, rather than the blue-covered “Big Book” published by Alcoholics Anonymous. The anthology begins with the transcript of a discussion about alcohol that Krusanov held with some other writers in 1994. The often-philosophical debate was first published in a magazine called “Yo” that the participants put together in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, there was only one issue. “There are plenty of bastards who drink moderately,” writer Sergei Korovin comments. “Of course, I don’t consider them to be people. They are not our comrades.” He also refers to a rule of thumb: “When someone is asked his opinion of another person, the answer is often, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t drunk with him.’” Krusanov himself describes drinking as “going on reconnaissance” and talks about a friend who calls his binges “getting into a B-52 and flying on a mission.” The stenographer’s notes add that two bottles of Rossia vodka were downed during the discussion. The book continues with several newly published works — including a short story by Korovin — and selected writings that were previously published in samizdat and small editions, such as Maxim Belozor’s “Magic Country,” which came out in 1999 with a print run of only 500 copies. “Magic Country” is a collection of reminiscences about Belozor’s circle of bohemian friends in Rostov-on-Don in the 1980s. One is the artist Avdei Ter-Oganyan, who gained notoriety in 1998 when he defaced Orthodox icons as part of a performance. Often reading like anekdoty, the stories also have a darker side, as introductory notes by Belozor allude to the premature deaths of many of the participants. “While I was writing, I started feeling some kind of moral debt toward our group of friends... mainly because, after just a few short years, there have become far fewer of us,” Belozor writes. But he continues: “What will we remember when we are old? The same thing that we remember now: how we drank.” In one story, Ter-Oganyan is looking for an apartment. A potential landlady calls and a guest picks up the phone. “Yes, yes,” he says. “You know, he is passed out drunk right now. Would you mind calling back?” In another, the artist and a friend drink vodka outdoors on a bitterly cold winter day. A man walking past with two small children hurries them along, saying: “Look, the daddies feel hot, and they’re having a drink of water.” One tale features three hung-over friends who need money for the hair of the dog. They contact an acquaintance who says his mother has promised to buy him trousers and shoes. He calls her and explains: “Here in TsUM, they have Salamander shoes, yes, yes, 200 rubles, I’ll come and get the money.” “But what about the trousers?” one of the friends asks indignantly. “I feel sorry for my mother,” he replies. “Everything is so expensive nowadays.” The book ends more seriously, with an account of the musician and writer Vladimir Rekshan undergoing treatment at an addiction center in Maryland. He notes in a postscript that he has been sober for more than a decade. Two of the book’s contributors are now members of Alcoholics Anonymous, the editor Krusanov wrote in an e-mail. “For the social group to which the authors of the anthology belong, it’s true that reckless drinking is now in the past. Now, if these people drink at all, they mainly drink as a means of socializing.” TITLE: Chernov’s choice AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov TEXT: “Glastonbury,” a film about the 35-year history of Britain's definitive music festival, will be screened at Platforma on Friday. The film’s director, Julien Temple, is probably best-known for “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle,” the cynical story of The Sex Pistols told from the point of view of the band’s former manager Malcolm McLaren. Temple made use of some 450 hours of footage shot by his 12 film crews at the festival from 2002 to 2005, as well as another 1,500 hours’ worth taken from BBC concert material and news archives, and submitted by fans, according to the festival’s official web site, Glastonburyfestivals.co.uk. Festival organizer Michael Eavis gave Temple the freedom to show the event through his own eyes. “[Temple] really understands Glastonbury, and I think he’s done a brilliant job,” Eavis was quoted by the festival’s web site as saying. “And the most important thing is he hasn’t left anything out. He’s really captured the Festival — the good times and the bad times, but most of all, the many important things that the Festival has come to represent over so many years.” Temple is now busy directing “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten,” a film about The Clash frontman, who died at the age of 50 in Dec. 2002. Although there was no Glastonbury festival this year, it is set to return in 2007. “Glastonbury” opened in cinemas in Britain in April and was released on DVD last month. “This is a film to be watched with other people,” said musician Seva Gakkel, who is promoting the show. “Glastonbury” will be screened at Platforma at 11 p.m. on Friday, after a concert by ex-Kolibri Natalya Pivovarova and S.O.U.S. The entrance for the screening is free. Rumor has it that City Bar has reopened without any pomp at a new location — its third since it first opened in 1996. The legendary expat hangout closed in early February after its owner, Aileen Exeter, decided to head back to the U.S.. It is now said to be operating on Furshtatskaya Ulitsa, near the U.S. Consulate. Described as an “American Pub & Eatery” on the sign, City Bar has been a little bit of the U.S. in the center of St. Petersburg for nearly 10 years, helping foreigners who live in or are visiting the city to feel a little less lonely or homesick. City Bar was first located in the Cappella building, but in 2002 it moved round the corner to Millionnaya Ulitsa. Exeter was not available for comment this week. Check this space for more information over the next couple of weeks. On the Petrograd side, what was once DK Berlin seems to change its name every week. With former (names) such as Podyom, Little Angels, The Eager Beaver and Yazzyk all dispensed with, last week it was renamed Mix. But what it’s called this weekend is anybody’s guess. See Club guide on page viii for details. TITLE: Smoke on the water AUTHOR: By Liza Hearon PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times TEXT: Hookahs may be the only nightlife trend that has existed for centuries. Oxygen bars and swing music quickly became passÎ, and even the almighty sushi is last year’s news. But everyone from grandfathers to students in southeast Asia and the Middle East have been puffing away on the tobacco pipes for hundreds of years before St. Petersburg’s fashionable set got a hold of them, and the smoke shows no signs of clearing soon. Hookah bars often spring up around college campuses first, then work their way into the nightlife scene. But in St. Petersburg, hookahs can be found everywhere from small Middle Eastern cafes to beach playgrounds for the rich and trendy. A hookah is made up of the base, which is filled with water, and the bowl, which consists of the tobacco and heating apparatus. A pipe connects the two and is inserted into the water, and it is smoked through the hose, which connects to the air filled portion of the base. Devotees say that smoking tobacco through a hookah is a lot smoother than smoking cigarettes, as the water cools the tobacco. Smoke is pulled away from the tobacco and filtered by the water before the smoker inhales it. The process also partially filters tar and nicotine from the tobacco. While some claim it is much healthier than smoking cigarettes, doctors aren’t so sure. The uncertainty isn’t stopping anyone. At some places, the base can be filled with wine, milk or rum, giving what one smoker described as “a total buzz, man.” There is often a huge variety of tobacco flavors, such as apple, strawberry, mint and cherry. Here’s a sampling of some of the many hookah joints in St. Petersburg. Ego Cafe 8 Sadovaya Ulitsa. Tel: 431 9836 www.egoclub.ru This cafÎ tries to offer something for everyone, and certainly didn’t want to miss out on the hookah craze. The atmosphere and menu are a curious mix of traditional, modern and vaguely Asian. While Ego doesn’t really have a legitimate claim on the hookah tradition, hookahs don’t seem entirely out of place here, and most patrons seem to order a hookah. The couches in the upstairs area are cozy spots to share a hookah with friends. The vaguely international sounding music isn’t pumped out too loudly, so it’s easy to share whatever thoughts run through nicotene-laden brains. Hookahs run at 400 to 600 rubles ($14.94-$22.42), with a good selection of fruit flavored tobacco and choice of water or wine for the base. Cynic 4 Antonenko Perulok. Tel: 312 9526 www.cynic.spb.ru It may be a dingy basement bar, with rock and roll blasting until all hours of the night, but hookahs seem to strangely jibe with the atmosphere at Cynic. Maybe it’s the fact that in no way can Cynic be described as Asian or Middle Eastern, serving decent Russian food to the bohemian and punk rock types who frequent the bar. This poor student population is probably exactly the type who can happily wile away an evening puffing away, just like their students all over the world and throughout time. So while the long tables and benches in Cynic are usually not teeming with hookahs, it’s normal to see at least a couple of the contraptions in use, provided by man whose only job it it is to set the thing up for you and relight it when it goes out. It’s definitely not a place for those sensitive to smoke though. With no ventilation in the basement bar, the tobacco and hookah smoke linger in the air far longer than is probably healthy. Magrib 84 Nevsky Prospekt. Tel: 275 1255 magrib.a-alliance.ru Magrib place lays on the Middle Eastern touches thicker than the smoke at Cynic. There are ornate gold furnishings, tile and servers dressed to create an illusion of leaving Russia and entering a sensuous, exotic nightclub. Extremely dim lighting only helps the imagination. The restaurant becomes a somewhat notorious dance club at night. Along with picking up some company for the evening, patrons can also try out, erm, a hookah. The tables designated for hookah smoking are lined with couches and big, comfy cushions, right near the dance floor. Hookahs are on the pricey here, at 600 rubles ($22.42), along with most everything else at this bar. Tobacco choice is limited to a few standard flavors, like cherry and apple. Magrib is the type of place for people who want to see and be seen smoking the hookah, but the die-hard hookah fans who are more into the social experience might want to look elsewhere. Barbaria 55 Marata Ulitsa. Tel: 164 7333 Barbaria is another Middle Eastern themed restaurant but without the pretentiousness of Magrib, and out of the way of Nevsky Prospekt crowds. Advertisements claim that Barbaria has the city’s largest selection of hookahs, tobacco flavors and ways to replace the water in the chamber. This may or may not be true, but the restaurant does have a solid selection, ranging from a regular hookah with water for 390 rubles ($14.57), to the most expensive one of rum and milk for 900 rubles ($33.62) The tobacco selection is good, and includes apricot, apple, strawberry and cherry. The hookahs are in good condition, and the staff is friendly and accommodating. Barbaria’s menu features Middle Eastern specialties which are slightly overpriced. While the music and atmosphere might not be draws in and of themselves, Barbaria is a good place for hookah conversation. Kashmir 7 Bolshaya Moskovskaya Ul. Tel: 314 2300 This small vegetarian Indian restaurant features hookahs on almost every table. It’s a refreshing change from the pseudo-hip atmospheres of other places, and the random dodgy hookah cafes that are sprinkled throughout the city. Hookahs are reasonably priced at 400 rubles ($14.94) and while there is not the variety or the coolness factor of other places, it does make for an enjoyable after-dinner activity. Royal Beach 12 Yuzhnaya Doroga, Krestovskiy Island. Tel: 916 6006 This beachside playground for the fabulous tries to feature everything and anything trendy and exciting, and this of course includes hookahs. Styled after European beachside clubs, Royal Beach has outdoor style lounges, with DJs who are hip for people in the money crowd. It practices strict “face control,” and is a perfect example of how hookahs have moved from lowbrow cafes and bars to playgrounds for the trendy. It would be nice to include more information here, but they probably wouldn’t let us in. We figure we’d better stick to Cynic. TITLE: Fellow travelers AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov PUBLISHER: Staff Writer TEXT: Want to hail a ride to the Black Sea coast without leaving your office? New “find a travel partner” web sites springing up all over the Russian Internet (RuNet) are making it possible. With just a month of summer left, Natalya is desperate to get out of Moscow and spend some quality beach time, but she needs to find someone to travel with to avoid feeling like a third wheel. “A girl and her boyfriend are coming with me, but I am alone,” Natalya said in her posting on Mahnem.ru, which can be loosely translated as “Let’s go.” She hopes to find a man or woman to join her two-week vacation to the resort town of Sochi, she said, with whom she can hang out at the beach and see the sights. People looking to share travel costs, catch a ride to an outdoor concert or meet someone fun to travel with have been flocking to the web site since it launched in April. The ranks of similar sites, some using travel as a pretext for online dating, are swelling on the RuNet. Ruslan Sadekov, the 26-year-old founder of Mahnem.ru, thinks of his online creation as “virtual hitchhiking.” About 400 different users log on to the site every day to catch or give a ride at the peak of the travel season, he said. Another web site matching up travelers, Poputchika.net, was launched two years ago by Dmitry Deniskin. Poputchika.net, or “no travel companion,” is now visited by 600 people per day, said Deniskin, also 26. “The site began growing on its own,” said Deniskin, who like Sadekov originally created his web page as a hobby. Users, who register on these sites but pay nothing to use them, continue pouring in. About 15.6 million Russians took off to see the country’s sights on their own last year, while 7.5 million chose organized packaged tours to travel inside Russia, according to the Federal Tourism Agency. Russia’s attractions are as varied as its 11 time zones, but local destinations are not always well-advertised or easy to reach. “There are so many ads for different package tours abroad,” said Sadekov, whose day job is in marketing. “And people normally go to places they hear about.” In contrast to colorful commercials for cheap sojourns to the beaches of Turkey — the most popular destination for Russians traveling abroad — information on interesting spots at home is often sparse. Sadekov hopes that his web site will make traveling in Russia simpler and more popular, he said. Not everyone turning to the Internet to find traveling companions does so with the goal of exploring Russia. Their destinations and reasons for going online are as varied as the country’s web surfers, numbering some 24 million people, according to estimates by the Public Opinion Foundation. Just a few posts down from a group of fishermen searching on Mahnem.ru for “lovely ladies” to join them for an end-of-summer Volga River trip, a Hobbit-obsessed Katerina posted a message to find a ride to the Ural Mountains. On Poputchika.net, several Muscovites hoped to find the one or two people their group was missing to make a sailing trip in the Greek islands in August. Many other posts on the site resemble online dating pitches. “People seem to use travel as a pretext for meeting someone,” Deniskin said. Alex, 37, who succinctly described himself as “single, normal,” said he was looking for a “good, attractive” woman, willing to go on a beach vacation with him and split all the costs. Poputchika.net, mainly used by 20- to 40-year-olds, was also flooded with announcements from women looking for a male “sponsor” to take them on a free vacation to any touristy spot. Given that average monthly incomes remain relatively low the desire to save money by sharing travel expenses appears to be a factor in the popularity of travel web sites. Tanya from Moscow turned to Poputchik.ru, another traveler-matching site, to find another female with whom to share the cost of her Tunisia vacation. Posts like Tanya’s abound in the RuNet, whose users don’t seem to be too preoccupied with safety concerns. “I’m not afraid to meet people [online], since I met my husband through the Internet,” Yekaterina Kanaki, a Greek-Russian translator, said in an e-mail. She wanted to catch a car ride from the Black Sea town of Yevpatoria back to St. Petersburg in August through the Mahnem.ru web site, Kanaki said, to meet interesting people. Traveler-matching sites normally do not take any responsibility for their users’ safety. “We recommend meeting people before traveling with them,” said Poputchika.net’s founder Deniskin. One just needs to use common sense when arranging travel through the Internet, said Sadekov, the creator of Mahnem.ru. “It’s the same kind of thinking as when you hail a car,” he said. TITLE: The Nevsky Magazine AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times TEXT: The St. Petersburg Times was not the first English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the city was a flourishing Imperial capital, a range of publications were printed in English. In the third of a series of articles, art historian Andrei Vorobei looks at The Nevsky Magazine, published in St. Petersburg in 1863. The first English-language periodical in the city, the St. Petersburg English Review, had been out of business for 20 years by the time The Nevsky Magazine was published in 1863. Unlike the English Review, The Nevsky Magazine gave equal weight to Russian topics as it did to subjects concerning the English-speaking world: theatrical reviews (“Samoiloff in Hamlet”); travel impressions such as “Summer’s Fishing in Finland” (then a part of the Russian Empire) and “Trip to the Ladoga”; and even a number of Russian contributions such as J. Beloff’s “A Few Words on Contemporary Russian Literature.” The journal appeared in the middle of the reign of Alexander II, which was defined by all-embracing social reforms (one of the most long-awaited was the emanicipation of the serfs) and the relative liberalisation of public life. In an echo of the new realities in society, The Nevsky Magazine featured such inconvenient topics as “woman human rights,” took part in a discussion of “Polish Insurrection” and reviewed the “History of the Crimean War” by a correspondent of the The Times of London in its Books of the Month section. A series of essays dedicated to the prominent English philosophers John Locke and David Hume, and the biologist Tomas Huxley (known for his defence of Darwin’s theory of evolution) exported to Russia, as it were, the intellectual history that had been the keystone of British political liberty, diversity and freedom of conscience. The Nevsky Magazine’s two editors and major contributors were lecturers of English language and literature: Charles Edward Turner at the Imperial Alexander Lyceum and at St. Petersburg University, and Henry Harrison at the High Commercial School and Navy Cadet corps. In the new society, the editors, familiar with Russian educational standards as well as Russian culture in general, were able to produce penetrating comparative analyses. This is perhaps, the most significant acheivement of the journal. The earliest material of this kind was Harrison’s extensive exploration “English and Russian Educational Systems,” which dealt with the methods of bringing up youth at schools and universities of the two countries and rightly considered these methods both as a measurement and a basis for constructing a responsible, well-rounded, intellectual and competitive society. For instance, the author, marking certain defects in the widespread practice of educating Russian upper class boys at home, suggested that “it is necessary for boys to mix with boys, to learn to measure themselves with those of their age and to feel that they must depend on themselves and not on a social position.” In fact, most of what was described in 1863 is still debated in contemporary Russia: lack of competitive spirit, and the idea that “Russian pupils are taught more than it is possible for any but very uncommon talent to master at once, and the result is frequently a smattering of all and an accurate knowledge of none” and so on. Above all, the essay suggested the following explanation of the “reasonable and even necessary” differences in the approach to classical languages at the schools and universities of the two countries. “It is equally patent, that all well educated Russians speaks two, if not three and four, foreign languages, while in England there are but too few of our educated classes that speak one.” But unlike an Englishman, “a Russian speaks a language that has no philological connection with those of Rome and Greece, and which is totally ignored by the other nations of Europe, he is naturally driven to learn foreign living [modern] languages.” The semantic continuation was an article dedicated to the “Study of Foreign Languages,” which examined teaching methods that prevailed in England and how English was taught in Russia. Another marvellous essay, “National Characteristics,” compared the inhabitants of four countries: France, Germany, England and Russia. It is written freely and is acute and non-committal: “the German formality is often mistaken for heaviness, and the English reserve for either pride or stolidity; French gaiety and facility is accused of frivolity, and Russian docility of want of energy.” The cultural assimilation of the editors allowed them to take a more balanced position on current Russian political matters like the Polish Insurrection but politically indifferent English literature remained a binding element of The Nevsky Magazine. The periodical was composed of original lectures on classical and contemporary English literature as well as dropping a few curtseys towards continental, first of all French, literature. An innovation was a long-running and ambitious project, “Essays Towards An English Anthology,” the aim of which was, for the first time, “to present readers with a brief sketch and critical analysis of the collection of literary fragments known by the name of the Greek Anthology, and then to consider in how far our own English verse-literature affords materials for the formation of a similar collection.” It can be seen in the first issue of The Nevsky Magazine there was a little scepticism among the English community about new undertaking. “‘An English literary journal in St Petersburg, that will never answer,’ is an argument we have heard enough of lately,” the editors wrote in the first issue. “We shall in this introduction, as in all colloquies with our friends, content ourselves with the answer, ‘Wait, and see.’ That our public must be limited we are well aware, and therefore we have never hoped for any great commercial success, but that there is a public in Russia capable of appreciating a well conducted Review, we are convinced.” Unfortunately, the sceptics were proved right and what was, perhaps, the meatiest English magazine ever published in St. Petersburg, didn’t last even a year. The author and The St Petersburg Times thank the staff of the Rossika, the Newspaper Department, and Russian and Foreign Magazines Funds of the Russian National Library for assistance in providing the material for this article. TITLE: Sri Lanka Slips Towards Civil War, Shells Kill 10 AUTHOR: By Peter Apps PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: TRINCOMALEE, Sri Lanka — Artillery fire killed 10 civilians sheltering from fighting in northeast Sri Lanka on Thursday, the army said, as troops battled Tamil Tiger rebels and the island slipped back towards civil war. More than 800 people have died this year and ambushes, air strikes and naval clashes had become commonplace, but it was a dispute over a rebel-held water supply that led to the first major ground fighting last week since a 2002 ceasefire. The centre of fighting on Thursday appeared to be the government-held and mainly Muslim town of Mutur, just south of Trincomalee harbour. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels moved into Mutur on Wednesday. “We cannot go out,” Mutur resident Mrs Karunawathi, aged 70, told Reuters by telephone from her home, crying as intermittent firing could be heard in the background. “We have no food and just one bottle of water. We are very scared.” The army said it had largely flushed out pockets of rebel resistance by early afternoon. The military said 10 civilians were killed when a college housing displaced residents was hit by a shell. Residents said both sides had shelled the town. Wounded civilians and servicemen trickled into a hospital in Trincomalee city as artillery, multi-barrelled rockets and jet fighters pounded rebel positions. Aid workers said it was simply too dangerous to get help into the Mutur area. The rest of the island still appeared largely quiet, but the military said two soldiers were wounded in a fragmentation mine and mortar attack in the northwest Mannar district. Truce monitors say the ceasefire exists only on paper, and analysts and diplomats describe the violence as war. The rebels and government each blame the other, but say they remain committed to the island’s protracted peace process. “If the ceasefire agreement is dead, then it is the Tigers’ fault,” Defence Spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella told a news conference. “We will make all possible endeavours to ensure the peace process is not derailed.” Death tolls are difficult to verify. In the fighting south of Trincomalee, the military says it has killed more than 70 rebels for the loss of only a handful of troops. Diplomats say both sides are understating their losses and exaggerating those of the enemy. As jets roared overhead, people stayed on the streets of Trincomalee, around 6 miles (10 km) across the harbour from Mutur, but most shops stayed shut in sympathy with residents of the mainly Muslim town. “This is a Muslim neighbourhood, but our shop is shut too,” said Hindu general store owner R. Sigamany, part of the minority Tamil community for whom the Tigers want a separate homeland. “We are closed down in solidarity because people from all communities are dying.” The main military advance to reopen a single Tiger-held sluice gate south of Mutur and restore water to 50,000 people that began the recent escalation seems to have all but halted amid minefields and mortar fire. Overall, diplomats say the government may have bitten off more than it can chew in launching an offensive, and the Tigers, whose ultimate goal is a homeland for minority Tamils in the north and east, have been seen as doing better than expected. “As it stands now, there is no reason for any kind of optimism,” Norwegian International Development Minister and peace broker Erik Solheim told reporters in Oslo late on Wednesday. But the government says it is willing to discuss what the rebels want if they are willing to sit down. “We certainly would be willing to talk about the water,” said head of the government peace secretariat Palitha Kohona. “Far better to talk about it than shoot at each other.” TITLE: Israel Pushes On with Offensive AUTHOR: By Lin Noueihed PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: BEIRUT — Israeli jets pounded Hezbollah’s Beirut stronghold and battles raged in the south of the country on Thursday while world powers struggled to come up with a plan to stop a war now in its fourth week. The United States, France and Britain hope for a United Nations Security Council resolution within a week that would call for a truce and perhaps beef up existing U.N. peacekeepers until a more robust force can be formed, U.N. officials said. But diplomatic moves to swiftly end the fighting have been beset by splits between the United States and France, mentioned as leaders of the new force, and over the timing of a ceasefire. Meanwhile, violence raged on. Israeli jets launched at least four air strikes on a Hezbollah-dominated southern suburb for the first time in days. They also hit a bridge in the northern region of Akkar and hammered the eastern Bekaa Valley overnight. Israel is expanding the ground war in southern Lebanon, where some 10,000 troops battled Hezbollah guerrillas. One Israeli soldier was killed and four others wounded near the border village of Aita al-Shaab on Wednesday, the Israeli army confirmed early on Thursday. The death brings to 37 the number of Israeli troops killed in 23 days of fighting. At least 643 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 56 Israelis have been killed in the conflict. The U.S.-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said late on Wednesday that the bodies of 28 people killed in an Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana had been recovered and 13 people were missing. The official Lebanese toll is 54. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would fight on until an international force reaches south Lebanon — even though no country has volunteered to send troops in the absence of a truce and a durable ceasefire agreement. Olmert called for an international combat force to implement a U.N. resolution calling for Hezbollah to be disarmed, saying Israel had already destroyed much of the group’s military power. But Hezbollah showed it was still a fighting force on Wednesday, launching 231 rockets, the most it had fired in a single day, killing one and wounding 10. U.S. officials were still upbeat. Asked when a ceasefire could be agreed, White House spokesman Tony Snow said: “I don’t want to make a promise on it ... but I think it’s safe to say days.” The United States and France, diplomats said, are rapidly ironing out differences on an initial resolution calling for a truce, a buffer zone and the disarmament of Hezbollah. But Paris has insisted it would not send troops without a truce and an agreement in principle on the framework for a long-term peace deal by Israel, Hezbollah and the Beirut government. Washington wants a force as soon as fighting stops. Once fighting ends, talks would begin at the United Nations on a second resolution for a permanent ceasefire all combatants could accept and authorize an international force in the south. Early on Wednesday, helicopter-borne commandos launched Israel’s deepest raid into Lebanon, killing 19, including four children, in the eastern city of Baalbek. The troops seized five militants, Israel said, but Hezbollah denied they were members. Battles raged on Thursday in at least five areas of southern Lebanon where Israel has launched ground incursions, backed by intense shelling and air strikes. Lebanese security sources said the Israelis had captured a hilltop at al-Aweida overlooking several villages, including Kfar Kila and Adaiseh where there was fierce fighting this week. Israel has imposed an air and sea blockade on Lebanon since the conflict flared after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12. Several U.N. and Red Cross convoys bearing food and medical aid headed to hard-hit areas, but at least one was called off after failing to get Israeli clearance, aid officials said. TITLE: Document Sees Iraq ‘Civil War’ PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: LONDON — Iraq is more likely to slide into civil war than turn into a democracy, Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Baghdad wrote in a leaked diplomatic cable, the BBC public broadcaster reported on Thursday. William Patey’s final cable from Baghdad gives a far more pessimistic assessment for prospects in Iraq than Britain has disclosed in public. It warns of the prospect of Shi’ite militia forming a “state within a state”, like Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy,” he wrote, according to excerpts quoted by the public broadcaster. “Even the lowered expectation of President (George W.) Bush for Iraq — a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror — must remain in doubt,” said the cable, sent to Prime Minister Tony Blair. Describing the main Shi’ite militia, he wrote: “If we are to avoid a descent into civil war and anarchy then preventing the (Mehdi Army) from developing into a state within a state, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon, will be a priority.” Patey did, however, also say that the situation in Iraq “is not hopeless”. The Foreign Office said it does not comment on leaked documents. “Every day the capacity of the Iraqi security forces to manage their own security is growing,” a spokeswoman said. The view expressed in Patey’s cable reflects pessimism that has settled among senior Iraqi officials as violence has increased in the three months since a new “unity” government took power. A senior Iraqi government official told Reuters last month that “Iraq as a political project is finished”, with the capitalsplit into Sunni and Shi’ite districts and officials working to divide control of the country on ethnic and sectarian lines. TITLE: No Sign of Cuba’s Castro Brothers AUTHOR: By Anthony Boadle PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: HAVANA — Nearly three days after Cuba’s historic handover of power, neither ailing President Fidel Castro nor his brother Raul, to whom he temporarily ceded control, has been seen by an anxious Cuban public. Close aide Ricardo Alarcon told a U.S. radio program on Wednesday that Castro, who had had a stomach operation, was “very alert” and resting after giving up power on the communist-ruled island for the first time in 47 years. No photographs or television pictures of Castro, 79, have been released since his operation for intestinal bleeding and there was also no sign of defense minister Raul, 75, Castro’s designated successor. “We don’t know what’s going on. We’re waiting for Raul to speak,” said Vilma Gutierrez, a mother of three who works in a ramshackle state-owned shop selling subsidized potatoes and bananas. Her part of town saw riots in 1994 during the economic crisis set off by the collapse of the Soviet Union. A finger to her lips, she said: “People are keeping their mouths shut. They don’t know what’s going to happen.” There was a small increase in police presence in poorer parts of Havana and communist neighborhood organizations had activated “rapid response groups” used to put down riots. Some Cubans with relatives in the security forces said military and other uniformed personnel had been mobilized in barracks and police stations as a precaution. But Havana’s sweltering streets, their stylish old buildings dilapidated from years of neglect, were quiet. Castro, the world’s longest-ruling head of government, gave Raul provisional powers as head of the armed forces, Communist Party and Council of State. Fidel Castro was still lucid, Alarcon said. “He’s in, I would say, a normal period of recovery after an important surgery. That’s essentially what I would say, but very alive and very alert,” he told the Democracy Now! show. A leading Cuban exile group in Miami called for military officials and civilians to establish a provisional government to “end the dictatorship of the Castro brothers.” “We are asking those in the military in Cuba to take hold of their own future to establish a provisional authority with the civil and military members of Cuba who do not want this succession of power,” said Cuban American National Foundation Chairman Jorge Mas Santos. Castro has not been seen in public since July 26 and the scant information about his condition has sparked rumors in the United States that he could be dead or running a “dress rehearsal” for his succession. TITLE: Juventus Sell Vieira to Inter For $12.11M AUTHOR: By Lisa Jucca PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: MILAN — Juventus have sold France midfielder Patrick Vieira to Inter Milan for 9.5 million euros ($12.11 million), less than half what they paid for him a year ago. Juventus said in a statement that they had booked a capital loss of 8.6 million euros on the sale, part of an exodus of players from the Turin club following a match-fixing scandal that led to their demotion to the second-tier Serie B league. Inter confirmed the deal, saying Vieira had signed a four-year contract that would tie him to the club until June 2010. Juve bought Vieira in July 2005 for 20 million euros from Arsenal. He played for Juventus only for one season in 2005-06. Vieira, a candidate to take over from Zinedine Zidane as captain of France’s national side, is the latest player to leave Juventus after the club were relegated to Serie B for conspiring with referees and linesmen to rig games during last season. Inter were awarded the 2005-06 Italian league title last week after a sports tribunal revoked Juventus’s title win. Vieira returned to Italy last year, having been signed by Arsenal from Inter’s city rivals AC Milan in 1996. The combative 30-year-old, a 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000 winner with France, moved to Turin after helping Arsenal win seven major trophies in nine years in north London. His crunching tackles, deft ball control and unhurried distribution marked Arsenal’s Senegal-born captain out as one of the best midfielders in English football. TITLE: Steffen Claims World Record Swim PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: BUDAPEST — Germany’s Britta Steffen claimed a world record in the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Laure Manaudou of France broke a 19-year European mark on a memorable day at the European swimming championships on Wednesday. Steffen hurtled through the 100 in 53.30 seconds to beat the mark of 53.42 set by Libby Lenton in Melbourne in January and deal a second blow to Australian pride in three days. The 22-year-old engineering student from Schwedt had recorded the fastest relay split of all-time, previously held by Lenton, on Monday when she inspired Germany to snatch the world record in the 4x100 metres freestyle relay from the Australian squad which won the 2004 Olympic crown. Steffen could scarcely believe it when she saw her time on the electronic scoreboard, looking uncertain whether to laugh or cry before she pulled off her cap and gave a huge smile. She touched more than a second ahead of Marleen Veldhuis of the Netherlands (54.32) and Nery-Madey Niangkouara of Greece (54.48), who took the silver and bronze medals as they had at the last European championships in 2004. Earlier, Olympic gold medallist Manaudou had expunged the last individual East German long-course record from the European books in a runaway victory in the women’s 800 metres freestyle final which also threatened the 1989 world record of American Janet Evans. The 19-year-old Frenchwoman clocked eight minutes 19.29 seconds to beat the 8:19.53 set by Anke Moehring at the European championships in 1987. TITLE: Business to be Turned off by Drug Scandals AUTHOR: By Gene Cherry PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: RALEIGH, North Carolina — Businesses will be less likely to invest in sport after positive doping tests by Tour de France winner Floyd Landis and Olympic champion Justin Gatlin, U.S. marketing experts say. “When this kind of thing happens, it is a downer for everybody, especially with track and field and cycling already having limited appeal in the rich American sports and entertainment market,” said Bob Dorfman, executive creative director for Pickett Advertising in San Francisco. “Fans will become more cynical and companies will wonder if athletes they might use for marketing are drug-free,” Dorfman told Reuters in a telephone interview. Businesses want a more positive rub-off, said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Centre at the University of Oregon. “If all that is being covered in the sport is negative and rooted in drug scandals, why would a business want to invest in that,” Swangard said via telephone from his Eugene, Oregon, office. “I do not think Gatlin will destroy track and field,” Swangard added. But even in his hometown of Eugene, which bills itself as Track Town USA, residents are troubled by the 100 metres joint world record holder’s positive test, he said. Gatlin faces a life ban from track and field and Landis a two-year suspension if their positive tests for the banned male sex hormone testosterone are determined to be doping offenses. The issue of Gatlin’s positive test is a grave one, USA Track & Field (USATF) chief executive officer Craig Masback said. “No one who loves the sport can be happy about events that undermine the credibility of the sport,” Masback said in an e-mail to Reuters. “But the place of track and field in the Olympic Games withstood the Ben Johnson (doping) scandal and BALCO (scandal) and it will withstand this development,” he said. Both the number of USATF sponsors and total sponsor dollars have grown since the BALCO scandal, he said. Nike and Hershey’s, two of the federation’s key sponsors, will continue their support, a spokesmen said. Both have financial ties to Gatlin. “They (doping allegations in general) have not changed our position within the sport or our interest in being involved in this sport and those governing bodies,” said Nike spokesman Dean Stoyer. IAAF spokesman Nick Davies would not speculate on the impact of Gatlin’s case. But he said the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had not lost a single sponsorship partner because of doping during the BALCO and Athens Olympics scandals in 2003 and 2004. The federation spends 2.5 million dollars annually in its fight against doping, he said. “The bigger the name, the worse publicity we get,” Davies said in an e-mail. “But what is the alternative?” Paul Doyle, manager of Jamaican 100 metres co-world record holder Asafa Powell, said he believed sponsorships and meets would be affected by positive tests. “Over the past decade to 15 years, the amount of money in the sport for prize money and appearance fees has dropped,” Doyle told Reuters via telephone from Ireland. “But the difference is that shoe contracts are a lot higher. So the top athletes are making more now than they did in the ‘90s, it’s just a larger percentage is coming from the shoe companies.” For athletes to boost their income even higher they need contracts with sponsors outside of shoe companies, Doyle said. “Those are the type of sponsors that are really going to be scared by something like this,” Doyle said. The impact will be even greater on cycling, Swangard said. “I would certainly be recommending (to) any prospective sponsor that there are safer bids for your money right now than cycling,” he said. “Cycling is the one sport that epitomises the abuses of performance-enhancing substances,” he added. Even before Landis’s positive, Swiss hearing-aid company Phonak, his team’s sponsor, had announced it was pulling out of the Tour de France next year. Andy Lee, director of marketing and communications for USA Cycling, declined to comment on the impact of Landis’s positive pending his B sample results. Another sport rocked by doping allegations, baseball, continues to enjoy high fan appeal, Swangard and Dorfman pointed out. San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds has been linked to the BALCO laboratory doping scandal with his personal trainer Greg Anderson, convicted of conspiracy to distribute steroids. Even with the negative publicity, U.S. newspapers are filled with positive articles about the sport, Swangard noted. About the only time track and field and cycling have a major impact in U.S. sports pages is during the Olympics or Tour de France or when there is a doping positive, he added. The entire issue of drugs in sport is a complex one, Dorfman said. “We want our athletes to be super-human,” he said. “But on the other hand, we do not want them to cheat and do it illegally. “Those things just don’t go hand in hand. “In order to excel it almost seems like you have got to do something (illegal).” (Additional reporting by Steve Ginsburg in Washington) TITLE: Loretta Makes The Difference As Red Sox Edge Indians PUBLISHER: Reuters TEXT: NEW YORK — Mark Loretta did his best David Ortiz impression by crushing a game-winning double with two-out in the ninth to lift the Boston Red Sox to a 6-5 win over the Cleveland Indians on Wednesday at Fenway Park. With Oritz, who has produced five game-winning hits in the last two months, on deck, Loretta took a 1-0 offering from closer Fausto Carmona and drove a bases loaded double off the Green Monster scoring Gabe Kapler and Alex Gonzalez with the tying and winning runs. “It’s a blast,” Loretta told MLB.com. “There’s nothing like it. It’s a euphoric feeling. “My at-bat was just the last part of a really great team game.” The Red Sox also left it late to earn wins over the Los Angeles Angels on Saturday and the Indians on Monday, Ortiz making the difference in both games. The Red Sox have recorded seven walkoff victories at Fenway this season, five courtesy of Ortiz and the other two by Loretta. “We’d certainly rather be up (a run going into the ninth), but in this ballpark, crazy things happen,” said Red Sox manager Terry Francona. “I think a combination of them having some youth out there (and) we have a good team that doesn’t quit. “The whole ballpark is vibrating. We just, thankfully, didn’t stop playing.” The victory kept the Red Sox from slipping further behind the New York Yankees in the ultra-tight American League east. The Yankees beat the Toronto Blue Jays 7-2 to remain a few percentage points ahead of the Red Sox. The Indians had looked poised to send the Red Sox to their second straight defeat when Travis Hafner connected on his 30th homer of the year, a two-run shot in the eighth inning to push Cleveland ahead 5-4. But once again Carmona (1-6) was unable to protect the lead, striking out the first two batters he faced in the ninth before suffering a total collapse. Manny Ramirez’s sixth inning solo shot was his 30th of the season and extended his hitting streak to 18 games. It marks the ninth consecutive season Ramirez has hit 30 or more home runs. Ortiz had a rare off night striking out in all four at bats. Jonathan Papelbon (3-1) tossed a prefect ninth for the win. In New York, Chien Ming-Wang pitched eight shutout innings and Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada both had home runs as the Yankees eased past the stumbling Blue Jays 7-2. Wang (13-4) scattered four hits while striking out three and walking three, helping the red-hot Yankees to their seventh win in eight games. “He (Wang) has got a fire in his belly, there’s no question about it,” said Yankees manager Joe Torre. Alex Rodriguez had another strong outing, going three-for-five with a pair of RBI. New addition Bobby Abreu and Craig Wilson registered their first hits in Yankees pinstripes.