SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1193 (59), Tuesday, August 8, 2006
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TITLE: Antiwar Call Unanswered By Israelis
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Saul
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TEL AVIV — Waving colorful banners and singing protest songs, a tireless band of Israeli demonstrators is trying to end the war in Lebanon. 
Few are taking notice.
“We understand we don’t represent the consensus. Everyone is asleep,” said Uri Even-Chen, 36, a computer programmer from the town of Ranana, during a weekend street march in Tel Aviv.
Opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of Israelis back the war against Hezbollah, sparked when the guerrillas abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
The death, damage and panic caused by Hezbollah’s rockets have only hardened attitudes — more than 2,700 missiles have slammed into northern Israel, killing 48 people.
Those views have been reflected in the tiny street protests.
By contrast, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated at the height of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when the army sought to cripple Palestinian militants living there.
In one of the biggest rallies to date, around 2,000 people turned out in Tel Aviv at the weekend. Many carried communist and anarchist flags and banners belonging to Arab Israeli movements — hardly the Israeli mainstream.
“The majority who support opposition to the war are from the radical left,” said protester Amit Ramon, 42, a high-tech worker. “The mainstream left is no longer left.”
Anti-war groups have demanded an immediate ceasefire and negotiations with Hezbollah over prisoners.
At the weekend rally in Tel Aviv, veteran peace campaigner Yael Dayan was booed off a stage for urging the safe return of all of Israel’s soldiers fighting in Lebanon, underscoring how far removed protesters remain from most Israelis.
“There is no mainstream political opposition [to the war],” Israeli analyst Mark Heller said. “This is basically seen as a legitimate response to a serious challenge from somebody else.”
Anti-war activists remain frustrated that protest groups such as Peace Now have not opposed the government.
The group, at the forefront of opposition to the previous war in Lebanon, insists Israel had the right to respond to attacks on its soil. Other dovish bodies such as the political party Meretz have been virtually silent in opposition to the war.
Many in the protest camp have turned on Defense Minister Amir Peretz, a former labor union leader and avowed supporter of negotiations with the Palestinians.
“Peretz wants to be a hero and we are suffering because of it,” said demonstrator Yoav Bar, 51, an electrician from Haifa.
Many traditional supporters of bodies such as Peace Now find it difficult to identify with the current anti-war groups.
“I supported the anti-war rallies in the 1980s but this is different,” Shmuel Adar, 71, from Tel Aviv said. “This is a defensive war and it is clear that there is an intention to attack and destroy Israel — just look at the amount of rockets fired.” 
With Israel possibly set to expand its offensive in Lebanon, opposition still looks feeble but protesters are not giving up. 
In the northern city of Haifa, one of Hezbollah’s favorite targets, sporadic protests have been held, with very little backing from the city’s embattled residents. 
“We remain distant voices but what Israel is doing in Lebanon is shocking... Opposition will build up,” said Yoni Yeheskiel, 23, a student at one Haifa rally.

TITLE: Three Detained in Hermitage Investigation
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Three people were detained over the weekend in connection with the massive theft from the State Hermitage Museum, but the police are reluctant to give details.
The Interfax news agency, citing an unidentified official which the agency described as a “source very close to the investigation,” said the police detained an art collector as well as the husband and son of Hermitage curator Larisa Zavadskaya. 
They have confessed to stealing at least some of the 221 artifacts over a period of six years, Rueters reported Monday, without giving a source.
Zavadskaya died at her desk in October 2005 as an inventory was taken in her department that resulted in the staggering theft being discovered. 
But both the police and the Hermitage refused to comment on the report on Monday.
Vyacheslav Stepchenko, head of the St. Petersburg police press service said the police did detain the three suspects but declined to elaborate on the case on Monday, adding that nobody has yet been charged. He also did not confirm whether it was members of Zavadskaya’s family that had been detained.
Under Russian law suspects can be detained for up to 48 hours, and if the prosecutors are unable to charge them, the suspects must be released. 
The theft an estimated $5 million-worth of jewelry, enamel and other artifacts was discovered during an inventory of the museum’s Russian art department between October 2005 and July 2006. The items were not insured.
A Moscow collector on Saturday contacted the police to return a 19th century gilded silver chalice — no.60 on the list provided by the museum — that he had bought almost two years ago. The dealer maintained he had been unaware of the artwork had been stolen.
Boris Boyarskov, head of the Russian Board for the Preservation of Cultural Valuables said the dealer provided valuable information to the investigation and “gave an important link to possible fate of the other stolen items.” 
In Moscow on Monday Anatoly Vilkov, Boyarskov’s deputy, showed reporters a small icon that had been recovered from an antiques dealer, and said officials hoped more items would be recovered soon, Reuters reported.
On Friday, an icon worth $200,000, was found in a garbage can outside 21, Ulitsa Ryleyeva, following an anonymous telephone call to police. Since Saturday, six more items, including two icons, a chalice, a cigarette holder, a mug and a hinged icon, have been returned to St. Petersburg and Moscow police, the police press service reported. 
The museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, said on Sunday he finds it impossible to comment on contradicting reports about Zavadskaya and members of her family and the theft.
A full list of the stolen works and their descriptions is available at the museum’s website at www.hermitagemuseum.org in the current news section.
“A crystal vase in the shape of a shell, on a crystal base, with carved ornamentation in a varicolored enamel coated silver frame,” reads the description of the No. 1 item on the list, a 19th century vase. 
Not all of the missing items have photographs or electronic images of them available. The museum’s electronic catalogue covers only several hundred thousand of the Hermitage’s staggering over 3 million artworks.
A high-profile inspection by the Russian Board for the Preservation of Cultural Valuables has been working at the Hermitage since Wednesday to investigate the case, assess potential risks for the future and make recommendations.
“It would be premature to talk about final conclusions but our experts have already found serious lapses and weaknesses in the Hermitage’s system of keeping records and maintain control over the precious items in its collection,” Boyarskov said at a news conference in Moscow on Saturday.
Piotrovsky admitted the Hermitage’s security and control systems need an overhaul.
“Access for the museum’s staff to the funds and storage facilities will be severely restricted,” Piotrovsky said. “The theft has shown that our current security routines do not respond to modern challenges and underestimate the chances of an inside job.”
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. 
Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Russian Agency for Culture and Cinematography, said Mikhail Piotrovsky will receive an official written reprimand for poor level of internal security in the museum.
Shvydkoi said Piotrovsky had previously received three similar  reprimands.

TITLE: City’s Jewish Revival Comes in Many Forms
AUTHOR: By Ben Judah
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Early on a Friday evening deep in dacha season, a couple of dozen people slowly drift into a non-descript office block, tucked away between a Coffee House and a S’barro. You would never know the small Sha’rei Shalom synagogue was here. 
Anya, 21, has recently decided to start coming here instead of the Choral synagogue. 
“I am modern, a woman and my mother is Russian. I felt there was no place for me at a traditional synagogue. This synagogue is different,” she says,” this is a progressive synagogue.”
The youthful and beardless Rabbi Michael Farbman of Sha’rei Shalom is keen to explain what is different about his community, compared to the long-established orthodox Choral synagogue. For him, “this is about offering a modern, progressive, alternative form of practising religious Judaism to the Jews of St. Petersburg other than the orthodox model.” 
At the Friday night service, that ushers in the Jewish sabbath, you can plainly see the difference between orthodox and progressive Judaism. Men and women sit together and the Rabbi strums on his guitar as he sings from the prayer book. 
“I like to think of my service as interactive,” he says smiling. Rabbi Farbman explains that the difference between orthodox and progressive Judaism lies in the matter of interpretation and application of Jewish religious law. 
“For the same reason we no longer have slaves, or practice any of those other ancient practices, we believe in the complete parity of men and women. It’s a question of form not essence.”
Progressive Judaism, which predominates in the U.S. and has a large affiliation in most other Jewish communities has just begun to appear in the former Soviet Union. 
“When we began three years ago, we started from scratch, but we found people who’d been waiting for progressive Judaism, people who’d been searching for progressive Judaism without really knowing what they’d been searching for, and then people who came, attracted by what we were doing.” 
Yet after only a few years, regular attendance every week is around forty, with youth groups and movements growing rapidly. 
“Even though the community is ageing, we have more than enough committed young people here,” insists Farbman.
Even though almost all of his congregation have only one or two Jewish grandparents, Rabbi Farbman stresses “we share, all of us, the Jewish feeling of not quite belonging, maybe belonging somewhere else.”
For many the attraction of progressive Judaism lies in its ability to seemingly reconcile Jewish and Russian identities in a simple accessible form and could become popular among Russia’s estimated Jewish population of 100,000, many of whom are secular.
Rabbi Peretz Peretz, of the orthodox Choral Synagogue disagrees, adding that “Russian Jews identify with a more traditional vision of orthodox Judaism — even if they are not practising it.” 
The relationship between Sha’rei Shalom and Choral has not reached the levels of bitter and vicious squabbles that other diaspora communities and and those in Israel have seen. But the theological differences between them are more than slight. 
“For me religion is an institution that cannot be reformed according to one’s likes and dislikes, then simplified to make it easier to digest,” Peretz Peretz said.
Adjusting his skullcap and evidently choosing his words carefully on such a sensitive topic, Farbman describes his relationship with the Choral synagogue as “cordial.” 
He adds, “they snipe at us all the time, I am lucky never to have been attacked personally. But we’re not in competition with each other.”
The problem both Rabbis face is one of outreach. In a city with a Jewish population half the size of the Jewish population of Britain, there are only a dozen or so strictly observant families. Art, a twenty-something classical promoter is typical. 
Art says “I am a Jew, so is my wife. And I won’t leave for Israel, though many of my friends have. I live here, I work here, I drink here and I’m not religious.” 
But cultural events and secular activities organised by the Jewish community are often a great success.
The Yesod, the new Jewish Community Center, which opened earlier this year has been attracting crowds of hundreds of people to celebrate festivals such as Purim, the Jewish carnival, as well as to cinematic events and themed evenings. 
Menachem Lepkivker, who is the Jewish American Joint Distribution Committee representative in the city, speaks enthusiastically about the impact he hopes it will have.
“The Yesod will be a bridge to either the orthodox or the progressive synagogues,” said Lepkivker. 
The JDC sponsors Jewish cultural life in the city.

TITLE: Alcohol Deaths Reduced
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The number of alcohol-related deaths declined in the first five months of 2006 thanks to new registration procedures in the alcoholic beverages industry, Gennady Onishchenko, the country's chief epidemiologist, said Friday.
Alcohol poisoning claimed 1,800 fewer lives in the period from January through May than during the same period last year, said Onishchenko, who heads the Health and Social Development Ministry's Federal Consumer Protection Service. 
There were 236 fewer alcohol-related deaths in the Moscow region alone, Onishchenko said, without providing any additional statistics, Interfax reported.
Onishchenko said that in the city of Moscow 45 fewer people died, a drop of 22 percent.
In his state-of-the-nation address in 2005, President Vladimir Putin said 40,000 died each year from alcohol poisoning, primarily from drinking tainted alcohol. He called on the federal government to address the problem.
The federal government responded by introducing the Unified State Automated Information System, or EGAIS, a database that will eventually contain records on all alcoholic beverages sold in the country from both domestic and foreign producers.
Domestic producers began providing information to EGAIS in January. Importers and distributors of foreign wines and spirits were supposed to hook up to the system on July 1. The system has been overloaded and has functioned poorly, however, causing widespread shortages and bringing the industry to its knees.
Onishchenko said that, despite the problems, the new system had achieved its main goal: to reduce the amount of tainted alcohol. 
“All the lives that have been saved are worth the suffering of people who built their fortunes at the expense of the health and lives of their fellow citizens,” he said in an apparent response to complaints from the alcoholic beverage industry.
The Sverdlovsk regional branch of the Federal Consumer Protection Service tells a different story, however. In a report posted on its web site, the branch office said alcohol-related deaths were up 19 percent in the first six months of 2006, compared with the same period last year.
The deaths were caused by excessive consumption of alcohol as well as by tainted alcohol, Anna Ozhiganova, a spokeswoman for the branch, said Friday by telephone.
The service does not keep separate statistics for these two types of alcohol poisoning, she said.
Onishchenko's spokeswoman declined to comment on the Sverdlovsk report.

TITLE: Yanukovych to Make Russia ‘Top Priority’
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: KIEV — Viktor Yanukovych was approved as Ukraine’s new prime minister Friday, and he immediately declared his intention to improve the country’s strained relationship with Russia.
Ukrainian lawmakers approved Yanukovych in a 271-9 vote after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko nominated his former rival as prime minister. Yushchenko said the alternative — dissolving the parliament and calling new elections — would have been a blow to the country.
After the vote, Yanukovych shook hands with Yushchenko and smiled broadly as supporters clapped and cheered. Later, Yanukovych told journalists: “When we shook hands with each other, I felt that we were partners.
“My first visits will be to Brussels, Moscow and the United States,” he said. “First of all, I would like to say that we will single out relations with Russia as a priority.”
Yushchenko acceded to his arch rival’s political comeback after Yanukovych agreed to continue Ukraine’s pro-Western course, uphold democratic freedoms and ensure the opposition has equal rights during elections. The “national unity” pact also spells out Ukraine’s European Union aspirations and promotes cooperation with NATO, but says membership can only come after a referendum.
Under constitutional changes made in the midst of the Orange Revolution, and now supported only lukewarmly by Yushchenko, the prime minister and the parliament have considerably broader powers, especially over the budget and domestic policy.
The parliament approved Mykola Azarov, a long-term Yanukovych ally, as finance minister and first deputy prime minister, and appointed diplomat Volodymyr Makukha as economy minister. 
Yushchenko was entitled under the Constitution to name the foreign and defense ministers, and he renominated his two current appointees to the posts: Boris Tarasyuk and Anatoly Hrytsenko, respectively.
Yanukovych also let the president nominate the interior minister, and Yushchenko retained Yuriy Lutsenko, whose criminal investigations into some of Yanukovych’s allies made him one of Party of the Regions’ biggest political enemies.
Lutsenko was hospitalized with hypertension on Friday.
Many lawmakers from Yushchenko’s party and that of Orange Revolution heroine Yulia Tymoshenko abstained or stayed away altogether from the parliamentary hall on Friday. 
Yanukovych’s return “is revenge, with an element of humiliation for us,” Our Ukraine lawmaker Vyacheslav Kyrylenko said. “We’ll see how serious this revenge is.”
Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions won the most votes in the March parliamentary election, capitalizing on the president’s falling popularity due to infighting among his allies and the slow pace of change. 
However, since no party won a majority of seats, the country fell into political paralysis as parties argued, maneuvered and shifted alliances. 
Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions formed a coalition with the Socialists, who had defected from an earlier coalition that included Yushchenko’s bloc, and the Communists. The new coalition nominated Yanukovych to be prime minister, the post he had held when he ran against Yushchenko in 2004. 
The parliament also swore in Constitutional Court judges on Friday. The court has been without a quorum since late last year, after the parliament refused to swear in Yushchenko’s choices or pick their own.

(AP, Reuters, NYT)

TITLE: Prosecutor Says Army Hazing-Death Rate is Down
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — After just one month on the job, the new chief military prosecutor, Sergei Fridinsky, announced on Friday a dramatic decline in the number of suicides and hazing-related deaths in the armed forces.
Speaking at a meeting of top military prosecutors attended by Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Fridinsky said the number of suicides among military personnel was down 10 percent in the first half of the year, while the number of hazing-related deaths fell by 28 percent.
Some 3,500 beatings and other hazing incidents have been reported this year, leaving 17 soldiers dead and more than 100 with serious injuries, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Most recently, a soldier killed himself Thursday while on guard duty at an Interior Ministry troops unit in the central Siberian city of Zheleznogorsk, Itar-Tass reported Friday. The suicide was the eighth non-combat death in the unit in the last 16 months.
Fridinsky’s upbeat assessment contrasted sharply with the reports of his predecessor, Alexander Savenkov. Just a few months ago, Savenkov warned about the rise of non-combat deaths and the plague of hazing in the armed forces, much to Ivanov’s consternation.
Savenkov feuded publicly with Ivanov for two years, accusing the top brass of covering up the truth about crime in the military. Savenkov lost his job last month when Chaika ordered a major shakeup of the prosecutor’s office. 
Human rights groups warned that Savenkov’s departure would allow the military to continue concealing the truth about crimes in the ranks. The Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees has warned that the military prosecutor’s office would once more turn a blind eye to hazing and other crimes.
Fridinsky admitted Friday that while the number of non-combat deaths had fallen, the overall crime rate in the military was actually on the rise, especially economic crimes committed by officers. Fridinsky offered no plan for tackling the problem, however. 
“We understand that this problem is not exclusive to the armed forces. It affects the whole of society, including law enforcement,” Fridinsky said.
The crime rate in the military has grown by 13 percent this year, Chaika said at the meeting. The number of hazing incidents increased by 3 percent, he said, blaming the increase on Savenkov, whom he accused of unnecessary confrontation with the Defense Ministry.
“In recent years, military prosecutors have adopted an openly confrontational stance toward the Defense Ministry rather than cooperating and pooling their efforts,” Chaika said.
Savenkov positioned himself as an outside observer and critic and politicized pressing problems, creating an uproar in the media, Chaika added.
Chaika seemed to be referring to the high-profile case of Andrei Sychyov, a first-year conscript serving at the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy. Sychyov was the victim of a brutal hazing incident in January that left him with gangrene in his feet and legs. Sychyov’s legs and genitals were subsequently amputated.
Savenkov stated publicly that he had never encountered a more egregious offense during his career, and vowed to oversee the investigation personally, including what he called the military leadership’s attempt to cover up the incident.
A second-year soldier at the academy, Alexander Sivyakov, has been accused of carrying out the attack. Sivyakov is charged with “exceeding his authority with grave consequences.” Sivyakov is currently on trial in Chelyabinsk. Sychyov is being treated at the Burdenko military hospital in Moscow.

TITLE: Police Say Safes, Documents Missing
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian criminal police in the capital are trying to track down two huge safes containing classified documents that had been removed from its offices by mistake as scrap metal, Kommersant daily newspaper reported on Monday. 
The newspaper quoted a police source as saying that workers, who were renovating the Interior Ministry building in mid-July, moved the safes to the yard from which they had been picked up by scrap metal collectors from among other decommissioned equipment.
The paper said checks at the scrap metal collection center yielded no results. Its source did not say what kind of documents the safes had contained.
“One has to hope that the safes had been utilized together with their contents,” the police source told Kommersant. 
“I even do not want to think about other options.”
Interfax news agency said that an investigation had been launched into the disappearance of the safes. 
Police refused to comment.

TITLE: U.S. Punishes Arms Trader, Sukhoi With Sanctions
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The United States has slapped sanctions on state arms trader Rosoboronexport and jetmaker Sukhoi, accusing them of helping Iran acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Officials in Moscow reacted angrily, criticizing Washington for attempting “to impose U.S. laws on foreigners.” 
The sanctions on Friday came as relations between Moscow and Washington were strained over a number of other issues, from tensions over the Middle East to frustrations over the United States blocking Russia’s World Trade Organization bid to Russian delays in announcing large contracts that U.S. firms hope to win.
The United States has been seeking greater help from Moscow in getting Iran to drop its nuclear program, citing fears Tehran is planning to make a bomb. Iran insists its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes only. 
The two companies denied in statements any wrongdoing, while the Foreign Ministry hinted that a tit-for-tat response would hurt U.S. companies in Russia. The Defense Ministry said the sanctions were likely a response to Russia’s arms deal last month with Venezuela.
Last Monday, Russia voted for a U.S.-backed United Nations Security Council resolution that called for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program.
Questioned about the timing of the trade restrictions, a senior U.S. government official said there was “never a good time” to impose sanctions, adding: “They know the law,” The New York Times reported Saturday.
“In effect, the United States is punishing its own companies by preventing them from working with the most advanced Russian enterprises,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its web site Friday evening.
The Foreign Ministry’s statement was the first indication of the sanctions, which were not officially announced by the U.S. State Department but were later confirmed by unnamed officials within the department.
It was not immediately clear how the sanctions would affect the Russian companies. The sanctions were imposed under the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000, a law that bars U.S. government agencies from working with companies judged to be aiding Iran in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
The sanctions came into effect July 28, and will last for two years. 
Of the five other companies put on the State Department’s blacklist, two are from India, two from North Korea and one from Cuba, Reuters reported, citing an unnamed State Department official.
“The sanctions apply to the specific entities and their successors, sub-units or subsidiaries, and not their respective countries or government,” Reuters quoted the official as saying Friday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government had “credible information” that equipment and materials that could help Iran make weapons of mass destruction had been sent to the country since 1999.
The Foreign Ministry on Friday denied that the Russian companies had supplied WMD technology to Iran.
“We want to especially stress that Russia limits its cooperation with Iran to supplying exclusively defensive weapons that are not capable of destabilizing the situation in the region,” the Foreign Ministry said.
Late last year, Russia agreed to supply $1 billion worth of weapons to Tehran by 2008, including up to 30 short-range Tor-M1 air defense systems.
News of the sanctions came a week after Russia struck a $3 billion arms deal to supply Venezuela with 24 Sukhoi fighter jets and 53 helicopters. There are also plans to build a factory in Venezuela that will produce AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition. 
The United States put an embargo on arms sales to Venezuela in May.
President Vladimir Putin and his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, signed the deal in the Kremlin on July 27. 
Chavez visited Russia as part of a tour that included several nations critical of the United States, including Iran, Cuba and Belarus. Chavez also said he would visit North Korea, but that leg of the trip was later called off. 
In Tehran, Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talked up the idea of an anti-U.S. alliance. 
During his tour, Chavez said Venezuela could also supply weapons to “friendly countries that also require a minimal level of defense.”
U.S. annoyance at the arms deal with Venezuela could well be the reason behind the sanctions, the Defense Ministry said over the weekend.
“The sanctions are apparently a U.S. reaction to the Russian breakthrough on the Venezuelan arms market,” the ministry said in a statement, Itar-Tass reported.
Rosoboronexport and Sukhoi denied any wrongdoing on Saturday.
“We haven’t shipped any products to that country in the last eight to 10 years,” Vadim Razumovsky, spokesman for Sukhoi said Saturday in televised remarks.
Rosoboronexport chief Sergei Chemezov said his company had acted in full accordance with international law.
“Many foreign companies, including those from NATO member states, have conducted similar deals,” Chemezov told Channel One television.
Rosoboronexport, in a statement carried by Interfax late Friday, said the sanctions could harm efforts to combat illegal weapons production across the globe, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
Kalashnikov rifles have been produced without license in many parts of the world for decades.
Rosoboronexport called the sanctions “an unfriendly act toward the Russian state and an attempt to destabilize Russia military and technical cooperation with other nations.”

TITLE: Memorial: Chechnya Killings Have Declined
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Killings and disappearances in Chechnya have dropped by more than one-third in the past year, human rights group Memorial said in an annual report. But the group cautioned that the fall might be due to a growing climate of fear in which people are afraid to report crimes. 
The report documented 192 killings and 316 disappearances since August 2005, compared with 310 killings and 448 disappearances the previous year.
The report also expressed concern about continued abuses, particularly the destruction of four houses in the settlement of Borozdinovskaya during a raid to flush out suspected militants. An elderly man died, and 11 people vanished.
Reprisals are known to occur against Chechens who complain about abuses, said Ole Solvang, director of the Stichting Russian Justice Initiative, which helped Fatmia Bazorkina win a European Court of Human Rights lawsuit in July over the disappearance of her son in Chechnya. “People are turning to us less frequently. Those who are coming to us for help do seem to be more afraid, and it has become more difficult to get eyewitnesses to testify,” he said.
The Memorial report said a clear improvement was the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure and housing.
On Saturday, Argun residents celebrated the end of the rebuilding of their city. Streets were decorated with portraits of Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov reading, “We Are Proud of You!”

TITLE: Fuel Theft Probed in Far East
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Military prosecutors in the Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk are investigating the possible theft of about $50,000 worth of diesel fuel from a secret nuclear weapons storage facility.
Colonel Yury Navrotsky, the commander of a military unit at the facility, is being accused by the unit’s chief accountant, Major Yury Shashkov, of stealing the fuel in 2004 and 2005, Kommersant reported late last week. The top secret facility stores nuclear warheads and is informally known as Korfovsky Obyekt.
Shashkov alerted the facility’s commander, Colonel Alexander Velikanov, after he first learned that the fuel was being stolen in 2004, but Velikanov decided to cover up the theft, Kommersant said. Velikanov forced personnel to accept responsibility and to chip in to pay from 5,000 rubles to 15,000 rubles ($187 to $560) each for the missing fuel. He also purportedly ordered that several of the facility’s vehicles be sold to help cover the 1.3 million ruble cost of the fuel. Calls to the military prosecutor’s office in Khabarovsk went unanswered Friday.

TITLE: Construction Company Labeled ‘Extremist’
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Prior to the adoption of a bill on extremism last month, human rights activists had worried that the first targets would be outspoken opposition groups and media organizations. But now it looks like it might be bricklayers and cement mixers. 
Senior environmental official Oleg Mitvol said Friday that he would seek to have a construction firm that resisted his attempts to carry out an inspection classified as extremist under the new law and have its property confiscated.
“I sent a letter today to the Prosecutor General’s Office, asking it to determine whether the actions of the company Kievskaya Ploshchad are extremist,” said Mitvol, deputy head of the Federal Service for the Inspection of Natural Resources Use.
“If it is qualified as such, I will bring the case to court,” he said by telephone.
The announcement is certain to stir up worries among rights activists, who had repeatedly warned that the new legislation was vaguely worded and open to broad interpretation. The legislation — roundly criticized by the activists as a way of empowering officials to silence opposition politicians and the media — broadly defines as extremist any violent and threatening action that impedes the lawful activities of officials. 
President Vladimir Putin signed the bill into law in late July, and it goes into effect Wednesday.
Mitvol’s complaint comes after he and two lawmakers were barred on July 11 from entering the guarded perimeter of the Yevropeisky shopping center, which is being built next to Kievsky Station. Kievskaya Ploshchad is overseeing the construction, and it and the shopping center are owned by Zarakh Iliyev, a media-shy Azeri retail tycoon who was named Moscow’s largest commercial landlord by the Russian edition of Forbes magazine in February.
Mitvol was accompanied on his visit by Alexander Khinshtein, the State Duma deputy and muckraking journalist; and Sergei Mitrokhin, a liberal deputy from the Moscow City Duma.
The trio visited the construction site to check whether builders were observing environmental regulations.
They were not let in, even when a group of police officers arrived to help at their request, Mitvol and Khinshtein said. Guards and builders pushed the officials out and even slammed a door on Khinshtein’s fingers, they said.
In June, Khinshtein wrote a critical article about the project in Moskovsky Komsomolets. 
In his capacity as deputy, he sent a letter to the Prosecutor General’s Office warning that the construction might lead to the collapse of the nearby Kievskaya metro station. 
Mitvol said Kievskaya Ploshchad lacked the proper environmental clearances for construction. 
He made a similar claim at the beginning of the year and tried to get the project called off.
Repeated calls to Kievskaya Ploshchad’s offices went unanswered Friday. In several interviews in June and July, Kievskaya Ploshchad head Vladislav Novikov maintained that his company had all the needed documentation and dismissed suggestions that the construction threatened the metro station.
Mitvol said that if a court were to determine that Kievskaya Ploshchad was an extremist organization, its property would be confiscated.

TITLE: Tracking Medicines Could Kill
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — After the botched implementation of electronic tracking to eradicate bootleg liquor, the authorities are considering using a similar system to combat counterfeit medicines.
Yet, such a crackdown could be extremely dangerous if bungled, say experts in the country’s $8 billion pharmaceutical industry. Counterfeit medicines are estimated to account for about 8 percent of the medicines in circulation. 
The Federal Health and Social Development Inspection Service “is considering the idea of instituting a system, similar to the Unified State Automated Information System, on Russia’s pharmaceuticals market,” service chief Ramil Khabriyev said, Gazeta reported late last week.
The troubled implementation of the Unified State Automated Information System, or EGAIS, which was created to track every alcoholic product sold in the country, since July 1 has emptied many store shelves of imported alcoholic drinks, and threatens to create a shortage of products that use alcohol, such as cosmetics.
Industry experts warned that a similar shortage of prescription medicines could threaten countless lives. Instead, tougher penalties for counterfeiters and better enforcement of the law would be a more effective measure of combating fake medicines, they said.
Botched reforms have been responsible for at least two instances of dangerous shortages of prescription drugs in recent years. In January 2005, the poorly implemented cash-for-benefits reform left many Russians without vital prescription drugs for several weeks, due to supply holdups. In 1999 a change in the system for prescribing and distributing insulin, coupled with an effort to boost domestic production of the drug, affected millions of diabetes sufferers and left supplies dangerously low. Shortages lasted for months. 
Khabriyev said EGAIS “would not be copied exactly.” 
On Friday, Sergei Osipov, a spokesman for the health service, declined to elaborate on Khabriyev’s comments. The service would only answer questions in writing, he said.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov last month stressed the need to “ban the flow of medicines into retail without using technologies that protect medicines from counterfeiting,” RIA-Novosti reported. Speaking during a meeting of United Russia Duma deputies and President Vladimir Putin, Gryzlov said legislators would clean up the pharmaceuticals market in the fall. 
But counterfeit drugs should not be approached the same way as bootleg liquor, market watchers warned. 
A system like EGAIS could have a “catastrophic effect” if applied to the pharmaceuticals market, said Vladimir Senatorov of Remedium, an industry consultant.
While alcohol shortages are a drain on the industry and a nuisance for consumers, shortages of vital medicines are potentially deadly.
Rooting out counterfeit medicines is “absolutely not a matter of technology,”said Veniamin Monblit, research director at Comcon, a research company. 
“The equipment for manufacturing medicine is expensive and complex. It cannot be installed at a dacha or in some shed,” Monblit said, referring to bootleg alcohol.
Counterfeit medicines are sometimes produced at the same plants that make legal medicines. “It’s a matter of catching them and closing them down,” Monblit said.
The inspection service is planning to complete large-scale checks of warehouses and pharmacies by November, Khabriyev said.
About 70 percent of uncovered counterfeit drugs are knock-offs of foreign medicines, Interfax reported, citing the inspection service’s figures. Roughly 8 percent of medicines circulating in the country are counterfeit, according to consultancy Pharmexpert.
Khabriyev said the production of fake medicines would be considered a “heinous breach of licensing rules” by pharmacies and warehouses and would lead to their licenses being revoked.
“It’s a good first step toward what needs to be done,” said Sergei Boboshko, executive director of the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. “Right now, counterfeiters get off with an administrative fine ... that is, if they are found out.”
Making or selling counterfeit medicines is not currently considered a criminal offense under the law.
“The only sure way [to fight them] is with strong legislation and effective enforcement. Without that, we are whistling in the wind,” Boboshko said.

TITLE: Funds Huff and Puff At Lack of City Real Estate
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The UFG Private Equity Fund has acquired a 40 percent stake in St. Petersburg-based tobacco producer Nevo Tabak. The fund intends to pour $100 million into company development, Interfax reported Friday.
“Those resources will be invested over the next few years. At the moment we are in the process of planning next year’s budget,” Interfax cited Oleg Amiranov, Nevo Tabak CEO, as saying last week.
He identified improvements to the distribution system, marketing work and the moving of production facilities from the Admiralteisky district to the Pulkovo area as the main costs.
The plant will move to the new location next year, without stopping production.
“The plant is squeezed between residential buildings at the moment. Because of the potential noise, we can neither work in three shifts nor modernize equipment to make the plant ecologically safe. Logistically it is also difficult. Large trucks are not allowed into the district. We have to use small cars, which increases costs,” Amiranov said to Interfax.
The new plant will increase production capacity to 11 billion cigarettes a year. It could then increase further to 25 billion cigarettes.
Last year Nevo Tabak produced seven billion cigarettes — considerably less that market leaders. Philip Morris, which produced over 90 billion cigarettes, and British American Tobacco — about 80 billion in 2005.
This year Amiranov expects a turnover of around $81.5 million.
Nevo Tabak’s current production site will be converted into residential, shopping and office areas. It was here, according to one expert, that UFG Private Equity Fund sought to gain from the deal.
“The fund’s interest in the tobacco company is based on its valuable assets — real estate in the center of St. Petersburg. The core business of tobacco production may not be included in the deal at all,” said Pavel Bilenko, director for securities at Planeta Capital investment company.
Western funds are forced into such deals by a lack of construction sites, especially in the center of the city, Belenko said. He recalled a recent deal between the managing company of Deutsche Bank and Severny Gorod construction company.
“Many Scandinavian investors invest into commercial real estate in St. Petersburg. In Moscow real estate prices have attained such a high level that further increases will be much slower. The St. Petersburg real estate market traditionally lags behind Moscow and has more potential for growth,” Belenko said.
A real estate expert identified several ways that the Nevo Tabak complex could be developed, though each has its limitations.
“Considering accessibility and location, the most reasonable option would be to reconstruct a part of the Nevo Tabak complex and convert it into a B2-class business center,” said Roman Urevich, head of the marketing research department at the London Consulting and Management Company.
The area’s relative poverty he found to be a disadvantage.
“The location of the complex outside higher class areas, the absence of unique panoramic views and the uneven social environment will not really allow the construction of elite real estate on the territory. Only houses of mid-range comfort would work,” Urevich said.
“Despite its advantageous location in the central part of the city and its proximity to main axes of transport and the Technological Institute metro station, a shopping center of classical design would not really be suitable. It would hardly be visible from Moskovsky Prospect,” Urevich said.
“A specialized shopping center or a center with a strong core of regular tenants would be preferable,” he said.
In any case, money needs to be spent on a spacious parking lot because construction of a shopping center would complicate the traffic situation in the area, Urevich added.

TITLE: State Funds Kindle Light at Both Ends of Neva Tunnel
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Last week the Russian government assigned three projects financing from the state investment fund — one of them was the Orlovsky tunnel under the Neva river.
“The first package of investment agreements is ready. We will not consider other projects until September,” Interfax cited German Gref, minister for economic development and trade, as saying Thursday.
The week before the government approved the financing of four other projects, including the Western High-Speed Link Road, also in St. Petersburg.
The total cost of the projects is $25 billion. The investment fund will provide $6.15 billion; the rest should be covered by private investors.
Investment tenders will start in September, Gref said. By the end of the year the minister expects 11 projects to be financed from the fund.
“Realizing both projects will have a significant social impact and define the city’s planning, economic development and its investment appeal,” Vera Heifets, press secretary of the committee for investment and strategic projects, said Thursday in a statement.
The total cost of the Orlovsky tunnel is $987 million. Apart from the $328 million supplied by the investment fund, the city budget will provide roughly the same again.
Construction is to start by the end of 2006, but to do so the city needs a private investor to cover the remaining costs.
According to the committee for investment and strategic projects, the Orlovsky tunnel project has been positively appraised by consultants from ING Bank N.V. in terms of its economic and financial viability and appeal for investors.
However experts listed a number of risks a probable investor should consider.
“It is not a trivial matter, the building of business relations on a parity basis with the state, a partner that essentially lays down the rules and historically has not been accustomed to playing in a team,” said Olga Poleschuk, attorney at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
She emphasized the importance of bringing “the liabilities of the RF state as a concession grantor in line with a huge variety of laws concerning the operation of the state budget and the distribution of authority and responsibility among numerous state bodies and agencies.”
“We believe that the path breakers are ready to assume a somewhat higher level of risk at the start while afterwards it should go more easily,” Poleschuk said.
Konstantin Krasovsky, general director of Competence Consulting, listed a number of successful public private partnerships including the Ust-Luga port, the Sangudinskaya hydroelectric power station and the Unified Aviaconstruction Company.
“Russian legislation allows the realization of such projects, though the risks taken on by private investors are not sufficiently covered by law,” Krasovsky said.
“State participation guarantees stability and minimizes investment risks, but if the state fails to provide financing, the efficiency of the project would be seriously put in question. On top of the risks related to partnership with the state, a thorough consideration of standard investment risks is needed,” Krasovsky added.
“The fact that the law does not define what security packages may be offered to investors is one of its weakness. It only provides a generic legal platform. Investors should address in detail the guarantees and liabilities of specific concession agreements,” said Olga Litvinova, office managing partner at DLA Piper in St. Petersburg.
The law only provides model concession agreements that are adaptable to various spheres. To protect their interests, she said, investors and their lawyers must enter in close cooperation with state bodies.
The large scale of PPP projects makes getting out of them rather difficult in the case of adverse developments, Litvinova said.
The complexity of the Orlovsky tunnel project makes the participation of several co-investors very likely, Poleschuk of PwC said.
Russian legislation allows joint ventures (simple partnerships) to become concessionaires, Poleschuk said.
“However, given the potential diversity of interests of co-investors, such a contractual structure may become so sophisticated and complicated that it becomes less attractive,” she said.
The more probable option for co-investors would be to set up a special corporate vehicle to unite their efforts and finances, Poleschuk said.

TITLE: Gazprom, ENI In Plant Talks
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom and Italian energy giant ENI are in talks to build a 2.5-billion-dollar natural gas liquefaction plant near Saint Petersburg, ENI CEO Paolo Scaroni said in an interview.
 “At the present time we are discussing with Gazprom building a natural gas liquefaction plant close to St. Petersburg with a capacity of eight billion cubic meters of gas per year,” Scaroni told Russian business daily Vedomosti.
“We are ready to be Gazprom’s partner,” Scaroni said.
The value of the contract in euros would be 1.94 billion euros.
Scaroni however said that Gazprom access to the Italian market would depend on ENI receiving access to concrete oil and gas projects in Russia.
“All of this is the subject of complex negotiations. Everything is going to depend on what we are able to get in return from Russia,” he said.
Scaroni said ENI was interested in joint liquefied natural gas, or LNG, projects off northwest Russia in the Baltic and Barents seas.
“We would be able to use ENI’s exclusive technologies in high-pressure gas liquefaction,” Scaroni said.
The Barents Sea is the site of the massive Shtokman gas field, which Gazprom plans to develop with several foreign partners.
ENI is not among the five foreign companies short-listed to help develop the 3.7-trillion-cubic meter field.
Scaroni said ENI could also help Gazprom’s plans to expand in Western Europe, but added that Gazprom “is still a young company, and it has to muster up a little patience.”

TITLE: Kerimov Tipped as Yukos White Knight
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Suleiman Kerimov’s investment company Nafta-Moskva has emerged as a possible white knight for Yukos and has held talks with former Yukos CEO Steven Theede about taking over the company’s debts, Kommersant reported Friday.
Nafta-Moskva denied the report, which quoted sources close to Yukos’ creditors. 
Yukos board chairman Viktor Gerashchenko told Ekho Moskvy radio earlier that a mysterious investor had proposed to the owners of the oil firm to pay its debts and take it over. 
Officials at Yukos and Nafta-Moskva were not immediately available for comment, and Kommersant had no further details. Yukos was declared bankrupt by the Moscow Arbitration Court on Tuesday. 
But Nafta-Moskva said in a statement that it was not interested in Yukos. “Neither Nafta-Moskva nor its representatives have taken part or intend to take part in any negotiations concerning Yukos, or in the purchase of its shares,” it said Friday. 
Yukos’ court-appointed receiver, Eduard Rebgun, has assessed its assets at $17.7 billion, less than its liabilities, while lawyers for the oil firm argue the company is worth at least twice as much. 
Yukos was hit with billions of dollars in back tax bills that it said was a politically motivated attempt by the Kremlin to ruin it and its founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is now serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison. 
Once the country’s largest firm by value, Yukos says it had already paid back over $20 billion in taxes, out of the total of $33 billion. But the total outstanding keeps snowballing as the state and state oil firm Rosneft present more claims. 
The intensely secretive Kerimov is little known in the West. 
A Dagestani-born State Duma deputy, he was listed as Russia’s eighth-richest man by Forbes magazine, clocking in at $7.1 billion. He was also No. 40 in the 2006 Sunday Times Europe’s richest 50 list. 
British media reports said pop stars Christina Aguilera and Shakira were paid $1.1 million each to sing at Kerimov’s 40th birthday party in Moscow recently. 
Nafta-Moskva owns the country’s No. 2 gold firm and biggest silver miner Polymetal. It also holds stakes of around 4 percent of gas monopoly Gazprom and 6 percent of state bank Sberbank, according to analysts and reports in the Russian media. 
Polymetal, the world’s fifth-largest silver miner, is seeking a London IPO in the first half of 2007. 
 Rebgun is complaining that he is being paid too little and wants at least $2 million a year, Vedomosti reported. The Moscow Arbitration Court hired Rebgun on a monthly salary of 1.8 million rubles ($67,260).
“After all, I have taken on responsibility for a company in the stage of bankruptcy,” Rebgun said. He said $2 million per year would be a fair salary “so I can just concentrate on my work, not look for other bonanzas.”

TITLE: Sakhalin-2 Faces Court Challenge
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Natural Resources Ministry said Friday that it would file a court challenge to the Shell-led Sakhalin-2 consortium’s plans to develop oil and gas fields off Sakhalin Island, a day after it called for a halt in pipe-laying at the $20 billion project. 
Analysts have said the ministry’s probe into Sakhalin-2 is aimed at pressuring the Sakhalin Energy group to offer Gazprom better terms as it jostles to join what will be the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas development. 
The ministry said in a statement Friday that the deputy head of its environmental agency, Oleg Mitvol, was suing to revoke approval for a feasibility study that underpins the consortium’s development plans. A day earlier, Mitvol had called for pipe-laying work on the island to be halted due to mudslide risks. 
Galina Dubina, spokeswoman for Sakhalin Energy, said the company had no comment about Friday’s statement. 
Sakhalin-2 is due to begin operations in 2008. 
Also Friday, government officials participating in a meeting at the Industry and Energy Ministry called for operators in production sharing agreements to issue quarterly reports on the status of the projects. 
A statement on the ministry’s web site also said the fact that operators departed from the original technical plans to develop fields was “problematic.”

TITLE: Interest Raised in Rates
AUTHOR: By Gleb Bryanski and Artyom Danielyan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Central Bank raised its short-term interest rates by a half-point Friday, taking advantage of tightening global monetary conditions to try and curb inflationary money supply growth. 
The hike, the third this year, is part of a Central Bank push to tackle annual inflation running at nearly 10 percent by soaking up some of the liquidity created by its dollar-buying currency market intervention. 
The bank said in a statement that it would increase its tomorrow-next, spot-next and call deposit rates to 2 percent and its one-week rate to 2.5 percent, effective Aug. 7.
“Today’s hike is part of the process of evening out credit and deposit rates in order to increase the efficiency of our monetary policy,” said Central Bank deputy head Konstantin Korishchenko. 
That comment suggested that deposit rates had scope to close the gap with the bank’s one-day repo rate of just over 6 percent. The repo rate is the bank’s main credit rate. 
Korishchenko confirmed the rate decision was influenced by global monetary tightening. The European Central Bank and Bank of England both raised rates last week, while the United States and Japan are also turning the interest rate screw. 
“We are not inclined to dramatize the situation and think markets will be calm. We see a critical level at 3.5 percent to 4.0 percent,” said Nikolai Podguzov, a fixed-income analyst at Trust Bank. 
“The Central Bank is trying to show it can influence liquidity through short-term interest rates,” he said, adding that previous hikes had “scared” the market but had had little practical impact. 
Overnight deposit rates popped higher on the interbank market but eased back to 2 percent to 3 percent, meaning real short-term rates remain deeply negative. The ruble rose 0.2 percent against the dollar/euro basket. Against the weak dollar, the ruble closed up 0.3 percent on the MICEX exchange at 26.6825, its highest since late 1999. 
Analysts say that as long as Russia’s main monetary policy tool remains the exchange rate, the Central Bank can only raise rates in step with the world’s major central banks, now all in tightening mode. 
M2 growth accelerated in the 12 months to July 1, to 43.9 percent. The Central Bank’s reserves of gold and foreign exchange — the largest of any country outside Asia — have soared 53 percent this year, to a record $266 billion. 
“This is the Central Bank’s answer to signs of rising inflation,” said Stanislav Ponomarenko, economist at Raiffeisen Bank, referring to expectations that retail prices may rise by 0.5 percent, to 0.6 percent in July. 
“There are plenty of reasons for prices to rise — gasoline prices, shortages of alcohol,” Ponomarenko said. 
“But the main reason is money supply growth. To limit this growth, the Central Bank is raising interest rates.” 
The Central Bank has allowed the ruble to rise by 4 percent against the dollar/euro basket this year, attracting new financial inflows made easier by Russia’s abolition of capital controls starting July 1.

TITLE: Gazprom and LUKoil Seeking Algerian Ventures
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Gazprom and LUKoil signed memorandums of understanding Friday with Algerian state company Sonatrach as they seek more joint oil and gas projects.
The Industry and Energy Ministry said Gazprom and Sonatrach agreed to cooperate in upstream asset swaps, joint bidding for assets in third countries and in the liquefied natural gas business, in which Sonatrach is a leading player.
Gazprom supplies Europe with one-quarter of its gas needs, and Sonatrach is also a major gas exporter to the continent.
LUKoil said it had also agreed with Sonatrach to cooperate in asset swaps in the upstream sector.
Russia and Algeria are both seeking to increase state control over their energy sectors and have often called for closer cooperation in the gas sector.
In the 1990s, Gazprom’s management outraged European officials by calling for an OPEC-like gas cartel, which would involve Russia, Algeria and Norway, supplying the bulk of pipeline gas to Europe.
The idea never materialized and Gazprom said it was focusing on learning more about gas liquefaction, a completely new business for the company, which allows for long-haul exports by tanker.
Last year, Gazprom agreed with France’s Gaz de France to swap Russian pipeline gas in Europe against one of GdF’s LNG cargoes for delivery to the United States. Gazprom supplied additional volumes of gas for GdF to Europe and swapped it against an LNG cargo from a joint venture between GdF and Sonatrach. 
Gazprom supplies Europe with 150 billion cubic meters of gas per year. Algeria has exports of about 60 bcm a year.

TITLE: Finding the Client Behind Battering Bureaucracy
AUTHOR: By Cori Weiner
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As might be expected, there’s more to opening a business in Russia than meets the eye.  When six-year resident of St. Petersburg, Mike Sherman, opened his English-language school and translation company, he grappled with Russian bureaucracy at every corner.  
Sherman describes the process of opening his limited liability company, American Language Master, with a bit of humor, but only in retrospect.  After numerous attempts on his own, he quickly understood the need to hire one of the many advertised agencies to complete all of the paperwork and take care of all the headaches.  
Personal experience gained since then, however, has taught him that this doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride.  “Even the lawyer filled out the paperwork wrong three times,” Sherman laughs - with some exasperation.
Twice visiting the tax office with this lawyer, he was both times turned away by the unrelenting clerk behind the window.   “She told us everything we did was wrong, and then said goodbye, and didn’t help us through the complications of filling out paperwork or assure us that the business would be ready to go.”  At one point the clerk told him something was not allowed, one minute later, after Sherman spoke with the supervisor, she agreed to help.  One of the beauties of Russia.  A friend once told Mike, “in Russia if you need something it’s not allowed, but if you really want it, it’s possible.”  
Eventually, he had to fire the lawyer, who still demanded full payment, incidentally, and start fresh.
Banking presented further complications. “It took two days after running around getting all the notarized documents, photocopies, etc., and the agents at the bank had almost no understanding of the procedures.”  Sherman then draws the comparison to his home state California, where it took only 20 minutes and one document to open a business bank account.  He does note his appreciation for the Russian bank manager’s willingness to travel from another branch in order to help him complete the process. 
Even after his tale of endless complications, Sherman asserts “I wouldn’t take back the experience.  Many business owners avoid some of these hassles by paying top consulting or service companies to do all of the paperwork and run-around for them.” According to Sherman, “If I had paid others from the start to carry out all of the procedures of opening a business, I would have stayed ignorant in the whole process.”
He is even inspired to write a book one day detailing all of the comical twists and turns.
In addition to the invaluable learning experience, the final product convinces Sherman that his efforts were worthwhile: American Language Master has been up and running for over two years now, bureaucratic red tape has been minimized, and he can now focus more on developing features of his school.
“Granted there are some good schools out there, but I thought things could be done better. I’m the only school that runs the teachers through a training course, even if they already have training. If they have no experience, we give them training and evaluate them.” 
When Sherman feels that a particular applicant is not adequately qualified, he will go so far as to suggest that the applicant gain experience somewhere else and come back. Another option is to assist in his Saturday conversational class, designed to give students fluency practice at no additional cost. 
What further distinguishes Sherman’s school from the competition is his insistence on running the company in what he terms as a “Western- style” of business. But running a customer-oriented business in a market that is largely unfamiliar with this concept hasn’t been all that easy.  
In fact, when asked if Russians accepted this approach, he replies with a smile: “Its all been interesting.  Customer service is a new concept, and this society is also very materialistic, which is understandable after years of being unable to enjoy individual achievements and wealth through hard work.”  
He says that at first he found that people were skeptical of his free course contests and money back guarantees, wrongly equating price with quality. But Sherman says he is now receiving many customer referrals and that his clients enjoy coming into his office to personally converse with him, both signs that the skepticism has diminished.
Offering affordable classes was also one of Sherman’s goals:  “I felt that schools were more profit-oriented than service-based.” It’s his opinion that better quality programs can be provided for the same money that clients spend elsewhere.  In fact, he remarks that he often witnessed the same teachers in various schools, working at drastically different pay rates. 
Sherman believes most clients study English to improve their quality of life, and charging exorbitant rates would only negate their efforts. “My feeling is that most people work hard for their money and they’re spending it to learn another language as a way of increasing their job prospects and earn a better living,” he says. 
Sherman concludes: “it’s a pleasure giving jobs to people and watching others work hard for a better life.  I hope the system adapts even more to promote this.” 

www.americanlanguagemaster.com

TITLE: Market Has Become Cleaner, Report Says
AUTHOR: By Conor Humphries
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s real estate market is becoming cleaner as more developers adopt Western practices a new global report by Jones Lang LaSalle says, classifying Russia alongside EU member states Greece and the Czech Republic as “semi-transparent.” 
While the difficulty in measuring market transparency gives the report a certain subjectivity, the report accurately reflects a significant maturing of Russian real estate, analysts said.
Since the last survey in 2004, Russia has leapfrogged over developing rivals Brazil, Thailand and the Philippines to climb three places to No. 35 of 56 countries surveyed. In doing so it has lost its classification of “low transparency” and is now “semi-transparent.”
Semi-transparent countries ahead of Russia include Poland, Israel and South Korea. Below Russia in the semi-transparent category, the middle of a five-tier ranking system, are Brazil, the Philippines and India. 
While it is hard to quantify the gains of the past two years, the market has improved significantly over the past five years, said David O’Hara, general director of real estate consultancy DTZ.
“Developers recognize that the more transparent they are, the more money they are going to make.
“If by meeting someone else’s due diligence standards and spending $100,000 in advance your sale price is $1 million higher as a result, the developer realizes that is a wonderful return,” he said. 
He said the best indicator of the improvement in transparency were international banks like Hypo, EuroHypo and Aareal that are starting to do business in Russia. 
“We now have true western project financing, which was not there a few years ago,” he said. 
Multinational occupiers who have entered Central and Eastern Europe in the past few years are now starting to look to Russia, said Alastair Hughes, European CEO of Jones Lang LaSalle. 
In the past few years this has been a powerful force for change in Central and Eastern Europe, he said in a statement. 
“A new generation of cross-border investors and occupiers demand more information, consistent regulatory treatment and higher ethical standards,” he said. 
Commercial real estate is benefiting as retail and office landlords insists on rent being paid in a legal and transparent fashion, said Yulia Dalnova, director of retail at Knight Frank.
“Every developer is thinking of its exit strategy, of how to sell,” she said. “To get the best price for a development, cash flows must be fully legalized, fully clear.”
She said developers in the regions were catching up quickly with Moscow in terms of transparency.

TITLE: Morgan Stanley Makes First Move Into Russia with Stake in RosEuro
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The real estate arm of Morgan Stanley has made its first foray into the Russian market by buying 10 percent of developer RosEuroDevelopment, the U.S. investment bank said Jul. 31.
Morgan Stanley’s Special Situations Fund III, a global fund that buys non-controlling stakes in real estate companies, bought the stake in RosEuroDevelopment via a dedicated capital increase, Morgan Stanley said in a statement.
No terms for the transaction were disclosed. Russia’s real estate sector is booming, with local and international property funds moving in and developers looking to raise new funding by coming to the stock market.
“We believe Russia’s strong economic growth and its fundamental undersupply of quality real estate provide an attractive opportunity to expand our investment platform,” said John Carrafiell, global co-head of Morgan Stanley Real Estate. Carrafiell added that RosEuroDevelopment would use the capital injection to invest in several projects in Moscow and other parts of Russia. 
The developer, part of a conglomerate called RosEuroGroup, specialises in building shopping and entertainment centres, business centres, logistics parks and residential complexes.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Stockmann Store
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Stockmann, a Finnish department store operator, plans to invest 12 million euros ($15.4 million) in opening its fifth store in Moscow.
The store will be located in the Metropolis shopping center, which is being built in central Moscow, the Helsinki-based company said Sunday in a statement. Stockmann aims to open the store in 2008 and estimates sales of about 30 million euros in the first full year of operation.

Car Plant Halted
KALININGRAD (SPT) — Private carmaker Avtotor has postponed construction of a car plant that would build China’s Chery models, Vedomosti reported Friday.
Avtotor froze the project because the government planned to revoke the duty-free status on the car components Avtotor uses, the report said. 
Earlier this year, Avtotor, which is located in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, said it had started building a new, $200 million assembly plant with an annual capacity of 150,000 vehicles.

TITLE: Fuelling Talk For Local Consolidation
AUTHOR: By Anna Shcherbakova
TEXT: Independence no longer makes sense, at least on the city’s fuel market — the consolidation of petrol station operators seems inevitable. Last week the Peterburgskaya Toplivnaya Companiya (PTK) gave the clearest sign yet of this inexorable process. The city’s largest operator, with a chain of around 100 petrol stations, PTK has always acted like a bold and fully independent player. Its been helped in this by its own expertise, good connections with official circles and the backing of its rich and shady shareholders. 
At the news conference last week the president of PTK, Yuri Antonov, made an announcement that also took on the look of a proposal. According to him, PTK would like to sell its stations to the oil company Surgutneftegaz, its supplier of gasoline. PTK had already received and refused various proposals from other vertically integrated oil companies to sell its chain, he said. 
The oil companies themselves were unavailable for comment.  Such negotiations, if they take place, are based on confidence. It’s difficult to confirm Antonov’s declaration, but on making it he’s made PTK look like an even more attractive proposition. And obviously it was addressed not only to the press but also to the oil companies. Antonov, who served as vice-governor from 1997 till 2002, was always clever at using the press to address his real target audience. 
It’s a good time for oil companies to put their ears on the ground. The fuel retail business has opened up – for a long time politics and personal greed ensured it stayed off limits. By selling the land reserved for the construction of gas stations only in big lots, the city’s authorities are effectively excluding smaller players from the process. Last Friday Lukoil won such an auction, where a giant 30 plots of land was sold for approximately $15 million. 
Nevertheless, with space on the market limited and construction of gas stations time consuming, it makes sense to purchase a chain, for time is equivalent to money in this situation. 
Several other chains, though nothing compared to the size of PTK, are already parts of Lukoil or other big players. Apart from PTK, there are still three independent chains, but probably not for long. Moreover, it is at just such a time that the local market’s major independent retailer announces the oil companies’ interest. 
For me it looks like an attempt to increase the price of any future deal. Sometimes girls count their former dates in order to attract a beloved. PTK is a rich bride. As well as gas stations, it has a transportation company, oil storage facilities and a lot of other property in the city. Recently it purchased 70 hectares of land on the Finnish Gulf that it will use for an export terminal. 
The PTK president said that he has already discussed the project with the CEO of Surgutneftegas and Gaspromneft and so they would presumably be party to the deal. The oil companies are keeping their usual quiet, while PTK’s image is on the up and up. 

Anna Scherbakova is the St. Petersburg bureau chief of business daily Vedomosti.

TITLE: A Few Unstable Assumptions
AUTHOR: By Yevsei Gurvich
TEXT: Last week, the Finance Ministry began investing money from the stabilization fund, thus putting the finishing touches on the fund itself. This, therefore, seems as good a time as any to address the nature of the fund and how it is managed. How successful has the first stage of its existence been? What changes will the initial distribution of petrodollars from the fund bring?
It’s not hard to understand the interest the stabilization fund has created, given that its value works out to more than $500 for every Russian. Unfortunately this discussion has largely been based not on a precise analysis, but only on very general considerations. However, in economics, like any other serious area of endeavor, to understand a question properly and make accurate and productive decisions we need more than just a general understanding. A number of misconceptions have spread concerning the fund. To combat this situation, it is important to take a look at a number of interrelated macroeconomic considerations. 
• Misconception No. 1: The country has missed out on returns because the money in the fund has not been invested but been held in rubles.
It’s understandable that some might regret the fact that the government took 2 1/2 years to establish the management of the stabilization fund in law. Paradoxical as it may seem, however, the fund served its purpose and there is no reason to talk about financial losses.
The fund was established to deal with two main problems: to provide insurance against a possible fall in world oil prices (defending the economy against a poor future) and to provide protection against external currency rate and price shocks (defending against an overly rich present). Investing the funds in foreign securities weakened the inflow of foreign currencies during the oil boom, thus checking significant swings in exchange rates.
The $75 billion that has been channeled into the stabilization fund so far provides an effective guarantee of budgetary stability in the future. At the same time, the fund has also fulfilled the second task. Although the money itself is saved in rubles, it has allowed the Central Bank to buy up foreign currencies and prevented a rise — to be more precise, almost a doubling — in the value of the ruble. This comes in conditions where the Central Bank’s current mechanisms for stabilizing the value of the ruble are extremely limited. Under other circumstances, the purchase of more than $16 billion of these foreign funds would have created an inflationary explosion. What actually happened is that the bank bought four times this amount — $62 billion — in 2005. This was only made possible by the existence of the stabilization fund. The extra money the Central Bank bought up ($46 billion) was placed in foreign bonds. As a result, all of the funds accumulated were invested in securities, but this investment was carried out not just by the government, but by the Central Bank as well. So the country didn’t lose out on any of the money it had coming. Much of this money simply came to the Central Bank instead of the government. Over the 2 1/2 years of the fund’s existence, taking into account exchange rate changes and gold and foreign currency reserves, these amounted to about $1.78 billion.
Laying the money aside in the stabilization fund also influenced its ruble value. Both the dollar and euro fell significantly last year against the ruble. Had some of the funds been invested immediately in foreign securities at the exchange rate at the time, the value of the stabilization fund in June would have been lower by more than $1 billion.
So keeping the money in the stabilization fund in rubles meant a gain for the budget that more than compensated for any profits the Central Bank might have made by way of increased investment. Further, 80 percent of all revenues for the Central Bank were transferred directly to the federal budget. So the effect of not investing the money from the fund up to this point has been minimal. Moving to a legislated allocation of the stabilization fund’s contents will simply shift this macroeconomic stabilization from manual to automatic mode.
• Misconception No. 2: Investing the money within the country would have generated greater returns.
Investing some of the funds inside the country would mean selling foreign currencies on the open market, resulting in a fall in the value of those currencies. Bringing just half of the stabilization fund’s cash into the economy as investment would trigger a fall in the dollar rate to 15 rubles. A popular explanation for slowing economic growth in Russia is Dutch disease, the term coined to describe the effects of the appreciation of the Dutch guilder as a result of export revenues in the 1960s from newly discovered oil. The rise in world oil prices has had the same effect in Russia, raising the value of exports and strengthening the currency. As a result of increased oil and gas prices, Russia received $50 billion more in export revenues in 2005 than the year before. There are a number of effects from the strengthening of the currency. It can render production from entire sectors uncompetitive while stimulating development in others. It can increase consumption and investment while reducing inflation. Whether the current pace of appreciation in the value of the ruble is acceptable or should be reduced is an open question. But investing money from the stabilization fund within the country can only serve to strengthen the ruble radically. Is anyone really willing to take responsibility for an exchange rate of 20 rubles to the dollar?
• Misconception No. 3: Inflation eats away at the value of the stabilization fund at the same rate, regardless of whether it is kept in rubles or maintained in foreign currency-denominated securities.
The main issue here is the nature of the stabilization fund itself, in that it is filled by the revenues generated by basis extraordinary profits from the export of oil and gas. Any increase in export revenues can be used in only one of two ways: to buy more imported goods (as a result of the strengthening of the ruble) or to buy foreign currency, postponing the purchase of foreign goods to a later date. The depreciation of a national currency reduces the ability to purchase imported goods. To escape from this trap, all that is necessary is to ensure that the returns generated by the stabilization fund stay above the inflation rates for the foreign currencies involved (which happens automatically if the funds are maintained in foreign bonds). If the government opts to start spending some of the money accumulated in the stabilization fund as the ruble was strengthening, some of the value of the original money that was set aside will be lost. But nothing is lost at the national level: The winners will include those people and companies for whom the value of imported goods will be lower — they will receive the equivalent of a budget subsidy. Therefore, what we are talking about in this case are not foregone returns on the part of the federal budget, but a return to the economy of part of the additional taxes that were collected during the period of positive international economic conditions, which is a basic principle of macroeconomic stabilization policy. This is the very essence of stabilization.

Yevsei Gurvich is the head of the Economic Experts Group. This comment was published in Vedomosti.

TITLE: No Time for Fiddling While Iran Is Arming
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: The UN Security Council issued another ultimatum to Iran July 31: Give up on your nuclear weapons program by Aug. 31 — or we’ll hold yet another meeting to discuss your fate. As ultimatums go, it wasn’t especially effective. It may even play into Iran’s hands by allowing it to keep stalling.
The leaders of Iran’s extremist regime have repeatedly played the Security Council and other international bodies, making occasional cooperative noises and claiming that they’re only interested in civilian power. Most experts think the country is still years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, but with each passing month it enriches more uranium — which can be used for power and weapons — and increases its capabilities. Even if Iran eventually suspends this work, the more progress it makes now, the more dangerous it could be later.
Tehran’s response to a European offer in June, said to include incentives like advanced technology and an end to the ban on sales of U.S. aircraft parts, was typical: It simply didn’t respond. The day the offer was made, engineers began enriching more uranium. Weeks later, Tehran said it would make a decision Aug. 22. On Aug. 1, Iran responded belligerently to the UN resolution, with President Ahmadinejad saying his country would never give in to such threats.
 Given the obvious dangers of further delay, it’s particularly disappointing that Russia and China continue to act as enablers for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The Security Council resolution was originally intended to impose sanctions Aug. 31 if Iran refused to suspend uranium enrichment. But Russia and China insisted on changing the wording. Now the council will only consider sanctions after that date.
These longtime backers of Iran have so far managed to block progress at little cost to themselves, but that may be changing. Russia is particularly vulnerable. Last month, U.S. President Bush reversed decades of U.S. policy by backing a civilian nuclear power agreement with Moscow, under which spent fuel from U.S. reactors around the world might be stored in Russia. The deal, which could mean billions of dollars for Russia, isn’t tied to Moscow’s cooperation on Iranian sanctions, but the connection was implied. Negotiations could easily collapse if President Putin’s regime continues to block sanctions.
In a month, Russian leaders will have to decide whether their economic and strategic interests lie with Iran or the West. They’re not going to be able to delay forever.

This appeared as an editorial in the LA Times.

TITLE: A Coalition Worth Waiting For
AUTHOR: By Anders Aslund
TEXT: On Friday, Viktor Yanukovych was confirmed as prime minister by the Ukrainian parliament, more than four months after elections to the body had been held. The process could have moved faster but, given the election outcome, the government is about as good as anybody could have hoped for.
This coalition represents a strategic realignment in four ways. First, it signifies that the Orange Revolution is really over, and its ultimate success has been the democratization of the Party of the Regions, which honestly attracted the most support in the elections. Second, it marks a departure from regionally divisive politics. Third, the new coalition is based on a common economic policy. And finally, the new government has adopted a unified foreign policy.
Yushchenko and Yanukovych have opted for a strategy of national unity. One of Yushchenko’s advisers explained to me recently that Ukraine needed to satisfy western Ukrainians on questions of the state, culture and language, because that was what they cared about, while the easterners should be catered to on the economy, which was the most important issue for them. Otherwise, Ukraine would be divided by a western national vision leaning toward Europe in opposition to a Russian-oriented vision.
After the elections, three alternative coalitions were possible: one orange, one eastern and the third an ideological coalition between the Party of the Regions and Our Ukraine. The Orange coalition was tried, but it alienated the east and fell apart. An eastern coalition was attempted, which naturally alienated the east. The natural way out was a government based on a liberal/conservative economic policy hybrid uniting Our Ukraine and the Party of the Regions. The Socialist Party has also gone along, while the Communists are likely to remain outside the coalition.
The new government is to be based on the principle of checks and balances. The Party of the Regions will get most of the economic posts, while Yushchenko will get to appoint the heads of the so-called “power ministries,” consisting of defense, foreign affairs and interior, the chairman of the State Security Service and the Prosecutor General, as well as the first deputy prime minister and a number of minor ministers. Each ministerial appointment is supposed to be balanced by a committee chairman in the Parliament from another party.
Yulia Tymoshenko, meanwhile, has announced that she will move into opposition and will welcome anyone who wants to cross to join her faction. She will undoubtedly provide an effective critique of the government, which should prove good for democracy and the ultimate quality of governmental decisions. The concern that she could force new elections on flimsy constitutional grounds has, fortunately, subsided. These elections would have increased divisions between Ukraine’s east and west and could have undermined Ukraine’s newborn democracy.
Yushchenko has put great effort into elaborating the program for the new coalition, called the “Declaration of National Unity.” This relatively brief document, consisting of six pages and containing 27 basic points, sets out the results of negotiations on four particularly difficult points: federalism, the status of the Russian language, private ownership of agricultural land, and Ukraine’s foreign policy orientation. Compromises were made on all points, but Yushchenko appears to have emerged with the upper hand.
The first paragraph establishes that Ukraine is a unitary state, while another advocates decentralization, but without any mention of federalism.
The paragraph concerning language appears to have been put together carefully. Ukrainian remains the official state language, but “every Ukrainian citizen is guaranteed the right to use Russian or any other native language in all walks of life.”
The private sale of agricultural land will be introduced no later than Jan. 1, 2008, a move that the Socialists have opposed.
Four paragraphs are devoted directly to foreign policy issues. Ukraine is to “take all necessary legislative steps to join the WTO before the end of 2006,” which is a clear victory of Our Ukraine over both the Party of the Regions and the Socialists.
Ukraine is to maintain its course toward European integration with the eventual aim of joining the European Union, including the beginning of negotiations on a free trade zone between Ukraine and the EU. Again, this looks like a victory for Our Ukraine.
The Party of the Regions insisted on adding a paragraph on the Common Economic Space, a proposed common market between Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine that has been pushed by Moscow. But the coalition addresses the Common Economic Space only as a free trade area and with certain reservations from Yushchenko that may make the deal much less attractive for the Russian side.
Our Ukraine was able to get a paragraph dealing with NATO in the declaration, calling for “mutually beneficial cooperation with NATO.” The Party of the Regions made sure that a paragraph calling for a referendum on Ukraine’s accession to NATO must be held, but Our Ukraine has attached the phrase that the referendum should be carried out only “after Ukraine has carried out all the necessary procedures,” which seems somewhat diffusely to refer to NATO accession.
What it all comes down to is that Our Ukraine appears to have formed the foreign policy and security bloc in the government, while the Party of the Regions gets the economic bloc. Both parties appear to agree on the basic principles of economic policy. At the same time, significant progress has been made on resolving national tensions. The Party of the Regions appears to have accepted a Western-oriented foreign policy. Whether or not Ukraine gets a membership action plan for NATO at the organization’s November summit in Riga is no longer a big issue.
That this was the outcome of the negotiations is impressive. Because of the complementary nature of the compromise, there is strong hope this alliance will hold. Therefore, we should not be too upset that it took four months to reach.

Anders Aslund is senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

TITLE: Too Scared to Laugh
AUTHOR: By Masha Gessen
TEXT: As I was driving to meet a few friends the other night, I noticed a banner advertising a chain of Georgian restaurants. “There is no water and no wine, but we’ve managed to preserve the taste of our food,” the rhyming banner boasted. I laughed. Here was the spirit of true perseverance. It has got to be difficult to offer Georgian cuisine when you are banned from selling either Georgian wine or Georgian mineral water (and when all other wines are a problem), but the trick of making the result look appealing is in making light of the problems as you overcome them.
At the restaurant, one of my friends told a Putin joke. Rather, she whispered it.
“Why are you talking like that?” asked another friend.
“The new law on extremism,” she responded, and proceeded to whisper the joke.
President Putin signed the bill on extremism into law on Friday evening. It is a venerable post-Soviet tradition, signing controversial legislation on Friday evenings to avoid media coverage. There is virtually no media left, but the habit apparently lives on. In accordance with an even older custom, the Soviet tradition of making an outlaw of every citizen, the new law makes it possible to punish anyone — including people who tell Putin jokes in public.
It actually was not a new joke, so the laughter around the table was moderate. Some other things we discussed were much funnier. Take the attempt by an agency of the Justice Ministry to ban any media mention of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party. In a letter issued July 11, the agency wrote that since the organization has not been registered as a political party, any reference to it will be considered to be “distribution of false information.” Based on this, the letter threatened punitive measures against media outlets that mentioned the NBP.
In fact, Russian law does not currently provide for any punishment for “distributing false information” — a fact for which the Rossia and Channel One television stations ought certainly to be grateful. Limonov’s organization has appealed the Justice Ministry’s refusal to register it as a party, and is now taking its case to the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. So on the face of it, the letter is very funny, since there can be no legal grounds for prosecuting a media outlet that mentions the NBP — say, in reporting on the progress of its complaint in Strasbourg. On the other hand, the new law on extremism could probably be used to prosecute a media outlet for mentioning Limonov’s organization.
That too is funny. This column mentions the National Bolshevik Party, which should not be a punishable offense but may in fact turn out to be one. But if it is not a punishable offense, then, according to the new law on extremism, in suggesting that it is a punishable offense, this column has libeled President Putin and his government, which is most certainly a punishable offense.
Back at our table, two friends, also journalists, were telling of their visit to the summer camp run by Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth organization. It was a hilarious story, complete with chases, captures, threats, and the interception of a story filed from the Nashi Internet cafe. We all laughed at how two young women journalists could so threaten an organization that is thousands of people strong.
All this humor — the restaurant’s, in the face of adversity, and ours, in the face of shocking, but legislatively supported, stupidity — was reminiscent of the late-Soviet era known as the Period of Stagnation. Things weren’t scary then, just very tedious, monotonous, and, usually, ridiculous. That is how it works now, too: There does not seem to be much reason to be scared as long as we can laugh at the increasing amounts of silliness coming from the Kremlin. Except that I think it’s scary to live in a country whose regime and its actions are laughable.

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

TITLE: Running Scared
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Like a gang of twitchy hit men afraid they’ve botched the job, the Bush regime is creeping back to the scene of the crime: the Congressional backrooms where they thought they’d put the kibosh on the American Republic once and for all.
But it seems there is still a flicker of life in the victim, and thus a threat that the gangsters might have to pay the piper somewhere down the line. So they went back to the bagmen on Capitol Hill this week, ordering their minions to provide retroactive legal cover for the rank offenses committed by the big boys at the top when they devised their torture regimen — in knowing, deliberate violation of the U.S. War Crimes Act, which was passed by acclamation in the Republican-led Congress in 1996, and toughened up the following year with the Pentagon’s support, The Washington Post reports.
The moribund republic was thought to have been bludgeoned to death when the Bushists brought out the blunt instrument of the “unitary executive” earlier this year. After the regime’s patently illegal domestic spying programs were revealed, the regime at last dropped all pretense and openly declared a presidential dictatorship, insisting that any action ordered by the commander-in-chief was beyond the reach of law.
When this extraordinary usurpation of the Constitution did not produce angry crowds in the street demanding the return of their liberties — and nothing more than a prissy “Well, I never!” from the oozing invertebrates in the Democratic opposition — it seemed that the republic was well and truly dead. But then last month, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case effectively overturned the Bushists’ “unitary executive” fantasies by ruling that the Geneva Conventions, which had been incorporated into U.S. law and are the basis of the War Crimes Act, applied to Bush’s Terror War.
This was the nightmare scenario that Attorney General Alberto “The Fixer” Gonzales and Dick Cheney’s capo, David “The Enforcer” Addington, laid out in legal memos for President George W. Bush in early 2002, when Bush, Cheney and Pentagon warlord Don Rumsfeld were signing off on the various tortures they would inflict on their captives. The minions told Bush that they could all be prosecuted, even executed, under the War Crimes Act for what they were doing — if the Geneva Conventions were upheld. Gonzales thus advised Bush to issue a presidential order stripping Terror War captives of the Geneva protections, the Post reports. Only this bit of weasel-wording could provide a “defense against future prosecution,” Gonzales wrote.
What he forgot to say was that this defense would only work in a presidential dictatorship under the legally baseless “unitary executive.” Otherwise, the president would still be bound by America’s strict laws against torture. Thus any president who ordered interrogation techniques that violated those laws could be prosecuted; and if those techniques resulted in the murder of prisoners, then that president, and his minions, could be executed. So far, at least 35 Terror War captives have been killed in military or CIA custody, Human Rights Watch reports.
But Bush duly wrote the unconstitutional order anyway, thereby committing himself to full, personal responsibility for the criminal system that followed. For the U.S. War Crimes Act not only forbids “murder, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” it also specifically criminalizes “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Gonzales and others have tried to define away torture, claiming that anything less than outright murder or “pain approaching, but not equal to, that experienced during organ failure” is not really torture, but just a kind of extending tickling or good-natured horseplay. Thus, they say, there is no torture in the gulag.
Yet even if you accept these ludicrous and frankly evil formulations, and even if you ignore the evidence of beating, waterboarding, deprivation and other actions acknowledged by any sentient human being as torture, there is no escaping the fact that the Pentagon and the CIA have instigated interrogation techniques centered on outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating, degrading treatment. Indeed, they’re proud of it; they brag about it. And yet these techniques — planned, approved and celebrated at the highest levels of government — are patently illegal.
The military’s own lawyers know this — and have long known it. Alberto Mora, the Navy’s general counsel throughout most of the Terror War, told the Pentagon that some of the specifically approved techniques “violated domestic and international legal norms,” with legal responsibility for the crimes running “along the entire length of the chain of command,” the Post reports. And just last month, the Air Force’s chief counsel, Major General Jack Rives, told Congress, under oath, that “some of the techniques that have been authorized and used in the past have violated” key portions of the Geneva Conventions: the very portions that are the foundations of the U.S. War Crimes Act.
That’s why the Bushists are now roaming the back alleys of Congress again, looking to fire a few more slugs into their victim. Bush wants the “unitary executive” autocracy he created in secret to be restored — in public — by Congress. 
There is brutal arrogance behind this, of course, but there is blind panic, too. For the blood-soaked thugs of the Bush regime now realize they have no choice: If law and the Constitution are allowed to prevail, they could all be doing hard time — or even find themselves strapped down and stretched out, waiting for the executioner’s needle. To save their hides, the republic must die, for good this time, forever.

TITLE: The Businessmen Who Were Barred From Russia
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Speaking English with a thick German accent, Adolf Winter occasionally slips into his native tongue as he tries to fathom why Russia declared him a threat to national security.
Winter, an Austrian businessman whose firm sells small gas engines, speculated that he was barred because a bureaucrat didn’t want to return 1 million euros in value-added tax. “Or maybe it was a business enemy who paid someone off. Any successful businessman has enemies. But these are only Vermuetungen,” or conjectures, said Winter, 65, speaking by telephone from Vienna.
Winter is among at least 10 businesspeople who have been denied entry over the past two years, apparently for national security reasons, according to a Moscow Times review of more than 30 cases.
The circumstances around the 10 cases are steeped in mystery. Russia, like other countries, is under no obligation to explain its rationale for refusing or revoking visas, and the Foreign Ministry and Federal Security Service, or FSB, routinely decline to comment on the cases. 
Some foreign business leaders said they believed the expulsions were isolated instances.
But a review of explanatory documents obtained by several businesspeople, together with anecdotal evidence from businesspeople, former government officials and others, suggests that the cases may be the tip of the iceberg. 
The expulsions appear to be linked to business dealings, and several businesspeople said they believed their Russian rivals had bribed officials to blacklist them. If that is the case, foreign investors could have a new reason to exercise caution when doing business in Russia. 
The best-known case, of course, is William Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, who was stopped at Sheremetyevo Airport in November.
Just two months before that, Winter was stopped at Sheremetyevo and expelled for the same reason as Browder: Point 1, Article 27 of the 1996 federal immigration law, which states that a foreigner may be denied entry “to safeguard military preparedness, state security and public order of the Russian Federation, or the health and safety of its citizens.”
Border guards detained Winter when he arrived on a flight from Vienna on Sept. 3. Three hours later, he said, they put him on a plane for Vienna with no explanation.
“I’ve been working in Russia since 1988, and have done everything correctly. All of the legal necessities — taxes, contracts, work permits, visas — were in order. It really is an economic catastrophe for our company,” said Winter, who owns the company VADO International.
After persistently pressing the authorities for an explanation, Winter received a letter from the FSB that said he had been barred under Point 1, Article 27 of the federal immigration law since June 20 — 2 1/2 months before he was denied entry. Winter provided a copy of the letter, dated Dec. 12, to The Moscow Times, sister newspaper of The St. Petersburg Times.
Between June 16, 2005, and the day he was turned back at Sheremetyevo, Winter said he had entered and left the country three times without any problem.
Winter’s case has been raised at meetings between the Austrian and the Russian trade ministries, and the Austrian Embassy has asked the Foreign Ministry why Winter has been barred and what he needs to do to return, an embassy official said. The Foreign Ministry has replied only that Winter was barred due to state security. 
As Winter tells it, he and his company pose no security threat. The company signed its biggest deals in 2002 and 2003, contracts worth more than 20 million euros with Bashkirenergo to construct thermal power plants in Bashkortostan, in part by importing gas engines produced by Austria’s Jenbacher.
The company, which maintains Moscow offices, currently has an annual turnover of 7 million to 8 million euros in Russia, primarily from imports of small gas engines made by the German firm Deutz, Winter said.
“This is by no means any sort of dual-use technology,” he said.
Dual-use technology has been cited in several espionage cases opened by the FSB against Russians.
A U.S. businessman who was recently denied entry for security reasons previously had run-ins with the government over dual-use technology. 
Thomas Hajek worked for 12 years in Perm on behalf of U.S. jet-engine maker Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of Connecticut-based United Technologies, which moved into the Russian defense industry in the 1990s.
In March 2003, four years after Hajek took over as head of P&W’s commercial operations in Russia, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency moved to prevent P&W from obtaining more than a blocking 25 percent stake in Aviadvigatel, the designer of engines for most Russian aircraft — apparently over concerns that Aviadvigatel made dual-use products. At the time, a representative of Gazprom-affiliated Tekhnologii Motorov on Aviadvigatel’s board had argued that P&W’s participation could threaten national security because of the dual-use products.
When Hajek left P&W in 2004 to work as an independent contractor and consultant, the Perm Enginemaking Complex, a holding company that includes Aviadvigatel, “had revenues of close to $300 million, was profitable, and was developing new products with funding from P&W and the Russian government,” he said.
It therefore came as a surprise, he said, when he flew into Perm from Frankfurt on Oct. 16, 2005, and was told by border guards that he was not welcome in Russia. 
“They just said ‘your entry is forbidden’ and locked me up overnight with no way of getting to anybody or talking to anybody,” Hajek said. “Basically, they told me I had to buy myself a ticket back to Frankfurt, and I left on a Lufthansa flight the following day.”
Hajek said, however, that he did not believe his case was connected to the 2003 controversy over dual-use technology. “That’s a very long time ago. No one talks about that anymore,” he said.
He learned through informal channels that he had been barred from Russia as a threat to national security under Point 1, Article 27 of the federal immigration law and had been accused of having connections with the CIA. He denied any CIA links and dismissed the idea that he posed a security threat.
“After working for so many years on behalf of Russian aviation and space enterprises, hand in hand with business leaders, local administrations and federal ministries to bring in foreign investments, I found this offensive and disappointing,” he said.
Hajek is trying to gain permission to return. But, he said, “this is one of these nebulous areas. Once you’re on file, there has to be a good reason to remove you from the list. They have to go back and look at why somebody put you there in the first place.”
The U.S. Embassy denied to comment on the case, citing the U.S. Privacy Act.
Hajek, Browder and Winter were among only four businesspeople willing to talk openly about their troubles involving national security. The Moscow Times is aware of six additional cases. Those businesspeople appear to be trying to resolve their problems quietly and refused to speak on the record with a reporter. Browder himself kept mum for several months, and he later explained that he had been trying to resolve the issue from behind the scenes.

What the Law Says
Of the seven reasons for barring a foreigner from Russia listed in Article 27 of the federal immigration law, Points 2 through 6 are relatively straightforward: A foreigner is not allowed entry if he has been kicked out of Russia within the last five years; has not served out his sentence or been rehabilitated for a serious crime committed in Russia or abroad; does not have a visa or relevant documents needed for a visa; has no proof of insurance valid in Russia; or cannot prove he has enough money to support his stay in Russia and subsequent exit from the country.
Point 7 states that a foreigner cannot enter if his presence has been deemed “undesirable” by one of eight federal agencies: the Interior Ministry, the FSB, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Federal Financial Monitoring Service and the now-defunct Health Ministry.
It is the vagaries of Point 1 that perplex Vladimir Ryakhovsky, a lawyer who has worked on about a dozen cases over the past four years involving Catholic and Protestant clergymen denied entry for national security reasons.
“Nowhere is it written who decides which foreigners are a threat to national security. It’s a completely arbitrary rule!” Ryakhovsky, becoming visibly agitated, said in a recent interview in his office.
While the law specifies which agencies can decide who falls under the undefined term “undesirable” in Point 7, nowhere in the law is it written who determines who is a national security threat.
The written explanation for Browder’s denial mirrors that of one of Ryakhovsky’s most high-profile cases, that of Father Stefano Caprio, an Italian Catholic priest. Caprio lived in Russia for more than a decade before having his visa taken away at Sheremetyevo Airport in April 2002.
Both letters — Caprio’s from the Interior Ministry and Browder’s from the Foreign Ministry — say “the responsible” government agencies declared them national security threats. No specific agencies are named in the documents.
The FSB, however, is clearly — and logically — one of the empowered agencies. U.S. labor activist Irene Stevenson was turned away at Sheremetyevo in December 2002 “based on information provided by the FSB” that she was a threat to national security, according to a letter from the Federal Border Service to State Duma Deputy Oleg Shein dated Jan. 17, 2003. 
Stevenson, the AFL-CIO’s pointwoman in Russia, had lived and worked here for nearly 15 years, and shortly before her expulsion had helped provide legal assistance for a strike of air traffic controllers. The strike disrupted flights at regional airports and forced the government to offer a sizable hike in salaries to the controllers.
The Defense Ministry, the Justice Ministry and the Foreign Intelligence Service also appear to have the authority to declare foreigners a security threat, according to legislation posted on their web sites.
Written inquiries sent in mid-July to the eight agencies mentioned in the immigration law went largely unanswered as of Monday, July 31. By law, the agencies have 30 days to reply, if only to say “no comment.”
Health and Social Development Ministry spokeswoman Lyudmila Politayeva said her ministry’s involvement in determining whether a foreigner’s presence was “undesirable” ceased two years ago and referred all other questions to the Interior Ministry. The Health Ministry was disbanded in March 2004 and replaced by the Health and Social Development Ministry.
Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Sergei Guskov referred all questions regarding the federal immigration law to the Foreign Ministry.

Boris Jordan in 1997 
The first high-profile case of a foreign businessman’s visa troubles ostensibly related to national security dates back to the Yeltsin years. In October 1997, prominent U.S. investment banker Boris Jordan was stripped of his multiple-entry visa when leaving Moscow for London.
Boris Berezovsky, then the deputy head of the Security Council, said at the time that Jordan’s visa was revoked because he had “gained access to information that could cause serious damage to the safety of our government,” though observers believed Jordan was merely a pawn in a feud among big banks.
Reached by telephone, Berezovsky stood by his earlier statements regarding Jordan’s refusal. “But that was in 1997, and these are completely different times,” he said. “The motivations now are completely different. Now it’s Kremlin policy to squeeze foreigners out of strategically important areas.”
Jordan, who was later allowed back into Russia, did not reply to an e-mailed request for comment.
After the Jordan incident there was a lull in cases — at least those made public — of foreign businessmen deemed threats to national security.
That is, until Feb. 14, 2005, when U.S. businessman Frank Neuman, former owner of the Abitare high-end furniture chain, called The Moscow Times from Sheremetyevo Airport and said he had been denied entry into the country without explanation. A Sheremetyevo spokesman promptly confirmed Neuman’s detention.
Five days earlier, Neuman had filed a complaint with city police that his former business partners, Oleg Lototsky and Marat Chekanov, had used a brigade of security guards in January 2005 to seize Abitare’s five stores in Moscow.
Neuman claimed $4.9 million in damages, but the status of his complaint to police remains unclear. A city police spokeswoman said she was authorized to disclose such information only to Neuman himself. And it is unlikely Neuman will be knocking at the doors of the city police headquarters at Petrovka 38 any time soon.

Bloomberg
|I’ve given up,” Neuman said by telephone. “I lost everything. It’s a sad, sad situation.”
Neuman said he was never given an official explanation for his entry denial, but when he inquired at the Russian consulate in New York, he was told he had been deemed a threat to national security but given no further details.
Neuman, however, says he is convinced he was denied entry because of the business dispute. He claims that Grigory Rabinovich, president of a company called GI Group Corporation, told him “to my face” he had paid the FSB $500,000 to block Neuman’s visa.
Rabinovich called the accusation “absurd.”
“I don’t know the type of people who could have someone kept out of Russia, and I don’t know anyone in the FSB,” Rabinovich said by telephone, adding that he had not spoken with Neuman since November 2004.
Shortly before Neuman’s expulsion, Lev Polyakov, identified by Abitare employees at the time as the company’s vice president, told The Moscow Times that contrary to the police report, no criminal case had been opened in the “so-called robbery” of the U.S. businessman. Polyakov said Neuman had simply sold his shares in the company.
Reached recently by telephone, Polyakov, now vice president of GI Group Corporation, also dismissed Neuman’s accusations. “I can’t imagine whom someone would have to pay. Buy the whole Interior Ministry? I don’t think so,” he said.
An FSB spokesman said he was unfamiliar with the Neuman incident and asked for a written request for comment. A fax sent July 22 remained unanswered as of Monday, July 31.

Graft, Yukos, Chechnya
Several authoritative studies have shown an increase in corruption under Putin, including one last week by the World Bank. Corruption watchdog Transparency International bunches Russia with Sierra Leone, Niger and Albania when it comes to corruption. A 2005 study by Indem, an anti-corruption think tank, study found the value of the average bribe had increased by 70 percent since 2001.
Indem head Georgy Satarov said he had no specific information about cases related to foreign businessmen being kept out of the country due to a bribed official.
“But such a situation is entirely realistic,” Satarov said. “Buying off officials is absolutely an instrument to get rid of a competitor.”
The Indem report found that the size of the average bribe was $136,000 and growing.
Berezovsky said any bureaucrat at any level would be ready to put a foreign businessman on a blacklist for the right price. “No question about it,” said Berezovsky, who lives in political asylum in Britain.
Five months before Neuman was barred, a foreign businessperson who had worked for several years in Russia was quietly deported under unclear circumstances. 
The person, who asked to remain anonymous to protect friends and colleagues working in Russia, was turned back by border guards at Domodedovo Airport in September 2004. The deportation document, a copy of which was obtained by The Moscow Times, had a box ticked as “other” as the reason for the denial.
The person said border guards had recommended clarifying the situation with the embassy where the visa had been issued. 
The embassy did not provide a clear explanation.
“Based on what the embassy official learned from Moscow, he tried to guess at the reasons,” the person said. “He asked if my company invested in Chechnya or Yukos.”
The person later learned through informal channels that $300,000 was the price to get off the blacklist. “But I understood that money wasn’t the issue,” the person said. “That sum was just a way of saying that it wasn’t a problem I can solve.”
Yukos and Chechnya have come up in other visa cases as well.
Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer for Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was expelled from Russia in September. Amsterdam, who holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship, said five men went to his hotel room at the Hyatt Ararat in central Moscow at about 1 a.m. on Sept. 23 and confiscated his passport. Two hours later, the passport was returned with his visa revoked, and Amsterdam was told to leave the country within 24 hours or face arrest.
Amsterdam said by telephone that he was still trying to get a written explanation as to why he was kicked out. He said he has never heard anything about national security regarding his case.
On Nov. 15, two days after Browder was refused entry at Sheremetyevo from London, British human rights lawyer Bill Bowring, who has represented Chechen clients in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, was denied entry at Sheremetyevo. “I was given no explanation at the time,” Bowring said by telephone.
Bowring eventually did obtain a letter from the Foreign Ministry, which he provided to The Moscow Times, saying he was turned back because he failed to hand over his migration card the last time he had exited Russia.
He called the claim “absolutely ridiculous” and said he turned in his migration cards “religiously.”

Is There a Trend?
If, indeed, foreign businessmen are increasingly being kept out of Russia as supposed security threats, representatives of foreign business associations are not aware of it.
Andreas Romanos, head of the Association of European Businesses, said Winter’s entry denial was the only case he knew of an AEB member being barred from Russia on national security grounds. AEB comprises roughly 500 companies and individual businessmen, around 85 percent from European countries but includes Russian and U.S. members as well.
The U.S. Embassy said it could not comment on the issue.
Putin said at the recent Group of Eight summit that he was in the dark about the Browder case.
“To be honest, I don’t know why this particular person has been refused entry to Russia. I can imagine that this person has broken the laws of our country, and if others do the same we’ll refuse them entry, too,” Putin replied heatedly to a reporter’s question.
Browder has battled with Gazprom over inflated corporate spending and nontransparent gas trading deals. He also clashed recently with Kremlin-linked oil major Surgutneftegaz over its murky ownership schemes. His Hermitage Capital Management firm holds about $4 billion in investments in Russia.
The Kremlin has refused to comment in the past on the reasons for declaring Browder a security threat.
Putin said fears that barring investors like Browder could deter foreign investment were groundless. “We are extremely interested not only in attracting investment but also in working with decent, professional investors, who really want to work in Russia on a long-term basis,” Putin said.
Browder said by telephone that he had never broken any Russian laws and that he was still trying to do everything possible to return to Russia.

TITLE: Activists, Reporters Also Called a Threat
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Three months after then-President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin as prime minister, a steady stream of foreigners connected with nongovernmental groups and media organizations began having their Russian visas denied. 
Most had been living in Russia for years, and their work had involved Chechnya, the environment, democracy and other issues.
Yeltsin plucked Putin from his post as director of the Federal Security Service in August 1999.
The government’s apparent reason for denying most of the visas was that it considered the foreigners’ work a state security risk. 
At least one of those foreigners, Greenpeace International activist Tobias Mßnchmeyer, obtained documents indicating that he was considered a security threat.
Mßnchmeyer, a German national who first came to Russia in 1991 as a graduate student, was denied a visa in December 1999 and sought explanations from the Foreign Ministry and in two Moscow courts: the municipal court where the ministry is located and the city court.
Mßnchmeyer provided The Moscow Times with copies of two letters from the same Foreign Ministry official explaining his visa denial.
Both letters — one dated Feb. 8, 2000, and addressed to Greenpeace Russia, and the other dated April 23, 2001, and addressed to human rights watchdog Memorial — cited Article 27 of the federal immigration law as a reason for Mßnchmeyer’s entry ban. But Point 1 of Article 27, which specifically refers to national security, was not mentioned in the letters.
Mßnchmeyer, who was among the organizers of an environmental conference in Ukraine in 1995 dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, connects his visa denial with his activities as an environmentalist who opposes nuclear contamination.
In 1999, he took part in publicizing protocols between the government and a Swiss company that indicated Russia’s intention to import nuclear waste, which at that time was illegal.
Mßnchmeyer said he had been allowed to travel to Russia again since the summer of 2004.
“I don’t have any written explanation as to why they let me back in,” Mßnchmeyer said by telephone from Berlin. 
“I don’t know whether it was a political success or just bureaucratic mechanisms.”
Foreign journalists also began falling under the category of national security threats. 
Around 30 have been denied visas or entry into the country since 2000, said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations. 
All of them were deemed security threats, and “almost all of them covered Chechnya extensively,” Panfilov said.
One such journalist is Vibeke Sperling, a veteran Danish reporter for the respected Politiken newspaper who applied for a single-entry visa to attend a European Union conference in St. Petersburg in the fall of 2003. 
At the same time, Sperling applied to the Foreign Ministry for accreditation to work as a reporter in Russia.
But when Sperling went to the Russian Embassy in Copenhagen to pick up the visa on Oct. 5, 2003, she was told that the both the visa and the accreditation applications had been turned down. An embassy official indicated that something was wrong with her reporting but did not elaborate, Sperling said by telephone.
Sperling believes she was denied a visa and accreditation because of her critical reporting about Chechnya and other sensitive issues, but said she still had never received an official explanation.
In a March 2004 television interview on the Danish talk-show “Deadline,” however, Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Dmitry Ryurikov, suggested Sperling had been denied entry for national security reasons, rather than her Chechnya coverage.
“I do not think that she is denied access to Chechnya because of her journalistic activities,” Ryurikov said, according to a transcript of the show provided by “Deadline.” “I think that there are security reasons.”
Politiken editor Toge Seidenfaden sent a letter dated March 21, 2005, to Ryurikov requesting permanent press accreditation, as well as a multiple-entry visa, for Sperling. Ryurikov answered in an April 4, 2005, letter that Seidenfaden’s request “was reported to the competent authorities in Russia and duly considered.”
“Following that, I was requested to inform you that the earlier decision regarding the press accreditation of Ms. Vibeke von Sperling was not reconsidered,” Ryurikov wrote in his reply, a copy of which was obtained by The Moscow Times.
Panfilov conceded that the only official written explanation he had seen in these cases was a letter from the Federal Migration Service, dated April 12, 2006, to the Russian Union of Journalists stating that British journalist Tom de Waal “is currently barred from entering Russia” because he is a national security threat.
“And that’s just because I was the one who invited him,” Panfilov said.
De Waal, a former Moscow Times reporter and co-author of a book about the first Chechen war, was planning to come to Russia at the invitation of the Union of Journalists to attend the presentation of a Russian version of his new book on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. 
He said his visa denial was retaliation for his critical reporting about Chechnya.
“I am curious to know how I can be judged according to a law without any kind of process or information on who made the decision, and on what grounds,” De Waal said by e-mail. 
“What is the threat they are claiming that I pose, and do I get a right to a hearing to put my case?”

TITLE: Israel Launches New Air Raids
AUTHOR: By Nayla Razzouk
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BEIRUT — Israeli warplanes have launched a new wave of bombing raids on Lebanon, killing 14 civilians and turning homes to rubble, after the Jewish state suffered its deadliest day since the conflict began.
At least one Israeli soldier was also killed in battles with Hezbollah guerrillas around a flashpoint border town, with no signs of a let-up in almost four weeks of fighting that has killed well over 1,000 people.
And with international efforts to broker a ceasefire faltering, Israeli officials warned they would continue the offensive to cripple the fundamentalist Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement regardless of any truce.
At UN headquarters in New York, where the Security Council had been expected to adopt a resolution by Tuesday, diplomats said they could no longer say when a vote would take place after Lebanon objected to the text.
Arab foreign ministers were due to meet in Beirut to discuss an alternative seven-point plan proposed by Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Siniora to bring a halt to 27 days of warfare.
As day broke over Beirut, Israeli fighter-bombers pounded Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs with bombs and air-to-ground missiles, sending huge clouds of black smoke into the air over districts that had already been largely reduced to rubble.
Warplanes also struck houses in villages around the port of Sidon, the main city in the south and carried out a dozen raids on roads linking the region with Syria, including the highway leading to the main border crossing.
At least 14 civilians were killed, and in one village television pictures showed workers hacking with axes through the rubble and twisted metal struts of a house in an apparent bid to find survivors or recover corpses.
The road to Syria, one of the only ways out of Lebanon for people trying to flee the conflict, has been knocked out repeatedly as Israel keeps up its blockade that has left the country almost completely cut off from the outside world.
Israeli troops were also engaged in clashes with Hezbollah in a bid to eradicate the Shiite fighters from the border area and halt rocket attacks that killed 15 people on Sunday alone, the deadliest single day for Israel.
The army said one soldier was killed around the border town of Bint Jbeil — the scene of the fiercest ground combat of the conflict, bringing to 59 the number of military personnel killed.
Another 36 civilians have been killed in a barrage of Hezbollah rocket fire from across the border.
Israel’s offensive launched July 12 has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, wounded more than 3,300 and driven more than 915,000 — close to a quarter of the population — from their homes, according to official tolls.
But with world powers unable to agree on a resolution to end the bloodiest cross-border fighting in a quarter century, Israel vowed it would plough on until it crushed Hezbollah.
“We are continuing operations to clean up southern Lebanon and to meet the goals we have set ourselves, regardless of any possible ceasefire,” said the commander of Israel’s northern military region, General Alon Friedman.
His comments were echoed by Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who said the “number one objective is to stop the rocket fire.”

TITLE: Iran Will Defy UN Deadline on Uranium
AUTHOR: By Michael Slackman
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: CAIRO  — Iran’s chief national security official said Sunday that Iran would defy the United Nations Security Council by refusing to halt enrichment of uranium by the end of the month.
During a news conference in Iran, Ali Larijani, the country’s security chief and top nuclear negotiator, condemned the West. He said it had engaged in double-dealing, by first offering a package of incentives in exchange for suspension of its nuclear-enrichment program, and then by issuing a threat.
In remarks reported by the official Iranian News Agency, Mr. Larijani did not appear to chart new ground, sticking with Iran’s position that it would not halt enrichment as a precondition of negotiations.
Western diplomats in Iran said in recent interviews that it appeared that Iran’s leadership had bet on the notion that it was more likely to get what it wanted if it refused to budge from its position, believing that the Security Council, and the West in particular, would do anything to avoid another ugly confrontation in the Middle East.
The remarks appeared to be consistent with the government’s initial reaction at the end of July, when the Security Council passed a resolution demanding that Iran halt its enrichment work or face the possibility of economic and political sanctions.
“The resolution is illegal,” said Mr. Larijani, echoing comments made in July by Javad Zarif, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. The two have said that since Iran has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and since it has not violated that treaty, it cannot be forced to suspend enrichment.
Under the treaty, members are entitled access to peaceful nuclear energy. Iran hid its nuclear program for more than a dozen years from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitoring arm of the United Nations, and now the United States and Europe contend that Iran is pursuing an arms program. Iran insists it is pursuing peaceful nuclear energy.
The United States and Europe offered the incentives in June. Iran had said it would look favorably on the package and give a reply by Aug. 22. The West, along with Russia and China, pushed Iran to reply sooner. When it did not, the Security Council adopted the resolution with the Aug. 31 deadline.
“If they are to solve the problem, they should find a solution in fair negotiations,” the news agency quoted Mr. Larijani as saying. “They should not harm the course of the negotiation.”
Mr. Larijani did not say what Iran’s response would be to the incentive package, only that it was being viewed less favorably after the Security Council resolution.
Christina Gallach, spokeswoman for Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, called on Iran to carry out the Security Council resolution. “We encourage Larijani and Iran to comply with the resolution,” she said, adding that Iran had ample time to make its case before the resolution was passed.
In Iran, the issue of its nuclear program has become intertwined with the rest of the turmoil in the Middle East. Western diplomats in Iran said it appeared that the chaos had given an upper hand to the more hard-line members of Iran’s leadership.

TITLE: Castro to Recover in ‘A Few Weeks’
AUTHOR: By Anita Snow
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAVANA — Cuba’s vice president and Venezuela’s leader gave optimistic assessments of Fidel Castro’s health, saying the Cuban president was recovering quickly from intestinal surgery and could be expected back at work within a few weeks.
Castro has been out of sight since July 31, when his secretary announced he had undergone surgery and was temporarily ceding power to his younger brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro.
“In a few weeks he’ll be recovered and he’ll return to his duties,” Vice President Carlos Lage said Sunday when asked by reporters when Castro would be back at work. Lage spoke in Bolivia, where he attended the Andean country’s constitutional convention.
Castro’s return would expose a U.S. policy of “lies” behind speculation that he would not recover from the operation, Lage said.
Cubans were told most details of Castro’s health would be kept a state secret to prevent the island’s enemies from taking advantage of his condition. Indeed, officials have failed to say what precisely is ailing Castro or what surgical procedure he underwent.
Lage earlier shot down reports that Castro had stomach cancer.
“The operation that he underwent was successful and he is recovering favorably,” he said Sunday. “Fidel’s going to be around for another 80 years.”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Castro, who turns 80 next Sunday, was out of bed and talking following his surgery.
“How are you, Fidel?” Chavez said during his weekly TV and radio program, suggesting he believed the Cuban leader was watching. “We have reliable information of your quick and notable recuperation.”
“Fidel Castro, a hug for you, friend and comrade, and I know you are getting better,” he added.
Speaking by phone with Bolivian President Evo Morales later during the program, Chavez said Castro was bouncing back quickly.
“This morning I learned that he’s very well, that he is already getting out of bed, he’s talking more than he should — because he talks a lot, you know. He has sent us greetings,” Chavez said.
Morales, a leftist elected in December as Bolivia’s first Indian president, said he was glad to learn of Castro’s recovery and that “what’s left is for him to be incorporated into the battle of his country” again. Morales said Castro was like an “older brother.”
Get-well wishes poured in from leftists across the hemisphere.
Former Nicaraguan President and Sandinista revolution leader Daniel Ortega arrived in Havana late Saturday. “I am sure that we will soon have Fidel resuming his functions and leading his people,” Ortega said.
Colombia’s largest rebel group also expressed its solidarity with the Cuban leader. “We hope you’ll recover in the shortest time possible,” the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia said in a statement.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday the United States wanted to help Cubans prepare for democracy but was not contemplating an invasion of the island in the wake of Castro’s illness.
“The notion that somehow the United States is going to invade Cuba, because there are troubles in Cuba, is simply far-fetched,” Rice told NBC News. “The United States wants to be a partner and a friend to the Cuban people as they move through this period of difficulty and as they move ahead. But what Cuba should not have is the replacement of one dictator by another.”

TITLE: Lieberman Facing Pressure in Primary
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EAST HAVEN, Connecticut — Facing intense pressure in his bid for the Democratic primary, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman strongly distanced himself from President Bush, saying he opposed the White House’s domestic agenda and its handling of the Iraq war. 
“I am the only Democrat in America to run against George Bush in a national election twice,” Lieberman told supporters at a rally Sunday. 
“You know why I ran for president in 2004? Because I believe that his agenda was wrong for our country and our future. And that’s the truth.”
Lieberman, a three-term incumbent and his party’s vice presidential candidate in 2000, has been dogged by liberal Democrats angry at him for supporting the war in Iraq.
Challenger Ned Lamont, a political newcomer and founder of a cable company, has capitalized on the war’s unpopularity in Connecticut by accusing Lieberman of being too close to Republicans and Bush.
The primary is Tuesday and Lieberman has said he intends to run as an independent if he loses. In Connecticut, more than 942,000, or 45 percent, of the state’s approximately 2.1 million voters are unaffiliated. More than 702,000 are Democrats and more than 456,000 Republicans.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Lamont leading Lieberman 54 percent to 41 percent in the Democratic primary. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points. Lamont ran into an enthusiastic following Sunday while campaigning at firefighter’s carnival in Orange. He drew a crowd as he made his way through the snow cone and cotton candy booths.
Sonja Duarte, 40, of East Haven, said Lamont has her vote. “It’s time for someone new,” Duarte said. “Lieberman is more Republican than Democrat right now.”
Lieberman, at his campaign rally, said he has opposed nearly every major domestic issue Bush has backed, including a ban on stem cell research and a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Lieberman laid out his stance on Iraq, saying he did support the resolution giving the president authority to take out Saddam Hussein, as did many Senate Democrats.
“I still believe that was right. What I don’t think is right, as I have said over and over again, are many of the Bush administration decisions regarding the conduct of the war,” he said.
He criticized the president for not having a plan to win the peace and for a shortage of troops and allies.
“Don’t think for a minute I do not grieve for every casualty of this war,” Lieberman said. 
“In fact, as someone who voted for the war, I feel a heavy responsibility to try to end it as quickly and successfully as possible.”
The candidates have had one televised debate and have flooded the airwaves with political ads.

TITLE: Bedbugs Are Back And Biting Again; Experts Are Puzzled
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATLANTA, Georgia — After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton couldn’t sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of Raid with him in bed. 
“We were afraid to even tell people about it at first,” Benton said of the bedbugs in his home. “It feels like maybe some way you’re living is encouraging this, that you’re living in a bad neighborhood or have a dirty apartment.”
Absent from the U.S. for so long that some thought they were a myth, bedbugs are back. Entomologists and pest control professionals are reporting a dramatic increase in infestations throughout the country, and no one knows exactly why.
“It’s no secret that bedbugs are making a comeback,” said Dan Suiter, an associate professor of entomology at the University of Georgia.
Before World War II, bedbug infestations were common in the U.S., but they were virtually eradicated through improvements in hygiene and the widespread use of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s.
Bedbugs are tiny brownish, flattened insects that feed exclusively on the blood of animals and humans. Their bites may cause itchy red welts or swelling.
Unlike mosquitoes, though, they are not known to transmit blood-borne diseases from one victim to another. They are extremely resilient and very difficult to exterminate. Experts say bedbugs are not necessarily an indicator of unsanitary conditions.
In the past four years, reports of bedbugs have significantly increased in U.S. cities, from New York to Honolulu, especially in hotels, hospitals and college dormitories — all places with high resident turnover.
The National Pest Management Association, which represents many of the country’s pest control companies, says the number of bedbug reports have increased fivefold in four years.
The Atlanta branch of pest-control firm Terminix saw no cases of bedbugs in 2004 and only three or four last year. But in the first six months of this year, they’ve had 23 new cases, said Clint Briscoe, a spokesman.
Experts are not entirely sure what has caused the marked increase. Some speculate that increased international travel and immigration may be partially to blame.
The tiny bugs may be hitching a ride in the luggage or clothing of travelers. This could explain the high concentration of the pests in cities like Atlanta and New York, which attract a lot of international traffic.
Another factor is a change in pest control practices. Companies are spraying more responsibly now, Suiter said. Instead of indiscriminately saturating the perimeter of all rooms, they often use more conservative measures and do large-scale spray treatments only when there’s an infestation. As a result of consumer demand, less toxic chemicals are also being used.
“The bottom line is it may be a convergence of all those factors, but none of that really explains the rapid increase in recent years,” said Michael Potter, a professor and urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky.
Experts agree that the public needs to be educated about bedbugs — on the symptoms and how to prevent them.
“A lot of people, including some physicians, don’t even think they’re real,” Potter said. As a result people may go months before realizing the source of their discomfort.
In Hawaii, where tourism is a major industry, state lawmakers passed a resolution for a prevention campaign after infestations at some hotels damaged their reputations and annoyed travelers. Similarly, legislation for a bedbug task force has been proposed by New York City Councilwoman Gail Brewer.
For Benton, a 31-year-old graduate student, the bedbugs sparked a seven-month battle that included bug bombs and the tossing out of his and his fiancee’s bedroom furniture.

TITLE: ‘Ricky Bobby’ Zooms Ahead At Box Office
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — Will Ferrell’s NASCAR spoof “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” enjoyed life in the fast lane with a No. 1 finish in the weekend box office race, taking in $47 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
“It’s one of those movies — pardon the pun — firing on all cylinders. When you have Will Ferrell and NASCAR, you just know you are going to have a crowd pleaser. But this was way beyond expectations,” said Rory Bruer, president of distribution for Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Also entering the box office race with a surprising debut was the animated movie “Barnyard: The Original Party Animals,” placing second with $16 million.
“It was at the high end of anybody’s expectations. We’re thrilled,” said Don Harris, executive vice president for distribution at Paramount Pictures, noting recent soft openings for the animated movies “Monster House” and “Ant Bully.”
Overall, box office revenue for the top dozen films was up 17 percent over the same week last year, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc., which tracks box office performance.
“Hollywood’s on a roll. Last year at this time it was all gloom and doom. Eighteen of the past 20 weekends have been up over last year,” Dergarabedian said.

TITLE: Madonna ‘Crucified’ at Rome Concert, Vatican Protests
AUTHOR: By Rachel Sanderson
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ROME — Madonna staged a mock-crucifixion in the Italian capital on Sunday, ignoring a storm of protest and accusations of blasphemy from the Roman Catholic Church.
In a sold-out stadium just a mile from Vatican City, the lapsed-Catholic diva wore a fake crown of thorns as she was raised on a glittery cross during the Rome stop of her worldwide “Confessions Tour.”
The Vatican had accused her of blasphemy and provocation for even considering staging the sham crucifixion on its doorstep, anger Madonna further enflamed prior to the show by inviting Pope Benedict to come and watch.
The self-styled “Queen of Pop” went on to pepper her two-and-a-half hour show with more controversial imagery, at one point showing photographs of the Pope after those of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
“Did you know two miracles have taken place in Rome?,” the star, dressed in skin-skimming black, later joked with the crowd. “Italy won the World Cup and the rain stopped before my show.”
The 70,000 fans, crammed into the Olympic Stadium, shrugged off the scandal, by dancing, singing and jumping as she performed songs from her latest album “Confessions on a Dance Floor” and classics, such as “Like a Virgin.”
Yet, the cheering lulled when she was raised on the cross and some fans from predominantly Roman Catholic Italy confessed their disappointment.
“The crucifixion was unnecessary and provocative. Because this is Rome, I wish she’d cut it out. But it’s Madonna, she’s an icon, and that balances out her need to provoke,” said 39-year old Roman, Tonia Valerio.
It is not the first time Madonna, whose father is a Catholic Italian American, has caused religious anger for her controversial religious and sexual imagery.
Catholic leaders condemned as blasphemous her 1989 video for hit song “Like a Prayer,” featuring burning crosses, statues crying blood and Madonna seducing a black Jesus.
In 2004, a Vatican group warned that her latest religious belief “Kabbalah,” a mystical from of Judaism, was a potential threat to the Roman Catholic faithful.
And she looks likely to face another storm when the tour reaches Moscow in September, where the Russian Orthodox Church has advised its followers to boycott the show because of the crucifixion stunt, agency Interfax reported on Saturday.

TITLE: Actors Defend Mel Gibson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Patrick Swayze has joined several of Mel Gibson’s celebrity friends in defending the actor, who in a drunken tirade blamed Jews for the world’s wars.
Gibson is “a wonderful human being,” Swayze told GMTV in an interview being aired Monday. “He is not anti-Semitic.”
Gibson, 50, was arrested on drunken driving charges July 28 on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Calif., where he unleashed an angry anti-Semitic outburst on the arresting deputy.
The “Lethal Weapon” series star and Oscar-winning director of “Braveheart” has apologized twice for his words and acknowledged his long struggle with alcoholism.
Swayze, 53, downplayed his friend’s drunken outburst, telling GMTV that “people say stupid things when they happen to have a few, and especially if you don’t drink any more, or have limited your drinking for a long time and all of a sudden you decide to have one too many with the boys — you are stupid.”

TITLE: Sharapova Wins in Run-Up to U.S. Open
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: SAN DIEGO, Californa — Second-seeded Maria Sharapova beat Kim Clijsters 7-5, 7-5, taking her first triumph in five tries over the Belgian top seed to win a $1.34 million-WTA hardcourt event.
The defeat snapped a 24-match North American summer hardcourt unbeaten streak for Clijsters, the reigning U.S. Open champion.
It was the fourth final of the year for fourth-ranked Sharapova, who won her only prior title of the year at Indian Wells in March.
“Coming into the match I knew I had to be physically and mentally ready or I was going down,” Sharapova said.
“So it was up to me to follow through with those sayings.
“I’m really happy that I came back and won that first tournament and got a win against someone who I never beat in competiton. It was just my day. I lost to her four times, so I thought this might be my lucky one.”
The Russian star, playing for the first time in three weeks, broke Clijsters in the final game to defeat Clijsters after one hour and 48 minutes and claim her 12th career title as well as a top prize of $196,900.
“To beat a player that’s been in the top, that’s been playing really well this year and that’s No. 2 in the world is a great achievement,” Sharapova said.
“But I’ve got to move on. This is my work to the U.S. Open. I have another task ahead of me.”
Sharapova, the 2004 Wimbledon champion, did not lose a set at the U.S. Open warm-up event but played some tension-packed tennis to do it. She downed Swiss Patty Schnyder 7-5, 6-4 in Saturday’s semi-finals.
“It’s amazing to get a title and I have a few more tournaments coming up,” said Sharapova. “Going into the U.S. Open is really exciting to finally have a few matches under my belt and hopefully be healthy in one of the biggest Grand Slam tournaments of the world.”
Clijsters has never won this event, losing the 2003 final to compatriot Justine Henin-Hardenne.
“Another final, especially having such a close match, you always want to go out and finish it,” said Clijsters, who was stunned by China’s Peng Shaui in last year’s quarterfinals.
“I did better then last year. That’s way I prefer to look at it.”
Complaining of a sore back the entire week, Clijsters felt weary after her ninth match in 12 days.
“I didn’t feel my freshest out there, but I tried the best that I could,” she said. “I fought and that’s the only thing you can do with the way that you feel that day.”
Sharapova has never been afraid of speaking her mind and the Russian freely admits that a desire to build on a successful start to her career is fueled by the prospect of an ever-expanding bank account. 
“It’s never enough. I always look for more,” Sharapova told reporters at the Acura Classic on Thursday. “Bring on the money.” 
According to a recent survey in Sport Illustrated, the 19-year-old world No. 4 is the world’s highest-paid female athlete, earning an estimated $25.4 million dollars a year. 
Sharapova is also ranked number four on the magazine’s international top-20 list, behind Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, MotoGP rider Valentino Rossi and soccer’s Ronaldinho. 
However, she has moved ahead of Real Madrid’s David Beckham, baseball player Ichiro Suzuki and Swiss tennis player Roger Federer, who earns an estimated $22.1 million a year. 
Sharapova, who has endorsements from a string of multinational companies, says she will always find time for another major contract.

TITLE: Syomin Quits Dynamo Moscow
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Russia manager Yuri Syomin quit as Dynamo Moscow coach following a 3-0 thrashing by city rivals Torpedo in a Russian premier league derby on Friday. 
“When the players are not following the orders and not doing what they are supposed to do, then it’s time for the coach to go,” Syomin told reporters after the defeat which left Dynamo second from bottom and facing relegation for the first time in the club’s history. 
Syomin’s departure was the second in the last three days for the Moscow club following the resignation of general director Yuri Zavarzin, who quit on Wednesday. 
It also came just a day after Dynamo’s first-choice goalkeeper Sergei Ovchinnikov received a five-match ban for physically threatening a referee in a premier league match last week. 
The once mighty club is having one of its worst seasons ever, struggling both on and off the pitch despite flamboyant owner Alexei Fedorychev having spent more than $100 million on players since taking control almost two years ago. 
Amid rumours that Fedorychev was trying to sell the club, players and staff did not get paid for several months earlier this year. 
Dynamo, the only Russian club never to be relegated, have had seven different managers in the last three seasons. 
Syomin, 59, joined Dynamo on a three-year contract last November, shortly after quitting as Russia manager after he failed to guide them to the World Cup finals. 
At Dynamo, he replaced Brazilian Ivo Wortman, who was sacked at the end of last season after a run of poor results. 
After weekend games, champions CSKA Moscow, city rivals Spartak and high-flying newcomers Spartak Nalchik are tied at the top on 28 points each, halfway through the March-November championship. 
A spectacular goal from Serbian midfielder Milos Krasic and a clinical finish by Croatian striker Ivica Olic handed CSKA a 2-1 home win over promoted Luch Energiya. 
Spartak Moscow beat lowly Rostov 5-2 after romping to a 5-0 lead in the opening 38 minutes, while Nalchik were held to a 1-1 home draw by fifth-placed Krylya Sovietov Samara. 
Fourth-placed Lokomotiv Moscow trail the leaders by four points after a disappointing 0-0 draw at home to struggling Amkar Perm, in which they had Elvir Spahic sent off.

TITLE: Sports Watch
TEXT: Davydenko Wins 
SOPOT, Poland (Reuters) — Russian top seed Nikolai Davydenko captured his second title of the season with a 7-6 5-7 6-4 win over unseeded German Florian Mayer in the Polish Open final on Sunday. 
Davydenko squandered two match points in the second set as Mayer stormed back from a set and 5-1 down to take the match into a decider. 
The world No. 6 proved to be too strong in the third and pocketed the $59,200 first prize after eventually winning the longest final in the tournament’s 15-year history. 

Skeet Shooting Record
ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — The United States set a world record in women’s skeet Saturday, hitting 211 targets at the world shooting championships. 
Connie Smotek hit 72 marks, Brandie Neal 70 and Haley Dunn 69 in the team event, beating Italy’s record of 210.
Russia was second and Italy third. 
Russia’s Erdzhanik Avetisyan won the gold medal in the skeet event with 95 points. Italy’s Chiara Cainero earned the silver. 
She had 94 points after hitting four targets in a shootout with Slovakia’s Danka Bartekova, who won the bronze with 94 points and three targets.

TITLE: Gold For Gleb
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BUDAPEST — Russia’s Gleb Galperin claimed his second diving gold of the European swimming championships when he won the platform title on Sunday. 
Galperin, who partnered Dmitry Dobroskok to victory in the synchronised platform event on Saturday, compiled 472.90 points from his six final dives from the 10-meter board. He beat 2002 champion Heiko Meyer of Germany (459.45) and Konstyantyn Milyayev of Ukraine (436.50). 
It was Meyer’s fourth silver medal in the event and the ninth European medal in his career. He also took silver in the platform synchronised final with fellow German Sascha Klein. 
Russia won the day’s other title when Natalya Umyskova and Nadezhda Bazhina prevailed in the women’s three-meter springboard synchronised event with 314.55 points. 
Heike Fischer and Ditte Kotzian of Germany took the silver (298.68) and Olena Fedorova and Kristina Ishchenko of Ukraine the bronze (292.17). 
It was Kotzian’s third Budapest silver following her second places behind Sweden’s Anna Lindberg in the one-meter and three-meter springboard finals.