SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1198 (64), Thursday, August 24, 2006
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TITLE: Lightning Not Likely To Be Sole Crash Cause
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — While lightning has been blamed for Tuesday’s downing of a Pulkovo Airlines Tu-154 jet, it is unlikely to have been the sole cause of the crash, which left 170 dead.
Lightning incidents are not unheard of on airplane flights, aviation expert Oleg Panteleyev said, with an average of one incident every two years in some areas. But few of those end in disaster, thanks to onboard equipment.
That equipment includes conductors in the plane’s wings to dissipate electricity in the event of a lightning strike, said Oleg Yermolov, deputy head of the Interstate Aviation Committee.
Yermolov said he could not remember a single instance in the past several decades of a commercial jet going down after being struck by lightning.
Tuesday’s flight took off from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa and was headed to St. Petersburg when it crashed midafternoon near Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said a storm with high winds, driving rain and lightning was raging through the region at the time of the crash. Russian Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova, citing Ukrainian officials, said the plane was likely struck by lightning.
The Tu-154 was equipped with radar that would have alerted the pilot to worsening weather conditions well in advance of the danger zone, Yermolov said. Air traffic controllers also would have pointed the plane away from the storm, Panteleyev said.
Panteleyev noted the pilot appeared to be steering the plane away from the storm when the plane went down. “It looks like the change of course was not sufficient to bypass the giant front,” said Panteleyev, the editor of the aviation web site Aviaport.ru.
Once caught in the storm, lightning could have contributed to the plane crash, Yermolov suggested. 
While lightning itself might not have caused any damage to the airplane, it could have induced relatively small electrical currents that could have damaged electronic systems on board.
“A plane shouldn’t enter a storm area, but once it’s there, some parts of the equipment can fail,” Yermolov said.
Russian airliners are no more vulnerable to lightning than are foreign planes, Panteleyev said.
One recent high-profile incident involving a plane struck by lightning occurred in April 2005, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair was flying aboard his campaign jet as it was approaching London. Those on board the jet said they heard a loud bang and the plane wobbled from side to side, but it landed safely at Heathrow Airport 10 minutes later.
Not a single U.S. airplane has been downed by lightning in at least 40 years, nor has lightning caused any plane crashes in U.S. airspace in that time.

TITLE: Black Boxes From Pulkovo Plane Crash Found
AUTHOR: By David Nowak and Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Flight data recorders from the Pulkovo Airlines plane that crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing all 170 on board, were recovered Wednesday.
Bad weather is believed to be at least partly to blame for Tuesday’s crash of the 14-year-old Tu-154M.
All of the bodies have been found.
Forty-five of the victims were under 12. Six of the children were under 2; the youngest was 4 months old. Figures were provided by Vasily Naletenko, Pulkovo Airlines’ deputy general director.
The death toll was revised upward by one on Wednesday. An earlier count put the figure at 169 people. The flight was en route from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa to St. Petersburg when it crashed outside the village of Sukhaya Balka, near the industrial city of Donetsk.
Many of those on board were thought to be vacationers returning for the new school year, which begins Sept. 1.
The plane departed Anapa at about 3:05 p.m. It is believed to have run headlong into a storm, encountering strong winds, rain and lightning.
Sometime after 3:30 p.m., the plane issued a distress call while it was at an altitude of 11,700 meters. A second SOS signal came in soon after, when the plane had dropped to 3,000 meters.
Soon after, the plane crashed in a field between two villages. No one on the ground was hurt.
Witnesses said the plane fell to the ground like a petal, twirling in an uncontrollable tail spin, and exploded when it hit the ground.
Five foreigners were on board: two Germans and citizens from the Netherlands, France and Finland.
The two recording devices, or black boxes, will be transported to Moscow on Wednesday to be examined by Interstate Aviation Committee personnel, Transportation Minister Igor Levitin said.
Levitin, speaking at a news conference, added that it would take six weeks to decipher the information in the black boxes, which he said were in satisfactory condition.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko spoke by telephone with President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to convey his sympathies and pledge assistance in the investigation.
Ukraine’s Emergency Situations Ministry originally speculated the crew had requested an emergency landing after a fire broke out on board. Aviation experts voiced skepticism about that theory to Interfax and Moscow newspapers, saying crew members would have had time to report the fire to air traffic controllers.
Irina Andrianova, spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry, said the plane was likely struck by lightning, but that it was doubtful lightning was solely to blame for the crash.
Interfax, citing a source close to the Russian Emergency Situation Ministry, said the crash might have been caused by the pilot exceeding the critical altitude of 11,500 meters. At that altitude, the Tu-154 could have stalled and gone into a tailspin.
It is common practice for pilots to avoid turbulence caused by stormy weather by flying above the clouds.
The Interfax source said a plane crash in the Uzbek city of Uchkuduk in 1985 might have been caused by exceeding the plane’s so-called ceiling. The plane in that accident was also a Tu-154; all 200 on board were killed.
Pulkovo Airlines on Wednesday arranged for family and friends to fly to the crash site. Some elderly relatives were unable to travel. Many relatives gathered at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport required serious medical attention, apparently overwhelmed by news of the accident.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko said the city would pay 100,000 rubles in compensation to the families of everyone on the flight, irrespective of where they lived or their citizenship.
NTV television later reported that all the families would receive 250,000 rubles and that the government would pay for burial expenses.
Tuesday’s tragedy comes on the heels of two other crashes in former Soviet republics.
In July, 127 of the 204 people on board a S7 Airbus A310 died when the plane crashed while landing.
In May, an Airbus A320 run by the Armenian airline Armavia crashed into the Black Sea, killing all 113 on board.
The death toll from the three crashes stands at 405.
These two accidents prompted State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov to call for action to boost safety standards on passenger planes.
“Regardless of whether reasons for the crash will be found, today one thing is clear: The system of safety on flights in Russia absolutely does not correspond to international standards,” Gudkov said Wednesday, Interfax reported.
At the time of Tuesday’s crash, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration considered Russia to be in compliance with international safety standards.
The Tu-154M is one of the most popular planes in use by Russian airlines, Tupolev official Alexander Zatuchny said.
“There are over 400 Tu-154 aircraft currently in use, mainly the M version,” he said by telephone.
“More are produced from time to time. They are regularly modified, updated and, of course, serviced. ... I think they will be flying for another five to 10 years.”
Officials in Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday declared days of mourning.

TITLE: The Cost of Living Just Keeps Getting More Costly
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — When the price of bread jumped by 6 rubles overnight, Vladimir Gaidukas was left reeling.
City authorities quickly began handing out bread coupons to him and hundreds of other pensioners in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — the first time food vouchers had been issued anywhere in the country since the dark days of 1992. But the gesture brought little comfort to Gaidukas, 72, who lives on 5,000 rubles ($187) per month.
“People are in a state of shock,” Gaidukas said by telephone from the remote city on the Kamchatka Peninsula this week.
While no other cities have resorted to vouchers, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is not unique in its problem. Nationwide, prices are rising sharply for everything from sugar and pasta to apartments and gasoline. Inflation is eating into people’s paychecks and savings. This means that millions of people are getting poorer, even as the country heads for its eighth straight year of economic growth.
Real disposable incomes — the amount of cash a person has after taxes, and adjusted for inflation — fell by 4.9 percent in July, according to data from the State Statistics Service released this week.
On the whole, though, real disposable incomes have grown by 11.2 percent over the past year. As such, some economists expect income growth to recover in the coming months — and the prices for goods and services also are expected to keep going up. Inflation over the past year was 9.3 percent.
In Kamchatka, the situation was exacerbated when regional authorities withdrew energy subsidies for businesses, and bakers immediately passed on the extra cost to consumers in early August. Bread prices rose from 14 rubles to 20 rubles on average. The Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s social security committee was forced to print 10,000 bread coupons to feed the needy.
But the food vouchers — which made national television reports — proved such an embarrassing reminder of post-Soviet food shortages that they were canceled last week and the head of the city’s social security committee was reprimanded. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service is investigating the price hike and is expected to wrap up its report on Sept. 5, Interfax reported Wednesday. For now, pensioners are allowed to buy bread at discounts.
Things are not getting any cheaper elsewhere. Nationally, a basket of essential foodstuffs, including meat, dairy products, sugar, pasta and fruits and vegetables, cost 1,538.30 rubles ($57.50) at the end of July, an increase of 14 percent from the start of the year, according to the State Statistics Service. Dairy products alone are 11.1 percent more expensive than last year, while fruits and vegetables are 11.9 percent more expensive.
July prices for new Russian cars such as the Lada sedan went up by 2.1 percent, while jewelry became 1.4 percent more expensive, compared with the previous month.
Consumer prices have risen 6.9 percent since the beginning of the year. Moscow falls just below the national average, at 6.8 percent, while prices in remote areas like Kamchatka have shot up more than 8 percent. (Prices, however, rose only 0.1 percent during the first 14 days of August and will fall for the rest of the month and for the month as a whole, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry said Wednesday.)
A large part of the reason that living costs are growing is a government campaign to eradicate poverty — a fiscally sensitive effort that has prompted the state to print billions of extra rubles to pay for higher salaries and pensions, among other things. Extra money, of course, helps fuel inflation.
So while the standard of living has improved for most people, inflation is so high that it is undermining the effort to fight poverty, said Vladimir Pantyushin, an economist with Renaissance Capital. “People can really feel the price movement. It hurts psychologically.”
In its crusade against poverty, the government is only targeting the poor and “has a vague idea of what’s happening in the middle class,” said Yulia Tseplyayeva, head of research at ING Bank.
She said the growth in the cost of living for the middle and upper classes, whose needs and spending habits are different, was well above the average 6.9 percent. “The 6.9 percent figure doesn’t really concur with my feelings. I am from a different income group,” she said.
Also from a different income group is Alexei Klevetov, who said he was lucky if he managed to bring home $1,500 per month from two jobs. An engineer by training, he is a technician for a mobile phone operator by day and a taxi driver by night.
Ever-increasing gasoline prices loom large in Klevetov’s budget. Energy prices also play a key role in fueling inflation, because high fuel costs make it more expensive to get food to store shelves. But Klevetov does not need an economist to tell him that. “Gas prices are rising everyday,” he said glumly. “Prices are slowly but surely going up.”
Gasoline prices have risen by 7 percent from Jan. 1 to Aug. 14, according to the State Statistics Service. In the first three weeks of August, the average price of gasoline in Moscow soared 5.5 percent, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
Klevetov said he did not feel his financial situation had been improving as the country raked in billions of petrodollars amid record-high global oil prices. Despite working two jobs five days per week, Klevetov is struggling to support his wife and a child. 
Klevetov’s family lives with his mother-in-law, as property prices spin out of control. “Buying an apartment is unrealistic,” he said.
The average price per square meter in Moscow is $3,812, according to Irn.ru, a web site that monitors the real estate market. The average home price in Moscow grew a staggering 50.5 percent in the first half of this year.

TITLE: Two Suspects Charged With Hate Crime in Market Blast
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOscow — The blast that left at least 12 dead at the bustling Cherkizovsky market Monday was most likely a hate crime committed by ultranationalist youths, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Two of the three suspects who have been detained in connection with the blast were charged with racially motivated homicide, the city’s chief prosecutor, Yury Syomin, said Tuesday.
Those suspects are Oleg Kostyrev, 20, of the Republic of Udmurtia, and Ilya Tikhomirov, 20, of Moscow. The third suspect is Valery Zhukhovtsev, 18, who was recruited later in the planning stages to help pull off the bombing, Syomin said.
Kostyrev, a fourth-year student at the Dmitry Mendeleyev Russian Chemical-Technological University in Moscow, downloaded a blueprint of the bomb used in Monday’s attack before assembling it, Interfax reported.
Tikhomirov studies at the Moscow Social Institute, Interfax reported.
Kostyrev and Tikhomirov targeted the Novaya Yevrazia section of the market because they felt there were “too many natives of Asia” there, Syomin said. 
Kostyrev and Tikhomirov cased the market Saturday and then asked Zhukhovtsev to help them with their getaway, Syomin said.
Syomin said the trio entered the market on Monday and proceeded to a cafe, where they deposited the bombs; detonators were timed to set off the explosions 55 seconds later. Both bombs reportedly consisted of canisters filled with liquid explosives.
Traders apparently took note of the two young men, who were said to have looked nervous. They were apprehended outside the market shortly after the bombs went off. Zhukhovtsev fled before the other suspects and was caught early Tuesday, Syomin said.
Six women, four men, a 4-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl were killed in the attack. Most of the victims came from Asia; others who were either killed or seriously injured included Azeris, Gypsies, Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians. Seven Chinese nationals were among those injured, the China’s Xinhua news agency said Tuesday.
As of Tuesday evening, there were 22 men, 12 women and one child being treated for injuries. Eleven of those injured were in grave condition, city health officials said.
None of the suspects belonged to ultranationalist groups, but they had been in contact with like-minded people on the Internet, Syomin said.
Independent xenophobia experts said ultranationalists and skinheads operating alone are a growing danger. “We see the emergence of so-called net-surfing nationalists who do not join any groups but get pumped up on the Internet and then strike out in the real world,” said Semyon Charny of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights.

TITLE: Egyptians Try to Tunnel to EU
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Egyptian citizens face criminal charges in the Bryansk region for attempting to tunnel under the Russian border using a shoehorn, Interfax reported Wednesday.
The Prosecutor General’s Office said Wednesday that the Egyptians, Mohammed Anwar el Maghriby Ali Kuram and Said Ali Taha Mohammed Hassan, hatched a plan in early July to cross the border illegally into Western Europe. They flew into Moscow on tourist visas, then made it to the Belarussian-Polish border by car and train.
A statement from the Prosecutor General’s Office said the pair used a shoehorn to tunnel into Poland under a barbed-wire barrier along the border.
“Once in Poland, the Egyptians lost their way, and assuming that the next barbed-wire fence they encountered was the border between Poland and Germany, they dug another tunnel using the same shoehorn,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, they wound up back in Belarus instead of Germany.”
After a brief stay in the custody of Belarussian border police, the two men were put on a train to Moscow and told to report to the Egyptian Embassy. They got off the train in Smolensk instead, however, and made their way to the border town of Sevsk, where they were detained by border guards as they tried to burrow across the border into Ukraine.
The two men are currently in jail awaiting trial in a Bryansk regional court. They have been charged with attempting to cross the Russian border illegally in an organized group. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

TITLE: Local Academic Rejects $1 Million
AUTHOR: By Daniel Woolls
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MADRID, Spain — A reclusive Russian won the math world’s highest honor Tuesday for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline’s greatest minds for a century — but he refused the award.
Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, won a Fields Medal — often described as math’s equivalent of the Nobel prize — for a breakthrough in the study of shapes that experts say might help scientists figure out the shape of the universe.
John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said that he had urged Perelman to accept the medal, but Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and “does not want to be seen as its figurehead.” Ball offered no further details of the conversation.
Besides shunning the award for his work in topology, Perelman also seems uninterested, according to colleagues, in a separate $1 million prize he could win for proving the Poincare conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space.
The award, given out every four years, was announced at the mathematical union’s International Congress of Mathematicians. Three other mathematicians — Russian Andrei Okounkov, Frenchman Wendelin Werner and Australian Terence Tao — won Fields medals in other areas of mathematics.
They received their awards from King Juan Carlos to loud applause from delegates to the conference. But Perelman was not present.
“I regret that Dr. Perelman has declined to accept the medal,” Ball said.
Perelman’s work is still under review, but no one has found any serious flaw in it, the math union said in a statement.
The Fields medal was founded in 1936 and named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields. It come with a $13,400 stipend.
Perelman is eligible for far more money from a private foundation called The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass.
In 2000, the institute announced bounties for seven historic, unsolved math problems.
If his proof stands the test of time, Perelman will win all or part of the $1 million prize money. That prize should be announced in about two years.
The Poincare conjecture essentially says that in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape into a sphere without ripping it, although any shape without a hole can be stretched or shrunk into a sphere.
Experts say Perelman’s work gives mathematical descriptions of what the universe might look like and promises exciting applications in physics and other fields.

TITLE: Court Sentences Spy to 12 Years
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Wednesday sentenced a Russian man to 12 years in prison for allegedly trying to pass information on new rocket technology to Germany, a federal security official said.
Andrei Dumenkov, 42, was convicted of charges of high treason in the form of espionage by the Moscow City Court, said a duty officer with the Federal Security Service, known by its Russian acronym FSB. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity in accord with agency policy.
Dumenkov pleaded guilty in court, Russian media reported. Phone calls to the court seeking more information went unanswered.
Security agents began investigating Dumenkov in 2004 as he allegedly tried to gather state secrets on unnamed rocket technology with the intention of selling them to German agents, Russian news reports said. RIA-Novosti said FSB agents detained Dumenkov on Aug. 3, 2005, at a Moscow railway station and that he had intended to flee the country once the secrets had been passed along.
The incident was the latest in a series of apparent espionage cases investigated by Russian security agents. Earlier this month, a military court sentenced a retired Russian colonel who reportedly helped British intelligence unmask dozens of Russian agents to 13 years in prison.
The FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, in January accused four British diplomats of espionage and alleged they received secret information from a radio transmitter hidden in a rock.
The FSB has also targeted Russian scientists and academics for alleged espionage or misuse of classified information.
Human rights advocates say the FSB is deeply suspicious of Russian scientists’ contacts with foreigners and the service has been emboldened now that its former director, Vladimir Putin, is president.

TITLE: Soaring Demand Helps Ford Dealers Find Focus
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In response to soaring demand for mid-price Fords, a number of local car dealers have announced plans to open new facilities. One of the city’s largest dealers, Alarm-Motors, is to begin construction of a new service center in the Krasnoselsky district, in which it will invest about $6 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement.
The new center will be located at the junction of Petergofskoye Shosse and Marshala Zhukova Prospekt. With a total area of around 5,200 square meters it will be the largest Ford service center in the city. “This project shows our loyalty to the Ford brand. Our company is striving to ensure its leading position in the local market through the selling and servicing of Ford cars,” Roman Slutsky, general director of Alarm-Motors, said in a statement.
“With the arrival of international carmakers to the city we are facing tough competition and consider it a priority to develop the market through provision of the best cars and service,” Slutsky said.
Alarm-Motors expects the new center to sell 5,000 cars a year and service 100 cars a day. The company already operates two Ford centers in the north of the city — in Lakhta and Ozerki. According to company data, it holds 41 percent of St. Petersburg market.
“The new dealer center…will provide residents in the southwest of the city and suburbs with the opportunity to buy and service their cars directly near their homes,” the statement said.
In the first half of the year Alarm-Motors sold 1,822 Ford cars. Compared to the same period last year sales increased more than two fold.
A number of corporate customers have been instrumental in this result — Baltika brewery bought 308 cars, Pepsi Bottling Group bought 60 cars, the Federal Service for Control over Drag Turnover bought 40 cars, the General Department of Interior Affairs in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast bought 39 cars.
By the end of the year Alarm-Motors expects to sell 3,500 Ford cars in total.
Rolf-Carline, another of the city’s Ford dealers, will open a new service center by December this year.
“Not only Ford but all producers and dealers of mid-price cars have been caught out by a such a rapid expansion in the market. As a result, we have queues for cars and for servicing,” said Sergei Petrosyan, director of Rolf-Carline.
In the first half of 2006, Rolf-Carline sold 1,377 Ford cars. However, this figure is not truly indicative of the situation, Petrosyan said, because strikes caused Ford to stop production for some period and orders were postponed.
Taking into account this year’s orders, Petrosyan said that a doubling of Ford sales was very likely.
“All market players are currently investing into the expansion of their services. The demand for cars will surely be saturated. Unfortunately, however, car production is a complicated and expensive business. You can’t suddenly increase production or open a new service center,” Petrosyan said.
The dealer’s activities are in accordance with Ford’s plans for expansion. Earlier this month Ford revealed its plans to increase production volume and sales in Russia.
“We are working on increasing our production facilities. Ford in Russia and Europe is very concerned with this question. We see high demand for our cars, and we don’t want to allow our competitors to have more production facilities here than Ford,” Interfax cited Henric Nenzen, Ford Motor Company president in Russia and CIS, as saying last week.
By the end of the year Nenzen will announce either the construction of new production facilities or the increasing in capacity of an existing plant or the launch of a new model.
This year Ford expects to sell 120,000 cars in Russia compared to 60,000 cars last year.
In the first half of 2006 Ford sold 36,826 cars in Russia — a 87 percent increase on the same period last year.
At the moment the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad Oblast, is capable of producing 62,000 cars a year.
“But this amount is still not enough. We still have queues of customers waiting for cars. Our constant headache is how to expand production facilities in Vsevolozhsk next year and the year after,” Nenzen said.

TITLE: Insurer Tight-Lipped Over Plane Crash Compensation
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Pulkovo airline’s Tu-154 plane, which crashed Tuesday near Donetsk in Ukraine, was insured by the SOGAZ group but the insurer has yet to make public details of any pay out on the policy. The policy covers third party liability and property damage risks, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Earlier this year SOGAZ insured 30 Pulkovo planes, each with a premium of between $400,000 and $2.75 million. The maximum possible pay out for the whole of Pulkovo’s fleet was limited to $950 million.
 SOGAZ is not providing any insurance details of the particular plane involved in the accident.
“We will only comment on the situation after the government committee completes its investigation of the accident,” Inna Zotova, press secretary of SOGAZ insurance group, said by telephone Thursday.
On Wednesday SOGAZ released an official statement on its web site.
“The plane that crashed, like all other planes belonging to the airline, was insured by the SOGAZ insurance group against property damage and third party liability risks. SOGAZ deputy chairman Yevgeny Derevenskov paid an urgent visit to the Donetsk region. He is currently at the site of the accident working with the expert committee investigating the reasons for the crash,” the statement said.
A total of 170 people — 160 passengers and 10 members of the crew — died in the accident. According to Russian legislation that regulates air transportation, the company responsible for the accident is obliged to provide over 1,000 times the minimum wage in compensation to relatives of the victims including both passengers and members of the crew.
“Ninety percent of insurance agreements for property damage risks between SOGAZ and Pulkovo were reinsured in Ingosstrakh,” Interfax quoted a source in Ingosstrakh as saying Tuesday.
Liability risks were reinsured in the VSK insurance company, according to Interfax.
In a previous accident in 2002, when a Pulkovo Il-86 plane crashed at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, the AFES insurance company paid out $3 million in compensation for damage to property and financial liabilities.
The remaining Pulkovo fleet consists of 18 Tu-154-M planes, two Tu-154-B planes, four Il-86 planes and five Boeing-737 planes — all of them insured by SOGAZ.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: The Right Track 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Oktyabrskaya Railway will invest 460 million rubles ($17.2 million) into modernization, Interfgax reported Tuesday.
The company will spend 220 million rubles ($8.2 million) on locomotives, 50 million rubles ($1.87 million) on cargo carriages and 110 million rubles ($4.1 million) on passenger carriages.
This year Oktyabrskaya Railway has acquired 76 new passenger carriages. By the end of the year 58 new carriages will have been bought.

Powerful Profits
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Power network operator Northwest Interregional Distribution Company earned a net profit of 426.2 million rubles ($16 million) in the first half of 2006, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Total revenue reached 11.7 billion rubles ($440 million) and operational costs were 10.7 billion rubles ($400 million). St. Petersburg subsidiary, Lenenergo, reported a net loss of 247.7 million rubles ($9.3 million).

Logistical Limit
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Belgian company Astros Logistic Center, a subsidiary of Ahlers, will open an $18 million logistic terminal in the Leningrad Oblast on Aug. 28, Interfax reported Tuesday. 
The terminal, which has been under construction since 2001, will consist of two 25,000 square meter warehouses and will be the largest logistic center in Northwest Russia.

TITLE: Gazprombank Tapped in Sell-Off
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Yukos’ court-appointed receiver, Eduard Rebgun said Wednesday that he had hired Gazprombank and Ernst & Young to help him prepare the sale of the company’s assets. In a separate development, the Moscow Arbitration Court rejected an appeal by Yukos of a decision declaring the company bankrupt.
The court had declared Yukos bankrupt on Aug. 1, upholding an earlier vote by the company’s creditors — a group dominated by the tax authorities and state oil company Rosneft.  
Rebgun has to sell off the firm’s assets or refloat its subsidiaries to raise enough cash to pay off creditors’ demands of at least 492 billion rubles ($18.4 billion), a process that may take a year.
“There were talks [with Gazprombank] about what we need to do to carry out all these procedures,” Rebgun said. “We realized that they could offer what we needed, so we are going to transfer [Yukos’] accounts to them.”
Gazprombank, not previously one of Yukos’ bankers, is a unit of Gazprom, which tried to buy several Yukos assets on the eve of its bankruptcy.
Analysts say Rosneft, the only company to successfully challenge Gazprom in a corporate deal in the last few years, is likely to be the main beneficiary of Yukos’ demise and win most of its assets.
Rosneft already bought Yukos’ main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, after mounting back tax demands that eventually topped $33 billion and forced Yukos to sell it in December 2004.
The sale left Yukos hollowed-out and Rosneft in dire need of Yukos’ refining capacity to process Yugansk’s output of around 1 million barrels of crude oil per day.
Rosneft has said it might take over capacity from Yukos, which has five refineries in Russia, but its claims on Yukos assets may enable it to take over an even bigger chunk of the firm.
Already the second-biggest creditor after the Federal Tax Service, Rosneft has asked the courts to approve a claim of $8.4 billion on top of its existing $2.8 billion demand. Gazprom has no claim as a creditor, but is keen to buy 20 percent of its oil unit, Gazprom Neft, held by Yukos, the remnant of an aborted merger three years ago between Yukos and what was then Sibneft.
In its 11th-hour bid, which foundered when Yukos creditors voted in favor of bankruptcy, Gazprom also expressed an interest in Yukos’ ArcticGaz unit and the Angarsk refinery and made a $105 million offer for its 49 percent stake in Slovakian pipeline operator Transpetrol.
TNK-BP has also said it will always look at any assets put on the market.
Yukos’ assets are now likely to go under the hammer, and Rebgun has hired Ernst & Young, one of the world’s four largest accounting firms, to prepare terms for choosing a valuer.
“We asked them to do it quickly,” Rebgun said, but added that there was no definite idea of when the sell-off might begin.	
(Reuters, AP)

TITLE: EU Warns Ukraine Over Low Gas Stocks
AUTHOR: By Simon Webb
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: STAVANGER, Norway — Insufficient gas pumped into Ukraine’s storage facilities could threaten supplies of Russian gas to Europe this winter, European Union Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said Wednesday.
His comments came a day after Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych sought to assure EU countries that the country would not siphon off gas from pipelines this winter.
“Will there be enough gas pumped into storage in Ukraine? That is my biggest point of concern for security of supply this winter,” Piebalgs said. 
During times of peak winter demand, Ukraine draws gas from storage to meet its own needs, and to ensure that flows through its pipelines from Russia stay high enough to meet European needs. 
Ukraine undertook maintenance on its gas storage facilities this year, Piebalgs said. The EU is unsure of whether the new Ukrainian government is injecting gas into storage at the same rate as the last government, he said. 
The previous government had aimed to match last year’s storage level by October, Piebalgs added. 
Piebalgs said he was also concerned about the state of repair of Ukrainian pipelines that transit Russian gas to Europe, but that was an issue for next year rather than this. 
“It’s a worry, the pipelines haven’t been renovated,” he said. 
“We’ve seen what can happen at BP’s Prudhoe Bay, sometimes these things happen when no one expects it,” Piebalgs said. “If something goes wrong there, then we are definitely left in the cold.” 
BP shut down half the output from its 400,000 barrels-per-day Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska earlier this month after finding severe corrosion on pipelines at the field. The shutdown stoked concern about the state of oil and gas facilities worldwide. 
The pipelines through Ukraine are aging and need a lot of investment, Piebalgs said. 
Another issue of concern for the vital supplies of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe is whether the new Ukrainian government can reach a supply deal with Russia for next year. 
EU member countries are meeting with Gazprom and Ukrainian officials to discuss next winter’s supplies and to ensure supplies this winter, Piebalgs said. 
He said Europe this year is in a slightly better position to meet winter needs than last, as member countries have increased storage levels. 
“Last year was an advanced warning for them about what can happen,” he said. “This year they are placing significantly more gas in storage in case there are less supplies than they need.” 
Yanukovych insisted Tuesday that Ukraine would not have any problems with storage this winter, and would not siphon off any gas. 
“I am saying this so Europe can hear and they can feel at ease,” Yanukovych said, The Associated Press reported. “We won’t take European gas from the pipes this winter. The gas we are pumping into storage will be enough for us.”
Yanukovych also said there was a “possibility of a small increase” in gas prices next year, in line with market prices, the AP reported.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Considering Copper 
YUNNAN, China (Bloomberg) — Yunnan Copper Industry (Group) Co., the parent of China’s third-largest smelter of the metal, may set up joint-venture mines in Russia and Mongolia to source copper ore, a senior company executive said Thursday.
Yunnan Copper recently sent a team of experts to the two neighboring states to seek partners, and could receive a third of the output, Zhang Yizhong, the company’s vice general manager and senior engineer, said.
“We want to be able to supply more than 50 percent of the concentrate that our smelters need from mines in which we have stakes,” he said at a conference in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in western China. 

Polling Slippage
WARSAW (Bloomberg) — PKN Orlen SA, Poland’s largest oil company, will ask the European Union to help it get Russian oil for the Lithuanian refiner it is buying, if deliveries are cut off for political reasons, the chief executive officer told Forbes.
Orlen still expects Russian pipeline operator Transneft to repair its pipeline to AB Mazeikiu Nafta, the only refiner in the Baltic states, which the Plock, central Poland-based company is buying for $2.34 billion, Igor Chalupec told the Polish version of the monthly magazine in an interview.

Slippery Competition
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — St. Petersburg’s port, a part of Russia’s largest harbor complex on the Baltic Sea, may load fewer oil product cargoes this year, amid competition by Lukoil’s port of Vysotsk and the halt of Volgotanker’s operations following tax claims by the government, Portnews reported on Thursday.
St. Petersburg’s port, which handled 62 percent, or 15.6 million tons, of all oil-product cargoes at Russian ports on the Baltic Sea last year, cut loading to 7 million tons in the first seven months of the year, down 17 percent from the same period last year, the online news service said, citing the port administration.

Peugeot Mulls Plant
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — PSA Peugeot Citroen, the second-biggest carmaker in Europe, has yet to decide whether to build a plant in Russia to win customers in that growing market, a spokesman said.
Russia, Europe’s seventh-largest economy, reported faster economic growth last year than any of the 25 European Union members, helping to boost new car sales. Peugeot may spend about 200 million euros ($255 million) on a plant, Vedomosti reported Thursday, citing an unidentified federal government official.
Peugeot has reached no decision and there is no target for how much the carmaker plans to spend, Jean-Hugues Duban, a company spokesman, said Thursday. 

Seventh Heaven 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Seventh Continent, a Russian supermarket chain, said first-half profit climbed 46 percent from the year-earlier period as the number of visits by customers increased.
Net income rose to $31.8 million from $21.8 million, the Moscow-based company said Thursday in a statement on its web site. Revenue increased 37 percent to $450.6 million.
The number of visits by customers rose 44 percent to 44.2 million, the company said. Seventh Continent added nine new stores in the first half of the year.

TITLE: Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
AUTHOR: By Rajan Menon
TEXT: The imposition of sanctions on two Russian companies this month for selling military technology to Iran by the presidential administration of U.S. President George W. Bush certainly sends the Kremlin a message — but it won’t be the one the White House has in mind. The penalties will only deepen the hostility that Russia’s political establishment feels toward the United States.
That attitude came through loud and clear in many discussions I had with Russian academics, foreign policy specialists and senior officials during a recent trip to Moscow. President Vladimir Putin echoed it in his caustic dismissal of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent complaint that Russian democracy was eroding. And his condemnation of the sanctions as an “illegitimate” attempt to foist U.S. laws on Russian companies was no less acerbic.
The anti-American nationalism so palpable in Russia today is rooted in the 1990s, the decade of President Boris Yeltsin, whom many Americans credit with ending Soviet totalitarianism and introducing the country to democracy. Russians have a different take on those years. They remember the chaos; the economic contraction; the extreme poverty; the robber barons who, with the connivance of the government, made billions after taking over state-owned industries at bargain-basement prices; and the Yeltsin family’s rampant corruption. Rightly or wrongly, they associate these bad experiences with the United States. As one Russian official told me: “We followed your advice, and look where it landed us.”
NATO’s expansion also feeds Russian anti-Americanism. During the debate in the United States, experts confidently predicted that Moscow would adjust to the induction of its former Soviet republics — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — into the alliance just as it had when Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined. They were wrong.
The Russians I met see the U.S. drive to enlarge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as unfriendly and unnecessary, undertaken when Russia was weak and without regard for Russian sensibilities. They believe that the United States continues to trample over vital Russian security interests, particularly in the post-Soviet republics, where, as they see it, Russia has the right to be dominant by virtue of history and geography. The democratic revolutions in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, hailed in Washington, are viewed in Russia as a U.S. gambit to undercut Moscow’s influence in its own backyard by creating what one official sneeringly called “puppet governments.” Russia, I was told, would never allow Georgia to retake its breakaway regions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia; “blood would flow” if it tried. And were Ukraine admitted to NATO, the consequences would be dire: Russia would throw in its lot with China, demand that Ukraine return the Crimea and show Europe who’s boss when it comes to energy.
Russia’s anti-American nationalism also reflects current circumstances. Although their country has many problems, Russians feel stronger and more confident than they did in the 1990s and are determined to be taken seriously as a great power. The economic disaster of the previous decade is over. Russia’s gross domestic product has annually increased, on average, by 5 percent under Putin. Yeltsin’s drunken antics, which made Russians cringe, have been replaced by Putin’s authoritative and confident air on the world stage. One young Russian, who finished high school and college in the United States, told me, with evident admiration, that Putin conducted himself at the G8 summit with the assurance of an adult tending children.
When Russians look ahead, they feel they are on a roll. Thanks to sky-high oil prices, Russia is flush with cash. It has paid off much of its foreign debt ahead of schedule. Europe is increasingly dependent on Russian energy, and Western oil and gas companies want to partner with their Russian counterparts, most of which are under state control. The West is desperate for Russian help on Iran and North Korea, and the United States is bogged down in Iraq and hated in much of the world. All this makes Russians determined to push back when they feel that they are pushed.
It’s folly to assume that a new, post-Soviet generation will seek greater harmony with the United States or that Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (certain to occur) and market forces will necessarily integrate it into the West. When I asked the U.S.-educated Russian whether he shared the anti-American nationalism that I’d heard during my talks with Russian academics and officials, he said he did. What’s more, he added, his circle of friends was, if anything, even angrier at the United States for what they regarded as its arrogant foreign policy and disregard of Russia’s interests.
Many Russian businessmen want Russia to join the WTO and for market-oriented reforms to accelerate. But others, in business and in society generally, consider foreign competition a threat, believing that globalization will reduce Russia’s independence, contaminate its culture and allow foreigners to control its natural resources. Moscow’s populist mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, said as much when, soon after last month’s G8 meeting, he welcomed Russia’s failure to get into the WTO as a blessing. It would be a grave error to see his view, also regularly voiced by the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church (itself an important source of a nationalism) as idiosyncratic.
Russians have yet to determine the kind of society they want to build and what its relationship with the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, should be. Let’s hope that the country’s attitudes toward the West will have a minimal effect on those choices.

Rajan Menon, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is Monroe J. Rathbone professor of international relations at Lehigh University. This comment was published in the Los Angeles Times.

TITLE: My Nationality Column Column
AUTHOR: By Masha Gessen
TEXT: I had to get a spravka recently and, when I got it, I stared at it in disbelief. In this case the spravka, or certificate, was a document showing who was registered as residing in my apartment. It listed me and my two children. But instead of looking like a list, as one might expect, it looked like a chart. The chart had a number of columns with headings, some of which were predictable — like name and date of birth — and some a little less intuitive. One heading was “arrived from.” For me, it listed my previous address in Moscow; for my daughter, it listed Falmouth, Massachussets, where she was born; and for my son, it said, “born” (which is the definitive bureaucratic answer to the question of where children come from: They are born). Another column was titled, “Ethnicity.” Opposite my name, it said, “Jewish.” My children’s “ethnicity” fields were, mercifully, left blank.
I am a returned emigre. When my family left the Soviet Union in 1981 we were all stripped of our Soviet citizenship. Since this was illegal according to Soviet law, in the early 1990s the Supreme Soviet decided to restore justice by giving all emigres their citizenship back. I was one of the few who actually went to a Russian embassy to reclaim their passports.
The application form was just like ones I had filled out as a U.S. citizen applying for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. It asked for my “nationality.” I wrote United States — as I had always done, as a matter of principle, when applying for a visa. Then I remembered all of the people I knew back in the Soviet Union who had lied, cheated and bribed their way to ensuring that their passport did not say “Jewish.” I crossed out “United States” and wrote down “Jewish.”
“Those bastards!” I thought. They have trapped me into identifying myself as Jewish by nationality, which is absurd. I crossed out “Jewish” and wrote down “United States.”
“Coward,” I thought. “Liar.” I crossed out “United States” and wrote down “Jewish.”
The embassy issued me a foreign-travel passport, which said nothing about my being Jewish. But in another couple of years I was living in Moscow and I got my internal passport. Back then, they still used the old Soviet passports, which specified the bearer’s ethnicity. “Congratulations,” a colleague said to me back then. “Now you know you are Jewish.”
Nor would I be allowed to forget. A couple of years after I got my new old passport, the magazine where I worked was getting its affairs in order, which involved creating personnel cards for all staff. I was asked to sign a piece of paper that contained all the information from my passport, including my Jewishness. I refused, explaining that my ethnicity had nothing to do with my job. The personnel manager couldn’t understand why I was being obstinate. She just kept repeating, “What are you so ashamed of?” and “Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.”
I held on to that passport as long as I could: I thought it was an artifact. A couple of years ago, I had to surrender it in exchange for a new Russian passport, which does not list the holder’s ethnicity. But the traces of that old passport live on — in the spravka, and elsewhere.
I raised my eyes from studying the spravka and saw a bulletin board that displayed samples of applications for Russian citizenship and residence permits for foreigners. Question 6 on those forms is “ethnicity”; Question 7 is “religion.” The laws on citizenship and residency say nothing about ethnicity or religion. But those old application forms, and the ways of thinking they demonstrate — just as with the spravka and the personnel form — never die. Which is just one of the many ways we know that when the people who rule this country start speaking about the threat of fascism, they are lying. Otherwise, their first priority would be to purge those applications and spravkas.

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

TITLE: Pages from history
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Times was not the first English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the city was a flourishing Imperial capital, a range of publications were printed in English. In the final part of a six part series, art historian Andrei Vorobei looks at periodicals published in St. Petersburg after 1900.

The emergence of new English-language periodicals in St. Petersburg at 20 year intervals since the publication in 1842 of The English Review, the first example, shows that each successive generation of local Britons wanted to express itself in print. 
Spontaneous, almost handmade, and narrowly-circulated, none of these papers lasted very long, with a lifetime of one or two years at best. 
These features of English journals in 19th century St. Petersburg help make sense of the new conditions of publishing in English in the city in the first decades of the 20th century. 
Literature-oriented, essayistic, self-contained magazines belonged to the past, while a straightforward, pragmatic, economically marinated press indicated that there were new values in the air. 
Gems of English prose and poetry, brilliant publicism, were replaced with dry figures, advertisements for engineering devices and growing foreign trade balances.
The change of the English press mirrored the social turbulence of the period in Russia, which, during a few decades saw an agrarian, landowner’s, rural culture mutate into an industrial, capitalist and urban one. And all this came before everything, along with the House of Romanov (which had just splendidly celebrated its tercentenary), collapsed in the last and the most eventful decade of the Imperial era. 

Business press 
Although Anglo-Russian trade was “as old as the hills,” the explosive appearance of a business press at the turn of the 20th century, evidently demonstrates a qualitative change in the two countries’ love-hate affair.
In general, the landscape of publishing followed economic geography: official, diplomatic press was published in St. Petersburg, while more pragmatic periodicals circulated in merchant Moscow, the industrial capital of the Russian Empire. 
The first journal of the kind was the Moscow-based monthly Russko-Anglisky Torgovy Vestnik (Russo-British Trade Messenger, 1897-1903). In addition, there was Moscow’s The Anglo-Russian Journal of Engineering, Industries, and Trade, published monthly only in 1903. 
In St. Petersburg, the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, established in 1908, published its bilingual monthly, Journal, between 1909 and 1917. There was also Russko-Britanskoe Vremja (The Russo-British Time) published from 1915 to 1917 — the explicit prerequisite of which was World War I and German economic dominance in foreign trade and capital in Russia which the two allies were appealing against. 

The Times
A couple of months after the failed attempt to arrange the first English newspaper, Friendship, the Journal of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce announced a new print project, “The Russian Issue of The Times.”
Featuring English and Russian editions, this well-thought out and ambitious undertaking by one of the oldest and prominent British dailies, in many respects, turned out to be one of the most remarkable events in the commercial history of Russia. 
“The object of these publications is to bring before the British public an impartial account of the resources and trade possibilities of Russia, and to point out what these resources and possibilities are, and to ascertain to what extent it may be practicable for British financiers and merchants to seek new fields for their enterprise and energy in this direction,” the Journal wrote.
“While the essential features of The Times Russian Issue will be those dealing with Finance, Trade and Commerce, articles of general interest will not be omitted. Several distinguished Russian publicists, as well as several well known British writers who have made the study of Russian progress their speciality, will be invited to contribute to this Issue. We hope to make it a complete treatise on Modern Russia... From the material already gathered it may be stated without exaggeration that the Russian Issue of The Times will in many respects be the most fascinating, readable, and useful of the series of Special Issues which have emanated from Printing House Square,” J. Murray Allison, advertising manager of The Times, wrote in another announcement. 
In such a way, together with a grandiose account of Russia’s natural and social resources, The Russian Issues summarised cultural treasures and trends in literature, music, fine art, drama, science, and so on, becoming a sort of encyclopaedia of Russian life at that date. 
The English and Russian versions of first Russian Issue were published on Dec. 15, 1911. The Russian language copies were designed to circulate throughout the Russian Empire; its artistic color cover represented Russia and England in allegorical form, while the English edition formed a supplement to the ordinary issue of The Times of London (“Russian Supplement”). Regarding the spacious section devoted to “general interest” articles, both versions were equal. 
Predictably, the issue dwelt on many Western clichÎs about Russia (which in essence havn’t change much since). 
“It is no exaggeration to say that the average educated Englishman knows more of China or Peru than he does of Russia, while for the man in the street, mention of the Tsar’s Empire probably suggests only confused impressions of danger, unrest, and general discomfort; hazy visions of passports and Secret Police; bombs, prisons and the knout; vast steppes across which the fur-clad traveller is chased by packs of wolves; picturesque Cossacks and revolutionary students; Siberia, with gangs of convicts in the further distance — in fact, all conventional mise-en-scÎne of Transpontine melodrama, with perhaps the recently vouchsafed vision of Pavlova dancing gloriously through it all, harbinger of a new era of sweetness and light for holy Russia.”
Perhaps, trying to find the way out of this amusing miscellany in British heads, the Russian Empire, along with enormous investment benefits and cultural reserves, was served by The Times as a little known but attractive destination for recreation and tourism.
According to the paper, in comparison with other Europeans, say, Germans or the French, the share of British travelers coming to Russia was ridiculously small. 
Thus, on the one hand, the English version of the Issue started with a collection of travel impressions of “The Playground of the Caucasus,” and included an overview of other fashionable Russian spas and health resorts, practically unknown abroad, but on the other hand, warning that there were still “passports and other anachronisms,” it suggested a somewhat philosophical way of managing many of these Russian twists. 
“Russia is the land of ‘Nichevo,’ the country where nothing really matters, even as Spain is the land of the tomorrow that never comes. Let the traveller realise this once and for all; let him recognise the fact that he has left behind him, at the German frontier, businesslike habits, punctuality, scrupulous accuracy of statement, and all such commercial virtues. 
“Let him in their place accept and enjoy the easy-going and tolerant attitude of a people which faces life and all its problems with a certain leisurely and speculative stoicism, an attitude which, after all, has much philosophy and good deal of religion in its favour. 
“Let him adapt himself to his Slav environment and he will speedily find himself enjoying the human comedy from a race of ‘thinking children,’ for whom the world of ideas is more than all the cold facts and figures of trade.”  
The intention was to publish a Russian Issue each quarter, but in reality the second issue appeared only in March 1913, all copies of which were sold out. Starting from the next issue the Russian Issues were in English only. In the same year The Times opened its St. Petersburg office, and perhaps due to this the subsequent supplements were issued quite regularly. In total, within three years at least 27 were published. During wartime they were furnished with frontline reports and news about the social and economic life of England’s most important ally. 

ANGLO-RUSSIAN 
The Times wasn’t the first and only London-based periodical with a Russia connection. 
There were a number of precursors and contemporaries, which, however, would hardly be welcomed in the Tsar’s Empire. 
For instance, the London-based Anglo-Russian monthly (1897-1902) voiced “Russian public opinion condemned to silence in the country itself.” 
Among the more radical, leftist papers were Free Russia (1890-1905) — “the organ of the English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom,” which featured a number of Russian political emigres, and The Darkest Russia: A Weekly Record of the Struggle for Freedom (1912 – 1914). Its few articles — “Ukrainian Complications,” “Anti-Jewish Legislation,” “A Polish Chronique,” “No University for the Caucasus,” “Finland’s Rights,” “The ‘Independent’ Duma,” “Official Corruption,” “Prison Life,” “Bureaucratic Anarchy,” “Suppression of the Press” — leave no doubt about its primary content and support the idea that English press in Imperial Russia was forced to occupy only a cultural and economical niche, while political and social journalism was a licenced activity, where the words “Precise. Reliable. Independent” were meaningless.

Revival
The destruction of Imperial Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution and later the establishment of the Soviet Union brought to an end the existance of an English-language press in St. Petersburg.
It would take seven decades and the collapse of communism before it would be revived in the form of The St. Petersburg Press in 1993.
That newspaper was sold to Moscow-based Independent Media in 1996 and renamed the St. Petersburg Times. 
Unlike any of its pre-Revolutionary antecedents, the newspaper has thrived in Russia, and is still going strong.

The author and The St. Petersburg Times thank the staff of the Rossika, the Newspaper Department, and Russian and Foreign Magazines Funds of the Russian National Library for assistance in providing the material for this article.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: The local urban-folk band La Minor, whose frontman Slava Shalygin was on vacation in Sevastopol until this week, will perform at Platforma at what will be the band’s first local concerts in the last couple of months.
“We will perform some old songs, some new songs, and some ‘new old’ songs — I mean reworked old songs that we haven’t played lately,” said Shalygin this week.
La Minor, which  spent six weeks touring Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany last April and May, will return to Europe for more concerts next month, said Shalygin, adding that the band will record a collection of its songs for a CD due on the Hamburg-based label Datscha-Project. Datscha-Project (not to be confused with local bar Datscha) was started in 2001 by a group of Russian expats to showcase Russian music, art concerts, parties, film screenings and exhibitons. 
As well as Slava on vocals, La Minor now also features Igor Boytsov on saxophone, Sanya Yezhov on accordion and backing vocals, Mikhail Tugarev on balalaika, Kostya Filatov on double bass and Peter Ketlinsky on drums.
La Minor was formed in summer 2000 by self-taught vocalist Shalygin (who was a singer with the short-lived rock band Navigators in the mid-1990s), Conservatory graduate Yezhov and drummer Ketlinsky, who had previously played with the local garage-rock band Kacheli. La Minor will perform at Platforma on Friday.
PTVP, a politically-tinged local punk band, will perfrom at Griboyedov, also on Friday. The band is now busy putting finishing touches to its first DVD. Called “Prava Cheloveka” (“Human Rights”), it documents the band’s gig at Orlandina earlier this year and will be launched with a concert at the venue on Sept. 2.
According to frontman Alexei Nikonov, PTVP also has a new album in the making. Called “Svoboda Slova” (“Free Speech”),  it is due to be released in the fall.
PTVP’s most recent album was the Orwellian-titled “2084” in 2004, described by Nikonov as an “album about love.” In an interview with this newspaper at the time he said the band’s next album would be a “political one.” 
PTVP’s full name means “Last Tanks in Paris,” a play on the title of a 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci film, as well as a reference to the French student uprising of 1968 and the suppressed Prague Spring of the same year. Formed in Vyborg in 1996, the band is now one of Russia’s last remaining outposts of uncompromising, politically conscious music. Nikonov will also recite his poetry at Stirka on Thursday.
Cynic’s owner, Vladimir Postnichenko, who used to be the drummer with art-rock band NOM, approached this column to drew attention to a young local band called Vozdushny Tsirk which he described as “what NOM would be if it would be formed today” after listening to its demo. The band, whose name translates as “Flying Circus,” will perform at the bar on Saturday.

TITLE: Clean air act
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Headaches, difficulties in concentrating and constant tiredness is the price many of us pay for living in the city. But Sushilka, a new sushi bar, claims to have a novel solution.
“Ha! ‘oxygen bar’ — what a funny name,” the taxi driver exclaimed, stopping at “The first oxygen bar in St. Petersburg” sign on the corner of Khersonskaya Ulitsa and Prospekt Bakunina.
But it is not merely a marketing trick or a play on words. Here they really do try to make money from air, or to be precise, a purified version of air with 96 percent oxygen. 
The oxygen bar is a machine that extracts oxygen from ambient air, and then supplies it to customers through a nose hose. Because the treated air is odorless, it is normally mixed with essential oils before it is inhaled to add more fun to the experience and, allegedly,  more health benefits.
The bar’s owners claim that inhaling the oxygen for between five and twenty minutes is a cure-all — from easing hangovers to boosting the immune system and counteracting negative effects of stress and smoking.
The practice might be new in St. Petersburg, but it is well established in many countries, especially in the U.S. and Japan, where concerns about air pollution started the craze in the early ‘90s. 
Oxygen bars are a common feature of the global health/entertainment scene and can be found in nightclubs, hotels, and clinics. An airport in Copenhagen even has one.
“As far as I know, the tradition of inhaling oxygen originates from Japan, where the first oxygen bars emerged and the first oxygen equipment was produced,” said Sushilka’s co-owner Natalia Tulinova in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times.
“So, being a sushi bar, we decided to support Japanese traditions and unite healthy stuff and pleasurable stuff under the same roof,” she said.
However, Mikhail Kopyt, general director of Planeta O2 Piter, a distributor of oxygen bar equipment, thinks the trend was first introduced in U.S. casinos, where their owners tried to prevent clients from falling asleep. 
“In America, in practically every casino, they have so-called ‘relaxation stations, ‘where gamblers can inhale oxygen, because the oxygen is like an energy drink, only healthy,” he said.
“And I recently saw ‘Pimp My Ride’ [a popular car show on MTV, also shown on Russian MTV], and they installed an oxygen bar into a car to prevent the driver from falling asleep while driving,” Kopyt added.
However, the science community warns that oxygen may be harmful for people with respiratory diseases such as asthma and emphysema. 
According to the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, a U.S. state body for the protection of public health, such consumers may cease breathing entirely if too much oxygen is inhaled. 
The FDA has also raised concerns about the practice of adding scents to oxygen. 
“Some bars use oil-free, food-grade particles to produce the aroma, but others may use aroma oils. Inhaling oily substances can lead to a serious inflammation of the lung,” says the FDA’s website, quoting Mary Purucker, its pulmonary specialist. 
“Even if an oil-free medium is used, the purity or sterility of the aerosol that is generated cannot be guaranteed.
“Susceptible customers run the risk of inhaling allergens or irritants that may cause them to wheeze. Inhalation of live contaminants such as bacteria or other pathogens may lead to infection.”
Tulinova of Sushilka admitted she had not heard anything about the harmful effects of the oxygen bars on susceptible peoples but said they change the machine’s parts once-a-week as required, and the aromatherapy oils are bought from the same certified supplier that provided the bar with the oxygen equipment in the first place.

Sushilka, 1/7 Khersonskaya Ulitsa. 
Tel: 274 1140.

TITLE: Dumbing down
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: It used to be about elections and terrorist attacks. Now it’s more about drunken husbands and breast enlargements. 
The country’s television channels bristle with colorful talk shows, where guests and the audience get into arguments over frequently tawdry topics.
Media watchers, however, say the numerous programs are merely an illusion of freedom of speech in Russia, serving as a smoke screen for an increasingly restrictive media climate where political talk shows have been yanked off the air and where government criticism is rarely voiced.
Since President Vladimir Putin came to power six years ago, the number of television shows addressing family matters and other social issues has drastically increased. But political talk shows that pitted guests, including fierce government critics, against one another on subjects such as elections, corruption and the bloody war in Chechnya have disappeared or been replaced by programs in which speakers often compete with each other in a different way — to praise government policies. 
Moreover, such shows are no longer broadcast live, so statements deemed unfit can be edited out. 
“The heads of television networks are afraid that if something is said that shouldn’t be said, then heads could roll,” said Vladimir Pozner, the broadcast journalist who is credited with starting Russia’s first political talk show in the late 1980s.
“The authorities have tightened the screws in this respect.”
Some critics say Pozner’s own weekly talk show also has softened. Some shows such as “Let Them Talk” have heated debates, but the topics steer clear of politics and veer toward tabloidy topics — prompting tears and outcries from guests and the audience in much the same way as “The Jerry Springer Show” in the United States.
A recent program focused on the violent killing of a 15-year-old girl in a small provincial town several days after she won a local beauty pageant, sparking speculation that she may have fallen victim to competitors’ revenge. 
Speakers including the slain girl’s teary best friend, uncle, the town’s mayor and a number of beauty experts discussed the pros and cons of the modeling and fashion industry. As the victim’s photos were displayed and the sound of her voice played to the public, a woman in the audience sprang up and pleaded to all mothers to keep their daughters away from the risky beauty contest business. 
“It’s a certain substitution — it’s more about freedom of screaming than about freedom of speech,” said Irina Petrovskaya, a media commentator with Izvestiya. “Sometimes they discuss things on television that some people wouldn’t even discuss in their kitchens.” 
“Let Them Talk” host Andrei Malakhov, 34, with shoulder-length dark hair, stylish glasses and tight jeans — which, according to his official biography, he likes to wear without underwear — disagrees, saying his show is what the public needs. 
“My show is like Chekhov’s short stories — but in a televised form,” he said at the end of a taping, as teenage girls clustered around for an autograph. 
Opinion polls indicate that most Russians aren’t bothered by what critics say is Putin’s campaign to curb media freedom as part of a broader drive to increase the government’s control over politics and society. 
“I like how democratic it is: ‘Let Them Talk’ — they really do talk about all kinds of stuff here,” said Alexei Vorfolameyev, a 23-year-old government agency worker who was in the audience for one of Malakhov’s shows. 
Petrovskaya said the sensational programs also serve a therapeutic purpose: “If there is a goal of distracting the population from their vital problems, of entertaining them, then ... when they see that an 11-year-old gave birth, a mother is living with her own son and a father ate his daughter, even if they don’t live perfect lives either, they will think, ‘Look, we are not so bad off after all. We don’t eat each other!’”

TITLE: Behind the scenes
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Locals may disagree, but St. Petersburg boasts a great music scene, where even buskers are highly talented, according to Richard Chappell, a technical engineer for art rock legend and world-music pioneer Peter Gabriel.
Chappell was checking out St. Petersburg’s music scene this month, even though August normally has little to offer as far as live music goes in the city.
“I’d been expecting that there would be more of a gig scene here, I haven’t seen as much as I would expect, but what I have seen has been very good,” he said, speaking at the local music bar Novus during his visit.
“Musicians’ standards seem very good here, and actually all the buskers that I see on the street seem really amazing, like the standard of musicianship. Most days I walk around and see a new person playing or a new group of people playing, and that’s also really good. Compared to England, the standard of musicianship here seems very high.”
Chappell, who has been working at Gabriel’s Real World Studios in the U.K. for almost 20 years, came to St. Petersburg by invitation from local musician and producer Viktor Sologub, who first gained underground fame with ska pioneers Stranniye Igry, or Strange Games, in the 1980s. Sologub’s other bands include indie rockers Igry and, most recently, electronic band Deadushki.
The two met at Real World Studios in January when Sologub was doing some production work for an upcoming album by award-winning Uzbek world-music singer Sevara Nazarkhan.
“Viktor came to the studio to do some more production work there with a friend of mine, Bruno Ellingham, who is another producer there,” said Chappell, who was working on mixing a Robert Plant concert for release on DVD at the time.
“He kept coming to my studio, listening to what I was doing, and there we’re very friendly, and there’s many rooms to use in the studio, and you walk in and out, say hello to people. So Viktor came in and we were talking, and he said, ‘Come to St. Petersburg.’ He kept saying that, and he came back again, maybe last month, and again he said, ‘You need to come to St. Petersburg.’ So I came.”
Chappell joined the staff of Real World Studios, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on June 28, early in its history. The 20-year milestone was marked with live performances by various artists including Plant and Gabriel. 
Chappell started at the studio in 1987, when he was 17, initially as a tea boy.
“I took a recording class at school, and it was a little four-track machine, and it was a two-year class of learning about sound and how to record things, it was the only one in England at that time” said Chappell.
“We would listen to The Beatles and to Steely Dan and all these amazing recordings, and we’d have to sit in the dark and listen and analyze, like, all these different records and get to talk about them. It’s a very inspiring class, very interesting, so at that point [I decided that] I’d like to be a recording engineer. 
“And basically I found that I wasn’t clever enough, I wasn’t getting the right exams that would take me to the right university to do the proper university recording course. So I left and I joined a band and that didn’t work out, and I went to college to study some more. In college you have career advisers in England, and my career adviser said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and I said, ‘I still want to be a recording engineer.’ He said, ‘Find a recording studio in this area.’ So I found a studio called the Real World Studios in the phone book and I called them up and asked, ‘Are you looking for anybody to come and work, you know, just making tea and being a runner?’ And they said, ‘Actually we are right now. We’ve just been built and nobody knows about us, so come for an interview.’ 
“So I went for an interview and a guy there, Mike Large, who is one of Peter [Gabriel]’s managers and the general manager of Real World gave me a job! So I stayed there on trial for a few weeks, and then they kept me on and I’ve been there ever since. So I learned basically all my skills within that environment.”
Now Chappell is Gabriel’s full-time engineer, rarely having time to work on anything else. Always a perfectionist, Gabriel takes a while to work on an album, with his most recent, the 2002 album “Up,” being seven years in the making.
“It takes several years, and sometimes there are breaks, so you might get a month to do something else, if you want to, but generally it’s Monday-to-Friday working just on whatever he’s got going,” said Chappell.
Sometimes Gabriel can be somewhere in the building, but then he has a musical idea and comes to the studio, where keyboards and microphones are always on, waiting for him.
“The immediacy of recording is really important,” said Chappell.
“You need to have everything ready all the time to be able to record, because otherwise you’re going to lose the moment. You’re going to lose the instancy of somebody getting an idea. And my boss, particularly, is quite random in his approach to music, so he will suddenly come up with an idea, and maybe he’ll be in the office, and he comes running over and sits down, and he wants to be recording straight away. So yeah, generally all his keyboards and all his microphones are always open, so at any time, he can hit ‘record’ on something. It’s always very important.”
Real World Studios was founded by Gabriel for his world-music projects as well as for his own work in June 1986. The studio, built in a well-lit 18th century watermill and surrounded by water, is special a place for music making.
“The studio is based in an old watermill, a flour mill in Wiltshire,” said Chappell. “The building itself, I think, dates back to the 1700s. There’s a mill pond that surrounds the building where the mill wheel used to turn within the building. They put in a glass floor, so you can record on top of the glass floor and see the water flowing underneath you. 
“The whole kind of idea of the studio is very much trying to combine the modern look with the old stone look of the building, and I think they’ve achieved that very well. So there’s a lot of big wooden rooms to record in. The main control room is one of the biggest control rooms in the world, and it’s based around a concept that Peter Gabriel doesn’t like to have a separate studio and control room. He likes to work in a room that’s big, and he can have a recording console within the room as well as the musicians.”
According to Chappell, what Gabriel had in mind was a dream studio, free of the drawbacks that he encountered when recording with his then band Genesis in the 1970s. 
“He grew very paranoid during his Genesis years of doing things in a studio and then on headphones, and then everything goes silent and you can’t hear people talking behind the glass, and you don’t know what’s being said or what’s going on. It’s quite hard to communicate in a creative way,” said Chappell.
“So Real World has been built and based on this principle that you can have separate recording rooms, and we have them as well, but generally the recording spaces are built to accommodate the band to play as well as the engineer and producer to be there and listen to what’s going on. So it’s quite a unique place. It has many windows. When it was built, it was very rare to have a recording studio with windows. All the rooms have huge windows and are very light. Yeah, it’s a special place, you know.”
Chappell’s first work, then as an assistant to engineer and producer called David Bottrill, was the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Called “Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ.” It was also the first release for Gabriel’s label Real World Records in 1989.
“So, I began engineering with David Bottrill, who has now come on to produce Tool and many many big American rock records. What’s happened is interesting. I have an assistant every year to work with me and I can teach them things. And my assistants come from this course called the Ton Master Course at Surrey University. And Surrey University is the course I wasn’t qualified enough to go to. But now I have a new assistant every year; they come and work for me and Peter Gabriel — and they assist me. So now it’s like a turnaround, which I feel good about.”
www.realworld.co.uk

TITLE: Astronomers Exile Pluto To Sub-Planetary Status
AUTHOR: By Frederic Garlan
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: PRAGUE — Suspense was deeper than a black hole as the world’s top astronomers prepared to announce whether lonely, little Pluto — ninth rock from the Sun — would be ejected from the planetary A-list.
After ten days of impassioned debate, some 2500 space scientists convening in Prague were to decide later in the day on a redefined solar system and a new taxonomy of the mainly lifeless objects circling our Sun.
Hoisting yellow ballots in a general assembly, the astronomers will vote on one resolution which could relegate the icy asteroid known for decades as the planet Pluto to a newly created category of “dwarf-planet.”
As an apparent effort to assuage those offended by this downgraded status, the scientists of the International Astronomical Union propose to anoint Pluto as the “prototype of a new class of objects.”
But even the hyphen in the two-word moniker is intended to reinforce Pluto’s ex-communication from the planetary family, said Uruguayan astronomy Gonzalo Trancredi.
“We did not want to introduce any confusion that ‘dwarf planets’ could be mistaken for planets,” he explained.
The first resolution to be considered would create a three-tiered classification of objects circling the Sun of our solar system.
Eight of the nine masses currently designated as planets would retain that exalted status: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and — furthest from the Sun — Neptune.
Pluto would be the first among equals in the “dwarf-planet” category, whose adjectival form would be “Plutonian”. This group would include Pluto’s moon, Charon; Ceres, an asteroid that for several decades after its discovery was described as a planet; and the so-called “object 2003 UB313”, which was discovered in 2003 by an American astronomer and is unofficial known as “Xena”.
Experts would then debate whether to include a dozen other candidates including Vesta, Pallas and Hygea, and any new discoveries.
An earlier proposal to call the neither-planet-nor-asteroid objects “plutons” fell afoul of protests from delegates who pointed out the risk of serious confusion because the spelling of “Pluto” in several European languages was the same.
Size in not an issue, though it does not help that Pluto is something of a runt. Both a planet and a “dwarf-planet” orbit the Sun, and “have sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces” to assume a roughly round shape.
Whether they differ is this: a planet has “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit, in astronomical jargon, whereas a “dwarf-planet” has not.
The only planet discovered by an American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto has other singularities compared to (other) planets. Neither rocky, like planets closer to the sun, or gaseous, like those further away, Pluto is composed largely of ice. It’s orbit is excentric and very long, taking 247 years to circle the sun.
It is also small, smaller in fact that earth’s moon.
The final category would include thousands of “small solar system bodies,” comets and asteroids that orbit the sun.
Iwan Williams, president of the IAU’s planet definition committee, said that with around 200,000 asteroids already identified there was “a need to rationalize, a need to say where we are.”
Another resolution to be voted on would insert the word “classical” in front of the eight remaining celestial bodies in our solar system that still rate planetary status. Pluto would not be one of them.
This step has won the support of the American Astronomical Society’s influential Division for Planetary Sciences, enhancing its chances of passing.
The debate has caught the public’s imagination “because it touches on things we learn as children,” Richard Blinzel of the definitions committee said as astronomers debated the measures.
“We have to accept that the universe changed because the knowledge we have of it evolves”.

TITLE: EU Officialss Negotiate on Troops
AUTHOR: By Slobodan Lekic
PUBLISHER: Associated Press Writer
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium — EU diplomats meeting before foreign minister talks later this week have attempted to draw up a list of troop contingents that member nations could contribute to a strengthened UN force in Lebanon.
But most EU nations remain wary of making firm commitments until the mandate for the new force is clarified, fearing that their peacekeepers could be dragged into a conflict with the Hezbollah militants based in south Lebanon or with Israel if the current cease-fire between them collapses.
The foreign minister of Finland, which holds the European Union presidency, said Thursday he wants to see the first reinforcements to a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon arrive within a week.
“The time of course is crucial, and we would like to see the first reinforcements for UNIFIL arrive within an week if possible,” Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja said after meeting with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
“The main thrust of the force should be there within a few weeks,” said Tuomioja, cautioning that the full deployment could take months.
Finnish ambassador Temu Tanner said there were no breakthroughs at Wednesday’s preparatory discussions of ambassadors and their deputies at EU headquarters in Brussels. But firm decisions on assembling the force may come as soon as Friday, when EU ministers meet with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Brussels.
“We didn’t expect any definitive indications of troop contributions today, but the feeling is now that on Friday the ministers will have a fruitful discussion,” Tanner said.
He said the Italians, who have pledged the largest contingent for the force, made a strong appeal for more EU troops on the ground.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was meeting Thursday in Rome with her Italian counterpart Massimo D’Alema and Premier Romano Prodi for expected talks about the shaping of the peacekeeping mission, which Italy seems on the verge of leading.
A UN diplomat said that France is also considering increasing its commitment, and a high-level meeting is planned Thursday with President Jacques Chirac, the foreign and defense ministers and key military officials to look at several options to add more troops. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because no decision has been made.
Chirac was scheduled to appear on television later Thursday to announce whether France will send more troops. France disappointed some by offering only 200 troops to double its contribution to the existing UN force in Lebanon.
A UN cease-fire resolution authorized the expansion of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon from 2,000 to as many as 15,000 troops. The peacekeepers are to help 15,000 Lebanese troops extend their authority into southern Lebanon, which has been controlled by Hezbollah, as Israel withdraws its soldiers.
“There is no time to sit on the fence. Europe must cough up with contingent contributions,” Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said in an interview with the Berlingske Tidene daily. “This is about Europe’s credibility in the field of foreign and security policy.”

TITLE: Austrian Escapes Captor After 8 Years
AUTHOR: By Veronika Oleksyn
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VIENNA, Austria — An 18-year-old woman who was kidnapped eight years ago and held captive in a cellar managed to escape, and her alleged abductor committed suicide by jumping in front of a train, authorities said Thursday.
Natascha Kampusch was found in a yard in a residential area northeast of Vienna on Wednesday afternoon. She was identified by a scar on one of her arms from a childhood operation, authorities said, ending one of Austria’s biggest police mysteries. She had disappeared while walking to school as a 10-year-old.
The alleged kidnapper has been identified by Austrian media as 44-year-old Wolfgang Priklopil. A DNA analysis was under way to confirm his identity, Austrian television reported.
Armin Halm, spokesman for Austrian’s federal police, said the woman told investigators her name was Natascha Kampusch and said she was kidnapped and kept for years in a cellar under a garage in a house in Strasshof, just outside Vienna, police said.
Besides the telltale scar, she also was identified by her father, mother and half sister. Results of a DNA test were expected later Thursday, Austrian television reported.
“We are quite sure it’s her,” Halm said.
Kampusch vanished in Vienna on her way to school on March 2, 1998, triggering a massive search that extended into neighboring Hungary.
Erich Zwettler of Austria’s federal police was quoted by the Austria Press Agency as saying the woman appeared to have a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome, a survival mechanism in which a hostage begins to empathize with a captor.
Investigators said the woman had been examined by a doctor and that she did not have signs of injuries. But police are investigating whether she was beaten or sexually abused.
Nikolaus Koch, a lead investigator, said on Austrian television that the police had contact with the alleged kidnapper about three months after the girl disappeared but that he had a “sturdy alibi” at the time.
Halm said the woman spent the night in “a secure location” in the presence of a female police officer with specialized psychological training. She was due to undergo more questioning throughout the day, he said.
Kampusch’s sister said in remarks broadcast on Austrian television that her mother almost had a nervous breakdown when police notified her Wednesday, adding that she always held onto the hope that her daughter would come back one day.
“She always said she was still alive,” said the sister, who was identified as Sabina Sirny.

TITLE: Eleven Suspects Held Over Alleged Bomb Plot in U.K.
AUTHOR: By Phil Hazlewood
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Eleven people have been remanded in British custody over an alleged plot to use suicide bombers to blow US-bound airliners out of the sky.
The 11 accused — including a young mother and a minor — appeared in a magistrates court in London Tuesday, 12 days after police raids in and around the British capital which prompted unprecedented security measures at major airports worldwide.
Eight facing the most serious charges of conspiracy to murder and preparing acts of terrorism were told to return to court on September 4.
No pleas were entered before judge Timothy Workman and only one asked for bail, but Mohammed Zeb, a lawyer for one of the accused, Tanvir Hussain, stated that “all allegations are denied”.
The whole process lasted four hours, but the first appearance of the nine men, one women and one youth took just five minutes each.
They were brought into the glass-panelled dock in courtroom number one at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in twos and threes, the men wearing matching white sweatshirts, grey jogging trousers and black, laceless pumps.
Only the sole woman charged stood out, her face peering out from behind a blue-coloured hijab, or headscarf, and rimmed spectacles.
The 17-year-old — too young under British law to appear in the dock or to be identified — sat next to his lawyer on the back row of the three benches reserved for their legal team.
Each confirmed his or her name, date of birth and address — although not the exact location, which was made subject to a reporting restriction to protect the defendants’ families — and listened to proceedings.
Lawyers for young mother Cossar Ali, 23, Mehran Hussain, also 23, and the 17-year-old youth indicated they would plead not guilty.

TITLE: Middlesbrough Shock Champions Chelsea
AUTHOR: By Sam Sheringham
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Mark Viduka scored in stoppage time to give Middlesbrough a 2-1 victory over defending English champion Chelsea, as Manchester United defeated Charlton 3-0 to top the Premiership standings. 
Andrei Shevchenko’s first league goal for Chelsea had given the Blues a first-half lead at the Riverside stadium. Emanuel Pogatetz tied the score with 10 minutes remaining before Australian striker Viduka claimed the winning goal. United has six points from two games compared with Chelsea’s three. 
“It’s only two games, of course, but we have the will to win the title, the players to do it and the spirit in the camp,’’ United manager Alex Ferguson told Sky Sports. “We have a great chance this year.’’ 
Chelsea, bankrolled by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, is eyeing a third straight Premiership title after adding the likes of Shevchenko, Michael Ballack and Salomon Kalou to its all-star squad. Middlesbrough is being coached by Gareth Southgate after Steve McClaren left to become England manager. 
In other matches, Martin O’Neill got his first win as Aston Villa coach in a 2-1 victory over newly-promoted Reading, Blackburn drew 1-1 with Everton, Fulham tied Bolton 1-1, while Manchester City and Portsmouth played out a goalless draw. 
Shevchenko, a 30 million pounds ($56.8 million) signing from AC Milan, converted a 16th minute cross from England international Wayne Bridge to give Chelsea the lead. Pogatetz scored a close- range header and Viduka came off the bench to make it 2-1. 
“We can only blame ourselves for the defeat,’’ said Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho. 
United, which defeated Fulham 5-1 in the season’s opening weekend, went into the game without Wayne Rooney and Paul Scholes, who were suspended after dismissals in a pre-season exhibition match. 
Park Ji Sung missed a chance inside the penalty area before Ryan Giggs rattled a post with a free kick. Charlton goalkeeper Scott Carson tipped a curling Giggs effort around the post and Cristiano Ronaldo struck the crossbar just before half-time. 
Three minutes after the break, Darren Fletcher gave United the lead with a right-foot shot past Carson. Louis Saha scored from 20 yards to double the lead before substitute Ole Gunnar Solskjaer rounded off the win. 
In Birmingham, Reading took the lead through a Kevin Doyle header after three minutes. Juan Pablo Angel leveled the score from the penalty spot after Luke Moore had been brought down by Ibrahima Sonko, who was dismissed for the foul. Gareth Barry scored the winner in the 61st minute. 
At Ewood Park, Tim Cahill tied the scores in the 84th minute after Benni McCarthy had given Blackburn the lead on his home debut. El-Hadji Diouf put Bolton ahead at Fulham before Jimmy Bullard leveled from the penalty spot in stoppage time.

TITLE: Agassi Set For Tough Open Finale
AUTHOR: By Liz Clarke
PUBLISHER: wp
TEXT: NEW YORK — A multitude of tennis fans, no doubt, would love to see Andre Agassi replicate last year’s improbable feat of reaching the U.S. Open final this year. But the draw for the final Grand Slam event of 2006, unveiled in New York yesterday, didn’t do the 36-year-old any favors as he prepares for the final tournament of his career.
The unseeded Agassi finds himself in the tougher half of the men’s draw, with his path to a rematch with defending champion Roger Federer choked with formidable opponents.
Agassi, who has been unable to compete since losing in the first round of Washington’s Legg Mason Tennis Classic this month, opens against Andrei Pavel of Romania, a 32-year-old veteran who reached the U.S. Open’s fourth round in 2004.
Should he get past Pavel, Agassi likely would face the charismatic Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus, who reached the semifinals of Wimbledon in July. Following that: a potential fourth-round meeting with fellow American Andy Roddick, who’s showing signs of improvement after hiring former champion Jimmy Connors to coach him out of a slump. Roddick, who won the 2003 U.S. Open at age 21, is seeded ninth and opens against 44th-ranked Florent Serra of France.
A more likely pairing in the men’s final would be Federer and Spain’s Rafael Nadal, the world’s No. 1 and 2 players, respectively, who have faced off in the last two Grand Slam finals, with Nadal successfully defending his French Open title and Federer claiming his fourth consecutive Wimbledon crown.
Federer opens play next week against Yeu-Tzuoo Wang of Taiwan, while Nadal has a tricky first-round opponent in Mark Philippoussis of Australia, who reached the U.S. Open final in 1998 and the Wimbledon final in 2003.
American James Blake, rewarded with a career-high fifth seed, opens against Juan Monaco of Argentina.
The women’s draw features many of the favorites in the top half — including top-seeded Amelie Mauresmo of France, who has won two of the season’s three Grand Slam titles (the Australian Open and Wimbledon), and third-seeded Maria Sharapova.
It also includes two-time U.S. Open champion Serena Williams, who needed a wild card to enter this year because her ranking had fallen so low (90th) after she missed most of the season with a lingering knee injury. She will open against Lourdes Dominguez Lino of Spain and could face Mauresmo in the fourth round and eighth-seeded Martina Hingis in the quarterfinals.
Venus Williams has had injury woes of her own. Seeded 30th, she’ll open against Marta Domachowska of Poland, who was ousted in the first round last year.
The Williams sisters combined for four consecutive U.S. Open titles from 1999 to 2002. It was because of their charisma and appeal that CBS moved its broadcast of the women’s final to prime time. But the ratings have dropped sharply when neither sister has advanced to the final.

TITLE: America Inspired by Anthony
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAPPORO, Japan — As his team left the locker room at halftime trailing Italy by nine points, captain Dwyane Wade broke into song. “I was walking out and everybody was quiet and I just started singing something that came to mind,” Wade said Wednesday night. “I just came off the NBA Finals, where my team had been down a lot [two games to none]. I don’t ever worry about being down. And I don’t want my teammates to worry about it, either.”
After the game, Wade couldn’t remember what he sang. But it proved to be the right tune, with the Americans surging back to beat Italy, 94-85, in the FIBA World Championship. The United States rallied behind Carmelo Anthony, whose 35 points were the most by an American in the world championship. Kenny Anderson set the previous record of 34 in 1990.
Anthony scored 29 in 19 electrifying minutes in the second half. “I think I got it going after a tip-in from the free throw line,” he said. “I knew once my outside shot was going it was going to open it up for my inside driving.” Wade scored 26 points and Elton Brand added 16 as the Americans clinched Group D. That means the United States will avoid Argentina or Spain, two of the tournament’s powers, until the final. The Americans will play the fourth-place team in Group C on Sunday. 
In the biggest upset of the tournament, Lebanon — playing without its coach — defeated France, 74-73, in Sendai, Japan.

TITLE: Pakistan Decides to Play On After Ball Tampering Scandal
AUTHOR: By Waheed Khan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KARACHI — Pakistan have dropped their plan to ask the International Cricket Council (ICC) to hold a disciplinary hearing before Monday into captain Inzamam-ul-Haq’s actions in the fourth and final test against England. 
Team manager Zaheer Abbas said that after lengthy consultations it had been decided Pakistan would wait until after the one-day series ended on Sept. 10 for the hearing to take place.
“There was an opinion we should ask the ICC to have the hearing before the one-day series to close this issue but since both boards have agreed on having Ranjan Madugalle as the adjudicator it has been decided to wait until he is available,” Abbas told Reuters from London.
Earlier, a Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) official said the PCB was willing to accept a replacement adjudicator to speed up the process after a postponement was caused by the enforced absence of ICC chief referee Madugalle.
“Madugalle’s sister has had a serious accident and the reasons for postponing the hearing are genuine. Our legal advisers also felt it was best to wait,” Abbas said. He added that Thursday’s fixture against Middlesex would go ahead as planned. “We are definitely playing that match and the remaining ones also. The players are now just concentrating on the cricket and winning the one-dayers.”
Earlier, ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed said Friday’s planned hearing had been postponed since Pakistan and England preferred Madugalle to act as adjudicator.
“The difficulty relates to the availability of Ranjan Madugalle to chair the hearing as he is dealing with a private and personal matter that requires his urgent attention,” said Speed in a statement.
“Pakistan and England, as the host country, have both expressed a preference for Ranjan to hear the case and on that basis we have agreed to the postponement.”
The hearing was scheduled by the ICC after the ball tampering controversy at the Oval on the fourth day of the finaltest on Sunday.
Inzamam and coach Bob Woolmer had suggested earlier this week that the tourists could refuse to play the one-day series if the captain was banned.
The England and Wales Cricket Board has indicated that if the one-dayers are not held on the scheduled dates it could cost them around 10 million pounds ($18.93 million).
The row centres around a decision by the umpires to award a five-run penalty against Pakistan for ball tampering. Inzamam’s team refused to emerge for the final session’s play and the match was eventually forfeited by the touring team. The Pakistan players vehemently deny any wrongdoing. The ICC has charged Inzamam with bringing the game into disrepute, for which there is a maximum ban of eight one-day internationals and four tests.

TITLE: Gatlin Must Serve Four Years
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Sprinter Justin Gatlin must serve at least four years of his doping ban, an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) spokesman has said.
The American Olympic and world 100 meters champion was banned for up to eight years on Tuesday after agreeing that his positive drugs test constituted a doping violation.
Gatlin also agreed to help fight drug abuse in the sport, and the actual length of his suspension will be decided by an arbitration panel. “Four years would be the minimum,” IAAF spokesman Nick Davies told the BBC. 
“We want to see if it leads to other convictions. We want him to tell the truth about what really happened. If Gatlin just says ‘I don’t know what happened,’ that’s not good enough.”
The 24-year-old Gatlin, who has lost his share of the 100 meters world record, tested positive for the male sex hormone testosterone at the Kansas Relays in April for reasons he said he did not know.
It was his second positive test, which under anti-doping rules could have resulted in a life ban.