SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1222 (88), Friday, November 17, 2006
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TITLE: Migrants Targeted By Cabinet
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia should not permit the creation of so-called ethnic enclaves where foreigners outnumber native Russian citizens, a top migration official was quoted as saying in an interview published Thursday.Vyacheslav Postavnin, deputy director of the Federal Migration Service, was commenting on a new government move that bars immigrants from trading at street stalls and markets.
"According to our calculations, compact habitation by citizens of another country in any district or region of the country should not surpass 17 to 20 percent, especially if they have a different national culture and religious faith. Exceeding this norm creates discomfort for the indigenous population," Postavnin was quoted as saying by the Vremya Novostei daily.
President Vladimir Putin ordered his Cabinet last month to take steps to decrease the employment of foreign workers at Russian markets, alleging they were crowding out native Russian producers and retailers. Indoor and outdoor markets are staffed heavily by migrants from former Soviet republics, many of them working without official permission to reside in or work in Russia — and working long hours for pitifully low salaries.
According to a new Cabinet order regulating labor migration for the next year issued Wednesday, migrants will be prohibited from selling alcohol or pharmaceuticals as of Jan. 1. Foreigners should comprise no more than 40 percent of retail personnel employed outside stores during the period ending April 1 and will not be allowed to take these jobs further on next year.
During a meeting Wednesday with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, Putin instructed him to extend that ban. "I see no reason why we should change that after 2007. This isn't a sector of the economy where we have a labor deficit, we have enough labor force of our own there," he said.
Russia's population is dropping by about 700,000 a year and has fallen below 143 million, in a demographic crisis blamed on the economic turmoil that followed the Soviet collapse.
The population decline would be even more catastrophic were it not for immigration.
Postavnin told Vremya Novostei that some 10-12 million foreigners work in Russia, including about 7 million who are working illegally. Each of Russia's 88 regions will be able to set quotas for the amount of foreign labor needed, he was quoted as saying.
The campaign against illegal migration has drawn criticism from rights activists. Some say that Putin has chosen to play the populist card to consolidate the Kremlin's already strong control over society, and they contend that the campaign is only fueling the already virulent racism in Russian society.
The new measures to restrict foreign labor "will lead only to increasing corruption since the very same foreigners will be engaging in trade, only illegally," the Gazeta.ru online newspaper quoted refugee rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina as saying.
Police and other government officials regularly roam markets, checking workers' registration papers and extracting bribes to allow unregistered workers to remain.

TITLE: In Flying Visit, Bush Positive On WTO
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush met Wednesday at Vnukovo-2 Airport, outside Moscow, where they confirmed the two countries had reached a critical trade deal and discussed Iran's nuclear program.The brief layover — Bush was en route to Singapore for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum — featured few surprises and plenty of chitchat as the presidents and their wives feasted on crab salad, fish, blini with caviar and sundry desserts.
Putin and his wife, Lyudmila Putina, welcomed the president and first lady Laura Bush on a red carpet that had been rolled out for Air Force One.
The Russian leader presented Laura Bush with a bouquet of flowers and the couples exchanged kisses. Bush clapped Putin on the back.
Inside the marble-floored Vnukovo Airport terminal, the two couples were seated in ornate armchairs while photographers clicked away.
The Bushes then presented their hosts with a giant-sized photograph of all four of them in a golf cart during the Group of Eight summit in June in St. Petersburg, The Associated Press reported.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the two leaders "found time to discuss concisely the most important issues on the bilateral agenda."
Last week, negotiators in Washington and Moscow ironed out all the bilateral agreements needed for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization.
On Wednesday, the two presidents said the WTO protocols would be signed at an upcoming meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Peskov said Wednesday's meeting, which lasted more than one hour, gave the two leaders time to outline issues they planned to discuss at greater length in Hanoi.
Peskov said the agenda for that meeting had not yet been finalized, adding that he could not say whether any issues besides the WTO and Iran would be discussed.
Beyond Iran's uranium-enrichment program, Putin and Bush also touched on nuclear nonproliferation in general and the state of affairs in the ever-turbulent Middle East, Peskov said.
Peskov declined to say whether North Korea's nuclear program came up during the meeting or whether Bush had signaled any changes in U.S. foreign policy in the wake of midterm congressional elections. The elections gave the Democrats control of the House and Senate for the first time in 12 years and were widely regarded in the United States as a repudiation of the Iraq war.
Since winning majorities on Capitol Hill, Democrats have said they have reservations about admitting Russia to the WTO in light of questions about intellectual property rights and Russia's resurgent authoritarianism.
Asked about the U.S. president's decision to stop in Moscow as he was flying to Asia — instead of, say, somewhere in Asia — Peskov said simply that the two leaders "attach great importance to sustaining bilateral relations."
Russia and the United States have increasingly been at odds over Moscow's efforts to maintain sway over former Soviet republics. Some of those republics, including Georgia and Ukraine, are seeking NATO entry.
The two leaders also do not see eye to eye when it comes to imposing UN sanctions on Iran for its failure to comply fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Washington wants tough sanctions; Russia, which is building a nuclear reactor for Iran, has resisted.
A Kremlin source told Interfax on Wednesday before the meeting that Putin would brief Bush on closed-door negotiations last week between Russian leaders and Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, in Moscow.
Putin is aware that relations between the two countries have sunk to their lowest point since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and is "trying to, if not reverse, then slow down the trend toward further deterioration of the relations," said Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: New Reality Tough on Russians in Latvia
AUTHOR: By Dan Bilefsky
PUBLISHER: INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
TEXT: RIGA, Latvia — The last Russian tank rolled out of Latvia more than a decade ago. But Inesa Kuznetsova, 75, a resident here for more than 50 years, has little doubt where she calls home."My address isn't a city. My address isn't a town. My address isn't a street," says the dressmaker, who arrived from Leningrad during World War II. "My address is the Soviet Union."
Kuznetsova's address is, in fact, Bolderaja, a largely Russian-speaking neighborhood on the outskirts of Riga, where a former Russian naval barracks sits empty and signs in the supermarket are in both Russian and Latvian. Here, she inhabits a parallel universe that has little to do with Latvia. She watches a Kremlin-funded television station, eats Russian food, and has no intention of learning the Latvian language — "Why the hell would I want to do that?" — though she says her grandchildren are being forced to do so.
Kuznetsova calls it an "insult" that residents who arrived after 1940, when the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, must now take a naturalization exam to become Latvian citizens. She has not done so, instead pinning her hopes on a new "Russian occupation" of Latvia. This, she says, is gaining force due to the arrival of illegal workers from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, who have streamed into the country in recent months by the hundreds, if not thousands, to help fill the gap left by the nearly 100,000 Latvians who have left in search of a better life since the country joined the European Union in May 2004.
Kuznetsova may be a relic from an era that many Latvians would like to forget. But the invasion she speaks of is stoking fears in this tiny Baltic country of 2.3 million, which is still grappling with how to integrate more than 800,000 Russian-speakers left over from Soviet times. One recent newspaper headline captured the national anxiety when, using variants on the name "John," it bemoaned that Latvian employers were "Looking for Janis, but finding Ivan."
The anxiety is stoked by strong memories of the Soviet occupation, when tens of thousands of Latvians fled the country or were deported and an equal number of Russians were sent here by Moscow. By the time of Latvian independence in 1991, the country's Russian population had swollen from 10 percent before World War II to nearly half, with Russian the dominant language in large cities like Riga.
During the occupation, Latvia dreamed of breaking open its Soviet-guarded border and rejoining Europe. That dream was fulfilled; the country is now a member of the European Union and NATO. But there was a price. While economic growth shot up to 10 percent this year, about the same as China's, the large migration westward of Latvians has left a gaping hole in the job market. This has forced the country to make a difficult, sometimes wrenching, choice: to accept the economic necessity of immigration, or to hold on to deep and abiding historical resentments.
"We already have had Russians invading us for 50 years and we don't need another invasion — it is too painful," says Liene Strike, 21, a museum guide at Riga's windowless Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, where a life-size model of a barracks in the Gulag shows the cramped conditions under which Latvians deported by Stalin froze and starved to death.
As part of its cultural self-assertion since independence, Latvia has introduced mandatory exams and an oath of loyalty for Soviet-era settlers who want to become citizens. To gain a Latvian passport, they must prove that they know Latvia's history and can speak Latvian.
Many of the nearly 400,000 Russian-speaking noncitizens from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and elsewhere, are wary of taking a test, which includes questions like, "What happened in Latvia on June 17, 1940?" Answer: "The beginning of Soviet occupation." But failure to pass the exam means being unable to vote or hold most public posts, and requiring a visa to visit most other EU countries.
The issue of Russian minority rights in Latvia has taken on global importance because Moscow argues that the European Union and other Western bodies are in no position to challenge it on human rights as long as Latvia's ethnic Russians are treated as second-class citizens.
Many Latvian employers argue that economic interests must supersede historical grudges if the Latvian economy, one of the poorest in the 25-member European Union, is to become competitive. So many Latvians have emigrated that construction sites across Riga sit empty for lack of workers; companies have installed billboards across the capital pleading with Latvians, "Don't go to Ireland, we need you."
In an effort to stem the exodus, the government will raise the monthly minimum wage next year to 120 lats from 90 lats, or 172 euros from 129 euros. But such increases have so far been ineffective, given the huge gap with wages elsewhere in the European Union. In Ireland, the minimum monthly wage is 1,293 euros.
Arturs, the 33-year-old owner of a cargo company, says he has been illegally smuggling Russian-speaking drivers from Belarus to Latvia because he cannot find qualified Latvian drivers. Declining to give his last name because he is breaking the law, he said he smuggled them in on three-month tourist visas and paid them 500 euros a month, half of the 1,000 euros that Latvian drivers now expect. "I just need workers — I don't care if they're from Africa or China or Russia," he said. "I just need to earn my living."
But the Latvian government counters that importing foreign workers is too risky.
Current immigration policies require companies who hire non-Latvians from outside the European Union to pay 687 lats per employee and wait up to three months for approval from a state employment agency.
Aigars Stokenbergs, Latvia's minister for regional affairs and until recently its economics minister, argues that relaxing the immigration rules would have the negative effect of driving down wages while saddling the country with a new generation of Russian speakers resistant to assimilation.
"It has taken 10 years to teach Russians here how to speak Latvian," he said in an interview. "We can't afford to assimilate another 100,000 people."
The challenge of assimilation is apparent everywhere on Moscow Street in a large Russian-speaking neighborhood called Moskachka that is literally on the other side of the tracks.
On the one side is Old Riga: picturesque, medieval, bustling with tourists. On the other is Moskachka: poor, dusty, and thronging with women in kerchiefs selling pickles and secondhand clothes in a giant covered market that housed German Zeppelin fighter planes during World War I.
Tatiana Kaspere, 43, a Russian-speaking vendor, says she is fed up living in a country where she feels she will never belong.
Such are the contradictions of Latvia's citizenship laws, she says, that her son, who was born before Latvian independence in 1991, is a noncitizen, while her three-year-old daughter is Latvian. She says her husband, a construction foreman, cannot get a promotion because of his Russian identity.
"This is my home, but I don't feel at home here," she says. "Why do I need to take a test to prove my loyalty? I was born here. I would go back, but there is nowhere to go back to."
Nils Usakovs, 30, head of the Harmony Center party, which advocates the rights of the Russian-speaking community and won 14 percent of the vote in recent national elections, says discrimination in Latvia against Russian-speaking laborers risks denting the country's economy by hampering growth. He noted that Riga already had more ethnic Russians than ethnic Latvians.
"This country knows how to deal with Russians," he said. "People lived together during Soviet times. They don't always like each other, but they understand each other."
Back in Bolderaja, the Russian-speaking neighborhood, Kuznetsova expressed the feelings of some ethnic Russians long-implanted in Latvia. "Look around," she said, pointing to a group of Uzbek shoppers and a store she described as owned by Azerbaijanis. "They call us occupiers but these people are coming, and they are the new occupiers."

TITLE: Anti-Fascist Activists Target Hate Graffiti
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Having waited for the city police or street cleaners to do it for long enough, a group of local activists is now buying paint to blot out extremist graffiti on the walls of St. Petersburg's buildings.To mark the International Day of Tolerance on Thursday, the St. Petersburg League of Nations and the local Jewish community have established a telephone hotline (713 8186), where anyone can call and report nationalist, extremist or fascist graffiti on apartment buildings, monuments and in cemeteries. The activists will collect calls until Nov. 24 and then will take to the streets to paint out offensive slogans.
"Nazi symbols and slogans excusing ethnic hatred can be found on the walls of many local houses," said Moishe Treskunov, spokesman of the St. Petersburg Jewish community. "Our children grow up seeing them all around, and we continue to tolerate it. But now it is high time for nearly five million citizens to peacefully reject these vicious activities by a wretched handful of low-lifes."
St. Petersburg was once considered to be Russia's most liberal and progressive city. It still considers itself to be Russia's "cultural capital." But in recent years, the city has become famous as the scene of a seemingly endless stream of racist attacks.
In 2006, at least 19 people have been murdered in hate crimes in Russia, according to the Moscow-based Russian Analytical and Information center SOVA. A further 166 people in 22 regions of Russia have suffered injuries in apparent racially motivated attacks.
Statistics collected by SOVA show that a total of 434 people suffered violent enthically motived attacks in Russia in 2005. Thirty-five of them died from the severe injuries they sustained.
Attacks were reported in a total of 36 regions, but the problem is especially serious in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Activists from the St. Petersburg-based African Union say at least six people died in hate crimes in the city this year.
Sergei Khokhayev, chairman of Memorial human rights group, blamed city authorities and Governor Valentina Matviyenko directly for what he called a general "hands-off attitude" towards ethnic and religious intolerance.
"Not only do they stay away from anti-fascist meetings, but they also don't send anyone to remove fascist graffiti from the walls of apartment buildings," Khokhayev said. "Young activists from Antifa [an anti-fascist group] are removing extremist slogans from walls on their own initiative, while the city simply turns a blind eye to them."
Alexander, a 22-year-old member of Antifa, who asked his last name to be withheld, said he is amazed at the passive attitude of ordinary locals.
"I very often see graffiti saying 'Beat the Jews!' or 'Wipe Out Blacks' in staircases," he said. "No doubt, Jewish people and dark-skinned people live in those buildings — not to mention self-respecting Russians. And day after day they just go by waiting for someone to cover it up or simply not paying attention. It is a sign of weakness."

TITLE: Duma Adopts Election Turnout Bill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A bill eliminating voter turnout thresholds in elections cleared a crucial hurdle Wednesday, making it almost certain the measure will become law.United Russia deputies rammed the bill through a second reading in the State Duma, with 336 lawmakers voting for it and 92 against. The Communists opposed the bill.
The bill, which passed a first reading earlier this year, is expected to make it easier for United Russia to hold onto power. Without any minimum voter requirement, local election authorities working for United Russia would be able to strip opposition candidates from ballots without fearing a boycott.
For now, boycotts are one of the few tools protesters have at their disposal to make their dissatisfaction with elections known. But striking the threshold would sap the boycott of any of its power to invalidate elections and cast a spotlight on public discontent. "Anything that threatens United Russia's getting a majority vote at the polls is being stricken from the law," Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said.
Sergei Mironov, the Federation Council speaker, on Tuesday called the elimination of the turnout threshold "premature." Mironov is the leader of the other pro-Kremlin party, A Just Russia, which has been portrayed as the center-left counterbalance to the center-right United Russia.
Other provisions of the same bill now coasting through the Duma would eliminate early voting, ban criticism between rival parties and candidates during election times, and allow election officials to kick candidates off ballots if they were convicted of extremist activity or detained for a minor offense during the campaign.
If the bill clears a third reading in the Duma, passes the Federation Council and is signed into law by President Vladimir Putin by year's end, it would take effect before regional and Duma elections in 2007, which are scheduled for March and October, respectively.

TITLE: Hermitage Theft Suspect Released
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Prosecutors in have dropped all charges against Ivan Sobolev, who had been detained in the theft of nearly $5 million in artifacts from the State Hermitage Museum, Interfax reported Monday.Sobolev, a lecturer in the history department at St. Petersburg State University, was released from the pre-trial detention facility where he had been held since early August.
Police told Interfax that Sobolev had been implicated only in thefts that occurred before 1995 and that the 10-year statute of limitations had therefore expired.
A routine inventory at the Hermitage this summer revealed that 221 items had gone missing. Thirty of the items have since been returned to the museum by collectors and antique dealers.
Sobolev was one of three suspects detained in the theft. The other two were the son and husband of the late Larisa Zavadskaya, a curator who worked in the section of the museum where the thefts occurred.

TITLE: Gambling to be Limited To Special Zones in Three Years
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov and Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — State Duma deputies unanimously gave tentative approval Wednesday to a bill that would tighten the screws on gamblers and ultimately ban gambling except in four special zones from 2009.But the legislation — criticized for clumsy wording and prohibiting activities such as betting on friendly card games in private homes — is widely expected to undergo drastic changes before it passes a second reading, probably later this year.
"There is no doubt the bill will change beyond recognition," said Yevgeny Kovtun, a spokesman for the Gaming Business Association, whose members have been operating in Russia for the past decade.
The bill, submitted by President Vladimir Putin last month, sailed through a first reading Wednesday by a vote of 440-0 and one abstention.
Under the bill, small slot-machine halls and casinos will be closed next July, when a minimum gambling age of 18 and other restrictions come into effect.
Duma deputies stressed the need for national gambling regulations, but said the legislation must clarify how the four gambling zones would be set up.
The current version does not outline how many of the zones would be established inside residential areas. Also, it does not provide a mechanism for creating the zones, which is also key to the legislation's success, United Russia Deputy Igor Dines said.
Federal authorities would grant five-year licenses for operation inside the zones.
The exact locations of the four zones have not been chosen, but Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov has said two zones will be in European Russia, one in Siberia and one in the Far East.
The first zone will be created in July, Putin's representative to the Duma, Alexander Kosopkin, said during his presentation of the bill on Wednesday.
Moscow does not plan to apply for the status of a gambling zone, a Moscow deputy mayor, Iosif Ordzhonikidze said last month. This means that the 537 gaming establishments that are licensed to operate in Moscow would need to close or relocate to a special zone by 2009.

TITLE: Swedish Giant Plants New Seeds of Success
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A subsidiary of Swedwood international, part of Swedish DIY retailer IKEA, opened a new furniture assembly plant Wednesday, investing 13 million euros ($17 million) into its construction.Swedwood Tikhvin was founded in 2001 as a subsidiary of the Swedwood international industrial group, which operates 36 furniture plants in 12 countries. The Leningrad Oblast plant will produce up to one million units of furniture a year. Turnover is expected to be around 30 million euros, and the company expects to return the investment within nine years, Interfax reported Wednesday, citing Niels Skerbeck, Swedwood manager for Eastern region, as saying.
Within two years Swedwood plans to increase the capacity of the new plant to two million units a year, which would allow a turnover of 65 million euros, Skerbeck said, according to Interfax.
The plant opening is just one of a number of IKEA projects currently in the news.
On Thursday, IKEA opened a 180,000 meter-squared MEGA family shopping center in Dybenko district, Leningrad Oblast.
The center houses over 170 shops distributing shoes and clothes, cosmetics, sportswear and children's goods, the company said in a statement.
Anchor tenants include IKEA, Auchan, OBI and Vsyo Dlya Doma (Everything for a house). MEGA Dybenko also houses brand boutiques, restaurants and a skating rink.
A second MEGA+IKEA shopping center of 130,000 square meters total area is due to open in Parnas district Dec. 1. It will house the same anchor tenants and entertainment facilities. Combined investment into both projects is about $300 million.
According to a review of shopping centers issued by Becar real estate agency, in terms of floor-space and total investment, the two MEGA centers are the most important projects due for completion in the city this year — next in importance is Rodeo Drive that will offer only about 50,000 square meters of shopping areas.
IKEA operates seven IKEA shops in Russia as well as the MEGA shopping centers in Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod, and two MEGA centers in Moscow. A third MEGA center in Moscow is due to open on Nov. 30.

TITLE: Gazprom Deputy Ryazanov is Sacked
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW —Gazprom on Wednesday fired deputy CEO Alexander Ryazanov, who spearheaded the gas monopoly's expansion into the oil sector after its acquisition of Roman Abramovich's Sibneft last year.Ryazanov is the most senior Gazprom official to be fired since President Vladimir Putin appointed one of his colleagues from his own St. Petersburg days, Alexei Miller, as the company's CEO in May 2001, replacing Rem Vyakhirev. Ryazanov, 53, joined Gazprom in 2001.
Gazprom said in a brief statement that Ryazanov had been released as his contract would soon expire. A spokesman declined to provide further details.
It was unclear whether Ryazanov would hold on to his post as head of Gazprom's oil subsidiary, Gazprom Neft. Sibneft was renamed Gazprom Neft after being bought by Gazprom for $13.1 billion in September 2005.
"As of today, Alexander Ryazanov is still holding the post of president of Gazprom Neft," Natalya Vyalkina, a spokeswoman for Gazprom Neft, said late Wednesday.
"Changing the president is a shareholder issue," Vyalkina added, saying she did not know whether a shareholder meeting was planned for the near future. Late on Wednesday, Interfax reported that the meeting would take place Nov. 22.
Gazprom Neft's production has lagged under Ryazanov's leadership, but it remains the country's fifth-largest oil company by market capitalization. With proven reserves of 4.5 billion barrels, it has been producing just over 30 million tons of oil per year.
State-run Gazprom, notorious for its inefficiency and failure to develop new fields, has been expanding into sectors as diverse as oil, banking and the media.
Some analysts have speculated that Gazprom Neft's low production is instead Abramovich's fault, accusing the billionaire of bleeding Sibneft's fields to boost the company's market value in order to fetch an inflated price.
Gazprom said Valery Golubyev, the head of its equipment and services arm, would take over as acting deputy CEO.
Golubyev is a former KGB officer who served in the St. Petersburg mayor's office in the early 1990s, when Putin was also serving in the city administration. Both men are 54.
Speculation has swirled of rocky relations between Ryazanov and other top officials at Gazprom.
"There are different power blocs in all big companies and this dismissal could be part of that," said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank.
Other speculation rested on the continuing competition between Gazprom and Rosneft as the two state-run companies battle it out for leadership in the country's lucrative hyrdrocarbon sector.
"Gazprom and Rosneft are competing with each other inside the Kremlin for several very attractive assets," Weafer said. "So [Ryazanov's firing] is the consequence of some internal argument between Gazprom and Rosneft on assets or it is part of the power struggle inside Gazprom."
The Kremlin appears to have backed Gazprom as its national champion in the international arena, supporting the company's controversial decision to develop the massive Shtokman gas field, in the Barents Sea, on its own. Threats by the Natural Resources Ministry to revoke operating licenses for Shell and TNK-BP have been interpreted as a means of putting government pressure on foreign oil majors to accept Gazprom's entry into their projects.
Gazprom's acquisition of Sibneft raised the state's stake in the oil and gas sector to 30 percent and came less than one year after Rosneft bought Yukos' main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, through a December 2004 bargain auction amid the dismantling of Yukos.

TITLE: Gas Giant Gets Lucrative Italian Job
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW —Gazprom signed a landmark deal with Italy's Eni late Tuesday which gave the Russian giant a coveted foothold in southern Europe's lucrative retail gas sales and Eni the promise of upstream assets.The accord — signed in Moscow after months of talks between the two companies — lets Gazprom sell gas directly onto the Italian market from next year with volume that could reach 3 billion cubic meters by 2010.
Eni will join with Gazprom to buy oil assets in Russia and Africa, Eni's chief executive Paolo Scaroni said after a statement on the accord. The deal also involves assets of bankrupt Yukos.
The deal will allow Eni "to have an important presence as an oil and gas producer in Russia," Scaroni said. "In exchange Eni will take Gazprom out of Russia and in particular to Africa where it will acquire productive assets together with Eni."
Gazprom could take a stake in Eni unit Enipower as part of the deal, Scaroni said.
nGazprom has about 10 contracts to deliver gas in France's partially deregulated market, La Tribune reported Thursday without saying where it got the information.
The Russian company, which will officially announce its arrival on the French market on Nov. 24, has started to deliver gas to some unidentified clients since October, the daily said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: EBRDInvestmentnST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development will double its investment into Russia in 2006, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The EBRD will invest a total of 2.2 billion euros ($2.7 billion) into Russian projects this year, compared to the 1.1 billion euros invested in 2005.
Since starting its operations in Russia the EBRD has invested 7.5 billion euros.International SharesnST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The International Bank of St. Petersburg will issue shares amounting to 275 million rubles total value by the end of 2006, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The issue will increase the bank's authorized capital stock from 14.78 million rubles ($547,000) to 289.85 million rubles.

TITLE: TNK-BP, Gazprom Form Gas Venture
AUTHOR: By Lucian Kim
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NIZHNEVARTOVSK, Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District — TNK-BP agreed Wednesday to form a joint venture with Gazprom as it seeks better government relations amid a crackdown on foreign energy companies.TNK-BP and Gazprom's petrochemical unit Sibur Holding signed an agreement to refine so-called associated gas, which is extracted along with crude oil.
The agreement may help TNK-BP, whose Russian shareholders include billionaires Viktor Vekselberg and Mikhail Fridman, smooth relations with Gazprom, which opposes the company's single-handed development of the $18 billion Kovykta gas field in eastern Siberia.
"This is a good example of partnership between private and state companies," TNK-BP executive director German Khan said at the signing ceremony in Nizhnevartovsk. "We want to broaden our cooperation to other regions where our interests intersect."
Gazprom will have 51 percent of the new company and TNK-BP 49 percent, though management control will be equal, Sibur president Alexander Dyukov said. Gazprom will contribute two refineries with a combined capacity to process 12 billion cubic meters per year. TNK-BP will provide the gas.
The agreement will guarantee deliveries at stable prices for future growth, Dyukov said.
The two companies may together invest as much as $500 million in the project over the next five years, Khan said.
Dyukov declined to put a value on the new venture.
State officials are using noncompliance with license agreements and environmental legislation to raise pressure on projects led by BP, Shell and Total, as the Kremlin seeks to turn state-run companies like Gazprom and Rosneft into global champions.
Sibur is in talks on similar projects at TNK-BP's Nyagan and Orenburg fields, Dyukov said. The company is also considering ventures with LUKoil, Gazprom Neft and Rosneft.
Many oil producers flare the natural gas that they extract along with crude, a process that is both environmentally damaging and wasteful.
Russia is facing a gas crunch as it seeks to meet export contracts and the demands of a booming economy.
TNK-BP, which pumps two-thirds of its crude in the Nizhnevartovsk area, produced 6.6 bcm of associated gas there last year, one-quarter of which was simply burned off into the atmosphere. By the end of 2008, the company wants to be using all of its associated gas.
Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Ananenkov said Wednesday on Sakhalin Island that Gazprom and Rosneft were completing talks on a "strategic partnership."
BP already has a close relationship with Rosneft, having spent $1 billion buying Rosneft shares in the company's initial public offering in July.

TITLE: FESCO Targets Domestic Control
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VLADIVOSTOK —The country's No. 1 container shipping firm, the Far East Shipping Company, or FESCO, plans to invest more than $1 billion to control half of the nation's fast-growing container shipments, company head Yevgeny Ambrosov said.Vladivostok-based FESCO aims to merge its sea and railway assets to become the nation's first "door-to-door" shipper, Ambrosov said.
"Our goal is to create an all-Russian, multifaceted shipper that would provide seamless transportation, using all the assets available on all stages of delivery," he said. "No one has ever done this in Russia.
"The investments are breathtaking. within the next few years we plan to spend over $1 billion to create an integrated transport holding."
He did not say where the company would raise cash for such an investment.
FESCO, specializing in sea shipments, pioneered railway deliveries in 2004 when it set up a joint venture, Russkaya Troika, on a parity basis with state monopoly Russian Railways.
FESCO, controlled by the Industrial Investors holding company, has invested a record $657 million this year, with more than one-half spent on buying railway assets and shares in container terminals in the country's ports.
FESCO aims to take advantage of the country's rapid economic growth, and Ambrosov forecast that door-to-door container shipments would be no less profitable than booming oil exports.
He said the country's container market, currently estimated at 2 million container shipments per year, was forecast to grow three or fourfold by 2010, expanding to between 12 million and 14 million containers over the following three or four years. "Getting control of up to a half of this stream of cargo is an ambitious target," Ambrosov said. "We have seen annual growth of 25 percent [in container shipments] in the last three years," he said.
"Growth is set to continue, and we can expect a slowdown only in five or six years."

TITLE: What a Master Spy Couldn't Master
AUTHOR: By Anne Applebaum
TEXT: "I did of course know of many of the terrible
crimes of the Stalin era
even while they were under way;
anyone who says he knew nothing is a liar."
"Memoirs of a Spymaster,"
Markus Wolf, 1998He tried hard, but when he died in his sleep last week, at 83, Markus Wolf had still not attained the elder statesman status to which he had long aspired. As chief of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, he had for three decades cultivated an aura of mystery, rejoicing in the nickname "Man Without a Face" (because Western intelligence long had no photograph of him) and in having allegedly been the model for Karla, John le Carre's fictional spymaster (though le Carre repeatedly denied it).Later, in his post-Cold War books and articles, Wolf fashioned himself the ultimate professional spy. In his memoir he boasted of the skill with which he had carried out his "madcap schemes and daring ruses" and mocked the sloppiness of Western intelligence. In contrast to the efforts to uncover his own slick operatives, spotting CIA men in Bonn was "ridiculously easy," since their "basic information about the East was so sketchy." At one point, Wolf claimed, the poor quality of U.S. agents led him to fear that "Washington had stopped taking East Germany seriously."
In a narrow sense, he may have been right: From a purely technical point of view, East Germany's spies probably were better than their Western counterparts. It is, after all, much easier to spy for a closed society, where there are no open debates about the morality of the methods, no congressional commissions, no nosy media.
Wolf gloried in his own amorality, shrugging his shoulders at the crimes of his society, bragging that he had perfected the art of psychological manipulation. He wrote of East German "Romeo agents" (his phrase) who successfully seduced lonely secretaries in West German ministries. To keep their victims happy, Wolf arranged "Potemkin weddings" (also his phrase) with phony priests — though if anyone grew suspicious, he swiftly arranged for the "husbands" to disappear back to East Germany.
Wolf also toyed with the emotions of women who had been forced by the Nazi regime to give up their blond, blue-eyed children — some the product of special breeding clinics — for adoption. Years later, he arranged for fake "sons" to get back in touch with their long-lost mothers, and then set those women up as East German agents too.
Such tactics — combined with a liberal use of bugging devices — did, it is true, help the East Germans infiltrate the very highest levels of West German society. One of Wolf's agents rose through the West German political hierarchy to become a senior aide to much-loved chancellor Willy Brandt. The East Germans were also expert at discrediting West German politicians and institutions. They would listen in on sensitive conversations, note the gaps between what was said in public and private, and then slip the information to journalists who could be relied upon to follow up.
And yet for all his preening, Wolf and his comrades did not win the Cold War. Nor, for all the CIA's ham-handedness, did the agents of communism even win the intelligence war. Invariably, Western agents received their best information not through psychological manipulation and complex schemes but through Soviet and East European defectors who offered themselves up voluntarily. Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, the Polish Warsaw Pact liaison, passed 35,000 pages of mostly Russian documents to the West because he'd seen plans for a Russian invasion of the West, during which Poland would be destroyed. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who worked as a double agent for British intelligence, did so because the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had gutted his faith in Soviet propaganda.
In the end, what Wolf liked to call his comrades' "professionalism" — and what might more accurately be called cynicism, opportunism or cold calculation — wasn't even persuasive enough to win the allegiance of most East Germans. Like the rest of the Soviet bloc, East Germany eventually fell apart not so much because of Western military pressure but because the loyalty of its people evaporated. As soon as they could leave their country, East Germans left. And no wonder: Who could feel affection for a regime led by men such as Markus Wolf?
Indeed, in retrospect, Wolf's intelligence achievements hardly seem to matter: The significance of a few moles pales beside the larger and more important cultural struggle between East and West. Even as he fought on behalf of the Soviet Union and its client states, Wolf — who had spent his boyhood in Stalinist Moscow — knew perfectly well that the West was more just, more affluent and more humane than his own cramped, repressive society. Most ordinary people knew it, too.
As the United States now debates torture, or domestic spying, or other dubious methods that will allegedly help it defeat radical Islam, it's worth remembering that the West won the Cold War not by matching the nastiness of Markus Wolf — though some certainly tried to do so — but by being and remaining more open societies.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post, where this comment was published.

TITLE: Russia's Own Middle East
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Even before Gazprom demanded that Georgia sell its gas pipelines to the Russian gas monopoly, and before President Vladimir Putin invited Azeri President Ilham Aliyev to take part in an energy blockade of Georgia, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity was already out uncovering more plots against him.The story should be pretty clear to everyone by now: Gazprom is planning to bring Georgia to its knees and Putin is personally asking Azerbaijan to take part in the exercise, but it is the Georgian side that is plotting terrorist attacks.
A couple of personal experiences in the recent past might help provide insight into what's going on.
The first incident occurred while I was in Abkhazia's Kodori Gorge. The GAZ truck in which I was riding was packed with weapons and we had no official passes, but were greeted warmly by the soldiers at every checkpoint. The reason for the reception was that the people in the truck with me had all fought for Abkhazia against Tbilisi in 1992, and one of them not so long ago had commanded the Abkhaz special forces. God knows what led this commander, whose ancestors had fled from Russia in the 19th century and who had served in Afghanistan, Abkhazia and Chechnya, to leave the battalion, which is still defending the gorge. He simply said to me in broken Russian: "See that mountain? There I am simply a human being. The mountain isn't Svan, Abkhaz or Georgian. But when there is a saboteur, he does something and I am held responsible?"
The second incident took place in South Ossetia. On this occasion I was returning overnight to Georgia from the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, and, as the soldiers at the Ossetian checkpoint were arguing with their Georgian counterparts over who was going to escort me, some of the Ossetians noticed a commotion at the Georgian checkpoint and interpreted it in their own particular way. "Their commanders have arrived," they announced and opened fire on the checkpoint.
The reason they opened fire was that the night before Georgian police had beaten up an Ossetian, leaving him with severe head injuries. The Georgians had beaten him up because the night before that, while out gathering firewood, a Georgian had been blown up by a landmine — something that generally leads to a rise in tensions. What startled me was the reaction when I mentioned the incident to one of Kokoity's aides: "This simply demonstrates [then-Georgian Defense Minister Irakli] Okruashvili's connections with local Georgian criminals," she said.
The difference between the mindsets in Abkhazia and South Ossetia is striking. In Abkhazia there is a strong commitment to defending its freedom from anyone and everyone. In South Ossetia, the commitment is to pleasing the Kremlin in any and every way possible.
Georgia doesn't always show restraint, either. Okruashvili's statement that he planned to spend New Year's Eve in Tskhinvali is just one example. As you may have noticed in my story, the Georgian was blown up in the forest, while the Ossetian was beaten up at an official checkpoint.
The Caucasus has turned into Russia's very own Middle East, determining more than just the fate of the region itself. What if a major terrorist attack were committed in Georgia or South Ossetia? It's not hard to imagine after the Kremlin's recent anti-Georgian campaign or Kokoity's recent revelations about a string of Georgian plots and groups of "Georgian saboteurs."
Georgia would clearly label such a terrorist attack as a provocation organized by Russian military intelligence, whereas South Ossetia would call it the latest monstrous outrage committed by Georgia. Putin would have to decide with whom to agree, and there really shouldn't be any doubt as to whose side he would take. What's that going to do for his image in the West?

Yulia Latynina is the host of a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: Prince of darkness
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Danish fashion designer Ivan Grundahl is seduced by the dark side.In a John Irving novel, a woman who launched an escort service called "Normal and Nice" failed miserably from the start. With an honest name like that she struggled to attract any clients, because many would think, what could be more boring than being nice?Premier Danish fashion designer Ivan Grundahl is not excited by nice women, either. During an exclusive interview with The St. Petersburg Times in his headquarters in Copenhagen, he said he is inspired by "the bitchy type."
Grundahl is one of the biggest names at the Nordic Look Fashion Days — a series of fashion shows and an exhibition by renowned designers from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland — that runs at the Mukhina Art and Design Academy from Wednesday to Saturday, Nov. 25.
Nordic Look, organized by the Nordic Council of Ministers in St. Petersburg with the Admiralty Needle International Competition for Young Fashion Designers, will focus on multifunctional clothes — garments that can be worn both at work and a social event with a sublime change of accessories — by Nordic designers.
The program also includes masterclasses by Russian fashion historian Alexander Vasiliev and Norwegian expert Renee Forsberg. East meets West, or, rather Japan blends with Scandinavia, in Grundahl's designs. Black, grey, white and red are some of his preferred colors.
In his urban outfits, Grundahl fuses asymmetrical lines and uneven silhouettes — that some would associate with Yohji Yamamoto — and the clean-cut architectural shapes of Scandinavia.
"I find black relaxing on the eye," Grundahl comments on his choice of colors. The designs may seem slightly at odds with Grundahl's exuberant personality — laid-back, lazy, creative and an excessive wine-drinker, as the designer himself puts it. But he adds, "I take my clothes very seriously."
No flowers or prints can be found in his creations. "Every now and then salespeople try to talk me into bringing the flowers in but I resist," he said. "My darkness is dear to me."
Women in black are perhaps more difficult to approach than women wearing a flowery design.
"Of course, they are more difficult — because they are admirable," Grundahl laughs. "All my female friends are difficult, demanding and selfish."
"Well-educated, good-looking, tough-borderline-bitchy — my clients can sometimes be really horrible," he adds, laughing. "But complicated and difficult people somehow happen to be the more exciting people."
Grundahl, now 55, with over 70 stores in Denmark as well as shops in the U.S., U.K. and Norway, spent more than 15 years of his career as a designer assisting his clients in choosing the right clothes.
Watching customers flipping through the hangers, Grundahl couldn't help thinking that these lawyers, doctors and managers looked absolutely helpless.
"Getting your clothes right in a job — like that of a lawyer or doctor — definitely does not come naturally to most people," he said.
At first, his advice was met with distrust, he recalls. "They were barely listening and nodded out of courtesy, their only thought apparently being 'this guy just wants to sell us something'," he said. "But the trick here is that once people realize you really do help them look good, they love you forever."
Grundahl has never been to Russia, and the only Russians he has ever come across were the notoriously picky clients in expensive designer boutiques.
"They instantly bargain and do not like words like 'thank you' or 'please' but rather prefer an aggressive 'urrrr' — at least this is what I have seen them like in the fanciest shops," he said. "They do not speak foreign languages and have an accompanying translator with them. We call them 'the new Arabs,' with their puffy wallets and glowing sexy looks."
In Grundahl's view, Russians seriously want to look sexy and fashionable, a lot more so than Danes.
"A lot of gold, push-up bras and boobs sticking out is what they seem to fancy," Grundahl said. "This flamboyant Hollywood-inspired image does not really come close to women in Nordic countries, who prefer a calmer, more basic and sporty style."
Grundahl designs for women from sizes 36-46, and the clientele in his boutiques is anywhere between mid-twenties and mid-seventies.
"Most designers target young ages, which is very natural," he said. "You may think of a middle-aged clientele — which some top-selling designers no doubt do — take Versace, for example — but there is no way to survive in the fashion industry as a self-styled old women's label. There is one very simple reason: everyone wants to look young. I am 55, and I would never go to a store advertising itself as selling clothes for men in their mid-fifties. No way!"
The same goes for sizes. H&M once launched a Big is Beautiful line targeting heavier women but it didn't last. Most people do not have the heart to go into a shop for fat people.
"Imagine, if you saw an ad in the paper for a restaurant for the oldies — I, for one, would not go there," he said. "Because I want to feel hip, not ancient."
What makes an older person attractive? Definitely not trying to look 20 when you are 60 — that would make you look pathetic, Grundahl said.
"You have to carry yourself with dignity and style — in the sense that there is no need to show your cleavage when all you have to expose is a bit of saggy tired flesh. Natural and cool, classy, comfortable and down-to-earth would do beautifully."
Twenty years ago, Grundahl designed clothes for men but sales did not take off and he abandoned the idea. Perhaps it was also his belief that men's fashion has to be very simple and not rich in detail.
"I did not enjoy it all that much, to be honest," he admitted. "Men do not need much to be invented for them — all the creative, provocative, new and sophisticated things in fashion are done for women. So here I am."www.norden.ru, www.ivangrundahl.dk

TITLE: A new direction
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A company of U.S. actors directed by Rober Olinger in the Kama Ginkas Master/Pupil festival.The Priyut Komedianta theater maintains the traditions of the Russian national theater school with the Second International Master/Pupil Festival starting on Nov. 24. The festival shows how a master's craft is reflected in his pupils' performances and how students try to find their own style based on their teacher's studies. Last year, students of director Peter Fomenko staged their works; this year students of Russian director Kama Ginkas are featured.Taking part are students orginating from New York, Moscow, Samara and Barnaul. Four students will present their work on different stages in St.Petersburg.
"This festival is like no other because it performs not the best achievements of any particular place but a school, a trend, set by only one person — the 'master'," said Nikolai Burov, the chairman of City Hall's culture committee, which backs the event.
Taking part in the festival is an important stage in the careers of young directors. With Petersburg theatergoers having severe, and even prejudiced, tastes (especially against things liked in Moscow), the festival becomes a risky and exciting experience for its participants.
"This is a difficult trial for them — making a performance in a regular theater which has its own repertoire, its own particular company," said Ginkus, whose students are featured. "The result can differ from one's wishes. There is no Ginkas who can help."
"A young director has no conception of the real theater," the 'master' added. "He is an idealist, and he finds himself in a particular theater in its condition. It will test both the director's personal qualities and professional skills."
New York director Robert Olinger will open the festival with his staging of "Finer Noble Gases" by Adam Rapp.
"Adam Rapp created a play about young artists who at one point in time had dreams, hopes, desires — all of which have gone unfulfilled. These men were unable to overcome their obstacles, and slowly gave up their dreams, hopes and desires," said Olinger.
"They now live in front of their television and are sustained by blue, red and yellow pills. In my view they have died young."
A play about youths losing themselves early in life is not a new topic in the theater.
"My fascination with Adam Rapp is the way he has written about this topic. Plays dealing with these themes are wrought with angst, violence and dramatic action as youths attempt to overcome their dilemma, where Rapp's characters are often involved in useless meaningless activities, attempting to ignore, to pass on unnoticed, they are anti-theatrical, modern Oblomovs, and here lies the pain and meaning in the production," Olinger said.
The show is staged by Studio 6, a company of 11 American actors who studied at MKhAT (Moscow Arts Theater) and whose artistic home is in Moscow. Studio 6 is currently creating a theater in the U.S., built according to the Russian national theater school, with a regular company and clear artistic program.
"This is the only company that can truly bring American drama to the Russian audience. I truly hope that Russian theatergoers will attend the production as we have gone to great lengths to remove the language barrier," said Olinger.
"I do not want to give away what we have done in the production but the Russian language plays a large part in our performance," added Olinger.
"Kama Ginkas demands the highest level of work from his students and in contrast to his reputation as an angry director, spends a great deal of time nurturing them. I am very nervous about the festival, since the audience will include my teacher and classmates, the jury most important for me."
The festival program also includes such classics as Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler," produced by Moscow director Irina Keruchenko, and William Shakespeare's "Othello" staged by Anton Kovalenko from Barnaul.
"I am very grateful for this honor — to introduce the performance in St. Petersburg. It is a dream come true," said Kovalenko.
Also in the program, Maxim Kalsin from Samara performs "The Paper Gramophone," based on Alexander Chervinsky's play "My Happiness.""Finer Noble Gases," directed by Robert Olinger at the Kama Ginkas Festival at Teatr Estrada, 27 Bolshaya Konnyushenaya, on Nov. 24 and 25, at 7p.m.

TITLE: Chernov's choice
TEXT: The Leningrad Rock Club, which celebrates its 25th anniversary with a stadium concert and exhibition this week, might be a legend but it belongs to the past. Hopefully.There was good music, there were good shows and good people, but it is always difficult, or maybe even impossible, to explain what the Leningrad Rock Club was like to a Westerner. Many words did not mean what they seemed under the Soviets. Rather than a rock club, LRG started as a state-sanctioned organization that had a license to promote concerts to a limited amount of fans, mainly its members. As with any other Soviet organization, it had to have people responsible for ideology and was controlled by the KGB. It had to have censors to scrutinize the bands' lyrics before they were allowed to perform in public, and ban anything they found improper. The bands had to submit set-lists for approval before a concert and were punished with a ban on performing, say, for six months if they played an unapproved song. Similar punishment was meted out to a band that dared to play a concert without its sanction. The Leningrad Rock Club's best known band Akvarium was banned at least three times and could perform only secret apartment gigs for months in the early 1980s.
Although some of the bands and their music were good, like the classic, early-1980s Akvarium, the Leningrad Rock Club was born out of an agreement between underground rock activists and the secret police that might explain the readiness to collaborate with the authorities in present-day Russian rock.
Strangely, one of the news releases about the event boasts of the KGB's involvement.
"On one beautiful day musicians and those who dealt with underground concerts got together and went to the director of the Leningrad House of Amateur Creative Work," it quotes Andrei Tropillo, the then underground recording engineer and producer, as saying.
"She invited some KGB officers. They came and we explained to them that if concerts were held here, there wouldn't be unofficial concerts anywhere else in the city. And if we censored the lyrics ourselves, there wouldn't be any anti-Soviet stuff. This is how we got the support of [the KGB]. Then we went with our proposal to Smolny [the city's communist headquarters]. They, naturally asked [the KGB men] about their opinion. [The KGB men] replied that they liked everything..."
There are more odd things about the event. For instance, the posters claim that not every band taking part in the anniversary concert is listed "due to the bands' request." Are they ashamed or what?
An exhibition about the history of the Leningrad Rock Club is currently being held at Manezh Central Exhibition Hall and the anniversary concert will take place at Yubileiny Sports Palace on Saturday.

— Sergey Chernov

TITLE: Composer with cred
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: British composer Michael Nyman found fame through his work with film director Peter Greenaway, but in a recent interview with the St. Petersburg Times he talks about St. Petersburg's "market culture," the communist rewriting of history and performing alongside rock bands in Michael Winterbottom's controversial film "9 Songs."Nyman, who performed a solo piano concert in St. Petersburg in June 1998, returns with the full Michael Nyman Band for a concert of music that made him famous and more recent pieces — including that from Peter Greenaway's films "Drowning by Numbers," "The Draughtsman's Contract," and "Prospero's Books," as well as Jane Campion's "The Piano," Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair" and Winterbottom's "Wonderland."
"It's a standard Michael Nyman Band program that we play all over the world and that audiences seem to get very enthusiastic about," said Nyman in a recent telephone interview from London.
"I prefer working partly for sonic reasons and partly for social reasons and partly for musical reasons, and my music is, I think, best represented by large numbers of instruments rather than one isolated instrument. I am very pleased to be at last coming to St. Petersburg with the authentic Nyman sound, which is the sound of the band."
Eight years ago, Nyman spent time in the State Hermitage Museum and looking at St. Petersburg's architecture, but he said that street culture was just as important to him.
"I spent a lot of time filming in the fruit and vegetable markets," said Nyman. "And actually I've been just recently looking at the footage that I shot, and it is really quite amazing. I mean there were some women who were selling honey, who were just wonderful human beings, very comedic. I always like to, if I have time, when I visit a place, to see both extremes of culture.
"Obviously I want to see the museum culture, but I think the street culture, and the market culture is as much an expression of a town, of a city, of a place, of its spirit, as official art. The strongest impression I have [of St. Petersburg is] of fruit and vegetable sellers which is rather brilliant.
"During the last three or four years, I've very much become a serious photographer, so I now carry two or three cameras around, everywhere I go. Being a photographer, for me at least, helps me to focus my eye on what I see and how I perceive things, so if I look for the first time at St. Petersburg through a kind of viewfinder, even in a short space of time I'll capture various things that attract me visually. That's another reason for being very happy about coming back to St. Petersburg."
Nyman's previous visit and his interest in Russian history and art led to an audio-visual work based on "The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia," David King's book showing how history was rewritten by the Communists through the manipulation of photographs.
Nyman's "The Commissar Vanishes" was premiered at the Barbican Center in December 1999. Nyman said the work was developed from music to a 1989 ballet "The Fall of Icarus," commissioned by Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels.
"The interesting thing about ballet is that you write serious scores, when you are lucky, and the ballet company performs the work for one or two or three seasons, and then it disappears. And then as a composer I'm left with a quite, I think, important piece of music that never gets performed. So I made the decision that I would rewrite, recycle and edit that music for another project, and it will be an audio-visual project. And I became obsessed with [Soviet constructivist artist and photographer] Alexander Rodchenko [1891-1956], so the music for 'The Fall of Icarus' was going to be combined with kind of the exposure of, maybe, the life of Rodchenko or his photographic style or his position of the proponent of Russian revolutionary art."
King's book, which demonstrated how party leaders who were repressed and shot were replaced on the photos by a tree or a bench, set Nyman's mind in a different direction.
"When I was thinking about this piece, I read a review of 'The Commissar Vanishes' and I thought, 'yeah, this would be interesting, I should get a hold of all of this book as kind of background reading to help me understand the context in which Rodchenko worked,' and I managed to get hold of a copy which was quite difficult to find, strangely enough. And then I looked at the cover and I saw all these faces that had been kind of blanked out in various, different ways, and I thought, 'My God, what is this?' These are very powerful images. Then I looked inside the book and saw that these were photographs that have been taken by Rodchenko and have been graphically erased by Rodchenko, you know, for reasons that we are familiar with or become familiar with. And immediately I thought the connection with Rodchenko was actually too brilliant, something that was telling me something, you know, this kind of bizarre connection with Rodchenko."
Nyman was also inspired by the "images themselves and the whole reason why people were removed from society and removed from photographs officially, doctored and erased, and defaced literally by Soviet citizens."
"I realized that the life and art of Rodchenko was not particularly interesting, and that the subject matter for this recycling of 'The Fall of Icarus' should and could and would and must be 'The Commissar Vanishes.'
"So I then contacted David King who collected the archive and put together the book and did all the writing, and I discovered that he's a neighbor of mine. Then I contacted [American video artist] Chris Kondek, whose work I've seen in connection with The Wooster Group in New York, and we made a piece, which I think is actually very beautiful and very powerful and very thought-provoking; at some point I would love to perform it in Russia. Maybe on my next trip I could do that."
Nyman's work might be seen in the context of "serious" music but Michael Winterbottom's controversial film "9 Songs," that alternated music performances and sex scenes, put him alongside modern rock bands such as Primal Scream, Franz Ferdinand and Elbow. Nyman said his participation stems from his previous work on Winterbottom's films "Wonderland" and "The Claim."
"He asked me whether he could film my solo piano performance at my 60th birthday concert because he wanted to use a particular song for 'Wonderland' as played by me as the solo in a film called '9 Songs.' And I didn't make any inquiries, and I said, 'Yeah, you can certainly have it.' And for some reason I showed no curiosity as to what kind of film it was going to be, and so there were two contexts, once I saw the film, of my music, which I subsequently learned about: one, you know, that it was a kind of sex film, which was interesting, you know, maybe even fascinating."
"The other was that eight of the nine songs, as you said, were performed by rock bands, and the ninth song is performed by me. And I actually feel rather pleased and rather proud that my work is perceived as being valuable or relevant or suitable for a context like that. So I guess, you know, at the age of 60 or 61 it gives me, you know, sort of 'street cred' that I certainly had 20 years ago, when my music was regularly reviewed in New Musical Express or Melody Maker or Sounds or whatever.
"So I'm kind of in my declining years, if somebody like Michael Winterbottom thinks that my music can be heard in a context of Franz Ferdinand and, I don't know who else, Super Furry Animals, then it doesn't define my work, but it kind of adds to its kind of cultural impact, cultural connections. So yeah, I'm very pleased. These are my feelings about the film, I am very pleased that my work is included in that musical environment."The Michael Nyman Band performs at Lensoviet Palace of Culture on Thursday. www.michaelnyman.com

TITLE: Body politic
AUTHOR: By Jenna Rudo-Stern
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg's Kinodance international dance film festival, one of the city's less-known treasures, wraps up Friday with the announcement of the winners of a dance film competition for works created by artists from Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and the CIS. A selection of music videos featuring innovative dance from such directors as Spike Jonze, Ne-O, and Octavio Iturbe will also be shown.The closing event crowns ten days of presentations that, in addition to an impressive line-up of world-class dance films, included a two-day masterclass with U.S. filmmaker Charles Atlas, an eight-day dance film workshop with British director David Hinton, and a dance installation, "Man in the Wall," by British artists Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie (see program).
During its run since Nov. 8, the festival, now in its fifth year, presented more than 50 films in a superlative program organized by the Kannon Dance Center, the ProArte Institute, and the British Council.
The connections that curator Alla Kovgan drew between the films through her choices included, in Sunday's program, the use of the traditions of feminism: personal narrative, subjectivity, direct address and political awareness.
"Balkan Baroque" (2000), directed by Pierre Coulebeuff and performed by Marina Abramovic, is a medley of the performer's previous work, re-performed and rewoven to become an autonomous film piece. It is a mix of visceral images and monologue exploring the themes of sex, violence, and shame. It opens with a close-up shot of the palm of a hand with the point of a needle tracing the lifeline.
This is the first of many images that stick — in your mind and in your throat. It is a film to choke on. One of Abramovic's recipes for "Spirit cooking: With a sharp knife, cut deeply into the finger of your left hand. Eat the pain." In one scene, she eats a whole raw onion, saying, "I am tired of being ashamed of my nose being too big, of my ass being too large, ashamed about the war in Yugoslavia." In another, she performs a strip dance, stepping out of the shadows. In another, she scrubs a skeleton, cradling it in her lap. "Balkan Baroque" is political. It is personal. It is a strikingly beautiful woman directly addressing her audience (close-up, into the eye of the camera) with wave upon wave of violence and vulnerability.
The following piece, "Book of Days" (1989) by Meredith Monk, is also political, but at a greater remove. It opens in color with demolition workers blasting a hole through a brick wall, which reveals a black-and-white, medieval town.
In this town, Christians are dressed in white; Jews are in black, marked by law with a yellow circle. When the town is struck by a plague, the Jews are blamed and a stylized riot ensues. Throughout the film, townspeople are interviewed by an anachronistic off-screen voice (and direct their answers to the camera — their personal is political).
The smooth beauty of the town is periodically interrupted by a splash of color with noisy footage of 1980s New York City. Monk thus draws a parallel between this medieval town, with its religious tensions and plague, to late 20th century America, with its racial tensions and AIDS epidemic.
The fourth screening on Sunday was comprised of five shorter dance films. The first, "Fly" (2001), by Shona McCullagh, is loosely based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus. The struggle between father and son, for intimacy and freedom, is shot in saturated color. This universal struggle is both abstracted and distilled by the dream-like quality of movement and light.
"Rosa" (1992), directed by Peter Greenaway and choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, shows a lone woman in black dress and pearls, moving fast and frenetic in a grand, and imposingly empty, ballroom. The elegant woman repeatedly looks back over her shoulder (close-up shot, gaze straight into the camera and out at the audience) with a look of… what? Shock? Panic? Confusion? A man enters, they dance a swift, dynamic, graceful duet, hurling themselves at one another and sometimes dodging the shot. He leaves. She is left alone to step back into high-heel pumps.
"Black Spring" (2002), directed by Benoit Dervaux, choreographed by Heddy Maalem, shows a lean, black, African body against cool gravel with muscles tensed and abdomen writhing. As the woman stands, we take in her magnificent, finely tuned body. A beautiful, exotic, and fierce object.
Nigerian choreographer Maalem explores the objectification of black Africans and celebrates his own cultural identity through dance in this film. Dervaux alternates between shots of running, shaking, and traditional dance sequences (all breathtakingly athletic and performed in a still, dark, gravel-floored studio), and bright, noisy scenes of African street life (including a shot of a little girl doing a shuffle step on the dirt road crossing a shanty town).
The camera directs us to indulge in the provocative images of moving bodies, then reprimands us for the same when Maalem approaches the camera and asks us, accusingly, "Do you want to see more African dance?" We watch, suddenly more solemn. We have been warned: this film is political. This film is confrontational. The dance is ours to watch, but nothing more.
Not only does the content of these pieces touch upon the political, but the very way these films are shot informs the viewer of their political intent, and are themselves informed by the feminist tradition of direct address.
The final two pieces presented — "Dom Svobode" (2000), directed by Saso Podgorsek and choreographed by Iztok Kovac, and "Cost of Living" (2004), directed by Lloyd Newson and produced by British dance company DV8 Physical Theatre — were the most polished in the program. They most evenly combine the art forms of film and dance. Indeed, one may easily overlook the political significance of these works, as it is so easy to be caught up in the sensual pleasure of watching them. But they are also works of personal narrative and political insight.
For "Dom Svobode," Kovac choreographed quick, rich, keen dances and Podgorsek filmed them in the mystical space of an old mine, creating a story and set as exquisite as the performances it holds.
The film opens with the disorienting and magnificent sight of dancers executing tight unison sequences against a rock face. The world has been turned at a 90-degree angle, and these dancers rule it. The dancers are perpendicular to the cliff and vertical in the camera's eye. The filmmaker creates magic out of space, and the dancers create magic out of movement. Here the two art forms are wed, joined by technical masters of each. And an awkward young man, hidden behind thick glasses lenses and exposed by a poorly tailored suit, leads us through the maze of a mine, stopping to gape in wonder at the people (orchestra members dispersed through a wide space, little girls in white tutus, pink-bloused lady singers, the earthy/otherworldly dancers) making their art in the disconnected freedom of this unusual space. He is our narrator, our hero, our representative. He spies on women undulating through iron grids, a couple dancing as if joined to each other. He steps into a courtyard, a fantasy, to find women like lawn-mermaids ready to lean against him, to dance around him, to include him in their art-making.
"Cost of Living" has a very different sort of beauty and expression. Its structure and aesthetic resemble mainstream feature film. It manages to be both innovative and accessible.
Its characters are strong and full, led by a graceful, legless, muscled man Dave (played by David Toole) and his garrulous roommate (Eddie Kay).
Romance comes in the form of skinny man Rowan Thorpe's courtship with the hula-hooper (Kareena Oates), played out in significant looks and the motion of the hoops. Romantic fantasy arrives when Dave swings and shifts and spins on his massive arms, over, under, around and with a lithe and attentive ballerina.
Discomfort and disbelief enter at the beginning of the film, when we first see Dave pop out of a small box on the ground and cantilever himself along the pier. It is there again when he is interrogated by a man with a video camera. Suddenly, we are implicated. Are these our intrusive questions? Is this our voyeurism? We are quickly let off the hook and let into Dave's fantasy retort: a swinging dance, echoed by the swaying rumps of his graceful, athletic friends. The camera invites us further in, the characters speak to us.
Kovgan, the thoughtful and energetic curator of the festival, seems to have chosen these films because they speak to the audience, sometimes directly. They encompass dance art, cinema art, visual art, and, like all good art, broach the interactive.www.kinodance.com/russia/index.html

TITLE: Blake Leaves Davydenko on Brink
AUTHOR: By John Pye
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SHANGHAI, China — James Blake, the last to qualify for the season-ending Masters Cup, became the first to make the semifinals of the elite eight-man field.The 26-year-old American rallied from a set and a break down, eventually getting his serve on track Wednesday to beat third-ranked Nikolay Davydenko 2-6, 6-4, 7-5.
It came two days after eighth-ranked Blake opened with an upset over No. 2 Rafael Nadal, who rebounded to beat Spaniard Tommy Robredo 7-6 (2), 6-2. Those results advanced unbeaten Blake into the semifinals.
"I'm just coming out here with nothing to lose, and trying to prove that I really do belong among these top players," Blake said. "I like to think that I have by beating two of the top players in the world in consecutive matches."
Blake has perfect records against both Nadal and Davydenko. He's the only player here with a winning record over Nadal at 3-0. He is 3-1 career up against Robredo, his last rival in round-robin matches, giving him a good chance of topping the Gold Group.
"There's obviously no easy match, but I guess if you look at the rankings I'm supposed be the easiest one to play," Blake said.
All four players in the Red Group can still reach the semis, with places to be determined Thursday.
Nadal and Davydenko meet Friday with the other Gold Group semifinal spot on the line.
Blake compiled his best season entering the Masters Cup (56-23) and finished in the year-end top 10 for the first time. But he did not hold serve until the third game of the second set, saying it was "a little embarrassing."
When he finally managed to get his first serve working, he won five of the next six games to take the momentum against a fading Davydenko.
After trading breaks early in the deciding set, Blake held at love in the 11th game, forcing Davydenko to hold serve to stay in the match. Davydenko saved two match points before Blake rifled a forehand down the line to set up another.
Blake clinched it on Davydenko's forehand error.
"I kept myself in this match, hung in when Nikolay was playing unbelievable tennis," Blake said. "Then he maybe faltered just a little bit, thanks to me playing a lot better."
Nadal dropped serve in the sixth game against Robredo but immediately broke back. He dominated the tiebreaker, racing to a 6-2 lead and then curling a forehand winner down the line on set point.
The 20-year-old Nadal needed four match points before clinching his first Masters Cup victory when Robredo's forehand was long.
He missed last year's Masters Cup with an injured foot.
"I'm very happy with my first victory," Nadal said. "It was very important for me. If I lost, I am out of tournament. I play more aggressive maybe with my forehand, trying to play with more winners, so I feel OK."

nDefending champion David Nalbandian ousted Andy Roddick 6-2, 7-6 (4) Thursday, keeping his Masters Cup semifinal prospects alive and ensuring No. 1 Roger Federer advanced.Roddick, who was only one serve away from victory over top-ranked Federer two days ago, is out of the tournament.
Nalbandian needed Federer (2-0) to beat Ljubicic (1-1) in the last Red Group round-robin match to make the semis. Fourth-ranked Ljubicic needed a win to advance.
The night started badly for the fifth-ranked Roddick, who was broken in the opening game, and again in his third service game.
Nalbandian, who was 0-2 coming into the match, closed the first set after 36 minutes with his eighth forehand winner.
The 24-year-old Argentine kept up the pressure in the second, breaking early before finally winning in a tie break.

TITLE: Pakistan Amends Hard-Line Rape Law
AUTHOR: By Robert Birsel
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Rights activists welcomed on Thursday amendments to Pakistan's Islamic laws that will allow rape victims to seek justice without the need for four male witnesses but said the laws should be scrapped altogether.In contrast, Islamist parties opposed the changes pushed through the lower house of parliament on Wednesday, in the latest battle of a long struggle between progressives and religious conservatives to set the course of the predominantly Muslim nation.
The Islamic laws, known as the Hudood Ordinances, were introduced by a military ruler, Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, in 1979, and laid down punishment for crimes such as theft and adultery.
They also made a rape victim liable to prosecution for adultery if she failed to produce four male witnesses to her ordeal.
The main amendment approved on Wednesday takes rape out of the sphere of religious law and puts it under the penal code.
"As an interim measure, the separation of rape from adultery is a welcome step but we don't consider this the end of the road," said veteran women's rights activist Tahira Abdullah.
"Our struggle continues and we will fight until the end of the Hudood Ordinances," she said.
Activists held up signs with slogans such as, "Hudood Ordinance unaccepted" and "Cancel Hudood Ordinance."
President General Pervez Musharraf, who espouses a vision of "enlightened moderation," hailed the amendment that was passed after members of the Islamist alliance walked out of parliament.
In a late-Wednesday address to the nation, Musharraf said moderates had to stand up to what he called Pakistan's extremists and reject them in elections next year.
The Islamists did not renew a threat to resign from the national and provincial assemblies over the change, but said they were considering their response.In an apparent concession to the conservatives, an amendment was introduced shortly before the vote setting down punishment of up to five years in prison for extra-marital sex.Sex outside marriage had always been an offence under the Islamic law on adultery, which still stands.
That law sets a punishment of death by stoning for adultery, although that has seldom been invoked, let alone carried out.
Human Rights Watch, while welcoming the amendment as providing victims partial relief, said the new clause on extra-marital sex was a disappointment and moreover a contravention of Pakistan's international obligations.
"We hope that the Pakistan government will rapidly move to address the outstanding issues in the Hudood laws sooner rather than later," the group said.
Abdullah also condemned the new clause and said it merely muddied the waters as it appeared that charges of adultery or fornication can be lodged in either a civil or an Islamic court.
"In order to prevent the resignation of the MMA they have added new clauses which have made us a ridiculous laughing stock," Abdullah said, referring to the Islamist opposition alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal.
Senior MMA leader Liaquat Baluch said alliance leaders would meet to consider their response to the amendment.
"We can resign from parliament any time but we want to use an appropriate time, to help end the dictatorship. Our main target is the end of military dictatorship," he told Reuters.Additional reporting by Zeeshan Haider.

TITLE: Japan's Best Horse Stripped of Impact
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TOKYO — Japan's Deep Impact has been stripped of his third place at last month's Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe after testing positive for a banned substance, the Japan Racing Association (JRA) said on Thursday.Traces of ipratropium, an inhaled medication that aids breathing, had been found in the horse's urine samples following tests carried out after the Oct. 1 race in Paris.
French racing authorities also fined Deep Impact's trainer Yasuo Ikee 15,000 euros ($19,200) for his part in the one of the most embarrassing scandals to hit Japanese racing.
The JRA announced Deep Impact's failed test almost a month ago, sparking widespread speculation that the four-year-old colt would be stripped of his third place.
"We are taking this case very seriously," the JRA's chief executive Masayuki Takahashi told reporters. "We must take steps to prevent this sort of thing happening again."
Deep Impact, considered the best horse in Japanese racing history, had won 10 of 11 starts in Japan and had been heavily tipped to become the first non-European horse to win the Arc.
Both his A and B samples tested positive for ipratropium, which is not on Japan's list of banned substances, and the JRA was informed by France-Galop on Oct. 13.
Deep Impact had previously undergone treatment for respiratory trouble but his handlers had been aware that ipratropium was banned in Europe, according to the JRA.
Ipratropium is a bronchodilator used to prevent wheezing, shortness of breath and asthma-related conditions.
"I take responsibility and apologize for the trouble," said Ikee. "But I did absolutely nothing to besmirch the name of Deep Impact."
Deep Impact's owner Masato Kaneko announced last month that the horse would retire this year.
JRA officials said Deep Impact would be allowed to enter races in Japan until then.
Around 5,000 Japanese race fans sparked a betting frenzy in Paris but Deep Impact narrowly failed to live up to his billing as favourite under jockey Yutaka Take.

TITLE: Youths Rampage In Tongan Capital
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NUKU'ALOFA, Tonga — Youths infuriated by a lack of political reform attacked the prime minister's offices and other government buildings today, smashing windows, looting shops and setting fires in the capital of this near-feudal South Pacific kingdom.Police helped people flee the violence and tried to protect property but made no effort to arrest rioters, said Mary Fonua of the Matangi Tonga news web site.
As night fell, some semblance of order began returning to the city center. But looters continued carrying goods from wrecked stores. Fires burned unchecked in buildings in several parts of the city and torched cars lay wrecked and smoldering on the streets
The rioting began after thousands of people met in Nuku'alofa, capital of the island nation halfway between Australia and Tahiti, and demanded that parliament pass democratic reforms before it ends its annual session today. The meeting in the capital was addressed by pro-democracy lawmakers pressing for democratic change.
The rioters smashed windows in Prime Minister Fred Sevele's offices and other government buildings, including Parliament House, the Magistrates' Court, the Public Service Commission Office and the Finance Ministry. It was not known if the prime minister was in the office at the time.
Rioters also overturned shelves and stripped stock from a mid-city supermarket owned by Sevele.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters branded the rioting and arson "a disaster for Tonga ... and a severe setback at a time when political reform is happening in Tonga."
"There is no way anybody interested in political reforms will advance their cause by criminal actions," he told National Radio from the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, where he's attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation foreign ministers' meeting.
New Zealand would offer assistance, he said, adding that he hoped those responsible would be punished.
Fonua said the office of the Shoreline power company had burned to the ground, and that the Pacific Royale Hotel had been "trashed" by hundreds of rampaging youths.
The government did not comment on the rioting.
Tonga's King Siaosi Tupou V was believed to be at a royal villa outside the capital today.
Last month, a government committee recommended that all lawmakers in Tonga be elected. Only nine lawmakers in the 32-seat parliament are now elected by popular vote - with the rest appointed by the king and noble families.
The recommendation was a significant step in the accelerating efforts to reform the kingdom's political system since the September death of King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, who was in power for more than 40 years.
Sevele, who is appointed by Tonga's king, is seen as complicit in delay of the reforms, along with most of the island nation's political establishment.
Tonga has a population of around 108,000 and an economy dependent on pumpkin and vanilla exports, fishing, foreign aid and remittances from Tongans abroad.

TITLE: Pakistan Test-Fires Missile In Show of Nuclear Might
AUTHOR: By Munir Ahmad
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan said it successfully test-fired a new version of its nuclear-capable medium-range missile Thursday — a show of power a day after peace talks with India that were criticized by domestic hard-liners.The Ghauri 5 missile, with a range of 800 miles — easily capable of striking deep into India — was launched to mark the end of military exercises at an undisclosed location, an army statement said.
The announcement came a day after longtime nuclear rivals Pakistan and India concluded a crucial round of peace talks in New Delhi aimed at resolving their differences, including the thorny issue of their territorial dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
India did not comment on the test.
A former head of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence spy agency, Hamid Gul, said Thursday that President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government was incapable of solving the Kashmir issue through talks with India, and that Pakistan must continue missile tests to safeguard its defense.
"So far Musharraf has got nothing in return for giving concessions to India," Gul said.
He said this week's Pakistan-India talks were an "exercise in futility" and that India was not interested in resolving the key issue of Kashmir.
"We should continue these missile tests to boost our defense. We have given our blood for our nuclear and missile programs," Gul said. "I don't expect Musharraf or anyone can solve the Pakistan-Indian dispute through talks."
In Islamabad, analyst Khaled Mahmood said the test was likely meant as a message to domestic hard-liners.
"It is obviously a show of power as the missile test came a day after the two sides held talks," he said, adding that Pakistan was also sending a signal to India that it would "not compromise on its defense."

TITLE: Stuttering Senators Sink Sabres
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TORONTO — The Ottawa Senators shocked the Buffalo Sabres 4-2 on Wednesday, providing a badly needed boost to their stuttering start to the season.Regarded as Stanley Cup contenders before the season began, the Senators have stumbled out of gate, losing seven of their last eight contests heading into Buffalo to face the NHL's top team.
Senators billionaire owner Eugene Melnyk had sent his top lieutenants to the HSBC Center in Buffalo for the game and said he was in an "assessment phase", fuelling speculation of wholesale changes.
The Senators (7-10-1), however, responded to the threat with a gritty comeback victory that sent the Sabres (15-2-1) to just their second regulation loss of the season.
"It's a nice win for us, come from behind on the road," Ottawa captain Daniel Alfredsson told reporters.
"We've got to keep working hard, we'll get our breaks like we did tonight and the win tonight is something to build on."
Trailing 2-1 after two periods, Ottawa exploded for three unanswered final period goals to secure the victory.
In other games: Carolina Hurricanes vs. New York Rangers 2:1; Nashville Predators vs. Columbus Blue Jackets 5:4; New York Islanders vs. Dallas Stars 3:0.

TITLE: Congo on Alert After Kabila Declared Winner
AUTHOR: By David Lewis
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KINSHASA, Congo — UN and European peacekeepers deployed in force to deter violence in Congo's capital on Thursday after President Jospeh Kabila was declared winner of a historic election in a result disputed by his rival.Pockets of supporters of the defeated rival, Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba, turned out in some parts of Kinshasa to express anger at the result announced late on Wednesday by Democratic Republic of Congo's electoral commission.
Some stoned passing cars outside Bemba's official residence, while others barricaded a road outside a pro-Bemba TV station.
But most of the sprawling riverside city appeared quiet, albeit tense, under a heavy international security operation.
White-painted UN armored vehicles and truckloads of blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers patrolled the streets and guarded strategic points of the teeming city as European Union military helicopters clattered overhead.
UN officials, part of the world's biggest peacekeeping force deployed in the vast, former Belgian colony, hailed the October 29 run-off vote and its result a major milestone in Congo's bid to leave behind years of war, dictatorship and chaos.
"We are living new days. Congo is a different country than it was yesterday. This is unchartered territory but on the basis of what we've seen and the work that's been done, we are not pessimistic," Ross Mountain, deputy head of the UN mission, told Reuters. "It is vital the international community maintains its support," he added.
The international security clampdown was aimed at deterring any repetition of the street fighting between soldiers and supporters of Bemba and Kabila which shook Kinshasa last weekend and in August.
Congo's electoral commission late on Wednesday announced incumbent President Kabila had won the October 29 presidenial run-off, taking 58.05 percent of the votes against 41.95 percent for his rival Bemba.
Although the Supreme Court must still confirm the result, Bemba's campaign coalition has rejected it after alleging "systematic cheating" in vote counting. Bemba's camp was due to meet on Thursday to decide its strategy to challenge the vote.
The historic October 29 vote was the culmination of a peace process to end Congo's 1998-2003 war in which Bemba led a rebel faction before joining a power-sharing government.

TITLE: France, England Feel The Weight of Expectations
AUTHOR: By Mitch Phillips
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — France coach Bernard Laporte has demanded his team restore the pride of French rugby when they face the All Blacks in Paris on Saturday still stinging from last week's 47-3 humiliation in Lyon.The game marks the centenary celebration of the national team and the public will demand a significant improvement seven days after France suffered their heaviest home defeat.
The paying fans will also be in unforgiving mood at Twickenham where England seek to avoid a record eighth successive defeat when they take on South Africa.
England were booed off last week after their 25-18 loss to Argentina and, with the Springboks fielding a second-string team, nothing but a spectacular win will be enough and even that will probably not save coach Andy Robinson's job.
Eddie O'Sullivan, in contrast, has the complete confidence of the Irish public and management and can put another feather in his cap with victory over Australia in Dublin on Sunday.
In Saturday's other games, Argentina, fresh from their morale-boosting Twickenham success, play Italy in Rome, while Scotland host the Pacific Islands. Wales play Canada on Friday night.
New Zealand coach Graham Henry said at the start of the tour he would use his first two games as warm-ups and then field his strongest sides against France in Paris and Wales in Cardiff next week.
Some warm-up. The "experimentals" handed England and France record home defeats, scoring 11 tries, to shorten further their already prohibitive odds to win the 2007 World Cup on French soil.
Henry made five changes from the Lyon starting lineup to put out what he described as his "best team right now" but few observers consider it to be his absolute strongest hand.
It hardly matters, however, as there is so little to choose between so many of his squad.
"It was a difficult selection because we probably have 30 players who were entitled to claim a start," said Henry.
He added that he expected a much stronger showing from France, who have made six changes, including a 27th different halfback combination since Laporte took over seven years ago.
"Players have to revolt against the supremacy of the All Blacks but also against themselves," Laporte said.
England coach Robinson said England had to suffer the pain of defeat to learn how to improve and pleaded for patience and support from the fans.
"I've told the players that there's no going back, we can't scrap our attacking framework and go back to nine-man rugby," he said in the wake of widespread calls for him to resign.
England have beaten South Africa six times in a row and, with the Springboks way under strength on this tour, must expect to make that eight over the next two weeks.

TITLE: Trescothick Gets Much Australian Sympathy
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SYDNEY — The departure from England's Ashes tour of depressed batsman Marcus Trescothick has evoked widespread sympathy among Australian sportsmen.Trescothick walked out on his team nine days before the start of the series after a recurrence of a stress-related illness that has touched the nerves of Australia's professional athletes.
Despite the intense rivalry on the field, the Australian and English teams have strong personal bonds off the pitch and Trescothick's plight has been felt as deeply in Australia as his homeland.
Australia captain Ricky Ponting said he was deeply saddened by the news of Trescothick's mental breakdown.
"All we can do is wish him well," Ponting told reporters. "If it's an illness that's going to keep him out of such a big series as this, it's obviously pretty significant."
Australian vice-captain Adam Gilchrist said cricketers were always vulnerable to bouts of depression because of the long periods they spend away from family and friends.
"It is a demanding lifestyle, particularly as an individual, and then you throw in family and children...there are a lot of sacrifices that need to be made," Gilchrist said.
"On top of all that there is the pressure and the intense scrutiny you come under every time you present yourself out on the field in front of millions and millions of people.
"It can start to play tricks on your mind, or your mind can start to wander."
Depression has become an increasing global problem in sport with more and more athletes turning to psychologists to help deal with the pressures and expectations.
Trescothick's breakdown was major news in soccer-mad Britain and Australia, with his situation also drawing widespread sympathy from the country's top golfers who are in Sydney for the Australian Open championship.
Steve Bowditch, a promising young player who achieved his life's ambition by qualifying for the U.S. PGA Tour this year, said his dreams were shattered when he developed depression.
The 23-year-old, who is back in Australia trying to rebuild his life and sporting career, said he became so depressed that he contemplated suicide.
"It scares you what goes through your mind," he told reporters.
"Everything seemed so small and so dark, and I realised it was time to get help."
Stuart Appleby also revealed that he needed professional help to cope after his wife was killed in a freak car accident in London in 1998.
"Lack of knowing if there was a future," he said. "A simple problem was no longer simple. You can imagine if that goes on for years and years and years and no one recognises it."

TITLE: Russia Wins World Volleyball Crown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OSAKA, Japan — Russia defeated tournament favorite Brazil in five sets Thursday to win the women's volleyball world championship.Ekaterina Gamova scored a match-high 28 points and Lioubov Shashkova followed with 19, helping Russia to a 15-25, 25-23, 25-18, 20-25, 15-13 win in the final.
It is the first time Russia has won the women's world title since the then-Soviet Union won in 1990. The Soviets also won in 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1970.
"It means a lot because this is the first gold medal for Russia after three bronze medals," said captain Natalia Safranova. "After we became Russia we did not win the title, but now we have the gold medal again. That is very important for us."
After a slow start, the Russians found their rhythm in the second set. They dropped the fourth set but came back to win the tie-breaker.
The 2.02-meter Gamova scored the match winner as the Russians rallied from 13-12 down to avenge their loss to Brazil in the World Grand Prix final this past summer. The Brazilian women were seeking their first world championship title.
Russia's Italian-born coach Giovanni Caprara praised his top players.
"We could win this title for the first time in 16 years because we found three players at the highest level: (Elena) Godina, Gamova and Shashkova," Caprara said. "These three players have a very strong motivation, and without strong motivation it is impossible to play well."
It was the first loss of the tournament for Brazil, which was looking to add a world title to its Grand Prix win.
"Our players made a great effort," said Brazil coach Jose Roberto Guimaraes. "They worked hard in the tie-break set and I think in that kind of situation it's difficult to decide which team wins and which loses."

TITLE: Russia Beats Macedonia To Revive Euro Hopes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SKOPJE — Two first-half goals powered Russia to a 2-0 win over Macedonia in a Euro 2008 qualifier on Wednesday and revived their hopes of reaching the finals from Group E.Vladimir Bystrov opened the scoring in the 18th minute, driving the ball into the roof of the net after a Diniyar Bilyaletdinov cross from the left. Andrei Arshavin made it 2-0 with a great solo effort 15 minutes later.
The game was briefly interrupted when Macedonian riot police clashed with Russian fans in the stands following Arshavin's goal. Some 300 Russians travelled to Skopje for the match.
Arshavin could have added a third midway through the second half but waited too long to shoot.
Macedonia, missing suspended strikers Goran Pandev and Ilco Naumoski, who both scored in a 3-0 victory over Andorra last month, rarely threatened Russia keeper Igor Akinfeyev.
Goran Maznov had the best chance for the home side, just going wide with a powerful header following a fine cross by Robert Petrov shortly after the interval.
The Russians, however, comfortably held on for victory to remain unbeaten under their Dutch coach Guus Hiddink.
"It was by far our best performance since I became Russia coach," the Dutchman, who was appointed to the job after guiding Australia at this year's World Cup finals, told reporters.
"We knew Macedonia would be tough to beat but in the first half we were attacking well while in the second half it was our defence who played well."
The win put them temporarily at the top of Group E with eight points from four matches while Macedonia, who also held England to a 0-0 draw in Manchester last month, dropped to fifth place with seven points after five games.
Croatia displaced Russia later on Wednesday with their 4-3 win over Israel in Tel Aviv moving them top on 10 points.

TITLE: Boston Rejoices as Red Sox Chase Pitcher Matsuzaka
AUTHOR: By Scott Malone
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BOSTON — Boston fans rejoiced on Wednesday after the Red Sox won exclusive rights to negotiate with top Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, if only because it meant their nemesis, the New York Yankees, were out of the running.The Red Sox agreed to bid a record $51.1 million for the right to negotiate with the 26-year-old right-hander, who plays for Japan's Seibu Lions.
"I like to see them getting him instead of the Yankees," said Michael Lydon, 43, of Medford, Massachusetts.
"I don't agree with the Yankees buying up everyone," Lydon added. "There should be more parity in the league."
The Red Sox have won six World Series to the Yankees' 26.
Boston's bid dwarfed the $13 million the Seattle Mariners offered to negotiate with Ichiro Suzuki, another Japanese talent who made the jump to U.S. Major League baseball.
The Yankees were among the other teams said to be interested in Matsuzaka. They already have Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui in their lineup. In Boston, Matsuzaka would join a pitching roster including ageing mainstays Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield.