SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1228 (94), Friday, December 8, 2006
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TITLE: Extremist Gets 3 1/2 Years For Hate Crime
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A St. Petersburg court on Tuesday sentenced a leader of the city’s hate crime underworld to 3 1/2 years imprisonment for organizing a gang of violent racists involved in numerous murders and attacks on non-Russians and anti-fascist activists over the past five years.
The Pushkinsky District Court found Ruslan Melnik, 21, guilty of organizing the Mad Crowd extremist group to attack and kill  Jews, Caucasians, Asians, Blacks and their Russian sympathizers. 
However, the sentence provided a rare instance of both human rights advocates and the political authorities reacting negatively to the court ruling, while both the prosecution and the defense appeared content.
“It looks like the judges pass such light sentences because they are either scared of vendettas carried out by local extremists or they regard the culprits as victims,” said Dmitry Dubrovsky, head of the department of modern ethnology and inter-ethnic relations at St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum of Ethnography.
“Just compare the verdict when offenders faced between 4 1/2 years and 19 years in jail for vandalizing the monument to Nicholas II four years ago and the case in question, where human lives were involved,” he said in support of his claim that hate offenses are treated as minor crimes.
In the ruling, Melnik was found guilty of taking part in separate incidents of violence against an Armenian national, a Chinese and quite a number of Caucasian men. 
He was also found guilty of masterminding at least five hate gang fights and of storming a McDonald’s restaurant in the city center in 2003. In his testimony, Melnik said he attacked the restaurant because it serves Zionist food and promotes the American way of life. 
On Wednesday, Boris Gryzlov, Russia’s Duma Speaker, also cried foul over the judiciary, condemning the verdict and a series of acquittals of suspected culprits of hate murders in jury trials in St. Petersburg this year, saying such verdicts are counter productive in the war on xenophobia and extremism.”
Gryzlov was responding to President Vladimir Putin’s call at a meeting with political party bosses on Wednesday where he urged them to “side with the government in the war on xenophobia, racial and religious extremism,” and asking them to avoid hate slogans.
“You should make sure that there is no room for anyone in Russia to incite hate or extremism in whatever form,” Putin said.
In the court ruling the judge said that despite the gravity of the crimes he had to consider the fact that the defendant had a difficult childhood and that some of the crimes had been committed when he was underage. 
According to the prosecution, Melnik was right-hand man to Dmitry Bobrov who was sentenced to eight years in jail last December for organizing  the Shultz-88 extremist group in 1998. 
Mad Crowd was founded in 2001 as an offshoot of Shultz 88 whose eight members, including Melnikov, had dual membership, partially operating under Bobrov’s command. 
More than a dozen young men who belonged to the two groups were arrested in May and charged with a number of crimes, including the hate murders of anti-fascist ethnologist Nikolai Girenko in June 2004, of Vietnamese student Vu An-Tuan in October 2004, and of Senegalese student Lamzer Samba in April, the prosecution said. They were cleared of all hate crimes but found guilty under other charges not related to extremism.

TITLE: Governor Resigns, Is Reinstated
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko appealed to president Vladimir Putin on Wednesday asking him to end her term in office ahead of its official end in October 2007. The president re-appointed Matviyenko as St. Petersburg governor for the next four years. Essentially, the governor was asking the president to reconfirm her status.
Matviyenko was elected to the post of governor in October 2003. 
Since 2005, following president Vladimir Putin’s decree — much critisized by democrats as excessive centralization of power — all Russian governors are appointed directly by the president. 
Matviyenko said that in asking the president she sought to ensure political stability for the city of St. Petersburg.
“Next year is going to be very difficult and challenging, with elections to the city parliament and the State Duma,” Matviyenko told reporters on Wednesday. 
“In this context it is crucially important to ensure political stability. It would not help things if, on top of all these elections, the governor was uncertain about her position.”
Boris Vishnevsky, political analyst and a member of the political council of the local branch of the democratic party Yabloko, perceives Matviyenko’s move as yet another sign of disregard towards voters, the ordinary citizens of St. Petersburg.
“There is only one voter whose opinion really matters for Matviyenko — it is president Vladimir Putin,” the analyst said.
In Vishnevsky’s opinion, the governor wanted to sort out her next term more as a remedy to her personal discomfort than as a noble attempt at preventing political chaos.
Matviyenko acted ahead of forthcoming elections to the St. Petersburg legislative Assembly, scheduled for March 11, 2007. 
“St. Petersburg does not run the risk of political chaos; the only thing that can happen is that after the next elections to the Legislative assembly the party that wins a majority of seats could propose their own candidate for city governor to the president,” Vishnevsky said. 
“Russian law gives the winning party this opportunity, and this is apparently what irks Valentina Matviyenko most of all.”
Vishnevsky said that public dissatisfaction with the governor is sure to grow after she backed several important projects that annoyed many ordinary locals, including the Baltic Pearl project that envisages construction of a Chinese quarter in the city, continued in-fill construction and the new skyscraper designed as the local headquarters of Gazprom.
“When voters are unhappy, their anger directly affects the results of any elections held at the time,” he said. “Perhaps, what awaits Matvieynko is a new parliament that will be slightly more difficult to manipulate.” 
Vladimir Yeryomenko, a lawmaker with the pro-presidential United Russia at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly said the governor had every right to appeal to the president. 
“I do not see her move as a sign of weakness or insecurity,” the parliamentarian said. “Yes, she showed she needed support from the president, and she did it before the end of her term. But considering the forthcoming elections, timely presidential backing allows the governor to have much-needed freedom — to speak or act, political battles around her notwithstanding — during a tough period.”
Yeryomenko laughed at Vishnevsky’s mention of social dissatisfaction. “Local opinion is not a major criteria here,” he said. “The governor has to be approved by the president. This is what matters.” Maria Matskevich, a leading researcher and project leader at the Institite of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that although the structure of the next Legislative Assembly is not going to differ drastically from the current one, and pro-Kremlin United Russia will most likely keep an overwhelming majority, Sergei Mironov’s new party Just Russia has made an impressive leap forward
Matskevich said that all sociological polls show that Just Russia members are likely to win a substantial proportion of seats in the next parliament.
More than 15 percent of locals intending to vote in the next city parliament elections say they are already willing to vote for Just Russia, the sociologist said, adding that nearer to the vote, the figures are likely to increase.

TITLE: Gaidar: Poisoning Is to Blame for Illness
AUTHOR: By Judith Ingram
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar is certain his mysterious sudden illness last month was caused by poisoning and that opponents of the Russian authorities were likely responsible, he said Thursday.
The 50-year-old liberal economist who served briefly as prime minister in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin and leader of a liberal opposition party became violently ill during a conference in Ireland on Nov. 24. He was rushed into intensive care at a hospital.
The previous day, ex-KGB officer and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko died in London, and the radioactive element polonium-210 was found in his body.
The incidents fueled speculation of a hunt against liberal Russians, including journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her apartment building in October. Neither that killing nor Litvinenko’s has yet been solved.
In an article published Thursday in the Russian daily Vedomosti and Britain’s Financial Times, Gaidar described the onset of his illness and the symptoms: irresistible fatigue, bleeding from the nose and mouth, vomiting and loss of consciousness.
Irish doctors concluded he was not poisoned by a radioactive substance, but said his health had suffered “radical changes.”
By the time Gaidar returned to Moscow on Nov. 25 and checked into a clinic, it was too late for lab tests to detect the toxin that allegedly caused his illness, he wrote. That meant that his longtime doctor here could not use the word poisoning.
“But we understand each other well. You can blame little green men — but if you remain within the bounds of reason, we are talking precisely of poisoning,” Gaidar wrote.
Gaidar said that he excluded the possibility that Russian authorities could be responsible, since Litvinenko’s death — which has greatly damaged Russia’s image — would not be in their interest.
“That means that more likely than not, someone among the open or hidden enemies of the Russian authorities, those who are interested in a further radical deterioration of ties between Russia and the West, stands behind this.”
Critics of President Vladimir Putin have accused the Kremlin and Russian security services of responsibility for the Politkovskaya and Litvinenko killings, and Kremlin-connected politicians and analysts have countered by pointing the finger at the emigre group around tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who is in self-exile in London. 
They say Berezovsky, a one-time member of Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle who fell out with Putin, is intent on blackening the president’s image.
Berezovsky, who knew Litvinenko before both came to Britain and reportedly paid for the ex-spy’s home in London, has said he would make no comment until the investigation was over.
Gaidar is an economist who served in post-Soviet Russia’s most liberal and democratically oriented government. He is unpopular among many Russians who blame the liberal, Western-backed economic policies he pursued as prime minister for the decline in their living standards following the Soviet collapse.
“If we were talking about an explosion or gunshots in Moscow, I would have thought first of all that radical nationalists (were responsible),” Gaidar wrote. “But in Dublin? Poisoning? Obviously that’s not their style.”
Gaidar wrote that he regained consciousness about 30 minutes after collapsing.

TITLE: Masked Agents Raid IBM Office
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Moscow headquarters of IBM and several other computer companies were raided Wednesday by masked law enforcement officials toting automatic rifles. It remained unclear Wednesday evening which branch of law enforcement was conducting the raids on IBM and two other companies, Lanit and R-Style, and what might have been the purpose of the raids.
An unidentified law enforcement source told Interfax that a total of 10 locations in the city had been raided.
The agents seized documents and electronic files from the offices of the fund’s chairman and executive director.

TITLE: Police Now Calling Litvinenko Case Murder
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — British investigators are now treating the poisoning death of former Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko as murder.
“It is important to stress that we have reached no conclusions as to the means employed, the motive or the identity of those who might be responsible for Mr. Litvinenko’s death,” Scotland Yard said in a statement.
Also on Wednesday, investigators questioned one of the two Russians who met with Litvinenko on the day he fell ill from polonium-210 poisoning.
British detectives and Russian prosecutors questioned Dmitry Kovtun, who met with Litvinenko at London’s Millenium Hotel, Kovtun’s lawyer, Andrei Romashov, told Interfax.
Kovtun was questioned Tuesday and Wednesday in Romashov’s absence, the lawyer said.
KGB veteran Andrei Lugovoi, who was also present at the Nov. 1 meeting, told Interfax late Wednesday that he had not yet been questioned.
“Most likely my meeting with Scotland Yard investigators will take place Thursday afternoon,” Lugovoi said.
In previous statements Lugovoi has maintained his innocence and said he was prepared to meet with British officials, although he has checked into clinics twice in two weeks to be tested for radiation poisoning.
Litvinenko became ill shortly after the meeting with Kovtun and Lugovoi. He died on Nov. 23.
Romashov said the British detectives had informed him that Lugovoi was a witness in the case, not a suspect. ABC News reported, however, that the detectives from Scotland Yard considered Lugovoi the main suspect in the poisoning.
ABC News also cited an unidentified senior British official as saying Russian law enforcement was hindering the probe as a growing body of evidence points to Lugovoi’s involvement.
The British Embassy said Wednesday it was satisfied with the cooperation of Russian officials but declined to comment further on the investigation.
Traces of radiation have been detected at the embassy, but they present no health risk, an embassy spokesman told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “The embassy is working as normal. There is no cause for concern,” said the spokesman, declining to be identified.
In a statement posted Wednesday on its official web site, the Prosecutor General’s Office said Russian and British investigators had questioned “a Russian citizen, who is mentioned in the British inquiry and who is currently in a Moscow hospital.”
Vyacheslav Sokolenko, Lugovoi’s business associate who met with him in London in late October, said Wednesday that he had also been tested for radiation poisoning. The tests were negative.
Sokolenko said he had not been present at the meeting with Litvinenko but that he did attend a football match between CSKA Moscow and Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in London in the company of Lugovoi and Kovtun.
The British Health Protection Agency said Wednesday that it had found traces of polonium-210 at two locations in the stadium.
Sokolenko said he had not been questioned by law enforcement officials in Britain or Russia.
Italian security expert Mario Scaramella, who also met with Litvinenko on Nov. 1 and who was found to have received trace exposure to polonium-210, was released from a London clinic Wednesday after showing no signs of radiation poisoning, the AP reported.

TITLE: Bill on Sanctions Gains Ground in Duma Vote
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Wednesday gave tentative approval to a bill that authorizes the president to impose sanctions on other countries.
The measure would enhance Russia’s ability to flex its muscles in the global economic arena and respond quickly to foreign threats, supporters said.
But opponents said it granted too much power to the president. They also criticized its vague wording and said that, if evoked, it could harm the Russian economy and contradict Moscow’s stance on sanctions by other countries.
The bill comes amid a nearly yearlong ban on Georgian wine and mineral water, widely seen as politically motivated. Russian officials insist that the sanctions were triggered by health concerns.
“This is a mechanism for quick reaction in case a tense situation occurs between our country and another,” bill co-author Vladislav Reznik, a deputy with United Russia, said during a presentation of the legislation.
The bill, titled On Special Economic Measures in Case of an International Emergency Situation, passed 356-10 with one abstention.
If passed in the two remaining readings, approved by the Federation Council and signed into law by the president, the measure would let the president freeze trade contracts, stop financial transactions, prohibit tourism and impose other economic sanctions.
The president would notify the Duma and the Federation Council of the planned sanctions, but neither would have a say in the matter, said a copy of the bill obtained by The Moscow Times. The government would then finalize the list of economic sanctions and their duration of up to four years, which could be extended for another two years if the president deemed it necessary.
Reznik said the bill was loosely modeled after U.S. law and stressed that it would help Russia assert its interests. Still, Reznik said, a group of deputies would look into the possible economic effects of the measure and try to craft a clearer definition of “emergency situations” before the second reading.
“Just because one state makes a mistake doesn’t mean another must repeat it,” said Valery Zubov, an independent deputy from Krasnoyarsk.
He opposed the measure, saying it would make other countries more cautious of doing business with Russia.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent from the Altai region, said the bill’s wording was vague and that its economic ramifications were not thought out. “Can you just give a concrete example of an emergency that may develop?” Ryzhkov asked Reznik during the presentation.
Ryzhkov noted that Russia’s ban on Moldovan wine, which President Vladimir Putin lifted last week, had taken a toll on both Russian and Moldovan businesses. “The countries that institute economic sanctions suffer from them,” he said.
Georgian and Moldovan wine accounted for some 44 percent of all in-store wine sales in Russia last year, according to Business Analytica, an industry consultancy. When wines from both countries were banned in March, it was a shock to Russian sellers and distributors. The ban on Georgian wine remains in place.

Staff Writer David Nowak contributed to this report.

TITLE: Extremism and Elections Are Focus of Meeting in Kremlin
AUTHOR: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Federation Council elections and cracking down on extremism topped the agenda at Wednesday’s Kremlin meeting between President Vladimir Putin and political party leaders.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, the leader of the pro-Kremlin party United Russia, is pushing for tougher punishments for anyone dubbed an extremist by authorities.
On Wednesday, Putin voiced support, Interfax reported. “The federal law on countering extremist activities has legal holes in it,” the president said, adding that it should be amended to “make sure that punishment is handed down and commensurate with the gravity of the crime.”
Critics of the anti-extremism legislation have said the measures, far from being a legitimate effort to curb violent ultranationalism, are a thinly veiled attempt to marginalize political rivals by labeling them extremist.
The number of extremist crimes has doubled in the past nine months to 211, Gryzlov said at the meeting. But, he said, only nine of those cases went to court.
The Duma speaker said that not only those who commit violent crimes, but also those who inspire violent behavior, including those who run extremist web sites, should be punished.
Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, the head of United Russia’s center-left rival party, A Just Russia, meanwhile, proposed elections to the council.
For now, Federation Council members are appointed by regional governors and legislatures. Putin appeared open to discussion but was noncomittal.

TITLE: Putin’s Seal Fails To Crack Forestry Code
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Analysts have dismissed a new Forestry code as creating as many problems as it solves and ultimately being dependent on by-laws that are yet to be developed.
The code was signed into law by President Putin on Tuesday and will come into force on Jan.1 next year. 
According to the new law, instead of ownership, companies are offered long-tern rental based on investment agreements. Companies will compete for these agreements at auction. The law also gives regional authorities more rights, at the expense of federal authorities who were previously responsible for the industry.
Speaking at a round table at the Rosbalt news agency Tuesday, Irina Bitkova, Northwest Timber Processing Company (SZLK) chairman, said that giving more control to regional authorities is a positive step forward for the forestry industry.
“Regional authorities are more familiar with those companies operating in particular regions. They know how these companies operate and what they contribute to the budget and to the development of forestry resources. With greater responsibility regional authorities will regulate the industry in a more effective and transparent manner,” Bitkova said.
Bitkova hopes that the new code will let SZLK begin logging because up until now the company has bought timber from foreign suppliers. “In the Kaliningrad region we face a paradox — processing companies have to buy timber from Belorussia and Lithuania,” she said.
Dmitry Chuiko, director for governmental relations at Ilim Pulp Enterprise believes auctions are more transparent than tenders. In theory tenders involve a fixed price, but authorities can demand additional investment — the winner might be obliged to construct a new road, for example. 
“The procedure is open to corruption, for example, when the tender committee imposes requirements that only one of the applicants can fulfill. If a timber company owns a stable, the committee might include in the rental agreement the requirement to build an equestrian school. Obviously, no other applicant has a stable,” Chuiko said.
However the new law could have negative consequences for the industry.
“It’s not a direct law. Its efficiency will depend on by-laws,” said Denis Sokolov, executive director of the Northwest Confederation of Timber Companies.
Between 52 and 54 federal by-laws and about 120 regional by-laws need to be introduced, Chuiko said. None of them are ready. Out of 80 forestry regions, only 47 have filed advance suggestions on those by-laws to Rosselkhoz.
As the regional budgets for 2007 have already been approved, it is unclear how the new regional forestry bodies will be financed, Sokolov said.
Auctions could lead to the monopolization of the industry by large financial and industrial groups. On the other hand, brokers could appear and start speculating on forest.
“The new code does not take into account specific features of the processing industry. In the last four years the volume of production has seen significant growth. All processes in this industry are interdependent, and disorder in any part could have negative consequences,” said Mikhail Shalayev, Leningrad Oblast parliament deputy and CEO of Vyborgskaya Tselyuloza.
“There is a risk that small companies will be forced out of the forests in their regions,” Sokolov said. He gave an example of the Komi region where a large local timber processing company forced out smaller competitors and the volume of processing dropped significantly.
Shalayev also warned that small and medium sized companies with profitability of just three to five percent could hardly finance forest renewal, which is required by the new law.
Chuiko was more optimistic. “I don’t see any harm in it if companies from other industries reinvest into forestry. It will only increase the total volume of investment,” he said.

TITLE: Sakhalin-2 Licenses Suspended
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian water protection authorities have suspended the licenses of a subcontractor of the Shell-led liquefied natural gas project Sakhalin-2 because of alleged violations, officials said Thursday.
The company, Starstroi, has two months to correct the problems or it will see its 12 licenses annulled, the Natural Resources Ministry said in a statement.
Starstroi had violated water regulations in the course of pipe-laying work, the ministry said.
Russian officials have threatened since the summer to pull key permits at the Sakhalin-2 development and hit it with economic sanctions.
Observers, however, contend that the attention is aimed at pressuring Shell to secure more favorable terms for state-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom to join the project, and comes as the Kremlin is increasing its role in the lucrative energy sector.
Shell enraged the Kremlin at the end of last year when it announced that the cost of the project would double to $22 billion. Russian officials have yet to approve the costs.

TITLE: Retailers Threaten Panasonic
AUTHOR: By Simon Shuster
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Six Russian retailers on Wednesday said they would boycott Japanese electronics giant Panasonic and accused the firm of smuggling television sets into the country in a bid to undercut prices.
The protest came after a sale on plasma televisions in Moscow this week drew shoppers to Media Markt, a subsidiary of German retail chain Metro, which opened its first two stores in the city Saturday. The Panasonic television sets sold for up to 45 percent less than what was asked by the Russian retailers.
On Wednesday, top executives of Evroset, ElDorado, Svyaznoy, Mir, M.Video and Technosila accused Panasonic of using middlemen to smuggle its goods across the Finnish border, thereby skirting import taxes of up to 35 percent.
They said they would consider lifting the boycott if Panasonic would sign contracts to import to Russia directly.
A spokeswoman for Panasonic’s Moscow office said managers were meeting to discuss the situation late Wednesday and declined to comment, as did the firm’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan.
“We are not trying to police anyone,” said Yevgeny Chichvarkin, the board chairman of Evroset. “We are simply voting with our feet.”Chichvarkin claimed that seven “gray” firms partly owned or managed by Panasonic were illegally importing its merchandise.
 Akhmyat Khasyanov, a spokesman for the Federal Customs Service, did not implicate Panasonic or any other firm, but said shady import brokers were common at the border. By lying about the contents of shipment containers, they help their customers skirt taxes, he said. After arranging just a few deals, such brokers often reregister under a different name, Khasyanov said.
“On the documents, it says they are carrying toys or underwear, but in reality the crate is packed with computers,” Khasyanov said. “This breach of the law lets them lower prices ... and hurts competition at Russian markets.” 
The Russian retailers said they would sell off existing supplies of Panasonic goods and not replenish them. 
“If Panasonic’s share of the Russian market was 5 percent before, now it will be 0.5 percent,” said Igor Yakovlev, the president of ElDorado.
Roland Smith, head of research at Alfa Bank, said the boycott might not have that much of an effect.
“Top to bottom, the retail market is highly unconsolidated,” he said. “And it’s hard to act like a cartel if they don’t control a big part of the market.”
Smith said that while this kind of smuggling was fairly common, he had never heard of retailers banding together to boycott a supplier. 
Yakovlev said Philips, LG, Electrolux and Samsung did not engage in “gray” imports. Ninety percent of imports were “white” and legal, he added.
The retailers also complained of the country’s high import tariffs. As of Jan. 1, new import laws will go into effect but are not expected to lower any tariffs. 
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said late Wednesday that the boycott might constitute a breach of anti-monopoly laws and that it would investigate, Prime-Tass reported.
Chichvarkin also complained that foreign firms got privileged treatment. 
“When a foreign company wants to come to Russia, we all take off our pants with happiness, if you’ll forgive the expression,” Chichvarkin said. He called on the press to turn the tables and praise Russian companies for a change. 
“We are better. We understand what you want,” he said.

TITLE: Oil Fund Should Be Split in 2
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Finance Ministry proposed Wednesday splitting its $83 billion stabilization fund into reserve and growth funds, winning praise from analysts who said the plan drew on best practice from other resource-rich nations. 
In a strategy document, the ministry proposed creating a new agency to supervise what would be called the Oil and Gas Fund, which would gather all oil and gas revenues accruing to the budget.
The Oil and Gas Fund would comprise two subfunds: a reserve fund worth between 7 percent and 10 percent of gross domestic product designed to insure against budget shocks, and a growth-oriented future-generations fund. 
The document, already submitted to the government, stopped short of saying the country would let private asset managers run part of the future-generations fund, a move encouraged by many Western economists.
However, it did cite the successful experience of private management of such funds in countries like Norway or Kazakhstan.
Economists said the country was gradually moving in the direction of putting its cash mountain under private management. 
“As far as the oil fund is concerned the sun for Russian planners is rising in Almaty,” said Anton Tabakh, an analyst at AllianceBernstein, referring to Kazakhstan’s National Fund, whose assets are run by Western asset managers. 
Analysts said Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s blueprint for saving Russia’s oil and gas windfall should enjoy the backing of President Vladimir Putin, but populist politicians may object as they seek to court voters ahead of a Dec. 2007 general election. 
“I’m quite impressed but I have my doubts that it will go through completely,” said Peter Westin, the chief economist at MDM Bank.

TITLE: AvtoVAZ Says Magna Deal Close
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — AvtoVAZ, the nation’s largest carmaker, hopes to sign an agreement by the end of the month with the Canadian car parts giant Magna to build a $1.9 billion plant, a senior AvtoVAZ official said Wednesday.
The comments, by Boris Alyoshin, who sits on the carmaker’s board and is the head of the Federal Industry Agency, appeared to be a classic case of the boy who cried wolf: After a year of making big — and false — promises, analysts were wary of yet another AvtoVAZ plan.
Tatyana Kapustina, an industry analyst with Aton, called Alyoshin’s comments typical. “Where are they going to get 1.5 billion [euros]?” she asked. That figure equals about $1.9 billion.
That AvtoVAZ board member Sergei Chemezov, the head of the state arms trader Rosoboronexport, is a friend of President Vladimir Putin, hardly guarantees state support, Kapustina said.
Reports that Chemezov is being considered for a senior post at the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, suggests that he may have political ambitions that diverted his attention from the carmaker, Kapustina said.
Aton announced this month that it would stop reporting on the carmaker’s financial health, saying in a memo that “the absence of a clear strategy, a lack of transparency, and poor financial and operating results suggest AvtoVAZ has little chance of becoming an interesting investment idea, at least in the medium term.”
 The AvtoVAZ plan envisions building a plant in the company’s hometown of Tolyatti, northwest of Samara, that would produce 450,000 cars annually. Financing would come from the Ontario-based Magna and several unidentified companies, Interfax reported.
“There’s a draft of a detailed agreement about designing and building a car assembly plant,” Alyoshin was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Magna CEO Siegfried Wolf, reached by telephone, declined to comment on the accord. “We are still in our planning phase,” Wolf said. 
Interfax reported Alyoshin as saying half of the cars produced at the new plant would be the new Lada C model; the other half would be a foreign carmaker’s. 
Last month, an AvtoVAZ source said Renault would join forces with AvtoVAZ to help improve the Kalina line of cars produced by AvtoVAZ.
Late on Wednesday, Interfax quoted an unidentified source as saying Renault might finance construction of an engine plant in Tolyatti. The plant would make 400,000 engines yearly for Lada Kalina and Renault’s Logan model, the source said.
The source added that Renault would spend between $300 million and $350 million on the engine plant in exchange for facilities provided by AvtoVAZ to build 80,000 more Renault Logan cars annually. The agreement between AvtoVAZ and Renault would be finalized in the first quarter of 2007.
A Renault spokeswoman said Wednesday that no decision had been made about any AvtoVAZ agreement.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Model Focus
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ford Motors will start producing the new Ford Focus in Vsevolozhsk next year, Prime-TASS reported Thursday.
The company is also considering increasing production to 150,000 cars a year, twice the current level, though difficulties in the supply of components have so far prevented Ford from such a move.

Tender Pulkovo
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Hall is set to announce a concession tender for the reconstruction of Pulkovo airport, Interfax reported Wednesday.
The new passenger terminal will have to be completed by 2010 with total investment into the project amounting to 700 million euros ($1 billion) by 2025.

OBI Operations
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — German retailer OBI is set to open seven shops in Leningrad Oblast by 2009, Interfax reported Wednesday.
OBI will also construct a logistics center near the ring road.
The company operates about 500 shops worldwide. 
Total group turnover for the financial year 2006 was 6.6 billion euros. OBI plans to increase turnover to 10 billion euros by 2010.

International Stock
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — International Bank St. Petersburg increased authorized capital stock by nearly 20 times, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The bank completed the emission of new shares worth a total value of 275.07 million rubles.

Vyborg Turnover
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Vyborg seaport increased freight turnover by 36 percent in the first 11 months of the year compared to the same period last year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Total freight turnover was 1.13 million tons. In November the port exported 80,419 tons and imported 25,386 tons of freight.

Star Loan
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Rising Star Media (RSM) will take a syndicated loan for the construction of four multiplexes in shopping centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Interfax reported Wednesday.
RSM operates two multiplexes in Mega shopping centers in Moscow. The company is owned by American distribution company National Amusements and American entrepreneur Pole Hit. 

Stakes in Power
n MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will sell its stakes in the country’s power companies — those that sell and distribute electricity as well as those that generate it — by 2010 to raise money for upgrading its aging electricity network.
Unified Energy, the national power utility, is seeking 395 billion rubles ($15.1 billion) to fund the upgrades by selling stakes in generators, Deputy Energy Minister Andrei Dementiev said at a conference in Moscow on Monday.

TITLE: A Familiar Mystery
AUTHOR: By Anne Applebaum
TEXT: In the almost two weeks that have passed since ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning in London, we have learned a lot about his death — haven’t we?
Well, we have learned that Litvinenko died after somehow ingesting polonium-210, a relatively rare radioactive substance. We have learned that a mysterious Italian, Mario Scaramella — a self-employed «security expert» who last year claimed that he’d found ex-KGB men selling nuclear material in the postage-stamp republic of San Marino — has been poisoned too. We have learned that a number of other people floating around London also have tested positive for polonium-210, as have a Piccadilly sushi restaurant, a London hotel room and a few airplanes.
We have seen a photograph of Litvinenko flaunting KGB gauntlets, a Chechen sword and a Union Jack. We have also seen a photograph of Litvinenko with tubes in his body, on his deathbed.
We have learned that Litvinenko may or may not have known who murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya earlier this year (and that the same people may have killed him too); that he may or may not have been involved in a scam to blackmail various prominent Russians (unless that’s just information planted in the British press); that he may or may not have possessed a dossier proving that the Kremlin had framed the imprisoned billionaire boss of the Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (unless that’s what Khodorkovsky’s people, or some other people, want us to think); that he may or may not have possessed proof that President Vladimir Putin — another ex-KGB officer — ordered his goons to blow up some apartment buildings in Russia several years ago, a terrorist act that launched the second Chechen war.
In other words: Though we don’t know who killed Litvinenko, we have learned that London is a more exciting place than we thought it was. We have learned that the complex plots of Dostoevsky novels merely reflect Russian reality. And we have learned that the old KGB lives on in new guises.
Or rather — we have been reminded that the old KGB lives on in new guises, because in fact we have known this for some time. True, the old employees no longer belong to a single all-powerful institution. Some (“the stupidest,” according to Oleg Gordievsky, the former double agent) have stayed with the agency, joining either the domestic service (the FSB) or the foreign service (the SVR). Others went into business, some joining the security entourages of new Russian millionaires, some becoming millionaires in their own right. Still others, to put it bluntly, went into organized crime. And some — Putin is the shining example here — went into politics.
Despite their widely varying fates, it has long been perfectly clear that many of these old comrades continue to work together in mutually profitable ways. As far back as 1999, for example, a group of Russian-born bankers was caught laundering money through a New York bank, probably using information obtained one way or another by Russian intelligence. Since then, it has become clear that a number of Russia’s largest companies were launched with money from mysterious sources and a number of former KGB officers have also shown up at the helm of businesses and banks.
This same mutually profitable relationship will also make it extremely difficult to find Litvinenko’s real killer. After all, this set of post-KGB relationships is nothing if not complex: There are conspiracies within conspiracies, agents of agents of agents, people who pretend to be acting on behalf of a particular oligarch or Chechen insurgent who are actually acting on behalf of someone quite different. It is possible that Litvinenko was murdered by “rogue secret policemen,” as the British press suspects. It is also possible that the rogue secret policemen were working for someone who worked for the Kremlin, or someone who worked for a Russian oligarch, or who worked for a Russian oligarch who worked for the Kremlin.
As the investigation progresses, I’m sure many more wonderfully shady characters will emerge, along with many theories about who was trying to discredit whom. But though it’s doubtful that he ever gave an actual order to an actual thug, Putin is certainly responsible for Litvinenko’s death in this deeper sense: He presides over this web of old intelligence operatives. Indeed, he sits at its center. And he approves of their methods.
One of his first acts as prime minister in 1999 was the unveiling of a plaque to Yury Andropov, the former KGB boss best known for his harsh treatment of dissidents. Last year, Russians built a statue to Andropov. No one should have been surprised that the former KGB’s harassment of modern dissidents grew harsher with every passing year — or that it culminated in what appears to be a strange murder.
That we were surprised, are surprised, is both tragic and ironic: After all, for the better part of a decade now we’ve been desperately looking for weapons of mass destruction and for the strange new enemies, the Islamic radicals who might be planning to use them. And now we’ve discovered that there really is nuclear material for sale and that it really is being used, in the West, to kill people. And that the killers aren’t strange, or new, or even Islamic.

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

TITLE: Tougher to Call Than in the Old Days
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Following the death of Alexander Litvinenko from poisoning by polonium-210, the Russian media have published numerous possible versions of events: He was killed by self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky; he committed suicide; he didn’t die at all; he was poisoned with tobacco smoke; or he was killed by Chechens. Since the 19th century it has been customary for blood enemies in the Caucasus to poison each other with polonium-210.
In the meantime, Scotland Yard trundled along the polonium-210 trail, trying to ascertain where Litvinenko first came into contact with the substance, how it got to London in the first place and where it originally came from. In the process they found a hotel room where some had been spilled.
The investigation is clearly nearing its end.
Now begins the most interesting part because, despite the fact that Scotland Yard probably knows the culprit’s name, we’re not likely to ever learn who poisoned Litvinenko or why.
Let me explain.
Enemies of the state have been liquidated more than once in Russian history: The Tsarevich Alexei was tortured to death, the Decembrists were hanged and Trotsky was killed with an ice pick. There aren’t divergent interpretations of those murders around today. No historian argues that Trotsky was killed to make Stalin look bad.
But the state apparatus is now so inscrutable that Litvinenko’s murder could fit a number of worldviews.
Did President Vladimir Putin order that Litvinenko be killed? If so, that’s pretty serious. If, instead, he only provided the motivation for the poisoning with a comment like, “Enough of Litvinenko,” this is different, and the main player is not the president but a group demonstrating its power to the president and the world.
And if he was murdered, were the killers certain the polonium-210 connection would be discovered? If so, then this constitutes a conscious challenge and a complete break with the West, suggesting the rogue groups theory. If not, then whoever did it was enough of an ignoramus to believe that the atomic-age novelty of the murder weapon would go undetected.
So, what is the actual state of affairs in modern Russia? Two factions of highly placed Russian secret service agents divide up the customs business and then go after each other with riot police; regular government housecleaning occurs, including decrees coming down from on high firing senior deputies to the foreign minister and in the Federal Security Service, but these same officials continue to work, inconspicuously, in the same offices.
Police show up at the offices of a Far East shipping company and seize various documents. They then proceed to the company’s warehouse, where they seize cases of caviar, claiming they lack the proper documentation. Different security agents rush in to protect the company. The police stage a retreat, but later call the other agency and threaten the agents with violence.
So, if someone in power killed Litvinenko, then the same state with security structures divvying up caviar and customs goes after its enemies with polonium-210 as a way to increase its power.
If, however, enemies of those in power killed Litvinenko, then to what are they opposed?
Are they opposed to a country where the crooks divvy up the red caviar and gorge themselves on the black? Enemies of a country where the security forces catch the police and police catch the security forces, while both team up against investigations by the prosecutor, who is in turn too busy running a protection racket?
Here is the difference between Litvinenko’s poisoning and Trotsky’s murder. With Trotsky, no one would doubt that Stalin gave the order. In today’s Russia, where every little section of the state power structure struggles with all the other parts, everything is possible.

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

TITLE: Moscow Not A Refuge In This Tragedy
TEXT: In October, when authorities cut transportation and postal links with Georgia and started a crackdown on Georgian migrants living in the country, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov promised that every effort would be made to ensure that law-abiding people would not be affected. The death in a Moscow detention center on Saturday of one law-abiding migrant, Manana Dzhabelia, shows that these efforts were tragically insufficient.
Dzhabelia, a 51-year-old mother of three, was detained on Oct. 4 after police found she was not carrying her passport. Despite her explanation that it was at the Georgian consulate to be extended, Dzhabelia’s deportation was ordered the very next day by a district court — rapid action in a country where legal procedures are notoriously slow.
In a cruel twist, a higher court ruled that Dzhabelia was in the country legally, but the detention center was still waiting for an official release order when she died.
It’s impossible to say, of course, that the detention killed Dzhabelia. Prison conditions, however, have been heavily criticized by human rights organizations and even by then-Justice Minister Yury Chaika in March. Dzhabelia’s legal representative, Irina Bergaliyeva, said her client had alerted guards that she suffered from high blood pressure. Although medical staff did visit with Dzhabelia at least twice, Bergaliyeva called the examinations insufficient. A hunger strike Dzhabelia started when her requests to be released pending an appeal of her deportation likely did not help her condition.
But that does not change the real injustice — that she was behind bars at all.
Russia’s relations with Georgia have been tense for months, in part because of Moscow’s accusations that Tbilisi is planning military action against the pro-Russian leadership of the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Ironically, Dzhabelia, an ethnic Georgian, fled Abkhazia to Moscow 13 years ago to escape the bloodshed of a conflict between Tbilisi and the republic.
The decision to restrict transportation and mail and to crack down on Georgian migrants followed the arrest of several Russian officers in Tbilisi on espionage charges. One of the men was released the next day, while the other three returned to Moscow three days later, raising issues of the proportionality of Russia’s response.
In Dzhabelia’s case, the results were out of all proportion. After just four days, the detained Russian servicemen were back in Moscow. Two months after her arrest, and two days after a court ruled that she should be freed, Dzhabelia died in detention.

TITLE: Mannish boy
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When he was a child, Jostein Gaarder promised himself that he would never become an adult. Now an internationally best-selling writer, who turned 54 this year, he feels he has been able to stick to this tricky self-imposed pledge. In Gaarder the child is very much alive and kicking.
The St. Petersburg Times spoke to the writer this month during his visit to the St. Petersburg Book Fair. The author was in town to present several of his books — “The Orange Girl”, “Sophie’s World” and “The Ringmaster’s Daughter” — which were issued by the Amphora publishing house this year.
Gaarder’s signature method is writing from the perspective of a teenage character, yet this does not mean that all his stories are aimed at younger audiences. The stories have a gripping plot, while touching on eternal topics — love, death, faith or the creation of the Earth. 
In some of the novels the young hero receives an important message from an adult. The communication may come in different forms. In “Orange Girl,” a fifteen-year-old boy suddenly discovers a letter from his late father written when the boy was four, during the father’s last weeks. The story told in the letter seems like a tale or worse, delirium, to the reader after flipping through the first dozen pages, but it eventually turns out to be a genuine life-story in the end. In “Sophie’s World,” the message is a philosophy textbook written by a father to a daughter. More to the point, the lively textbook centers around a teenage girl who exchanges letters with a mysterious philosopher.
Gaarder is convinced that a good children’s story can always make a good read for older audiences. The writer perceives adults as children who have somehow lost much of their curiosity in the process of growing up. At least, he says, this is what happens to most adults.
“The child is curious; they have a fresh orientation and they seek new insights,” Gaarder explains. “An adult comes in the form of a mysterious wizard of some kind who leads them into amazing discoveries.”
Hormones kill curiosity, Gaarder volunteers. First love, or any real love  — reciprocated or not — vigorously drains your energy and at high speed. And it claims one’s full attention, the writer argues.
“When you turn fourteen or fifteen you become obsessed with the opposite sex; at that age I was totally focused on girls,” Gaarder smiles. “Then, as it often happens, you get carried away, then you marry someone and have children, and curiosity evaporates. I mean my books to bring it back or stop it from vanishing.”
His readers’ response suggests he often succeeds.
The warmest compliments often come from the least likely admirers.
“Big tough guys with a beard and wide shoulders come up to me confessing that my books made their eyes wet — that means a lot to me,” Gaarder said. “It proves the story got under their skin and maybe even changed them for the better. That’s my hope.”
Gaarder’s goal as a writer is to transmit what he calls an “almost ecstatic feeling about life.”
A philosopher at heart, he has always been attracted by mysteries. The word mystery has even made it into the titles of his books, including “The Solitaire Mystery” and “Christmas Mystery.” The two greatest mysteries today for mankind are, Gaarder believes, what the Big Bang was and what is consciousness. None of the existing definitions, scientific or philosophical, suffice for the author and he is in search of the answers. 
In “The Orange Girl” the father asks his teenage son a question: If, before you were born, you had been given a choice — to come into this world for a short time or not to be born at all — what would you prefer? The father, a doctor in his early thirties, dying from an incurable illness, confesses to his son that he regrets being born. He feels cheated and perceives life not as a precious gift but rather as a heartless tease.
The author found himself asking the same question repeatedly.
“Giving a thought to this question is worth doing to intensify the better things about life and experience an overwhelming sense of being,” Gaarder suggests. “Every week, in newspapers all around the world you see stories titled ‘And then I realized...’ The word ‘then,’ in these stories, inevitably refers  to a visit to the doctor, and bad news coming from the doctor. I’m only proposing that people don’t wait until that visit and, maybe, that a new sense of life can even help some to avoid such visits altogether.”
What triggered his passion for writing was an experience Gaarder had as an eleven-year-old boy. “One day I had a sudden, mysterious revelation; I felt the universe come alive, and it was like diving into a magic fairy-tale,” he remembers. “This feeling that enabled me to become an author has been returning ever since. But I still well remember my parents and teachers saying to me that I shouldn’t go round thinking such nonsense.” 
By never becoming an adult, Gaarder means, first and foremost, never getting accustomed to the world and taking life for granted. He sought to avoid what annoyed him in too many grown-ups around him — being bored or uninspired.
“Human existence should never become a habit,” he argues. 
When Gaarder worked on his most popular book, Sofies Verden (Sophie’s World) in 1991, he was absolutely sure he was writing for a very limited audience.
“I remember telling my wife that this book is meant for a narrow circle of people with an interest in philosophy, and warning her that it is not going to earn me much money,” he recalls. “She then urged me to finish it ASAP.”
To date, the novel is an international bestseller that has been translated into 45 languages and sold over 30 million copies globally.
“I think the key to success was that the book blended entertaining fiction with history of philosophy, a fusion that most would think can never work,” Gaarder said. “Philosophy books look intimidating, as a really tough, deadly serious read. Most ordinary people feel they would never digest them even if they are hugely interested in the issues discussed in these books.”
The book brought the writer a fortune he felt he could not keep all to himself. In 1997, Gaarder and his wife Siri Dannevig launched the Sofie Foundation to promote sustainable environment. The foundation awards an annual environmental prize — titled, predictably, Sophie’s prize — worth $100,000. 
“Our planet is a very vulnerable place, and the more people realize this the more protection this planet gets,” he says, explaining his motivation. “Saving it is a global responsibility.”
For Gaarder, a father of two grownup children and a happy grandfather, the key quality to be encouraged in the younger members of his family has been compassion. “I have not been a philosophy teacher for them, although we do talk a lot about astronomy and physics and the problems that philosophers discuss,” he said. “Being close to them as a father and grandfather is much more important. I am proud that they share my concerns about the environment. And, to me, being a philosopher means being a curious and open-minded soul.”
Gaarder spends much of his time studying and researching natural sciences ranging from biology to astronomy.
The other goal Gaarder has as an author is to spark people’s interest in who they are and where they come from.
“I am an aging primate,” the writer smiles. The primate remark is often used by the writer, and not merely as a flamboyant gesture or throwaway line.
“When I say this to people, they start laughing,” Gaarder admits. “The laugh shows that people do not relate to the other species and do not identify with nature. What I say about being a primate is a very basic and most obvious thing.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: The ubiquitous Channel One host Andrei Malakhov has published his first book, “My Favorite Blondes.” Showing it off to various people, I noticed that everyone asked the same question: “Did he actually write it himself?”
Malakhov currently hosts a scandal-raking chat show called “Let Them Talk” and a Saturday-night light entertainment show called “The Highest League.” He recently appeared as a judge on the ice-skating contest “Stars on Ice,” and he’s also a fixture in the tabloids, which love his over-the-top outfits at society events and ardently discuss his high-profile affairs with older women.
So it’s hard to see how he found the time to write a 400-page book, though admittedly, it’s one with very large print. And it has to be said that Malakhov hasn’t exactly carved out a role for himself as the doyen of the literary salons. Still, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, who else would describe in such detail how bad the toilets are at the Ostankino television center?
It seems to be fashionable at the moment for Russian celebrities to write books that are called novels, but that are in fact autobiographies with one tiny detail fictionalized, probably for legal reasons. The singer Valeria recently wrote a “novel” called “Life, Tears and Love” about her ex-husband beating her. His name was Alexander Shulgin, but in the book he’s called Shuisky.
In Malakhov’s book, he describes working on a Jerry Springer-esque show called “The Big Wash” — which he did — and going about with a rich woman called Marina — which he also did — but the person he is most rude about, the show’s producer, has been given a made-up name. What a cop-out.
The book’s title refers to the blondes working on his show, as well as to Marina, a woman with whom he, or at least his fictional hero, has an affair. They meet at a party at a fitness club. She doesn’t know who he is — shock! horror! He asks her what brand of perfume she’s wearing. She makes him an indecent proposal.
This is the book’s romantic storyline, but it’s not exactly a bodice-ripper. It’s more of a bitchfest. Here is one passage about Marina that says it all: “Her eyes sparkled like Swarovski crystals. I had only seen this inner illumination in her in two situations, after drinking Piper pink champagne, after buying something new and at the moment when she saw her photo in the society pages of Harper’s Bazaar.” 
An attentive reader — or editor, for that matter — would notice that he lists three situations here, not two. But more to the point, he’s not very gallant, is he? Would you like your eyes to be compared to something that is sold at Sheremetyevo airport?
And note the name-dropping of all those glamorous brands. Malakhov may appear on mass-market shows, but he doesn’t seem too familiar with the lives of his audience. 

Sergey Chernov is on vacation.

TITLE: Good cops, bad cops
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Darya didn’t see the traffic cop when she yanked a left after pulling out of the Hotel Ukraina parking lot. It was a blatantly illegal turn, and it was obvious that money would have to change hands if we were to make it to the set on time.
It had been a long time since I’d witnessed the whole process of haggling over a bribe with Moscow’s notoriously corrupt defenders of traffic safety. I felt awkward watching from the passenger seat as Darya, the PR representative for Studio 2V, begged the cop to let us go with a warning, so I just leaned my head back and closed my eyes while trying to suppress a grin. 
We were, after all, on our way to the set of Studio 2V’s latest project, a Russian adaptation of the hit U.S. crime show “Law & Order,” which NTV plans to beam into living rooms nationwide early next year.
The cop saw no irony in the situation after Darya explained where we were going.
“Maybe you can just pay a small fine on the spot,” he said as Darya began rifling in vain through her wallet. She didn’t have the cash, so I fronted her 300 rubles — giving up one of my two 1,000 ruble notes would have been excessive, I felt — and the cop sent us on our way.
“But no more hooligan behavior!” he ordered, as if to convince himself he was doing his job correctly.
For most Russians, a police force without corruption might sound as implausible as borshch without sour cream, or a legal document without a stamp. But if you tune in next February to watch the Russian adaptation of “Law & Order,” don’t expect to see Moscow’s finest planting evidence, beating confessions out of witnesses or extorting cash out of illegal Tajik workers.
“We have a lot of corruption,” said veteran actor Dmitry Brusnikin, who is directing and starring in the adaptation of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” in an interview on the set. “But we don’t want to show the whole truth about our police, because we want our police to be better than that.”
Brusnikin said, however, that the sketchy aspects of police work would not be entirely whitewashed.
“That wouldn’t be realistic,” Brusnikin said. “The characters are simply people who love their job and do it honestly. There are such people, and we’re telling their story.”
When “Law & Order” first appeared on U.S. television in 1990, it stood out from other crime shows because of its two-part format. The first half of each episode featured an investigation where detectives nabbed the suspect, while the second half focused on the legal maneuvers of prosecutors trying to get a conviction. It proved to be a successful formula, and the show is still running today. It also has a number of spinoffs, including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”
“The franchise is now going international. A French version is in the works, and Studio 2V is filming Russian adaptations of “Special Victims Unit” and “Criminal Intent,” with plans to make 12 episodes apiece.
The producer of the project, Pavel Korchagin, said the U.S. show had been one of his favorites for years.
“I liked it because of the psychological and philosophical aspects,” Korchagin said. “They catch the criminals with the help of their brains, not with mindless car chases.”
NBC Universal Television, Wolf Films and NTV announced in May that a deal had been inked for Studio 2V and Global American Television to co-produce the show, adapting the original U.S. scripts to the specifics of the Russian justice system.
The Rossia channel currently airs the original U.S. series in translation in the 3-4 a.m. time slot. But Korchagin said that if previously Russian viewers preferred foreign series in translation, in recent years they have been increasingly tuning in to domestically produced spinoffs.
With the exception of the “Gilligan’s Island”-meets-“X-Files” drama “Lost,” which has been broadcast this year with heavy promotion on Channel One, ratings for hit U.S. shows like “Sex and the City,” “24” and “The Sopranos” are unexceptional, Korchagin said.
“It’s not because the plot lines are bad,” Korchagin said. “It’s just that they portray a different reality.”
In fact, it was the glaring differences between the U.S. and Russian justice systems that prompted the producers to adapt “Criminal Intent” and “Special Victims Unit” rather than the original “Law & Order” — or the “mother ship” — said Ed Wierzbowski, president of Global American Television, the co-production partner of Studio 2V.
“We specifically chose those two because the court scenes in those shows are kept to a minimum,” Wierzbowski said.
Indeed, U.S. prosecutors would likely drool over the chance to argue their cases in front of Russian judges, who last year acquitted only 3.6 percent of the suspects whose cases they tried, according to Supreme Court statistics. Their chances of obtaining convictions from juries would be a lot slimmer. According to the same statistics, every sixth person tried by a jury last year was acquitted.
Korchagin said the shows would feature both jury and judge trials.
“The more complex cases will be tried by a judge, the less complex ones by a jury,” he said.
Both Korchagin and Wierzbowski, however, said that crime was the same anywhere in the world and that they had little difficulty adapting the U.S. scripts.
“The only real changes were the names and places,” Wierzbowski said.
In recent years, crime has become to NTV what sensationalist stories like the Jon Benet Ramsey murder, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, are to U.S. cable news networks: oxygen.
From “Cops”-like city crime wrap-ups to documentaries about cannibals and the son of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo — complete with menacing music and comically manipulative camera work — NTV has made an overt bid to corner the blood-and-guts market, critics say.
“It’s hard to say whether there is truly is a demand for such shows among the public, or whether channels are creating the demand themselves by force-feeding crime shows to the public,” Kommersant television critic Arina Borodina said.
But actor Ivan Oganesyan, whose detective Andrei Pankratov is based on detective Elliot Stabler from the original “Special Victims Unit,” said he hoped the show kept the gore to a minimum. As someone who was on stage when Chechen terrorists seized the Dubrovka theater in 2002 and survived three days in captivity before special forces stormed the building, Oganesyan’s distaste for violence is perhaps understandable.
“Now when I hold a gun in my hand, I feel somewhat squeamish,” Oganesyan said.
Oganesyan isn’t the only actor in the show with a disturbing crime story in his past.
Valery Troshin, who plays senior lieutenant Petya Yevdokimov — based on the Richard Belzer character Detective John Munch in the original — said an acquaintance of his in the 1990s turned out to be a serial killer who targeted pregnant women.
“I saw firsthand the investigators who actually nabbed this guy,” Troshin said. “Maybe they’re our prototypes.”
According to a March poll conducted by the Levada Center, 70 percent of Russians are fearful of law enforcement agents, and 45 percent believe those in power use law enforcement to deal with political opponents. But Troshin, like others involved in the project, said police detectives like the ones he and his co-stars are playing are not the object of public distrust. 
“People don’t trust dishonest traffic cops, dishonest duty officers who might confiscate and resell someone’s apartment,” Troshin said. “But they trust the ones who do the investigative work, the ones who are out there catching bad guys on the street and saving people.”
Brusnikin offered a more blunt analysis.
“Whether you want to or not, if something bad happens, you call the police,” he said.

TITLE: Made in Germany
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: German cinema is much more than tacky adult films and low-brow slapstick comedies if one is to believe the organizers of the German Film Festival, starting Friday at Dom Kino.
The event, which is being held for the third time in the city, introduces another Germany, where the hot topics include the never-ending quest for love, the reassessment of history and the survival of cultural differences. 
The program offers a wide array of genres — drama, comedy, two documentaries, a children’s film and student experiments.
A critically acclaimed second feature from Chris Kraus, “Four minutes” (“Vier Minuten”) will open the Festival. Kraus, whose debut film Scherbentanz won ten national and international prizes, tells the story of an elderly piano teacher training a young and extremely talented convict at a women’s penitentiary. 
“The idea behind the film is to show the saving potential of music as creativity cures the soul and the talented trainee feels real freedom when she plays the piano,” a press release from the Goethe Institute, the event’s promoter, explains.  
Another drama, the directorial debut of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, “Das Leben Der Anderen” (also known as “XX/7 Agent” or “The Lives of Others”) focuses on the horrifying, sometimes unintentionally funny system of surveillance in the former East Germany and is expected to become a highlight of the festival. 
One more example of social realism is “Knallhart” (“Tough Enough”). The result of the creative efforts of cult persona Detlev Buck, the film follows the struggles of a Berlin teenager after his family is forced to move from a rich area of Zehlendorf to run-down Berlin-NeukÚlln. 
“There are some gut wrenching scenes in this film…both physical and emotional violence are portrayed with alarming conviction. I wish more film makers could achieve this instead of resorting to comic book fights or glossing over brutal reality,” says a review published at IMDB, which bills itself as the world’s biggest movie database website.
Viewers will learn that it is not only drama that depicts reality. Comedy is fully capable of transmitting sophisticated ideas and deep study. And participating films seem to rewrite the reputation of German-language comedy as being sharp, witty and unwilling to retreat to the niche of pure entertainment. 
Andreas Dresen’s “Sommer vorm Balkon” (“Summer in Berlin”) offers a bittersweet account of life in Berlin. The director enjoys great popularity in his native Germany with premieres of his work never failing to generate huge queues.
Swiss director Soeren Senn’s feature debut “KussKuss” tells the tragicomical story of a courageous and liberal doctor, Katja, who urges her boyfriend to help an illegal Algerian immigrant by marrying her.
The festival includes a number of documentaries. While  Marc Bauder’ and DÚrte Franke’s film  “Jeder Schweight von Etwas Anderem (“Last to Know” is its international title) deals with the consequences of mass repression in East Germany, “Der Unbekannte Soldat” (“The Unknown Soldier”) from  Michael Verhoeven examines the attitudes of Germans towards Nazi crimes and challenges established social taboos. 
The film is based on The Wehrmacht-Exhibition, which was shown in eleven major German cities between 1999 and 2004. Displaying disturbing images of Wehrmacht officers killing civilians, the exhibition was unbearable for many. Filmed in such places of historical terror as Ukraine and Belarus Verhoeven’s documentary has traced some of the crimes the Wehrmacht is alleged to have committed. 
SÚnke Wortmann’s work “Deutschland. Ein Sommermarchen” shifts the focus onto a lighter note and will appeal to many football fans, depicting the German national team’s World Cup 2006 journey, all the way from a boot camp in Sardinia to the 3rd-place play-off. 
Other films include Sebastian Steinbichler’s  “Winterreise” (“Winter Jorney”), drama “Die Weisse Massai” (“The White Massai”) directed by Hermine Huntgeburth, children’s comedy “Hui Buh – das Schlossgespenst” and a “Next Generation” — a collection of short films made by students. 

The festival is held from 8-17 December in Dom Kino, 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa, phone: (812) 314-56-14, (812) 314-06-38.

TITLE: Playing with words
AUTHOR: By Benjamin Paloff
PUBLISHER: For The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Although the introduction to Joanne Turnbull’s new translation of seven short stories by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky paints the author as “a prominent figure in literary circles” in Kiev and Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s, this has more to do with making the case for a neglected genius than with realities on the ground. As the introduction itself goes on to acknowledge, Krzhizhanovsky was “all but unpublished” during his lifetime, and he described himself as having been “known for being unknown.” It is regrettable, if perhaps inevitable, that whenever an obscure foreign writer first makes the leap into that wider obscurity that is the English language, he is retroactively fitted with greater Modernist street cred than he ever enjoyed in life, which is to say that his publisher and translator compare him favorably to Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. In the vast majority of cases, “neglected” + “Kafkaesque” = “not worth the trouble.”
And yet this seems to be one of those rare instances wherein both the praise and the ebullient comparisons are quite earned. A prolific and versatile author, particularly of fiction and essays in aesthetic theory, Krzhizhanovsky left a substantial body of work when he died in 1950; his collected writings in Russian will run five hefty volumes when completed. That only a tiny fraction of his fiction appeared in print during the author’s lifetime, and that he nevertheless continued to produce his odd and thoroughly exhilarating prose, is a testament to the resilience of an author palpably dedicated to his craft and its multiple pleasures. Reading Krzhizhanovsky is to partake of those pleasures, though not necessarily to assume them as one’s own. For this is self-indulgent writing par excellence, in which existential isolation and authorial play seem to go hand-in-hand. The reader will either want out right away or, with a little more imagination, hope that the ride goes on forever.
It is little wonder, then, that most of the stories collected here toy with the themes of isolation and of reading as a voyeuristic act, one that implicates the reader in the author’s game. In “Autobiography of a Corpse,” for example, a man rents a room in Moscow and is immediately delivered the testament of the previous tenant, a suicide whose text bubbles over with the joy of infecting its reader. “I’m already fairly well entangled in your ‘associative threads’; I’ve already seeped into your ‘I.’ Now you too have a figment,” the testament reads. “The Unbitten Elbow,” meanwhile, relates a performance artist’s efforts to bite his own elbow, as well as a famous philosopher’s insistence that there is serious metaphysical consequence in the performance: “The very next morning he began an article on ‘The Principles of Unbiteability.’” And in “Quadraturin,” the protagonist purchases a potion to remedy cramped quarters from a traveling salesman, only to find that the formula is all too effective. After dropping the tube on the floor, his anxiety about being found out by the neighbors, the landlady, or the “Re-measuring Commission” turns to terror, since he can’t find a way out of his rapidly expanding apartment.
Even as these stories throw jabs at philosophy and Soviet society, they are themselves philosophical, social set pieces, and their characters — named, unnamed or simply numbered — are purely functional props in the author’s contrivances. Certainly, such solipsism can try the reader’s patience. “The Bookmark,” in particular, seems more interested in perpetuating its own self-amusement than in amusing an audience. Similarly, “The Runaway Fingers,” an update of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” is at best a disposable good time: While it may be difficult to look away as a famous pianist chases his errant hand through the city, the event is, like most football games, not likely to invite repeat viewings. Of course, such fancies are more excusable when one considers how scant Krzhizhanovsky’s expectations of eventual publication may have been: His work wasn’t uncovered in a Soviet archive until nearly 30 years after his death, and it could have easily remained there for much longer.
“What is exceedingly impressive about Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction, however, is that it manages to be self-indulgent, contrived and solipsistic all at once — that is, it violates all the critical taboos that have come to indicate literature not worth our time — and to turn these defects into means of seduction. This is an audacious art, one whose accomplishment rests in the author’s ability to write about literature and the self unselfconsciously, without needing to achieve the psychological depth of Kafka or the clownish parodies of Witold Gombrowicz, both Krzhizhanovsky’s contemporaries. In this way, he wanders the landscapes of European Modernism without straining toward significance, which he has in abundance, but which he almost treats as beside the point.
This achievement can be credited to Krzhizhanovsky’s lyricism. His narrators have the verbal intelligence of wry editors, their remarks casually poised between irony and portent, whether Krzhizhanovsky is talking about a forgotten bookmark (“Thus do long sea voyages part sailors from their wives.”) or the spectacle of a man eating his arm, itself a parody of the lengths to which people go to make a philosophical point.
Krzhizhanovsky’s satire of Soviet society can be acute, whether he is building an entire story around the housing shortages of the 1920s or introducing Bolshevik jargon into his characters’ speech. (“You owl!” an old woman yells. “Comrade Owl,” someone corrects her.) But neither his lyricism nor his wit, neither of which is often the stuff of bestsellers, properly accounts for the obscurity of this wonderful author. As difficult as it may have been to navigate the moody literary establishment of Josef Stalin’s Russia, the censorship was in fact much more tolerant of satire than is sometimes thought today. But where the canonical satires of Mikhail Zoshchenko, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov focus squarely on Soviet life, Krzhizhanovsky’s work insists on being about nothing in particular. As one character suggests in “The Bookmark,” these are narrators who “tell stories about stories,” and much as the reader may struggle to figure out what’s going on, “to annotate the meaning, to exgistolate the gist,” the story itself resists.
For all its postmodern echoes, such meta-fictive gamesmanship has drifted in and out of use for as long as people have been telling stories to one another, and it has never proven satisfactory to readers hoping to hear about the man on the street. But it is sure to delight anyone interested in what happens when that man comes home to an empty apartment.

Benjamin Paloff is a poetry editor at Boston Review. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.

TITLE: Emigre director Slava Tsukerman comes back to Russia to shoot a film set in perestroika-era Moscow
AUTHOR: By Tom Birchenough
TEXT: For cult director Slava Tsukerman, his new project “Surviving Perestroika,” which recently completed filming in Moscow, has a distinctly personal angle.
The Russian-born director emigrated from Moscow in 1973 and only returned for the first time in 1989. In the West, he’s best known as the director of the 1982 movie “Liquid Sky,” and it’s from that film that the word “cult” has stuck to him, given that the picture is distinctly weird in its subject matter and continues to be played in art-house theaters to this day.
Though his subsequent career has largely been in commercials, he has revisited his native land in film on a number of occasions — including a rather less than successful English-language adaptation of Nikolai Karamzin’s novel “Poor Liza” back in 1998, as well as the acclaimed documentary “Stalin’s Wife” from two years ago.
“Surviving Perestroika” is set in Moscow in 1989, and it hits the strange mood of the time, in both a personal and a wider context. Its story centers on the contact between two astrophysicists, one of whom is Sasha Greenberg (played by Sam Robards of “American Beauty” fame), an emigre from the Soviet Union returning there for the first time for a scientific congress.
There he meets his original teacher, Professor Gross, an American who is himself a sort of emigre, having moved to Moscow in the 1950s (that part is played by F. Murray Abraham, from “Amadeus,” and most recently seen on Russian screens in the television version of Sergei Bondarchuk’s “And Quiet Flows the Don”).
“It’s the story of a person whose life’s dream is understanding the universe. 
Everyone around him thinks he has reached greatness and success,” Tsukerman said in an interview after shooting was completed in early October.
“But he doesn’t understand his own world, and he arrives in Moscow to find Russian perestroika going on, and in a way, it becomes his time of personal perestroika.”
The film was shot on a minimal enough budget of something over $1 million — despite the Hollywood names in its cast — and should be completed by next spring. One of the major challenges, Tsukerman admitted, was finding Moscow locations that could stand in for the city as it was more than 15 years ago. One, at least, looked completely authentic: the astrophysics department of Moscow State University, which, if you disregarded a few messages on the notice board about forthcoming international conferences, looked as though it had remained unchanged for the past several decades.
It’s a project Tsukerman has been trying to bring into development for many years, and he says its storyline will end with a question.
The fact that he managed to get it off the ground at all leaves plenty of room for hope, a quality the director seems to have in abundance. “At various times in my life, I was expecting the end of the world to come along quite soon, but it hasn’t happened — so that leaves some room for optimism,” he said.
“Surviving Perestroika” may not achieve the cult status of “Liquid Sky,” with its strange story of aliens visiting New York during the post-punk era. But it’s likely to end up as a much more serious film — and a more personal one for its director.

TITLE: Manaudou Eyes Four Euro Gold
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: HELSINKI — French star Laure Manaudou is eyeing a quadruple gold medal and record-breaking haul as she warms up for next year’s worlds at the European short course swimming championships starting Thursday in Helsinki.
But triple Olympic champion Pieter van den Hoogenband, former arch-rival of now retired Australian superstar Ian Thorpe, has opted to give the continental meet a miss as he prepares for next March’s world championships in Melbourne.
Manaudou, the Olympic and world champion over 400m, was the heroine of the European long course event in Budapest last August when she won seven medals, including four gold.
And this time the 20-year-old will be bidding to go one better than her three titles in the 400m and 800m freestyle and the 100m backstroke at last year’s short course, being also tentatively slated to compete in the 200m freestyle.
She will also be bidding to lower her world marks in the 400m freestyle (3:56.79) and the 800m freestyle (8:11.25), as well as bettering the European mark of Czech Ilona Hlavackova over the 100m backstroke (57.75).
Her leading rivals will be Russia’s Anastasia Ivanenko over 400m and 800m and Germans Annika Liebs (200m free) and Janine Pietsch (100m backstroke).
Manaudou, meanwhile, is taking nothing for granted.
“You can’t just arrive expecting to beat girls of your own level,” she said.
“I wasn’t taking anything for granted at the nationals so I’m not going to at Europeans,” added Manaudou, who won eight titles and broke six French records at the nationals last weekend in the south of France.
Notable absentees include van den Hoogenband and Germany’s Britta Steffen, winner of four titles at the European long course championships, who has withdrawn because of flu.
Van den Hoogenband, meanwhile, has decided not to compete in the event in which he was four times champion over 200m freestyle. The Dutch swimmer, a double Olympic champion over 100m, has fought his way back from a herniated disc, and wants to be fully fit for the 2007 worlds and the 2008 Olympics.
Only three title-holders will miss the competition, Britain’s Mark Foster (50m freestyle) who is now retired, Denmark’s Louise Ornstedt (50m backstroke) and Austria’s Markus Rogan (200m backstroke).
Meanwhile, Finland’s Jani Sievinen will be bringing the curtain down on his illustrious career at home.

TITLE: U.S. Strategy in Iraq is Not Working
AUTHOR: By Dave Clark
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Baghdad awoke once again to the sound of explosions and sporadic gunfire Thursday as Washington digested a 160-page indictment of President George W. Bush’s failed plan to save a country where an average of more than 100 people are being killed every day.
These victims now include 11 American soldiers killed in four separate incidents on Wednesday, a day in which 45 Iraqi bodies were found scattered around Baghdad. At least eight more Iraqis were killed Thursday.
In the worst attack on U.S. troops, five soldiers from Task Force Lightning were killed in an “explosion near their vehicle” as they conducted a combat operation in northern Iraq’s Kirkuk Province, the military said.
No other details have been released on the other American casualties, which brought the U.S. military death toll since the March 2003 invasion to 2,910, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures.
On Thursday, the dull thump of mortar shells exploding in the capital could be heard through a thick dust cloud that had settled overnight. At least four civilians were wounded, a security official said.
Meanwhile, gun and bomb attacks around the country killed eight more Iraqis, six of them members of the beleaguered police force.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush’s main foreign ally with regard to Iraq, arrived in Washington on Thursday for talks on the crises in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. and British troops face open-ended battles against insurgents.
The president and the prime minister “have a number of issues to discuss, including Iraq, the broader war on terror, the NATO commitment to Afghanistan, Sudan, as well as free and fair trade,” said Bush spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
Britain’s former army chief, General Sir Mike Jackson, said Thursday that “clearly, we’re not winning” in Iraq. 
He warned, however that “we need to be very careful about letting dates direct when a campaign should be concluded.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office said he would study the US report in the course of the day. It will make worrying reading for the Iraqi leader, who is struggling to hold together a shaky coalition.
Against the backdrop of what it called a “grave and deteriorating” situation in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group urged Washington to increase pressure on Maliki to meet the political challenge of reuniting the country.
“If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military or economic support,” it said.
The Iraqi leader has bridled before at American pressure, and specifically rejects the notion of a timetable for reform imposed from abroad, but his response to the report was cautious and he promised to look at it.
Bassim Ridha, a senior political advisor to Maliki, warned the White House not to back away from supporting the national unity government.
“If they do not support the government then it will look as if they do not do what they preach,” Ridha said. “We need their support to go forward.”
The report by a 10-strong panel of policy experts headed by former secretary of state James Baker will also make for grim reading at US headquarters in Iraq, whose upbeat weekly briefings have been undercut by its pessimism.
“There is no path that can guarantee succcess but the prospects can be improved,” it notes.
It goes on to declaring a six-month-old operation to secure Baghdad a failure that has seen violent attacks rise by 43 percent.
“The level of violence is high and growing. There is great suffering and the daily lives of many Iraqis show little or no improvement,” it said.
“If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian catastrophe,” it warned.
But the report’s insistence that the 135,000-strong U.S. force in Iraq should start to pull its troops out of combat. 
The comment recommends that instead the U.S. should increase the training and support of Iraqi government units, which will find no argument in Baghdad.
Maliki has long insisted that the path to peace leads through arming his men and giving him operational control of the armed forces, most of which are still under the command of the head of the US-led coalition, General George Casey.
On Tuesday, the day before Baker’s report was released, coalition spokesman Major General William Caldwell said Bush had agreed that Maliki should take control of his army by the middle of next year and his country by 2008.

TITLE: Man U, Arsenal Into Last 16
AUTHOR: By Krystyna Rudzki
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United, Arsenal, FC Porto and Lille qualified for the second round of the Champions League on Wednesday, completing the 16-team field for the first knockout stage. 
Man United rallied to a 3-1 victory over Benfica, the team that eliminated the English club from last season’s competition, and Arsenal and Porto both advanced after a 0-0 tie. Lille beat AC Milan 2-0 to join the Italian club in the next round.
“We knew what we had to do and we did it,” Porto coach Jesualdo Ferreira said.
The four clubs join defending champion FC Barcelona and AS Roma, who qualified Wednesday. Ten others had already qualified: Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Liverpool, PSV Eindhoven, Valencia, Lyon, Real Madrid, Celtic and AC Milan.
Werder Bremen, Spartak Moscow, Bordeaux, Shakhtar Donetsk, Steaua Bucharest, Benfica, CSKA Moscow and AEK Athens all finished third in their groups and will play in the UEFA Cup.
Also Wednesday, it was: Dynamo Kiev 2, Real Madrid 2; Lyon 1, Steaua Bucharest 1; FC Copenhagen 3, Celtic 1; Hamburg 3, CSKA Moscow 2; and Anderlecht 2, AEK Athens 2.
FC Porto scored first at Old Trafford, with Nelson curling the ball high into the Manchester United net in the 27th minute. The Red Devils tied it in first-half injury time when Nemanja Vidic scored with a header off a free kick by Ryan Giggs. Cristiano Ronaldo set up Giggs to head in United’s second goal in the 61st, and Louis Saha headed in United’s third in the 75th.
Benfica’s 2-1 win in the final group game last season ensured United missed out on the knockout stage of the Champions League for the first time in 10 years.
In the other Group F game, Atiba Hutchinson evaded the Celtic defense to put FC Copenhagen ahead in the second minute. Jesper Gronkjaer hooked the ball into the net in the 27th to make it 2-0, and Marcus Allback added Copenhagen’s third in the 57th. Jiri Jarosik pulled a goal back for the Scottish club in the 75th.
Arsenal, last season’s runner-up, and Porto knew they would both advance with a tie regardless of the result in CSKA Moscow’s game at Hamburg.
Ten-man Hamburg rallied to beat CSKA 3-2. The Russian team went ahead when Ivica Olic converted a 22nd-minute penalty kick, but Hamburg evened it in the 28th with Besart Berisha scoring from a corner. Hamburg got goals from Rafael van der Vaart in the 84th and substitute Boubacar Sanogo in the 90th.
Real Madrid came back to tie Dynamo Kiev 2-2. Maxim Shatskikh scored in the 13th and 27th minutes for Dynamo Kiev, but Ronaldo answered with goals in the 86th and 88th.
The Ukraine team had already secured a UEFA Cup place, and the tie meant Real Madrid finished second behind Lyon in Group E.
Lyon conceded its first goal at home in this season’s competition when Nicolae Dica volleyed in for Steaua Bucharest in the second minute. Ten minutes later, Lyon’s Alou Diarra evened the score with a header past Steaua goalkeeper Cornel Cernea.
Lille went ahead in the seventh minute on a goal by Peter Odemwingie, who scored when AC Milan goalkeeper Zeljko Kalac parried a long attempt from Mathieu Bodmer. In the 67th, Lille’s Kader Keita prodded the ball past Kalac, leaving the French club second in Group H.
Anthony Vanden Borre scored for Anderlecht from a goalmouth scramble in the eighth minute, and Nicolas Frutos made it 2-0 in the 63rd minute. Vassilis Lakis scored for AEK in the 76th.

TITLE: Kagame says French PM backed genocide
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Rwandan President Paul Kagame said on Thursday France’s Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was among French officials whom he accuses of supporting the 1994 genocide.
“There are French officials who were involved at that time who are still alive including the prime minister of France now, who was a director of the cabinet of the foreign minister and these people were involved directly in this situation,” he told BBC World television in an interview.
Rwanda broke off diplomatic ties with Paris last month in protest at a French judge’s call for Kagame to stand trial over the killing of former President Juvenal Habyarimana in a plane crash in 1994.
On Wednesday Kagame, on a visit to Britain, denied any involvement in Habyarimana’s death — widely regarded as the trigger for the genocide — and accused France of actively supporting the killings.
“It’s France that supported the genocidal forces, that trained them, that armed them, that participated in fighting against the forces that were trying to stop the genocide,” he told BBC radio.
“France did not at any one time attempt to stop the genocide,” he added. “On the contrary, they actually participated in the period leading to that genocide in supporting the government of Rwanda.”
France denies involvement in the killing and instead says its military interventions helped Rwandans.
Kagame dismissed allegations that his rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), shot down the president’s plane.
“That is nonsense,” he said. “I was involved in fighting the genocidal forces. I am a freedom fighter, I am not to be seen as a criminal.”
The downing of the plane is widely seen as the spark for the 100 days of killing during which 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.
Kagame, a Tutsi, is revered by many genocide survivors because the RPF defeated the Hutu militants.

TITLE: Equestrian Tragedy Strikes Asian Games
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: DOHA — Tragedy has struck the Asian Games after an experienced South Korean equestrian rider died after his horse threw him from the saddle then crushed him underfoot. 
The horse, Bundaberg Black, hit a fence and stumbled, tossing Kim Hyung Chil to the ground during the individual cross country competition. The mare fell on top of him and the Seoul resident, 47, never regained consciousness.
He was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead soon after. The horse survived with no noticable injury.
“We have opened a formal inquiry into this tragic accident. I don’t want to speculate on the results of that inquiry until it is completed,” said Chris Hodson, vice-president of the International Equestrian Federation.
“To my knowledge it is the first time this has happened at the Asian Games.”
Kim was an experienced rider and had won a gold medal on Wednesday in the dressage event. 
He had competed in Olympic Games and was a silver medallist at the last Asiad in Busan, South Korea, four years ago.
Chef de mission of the Korean team, Kim Young Hwan, said the whole Korean squad here was in shock.
“I’m in shock and feel very sad,” she said.
“There’s a chance of an accident at every event. It’s important to win medals but it’s more important that competitors are safe and return home safely.
“It’s a tragedy and many things are going through my mind at the moment.”
The family of Kim, the rider, are rushing to Doha, she added.
Discussions are underway on whether the Korean team will pull out of the event as a mark of respect, although Hodson indicated the event, suspended because of the accident and heavy rain, would likely continue. 
He added that the death would inevitably force some deep thinking about the future of equestrian as an Asian Games and Olympic sport, but expressed confidence that its standing would not be affected.
“It’s not just activists concerned about this. It’s all of us in the equestrian community,” he said of injuries to riders and horses.
“I’m absolutely confident that equestrian and eventing will continue and we will discover that there are lessons to be learnt from this.”
It is the eighth death linked to the Asian Games, although the first of an athlete.
Last week a 60-year-old Indian woman working as a volunteer died after being hit by a car as she crossed a busy, city centre street.
On Wednesday, a man turned himself into the police following the deaths of six young Qatari women who were killed in a car crash as they returned from watching the Asian Games torch relay.
The deaths of athletes while competing is a rare occurance, but does happen.
In August, the best friend of Britain’s Zara Phillips — the daughter of Princess Anne — died at an equestrian event in England when her horse fell on top of her, crushing her skull.
Other high profile sporting casualties in recent years include French skier Regine Cavagnoud who died in 2001 from severe brain injuries suffered in a high-speed training accident. 
Perhaps the best known athlete to die on the sporting field was Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, who was killed in crash at the San Marino GP in Imola.
In practice the day before, Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger also died.

TITLE: U.K. Most at Risk of Attack
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: LONDON — Britain is the Western country most at risk to suffer a terrorist attack at the hands of the Al-Qaeda terror network, a newspaper has reported, citing unnamed government officials.
The Financial Times also said Thursday that the terror group was rebuilding its headquarters’ operations in Pakistan, making Britain particularly vulnerable because of the large number of British residents who travel to the South Asian country on a regular basis.
“It’s an emerging pattern. Training is taking place in Pakistan and contacts are continuing after the training,” one unnamed official told the FT.
The conclusions have been reached on examination of past plots and various other evidence.
Another unidentified official told the newspaper: “We are seeing an increase slowly in the level of sophistication of Al-Qaeda directed or inspired attacks.”
The officials said that Dhiren Barot, a British Muslim convert who was jailed for life last month for plotting to kill thousands of people in devastating terror attacks in Britain and the United States, was directed by Al-Qaeda.
They also said that two of the four Islamist suicide bombers who killed 52 commuters on London’s transport network in July 2005, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, are thought to have visited terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
Though the United States remains Al-Qaeda’s top target, Britain is an easier mark, the officials told the FT.
“We are talking about risk: risk is made up of a combination of threat and vulnerability ... If the threat is big, but you are not vulnerable, there is a low risk,” an official told the business daily.
“But if the threat is high and vulnerability is high, then you are in trouble.”

TITLE: Afghan Civilians Bear Brunt Of Suicide Attack on NATO
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A suicide car bomber has struck near a NATO convoy in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, killing two civilians and injuring several others.
Witnesses said the bomb went off as a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy of military vehicles drove through the Chawk Madat area of the city, the birthplace of the Taliban movement.
Two dead bodies and seven injured men were taken to the Mirwais hospital in restive Kandahar after the blast, Doctor Najibullah, who gave only one name, said on Thursday.
“We’ve got two dead bodies and seven injured in our hospital. They’re all civilians,” he said. The interior ministry in Kabul confirmed there was a suicide bombing, but said only one civilian was killed, while putting the number of injured people at 11.
ISAF headquarters in Kabul confirmed there had been an attack against its troops, but said there were no military casualties.
The gruesome blast area was sealed off by Afghan security forces, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.
Police were also trying to dismantle an unexploded hand grenade which they said was left over from the car bomb, the reporter said.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack.
The bombing was the third suicide attack in Kandahar in as many days and the 10th since Nov. 25 across Afghanistan, amid a spike in violence blamed on the Taliban militia.
Two U.S. citizens working for a private security company and five Afghans died in a suicide attack in Kandahar on Wednesday, while two Canadian soldiers were killed in a similar car bomb in the city on Nov. 27.

TITLE: Ovechkin No Longer Carrying
Capitals
AUTHOR: By Howard Fendrich
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Alex Ovechkin is doing his part again for the  Washington Capitals. Here’s what’s different this season: The reigning rookie of the year is getting a lot more help. 
Ovechkin and linemate Dainius Zubrus had three assists apiece, and Chris Clark scored twice to lead Washington past the Ottawa Senators 6-2 Wednesday night for its fourth consecutive victory.
The Capitals have averaged 5 1/2 goals during wins over Tampa Bay, Dallas, Buffalo and Ottawa — and 11 players scored at least once in that span. Ovechkin still leads the club with 17 goals and 31 points, but five teammates have as many or more goals as he does (two) during the winning streak.
“This just shows we have the quality of guys to score goals. It’s not just one or two guys,” said Clark, Washington’s captain. “Over this streak, it’s four lines that have been scoring. We showed we have four quality lines.”
The Capitals haven’t had a five-game winning streak since March 3-11, 2001. They’ll try to match that Friday at home against NHL-leading Anaheim.
“I have great team, and we play well,” Ovechkin said. “Right now, we play well. Enjoy it.”
Olie Kolzig made 35 saves to help Washington end Ottawa’s four-game winning streak.
In other NHL games Wednesday night, it was: New Jersey 2, Montreal 1 in overtime; Dallas 3, Phoenix 0; Edmonton 3, Carolina 1; and Anaheim 4, Nashville 0.
Washington has won three in a row at home for the first time since Feb. 24 to March 2, 2003. Its latest victory came in a penalty-filled game, with each team whistled 11 times.
“I’m not supposed to comment, but (during) the first goal, Ovechkin was offside, and we watched it. His foot was well over the line, and his other foot was in the air,” Senators coach Bryan Murray said. 
“The third goal, with an icing call ... that’s what we were yelling about, and they call it a clean play.”
Jason Spezza and Mike Fisher scored for Ottawa, which played without captain Daniel Alfredsson, injured in Tuesday night’s win against the New York Islanders.
The Capitals continued their pattern of playing their best against some of the NHL’s top teams: They’re 8-3 against clubs that topped 100 points last season — including 2-0 against Ottawa — and 4-6-6 against everyone else.
The Senators had been pretty much unstoppable lately, winning eight of nine heading into Wednesday. Top goalie Ray Emery had won six of seven decisions, but he allowed all of the goals against Washington, and the announced crowd of 10,926 chanted his name sarcastically during the hosts’ three-goal third period.
“We’ll just have to regroup and start another streak,” said left wing Peter Schaefer, who assisted on Fisher’s goal.
Clark lost a couple of teeth when a puck hit him in the mouth during a game against Boston on Nov. 15, which came in the midst of a six-game winless drought for the Capitals.
Now things are better for Clark and his team.
“Getting the two goals and the win is a fantastic feeling. Coming off the injury, and then the losing streak — it was tough,” Clark said. “Being able to contribute like this is a great feeling.”

Devils 2, Canadiens 1, OT 
Patrik Elias scored a power-play goal with 7.3 seconds remaining in overtime to lift New Jersey over visiting Montreal. 
Zach Parise scored with 5:48 left in regulation for the Devils, 10-1-1 at home. 
Montreal scored 4 minutes into the game on a seemingly harmless dump-in to the New Jersey zone. Alexander Perezhogin backhanded a centering pass into the slot to Radek Bonk, who tipped the puck in. 

Stars 3, Coyotes 0 
Marty Turco made 25 saves for his 27th NHL shutout, and Sergei Zubov scored an early power-play goal to lead Dallas. 
Mike Ribeiro and Philippe Boucher added goals for the host Stars, who’ve won three straight. 
Boucher’s one-timer from the left point while Dallas held a two-man advantage extended the lead to 3-0 with 2:30 remaining. 
Turco preserved his second consecutive shutout and third of the season with a sliding stop on a rebound attempt by Shane Doan with 13:50 left. 
Ducks 4, Predators 0 
Teemu Selanne had two goals and an assist, Chris Kunitz had a goal and three assists, and Jean-Sebastien Giguere recorded his 25th NHL shutout as Anaheim beat visiting Nashville in a matchup between the Pacific and Central division leaders. 
Ryan Getzlaf also scored and Andy McDonald had two assists for the Ducks, who have a league-leading 46 points. Giguere made 21 saves en route to his fourth shutout of the season. 
The Predators lost their third straight game, matching their longest skid this season. 
They were 17-2-2 in between the losing streaks. 

Oilers 3, Hurricanes 1 
At Edmonton, Alberta, Jason Smith’s first goal of the season snapped a second-period tie and lifted the Oilers over the Hurricanes in a rematch of last season’s Stanley Cup finals. 
Brad Winchester and Fernando Pisani also scored for the Oilers, the defending Western Conference champions who lost Game 7 in Raleigh, N.C., this spring. 
Craig Adams had the lone goal for the visiting Hurricanes.

TITLE: Lebanon PM Urges Return to Talks
AUTHOR: By Kerry Sheridan
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: BEIRUT — Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has urged opposition parties to return to talks after the Hezbollah-led movement pledged a new push to topple the Western-backed government.
“However long it takes, the Lebanese will have to sit back down together,” Siniora said Thursday after a week of street protests on the government’s doorstep in central Beirut with no solution in sight to the political deadlock.
The army issued a stern warning against the “dangers of the continuation of the present situation in a tense climate throughout” the country, local press reported, adding that 20,000 troops were being deployed to keep the peace.
The deep political tensions in Beirut and a number of street fights that have killed at least one young Shiite man have raised concerns of a resurgence of sectarian strife in a country still reeling from the 1975-1990 civil war.
The opposition’s call for a new mass demonstration on Sunday and unspecified “other means” of protest came after thousands of demonstrators have waved flags, sung militant chants and cheered opposition speakers for seven days straight.
“We call on the Lebanese to participate en masse in a demonstration Sunday in central Beirut at 3 pm (1300 GMT) in the hope that this will be a historic day on which our voices are heard,” the opposition said Wednesday.
It also asked the Lebanese to “be ready for other forms and means of peaceful protest” to obtain the fall of the government, but did not elaborate.
Top-selling An-Nahar daily said the opposition aimed to ramp up the pressure because “the movement launched one week ago has borne no fruit” and it needed a fresh injection of energy.
The government and its anti-Syrian parliamentary majority have repeatedly urged a return to talks but have been so far been ignored by the opposition which wants the government replaced with a new unity leadership after six pro-Syrian ministers resigned last month.
“Our hands are extended. Our government is constitutional and we did not accept the resignation of our colleagues,” said Siniora. “We have to find a solution by sitting down together, away from tension and confessional incitement.”
The opposition, made up of Shiite and Christian factions, has held demonstrations since Friday outside Siniora’s offices in central Beirut where he and several ministers have been holed up.
Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun has warned that his camp would escalate its street protests if the government failed to accept demands for a national unity cabinet.
“If the prime minister and his camp continue to monopolize power, there will be an escalation of popular pressure,” Aoun told AFP in an interview. 
“We will paralyze the government, we will force it to go into a deep coma.”