SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1232 (98), Friday, December 22, 2006
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TITLE: Zoo’s Goose Is Cooked In Bird 
Flu Flap
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two geese that died in St. Petersburg this month did not die of bird flu as widely reported, scientists have said.
Tests for avian influenza at St. Petersburg’s zoo following the death of the geese proved negative, the zoo’s scientific secretary Galina Afanasiyeva said Thursday in a telephone interview.
Since the death of the geese was first reported in the media on Monday, there has been a series of articles in the local media speculating that an unknown subtype of the bird flu virus was found in five geese at St. Petersburg’s zoo, including the two birds that died earlier this month.
These reports have not been backed by official sources.
The bodies of two dead geese were found at the zoo, which is located in central St. Petersburg, on Dec. 5 and their blood was then sent for tests to several laboratories.
“We have been informed that the zoo is all clear,” Afanasiyeva said, adding that the zoo is fully open to visitors with no restrictions. “One of the geese died of old age and another had another infection that was not Avian Influenza. No further tests are necessary.”
The zoo, one of the oldest in Russia, was closed on Monday and Tuesday but reopened on Wednesday. The zoo’s closure provoked assumptions that it was linked with the death of the geese.
The zoo’s spokeswoman Tatyana Solomatina said the zoo had to close for a routine dispensary check which is held annually but several local media said the closure was due to an emergency inspection and tests as well as personnel vaccination in connection with bird flu.
Natalya Gergilevich, a senior aide to the director of the zoo, said the cages where the dead birds were found have been treated with disinfectant. 
“No additional precautions or security measures were taken,” she said on Thursday. “We followed a normal routine.”
The zoo has more than 800 birds. 
The situation was discussed at City Hall on Tuesday. Yury Andreyev, head of the St. Petersburg Veterinary Board, said the birds had undergone vaccination — their second this year — with a Russian medicine.
Officials attempted to conceal the facts surrounding the case, it emerged Thursday. Gennady Onishchenko, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, told reporters on Monday that no types of bird flu were found in the bodies of dead geese, although according to the zoo the test results were not yet available at that time. St. Petersburg vice-governor Lyudmila Kostkina said Tuesday that the cause of death of the birds remained open to question.  All birds at the zoo were vaccinated against bird flu in April, Solomatina said, adding the zoo has been running a special prevention program since January 2006.
“Every month, we take about forty blood samples from our birds and send them to the laboratories of the St. Petersburg Influenza Research Institute for tests,” the spokeswoman said. “The birds are kept within a relatively safe distance from each other, enough to ensure they are protected from mass infection.”
Afanasiyeva said the media attention had been very stressful.
“I do not understand why they had to make a storm in a teacup,” she said. “But on the other hand it was perhaps good training.”

TITLE: Turkmen President Dies at 66
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — President Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s eccentric and iron-fisted leader who created a lavish cult of personality during two decades of rule over his isolated nation, died Thursday. He was 66.
A terse report from state television said Niyazov died early Thursday of heart failure and showed a black-framed portrait of the man who had ordered citizens to refer to him as “Turkmenbashi” — the Father of All Turkmen. An announcer in a dark suit read a list of the accomplishments of Niyazov, who in life had been treated as a demigod by the state.
The funeral is to be held Sunday in his hometown of Kipchak, where Niyazov built Central Asia’s largest mosque, called “Spirit of Turkmenbashi,” at a reported cost of more than $100 million.
In the capital Ashgabat, dotted by golden statues of Niyazov, liquor stores were ordered closed and workers removed New Year’s trees and other holiday decorations — remnants of Turkmenistan’s days as an outpost of the Soviet Union, which promoted New Years’ celebrations over religious holidays.
Pedestrians appeared quiet and stunned about the death of the man whose musings, in his collected works, were required reading for school children. Most refused to comment to a reporter — a legacy, perhaps, of the government’s efforts to stifle independent expression.
Asked why he was closing his doors, one shop owner said simply: “An order is an order. Turkmenbashi has died.”
Niyazov’s image was immortalized in a 9,700-square-foot carpet titled “The 21st Century: The Epoch of the Great Saparmurat Turkmenbashi.” He also renamed the months of the year, including January after himself and April after his mother.
“What a sorrow has fallen on the Turkmen people,” said one woman, who declined to give her name.
Turkmenistan’s State Security Council named Deputy Prime Minister Kurbanguli Berdymukhamedov the acting president, even though the constitution required Parliament Speaker Overzgeldy Atayev to take over as acting head of state.
The council said the Prosecutor General’s office has opened a criminal investigation against Atayev, making him ineligible to fill in as president. The move could herald a battle for succession between rival groups.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov voiced hope that the transfer of power would take place lawfully. Russia is the sole transit route for Turkmenistan’s vast gas resources, and it would be interested in preserving the status quo.
The security council declared a seven-day national mourning period, urging Turkmenistan’s citizens to “unite for the sake of our homeland’s peace and prosperity.”
Niyazov underwent major heart surgery in Germany in 1997 and last month publicly acknowledged that he had heart disease. But he did not seem seriously ill. Two weeks ago he appeared in public to formally open an amusement park named after him outside the capital.
Niyazov had led the desert nation since 1985, when it was still a Soviet republic. After the 1991 Soviet collapse and independence, he retained control and started to build an elaborate personality cult.
Among Niyazov’s decrees were bans on lip-synching, car radios and the playing of recorded music at weddings. He once ordered doctors to stop taking the Hippocratic Oath and swear allegiance to him instead.
His image was everywhere, including Ashgabat’s central square, where a soaring golden statue rotated so Niyazov’s likeness would always face the sun. He is listed as the author of the “Rukhnama” (Book of the Soul) that was required reading in schools, where children pledged allegiance to him every morning.
Earlier this year, Niyazov announced he would provide citizens with natural gas and power free of charge through 2030.
But he has also tapped the country’s vast energy wealth for outlandish projects — a huge, man-made lake in the Kara Kum desert, a vast cypress forest to change the desert climate, an ice palace outside the capital, a ski resort and a 130-foot pyramid.
Niyazov’s death, after two decades of wielding enormous power, raised concerns about whether political instability would follow.
“His death means a terrible shock for the republic, its residents and the political class,” Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the Moscow-based Politika think tank, told the RIA-Novosti news agency. “It’s comparable to the shock the Soviet Union felt after Stalin’s death.”
The agency also quoted Khudaiberdy Orazov, a leader of Turkmenistan’s hard-pressed opposition, as saying he and other opponents of Niyazov’s regime will meet soon to plan their next moves.
In 2002, an alleged assassination attempt against Niyazov prompted a crackdown, leading to dozens of arrests.
A former foreign minister, Boris Shikhmuradov, was named as the mastermind of the alleged plot and sentenced to life in prison after a Stalinist-style show trial broadcast on TV. During the trial, prosecutors played a tape in which Shikhmuadov confessed he was a drug addict and hired mercenaries for the attack while living in Russia.
Turkmenistan — a majority Muslim country dominated by the vast Kara Kum desert — has the world’s fifth-largest natural gas reserves, but Niyazov failed to convert that wealth into prosperity for his country’s 5 million people.
Niyazov was born Feb. 19, 1940. His father died in World War II and the rest of his family was killed in an earthquake that leveled Ashgabat in 1948. He was raised in an orphanage and later in the home of distant relatives.
He was elected president of the newly independent Turkmenistan in 1992 with a reported 99.5 percent of the vote. In 1994, a reported 99.9 percent of voters supported a referendum allowing him to remain in office for a second five-year term without new elections.
Niyazov effectively became Turkmenistan’s permanent ruler in 1999, after parliament removed all term limits. But an August 2002 gathering of the country’s People’s Council — a hand-picked assembly of Niyazov loyalists — nonetheless went further and endorsed him as president for life.
Under his rule, Turkmenistan adopted a strict policy of neutrality and spurned joining regional security or economic organizations created in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
But he also supported the U.S.-led military operations in neighboring Afghanistan, allowing coalition airplanes to use Turkmen airspace and humanitarian agencies to pass through to deliver aid.

TITLE: Russian Debtors Facing Travel Ban
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Celebrating the New Year in a foreign country is becoming increasingly popular among Petersburgers, but those who purchased their trips instead of settling their debts might have to stay at home for this festive season, according to the city’s branch of the Federal Service of Bailiffs.
“In order not to cast a shadow on your and your relatives’ Christmas holidays, make sure that you settled your alimony payments, repaid damages to those you injured in road traffic accidents, have settled loan payments and housing rent due and paid the neighbors you flooded,” warns the bailiffs service on its web site. 
The service said outstanding payments should be settled by Saturday or debtors will be stopped at the border and their passports will be confiscated. The bailiffs plan to begin sending lists of debtors to the Border Guard starting next Monday. 
Lawyers and human right activists have already expressed their criticism of the initiative and said such actions contradict Russia’s constitution and other laws.
“Firsty, citizens of Russia have an undeniable constitutional right of movement,” wrote Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Tuesday quoting an unnamed source at St. Petersburg’s bar association.
 “Secondly there are [methods], prescribed by legal measures to collect debt such as the imposition of arrest of part of the debtor’s salary, property and so forth… to add the ban on leaving the country to the stipulated legal measures is illegal,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta continued. 
Sofia Dorinsakya, the president of the Moscow-based Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights, was also highly negative in her reaction to the scheme.
“Of course [the move] is illegal. It contradicts all the existing norms and the [Russia’s] constitution,” she told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday.
“The only [lawful] mechanism available to bailiffs is to arrest property and they must act only under their rights,” Dorinskaya said in her telephone interview. 
“There is the law and it should be above all… otherwise we can end up in the situation where they would start cutting the debtors’ legs off to prevent them from running away or would start cutting thieves’ hands off so they can’t steal,” she said. 
Reacting against mass disapproval of their new methods, as widely expressed in the media following the decision, the service issued the note, where it called such criticism “incorrect.”
The note also says that “the ability to temporarily restrict the right of the citizen to leave the Russian Federation in the case of his or her departure from executing the liabilities imposed by the court cannot be considered a violation of constitutional rights as it aims to safeguard  constitutionally-important objectives.”
The service also warns “the most clairvoyant of debtors” that not only will the borders with neighboring Finland  will be closed to them, but so will all borders “from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.”

TITLE: Lavrov Lashes Out at the West
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday blasted Western leaders for criticizing President Vladimir Putin to score points at home and contain Russian power.
Speaking at his traditional, end-of-the-year news conference, Lavrov stressed that Russia’s resurgence to the status of global player would continue and defended Russian policy in the former Soviet Union.
“We very often take into account recommendations when our partners pose concrete questions that are rooted in the conviction that we have something wrong somewhere, or when these questions are posed with an eye toward helping us correct ourselves in the international arena or domestically,” Lavrov told reporters at the Foreign Ministry’s offices in central Moscow.
The foreign minister cited the Council of Europe as an organization that has had a meaningful impact on Russian lawmaking.
He was referring to consultations between Russian officials and the council’s Legal Affairs Directorate and the Office of the Commissioner of Human Rights with regard to Russia’s nongovernmental organizations bill. The NGO bill has since become law.
While welcoming such outside help, Russia has no patience for the angry, anti-Kremlin mass-media campaigns and rallies that often take place in Western countries shortly before Putin is scheduled to arrive for a visit, Lavrov said.
Lavrov said such criticism — for example, that surrounding the murder of former Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko — was not aimed to help Russia but to play to domestic audiences.
Western media coverage of the Litvinenko case, he said, “has demonstrated the ability of the mass media to talk about anything.” He added that “one can observe an unquestionable desire to paint an image of Russia in dark hues.”
Lavrov linked criticism of Russia with Western recognition that Russia was growing in power. “Competitors always wish ... to weaken their competitor-partners somehow,” he said.
In a separate interview, Lavrov said some Western powers are stuck in a Cold War mindset. He added that the United States’ unilateral use of force had reached its limits. The interview, with Interfax, was posted on the Foreign Ministry’s web site Wednesday.
Lavrov’s comments came days after senior European officials questioned the Kremlin’s commitment to democracy.
Russia “isn’t really a democratic system as we understand it here” in Europe, Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht was reported to have said late last week.
Belgium is the outgoing chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
De Gucht also tied Russia’s handling of the so-called frozen conflicts in South Ossetia and Transdnestr to a national inability to get over the collapse of the Soviet Union. South Ossetia and Transdnestr are breakaway provinces; the former is in Georgia, while the latter is in Moldova.
De Gucht was echoed by Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, who expressed serious doubts this week about the direction Russia was moving in. Finland is the current president of the European Union.

TITLE: Abramovich Tenders His Governorship Resignation
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky and Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire mogul Roman Abramovich on Wednesday asked President Vladimir Putin for permission to resign as governor of the polar Chukotka region.
Abramovich, the richest man from Russia, believes he has done everything he can to help the barren peninsula, said his spokesman, John Mann.
Putin has yet to give a formal reply, the Kremlin said on its web site. Abramovich is the first appointed governor to ask to step down.
Mann portrayed Abramovich as a “crisis manager” who had turned things around in Chukotka and now wanted out.
Abramovich first visited Chukotka when he campaigned for a seat in the State Duma in 1999. He won that race. “He came out, ... saw people starving and wanted to help,” Mann said.
Today, Mann said: “People live there on a par with the better regions in Russia, the infrastructure is in place, housing is renovated, schools and hospitals work and the economy is in good shape.”
Abramovich, who invested hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into Chukotka, is serving his second five-year term as the region’s governor. He was first elected to the post in 2000, and Putin reappointed him in October 2005.
This is a good time to step down, Mann said, because next year’s budget has been approved.
Abramovich will still run his two charity funds in Chukotka, Mann said.
Asked whether being governor of Chukotka had been a considerable financial burden for Abramovich, Mann chuckled. “That’s the most stupid thing I heard today,” he said.
Abramovich asked to step down at a meeting with Putin in the Kremlin, the Kremlin web site said. “Putin highly appreciated” the work Abramovich had done in the region, the Kremlin statement said.
Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky said Abramovich had wanted to quit ever since selling his oil company, Sibneft, in 2005.
Valery Khomyakov, an analyst at the Council on National Strategy, a think tank, hypothesized that Abramovich was simply tired of being governor. “I feel sorry for Chukotka residents,” Khomyakov said. “They consider him a god.”
Abramovich could need more time to dedicate to football and his business interests, Khomyakov said. Abramovich owns the English football club Chelsea.
One of his latest ventures has involved the steelmaker Evraz Group. Abramovich, through his investment vehicle, Millhouse, has a 41 percent stake in the company.
Evraz is in the process of buying U.S.-based Oregon Steel; Oregon Steel’s board of directors agreed Nov. 20 to be sold for $2.3 billion.
But before the deal can go through, the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment will reportedly examine Abramovich’s ties to the Kremlin.
Millhouse has denied any links between Abramovich and the Kremlin.
Appearances aside, Abramovich is trying to sever his ties to Russian officials, said Sergei Mitrokhin, a leader of the liberal Yabloko Party.
Those connections, Mitrokhin said, “used to be a source of wealth, but now they are a source of his problems in the West.”
Political analyst Sergei Markov, who is close to the Kremlin, said Abramovich was simply following the latest trend in Kremlin policymaking: creating big companies that can compete on the world stage.
“He will be creating a world leader in metallurgy,” he said, referring to Evraz. “He needs to spend a lot of time and money on this.”
Abramovich’s life after politics will actually be more political, Markov said. “Chukotka was not politics. It was social welfare. The building of a major metallurgical company is politics,” he said.
Staying out of politics — at least overtly — is a good idea until the 2007 State Duma elections and the 2008 presidential election are over, said Roland Nash, chief strategist at the investment bank Renaissance Capital.
In addition to Chelsea, Abramovich spends money on football in Russia.
As chairman and financier of the National Football Academy, he is reportedly funding the construction of a $40 million training center near Moscow for the national football team.
The Russian edition of Forbes magazine said earlier this year that Abramovich was worth $18.3 billion.
 Valentina Matviyenko, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin, was appointed Wednesday as St. Petersburg’s governor for another five years. As governor, Matviyenko has sought to boost the city’s commercial and political clout.

TITLE: HIV Policy Changes Lambasted
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — HIV activists are accusing the Health and Social Development Ministry of endangering the lives of tens of thousands of infected Russians by altering the list of anti-retroviral drugs the government plans to buy next year.
The activists say government officials surreptitiously replaced cheaper, more effective drugs with more expensive, less effective medications. A State Duma deputy has suggested that a backroom deal may be behind the changes.
In a Nov. 21 decree, the health ministry replaced some of the so-called first-line drugs — for patients who have not been undergoing treatment for very long — with third- and fourth-line drugs designed for patients who have had the virus for years and built up resistance to other medications.
Activists say this change will jeopardize the lives of the 30,000 HIV patients slated for treatment.
Curiously, the decree was issued quietly, months after health officials and activists from the Federal AIDS Center worked jointly on a standard therapy regime for HIV patients, said the center’s head, Vadim Pokrovsky.
“I didn’t even find out about it until three weeks after it was issued,” Pokrovsky said Wednesday. “We worked closely with them on standards approved in August. It was clear that a bureaucrat with no understanding of medical treatment for people with HIV and AIDS issued this decree.”
Adding an element of suspicion to the whole flap has been a reported upcoming government tender for HIV drugs. The head of the State Duma’s anti-corruption committee has promised to investigate possible malfeasance at the health ministry, which has been engulfed in scandals in recent months.
Mikhail Grishankov, the anti-corruption committee chairman, told Kommersant he had reason to believe that the decree was issued “in the interest of specific companies.” He did not elaborate.
One of the drugs at the heart of the dispute is the protease inhibitor darunavir, sold as Prezista, which was not among the drugs approved in August but suddenly appeared in last month’s decree. AIDS experts consider the drug too expensive and ill-suited to Russian HIV patients.
According to the decree, the government plans to buy Prezista, which is produced in Russia by Makiz-Pharma, for an estimated 3,000 patients next year.

TITLE: Gambling Bill Passes Reading
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — A bill that would close most casinos and slot-machine halls in the country — including Moscow and St. Petersburg — cleared a third and final reading Wednesday in the State Duma.
To become law, the bill still needs the approval of the Federation Council and of President Vladimir Putin, who submitted the draft in October.
The bill received the support of 428 out of 450 deputies, indicating that the law is certain to be adopted.
The bill calls for the creation of four zones for legal gambling — the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, the Primorsky region on the Pacific coast, the Siberian region of Altai and the southern Krasnodar-Rostov area.
Casinos and slot-machine operations elsewhere in the country would be banned as of July 1, 2009.
Gambling experts have have voiced doubts that the areas will be able to draw enough visitors to make gambling viable there.
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: Dymov Unveils Plans For New Oil Terminal
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new Russian oil terminal is to be built in the Leningrad Oblast by the end of 2008, developer Northwest Alliance announced at a press conference on Tuesday. The company said that it had completed the exploration phase of the $40 million project and had begun planning the sea terminal on a 1,254 hectare site near the village of Vistino in Kingisepp region on the south coast of the Finnish Gulf.  
“This project is commercial and not state-supported. At the moment, it is being financed only by Northwestern Alliance. However, we need to make it transparent and available for bidding by the foreign companies,”  Northwestern Alliance chief executive officer Alexander Dymov said. He also said that the company had signed the engagement agreements for the project’s financing with German and Dutch banks as well as institutional investors. He did not want to reveal their names.
The terminal operator, said to be Scandinavian, was also not identified at Tuesday’s new conference.
According to Dymov, Northwestern Alliance has already made the preliminary arrangements with several Russian oil companies, such as TNK-BP, Sibneft, AssoNeft and Gazprom Neft, which are interested in oil reloading at the Vistino terminal. 
“I am sure we will not have a lack of potential clients. Now, demand for reloading at Vistino is half as much again the supply,” he said.
The new terminal is planned to provide the reloading of 10-18 million tons of oil a year. The project also includes the multifunctional use of the terminal that involves the reloading from shipping to rail. 
Up to 7,000 people are planned to work at the terminal. 
However the population of the village of Vistino is just 500 people, most of whom, Dymov said, are disabled. Therefore the operator will recruit qualified personnel from the nearby town of Kingisepp and St. Petersburg.
“The new terminal will not only give new working positions to local citizens, but will also contribute to the development of Vistino’s infrastructure,” said Dymov. 
The location of the terminal on the eastern coast of Luga Bay was chosen due to its suitable natural depth of 25-30 meters which makes it possible for heavy displacement tankers of up to 150,000 tons enter the terminal, Northwestern Alliance Andrei Pchelkin said
Among the other advantages of the location Dymov mentioned was its distance from downtown St. Petersburg. 
“Nowadays, it is neither strategically, nor ecologically good to have an oil-reloading terminal in the center of a city,” he said. 
As for the general environmental damage that the construction of the new oil terminal causes, Pchelkin said that the project meets all compliance requirements and compensation will be paid to citizens of Vistino for environmental damage
Vistino residents will be asked for their approval of the plan to build the terminal at a meeting on Saturday.
The complex would be Russia’s fifth port on the Baltic Sea, after those in Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Primorsk and Visotsk. Their combined capacity is less than a quarter of the capacity of the nine Baltic sea ports that were operated by the Soviet Union before it collapsed. 
GT Morstroy, the contractor, is planning to finish the design of the terminal by March.

TITLE: Ban on EU Meat Imports Averted
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia agreed Tuesday to keep European Union meat flowing into the country after long threatening to ban imports from the trade bloc — at the expense of two soon-to-be EU members.
The deal, which was hammered out by Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev and Markos Kyprianou, the European Union’s health and consumer protection commissioner, stipulates that meat from Bulgaria and Romania will not be part of EU imports.
It also narrowly averts a cessation of the flow of meat from the EU to Russia. Russia had threatened to impose a ban on EU meat starting Jan. 1, when Bulgaria and Romania are slated to join the EU.
Russian officials had voiced fears that meat coming from Bulgaria and Romania, both former communist states that had been Soviet satellites, was contaminated.
The announcement that a deal had been reached came at a news conference that followed a meeting in Moscow attended by Gordeyev, Kyprianou and Sergei Dankvert, head of the Federal Service for Veterinarian and Vegetarian Sanitary Supervision.
“Considering that the EU and Russia have similarly high standards in product safety and veterinary well-being, we accept the fact that the banned meat will not come into Russia through third countries that are European Union members,” Gordeyev said.
That additional provision means Russia expects that EU members besides Bulgaria and Romania will not import meat from those two countries and then sell that meat to Russia.
Kyprianou said of the agreement: “The aim was to reduce and minimize any possible risk and to provide for uninterrupted trade between Russia and the European Union. The result sends a positive signal to Russian and European meat producers and consumers.”
Moscow also refuses to end a year-old ban on meat imports from Poland, also an EU member. Kyprianou said the Polish ban did not come up at Tuesday’s meeting. That issue, he said, “is still on the table.”
The ban on EU meat, dairy and fish imports would have interrupted $2.25 billion in annual trade, according to European Commission figures.

TITLE: Bank Rossiya Buys Stake in Ren-TV Station
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — IK Abros, an affiliate of Bank Rossiya, which has ties to President Vladimir Putin, has bought a stake in Ren-TV.
While it is unclear how many shares Abros has acquired, the stake was big enough to get Abros representative Lyubov Sovershayeva the chairmanship of Ren-TV’s board of directors.
Yury Kovachuk, chairman of St. Petersburg-based Bank Rossiya, is a close friend of Putin.
Ren-TV shareholders announced a new board of directors Monday, the television station said in a statement.
Sovershayeva worked on St. Petersburg’s city property committee in the early 1990s, when Putin was serving as the city’s deputy mayor, Kommersant reported Tuesday.
There had been only three shareholders in Ren-TV: two Russian and one German.
It was unclear Tuesday which Ren-TV shareholder — steelmaker Severstal or oil producer Surgutneftegaz — had sold its stock to Abros. Severstal declined to comment; representatives for Surgutneftegaz could not be reached.
Alexei Germanovich, Severstal’s representative on Ren-TV’s board, was chairman of the board until Monday. Severstal and Surgutneftegaz each had owned 35 percent of Ren-TV.
Ren-TV’s foreign shareholder, RTL Group, said the company retained its 30 percent stake, Kommersant reported. With 39 television channels and 33 radio stations in 11 countries, RTL Group is the No. 1 media company in Europe, according to the firm’s web site.
Abros also owns more than 38 percent of the television company Petersburg, which is based in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Putin Approves  Budget
TEXT: MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday approved the 2007 budget, which assumes world oil prices will remain high in an election year and foresees a 25 percent spending increase, the Kremlin said.
The budget predicts revenues of 6.97 trillion rubles ($263 billion) and anticipates a budget surplus of 1.5 trillion rubles, or 4.8 percent of gross domestic product. Spending is earmarked at 5.46 trillion rubles, up 25 percent from 2006.

TITLE: $30Bln Auto Demand
TEXT: MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russians will spend $30 billion on cars this year, triple the amount five years ago.
Russians are expected to buy 2 million cars this year, spending as much as $30 billion, according to preliminary estimates by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. 
Sales of foreign models will reach 1 million, up from 128,000 in 2002, Pricewaterhouse said Tuesday in forecasts for the sector.

TITLE: Rosneft: No Share Sale
TEXT: MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Rosneft does not plan to sell more shares to the public because it does not need the money and has not begun assessing Yukos’ assets, Interfax reported Tuesday, citing company CEO Sergei Bogdanchikov.
Talk of a new share sale is premature, and it is not clear why one would be needed, Bogdanchikov told reporters Tuesday.

TITLE: Norilsk Share Issues
TEXT: MOSCOW (REUTERS) — The world’s top nickel producer, Norilsk Nickel, said Tuesday that two issues of its shares had been consolidated to ease investors’ dealings in its stock.
“We initiated the consolidation because the circulation of two share issues had caused difficulties for market players,” the company quoted head of investor relations Dmitry Usanov as saying in a statement.

TITLE: Capital Inflows $30Bln?
TEXT: MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Net capital inflow into the country may exceed $30 billion this year, Interfax said, citing Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov.
Zhukov, who was speaking at the State Duma, also said foreign investment had grown 12.9 percent in the first 11 months, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Shell to Cash In Half Stake, Stay Operator
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Shell is due to sell half of its 55 percent stake in Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom for cash, a source close to the talks said Wednesday, in an imminent deal that looks likely to be a significant setback to the oil major.
The project’s three shareholders will each give up one-half of their holdings to hand Gazprom a controlling stake, the source said, citing part of the proposed deal finalized last week.
Project operator Shell would then have a stake of 27.5 percent, while Mitsui would reduce its stake to 12.5 percent from 25 percent and Mitsubishi to 10 percent from 20 percent. Gazprom would need just 50 percent plus one share to take control.
Shell has long been angling for an asset swap with Gazprom, and would be dealt a harsh blow if forced to settle for cash only, analysts said.
But the deal would not give Shell any guarantee that it would be invited to develop future projects with Gazprom, the source said.
“There is a consideration of future cooperation,” the source said. “It is an expression of goodwill.
“I wouldn’t say it was a promise,” the source said, adding that any talk of future cooperation in the deal would be nonbinding.
Deputy Industry and Energy Minister Andrei Dementyev on Wednesday confirmed that gazprom would pay for its stake in cash.
Under the proposed deal, Shell would remain the project operator, even though its controlling stake would be heavily reduced, the source said. Sakhalin-2 is the world’s largest liquefied natural gas, or LNG, project. Gazprom has no experience producing LNG.
The state-run gas giant has also said it would develop Shtokman on its own. The huge Arctic gas field is also due to produce LNG, and Shell has said it would be interested in participating.
The source said the information came from a document finalized last week that is part of the deal. Talks between Shell and Gazprom have stalled over varying valuations of Sakhalin-2.

TITLE: Bank Austria to Purchase Aton
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — UniCredit’s Eastern European arm, Bank Austria, is to buy Aton brokerage for $424 million, Bank Austria said Wednesday.
The acquisition will include the equity, fixed-income and corporate-finance divisions of Aton Capital Group, Milan-based UniCredit said in a stock exchange statement Wednesday. Aton’s discount brokerage and asset-management businesses are not part of the transaction.
“Aton’s capital markets franchise will enhance our already strong banking presence in Russia,” Willi Hemetsberger, head of global markets of UniCredit Markets & Investment Banking, said in a statement.
UniCredit already has 79.3 percent of International Moscow Bank, or IMB, and agreed to buy another 16 percent stake earlier this month.
“Together with IMB we have now a powerful platform to serve our global and Russian customers,” Hemetsberger said.
Aton had earlier been courted by investment bank Goldman Sachs but negotiations produced nothing.
“We were flattered by their attention but we had to see the synergy potential and CA IB is very similar to Aton in what it does. Aton management saw more potential in a deal with CA IB,” said Steven Dashevsky, Aton’s managing director.
Aton’s CEO Alexander Kandel earlier forecast 2006 revenues for Aton Broker, the main part of the deal, at no less than $100 million and operating profit at no less than $50 million.
“Our full-year results will be in line with this forecast,” Kandel said.
The Italian lender wants to win more investment banking clients by also focusing on Eastern Europe.
“Russia has interesting prospects, especially considering the growth in the equity market,” said Simone Freschi, a stock and derivatives trader at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. “It’s the right move.”
(Bloomberg, Reuters)

TITLE: Russia Blows Hot and Cold on Gas Costs
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — While Russia offered concessions Wednesday in its gas pricing standoff with Belarus and Moldova, which may soothe Europe’s fears that it could again face reduced gas supplies in the middle of winter, it appeared determined to pursue its hard line with Georgia.
The Russian ambassador in Minsk, Alexander Surikov, said Moscow was ready to pay more for Belarussian gas pipelines and to continue to sell tax-free oil as part of a broader deal to secure stable gas sales at higher prices.
“Russia will cut the gas price for Belarus to $140 per 1,000 cubic meters from the earlier proposed $200 if a deal is reached with [state gas firm] Beltransgaz,” Surikov told reporters.
Surikov said Russia agreed Beltransgaz might be worth from $3 billion to $4 billion, up from the $1 billion at which it had assessed its value earlier.
However, Belarus rejected Russian demands that it pay from $130 to $140 per 1,000 cubic meters for natural gas supplies, as the well as the estimate of the value of its pipelines. Belarus says Beltransgaz is worth $5 billion, said Belarus’ Finance Minister Nikolai Korbut.
Belarus will pay less than $130, Interfax reported, citing Belarussian First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Semashko in Minsk on Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, Moldova clinched a deal with Gazprom on a small increase in gas prices next year, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin said.
Voronin said Moldova would pay $170 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas next year compared with $160 this year, adding that gradual increases were also possible in the future.
“The price will grow slowly, not sharply, every year. The price will grow within the next five years until it reaches the European level,” Voronin told a news conference in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.
Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest countries, was hit hard this year when Russia doubled gas prices and banned Moldovan wine imports. Some analysts accused Russia of seeking to punish Voronin, who has announced his intention to move his country out of the Kremlin orbit.
Relations between Moscow and Chisinau have warmed up in the past months, and Voronin managed to agree on a partial restart of Moldovan wine imports during his recent visit to Russia.
Meanwhile, Gazprom on Wednesday set the price of natural gas exports to Georgia at $235 per 1,000 cubic meters, an increase on the current $110, and threatened to cut off supplies if that price was not accepted, officials said.
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said the company had sent a letter to Georgian authorities asking them to come up with a final amount of gas they want to receive next year at the proposed price, or risk receiving no gas at all. 
(Reuters, Bloomberg, AP)

TITLE: Finance Minister Criticizes State Monetary Police for ’06
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The high pace of the ruble’s real appreciation is the main flop of the country’s economic policy in 2006, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said in an interview published Tuesday.
“The failure is the very high rate of ruble appreciation,” Kudrin told Vremya Novostei in response to a question on what was this year’s main economic policy failure.
“Such high appreciation rates can be tolerated for, say, one year, but not two to three years in a row. If the national currency strengthens by 50 percent in 5 years, it is a serious blow for the economy,” Kudrin said.
The ruble has appreciated by 8.3 percent in real terms against the basket of currencies of the country’s trading partners since the start of the year. It was also up by 9.23 percent in nominal terms against the dollar in 2006.
The country is set to hit its full-year 2006 inflation target of 9 percent, the first single-digit inflation rate since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will also post higher-than-expected rates of economic growth and investment.
But lower inflation comes at a cost of accelerated ruble appreciation. Kudrin is one of the most prominent opponents of the appreciation policy the Central Bank uses to fight inflation.
The Central Bank controls the ruble exchange rate by buying up mainly dollar-denominated oil and gas export revenues. A stronger ruble makes imports cheaper but hurts exporters.
The Central Bank has let the ruble appreciate by 4.29 percent in small moves throughout the year against a dollar-euro currency basket it uses to guide its exchange rate policy.
It argues a stronger ruble also makes imported machinery and technology cheaper and helps domestic manufacturers.
(Reuters, SPT)

TITLE: Give the Pragmatists a Chance
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Trenin and Tedo Japaridze
TEXT: Last month, President Vladimir Putin and his Georgian counterpart, Mikheil Saakashvili, were due to meet on the margins of the CIS summit in Minsk. They exchanged a few words but never sat down for a serious talk. Meanwhile, relations between Georgia and Russia continue to be in a danger zone. If the current situation is allowed to fester, the risk is that some hotheads might turn a diplomatic spat into a shooting war. Should bullets start flying, things would probably soon get out of hand. The conflict would no longer be about Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, or even about Georgia and Russia. The ensuing crisis would have the most negative repercussions for the Caucasus — both south and north — and for Russia’s relations with the West. This is surely enough to worry about.
In the run-up to the Minsk summit, Moscow and Tbilisi took a few steps away from the abyss. Putin publicly supported Georgia’s territorial integrity and refused to recognize the independence referendum in South Ossetia, while Saakashvili replaced a hawkish Cabinet minister who had vowed to bring South Ossetia back into the fold before the year’s end. Good, but hardly sufficient. To build firewalls against further deterioration, both sides must stop playing debilitating patriots’ games. Hardheaded pragmatists should replace propagandists and be told to reinject a modicum of civility into a relationship that has hit an all-time low.
Two fairly urgent items on the agenda are Russia’s de facto trade and transportation boycott of Georgia, and Georgia’s objections to Russia’s World Trade Organization entry. As the recent example of Moldova demonstrates, these knots can be untied more or less independently of other issues. Surely Moscow does not want to be shut out of the world trade body by Tbilisi.
Another item is confidence building in the areas of conflict, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. All those with forces on the ground must make sure that the situation there remains calm, nonthreatening and well-monitored. There is little likelihood of the resumption of hostilities over the winter, but it is necessary to exclude unwelcome surprises when spring comes.
An even more important step toward building confidence would be if Moscow came to terms with the political realities in Georgia. The notion of a regime change in Georgia should be abolished as a chimera. It looks like Putin will have to deal with Saakashvili for the next two years, and even when presidents change on either or both sides, the Georgian political universe is unlikely to be altered. In the foreseeable future, for the bulk of the Georgian elite the sun will be rising in the west, rather than the north.
This raises the issue of Georgia’s bid to join NATO. The next Atlantic Alliance summit that can decide on the matter is less than two years away. Georgia may or may not be brought into NATO alongside three Balkan states — Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. Russia will be unable to block Georgia’s membership by simply opposing it. 
To make a more powerful statement, it would have to rake the embers of the conflicts and basically threaten war to keep NATO at bay. This would be playing with fire.
A more enlightened tack would be for Russia to change its overall approach to the frozen conflicts. Instead of clinging to the status quo in the zones of conflict in Georgia, Moscow needs to exercise leadership in helping resolve those standoffs, without prejudice to their outcome. Russia would thus help buttress stability and build prosperity on both sides of the Caucasus range. As a result, Russia would also acquire a much friendlier neighborhood along its southern border.
Just as the Georgian elites marvel about the West, they also need to realize that Russia continues to be their biggest neighbor. Brinkmanship is a poor policy recipe in general, and an entirely disastrous one when it comes to reintegrating the lands lost. On the contrary, focusing on domestic development — economic, social and administrative — would bring Georgia respect and recognition in the neighborhood and beyond. Tbilisi has made a few steps in that direction, but it needs to do much, much more.
2006 has been the worst year in modern Russian-Georgian relations. As Putin and Saakashvili prepare to see in the new year, each might spend a minute focusing on the painful lessons of the near-collision and make a resolution to banish that risk in 2007.

Tedo Japaridze, a former Georgian foreign minister, was national security adviser to former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. Dmitry Trenin is deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: New Year, New Image — in 2008
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Not long ago, a high-ranking Kremlin official admitted to close associates that the country’s main goal in 2007 would be to “correct Russia’s image abroad at least a little bit.” Russia’s image abroad has clearly deteriorated over the year, despite its chairmanship of the Group of Eight and the establishment of Russia Today television, the English-language channel aimed at improving foreign impressions of the country. Attention today continues to focus on the perception that Russia is using its energy resources as a political weapon and on the poisoning death of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko.
The Litvinenko case has been splashed across the pages of European newspapers for the last month and a half, generally focusing on the possibility that the Kremlin had him murdered. The degree to which Russian coverage has differed from that in the West underscores the huge political chasm separating Russia from the West today.
The Western take on the Litvinenko case is fairly consistent and simple: Litvinenko was an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin’s regime and a friend of Putin’s enemy, self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko feared for his life and, in a note written just before he died, said that Putin had ordered his murder. The polonium-210 that poisoned Litvinenko was traced to Moscow, and appears to have been carried by one of his business partners, all of whom are former KGB and Federal Security Service officers. Readers aren’t left with much doubt that the Kremlin really did order Litvinenko’s murder and Putin’s regime is becoming totally discredited in their eyes. Proclaiming a global power doctrine is one thing, but a head of state being involved in such a sordid criminal affair is something else altogether.
A different version of events has emerged in Russian coverage. Here, Litvinenko was not significant enough for Moscow to have ordered his murder. His associates, such as Berezovsky, were questionable figures, and he may even have been providing smuggled radioactive materials to terrorists.
One major pro-Kremlin newspaper suggested that Litvinenko and his associates were carrying contraband nuclear materials at Berezovsky’s bidding. During one delivery Litvinenko accidentally received a lethal dose of radiation, and in a panic ran to Berezovsky, who suggested that Litvinenko ingest some of the polonium-210 so that his death, already a certainty, could be pinned on the Kremlin. In this version, the source of the polonium-210 was Leonid Nevzlin, the former Yukos major shareholder currently hiding in Israel from the Russian prosecutor general.
Dmitry Kovtun — who has been linked to early traces of polonium-210 in Hamburg — has been suggested by one side as the person who poisoned Litvinenko and by the other as another victim of an attempt to discredit Putin.
What is most lamentable here is that neither side is seems willing to be candid with the other as they conduct independent investigations and use the case as a propaganda weapon. The West is looking to implicate the KGB in the affair and undermine Putin. Moscow agreed to let Scotland Yard investigators come to Russia, apparently to allow itself to demand the right to interrogate Berezovsky in London in return. Meanwhile nobody has made any attempt to find traces of polonium-210 in Moscow, despite the fact that Kovtun flew to Europe from Moscow.
One thing is clear: No matter what the investigations ultimately turn up, it will be difficult for Moscow and the West to emerge from this scandal on good terms.
Which brings us back to the question of improving Russia’s image in 2007. Not much hope now.
When he came to power six years ago, the big question in the West was: “Who is Putin?” Now that the West appears to have found its answer, we’ll have to wait until 2008 — and for Putin’s successor — to try to work again with a clean slate.

Georgy Bovt is editor of Profil magazine.

TITLE: Eye to eye
AUTHOR: By Matthew Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One is 23 years old and from Dresden. The other is 80 years old and from St. Petersburg. Together they have formed an unusual bond that stretches across nations and generations.
When director Erik Lemke was looking for the subject of the film he was making as part of his studies in documentary cinema at the St. Petersburg Institute of Film and Television, he needed to look no further than the walls of the apartment he was living in at the time. 
There, his landlord had hung a series of paintings — workmanlike oils in the chocolate box style of late 19th century Russian landscape painters — which, the landlord explained, had been bought directly from the artist, who was an acquaintance. 
Lemke later met the artist, Sergei Kyut, and the idea of a film portrait of the painter emerged.
“In [Dmitry] Sidorov’s class [a noted documentary filmmaker and teacher] we were asked to make a film portrait of any subject,” said Lemke. “So when I met Sergei Sergeiyevich and heard his story, I decided he would make an intriguing subject.”
The 20-minute film, simply called “Kyut,” premiered on Tuesday at the Russian-German Exchange, a cultural and educational non-governmental organization which fosters links between Russia and Germany.
In the first part of the film, Lemke films Kyut’s collectors — including his former landlord — talking about the works they have bought and their feelings about the painter. In the film, collector Natalya talks about a small landscape on her living room wall. 
“Many art lovers might think that this is a copy of [19th-century Russian master Isaak] Levitan. And, anyway, I can understand them,” Natalya says to the camera.
The second part of the film shows the painter, who is sadly losing his sight to glaucoma and cataracts, attempting to paint and visiting an eye doctor. Throughout the film, decades-old 8-millimeter footage of flowers and landscapes — shot by Kyut himself — offers a bright and nostalgic counterpoint to the elderly Kyut’s decline.
During filming over six months, the filmmaker and his subject struck up a friendship through both men’s fascination with images. 
Lemke grew up in Dresden, East Germany, where he learned to speak Russian. He said he decided to take up the chance to study at the St. Petersburg film school thanks to its excellent reputation for teaching documentary film making. On the other hand, Kyut’s early life was spent fighting Germans as a tank operator during World War II. Lemke said that when this subject came up in conversation, the two men realized they shared no wish to rehash it.
Kyut later worked as an official artist for various factories in post-war Leningrad but considers himself first and foremost a painter, although at Tuesday’s presentation of the film about him he acknowledged the modest scale of his career. He also painted placards for the Central Naval Museum featuring Soviet propaganda. Lemke said that he also recognized the limits of Kyut’s work — now flower paintings and pastoral landscapes — so it was the passion of his collectors that became a focus of his short film. 
“All of them have different relationships with the paintings they collect. It is like a dialogue between them, the painting and the artist,” Lemke said. “That is what I realized I wanted to capture in my film.”
As well as Natalya, and ex-landlord Alexander, the film also draws on the views of Marina. Strangely, the three collectors are competitive and dismiss each other’s taste. At the climax of the film, Lemke manages to get the three to visit Kyut in his apartment. Like much of the film, the sequence is accompanied with a piano soundtrack of works by 19th-century French composer Claude Debussy — a reference to Impressionist idiom that inspires Kyut.
But Kyut recalled a more direct link to the influential art of the 19th century.
When he was Lemke’s age, Kyut said was acquainted with an artist 50 or 60 years his senior — who had studied in France before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
“When I was working at the Naval Museum [in the 1950s] I met this old man,” Kyut said. “He was Vladislav Matyevich Ismailovich and he had studied with the Barbizon School near Paris.”
The Barbizon school, which was active from about 1830 to 1870, was named after the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau, where a group of naturalistic landscape painters — led by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Jean-Francois Millet and Charles-Francois Daubigny — met to paint and discuss their ideas.
The group attracted artists from around Europe who went to Barbizon to study — including Ismailovich.
“Vladislav Matveyich gave me paints and canvass he had used before the Revolution,” Kyut said, adding that such materials were scarce in the Soviet Union. 
Ismailovich became Kyut’s mentor, he said.
On Tuesday, Kyut said he appreciated the friendship he now shares with “young Erik” and that it brought him much support during the problems he is having with his failing eyesight.
“I wish him a great career,” the painter said in remarks to the 40 or so film fans who came to see “Kyut.”

TITLE: In the Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: If leopard-skin print had a spiritual home, it would probably be the Kremlin Palace concert hall, an endearingly unfashionable place where middle-aged people go to watch middle-aged singers whom they have seen on television. And that’s what I did earlier this month to see Channel One filming its annual New Year’s concert. 
Stop reading now if you still believe in Ded Moroz, but unfortunately, those partying celebrities who wish you Happy New Year from the screen are doing it in early December. After all, they’ve got oligarchs to visit on the night itself.
Every year, Channel One wheels out two gala concerts for New Year’s. One is called “Old Songs About the Main Thing,” and the other is called “New Songs About the Main Thing.” It may be clearer in Russian, but I’m still not sure what the main thing is. 
The format is a bit like Eurovision, as two hosts, singers Iosif Kobzon and Larisa Dolina, introduce each act and engage in banter. It would have been nice to have a summing up at the end — “Kristina Orbakaite: nul points” — though most of the singers didn’t overstretch their vocal chords, and I’ve never seen so many unplugged electric guitars.
The singing had mainly been pre-recorded, but at least the live audience got to see some missed cues and comedy falls that will be cut out of the final broadcast. 
Concerts like this are also shown on professional holidays such as Traffic Policeman’s Day, when Russians frolic in front of their televisions. Or something like that. In any case, it is certainly a cheap way to fill the prime-time schedules, so it seems a bit cheeky that the live audience for the New Year’s show has to pay. The traffic policeman’s concert is probably an invitation-only thing, since people usually pay not to see them.
I hoped that when Valery Leontyev came on stage, it would all fall into place. The Kremlin Palace is the perfect backdrop for this incredibly kitsch but strangely passionate singer who is always a highlight of these concerts. Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote that his wife works as a dog hairdresser in Miami, which may explain his crispy perm — a brave choice for a man in his 50s.
Leontyev did get a good cheer, and I think he was really singing, but by that point I had almost lost the will to live. Singers such as Anita Tsoi, whose husband is Yury Luzhkov’s press secretary, can have that effect — in her case, perhaps because her hobby is keeping sheep, making her the Marie Antoinette of the Moscow region. 
The best bit will not be shown on television. Kobzon had to announce a band. Suddenly he said that he’d forgotten his script. He looked around at the band, then Dolina looked around at the band. That didn’t help. Poor old Chelsea, as the blond boy band turned out to be called. What a blow, after they’d taken all that trouble with their hair.
Sergey Chernov is on vacation.

TITLE: Blast from the past
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A mostly geriatric crowd of about 500 fellow travelers gathered Tuesday evening at the Moscow Electric Lamp Factory’s House of Culture to honor Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s 100th birthday. 
The evening featured Soviet propaganda — a 1976 film documenting the achievements of the Soviet leader that included applause-inducing footage of Brezhnev with cosmonaut Yury Gagarin — and speeches by Communist stalwarts Yegor Ligachyov and Gennady Zyuganov.
Ligachyov served as a regional Communist Party boss under Brezhnev before he joined the Politburo. Zyuganov heads the current Communist Party.
Ligachyov praised Brezhnev’s ability to solve many of the country’s problems without destroying the Soviet system and chided the “traitors” behind perestroika.
“The party under Leonid Ilyich was able to fix the mistakes of the past without tearing our country apart,” Ligachyov said.
Many in attendance at Tuesday’s celebration fondly recalled the days of Brezhnev, known alternately as a period of stability or stagnation.
“People lived much better back then,” said Viktor Tolstykh, 60, a driver who turned up to pay his respects. “Back then, I earned 129 rubles per month. I could go to a sanatorium on that money and still have some left over for myself.”
Not everyone at the event was enamored of Brezhnev, however.
Margarita Gorashkova, 70, said that for her the Brezhnev period was one of “temporary retreat” on the road to communism.
“Brezhnev did not understand the tenets of Marxism well enough,” Gorashkova, a retired nurse and programmer, said in the foyer of the House of Culture, where she was selling books on Marxism. 
“But it was only a temporary retreat,” she promised. “Socialism will still triumph.”
Gorashkova said Brezhnev was perhaps too kindly to run a superpower. Still, she said, she lived better back then than she does today.
“I had an apartment that the Soviet government gave me, I earned three university degrees for free, and I had free medical care,” Gorashkova said. “And every year I could go on vacation down south with my daughter. Our money went further back then.”
The setting for the Brezhnev tribute was fitting — a dusty testament to proletarian industriousness in the working-class stronghold of eastern Moscow. 
The 100th anniversary of Brezhnev’s birth went largely unnoticed outside the House of Culture. No political heavyweights — with the exception of Boris Gryzlov, head of the new party of power, United Russia — attended the event. 
Gryzlov offered vague remarks on Brezhnev’s 18-year tenure, which began in 1964 and ended with his death in 1982. “It was, perhaps, not the worst period of the life of our country,” said Gryzlov, who is also State Duma speaker. He added: “That period could have ended either worse than it did or in the way it actually did.”
Outside Russia, only Brezhnev’s native Ukraine hosted any major events commemorating the former Soviet leader. Lawmakers in the city of the Dnepropetrovsk, in the eastern part of the country, voted Tuesday to rename the central park and a street in the center of the city after Brezhnev. 
Brezhnev was born in Dnepropetrovsk on Dec. 19, 1906. 
About 500 residents and officials gathered Tuesday at a monument to Brezhnev to commemorate him, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Back for good
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Artwork belonging to the Russian Avant-Garde movement of the early 20th century has acquired another residence in St. Petersburg — and one far more authentic than, for example, the Russian Museum. 
A promising draw for tourists, the Museum of the Petersburg Avant-Garde was opened Wednesday at the house where one of the pioneers of the Russian avant-garde movement, musician, artist and theorist Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934) lived and had a studio during the most turbulent period of the movement’s history. 
In 1912, he and his wife, poet and artist Yelena Guro (1877–1913), moved into the house at 10 Pesochnaya Ulitsa. At that time this street was a backwater, but now the grey, wooden two-story building with carved ornaments sits among the eclectic stone buildings of Petrogradskaya, one of the fashionable city districts. 
To be precise, this builing is a reconstruction because the original one, built in the 1850s, although surviving even the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, failed to survive perestroika. 
However, the original location, almost the same architecture, garden and the former possessions of the Matyushin family such as archival documents and letters — along with dozens of brilliant, rarely shown paintings and graphic works — have breathed new life into the building, which for several decades was one of the centers of cultural life in Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, bringing together avant-garde artists of all creeds and colors. 
The Burlyuk Brothers, Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov and many others, as well as those from the Soviet cultural nomenclature, were all frequent visitors — and sometimes even residents — at this house. 
The museum covers the “main stages of the formation of St. Petersburg avant-garde culture of 1910s-1930s” according to the chief curator, Yelena Basner. The task of the undertaking, she said, is to articulate St. Petersburg’s contribution in the formation of the Avant-Garde movement in Russia, traditionally and by default imputed to Moscow. 
St. Petersburg witnessed the first Futurist and other “new art” exhibitions and lectures, and prominent literary and theoretical texts of the time by Guro, Filonov, Khlebnikov, Malevich were brought to life by the Guravl publishing house, established by Matyushin in the city.
The legendary Futurist opera “Pobeda nad solntsem” (“Victory Over the Sun”), which brought together perhaps the most powerful figures on the art scene of the period — Matiushin (music), Kruchenykh (text), Khlebnikov (introduction) and Malevich (sets and costumes) — was staged in St. Petersburg. Some commentators find the origins of Malevich’s “Black Square” in that remarkable multimedia experiment of 1913. 
As a branch of the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg, the new museum focuses not just on visual art but rather on its historical context and social function, and on its intellectual and visual sources — everything from everyday objects to leaflets, posters and newspapers. 	
The permanent display occupies the second floor of the house, where the  only attempt to simulate the orginal interior is a recreation of Matyushin’s studio. His original palette, instruments, a piano, pictures and everyday objects are playfully set against the background of wall-sized photographic reproductions of the room of as it was originally. Guro’s room features her paintings and graphic works — she wasn’t a very inventive or radical painter — and photographs of her. She was a very curious, attractive person, outwardly resembling the Icelandic singer Bjork with a similar “other-worldly” nature. 
The other two halls divide the story of the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde into two periods — before and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The endless public announcements of lectures, debates, publications, books, manifestoes, along with heavy bourgeois criticism of all these provocations, were replaced by Soviet employment, teaching positions and its train of followers. The last room features the works of pupils of the key figures of the Russian Avant-Garde. The rarities of the collection are Matyushin’s handmade, collage-like works that describing the dispersion of light. These are profound, scientifically-valuable explorations on the mutual influences between forms and colours.
The museum’s plans are ambitious and one hopes that there will be a collection to match. Besides the permanent display there will be temporary exhibitions expanding the museum’s focus. 
The unique materials donated by the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg look set to present well-known artistic events in an interesting and often complementary way to the Russian Museum. 

10 Ulitsa Professora Popova. 
Metro: Petrogradskaya
www.spbmuseum.ru/matyushin/

TITLE: Rare glimpses
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The amazing clarity of images of some of France’s signature architectural landscapes — Notre Dame de Paris cathedral, Tuileries Palace and Gardens, Royal Palace — dating from the second half of 19th century, can be admired at a new exhibition at the National Center of Photography. 
The display showcases more than 100 works by renowned French photographers such as Felix Bonfils, Louis Crette and Edouard Denis Baldus, from the vast  archives of the Institute of Material Culture History.
The items date from the mid 1850s, when photography was a purely  documentary practice, rather than an art. Most photographic prints from the era are more easily found in archives and libraries, than in art museums. 
Back in the Soviet era, photographic prints from private pre-Revolutionary collections were censored and revised by culture bosses, and subsequently divided between archives and museums. The curators of the center say the lion’s share of these have not been properly researched. Some of the prints in this exhibition are enjoying their first public showing since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Others became known to experts only during the research for this project.
All photographs are genuine vintage prints. The prints were made from paper or glass negatives as well as from the first films produced by Kodak.
It shows you France as you have never seen it — and will never see again. Deserted beaches, abandoned boats and not a soul on what is now a lively, busy promenade peer from Louis Crette’s “Nice Seashore,” dated 1858.
There is little in the forefront of the pictures, as if the photographers deliberately tried to exclude signs of life. Paris is almost breathless.
While Edouard Denis Baldus was taking his photograph of the facade of Paris’ Royal Palace in 1850s, the horses and the carts in the forefront were moving. In the resulting picture the animals have spooky, ghost-like doubles.
The photographs take the viewer on captivating journeys to Paris, Nice, Alpine peaks and glaciers, Asian bazaars and Samarkand mosques. 
One of the most eye-catching and certainly one of the most artistically precious is Gustave Le Gray’s 1856 serene and romantic “Normandy. Brig” — a lone sailing vessel in a quiet bay at what resembles a cloudy sunset. When the print was shown at a prestigious photography exhibition in London in 1856, it won the highest critical acclaim, and was declared “the most beautiful work of photography created to date.” The image immediately became immensely popular, and Le Gray was up to his eyes in requests. He made 800 prints, and one of them — currently on display at the National Center of Photography — was purchased by Shuvalov, a Russian count. The exhibition runs through 20 Jan.

National Center of Photography: 35 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 314 1214.www.ncprf.org.

TITLE: Bewitched
AUTHOR: By Katherine Shonk
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Philip Sington’s solo fiction debut, “Zoia’s Gold,” arrives cloaked in an aura of obsession. A co-author of six successful thrillers under the pseudonym Patrick Lynch, Sington digs deep into the documents left behind by Zoia Korvin-Krukovsky — last-known survivor of the Romanov court, femme fatale, emigre artist. In doing so, he not only melds the best elements of biography and fiction to create a tale that is at once expansive and intimate, but offers compelling insights into both his own creative process and that of his subject. 
Sington discovered Korvin-Krukovsky through the type of chance encounter that success later tinges with the glow of fate. Days before her quiet death in Sweden in 1999, the secretive Madame Zoia, who was born in 1903, entrusted her private papers to a young acquaintance. Sington learned of the archives, a treasure trove of 20th-century history, art and intrigue, and ultimately applied his considerable narrative skill to the challenge of making sense of the voluminous cache. The result is “Zoia’s Gold.”
Korvin-Krukovsky was a painter known for her work on gold leaf, a medium that references the icons of her Russian youth. In literary and historical terms, however, Zoia holds more interest for the spell she cast over her numerous paramours and for the vanished worlds that she inhabited. At the center of his fictional web, Sington plants his inspiration: actual letters to and from Zoia’s lovers, husbands, friends and family members. Quoted at length, the letters are so seamlessly woven, so illuminative of the fictionalized characters and their time, that one soon ceases to wonder where Zoia’s reality ends and the author’s imagination begins. 
But this is what we know for sure: Zoia was born into St. Petersburg high society and would have served as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress had world events not intervened. The girl’s father and stepfather died in World War I; after the Revolution, she and her mother burned incriminating evidence of their noble stature, including letters “entrusted to them by the ballerina Kshesinskaya, love letters from the tsar,” and went to Moscow to lower their profile. At 16, Zoia married a young tennis player; in 1921, she was arrested on suspicion of counterrevolutionary activities and imprisoned in the Lubyanka. Saved from execution by a smitten Swedish communist for whom she worked as a translator, Zoia divorced her first husband, married the Swede and escaped to Stockholm. Her second marriage collapsed after she fell in with the legendary 1920s Left Bank bohemians in Paris. She eventually learned gilding techniques in Africa and Italy and perfected her signature style of landscapes and portraits painted on gold.
Sington fleshes out these facts with his first layer of invention: vividly rendered scenes from Zoia’s youth and early adulthood. In 1919, soon after learning that the tsar and his family have been murdered, Zoia joins a group of other fallen aristocrats for a clandestine hunting party on the outskirts of Moscow: “Count Orlov swapped a diamond necklace for half a case of claret from the Kremlin cellars. Tatiana Argunov, a pretty, blonde-haired girl with rosy cheeks, traded a string of pearls for a kilo of dried fruit and some brandy.”
The next layer brushed onto the novel’s golden backdrop comes from the present day. Not content to simply embellish Zoia’s story, Sington invents a loose alter ego, a fellow explorer of the legend. Soon after Zoia’s death, fictional Englishman Marcus Elliot is hired by a colleague in Sweden to write the catalog that will accompany the upcoming auction of the Korvin-Krukovsky collection. Elliot’s first encounter with Zoia’s papers appears to mirror Sington’s own thrilling discovery:
“They were love letters. Letters and drafts of letters, in Russian, French, German, Swedish, English. They were written on postcards, on watermarked stationery, on pages torn from notebooks and diaries. They were scrawled on the backs of hotel bills and restaurant menus, or squeezed into the white space around theater programs. ... There were letters from New York, London, and Moscow, from Paris and Berlin, from Kazakhstan, Tunis, Algiers. They numbered in the hundreds, a secret archive of love.”
Elliot quickly realizes that Korvin-Krukovsky had a knack for permanently bewitching just about any man who crossed her path. “Zoia’s lovers were men whose eyes had been opened, who could never again see the world as they had,” he surmises, and proceeds to become her next victim. Holed up in Zoia’s chilly home in the dead of a Swedish winter, surrounded by her papers, Elliot makes a series of discoveries that lead him into the dark corners of his past. 
No dispassionate consumer of the archive of love, Elliot is recently divorced and fighting a losing battle for custody of his young daughter. What’s more, he has become persona non grata in the art world after being ensnared in a scheme to smuggle Russian art. And as if that weren’t enough, details of Zoia’s private life parallel those of Elliot’s tortured mother. Elliot is a man ready and willing to be unhinged, and one guesses that something far less provocative than the steamy love letters of a dead stranger would have done the trick.
Sington’s painstaking research shines through not only in his close reading of Zoia’s texts, but in the wealth of period detail he amasses to make each sentence and scene crackle with life. On the basis of the writing alone, comparisons to the oeuvre of another literary detective, Dan Brown, would be beyond insulting. Occasionally, Sington’s zeal does threaten to teeter into melodrama, though, as in his description of Montparnasse in 1929, “a year when the whole frenetic scene finally imploded, madness and death descending like a biblical plague on the high priests of excess.” 
More problematic than a little purple prose is the issue of Zoia’s mystique. Though insisted upon again and again, the definitive source of her feminine wiles — beauty, sexual voracity, vulnerability, all of the above? — never quite coalesces. That’s unfortunate, for neither the fictional nor the real Zoia has much artistic gravitas to fall back on. “Marcus, this is not Picasso we’re talking about,” complains Cornelius, the dealer who hired Elliot to write Zoia’s catalog, late in the novel. “This is not Rembrandt. This is a minor artist. ... For God’s sake, what made you think she was worth all this ... effort?” 
After enjoying nearly 300 pages fueled by Zoia’s alleged allure, the reader is at first tempted to slap this minor character on Elliot’s behalf. Then comes the sneaking suspicion that Sington has, in fact, been pulling a fast one. Zoia may have traveled in the same circles as Gertrude Stein and Isadora Duncan, but she was no Stein or Duncan, nor even a Matilda Kshesinskaya. Her reputation does not live much beyond Sington’s book.
Yet what does it matter? Most of us are minor characters on the stage of life. And if only our love letters and some eccentric paintings were to outlast us, better that the letters burn with the intensity that inspires greater works of art to proclaim our glory, such as “Zoia’s Gold.”

Katherine Shonk is the author of “The Red Passport,” a collection of short stories set in contemporary Russia.

TITLE: Christmas midnight mass at St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This year, the parish of the St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church is having the Christmas midnight mass at midnight for the first time in its modern history. 
Dec. 25 is not an official state holiday in Russia, where the Orthodox calendar puts Christmas on Jan. 7, and many people will be working on Monday. 
“We used to have Christmas mass at 7 p.m. in order to make it possible for people to take the metro to get home and go to work next morning. It confused many foreigners who are accustomed to go to Christmas mass at midnight and were surprised to see the church close at that time. We are especially lucky this year because Christmas Eve is on Sunday and our parish can start celebrating it with their families at home. We also decided to have a traditional midnight holy mass not only at 8 p.m. but also at midnight, so people can choose the most suitable time,” said Father Maciej Rusiecki, senior priest at St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church.
“I am often asked how to celebrate Christmas and say that it is very important not only to prepare gifts beforehand but also to reconcile with God and confess to a priest,” said Father Maciej. He said that although Christmas traditions have some national differences between countries, one thing is in common — it is a big family holiday. 
However, it was a revelation to Father Maciej to find out that many of his parish go to the holy mass at Christmas but do not have any celebrations at home. 
“Christmas celebration traditions were lost in many families and the young generation just does not know how to celebrate it in a family,” he said.
By Christian tradition, when the first Advent Star appears in the sky on Christmas Eve all the family members gather together at table to share Christmas bread and, in that way, to forgive and reconcile one another. 
“It is usually hard to see the first Advent Star in the cloudy sky of St. Petersburg but we usually start Christmas dinner at 5 or 6 p.m.,” said Father Maciej Rusiecki. 
A special early dinner for students of the Sunday school will be held in the church basement after the morning mass around 12 p.m. 
“Although it will be before the Advent Star appears, we think it will be dark enough there,” said Father Maciej.
On Dec. 25, Christmas performances and celebrations for children will take place at the church at 4 p.m. 
The Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria is the first parish of the Roman Catholic Church founded in Russia. The church building was erected in the style of early classicism by Jean-Baptiste Vallin de La Mothe in 1783. In the Soviet era, it was ransacked and used as a storehouse by the Museum of Ethnography. In 1984, the entire interior of the temple was completely destroyed by a massive fire. 
The church was returned to believers in 1992. Since then it has been the main catholic sanctuary for its parish who today number about 500 members, most of whom are Russians of Polish, Lithuanian and Byelorussian descent as well as foreigners who work, study or travel in St. Petersburg. 
In order to bring the word of God to the international parish, the holy masses are given daily in several languages, such as Russian, Spanish, English, Polish, Korean and French. In summer, when lots of tourists from Italy come to St. Petersburg, masses are also given in Italian. 
The Church of St. Catherine is located on Nevsky Prospekt near the Grand Hotel Europe.

TITLE: In the bag
AUTHOR: By Katherin Machalek
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Not many fine diners in search of authentic French cuisine wander to the end of Bolshaya Konyushennaya, where swaggering teenagers loiter outside Mod Club on Konyushennaya Ploshchad and the stench of Tsar Nicholas II’s adjoining stables still lingers. At least the tables-in-waiting in the otherwise charming, round dining room at the Grand Cafe Bagatelle give this unfortunate impression. 
But, entering the dim though cheerfully decorated dining area, visitors will feel as if they’ve been whisked away to a bourgeois Alsatian parlor room with plush pinstriped couches and eccentrically placed still-lifes scattered along its stucco walls. 
The waitress calmly permitted us to contemplate the menu with laissez-faire leisure, a certain break from traditionally impatient Russian service, appropriately waiting until we had closed our menus on cue. A range of over 35 imported red and white wines mostly by the bottle can be sampled here from all regions in France including the Loire (700-1,100 rubles, $26.53-$41.67), Bordeaux (660-2,400 rubles, $25-$90.95), Bourgogne (680-2,500 rubles, $25.77-$94.74), Alsace (750-1,250 rubles, $28.42-$47.37), as well as the Rhein Valley (760-1,800 rubles, $28.80-$68.21). 
The brisk Alsatian Riesling (800 rubles, $30.30) refreshes the palate well with a heavier appetizer or lighter entree.  A small selection of Georgian wine and Russian Champagne is also available for those who feel too culturally confined.
A sign on the front door boasts Russian cuisine — cold or hot borshch for example for 140 rubles, $5.30, or such cliched entrees as beef Stroganoff for 340 rubles, $12.88 — but the menu mostly features French cuisine and will be a delight to Francophiles searching for beloved shellfish hors d’oeuvres such as Coquilles Saint-Jacques (430 Rubles, $16.29), Mussels on a Green Cockleshell in Roquefort Sauce (430 Rubles, $16.29), or even Escargots de Bourgogne (370 rubles, $14). While the escargots were probably not fresh, they were expertly prepared in a traditional ceramic plate with the snails bathing in six recessed pockets and gurgling in a zesty garlic butter and even the most hardline snail connoisseur would slurp them up without complaint.
Stinky cheese lovers should select the French cheese plate (290 rubles, $10.99), which includes both baked goat’s cheese (topped with walnuts on a light toast) and cold Camembert and D’or Bleu wedges served with robust red grapes on a wooden cutting board, just like Mamon used to make! 
Even other more ordinary appetizers like the vegetable salad (190 rubles, $7.20) or the creamed mushroom soup (180 rubles, $6.82), while plain in name, still shock and awe with homemade freshness.  
The waitress, who unfortunately spoke no French and only a handful of English words, nevertheless wisely recommended the crushed pepper steak served in a creamed cognac sauce (360 rubles, $13.64). This generous, cooked-to-order slice of beef would likely convince anyone to ignore its complimentary Idaho potatoes and opt to simply lick the plate clean. On the other hand, the unendorsed lamb chop in tarragon sauce (360 rubles, $13.64) left something to be tasted other than it’s watery sauce. 
All this rich gorging ought to leave any normal stomach disinterested in dessert. However, if gluttonous curiosity manages to overlook the stomach’s cries for mercy, the final course will not disappoint even the fullest belly. They are currently out of the Tart Tatin (150 rubles, $5.68), but a carrot cake topped in a sugar glaze (140 rubles, $5.30) is on offer as well as the mint parfait (130 rubles, $4.93), the simple presentation of which understates it’s sophisticated taste, which is smooth and intoxicatingly cool like a mint-flavored sedative. Freshly sliced apple and walnuts rolled into Russian-style hot-off-the-griddle pancakes (120 rubles, $4.55) is of one this restaurant’s many satisfying sweet after thoughts.     
Grand Cafe Bagatelle holds up to European purist ethics in gastronomy: a combination of simple and decadently fresh ingredients, without over-cooking, over-spicing, or assimilating rich French culinary chic. Its intimate, smokeless atmosphere makes it an ideal place for entertaining foreign guests.

TITLE: Presidential Opponents Win in Iraq
AUTHOR: By Ali Akbar Dareini
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — Opponents of Iran’s ultra-conservative president won nationwide elections for local councils, final results confirmed Thursday, an embarrassing outcome for the hardline leader that could force him to change his anti-Western tone and focus more on problems at home.
Moderate conservatives critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a majority of seats in last week’s elections, followed by reformists who were suppressed by hard-liners two years ago. Analysts said the president’s allies won less than 20 percent of local council seats across the country.
The vote was widely seen as a sign of public discontent with Ahmadinejad’s stances, which have fueled fights with the West and led Iran closer to UN sanctions.
Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rhetoric and staunch stand on Iran’s nuclear program are believed to have divided the conservatives who voted him into power. Some conservatives feel Ahmadinejad has spent too much time confronting the West and failed to deal with Iran’s struggling economy.
Final results of Friday’s local elections announced by the Interior Ministry show moderate conservatives opposed to Ahmadinejad have won a majority of the seats.
The voting also represented a partial comeback for reformists — who favor closer ties with the West and further loosening of social and political restrictions under the Islamic government.
In Tehran, the capital, candidates supporting Mayor Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, a moderate conservative, won seven of the 15 council seats. Reformists won four, while Ahmadinejad’s allies won three. The last seat went to an Olympic wrestling champion who is considered an independent.
The election does not directly effect Ahmadinejad’s administration and is not expected to bring immediate policy changes. The local councils handle community matters in cities and town across the country.
But it represented the first time the public has weighed in on Ahmadinejad’s stormy presidency since he took office in June 2005. The results are expected to pressure him to change his populist anti-Western tone and focus more on Iran’s high unemployment and economic problems at home.
Leading reformist Saeed Shariati said the results of the election was a “big no” to Ahmadinejad and his allies.
“People’s vote means they don’t support Ahmadinejad’s policies and want change,” Shariati, a leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Iran’s largest reformist party told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Similar anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment was visible in the final results of a parallel election held to select members of the Assembly of Experts, a conservative body of 86 senior clerics that monitors Iran’s supreme leader and chooses his successor.
A big boost for moderates within the ruling Islamic establishment was visible in the big number of votes for former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who lost to Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election runoff.
Rafsanjani, who supports dialogue with the United States, received the most votes of any Tehran candidate to win re-election to the assembly. Also re-elected was Hasan Rowhani, Iran’s former top nuclear negotiator.

TITLE: Ducks Fly High With Victory Over Dallas
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANAHEIM, California — Scott Niedermayer put Anaheim’s impressive record in perspective.
“The regular season is a long stretch of hockey. There are a lot of games, road trips and everything that goes into it,” the Ducks’ defenseman said after a 4-1 victory over Dallas on Wednesday night.
“So far, our guys have been doing a great job of staying committed and working as hard as they can.”
It’s paying off: Anaheim has an NHL-best 27-4-6 record, by far the best in franchise history at this point.
“We’re just trying to go out there and prove ourselves every night,” said Corey Perry, who scored twice against the Stars.
“It was one of those games where there weren’t really any disappointments,” Anaheim coach Randy Carlyle said. “We knew we would have to win our fair share of puck battles and specialty teams would have to be good.”
In other NHL games it was Detroit 5, Columbus 0 and Nashville 2, Chicago 1.
Perry’s emergence from a slump makes the high-flying Ducks look even better. He has six goals and three assists in his last seven games after a 12-game span where he had only three assists.
“The bounces are going my way right now. Before, the puck was going one way and I was going the other way,” he said. “Scoring goals is my job and that’s what got me here.
“So I was putting a little pressure on myself and it was frustrating going through that stretch. My confidence is coming back.”
On his second goal of the game and 11th of the season, Perry picked up the loose puck near the right circle, skated into the slot, stopped, whirled and flipped the puck over goalie Marty Turco’s left shoulder to give Anaheim a 3-1 lead 13 seconds into the second period.
“I knew I didn’t have a backhand shot available, so I just turned and fired it,” Perry said. “I tried to get it up because I knew there would be a lot of traffic.”
Niedermayer added a power-play goal at 16:39 of the second, his sixth goal and 30th point, to give Anaheim a three-goal advantage. Chris Pronger had opened the Anaheim scoring just 3:22 into the game, and Perry got his first goal of the night later in the period.
Jean-Sebastien Giguere stopped 26 shots for his league-high 23rd win of the season, and he’s 11-1 in his last 12 starts. Stu Barnes scored Dallas’ goal.
The Stars held a closed-door meeting following the game, and coach Dave Tippett was grim afterward.
“We need more from everybody,” he said. “These are real strong barometer games for us. There are some individuals who move up and some who move down. That’s the way it is.”
Predators 2, Blackhawks 1
At Chicago, Paul Kariya scored twice in the third period and won its fifth straight.
Kariya’s power-play goal with 7:02 left snapped a 1-1 tie.
Chris Mason made 28 saves while starting his 13th straight start for Nashville. He is 9-3-1 since top goalie Tomas Vokoun underwent hand surgery on Nov. 27.
Martin Havlat scored for the Blackhawks, 7-2-3 since Denis Savard replaced fired coach Trent Yawney on Nov. 27. Havlat has five goals and five assists in seven games since returning from a sprained right ankle.
Red Wings 5, Blue Jackets 0
At Detroit, Dominik Hasek made 27 saves for his 73rd NHL shutout and Dan Cleary scored twice to lift the Red Wings.
Nicklas Lidstrom added a goal and an assist for Detroit, and Kirk Maltby and Jason Williams also scored. Hasek’s league-leading fifth shutout of the season moved into 10th place on the career list, one spot ahead of Lorne Chabot.
Cleary has six goals and seven assists in his last 10 games. He passed Henrik Zetterberg for the team lead with 13 goals and all but one of his 24 points have come in a 20-game span.

TITLE: Man U’s Lead Shrinks As Chelsea Beats Everton
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United’s lead in the Premier League was cut to two points Sunday after it lost to West Ham 1-0 and Chelsea rallied past Everton 3-2.
Nigel Reo-Coker scored in the 75th minute, giving Alan Curbishley a winning start as West Ham manager. Chelsea needed an 87th-minute goal from Didier Drogba to win.
United leads the league with 44 points, two more than Chelsea. Liverpool is third with 31 points and Arsenal is fourth with 30.
“We have got to show our mettle ourselves,” Man United manager Alex Ferguson said. “That’s the hallmark of champions and we’ve proved that many times in the past. This team is young enough to be able to do that.”
Reo-Coker scored from close range after Marlon Harewood had played the ball back to him from the edge of the field.
On Wednesday, Curbishley signed a 3 1/2-year contract at the club where he started his playing career, two days after Alan Pardew was fired.
This was the first time Curbishley has beaten Manchester United as a manager. In the 15 years he managed Charlton, he tied twice and lost 12 times.
Drogba scored with a bending ball that went over the head of U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard and came just moments after he had hit the post. The goal came only 6 minutes after Frank Lampard had tied the score for the two-time defending champions.
“When we were losing 1-0 and 2-1 it was difficult, but we did it,” Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho said. “The players had incredible character and they believed it until the last moment.”
Mikel Arteta gave Everton the lead with a 38th-minute penalty kick — sending goalkeeper Hilario the wrong way — after Chelsea defender Khalid Boulahrouz had brought down Victor Anichebe.
Michael Ballack scored in the 49th with a curling free kick that bounced in off the post. Joseph Yobo again put Everton in the lead in the 64th, heading in a corner from Arteta that got a slight deflection off Ballack’s head.
Tom Huddlestone and Calum Davenport scored a goal each to give Tottenham a 2-1 win over Manchester City.
Marco Materazzi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored to help Inter Milan beat Messina 2-0 and win its club-record ninth straight in the Serie A.
Materazzi scored with a bicycle kick in the 49th minute and Ibrahimovic added the second 10 minutes later to keep Messina winless in seven straight games.
Inter coach Roberto Mancini surpassed the record for eight successive victories held by former coaches Tony Cargnelli (1939-40), Helenio Herrera (1964-65) and Giovanni Trapattoni (1988-89). Inter improved to 42 points, seven more than AS Roma, which beat third-placed Palermo 4-0.

TITLE: Troops to Gates: Extra Forces Would Help
AUTHOR: By Lolita Baldor
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq — Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the rest of the Bush administration may be undecided on whether to send more troops to Iraq, but several soldiers he met with at Camp Victory on Thursday morning  said extra forces would help.
“Sir I think we need to just keep doing what we’re doing,” Spc. Jason T. Green, with the 101st Military Intelligence Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, told Gates during a breakfast session with about 15 U.S. soldiers.
“I really think we need more troops here. With more presence on the ground, more troops might hold them off long enough to where we can get the Iraqi Army trained up.”
The troops may be somewhat at odds with military commanders, who worry that rushing thousands more Americans to the battlefront could prompt Iraqis to slow their effort to take control of their country.
Those concerns are “clearly a consideration” in mapping out future strategy, Gates said.
Just days into his new job as defense chief, Gates planned meetings in Baghdad with Iraqi government officials Thursday, after a day of talks with his military commanders on Wednesday.
His hour-long question-and-answer session with troops over scrambled eggs Thursday was largely spent gathering insights from those closest to the action.
When he asked them whether adding forces would help, he got a roomful of nods.
“More troops would help us integrate the Iraq Army into patrols more,” said Pfc. Cassandra Wallace, from the 10th Mountain Division.
The soldiers also told him they think the Iraqi Army is getting better, but that it should be bigger and that many of the Iraqis are still not showing up for duty.
Gates, who later helicoptered to Balad Air Base west of Baghdad for a special operations briefing, did not tip his hand much to the soldiers, who were from the 1st Cavalry Division, the 1st Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division.
But he said U.S. logistics and support troops are likely to be in Iraq for a lot longer than the combat forces — as efforts continue to stabilize the country. And saying Iran and Syria are playing a very negative role in the violence in Iraq, he emphasized that “figuring out the regional context is very important.”
“We need to make damned sure that the neighbors understand that we’re going to be here for a long time — here being the Persian Gulf,” said Gates.
The new defense chief is visiting Iraq with a high-level entourage to assess options for calming violence in the country as President Bush considers sending thousands more troops. Bush is expected to unveil his new policy next month.
“Secretary Gates is going to be an important voice in the Iraq strategy review that’s under way,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference Wednesday.
After meeting with top U.S. generals at Camp Victory, Gates said Wednesday that he had only begun to determine how to reshape U.S. war policy. “We discussed the possibility of a surge and the potential for what it might accomplish,” he told reporters.
Top U.S. commanders also have worried that even a short-term troop increase might bring only a temporary respite to the violence — or none at all — while creating shortages of fresh troops for future missions.
One option would add five or more additional combat brigades, or roughly 20,000 troops, to the 140,000 already there.
General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq and one of several generals who met with Gates, said he supports boosting troop levels only when there is a specific purpose for their deployment.
“I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea, but what I want to see happen is when, if we do bring more American troops here, they help us progress to our strategic objectives,” Casey told reporters during a news conference with Gates and military leaders.
General John Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said the military is “looking at every possible thing that might influence the situation to make Baghdad in particular more secure.”
In addition to a possible short-term troop increase aimed at bringing violence in Baghdad and Anbar province under control, Bush is considering removing U.S. combat forces and accelerating the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces. Military leaders are also considering an increase in the number of American advisers for Iraqi security forces.
Echoing Casey and other commanders, Bush said he would only agree to a temporary troop surge if an achievable mission could be defined.

TITLE: Indian Runner Fails Gender Test, Stripped of Doha Silver Medal
AUTHOR: By Sandeep Nakai
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI, India — An Indian runner who won a silver medal in the women’s 800 meters at the Asian Games failed a gender test and was stripped of the medal.
Santhi Soundarajan, 25, took the gender test in Doha, Qatar, after placing second.
The Indian Olympic Association said Monday it has been told by the Olympic Council of Asia that the 25-year-old runner was disqualified.
“IOA has asked the Athletic Federation of India to return the medal as desired by the Olympic Council of Asia,” the Indian Olympic group said.
The IOA also asked its medical commission to inquire into Soundarajan’s case and report within 10 days.
There are no compulsory gender tests during events sanctioned by the International Association of Athletics Federations, but athletes may be asked to take a gender test. The medical evaluation panel usually includes a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and internal medicine specialist.
An Indian athletics official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media said Soundarajan almost certainly never had sex-change surgery.

TITLE: Explosives, Knives Smuggled Onto Plane for Documentary
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — A French television reporter managed to smuggle explosive material and knives onto American and French passenger planes apparently revealing serious flaws in security at French airports.
Appearing in a documentary made for state television due to be aired on Friday, the reporter has raised fresh questions about French air safety after accusations last month that it was too easy to gain access to aircraft at Paris’ main airport.
Reporter Laurent Richard, aided by security expert Christophe Naudin, used hidden cameras to show themselves carrying “de-activated” Semtex explosive and a detonator in their hand luggage aboard an Air France flight to Nice.
On another occasion, the pair carried two box cutters aboard a Delta airlines flight from Paris to New York, with security staff not looking at their screens as the weapons passed through the x-ray machines.
Box cutters were used by the hijackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities.
The film also shows the duo packing a Semtex-like substance in their luggage, which was subsequently put into the hold of a domestic French flight despite x-ray checks on the suitcase.
Richard said the substance could not have exploded but had the same chemical characteristics of the plastic explosive Semtex, and should, in theory, have been detected. Air France and French airport authorities declined immediate comment ahead of Friday’s screening.
Richard is also filmed driving a truck into a supposedly secure area of Paris’s main Roissy airport, passing three check points by simply showing his driving license and finishing up just a few meters from a parked aircraft.
All the security breaches were made over the past month.
In November, a union representing Paris airport workers said a film apparently showing a block of clay being smuggled on to an aircraft demonstrated how easy it would be for terrorists to get plastic explosives onto a plane.
Airport security, which underwent a fundamental transformation after September 11, 2001, returned to the media spotlight in August when British police said they had foiled a plot to blow up aircraft flying to the United States.

TITLE: Suspects in Prostitute Murder Case Detained
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: IPSWICH, England — Police questioned two suspects in the killings of five prostitutes on Thursday, with deadlines for charging or releasing the men looming in the next two days.
Police have until Friday evening to charge or release their first suspect, identified in news reports as Tom Stephens, 37, who was arrested Monday at his home in Trimley St. Martin, eight miles southeast of the town of Ipswich where all the victims worked.
Suffolk police are also interrogating a 48-year-old man, identified in news reports as Steve Wright. He was arrested Tuesday at his home in Ipswich, and can be detained until Saturday without being charged.
Magistrates granted permission for extended questioning on Wednesday.
All five victims had been working as prostitutes, and their naked bodies were found in rural areas around Ipswich over a period of about 10 days beginning Dec. 2.
Three of the bodies were found near the main road and the rail line between Ipswich and Trimley; the two others were discovered near the same road in areas south and southwest of Ipswich.
On Wednesday, Greater Suffolk Coroner Dr. Peter Dean opened and adjourned inquests into the deaths of Tania Nicol, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell, and Annette Nicholls. An inquest into the death of the fifth victim, Gemma Adams, was opened last week.
Clennell, 24, died of compression to her neck, and Alderton, 24, was strangled, a senior pathologist determined. Post-mortem examinations of the bodies of Nicol, 19, Nicholls, 29, and Adams, 25, reached no conclusion on the cause of death.

TITLE: Cannavaro Named ’06 Player of The Year
AUTHOR: By Frank Jordans
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ZURICH, Switzerland — Fabio Cannavaro was voted FIFA Player of the Year on Monday, becoming the first defender to earn the honor and only the second Italian.
Brazilian midfielder Marta was voted FIFA Women’s Player of the Year, with U.S. forward Kristine Lilly finishing second.
The 33-year-old Cannavaro, who captained Italy to its fourth World Cup title, finished with 498 points in voting by national team coaches and captains.
“It is indeed more difficult for a defender to come this far,” Cannavaro said.
Zinedine Zidane was second with 454 points. He was voted top player at the World Cup despite his ejection in the final for head-butting Marco Materazzi in overtime.
Ronaldinho, who won the award in 2004 and 2005, was third with 380 points.
The only other Italian voted world player of the year by FIFA was Roberto Baggio in 1993, two years after the award began. This was a tumultuous year for Italian soccer, which was upended by a scandal in which team officials were found to have fixed referee assignments for Serie A games.
“I would like to dedicate this award to Italian football,” Cannavaro said. “Everyone knows that we have had problems, and this should be a moment of rebirth for Italian football,” he said.
Former U.S. coach Bruce Arena voted Ronaldinho first, followed by Cannavaro and Thierry Henry. Former U.S. captain Claudio Reyna had Ronaldinho first, followed by Andrea Pirlo and Deco.
Marta topped the voting for the women’s award with 475 points. Lilly had 388 and German midfielder Renate Lingor was third with 305.
“I don’t feel much pressure. I just want to keep playing at my level,” said the 20-year-old Marta, who was prevented from competing in the FIFA Under-20 Women’s World Championship this year by her Swedish club, Umea IK.
Marta finished second behind Germany’s Birgit Prinz last year.

TITLE: Williams Sisters Are Served Up $4 Million Lawsuit
AUTHOR: By Brian Skoloff
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — Tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams and their father should be held liable for millions of dollars in a lawsuit alleging the sisters reneged on a deal to play in a 2001 match, a plaintiffs’ attorney said in closing arguments Wednesday.
Promoters Carol Clarke and Keith Rhodes allege that Richard Williams agreed to a contract to have his daughters play in a “Battle of the Sexes” match that never took place.
The promoters are suing the sisters, their father and his company, Richard Williams Tennis & Associates, for unspecified damages. An initial trial last year ended in a mistrial.
The dispute centers on whether Richard Williams had authority to commit his daughters. The promoters claim he presented himself as the sisters’ manager and negotiated the deal on their behalf. Venus and Serena Williams testified during the more than monthlong trial that only they have authority to approve contracts.
“We have the existence of a written contract in this case,” plaintiffs’ attorney John Romano told jurors. “It’s not a case of a verbal agreement over who said what.”
Despite the agreement with Richard Williams, the sisters’ attorney noted in his closing arguments that neither Venus nor Serena signed anything.
“The contract, or the letter, if you will, is signed by Richard Williams,” F. Malcolm Cunningham told jurors. “The case, ladies and gentlemen, should end right there for Venus Williams and Serena Williams.”
Jurors got the case Wednesday afternoon, picked a foreman and adjourned for the day. Deliberations were set to begin Thursday morning. The panel of five women and one man have the option of finding Richard Williams liable, alone. They could also find the sisters and their father liable or dismiss the allegations.
Richard Williams has acknowledged drawing up terms of the contract, but insists he told the promoters they would have to go through the IMG sports agency, which represents Venus and Serena, to complete an agreement. The promoters say he made no such disclaimer.
“Richard Williams is a dad. Richard Williams is a tennis coach. He is not a manager,” Richard Williams’ attorney, David Slutsker, said in his closing arguments. 
“He is not authorized to bind or commit his daughters.”
Slutsker maintained that the agreement was preliminary and that the promoters failed to follow through with IMG.
“There was no breach of contract because that is not a contract,” Slutsker said.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys previously played a video clip for jurors showing Richard Williams negotiating the deal with Clarke. In the video, taken by Richard Williams, he tells Clarke that Venus and Serena are “well aware of what I am doing.”
Richard Williams later testified he was lying, and both sisters have said they knew nothing of the deal and would never have agreed to play in the match.
“It is inconceivable that Venus and Serena Williams ... did not know what was going on,” Romano told jurors, adding that Richard Williams “perpetrated a fraud.”
Cunningham countered that there is no evidence that proves Venus and Serena knew about the deal.
“The evidence is clear that Carol Clarke and Keith Rhodes never had one conversation with Venus or Serena Williams about the Battle of the Sexes,” he said. 
“I submit to you that Richard Williams’ word is not the word of Venus and Serena Williams.”
Throughout the trial, jurors were shown tax returns that indicate Richard Williams was paid management fees, bolstering the plaintiffs’ contention that he had authority to sign contracts for his daughters.
However, attorneys for the sisters and their father claim the payments were mischaracterized for tax purposes and that Richard Williams was paid merely for coaching services.
A plaintiffs’ witness who had served as a Williams family business adviser testified previously that in 1999 he produced a document that outlined protocol for doing business with the tennis stars. 
The document, shown to jurors, states that no one is to speak directly to the women without first going through their father.
Richard Williams first acknowledged signing the document, but later, under oath, insisted he had never seen it. Richard Williams also denied signing other contracts that appeared to have his signature, including one that committed his daughters to appear in public service ads.
The promoters claim the tournament could have made about $45 million, of which 80 percent was to go to Richard Williams’ company.

TITLE: JT Wins Fight At Home
AUTHOR: By Noah Trister
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — Fighting at home for the first time since becoming middleweight champion, Jermain Taylor was a little too excited.
“I came out trying for the knockout and threw a lot of wild punches,” Taylor said. “That is something you’re not supposed to do in boxing.”
Taylor eventually settled for a unanimous decision over Kassim Ouma on Saturday night, a fitting ending to a homecoming that was successful but far from perfect. Ticket sales had been a concern all week, and Taylor was bothered for much of the fight by a cut over his left eye.
But Taylor (26-0-1) landed most of the big punches, and toward the end, Ouma’s only chance was an unlikely knockout. Taylor, a Little Rock native, won the first six rounds on all three judges’ cards and the first nine on two cards. There was little suspense at the end — open scoring was used at the fight and showed Taylor with a big lead after eight rounds.
Taylor became the middleweight champion in July 2005 by beating Bernard Hopkins in Las Vegas, then he outpointed Hopkins there again that December. Taylor escaped with a draw against Winky Wright in June in Memphis, Tennessee.
After three straight decisions, Taylor was eager for a change.
“I came out tonight and wanted a knockout really bad,” Taylor said. “I am in great shape, but I had to take out a loan in those last two rounds.”
Ouma, a native of Uganda, had been all smiles during the week. He seemed to relish the chance to fight the bigger Taylor on the champion’s turf — he even raised his arms triumphantly after some of the later rounds despite being way behind on points.
Ouma’s fascinating story includes being kidnapped by the National Resistance Army in Uganda when he was a boy and being forced to fight in the civil war. His promoter sarcastically referred to him as “Little Kassim Ouma” this week — but the former junior middleweight champion hung in there against Taylor.
The cut near Taylor’s eye appeared around the fifth round, and he seemed bothered by it at times, occasionally lifting a hand to the eye.
“That comes along with the job,” Taylor said. “I will never let it get to me. It did affect my vision but I am a soldier, baby.”
Taylor came to the news conference after the fight wearing sunglasses, presumably to hide his eye injury.
“He didn’t get the knockout,” Ouma said. “I am still here. Look at me, then look at him.”
The cut, however, was apparently caused by an accidental head butt — not anything Ouma did with his fists. Ouma threw 701 punches to Taylor’s 597, but Taylor had a clear edge in punches landed, 244-177.
“He came out and fought all 12 rounds,” Taylor said. “He’s a little guy but he’s a tough guy.”
Attendance for the rare title fight in Arkansas was 10,119 thanks to a good walk-up turnout. Organizers did little to hide their attendance worries this week, but the crowd broke the 10,000 mark and was intense once Taylor made his way to the ring.
Fans serenaded the 28-year-old Taylor with rousing chants of “JT! JT!” throughout the fight — and also added a few of Arkansas’ famed “Pig Sooie” cheers. Taylor started well, knocking the 27-year-old Ouma (25-3-1) off-balance with a right uppercut in the first round, but Ouma lived up to his reputation as an aggressive fighter. He ran right at Taylor several times, although Taylor seldom stayed on the ropes for long.
The judges scored the fight 118-110, 117-111 and 115-113 for Taylor.
“I don’t think a rematch is in order right now,” said Lou DiBella, Taylor’s promoter.
Taylor weighed in at 159 1/2 lbs on Friday, and Ouma was at 158 3/4 lbs — although that did little justice to the challenger’s size disadvantage. Taylor is expected to move up from the 160-pound class to the 168-pound (super middleweight) division at some point.
“I can fight at 160 — I made it easy. But I will fight wherever the money is,” Taylor said. “I will fight up, whomever wants to fight.”