SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1244 (10), Friday, February 9, 2007
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TITLE: Election Commission To Review Yabloko Case
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Central Election Commission in Moscow was due to hold a special session Friday to review the conflict between the St. Petersburg branch of liberal opposition party Yabloko and the St. Petersburg election commission that banned the party from upcoming election to the city’s Legislative Assembly.
Now that the option to vote “against all candidates” no longer exists and with Yabloko thrown out of the election, the party’s supporters have been left wondering how to act. 
However Yabloko and the opposition coalition Other Russia are considering a bold alternative: suggesting that voters can take ballots out of the polling station and hand them over to party representatives, who would then calculate the results as a “protest vote.”
“This scenario is still being discussed among liberals, and the final  decision will be announced after the verdict of the Central Election Commission,” said Sergei Gulyayev, a Yabloko lawmaker in the Legislative Assembly. “There is still hope that [Governor] Valentina Matviyenko’s grudge against Yabloko, that is apparently behind the decision of the local commisssion, is not shared by the officials in Moscow, who might take a different view of this political battle.” 
Taking a ballot out of a polling station is not illegal in Russia since there is no mention of the tactic in the country’s election law. 
Political analysts however have expressed scepticism about the outcome of this action, if it is implemented.
Yury Korgunyuk, a leading expert on political parties of the Moscow-based think-tank INDEM, is pessimistic about the plan.
In his opinion, Yabloko greatly overestimates the level of political activity among Russians.
“Apathy and inertia are the two predominating moods in Russian society today,” he said. 
“Had the people been more active politically, there would have been no need for such tools. If masses of enraged voters flooded the streets in protest against such blatant bias against a major democratic party, the authorities would have promptly taken a step back.”
As Sergei Khokhayev, chairman of the Memorial human rights group points out, the last time Russia saw a mass protest was in January 2005 when people across the country took the streets to object to pension reforms.
“Sadly, it takes a financial matter now to get the people out of their homes,” Khokhayev said. “As for the opposition rallies, with such low attendance it is impossible to make a difference. Of course, the state would face greater pressure if many thousands of people joined forces, even if it’s just for one street protest,” he added.
Diana Kachalova, a political journalist and editor of the newspaper Moy Rayon, said the Russian public, even those who support the goals declared by liberal opposition parties, are tired and wary of engaging in politics.
“Failed Communism followed by failed democracy complete with failed economic reforms was too much for many people,” said Kachalova, who won the 2005 Paul Klebnikov Prize for Courage in Journalism, awarded in memory of the murdered editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. “They have learned to watch out for themselves and be selfish, and to mind their own business,” she added.
Public support for political rallies and marches, which reached its peak in the early 1990s in the wake of the turbulence of perestroika, has been declining since and has nearly come to a standstill in recent years. 
Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly on Wednesday sent an appeal to the State Duma asking the parliamentarians to amend the election law by including a ban on holding referendums during any election campaign.
The St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko had earlier called for a city-wide referendum on the building of a controversial new building to be the headquarters of Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant.
Gulyayev said that the city’s election commission had offered the party a deal: if Yabloko took a step back from pressing for the Gazprom vote, the commission would not hinder the party’s participation in local elections.
“We did take time to consider the offer and thoroughly think it over but we felt we cannot make deals with dishonest people,” Gulyayev said.
Dmitry Krasnyansky, deputy head of the St. Petersburg Election Commission denied Gulyayev’s allegations. He maintains Yabloko was excluded from the elections solely on legal grounds. 
“A total of 11.97 percent of the signatures presented to the commission in order for the party to be registered for the elections failed to meet the required standards,” Krasnyansky said. “The law sets a 10 percent limit for the invalid signatures.”
The election to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly is scheduled for March 11.
Yabloko’s plight has attracted international attention. This week the party received two open letters of support from European parliamentarians. Lawmakers from the environmental faction of the Hamburg parliament and People’s Party faction of the parliament of Sweden expressed their serious doubts about the legitimacy and fairness of verdict of the St. Petersburg Election Commission and urged the Central Election Commission to deliver an independent decision on the matter.

TITLE: Military Set to Receive $189 Bln Overhaul
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov unveiled an ambitious spending plan Wednesday allowing Russia to maintain its nuclear deterrent while developing its conventional forces.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles, aircraft carriers and an early warning radar system will figure prominently in the Defense Ministry’s eight-year, $189 billion plan, Ivanov said in comments before the State Duma.
The plan also makes it easier for the military to launch rockets into space from Russian territory, said the defense minister, who is considered a leading contender for president in 2008.
Ivanov boasted that the spending plan he outlined Wednesday gives the country the capacity to fight “wars of the future,” Interfax reported.
Indeed, nearly half — 45 percent — of military hardware now being used would be replaced in the course of the 2007-2015 procurement program.
This year alone will see $11.3 billion spent on new arms.
The modernization of the armed forces reflects Russia’s economic resurgence over the past several years: This year’s defense budget of $31 billion marks a nearly fourfold increase from the $8 billion spent in 2001.
Ivan Safranchuk of the Center for Defense Information called the build-up evidence that Russia seeks to “expand its military-political influence across the globe.”
In a further sign of the country’s assertiveness, Ivanov also said Russia retained the right to launch a pre-emptive, conventional strike, and he ruled out any personnel cuts.
The military now has 1.1 million soldiers. Ivanov confirmed Wednesday that the fraction of professional, or volunteer, soldiers would continue to grow.
In the coming years, military planners are looking to replace military-command districts with regional districts.
Turning to the early-warning system, the defense minister said Russia would build “cheaper and more efficient” radar stations than those constructed during the Soviet era.
The new stations, which are to be built on Russian territory, are meant to fill in holes in the military’s warning capabilities — created by the 1991 Soviet collapse — and to decrease dependence on former Soviet republics.
Russia’s nuclear defense relies on data from early warning radar stations not only in Russia but also Belarus, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. The defense system also includes a fleet of satellites, but there are said to be too few to keep an eye on the whole world.
In 2007, Ivanov said, the armed forces will acquire four satellites and four “launch vehicles.”
In keeping with Russia’s move to be more independent, the plan envisions building launch pads for the Soyuz-2 and Angara rockets at the Plesetsk station in the Arkhangelsk region. 
For now, Russia launches its so-called heavy satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Russia rents the cosmodrome from the authorities in Astana, Kazakhstan.
And the military will continue spending nearly $38 million yearly on a new base for its Black Sea fleet, now based in Ukraine’s Crimea in accordance with an agreement that expires in 2017.
Procurement of intercontinental ballistic missiles will jump markedly in the coming years: In 2007, 17 ICBM’s will be bought, compared to no more than 10 in previous years.
Russia will also continue operating 50 long-range Tu-160 and Tu-95 bombers, Ivanov said. And the country will buy Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missiles. A series of launch test failures had delayed purchase of the SLBM’s and a new generation of atomic submarines.
While the procurement plan is not enough to replace all the obsolete nuclear missiles in the next five years, Safranchuk said, it “would still allow the country to maintain its strategic military capability at an acceptable level.”
Between 2012 and 2015, Russia must decommission almost all of its Soviet-built ICBM’s, given that the missiles’ service lives will have expired.
In the arena of conventional, or non-nuclear, forces, Russia plans to buy 31 ships, including aircraft carriers. Also, additional arms will be bought for tank, infantry and airborne battalions.

TITLE: Deputies Set Their Sights on Corruption
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A bill introducing “additional measures to tackle corruption in St. Petersburg” passed its first reading Wednesday in the Legislative Assembly. 
According to its author, Legislative Assembly deputy Vladimir Yeremenko, the document is intended to help battle “corrupt civil servants, bribe-takers who have merged almost entirely with state, commercial organizations and criminal groups… that very same force that might destroy the state from within.” The bill calls for the putting in place of procedures concerning control of the hiring and employment of civil servants, anti-corruption checks of legal norms, and the creation of a special council to discuss corruption issues, Yeremenko, a member of the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday.
“Unfortunately, corruption has in recent times penetrated every sphere of our life and has even spread to the simplest, most everyday relationships, not to mention the corruption on the state scale,” Vadim Tyulpanov, chairman of the assembly and leader of  United Russia in St. Petersburg said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
He said the initiative was timely and that, although subsequent readings of the bill will come only after a new assembly sits following March elections, he believed deputies will be able to successfully “see [the bill] through.”
The proposed law’s critics said, however, that the bill does not have the potential to become an instrument in the fight against corruption.
“Real life and this document exist independently of each other, and do not have anything in common,” Fontanka.ru quoted Legislative Assembly deputy Mikhail Amosov as saying on Thursday. 
Amosov, a member of the Yabloko party, who promised to give the bill his support as a gesture of respect to Yeremenko, said the situation reminded him of the beginning of the assembly’s work during perestroika 20 years ago.
During the Soviet era the rubber-stamp parliament attempted to address complex matters by simply issuing a law, Amosov said.  
“Such bills are usually just imitations, rather than real problem-solving tools,” acting chairman of the National Anti-Corruption Committee Kirill Kabanov said Thursday in a telephone interview. “To state a general declaration norms is harmless, but also useless.” 
“[The reasons behind the creation of the bill] partly derive from a willingness to change things for the better, but are also designed to prove to everyone that not only the federal authorities are trying to do something on the matter, but also that [the Legislative Assembly] is involved,” Kabanov told the St. Petersburg Times. 
Kabanov said he didn’t believe that the bill was going to solve the problems it is designed to counteract due to “the absence of an in-depth approach to the problem” in the country in general.
Corruption is a systemic phenomenon, he said. In order to tackle what he called “the biggest problem in Russia,” a system must be created that enables drastic changes in the legislative and executive powers to be made and allows society to take control of the situation.

TITLE: Russia Frustrated by Delays In London’s Spy Investigation
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia complained on Wednesday about a “long delay” in the British response to its request to send investigators to London for inquiries into the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
The statement was the latest suggestion of tension between Britain and Russia over the investigation into the death of the fierce Kremlin critic who succumbed to radioactive polonium-210 in London in November and blamed President Vladimir Putin for his poisoning.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said the prosecutor general’s office sent a request Jan. 8 asking permission to send investigators to London, where Russian prosecutors have said they want to visit several sites and question about 100 people, including outspoken Putin foe Boris Berezovsky.
“So far, no answer has been received,” Kamynin said. 
“Such a long delay in considering the Russian request causes regret, especially against the background of the readiness displayed by the Russian side for swift and constructive cooperation in this question at the professional level,” Kamynin said.
Litvinenko fled to Britain and was granted asylum after accusing his superiors of ordering him to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, a Russian tycoon and one-time Kremlin insider. 
Berezovsky has also been granted British citizenship.
Litvinenko died in a London hospital on Nov. 23.

TITLE: Russia Urges Iran to Negotiate
AUTHOR: By Henry Meyer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s foreign minister on Thursday urged Iran to show good will in resolving the dispute over its nuclear program, as a senior Iranian envoy held talks in Moscow.
Sergey Lavrov told Ali Akbar Velayati, an envoy of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Moscow hoped for a positive response in Tehran to its efforts to achieve a solution.
President Vladimir Putin last week said that Moscow backed a “time-out” proposed by the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency that calls for holding off on imposing UN sanctions if Tehran suspends uranium enrichment in its nuclear program.
“We sent corresponding signals to Tehran … with good will on all sides, we can find a fair solution based on international law,” Lavrov said at the start of his talks with Velayati.
In December, Russia supported a UN Security Council resolution imposing limited sanctions against Iran, after it ignored calls to halt uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for atomic power stations or nuclear warheads.
But that support came only after an initial proposal was dropped that would have imposed curbs on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, which Russia is helping build under a $1 billion contract.
The United States and several of its Western allies believe that oil-rich Iran is using the nuclear program to produce an atomic weapon — charges Iran denies, saying its only aim is to generate electricity.
Diplomats accredited with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, said Monday that Iran has set up more than 300 centrifuges in two uranium enrichment units at its underground Natanz complex.
The move is a direct challenge to the UN Security Council and potentially opens way for larger scale enrichment operations. Iranian leaders have said the Natanz complex would initially house 3,000 centrifuges, and ultimately 54,000.
Velayati said Iran supported Russia in its efforts to resolve the dispute.
“There are no doubts that Russia, as an important world power, and Iran, as an important regional power, will play a key role in the future of this sensitive region,” he said.
“The steps which Russia is taking in this direction of course have the support of Iran,” Velayati said. He later met Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov, who visited Tehran last month.
Iranian state-run radio said late last month that Tehran wanted Moscow to help mediate the standoff, saying Tehran’s leaders were looking to Russia for new proposals, such as enrichment of uranium on Russian soil.
The Kremlin proposed last year that Iran move its enrichment work to Russia, where it could be better monitored.

TITLE: Foreign Minister  Ivanov Laments Loss of $50 Bln
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that cash-rich Russian companies failed to clinch $50 billion in deals over the past year due to Western trade barriers and pledged to do something about it.
Lavrov, speaking at a conference celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, also said the barriers and “the discriminatory approach of Western countries” were a sign that European companies perceived the Russians as a “serious competitor.”
“We need to fight this, and we’ll be doing it together,” Lavrov told a room packed with more than 200 of the country’s business leaders.
During a meeting with the same business leaders in the Kremlin on Tuesday, Putin praised their “healthy ambitions,” saying they had come of age and were ready for great expansion plans abroad.
Russian companies lost 13 deals worth $50 billion, said Lavrov, citing what he said was data from a European consultancy.
He appeared to be referring to a report released late last month by M&A Intelligence, a Russian consultancy. The report said the 13 lost deals included five by Gazprom, three by LUKoil and two by Severstal. Unified Energy Systems, MMK and AFK Sistema were also on the list. The biggest was Severstal’s $13 billion bid to buy Luxembourg-based steelmaker Arcelor.
Last summer, Severstal put forward a last-minute bid to take over Arcelor, months after the eventual victor, Mittal Steel, had made its own offer.
Lavrov also expressed hope that Russian businesses would face fewer restrictions in the United States, where he recently met with President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other officials. Lavrov said the general mood on the U.S. side was that the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Soviet-era law that restricts trade, was an “anomaly” that would be lifted by the year’s end. Russian companies’ expansion plans have stoked fears in the West that the Kremlin was using their ever-growing cash reserves to pursue foreign policy objectives.
Speaking of ways to ease the difficulties of expansion to foreign markets, Viktor Vekselberg, an oil and metals billionaire, said Russian companies should do a better job of communicating with their foreign colleagues. Despite RSPP’s 15-year history, only last February did the group sign a partnership agreement with its European counterpart, UNICE, Vekselberg said.
He said the Russians needed to explain to the West: “Who we are, why we are coming, what our tasks and goals are, and what our principles are.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, he said he planned to travel to Switzerland later this month to tell the European public about the company’s intentions. “We’ll come and tell everything within the next two weeks,” Vekselberg said. He was responding to a question from an Agence France Presse reporter who said the foreign public did not understand what his SUAL metals company was up to. SUAL joined forces with Russian Aluminum and Switzerland-based Glencore last year to create the world’s biggest aluminum company.
Billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, AFK Sistema’s core shareholder, largely agreed with Vekselberg but said it was only natural that domestic companies were not “greeted with open arms.” “We all encounter that. It’s a difficult process,” he told reporters.
The M&A Intelligence report said a $786 million deal between Sistema and Lithuania’s Bite Lietuva, the Baltic mobile operator, fell through last year.
The expansion problems, however, did not appear to spoil the festive mood at the anniversary conference. Severstal chief Alexander Mordashov extolled the government, saying it “has constantly listened to us, the RSPP representatives.”
Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref returned the compliment, calling the RSPP “perhaps the biggest achievement” of the government and business.

TITLE: Cellist Rostropovich Enters Hospital
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Renowned cellist, conductor and human rights activist Mstislav Rostropovich is recovering in a Moscow hospital. He is not in serious condition, his spokeswoman said Wednesday.
“He has fallen ill, but he will be okay,” said Rostropovich’s spokeswoman, Natalya Dollezhal. Dollezhal declined to discuss Rostropovich’s illness but said he was on the mend and “getting ready for his anniversary.” Rostropovich will celebrate his 80th birthday on March 27.
President Vladimir Putin visited Rostropovich in the hospital Tuesday evening, the Kremlin announced on its web site. Putin ended his Tuesday meeting with 24 of the country’s leading businessmen by saying it was time for him to go visit Rostropovich, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
“And if you have no objections, I will say hello to him from all of you,” Putin said, Kommersant reported.
Rostropovich, one of the world’s greatest cellists and a human rights campaigner, emigrated with his wife, opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, from the Soviet Union in 1974 under intense pressure from the authorities.
Three years after his exile, he became music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington.
Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya returned in 1990, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored their citizenship. 
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: United Russia Stakes Claim to Nationalism
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A senior United Russia official on Wednesday staked the pro-Kremlin party’s claim on the politics of nationalism as the long campaign for the State Duma gets under way.
“No other political party can employ nationalist rhetoric and raise the ‘Russian question’ without slipping into extremism,” said Andrei Isayev, a United Russia Duma deputy and co-coordinator of the party’s Russian Project.
“We will try to break the extremists’ and fringe elements’ monopoly on nationalist rhetoric,” he said. “We need to show that pronouncing the word ‘Russian’ does not require you to turn into a fascist.”
Under the umbrella of the Russian Project, unveiled last Saturday, the party says it will hold public forums and promote legislation to preserve Russian culture and the purity of the Russian language.
Some political analysts say the Russian Project is little more than a campaign gimmick.
“This is not a ‘Russian’ project; it’s a typical election-year project aimed at exploiting people’s sense of their national identity,” Mikhail Delyagin, a former leader of the nationalist Rodina party who is now affiliated with the Institute for Globalization Studies, told RIA-Novosti.
Mark Urnov, head of the Expertiza think tank, said Russians were not ready for populist, patriotic politics and that United Russia’s initiative would only fuel the rise of ultranationalism.
“A discussion of this issue is necessary among the experts, but not in the public domain, because the public conscience is still neurotic and unstable. People aren’t ready for this,” Urnov said.

TITLE: Surgutneftegaz Spends Big on New Capacity
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One of Russia’s largest oil companies, Surgutneftegaz, will invest around $2 billion into a new oil processing complex in Leningrad Oblast, in an effort to increase production capacity.
Its subsidiary, Kirishinefteorgsintez, operates the only oil processing plant in the Northwest region. The new complex will be created on the base of the existing plant, Interfax reported Tuesday, and is due for completion in early 2009.
The total cost of the project increased from an initial $736 million, mainly because of the growing cost of metals, Interfax cited Vadim Somov, general director of Kirishinefteorgsintez, as saying at a St. Petersburg news conference on Tuesday.
Although the final cost of the project could become even higher, Somov said it would not affect the payback period, which is expected to be about seven years. Processing oil at the new complex will yield almost a third more gasoline, up from the current 54 percent to 85 percent, Somov said. The company has already spent about $800 million on hydrocracking equipment.
At the moment Kirishinefteorgsintez is preparing documents to prove the necessity of additional investment into catalytic cracking equipment. Somov expects this equipment to provide even better quality refining.
“We hope the construction to continue till 2012-2013 when we’ll get a 98 percent yield,” he said.
Somov said that the plant could also increase production capacity, though Surgutneftegaz has yet to make a related decision.
“We are considering increasing plant capacity to 24-25 million tons,” Somov said. This goal could be reached by 2012, he indicated.
At the moment production capacity at Kirishinefteorgsintez is about 20 million tons a year with 60 percent of products exported.
Maxim Shein, head of the analytical department at Brokercreditservice brokerage, saw this huge investment as a logical step. “Some time ago Surgutneftegaz considered constructing a new oil processing plant in Leningrad Oblast from scratch. Now they have decided to build the new complex on top of the existing plant,” Shein said.
“It’s advantageous for the region since tax payments to the regional budget will increase. As far as I know, a new law is soon to be introduced stating that excises on oil products will be imposed not on distributors but on oil processing companies,” he added.
Nevertheless, “as almost the only exporter of light oil products in Russia, Surgutneftegaz also benefits from the fact that the plant is located close to the sea port,” Shein said.
He estimated Surgutneftegaz’s economic performance to be about equal to that of LUKoil and TNK-BP, though shares of state-owned companies like Gazpromneft are traded at higher rates in the Russian Trading System.

TITLE: Khodorkovsky Labels Charges ‘Shameful Farce’
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky dismissed the money-laundering charges brought against him this week as a “shameful farce” aimed at keeping him in prison until after the 2008 presidential election and predicted that judges would find him guilty after a short trial. 
“Those who devised the Khodorkovsky affair to steal Russia’s most successful oil company … are afraid to see me free and want to insure themselves against my release on parole,” Khodorkovsky said in a statement posted on his web site late Tuesday.
“The court, a subservient instrument of the power vertical, will of course deliver a guilty verdict,” Khodorkovsky said in his statement. The case was a “shameful farce, which has nothing to do with justice,” he said. 
Prosecutors brought charges against Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev on Monday in the east Siberian city of Chita, where the two are being held. They are currently serving eight-year sentences on fraud and tax evasion charges. The men now stand accused of embezzling and laundering $23 billion to $25 billion in oil revenues through offshore trading companies and Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia foundation, defense lawyers say. 
If convicted, they each face up to a further 15 years each in prison. The charges mean that they will likely have to stay behind bars pending the trial and throughout the hearings. If it were not for the charges, the men could be considered for parole later this year. 
Yukos’ former CFO Bruce Misamore on Wednesday defended the oil company’s sales practices, saying the latest charges against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were a result of the Russian government’s misunderstanding of basic accounting principles.
“From what I know about the charges, they are 100 percent completely false and they arise from the complete ignorance by the Russians of international accounting standard practice,” he said in a conference call from Tampa, Florida. “All of the transactions were conducted at a market price.”
Prosecutors have not detailed the latest charges but have said that from 2000 to 2003, Yukos officials sold crude oil through two trading subsidiaries, Fargoil and Ratibor, both registered in tax havens, at knockdown prices. These companies resold the crude internationally, thus illegally stripping Yukos of profits, prosecutors say.
Misamore countered that Yukos charged a fair domestic price for the crude. “Take the Urals blend world market price, detract the Russian export duty and transportation cost in order to deliver it to the border and you come up with a very reasonable approximation of the Russian domestic crude oil price,” he said. “People don’t understand that when they see Russian domestic crude oil prices and think they are held down artificially low that there’s actually a mathematical relationship.” Other Russian oil companies were using the same arrangement to sell their crude, he said. 
 The Moscow Arbitration Court on Wednesday ordered Fosagro, a company created by Khodorkovsky, to return the government’s 20 percent stake in Apatit, the country’s biggest fertilizer maker, RIA-Novosti reported. Fosagro acquired the stake in 1994.

TITLE: Petersburg Set To Be Crowned With Plaza
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has announced plans to develop a new Crowne Plaza St. Petersburg in an historic building in the city center. 
Last year the British company opened a Crowne Plaza hotel in Moscow.
According to the agreement, signed between IHG and Rastor Investments, the Crowne Plaza St. Petersburg will open in early 2009, IHG said last week in a statement.
“This project represents a unique opportunity to establish the Crowne Plaza brand in St. Petersburg. Russia is a strategic market for IHG. The strength of the Russian economy and increasing opportunities in this region have attracted hotel investors and operators, and raised the demand for international hotel brands,” Robin Wicks, IHG’s Chief Operating Officer for Europe, said in the statement.
The hotel will comprise 339 rooms, two bars, two restaurants, a swimming pool, a gym and a 750 square meter conference hall. It will be located in a historic, low-rise building in the Admiralteysky district. Situated near extensive shopping areas, the hotel will have a covered atrium with shops, bars and restaurants.
The hotel will be close to a number of historical and cultural attractions such as Nikolsky Cathedral and Yusupov Palace, as well as two metro stations and a further two railway stations. The hotel will aim at both business travelers and tourists.
IHG owns, manages, leases or franchises over 3,650 hotels and 543,775 rooms in nearly 100 countries or territories. The Group owns the InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites, Candlewood Suites and Hotel Indigo brands.
In Russia IHG operates four Holiday Inn hotels in Moscow providing 1290 rooms. In St. Petersburg, along with Crowne Plaza, the company is to open a Holiday Inn Ligovsky Prospekt and a Holiday Inn Moscovsky Prospekt — both of them in 2008. Altogether in the three hotels there will be a total of 968 rooms.
“St. Petersburg is currently lacking in quality business and travel accommodation but an increasing number of international hotel chains are starting to come to Russia’s cultural capital,” said Andrei Yakunin, Partner and Chief Financial Officer of Rastor Management.
“This new Crowne Plaza is not only contributing to a high standard of accommodation in St. Petersburg but also means an architectural monument built in 1789 is being resurrected,” he said.
“Crowne Plaza’s main competitors will be the 4- and 5-star hotels located along Nevsky Prospekt like Nevskij Palace, Radisson SAS and Novotel,” said Oleg Gromkov, consultant of Knight Frank St. Petersburg.
He estimated that investment would surpass $75 million with a payback period of seven to eight years. Depending on the costs of redevelopment, the total investment could be higher, he said.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Runaway State</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — The Kremlin will transfer ownership of St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport to the city after the regional government lobbied to take the company over instead of having it auctioned off, Kommersant reported.
The airport needs as much as 900 million euros ($1.2 billion) in investment and the city plans to find a private backer to provide funds in exchange for a share in the airport, the Moscow-based newspaper said, citing Igor Grechukhin, the director of the Economy Ministry’s property relations department.
Pulkovo plans to quadruple the number of passengers it handles to 22 million, Kommersant reported, without giving a timeframe. The airport is currently valued at $500 million, the newspaper said, citing unidentified analysts.

<b>Local Concession</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Hall has included the Nissan car assembly plant in its list of strategic projects, Interfax reported Tuesday.
As strategic investors, Nissan Motor Co. and its subsidiary Nissan Manufacturing Rus will be awarded tax concessions according to local legislation.
Nissan plans to invest about 5.5 billion rubles ($208.5 million) into construction by 2009. Located in the Kamenka industrial zone the new plant will produce 500,000 cars a year.

<b>Statistical Services</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Inflation in Russia stood at 1.7 percent in January as opposed to 2.4 percent in January 2006, according to a statement by the Federal State Statistics Service released Tueasday.
The price of petrol in January this year was 10.7 percent higher than in January 2006, even though the price has been decreasing for the last four months. In October 2006 the price of petrol decreased by 0.4 percent, in November by 0.6 percent, in December by 0.2 percent, in January by 0.1 percent.
Tariffs for communal and housing services in January increased by 11.1 percent.

<b>Nomos Bonds</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Nomos bank has announced plans to issue eurobonds worth a total of $300 million in 2008, Interfax reported Wednesday.
The eurobonds will be in circulation for five years. This year Nomos bank plans to issue bonds in Russia. By 2008 Nomos bank is also due to organize an IPO in Moscow.
Last year Nomos bank reported net profits of $80 million and owned capital worth $580 million, according to IFRS.

<b>Polymetal IPO</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Polymetal, the Russian silver producer owned by billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, raised $604.5 million at an initial public offering.
The company sold 40 million new global depositary receipts and its main investor, Kerimov’s Nafta Moskva Ltd., sold 38 million existing shares at $7.75 each, St. Petersburg-based Polymetal said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. 
The sale values the company at $2.44 billion. Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch & Co. and UBS AG managed the transaction.
Shares of Polymetal will start trading in Moscow on the Russian Trading System on Feb. 7, the Micex exchange on Feb. 9, and in London on Feb. 12, according to the company statement.

<b>India Jets</b>
BANGALORE (Reuters) — India is set to sign a contract to buy 40 more Sukhoi Su-30 fighters from Russia by the end of March, the country’s air force chief said on Thursday.
Air Chief Marshal S.P Tyagi said he expected the planes, costing slightly less than $40 million each, to be delivered within three years.
“We think that in this financial year, we will sign the contract,” Tyagi told reporters in Bangalore.
The air force already has an unspecified number of Su-30s in its fleet.

<b>Alrosa President</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Alrosa, the world’s second-largest diamond-mining company, appointed Sergei Vybornov as president in place of Alexander Nichiporuk.
Vybornov, 49, will take up the post tomorrow, the company, based in the Far East republic of Sakha, he said Wednesday in an e- mailed statement.

TITLE: British Minister Calls for Clear Rules on Investment
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Alistair Darling led a group of 20 top-level British CEOs on Wednesday in calling on the Kremlin to clarify investment rules in the first Cabinet-level visit to Russia since the recent souring of bilateral relations.
“Investors must know where they stand from the start,” Darling told reporters after meeting Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. “It is absolutely essential that when disagreements arise, we do everything we possibly can to resolve them.” 
The delegation included top officials from BP, Shell and mining giant Rio Tinto — important players in key sectors, where foreign investment is due to be limited by a new bill.
Darling said he had raised the problems facing BP and Shell in his talks with Kudrin and at a previous meeting with Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref. He was also due to meet Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko late Wednesday.
“Those difficulties [regarding BP and Shell] need to be resolved,” Darling said. “The will is there to make it work.”
BP has become the most recent target of the Kremlin’s scrutiny and is currently in negotiations to allow state-run Gazprom into Kovykta, the giant Siberian gas field operated by its TNK-BP subsidiary. Gazprom is also interested in buying out the three Russian billionaires who currently hold a 50 percent stake in the TNK-BP joint venture.
BP Russia chief Richard Spies and Andrew Wood, an adviser to the company and former British ambassador to Moscow, also attended the talks Wednesday. TNK-BP spokeswoman Marina Dracheva said she was unaware of any plans for meetings with company officials in Moscow.
“We have not approached any politicians on either side,” she said.
Shell sold a controlling stake in Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom in December after months of pressure from state environmental officials. Shell was represented in the delegation by Sir Philip Thomas, an adviser to the company and a former Foreign Office official.
“British business, especially natural resource companies, want to know about the certainty of the subsoil laws,” Rio Tinto CEO Leigh Clifford said after the news conference. The team would continue to push for more clarity, he said, while adding that talks with government officials were useful.
The State Duma is widely expected to pass a new law on subsoil rights this year that would codify the rules that the Kremlin has increasingly made clear through its behavior towards foreign investors — namely, that Russian state-linked companies are to have a controlling stake in all major projects involving the country’s vast natural resources.
Recent shifts in the ownership structure at mining giant Norilsk Nickel, as well as leadership changes at diamond monopoly Alrosa, have prompted speculation that the mining industry could be the state’s next target for restructuring.
British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto runs a joint venture with Norilsk in which it holds a 49 percent stake. The company, RioNor, was set up last year to explore greenfield deposits of copper, brass and zinc, as well as precious metals, in Siberia and the Far East.
Britain is the country’s largest foreign investor, with $5.5 billion invested in the first nine months of 2006. London is the top choice for Russian company IPOs.

TITLE: A Problem Crossing Borders
AUTHOR: By Daniel Sershen
TEXT: Recent changes to Russian labor migration policy have long been overdue. But while they are certainly a step in the right direction, the new rules may have unintended consequences that would damage the economy and send negative ripples through the economies of its neighbors.
Russia is heavily dependent on foreign labor, the vast majority of which comes from these countries. With its population declining at an alarming rate — falling at roughly 750,000 people per year — Russia needs to attract migrants to forestall a drastic labor shortage.
And the migrants need Russia. This is particularly true for the poorest former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the South Caucasus and Moldova. Conservative estimates put the number of Kyrgyz workers in Russia at 500,000, or about 10 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s population, and some experts say it is closer to 1 million. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan also send high percentages of their workers abroad.
Anyone who lives in Central Asia has noticed the signs of a population on the move: job seekers lined up at transportation hubs, waiting grimly for the plane, train or bus that will shuttle them north. The flip side is the huge amount of money the migrants send back. According to an IMF position paper, overall remittances in Tajikistan amount to at least 20 percent and perhaps as much as 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, the vast majority coming from Russia.
The effects in Russia are equally dramatic. A recent World Bank study ranked Russia’s immigrant population as the second largest in the world, surpassed only by the United States. Non-citizens dominate whole sectors of the Russian labor force, including outdoor markets and many other categories of unskilled work.
The majority of migrants from what Russians refer to as the “near abroad” benefit from visa-free travel, but Russia’s labyrinthine bureaucracy has so far deterred most from getting the proper labor registration. In January, Federal Migration Service chief Konstantin Romodanovsky told Ekho Moskvy radio that fewer than 1 million of an estimated 11 million migrants were working in the country legally.
The benefits of remaining off the books are clear: The workers can evade taxes and avoid a long and likely losing battle for registration with the bureaucracy, while employers get cheap labor. But undocumented workers have little recourse when their bosses, law enforcement officials or others decide to take advantage of their vulnerability.
The package of new legislation and decrees that came into force in January has the potential to change the situation dramatically. Quotas for foreign laborers in Russia have been expanded significantly, and huge fines will be levied on employers who hire undocumented workers. Meanwhile, the process of registering and obtaining a work permit has been made much easier. Weighed against these positives is one major drawback: a ban on foreign nationals working in the country’s open-air markets, which is to come into full effect April 1.
Overall, the changes should be welcomed as a good-faith attempt to fix a broken system. But xenophobia and political considerations have determined some aspects of the new policy, and the results will hurt both Russia and the countries from which most of the migrant workers come.
The market ban is part of a trend of growing intolerance; a populist move intended to placate elements in society that would rather have immigrants out of sight and mind. Moreover, if fully enforced, it would lead to higher prices in many markets, as employers switch from migrants to more costly domestic labor. Even now, markets have curtailed activities and even closed in some cities, the public relations manager for the Tsentraziya migrant support group, Nurbek Atambayev, said last week.
The damage will be greater for sending countries. Concrete numbers are hard to come by, but Aygul Ryskulova, head of Kyrgyzstan’s Migration and Employment Committee, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting that the changes were likely to leave about 100,000 Kyrgyz unemployed, and figures for Kyrgyzstan’s neighbors are likely similar. It is not yet clear how market workers are reacting to the ban; some may find jobs in other sectors, while others may continue to work illegally or even seek Russian citizenship. But a significant number can be expected to return home to fragile economies that have little capacity to absorb the influx.
One of the unintended ripple effects caused by the ban is a copycat Kyrgyz law that forbids foreigners from working in Kyrgyzstan’s own markets starting in April, a move expected to hit the many Chinese merchants operating in the country’s bazaars. Kyrgyz officials have connected their ban directly to the Russian example, saying they hope to open up employment opportunities for their compatriots coming home from Russia.
Even the obvious improvements in the laws could prove double-edged. Many labor migrants are unaware of how the changes in the registration rules will affect them, which opens the door to their exploitation. Word is spreading of scams in which unscrupulous employers try to extort money from laborers, such as by telling them they must pay a steep fee to get registered.
Another potentially ominous consequence is the increased politicization of migration policy. As the labor market seems likely to become more regulated, countries of origin have begun lobbying for a greater allocation of slots for their citizens. There is a danger that the Russian approach to labor migration may become as politicized as its energy policy, with officials allocating preferential quotas to Russia’s allies and punishing those with whom it disagrees. Such moves, although by no means unprecedented in Russia or elsewhere in the world, would further expose foreign workers to the vagaries of international politics.
Improving on the current policy should not be particularly difficult. Lifting the ban on foreign laborers in markets would be a good start, along with raising the overall quota of 6 million to a figure that more closely reflects the actual number of migrants in the country. Perhaps most important, an extensive information campaign will have to be conducted to make sure workers know how the changes affect them.
Russia’s labor migration policy does not need to be a zero-sum game; a few telling adjustments can bring benefits to both sides of this complex equation.

Daniel Sershen is a freelance journalist based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

TITLE: Consolidating Power
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin held an unexpectedly substantive annual news conference last week. It was surprising because, whereas Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko apparently thinks leaders were given tongues in order to keep people in line, Putin, as a former intelligence officer, seems to believe that his should be used to conceal his true motives.
Every one of Putin’s public addresses is conducted like a special operations disinformation campaign designed to confound any possible opponents. Trying to ascertain the president’s real views on democracy and the rule of law from these talks is about as pointless as analyzing the trajectory of a missile’s flight in order to learn what the pilot who fired it ate for breakfast.
But the press conference was of importance because the questions touched not only on Putin’s plans for the future, but on concrete events: The cancellation of gubernatorial elections, the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
But Putin had little factual to say about these topics. In answer to the question: “Which of his enemies murdered Litvinenko?” Putin replied with a tirade rather than a satisfactory answer, saying, “He possessed no [state] secrets. Criminal proceedings were instituted against him for abusing his position as a security services officer by abusing citizens in detention and for smuggling explosives. He was given a three-year suspended sentence and there was no reason for him to flee.”
However, even the petty nature of Litvinenko’s crimes suggested by this account does not disprove the involvement of Russian special forces in his death; instead, it merely proves that, were they involved, it was a case of inhuman and senseless murder. It is also strange that Litvinenko’s photo adorns so many military and police shooting range targets, right beside that of the late Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.
Putin had at least one more important comment to make: “The position of those in power following the 2008 election should be consolidated and effective,” he said. “This is not just a casual remark,” he continued, “after all, in the mid-1990s, different branches of government were like the swan, the lobster and the pike of the fable, all pulling in opposite directions, and thus bringing the country to a standstill.”
And on this point the Kremlin’s gloating over disorder in Georgia and Ukraine demonstrates that what the rest of the world considers democracy’s greatest asset, a healthy opposition, Moscow sees as its greatest weakness. Putin’s answer illustrated this clearly. From his point of view, the leadership is “unconsolidated” and the government weak if opposition exists. But according to a Western understanding, the presence of an opposition is what defines democracy.
From the Kremlin’s point of view, control over society entails the executive authority’s control over the courts, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the parliament; that is, control over the very institutions that should be independent of the executive branch in a democracy.
In a real democracy, public order is maintained by judges who don’t take bribes, police who don’t imprison innocent people, and military officers who defend the country without trading in soldiers as a human commodity. In the Kremlin’s view, order results when the courts, the parliament and the defense minister, who happens to be Putin’s personal friend in this case, all answer to the president. As for how they deal with the masses of humanity entrusted to their care, that is just a personal matter between friends.

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

TITLE: One day in January
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: On the morning of Jan. 29, Mohammad Faisal Siksik was hitching a ride on the hot, dusty road that runs along Israel’s border with Egypt.
Dressed in a black coat and carrying a bag, the 21-year-old asked a local motorist to take him the short distance south to the city of Eilat.
The resort town lies at the southernmost tip of Israel, where its territory tapers to a point between Egypt and Jordan, and dips its toe into the warm waters of the Red Sea.
The town meets the sea atop the Gulf of Aqaba, which, if the Red Sea were a slug, would be one of its horns. The other is the Gulf of Suez to the east. Between them lies the rocky and forbidding expanse of the Sinai Peninsula. 
Siksik, a Palestinian from Gaza and presumably subject to travel restrictions in Israel, had probably arrived on the road to Eilat from the Sinai, where the desert border, although tightly patrolled, is not marked by a physical barrier. 
Nothing much grows in this hotspot, apart from the date palms which Siksik may have seen from the car window on his journey into town. Yet mankind — in various epochs and under different systems — has found sustenance here for thousands of years.
At Timna Park, thirty kilometers north of Eilat, a landscape sculpted by geological erosion harbors evidence of ancient civilizations. 
Solomon, a biblical king revered by the Jews, mined for precious stones such as sea-bright malachite here. Tour guides disdain the myth arising from H. Rider Haggard’s 1895 novel “King Solomon’s Mines,” which depicts a sort of pre-industrial conglomerate hungry for diamonds somewhere in Africa, as a fantasy they say denigrates the wisdom of Solomon’s leadership. The mine shafts that remain at Timna are barely a meter wide and just thirty meters deep, and now filled with sand. After dropping Siksik off in downtown Eilat, the driver called the police to report that the hitch-hiker had behaved suspiciously. It was odd for the young man to be wearing a black coat. Even in January, Eilat is hot.
This climate is made for holiday makers, and Eilat, positioned on part of the last territory wrested from its neighbors during the Israeli war of independence 60 years ago, has evolved as a holiday town. Nearly 180,000 foreign tourists visited Eilat in 2006, attracted in part by its safe reputation in a strife-ridden nation.
Visitors are chiefly drawn by the magnetic allure of what lies just beneath the surface of the sea: a startling abundance of marine life in all its forms. 
The world’s northernmost coral reef provides the infrastructure —?itself mad, beautiful and sinister —  for a mass of fish and molluscs, plus a few friendly mammalian dolphins, that forms a living population more diverse and weird than any human city. And you don’t even have to dive to sea it. An undersea observation platform has been constructed off the coast at Eilat’s oceanographic park, close to which coral attracts thousands of examples of naturally occurring local fauna. 
Tour guides admit this underwater garden has been “planted” or “cultivated” to be viewed through toughened glass six meters below the surface. But this is the sea. The animals that gather there could swim away. However “this is their house, and they stay put,” a tour guide will explain.
Some of the stars of this dazzling community deserve special mention. Everybody loves dolphins, yes, and are morbidly attracted to the benign sharks that live in the Red Sea, but consider the puffer fish — it can double its size when threatened and is almost entirely lethally poisonous. This doesn’t stop the Japanese risking death to eat the bit that won’t kill them, but each year a chef’s knife makes the wrong cut and the gamble doesn’t pay off. 
In one of the park’s onshore aquariums there’s an octopus that can open a screwtop bottle to get its lunch (and does so each day for an audience). In others there are angel fish, clownfish, pipefish, starfish, turtles and a charming herd of sea horses.
Nobody disputes the excellent scuba diving opportunities Eilat’s proximity to these natural wonders affords, but the town must compete for tourists with nearby Egyptian and Jordanian resorts that have access to the same thing. 
The underwater world may not be divided by the borders of human civilization above — on top of the below-sea gallery is a 10-meter high viewing deck from which not only Israel, Jordan and Egypt can be seen, but also stretches of nearby Saudi Arabia — but it is these divisions that drive political, religious and economic realities in the Middle East. 
Perhaps that’s what was in Mohammad Faisal Siksik’s mind as he stood in a residential street in Eilat, far from its gleaming beach hotels, and walked into a nearby bakery.
Just three weeks before Siksik’s journey, Eilat hosted the Second Red Sea International Music Festival in a bid to increase visitor numbers and show that the town has more to offer than coral and fish. 
The star attraction was Valery Gergiev and the orchestra and chorus of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater. The Russian maestro led his world-class ensemble through three nights of opera classics to an enthusiastic, mostly Israeli audience. Evidence, however, of Eilat’s neophyte status on the classical music festival circuit came in the venue for the Mariinsky concerts — not a concert hall, but a converted hangar at the town’s port. 
Because it is Israel’s only access to the southern oceans, the oil, cars and other products from Asia that the nation needs are imported through Eilat. Scientists at the oceanographic park privately worry that shipping can harm the sea life they study and protect. 
Residents of Eilat however understand that Israel —?surrounded by countries that for so long resisted its creation —?needs its strategic connections to the rest of the world. Offering a top-class vacation destination, cut off from Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, is a part of that strategy. It should remain so — despite the events of Jan. 29.
A witness near the Lechamim bakery recorded what happened next that day less than a month ago. 
“I saw a man with a black coat and a bag. For Eilat, where it is hot, it is strange to see someone walking with a coat. I said to myself, ‘Why is this idiot dressed that way?’ Seconds later, I heard a huge blast. The building shook.” 
Siksik, a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, detonated 10 kilograms of explosives strapped to his body, destroying himself and blasting apart three people standing near him. Dozens were injured. The bakery was wrecked.
At his home in Gaza, Siksik’s brother Naeem told reporters: “We knew he was going to carry out a martyrdom operation. His mother and father prayed for him to succeed.”

The author traveled to Eilat on Jan. 3 as a guest of the Mariinsky Theater.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Last week brought another insight into the music tastes of senior Kremlin official. 
Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of presidential administration and and the Kremlin’s ideologist, and Dmitry Medvedev, the first deputy prime minister often seen as President Vladimir Putin’s preyemnik, or successor, revealed they are both fans of Deep Purple, according to Vedomosti newspaper.
Meeting around 20 activists from pro-Kremlin youth organizations such as Nashi and Rossiya Molodaya late last month, Surkov was reported as saying about Medvedev and himself: “We are think alike on most subjects, the only difference in terms... We both like Deep Purple, but he likes ‘Kentucky Woman’ better while I like ‘Lazy.’”
Earlier, Medvedev was reported to have introduced defense minister Sergei Ivanov to the British rockers, whose heyday was in the early 1970s.
“I do have friendly, good personal relationship with Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev,” Ivanov was quoted by Interfax agency in October. “We even went to Deep Purple together.”
Ivanov, however, is better-known as a Beatle fan. In the U.S. documentary “Paul McCartney in Red Square,” about the ex-Beatle’s 2003 Russian tour, the minister was shown with what was said to be his collection of The Beatles’ vinyl records.
But, reports say, it’s different with Putin. Even if he let McCartney serenade him with “Hey Jude” in the Kremlin and attended the ex-Beatle’s show in Red Square, his real soft spot is Smokie, the forgotten Brittish popster who entertained Putin at the Kremlin’s New Year party in Dec. 2004.
Why don’t these people listen  to something more relevant? Do their musical tastes reflect nostalgia about the Soviet past?
Meanwhile, the local club scene has awoken after its post-New Year slumber and offers quite a few treats this week.
<b>J.D. and the Blenders</b>, the soul-funk band fronted by U.S. vocalist Jennifer Davis, will perform at Maina on Friday. Watch out for Dva Samaliota performing at Tsokol on Saturday and the comeback of the surf-psychobilly band <b>Bombers</b> at Maina on Thursday.
The all-woman band <b>Iva Nova</b> will premiere its second album “Chemodan” (Suitcase) at Orlandina on Wednesday. See article, page iii.
<b>NOM</b>, the frequently hilarious theatrical art-rock band famous for their videos and feature films, will perform twice this week.
The veteran band, whose sound draws on rock, new wave, pop, Soviet torch songs, Gypsy folk and cabaret, has turned to a more electronic sound on its last, 10th album, “Boleye Moshchny” (A More Powerful One). 
Featuring vocalist/bassist Andrei Kagadeyev, showman and vocalist Ivan Turist (real name Yury Saltykov) and keyboard player Nikolai Gusev, formerly of Stranniye Igry and AVIA, NOM will play at Revolution on Friday and Orlandina on Thursday.
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Rip-Off artists
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A slang-filled diary narrating the adventures of two Russian dropouts in London won a prestigious literary prize in 2000. Now the book has been turned into a low-budget, English-language film, “Bigga Than Ben,” with a cast of British and Russian actors including Andrei Chadov and Ben Barnes. It is set to premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival in California next month.
The book’s authors, Pavel Tetersky and Sergei Sakin, were close friends who traveled to London in 1999 with the aim of staying as long as possible. Originally written as a joint diary, “Bigger than Ben” chronicled their dubious methods, including mobile phone and bank-card scams.
When the book won the first Debut prize in 2000, its authors were not talking to each other due to a dispute over who had contributed more to the writing. Sakin went on to star on the Russian version of “Survivor,” while Tetersky wrote several solo novels.
The film’s director, Suzie Halewood, read about the book in the British press, where it whipped up a small furor after winning the Debut prize. The Daily Telegraph called the book a “drug users’ guide to London fraud,” while the Evening Standard headlined an article “How to rip off London.”
Speaking by telephone from London last week Halewood said she had immediately spotted a “fantastic idea” for a film. Reading an English translation of the book, she was shocked to find that its heroes were “really racist, really obnoxious.”
Not dissuaded, the director met the authors — separately — and acquired the film rights. The writers took no further part in developing her script, which eventually lost most of the book’s idiosyncratic slang, she said, although she did consider handing out glossaries to moviegoers.
The film was shot in London last July, and a preliminary cut is now finished, Halewood said. However, she wants the final version to be more edgy, since the actors “had a little bit too much sympathy for their characters.” In a meeting with Sakin, he told her, “Don’t make us nice,” she recalled.
Nevertheless, the director believes the film is as much about London and its attitude to immigrants as it is about Sakin and Tetersky’s swindles. “London really rips you off,” she said. Although Britain has a reputation as a benefits haven, “most people are spat out of the system,” she said.
The director is looking for a Russian distributor and is not worried that Russians will be offended by the film’s depiction of their compatriots. “It’s not my portrayal; it is two Russians’ portrayals of themselves,” she said.
The authors got back in touch with each other this week, six years on, after watching the film’s trailer. Sakin now works in advertising, while Tetersky combines editing jobs with driving a taxi. Drinking beer in Sakin’s office last week, they expressed their amazement that the film had gotten made and said they were impressed by how closely the actors resembled them.
“When I heard about the budget of the film, I thought it would be complete shit,” Tetersky said. “When I saw the trailer, I really took heart.” He joked that Barnes, who plays his role, was “a lot more charismatic than the prototype.” 
Sakin spoke of the director’s “unbelievable flair,” saying he would have filmed the book in the same way and agreeing with the decision to cast Chadov as himself. 
The book is currently out of print due to a dispute with the publishers, and 70 percent of readers read it on the Internet, the authors estimate. Neither has visited Britain since. Yet asked if he ever rereads the book, Sakin replied: “Even now, every moment of that life, every line is still in my heart.”

TITLE: Super Nova
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Iva Nova — one of Russia’s best live acts — will unveil its new album on St. Valentine’s Day. 
Iva Nova, a crazed all-women band that combines Russian folk and punk, has a reputation as one of the best live acts on the club circuits of both Moscow and its hometown of St. Petersburg. But its concert at Orlandina on Wednesday will showcase, if belatedly, the band’s studio work.
“A lot of fans say it’s best to listen to us live. It’s difficult for us to record — we lose half of our drive when recording, so we try to decorate it with arrangements,” drummer Katya Fyodorova said in a recent interview. 
“It’s not just our problem, though. It happens with many live bands, such as Markscheider Kunst or Spitfire, when a disc sounds a little bit too quiet.”
Iva Nova’s new album, “Chemodan” (Suitcase), was recorded in the local Dobrolyot studio and released by the Moscow-based label Geometriya in November. It features songs in Georgian, Tartar and Bulgarian, as well as Russian.
“We called it ‘Suitcase’ because it came out very diverse, with different styles, with every song about something new, with different languages all mixed in, so we couldn’t name it after some song,” Fyodorova said. “We are also absolutely different characters, with different tastes.”
Fyodorova — an accomplished drummer who was asked to stand in for Faust’s drummer during the krautrock legends’ British tour in 2002 — said Iva Nova’s folk-punk style dates back to the founding of her first all-female band, Babslei, in 1998. That group started as a joke act for an International Women’s Day party at Moloko, St. Petersburg’s seminal, now-defunct underground club.
At the time, Fyodorova said, her bandmates weren’t strong on musical expertise. “We all knew folk songs from our childhood, and we just tried [them] and it turned out great — so we put them on three chords, and got our style,” she explained.
Iva Nova formed in 2002 after three members of Babslei, including Fyodorova, quit because of personal differences. They started Iva Nova, which went on to release a self-titled debut record in 2003 and a live DVD, “Zhivaya!” (Alive!), in 2005. “Suitcase” is the band’s second album.
“I didn’t like the first album at all, because we were recording it in Moscow and had to travel there, one by one, separately — that’s why it came out not that strong,” said Fyodorova.
“We also recorded it on our own, in a very basic style — the songs do sound better live. With ‘Suitcase,’ we had a more artistic attitude, it sounds more interesting.”
Over the past few years, Iva Nova has experienced a number of lineup changes — partly due to its gender make-up. “Because we’re a female band, everybody leaves when they have babies,” Fyodorova said. 
Apart from Fyodorova and original guitarist Inka Lishenkevich, Iva Nova now features three new members: vocalist Nastya Postnikova, accordion player Elnara Shafigullina and bassist Katya Grigoryeva. Postnikova used to sing in Baobaby, an alt-rock band from Pskov, also with an all-female lineup, while the Chukotka-born Shafigullina had a stint in Babslei. For bassist Grigoryeva, who previously worked as a bartender at Moloko, playing with Iva Nova is her first musical job.
The lineup changes have affected the band’s sound, Fyodorova said, singling out the departure of vocalist Vera Ogaryova and the replacement of bayan player Lena Zhornik with accordionist Shafigullina.
“Elnara is a very original player, and she brought a lot of her own into the music, so it became more interesting, especially with the new songs,” Fyodorova said.
Fyodorova also works with experimental bands ZGA and FIGS and has recently appeared, as a prostitute, in “Ulitsa Razbitykh Fonarei” (“Boulevard of Broken Streetlights”), a locally made television series.
Iva Nova showcased “Chemodan” at Dom, Moscow’s respected venue for avant-garde and world music, in November, but had to postpone the local premiere until Feb. 14, because the venue, Lensoviet Palace of Culture, had second thoughts, according to Fyodorova. More recently, the band moved the show into the smaller Orlandina club.
Wednesday’s concert at Orlandina will feature Ogaryova, who no longer performs live with Iva Nova but continues to work with the band in the studio. The band will also be augmented by several men who guested on the album: saxophonist Nikolai Rubanov and tuba player Mikhail Kolovsky, both of the St. Petersburg art-rock band Auktsyon, trombone player Ramil Shamsutdinov, formerly of Markscheider Kunst, and Skazy Lesa’s Vladimir Molodtsov on bagpipes.
During Iva Nova’s lifespan, the original idea of fusing Russian folk and punk has evolved, Fyodorova said. 
“We sound more folk now, because we play mostly acoustically and there are more voices,” she said. “We don’t sing traditional folk songs anymore — we only play one or two very occasionally. But it’s still folk because we are part of the people.”

<i>Iva Nova performs at Orlandina on Wednesday. www.iva-nova.ru</i>

TITLE: Ilya Kormiltsev (1959-2007)
TEXT: Ilya Kormiltsev, poet, translator, the head of the radical publisher Ultra Kultura and a former songwriter for the Soviet rock band Nautilus Pompilius, died in London on Sunday. He was 47.
Late last month, Kormiltsev was reported to have been hospitalized in London, diagnosed with cancer of the spine in its worst stage.
A persistent critic of the Kremlin’s politics, Kormiltsev protested when former Nautilus Pompilius’ singer Vyacheslav Butusov performed, for a fee, for 5,000 activists of Nashi at the Kremlin-backed youth movement’s summer camp in July 2006. He compared Nashi with the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s infamous Red Guards. 
In articles and interviews, Kormiltsev accused former rock scene peers in betraying the dissenting nature of the music when Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, Leningrad’s Sergei Shnurov and the others secretly met the Kremlin’s ideologist Vladislav Surkov in 2005.
“It means that the people don’t think about their future, above all,” he said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times last August. 
“The Surkovs come and go, but you won’t be able get back your reputation.”
Kormiltsev was born on Sept. 29, 1959 into the family of geologists in Sverdlovsk, as Yekaterinburg was then known. He graduated from the chemistry department of the Urals University in 1981.
In the 1980s, Kormiltsev became active at the then-burgeoning Sverdlovsk underground rock scene, writing lyrics for several local bands including bands Urfin Dzhus and Nastya.
But he is best-remembered for co-writing some of the best-known Nautilus Pompilius songs, such as the anti-totalitarian anthems “Skovanniye Odnoi Tsepyu” (Chained Together) and “Shar Tsveta Khaki” (Khaki-Colored Globe).
Always an opponent to the Soviet and post-Soviet authorities, he rejected the Lenin Komsomol Award that was given to Nautilus Pompilius in 1989. 
In the 1990s and 2000s, he became well-known as a translator. He translated many English and American works by authors such as William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis.
More recently, Kormiltsev’s publishing house attracted controversy by putting out a wide range of nonconformist literature, from skinhead memoirs to anthologies of American Beat poetry to the prison essays of National Bolshevik Party founder Eduard Limonov. 
Ultra Kultura was under permanent attack from the authorities and was accused, alternatively, of promoting drug use, or spreading pornography.
Kormiltsev is survived by his wife, the opera singer Alesya Mankovskaya, and a son, Stas. 
A memorial service will be held at the Central House of Writers in Moscow at 11 p.m. on Friday. A funeral service will be held at Moscow’s Troyekurovskoye Cemetery at 2 p.m.
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: You shall go to the ball!
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The great and the good are reviving pre-Revolutionary traditions with increasingly lavish parties. Internationally renowned opera diva Yelena Obraztsova is resting leisurely in her ornate armchair, the singer’s regal profile reflected in the mirror. Carmen and Musetta, two vivacious black poodles occupy two small padded stools at  the singer’s feet.
The singer is preparing to perform at this year’s Epiphany Ball in Yusupov Palace. The ball aims to revive a pre-Revolutionary tradition of social events for the nobility.
Obraztsova, a regular with the world’s most respected opera companies, is a frequent guest of such social events both at home and abroad.
“I think reviving the traditions of balls in Russia is a wonderful idea: as you prepare for a ball, get into beautiful clothes, change your mindset, get inspired, anticipate seeing friends, it plunges you in a very special mood,” the diva said. 
“A ball is a contrast to reality, it is a dream-like experience that grown people need no less than children need fairy tales.”
Remarkably enough, Yelena Obraztsova was a guest of a private event that, despite its name Epiphany Ball, was in fact, a birthday party thrown in honor of prominent businessman Sergei Osintsev, the patron of the Suvorovsky Military Institute. 
Suvorovsky cadets greeted the guests at the entrance of Yusupovsky Palace and lined up alongside the stairwell leading to the richly decorated theater, holding flaming torches.
Most contemporary St. Petersburg balls are organized by musicians. Every summer in June, the Mariinsky Theater runs its “White Nights Ball” in Catherine’s Palace of Tsarskoye Selo, as part of its famous “Stars of the White Nights Festival.” Well-known pianist Irina Nikitina, the director of the Musical Olympus classical music festival, hosts her Strauss Ball every year in May.
On New Year’s Eve, the Yusupov Palace traditionally welcomes the guests of Yury Temirkanov’s Ball, while Catherine’s Palace in Tsarskoye Selo serves as host venue for the Tsar’s Ball organized by the international catering company Potel&Chabot especially for foreign travelers. The balls revive Russia’s musical, cultural and historical traditions, which emerged during the reign of Peter the Great when aristocrats arranged musical carnivals, masquerades, performances and shows in their family palaces. But in Russia, at balls, the time actually devoted to dancing is often very limited. 
There is always a ceremonial, six- or seven-course dinner, sumptuous fireworks, varied entertainment, while the actual dancing comes to about half-an-hour. 
Furthermore, in most cases professional pairs are doing the job and only a modest proportion of guests feel confident enough to join in.
“I don’t understand those who treat balls like some sort of rave and go there for yet another endless chat,” Obraztsova said, adding that she chooses her events carefully. “Instead of going to such tasteless and posh gatherings, I would prefer to stay at home, read a book, listen to a good recording, learn a couple of new romances or even watch a decent TV program.” 
But the singer appreciates the attempts to create a genuine festive  atmosphere. 
“It takes a talented and genuinely hospitable host but tact and understanding of the guests are equally important,” she explains. 
“It is crucial that nobody tries to win everyone’s attention and go to all lengths to keep it until everyone goes home.”
Obraztsova’s opinion is shared by prominent violinist Maria Safaryants, the founder and artistic director of the “Palaces of St. Petersburg” classical music festival, who launched another tradition in June 2006, by organizing the Vienna Piano Ball in Peterhof’s Grand Palace.
Safaryants believes balls and other social events should fit the refined historical interiors of palaces.
“There has to be a connection — historical, cultural, musical or artistic —  an excuse to disturb the venerable walls,” she said. “When a bunch of youngsters rent out a palace for a mish-mash party, it looks plain vulgar.”
In Safaryants’ opinion, a ball is a special event, which does not happen very often and should be memorable. 
“It is like a dream which can come true, even if you are not rich:  one day you will earn the money and get there.”

TITLE: Winter War inspires new music
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new work by British composer Peter Dyson, entitled “Sinfonietta: The Unknown” and inspired by the Russian-Finnish War, premieres on Sunday at the Herzen University’s Kolonny Zal.
The idea came to the composer after he read a piece in The St. Petersburg Times about Russian and Finnish war veterans going out to the Karelian Isthmus on summer weekends with metal detectors to look for bodies of fallen colleagues in order to rebury them.
“In the process I discovered the disproportionate numbers of dead on both sides so I started to go out to the places myself and look,” Dyson recalls. “I guess it was the churchyard at Muola — now Pravdino — that really made me think. Nothing has happened there with the passing of the years except that nature has taken over again and there are trees pushing up amongst the broken gravestones. There is a newish small memorial with the names of Finnish soldiers but nothing to remember the Russian dead.”
Dyson’s piece is about remembrance. “Reconciliation is a slow healing process just like the natural reforestation of the battleground at Muola,” the musician explains. “As with all the pieces I write, listeners are encouraged to read what they like into the images I have created. While the events may be fixed in time, our understanding of them will depend on our own perspectives and experiences.”
Dyson’s next step is to travel to Finland to repeat the performance.

Dyson’s Sinfonietta “The Unknown” premieres at Kolonny Zal of the Hertzen University, 48 Moika, Korpus 4, on Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets on the door: Box Office: 312 9663

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: When it comes to the Eurovision Song Contest, the British tend to take an ironic postmodern approach — i.e., sending the nation’s worst band and laughing off the resulting nul points. It’s a much more serious matter in Belarus, which has unveiled its official entry — four months early — on the web site of Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Keen as mustard, Belarus is putting forward a song called “Work Your Magic” that has music composed by one of Russia’s top pop singers, Filipp Kirkorov, and lyrics by the same person who wrote last year’s second-place winner from Russia, “Never Let You Go.” Pipeline conflict? What pipeline conflict? When it comes to Eurovision, such petty differences are forgotten and the two nations join in a chorus of “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
The Belarus entry is playing on the Komsomolskaya Pravda web site, so I can reveal that it has sweeping strings and falsetto bits, and sounds a little like Shirley Bassey belting out “Goldfinger.” It also has a slightly suspicious resemblance to “Never Let You Go.” The English lyrics need to be sung with a Slavic accent in order to bring out the full beauty of rhymes such as “feeling” with “willing.” 
The young singer, Dima Koldun, is a protege of Kirkorov who took part in the television talent contest “Star Factory.” His surname means “wizard” in Russian, and he’s had a song specially written for him about magic — Belarus certainly deserves top marks for effort. The only question is whether Koldun and his magic potion will set our beating hearts in motion.
Kirkorov sang for Russia in 1995, but only got 17th place. KP reported that he was planning to sing for his native Bulgaria this year, but then threw it all away to cheer on Koldun for Belarus. Luckily, Eurovision has very liberal immigration rules.
It’s nice to know that his song might compete with one by Morrissey, the former leader of The Smiths, who has been invited by the BBC to write the British entry this year. Heaven knows, Filya will be miserable if he gets beaten by a disheveled nonentity who probably doesn’t even know that you can buy a leopard-print Hummer.
The Russian entry to Eurovision 2007 is still up in the air, although last year’s contestant, Dima Bilan, is rumored to be keen to have a second go. Coming in second after the Finnish monster band Lordi, he equaled Russia’s best-ever result, although you would never have guessed that from the headlines saying “Russia Lost.” Dima deserved to win because he had a ballerina coming out of a piano. Unfortunately, the Finns cheated by getting more votes.
Still, this flagrant injustice has not harmed Bilan a bit in Russia, where he is bigger than Elvis. 
He recently signed a $1 million contract to become the shapely posterior of a jeans brand, Tvoi Den tabloid reported, not saying which one. And he is the subject of a multi-episode documentary film to be shown on Russian MTV. The autobiography, “Being Bilan,” can only be just round the corner.
In the ultimate sign of having arrived as a star, Bilan even has an unofficial web site in Polish. The pink main page has a picture of him lying in bed on rumpled sheets and beckoning at the camera. Below is the word “enter,” or wejdz. Thanks, but I’m washing my hair.
On a more wholesome note, Russia managed to win one Eurovision song contest last year: the children’s one. 
A recent television documentary profiled the winners, Anastasia and Maria Tolmachyova, a pair of 9-year-old twin sisters from Kursk. Chirpy and fond of pink, they’re a bit like junior versions of Dolly Parton. Watch your back, Morrissey.

TITLE: Break on through
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Other Side Gastro Bar & Refuge
1 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa. Tel: 312 9554
Open 12 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, 12 p.m. to 5 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
Menu in Russian and English
Two beers and two sandwiches: 540 rubles ($20.30)

Rapidly emerging as a favored spot among foreign visitors and long-term residents alike, The Other Side offers what too many bars in St. Petersburg do not: gourmet bar food, a solid selection of drinks, friendly, relaxed service and a cool, classy atmosphere. 
Occupying a basement location at the Konnyushennaya Ploshchad end of Bolshaya Konyushennaya, The Other Side is reached through a modest, wooden door that even newly established regulars can easily walk past. This offers a clue as to why the place calls itself a “refuge.” Inside is an intimate two-room space which seems too dark until your eyes adjust. The first room features a handsome wooden bar to the right and a large mirror to the left, with seating for about fifty guests. The room at the back is darker still, with bench seats upholstered in chocolate and orange tones. In one corner, unfortunately next to the exit to the toilets, is a grand raised nook done out in leopard skin, which is not as tacky as it sounds. 
Small paper menus play with the bar’s quirky name (“The other side of what?” people might well ask) and is divided into sections called On the Lighter Side, On the Warming Side, On the Fresh Side, On the Inside, On the Filling Side and On The Sweeter Side. There are only a few choices in each section and the range of dishes is not vast but Mexican, Middle-East and Mediterranean influences — with a splash of Thai — ensure that what’s on offer is tempting.
But first get a drink. Apart from the ever-reliable Nevskoye Svetloye (80 rubles, $3, for 0.5 liter), beers on tap include Krusovice Dark and Light lagers from the Czech Republic (150 rubles, $5.60, for 0.5 liter) and the flavorsome English ale Bishop’s Finger for 170 rubles ($6.40) — ask for it in Russian — “Palets Episkopa” — and you’ll raise a laugh.
More tap beers are planned: in the near future the bar promises to introduce St. Petersburg to Samuel Adams Boston Lager, one of the U.S.’s more sophisticated brews.
The Other Side has a classy selection of New World wines from the U.S., Argentina and Chile priced affordably between 600 rubles ($23) and 900 rubles ($34), as well as French, Italian and Portuguese choices. There’s also the usual range of vodka and other spirits, but, brand labels such as Russky Shtandart, Glennfiddich, and Hennessey, are not amazingly cheap.
Ready to order? Oven fried potato wedges with rosemary and garlic (90 rubles, $3.30) come with a blue cheese sauce, and despite the humble nature of the dish, are prepared with fresh ingredients and the care of a good chef. Hummus and pita bread (180 rubles, $6.80) is also a rare treat made well.
A poached chicken and roasted yellow pepper sandwich (140 rubles, $5.30) goes down a treat — particularly in winter since the crunchy baguette that is used is served warm. Likewise, a tuna salad sandwich (150 rubles, $5.60) is served in warm pita bread.
The Other Side oozes conviviality and is a rare hangout in St. Petersburg — a place where long conversations can be enjoyed without aggressive interruptions from waiters or being drowned out by television pointlessly showing Fashion TV. An imaginative selection of American rock, soul and country tracks is played with  subtlety. 
In a new departure, last Friday, The Other Side hosted Cuban drummer Yoel Gonzalez and Russian guitarist Stas Pro. The duo brought a touch of rhythmic heat to Bolshaya Konnyushennaya on an otherwise cold night. They are set to appear again at The Other Side on Saturday at 11 p.m.

TITLE: Talk of the town
TEXT: Novotel tells us that the head chef at its Cote Jardin restaurant, Serge Fery, will be pushing the boat out for the traditional Russian Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) celebrations. This feast of pancakes, caviar, smetana and jam will run for the entire festive week from Feb. 12 to 18. Tempting offerings on the special menu for the occasion include goat cheese pancakes and the “Belle Helene” — a pancake with vanilla ice cream, hot chocolate sauce and almond flakes. 
It goes without saying that there will be St. Valentine’s Day events across the city on Feb. 14, but Global Point Entertainment will be holding its own bash on Feb. 17 at the trendy Zimaleto Bar on Krestovsky Island — it may be worth the wait. 
Meanwhile, our friends at the Russian Translators Union, together with local firm EGO Translating, St. Petersburg State University and leading organizations in the field are holding the seventh “Sensum de Sensu” competition for translators.
The competition will be held in seven language categories — Russian, English, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Finnish — although the event will be placing an emphasis on the fact that  2007 is officially the “Year of the Russian Language” in Russia.
This is also the first year that the competition is being held across the whole of Russia for anyone under the age of 30 on April 19, 2007.
Entry applications should be sent in before March 12. For more details see www.egotranslating.ru

Send your information for Talk of the Town to tot@sptimes.ru

TITLE: Towering achievement
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: The biblical story of Babel takes up a handful of verses in the 11th chapter of Genesis, and it illustrates, among other things, the terrible consequences of unchecked ambition. As punishment for trying to build a tower that would reach the heavens, the human race was scattered over the face of the earth in a state of confusion — divided, dislocated and unable to communicate. More or less as we find ourselves today.
To make sense of this condition requires an ambition nearly as great as the one that got those ancient architects into trouble in the first place. Any discussion of “Babel,” therefore — whether grounded in skepticism or lost in admiration — has to begin by acknowledging just how much the film, the third collaboration between the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, sets out to do.
It tells four distinct stories, disclosing bit by bit the chronology and causality that link them and making much of the linguistic, cultural and geographical distances among the characters. The movie travels — often by means of jarringly abrupt cuts and shifts of tone — from the barren mountains of Morocco, where the dominant sound is howling wind, to fluorescent Tokyo, where the natural world has been almost entirely supplanted by a technological environment, to the anxious border between the United States and Mexico. Each place has its own aural and visual palette. The languages used by the astonishingly diverse cast include Spanish, Berber, Japanese, sign language and English. The misunderstandings multiply accordingly, though they tend to be most acute between husbands and wives or parents and children, rather than between strangers.
Surely, something must hold this world — or, at any rate, this film’s vision of the world — together. Whether anything does is the question most likely to fuel the cafe-table arguments “Babel” will surely provoke. The individual scenes are sometimes so powerful, and put together with such care and conviction, that you might leave the theater feeling dazed, even traumatized. “Babel” is certainly an experience. But is it a meaningful experience? That the film possesses unusual aesthetic force strikes me as undeniable, but its power does not seem to be tethered to any coherent idea or narrative logic. You can feel it without ever quite believing it.
But let’s give feeling its due. The sheer reckless ardor of Gonzalez Inarritu’s filmmaking — the voracious close-ups, the sweeping landscape shots, the swiveling, hurtling camera movements — suggests a virtually limitless confidence in the power of the medium to make connections out of apparent discontinuities. His faith in cinema as a universal language could hardly be more evident. 
Some of the pieces of “Babel” are attached to one another by the banal lingua franca of television images, as events in North Africa, for instance, make the evening news in Tokyo. But Gonzalez Inarritu’s own visual grammar tries to go deeper, to suggest a common idiom of emotion present in certain immediately recognizable gestures and expressions. We may not be able to read minds or decipher words, he suggests, but we can surely decode faces, especially when we see them at close range and in distress. Loss, fear, pain, anguish — none of these emotions, it seems, are likely to be lost in translation.
It gives nothing away to note that every story in “Babel” ends in tears. The raw, naturalistic intimacy of Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography disguises some flagrant melodrama, as does the dedication of the actors, some of whom have never appeared on film before. 
The most glamorous cast members are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play an American couple on a desultory vacation in Morocco, trying to repair the damage done to their marriage by the death of their infant son. Their movie-star charisma is turned down to a low, flickering flame, and the easy sense of entitlement they sometimes betray belongs naturally to their characters, Susan and Richard, who nonetheless receive a brutal reminder that even the privileged are vulnerable to accident. 
Susan — the kind of tourist who worries that the local ice cubes carry disease — is badly wounded when a bullet is fired through a bus window, hitting her in the neck. The bullet comes from a gun belonging to Abdullah (Mustapha Rachidi), a goatherd, and used by his two sons, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) and Yussef (Boubker Ait El Caid), to keep jackals away from the herd.
The gunmen and their victim are never in the frame together, and the consequences of the incident unfold in parallel crises. Susan and Richard wind up in a small town, waiting for an ambulance, facing the panic and impatience of their fellow holiday makers and relying on the kindness of strangers. Abdullah and his sons and neighbors, for their part, must deal with the harsh attentions of the Moroccan police, who are trying to defuse what threatens to become an international incident.
Meanwhile — or, rather, a short time later, since the overlapping and sequential chapters of the movie are presented as if they were happening simultaneously — Richard and Susan’s surviving children (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble) travel to Mexico with the family’s housekeeper, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), whose son is getting married near Tijuana. They are accompanied by Amelia’s roughneck nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal, who clearly relishes playing the heavy for once). 
And in Tokyo, a deaf teenage girl named Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) spins through the emotional upheavals of adolescence, which are intensified both by her disability — or, more precisely, the obtuse way other people respond to it — and by the aftershocks of her mother’s death. 
In “Babel” there seems to be an active, palpable tension between the schematism of Arriaga’s scenario and the sensuality of Gonzalez Inarritu’s filmmaking. Some of the most exciting and powerful sequences — a Tokyo nightclub rave, the wedding of Amelia’s son — push beyond the constraints of the narrative and defy, at least for a time, the grim inevitability that hovers over the film.

TITLE: Astronaut Held For Attempted Murder
AUTHOR: By Rasha Madkour and David Crary
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HOUSTON — Anyone who’s read Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” or seen the movie based on it knows about the mental and emotional stresses astronauts face as they train for space travel. But those trying to explain the apparent breakdown of Lisa Nowak say the pressure can be even higher for female astronauts, who not only face the same work stresses as their male counterparts but often face high expectations at home.
“They made more sacrifices than the ‘Right Stuff’ guys,” said Dr. Jon Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon who lost his wife, astronaut Laurel Clark, in the 2003 Columbia disaster. “They have to balance two careers — to be a mom and wife and an astronaut. … You don’t come home at night, like most of the male astronauts, and have everything ready for you.”
Clark said Nowak, charged with attempted murder and attempted kidnapping in what police depict as a love triangle involving a fellow astronaut, provided invaluable support to his family after his wife’s death, even when it cost her time with her own husband and three children.
Nowak’s background — high school valedictorian, Naval Academy graduate, test pilot — seemed to equip her for the challenge. Yet as she and some of her acquaintances acknowledged, the stresses on her and her family were extraordinarily intense.
On Wednesday, transformed from space hero to criminal suspect, Nowak returned to Houston for a medical assessment.
She was met on the tarmac by police and escorted into a waiting squad car after her release on bail. Her head was covered by a jacket. She faced a medical exam at Johnson Space Center.
NASA said it would revamp its psychological screening process in light of Nowak’s arrest. The review will look at how astronauts are screened for psychological problems and whether Nowak’s dealings with co-workers signaled complications.
Nowak has a teenage son and 5-year-old twin girls with her husband, Richard, who works for a NASA contractor. The couple separated a few weeks ago after 19 years of marriage.
“She was the epitome of managing a very hectic career, making sacrifices to accommodate her family,” Clark said in a telephone interview. “All those stresses can conspire to be overwhelming. … Clearly she suffered a lot of mental anguish.
“There is a lot of marital stress in the astronaut corps in general — a huge amount,” Clark said. “It’s not unheard of for things to change into relationships that are beyond professional.”
Clark expressed empathy with Richard Nowak.
“He was a real low-key, go-with-the-flow, unobtrusive person,” Clark said. “You almost have to be to survive in the realm. … It was hard on our marriage to have my wife gone all the time, and eventually have her career surpass mine.”
Lisa Nowak grew up in Rockville, Maryland, where she was co-valedictorian and a member of the track team in high school. She graduated from the Naval Academy in 1985. The class officers of her year said Wednesday in a statement released by Bryan Caisse, the class secretary, that Nowak was “a great classmate and friend.”
“She never hesitated to lend a hand or assist someone in need. She has been an incredible role model as a Naval Officer, astronaut and mother, and has shared her success with many others,” the statement said.
Nowak received a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, flew as a test pilot in the mid-1990s while caring for an infant son, and became a full-fledged astronaut in 1998.
“It’s definitely a challenge to do the flying and take care of even one child and do all the other things you have to do. But I learned that you can do it,” she said in a recent interview with Ladies Home Journal.
Last July, in the climax of her career, she flew on the space shuttle Discovery, helping operate its robotic arm and winning praise for her performance.
However, there were signs of turmoil in her life.
In November, a neighbor reported hearing the sounds of dishes being thrown inside Nowak’s Houston home. And she had begun to form a relationship with William Oefelein, a fellow astronaut and father of two whose own marriage ended in divorce in 2005.
Police said Nowak told them the relationship was “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.”
Charlene Davis, the mother of Oefelein’s ex-wife, Michaella, said Wednesday that Nowak — although friends with Oefelein for years — had nothing to do with his marriage breakup.
“I think there were a lot of bad choices being made, and Lisa just made a horrible one,” Davis said in a telephone interview. “And I just feel sorry for her. What the hell was she thinking?”
The final unraveling came this week when police arrested Nowak for allegedly trying to kidnap Colleen Shipman, an Air Force captain from Florida. Police said Nowak believed Shipman was her rival for Oefelein’s affections.
Police charged Nowak with attempting to murder Shipman based on weapons and other items found with Nowak or in her car: pepper spray, a BB-gun, a new steel mallet, knife and rubber tubing. Nowak’s lawyer, Donald Lykkebak, has said she only wanted to talk to Shipman.
Those who know Nowak away from the high-pressure atmosphere of NASA were stunned.
“I was very surprised… She always seemed very normal to me,” said Candis Silva, who lives three houses down from the Nowaks. “She was a good role model for our daughters.”
Thomas Nagy, a Palo Alto, California, psychologist who has studied the stresses facing dual-career couples, hesitated to offer any specific diagnosis of Nowak, but said such seemingly desperate acts could result from a chronic personality disorder or from a period of high stress that clouds one’s judgment.
“When people are in that role of trying to do everything to the Nth degree, they don’t get enough sleep, they don’t do enough activities that are fun, they don’t get enough exercise,” he said.
“If we ignore those because we’re trying to do it all, we pay a price — more anxiety, more depression.”

TITLE: Dutch Score Four, Add to Hiddink’s Woe
AUTHOR: By Theo Ruizenaar
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: AMSTERDAM — Four Dutch goals in the second half made up for a poor first half as the Netherlands scored a comfortable 4-1 win over Russia in a friendly international on Wednesday.
Ryan Babel opened the scoring with a goal in the 68th minute with fellow substitute Wesley Sneijder doubling the lead two minutes later.
Vladimir Bistrov scored the best goal of the night to give the visitors some hope but Joris Mathijsen added a third with a header after 79 minutes before Rafael van der Vaart converted a penalty to make it 4-1 two minutes before time.
Marco van Basten was missing a complete team through injury and improvised, going against the Dutch nature by starting without wingers and missing the creativity to pierce the well-organised Russian defence.
Van Basten said afterwards: “We looked secure with our starting line-up but it didn’t work out as we planned, so we made some changes at halftime.
“We took more risks and played more football with Sneijder and Babel, who both did very well.”
Russia’s Dutch coach Guus Hiddink agreed the Dutch had the better of the second half — and much of the first half too.
“We didn’t have the power to harm them, but we kept them down to one chance before the break,” he said.

LACKLUSTER HALF
In a lacklustre first half the home team threatened Russian goalkeeper Igor Akinfejev only once, while the Russians frustrated Hiddink by failing to launch a proper attack.
Two minutes before the interval Clarence Seedorf set Giovanni van Bronckhorst away, but his cross was missed by Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink before Van der Vaart fired wide from a tight angle.
A double Dutch substitution with Sneijder and Babel coming on, revived the home team’s hopes and Sneijder twice tested Akinfejev with long distance strikes, while Vennegoor of Hesselink came close to a first international goal with a close range header.
Midway through the second half Babel broke the deadlock with a well-taken shot and two minutes later Sneijder made it 2-0 when he beat Akinfejev with a fierce shot at the near post.
Bistrov pulled one back for the visitors with a fine volley after the Dutch defence failed to clear a cross though Mathijsen restored the two-goal lead with a close range unmarked header from a corner minutes later.
An unlucky handball by a Russian defender gave Van der Vaart the opportunity to score his eighth goal in his 41st international match. 

N?
Dutch prosecutors called on Tuesday for a 10-month jail sentence for Russia’s national football coach Guus Hiddink on tax fraud charges, a Dutch court said in a statement.
Prosecutors say Dutchman Hiddink evaded almost 1.4 million euros (0.92 million pounds) in Dutch taxes while falsely claiming he was a resident of Belgium in 2002 and 2003.
From 2000 to 2002 Hiddink was employed as the national coach of the South Korean national team, guiding the co-hosts to the semi-finals of the 2002 World Cup tournament.
A prosecutor said Hiddink, who is on trial alongside his tax advisor for whom prosecutors are seeking a 13-month sentence, had instead stayed at his girlfriend’s home in Amsterdam. He called calling Hiddink’s Belgium residence a “joke”.
He went on to describe Hiddink as a stubborn man who had ignored the advice of his accountant to at least spend the occasional night in Belgium, according to the Dutch news agency ANP.
“Hiddink has fallen from a high pedestal,” he added.
Hiddink admitted that he had not spent a single night at his Belgian residence at the trial’s opening in late January, describing himself as a sort of football “nomad”, according to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad.
“I never felt comfortable there and no desire to lie there staring at the ceiling,” Hiddink said.
He said he had instead slept all over the place — in hotels, at his girlfriend’s home, at the training ground of PSV Eindhoven, whom he was also coaching at the time, and sometimes even behind the wheel of his car.
The Russia coach said his income from coaching South Korea had already been taxed in Asia and he has acknowledged he chose Belgium as his official residence for taxation purposes.

CIVILIZED WORLD
In Moscow, Russian Football Union president Vitaly Mutko said he was not too concerned about the case.
“I don’t think it’ll get to a jail sentence,” Mutko, the man responsible for luring Hiddink to Moscow, said.
“We live in a civilized world, not in medieval times. Holland is a European country, so I don’t think they will go to the extreme.
“Besides, this is just a prosecutor’s demand. Let’s wait and see what the judges will actually make of it.”
Prosecutors began legal proceedings against Hiddink last July. A verdict is due on February 27.
Reuters

TITLE: N. Korea Set to Hold Nuclear Talks
AUTHOR: By Burt Herman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — International talks on North Korea’s nuclear program resumed Thursday after Pyongyang’s envoy said he was ready to discuss initial steps toward nuclear disarmament, raising hopes for the first tangible progress at the talks since they began more than three years ago.
“We are prepared to discuss first-stage measures,” North Korean nuclear envoy Kim Kye Gwan said on arriving in Beijing for the six-nation negotiations, which began later Thursday at a Chinese state guesthouse.
American experts who visited Kim in Pyongyang last week said North Korea would propose a freeze of its main nuclear reactor and a resumption of international inspections in exchange for energy aid and a normalization of relations with Washington.
Kim said Thursday that any moves by North Korea would depend on the United States’ attitude.
“We are going to make a judgment based on whether the United States will give up its hostile policy and come out toward peaceful coexistence,” he said, adding that the U.S. was “well aware” of what it had to do.
North Korea has twice boycotted the nuclear talks for more than a year, claiming various U.S. policies show the Bush administration intends to topple its communist government.
“I’m not either optimistic or pessimistic because there are still many points of confrontation to resolve,” Kim said.
Still, his comments marked a change in North Korea’s position from the last round of talks in December, when Kim refused to even discuss disarmament and demanded the lifting of U.S. financial restrictions against a Macau bank where North Korea held accounts.
China planned to circulate a draft disarmament plan Thursday among delegates that would call for freezing the North’s nuclear reactor within a few months in exchange for energy aid, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unnamed “high-level source” familiar with the talks.
Earlier Thursday, the main U.S. envoy said he sensed “a real desire to have progress” by the North Koreans at the talks.
However, U.S. envoy Christopher Hill denied a Japanese newspaper report that the United States and North Korea had signed a memorandum during bilateral talks last month agreeing that the North’s first steps toward denuclearization and U.S. energy support would begin simultaneously.
Hill said he was hopeful the talks would lead to progress such as working groups to discuss technical issues.
At the formal opening of the meeting, Chinese envoy Wu Dawei highlighted the contacts between Washington and Pyongyang since the six nations last gathered, which he said would “provide a more solid basis for this session.”
South Korea’s envoy Chun Yung-woo said all sides agreed during a closed meeting of chief delegates that “it is important to reach agreement at this round of talks on first-phase measures.”
He told reporters that host China was to circulate a draft agreement by Friday morning, but gave no details.
Japanese envoy Kenichiro Sasae demanded in his opening statement that the North halt operation of its reactor and allow inspections as initial steps “within a reasonably short period of time,” according a statement issued by the Japanese delegation.
The lack of any on-the-ground results on disarming North Korea has raised the issue of the credibility of the six-nation talks, which involve China, Japan, Russia, the U.S. and the two Koreas.
Since 2003, they have produced only a single joint statement in September 2005 on principles for North Korea to abandon its nuclear program in exchange for aid and pledges that Washington won’t seek the regime’s ouster.
Chun said earlier Thursday the negotiations were at an “important crossroads” and needed to move beyond words to actions.
“Joint efforts, wisdom and flexibility from all six countries are badly needed now more than any other time,” the South Korean said.
The latest nuclear standoff with the North was sparked in late 2002 after Washington accused North Korea of having a secret uranium enrichment program in violation of a 1994 deal between the two countries. 
North Korea kicked out international nuclear inspectors and restarted its reactor, moves that culminated in the country’s first-ever test atomic detonation in October.
Although the U.S. and key North Korean allies China and Russia backed UN sanctions in the wake of the nuclear test, Washington has since engaged in a series of diplomatic overtures that have drawn praise from the North.
They included Hill’s trip to Germany last month to meet the North’s Kim, along with separate U.S.-North Korean talks on the financial restrictions placed on the Macau bank.

TITLE: Teenager Questioned On Death
AUTHOR: By Wladimir Pantaleone
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PALERMO —?Italian police are questioning a 17-year-old boy over the death of a policeman in soccer riots in Sicily last week which led to the suspension of matches all over the country, they said on Thursday.
The policeman died after being hit and having a homemade explosive thrown into his car as rival fans went on a rampage at a Serie A derby in Catania last Friday. Police in Sicily would only identify the suspect as a teenager from Catania.
About 41 people were arrested after the incident, many of them charged with resisting police offers and causing injuries. 
Police have been studying video surveillance tapes at Massimino stadium in Catania to ascertain who killed their colleague.
All Italian soccer, even youth matches, was suspended after the policeman’s death pending a security review and the government announced that only six major stadiums would be open to fans when matches resume this weekend.
Only the Rome, Genoa, Siena, Cagliari, Turin (Olimpico) and Palermo stadiums will be allowed to operate normally. All others — including Milan’s San Siro — will remain closed to fans pending security improvements, the interior ministry ruled.
AC Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani said the club was examining its options.
“We’re free to decide to play behind closed doors. Some other cities have offered us their stadiums, like Geneva (Stade de Geneve) and Newcastle (St James’ Park). But our inclination is to play at San Siro and let in season ticket holders.”
More stadiums may be opened in coming days if checks show they have installed security measures such as closed-circuit TV surveillance, numbered seating and electronic turnstiles.

PROFOUND CHANGES
Sports Minister Giovanna Melandri said the new measures were essential to rid Italian soccer of violence.
“My hope is that in a reasonable amount of time we will able to say we are not only world champions but we have deeply, profoundly changed the system of the football scene in this country,” she said in an interview.
Other new security measures include a ban on the block sale of tickets to away fans, a beefing-up of stadium bans for those involved in violence, including under 18s, tougher jail terms and a ban on financial links between clubs and fan associations.
Firecrackers will no longer be allowed inside stadiums and, at least initially, there will be no late-night matches.
Clubs say the government is overreacting to an isolated incident — though officer Filippo Raciti’s death was the second in a week in Italian soccer, after an amateur league official was kicked to death while trying to stop a fight at a match.

(Additional reporting by Silvia Aloisi)

TITLE: Iran to Respond in Kind if U.S. Attacks
AUTHOR: By Nasser Karimi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — If the United States were to attack Iran, the country would respond by striking U.S. interests all over the world, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday.
Speaking to a gathering of Iranian air force commanders, Khamenei said: “The enemy knows well that any invasion would be followed by a comprehensive reaction to the invaders and their interests all over the world.”
Iranian leaders often speak of a crushing response to any attack. While the remarks are seen as an attempt to drum up national support, Iran’s position on Iraq and its nuclear program have provoked more than usual international pressure in recent months. 
President Bush has ordered American troops to act against Iranians suspected of being involved in the Iraqi insurgency and has deployed a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf area as a warning to Iran. The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions because of Iran’s refusal to cease uranium enrichment.
“Some people say that the U.S. president is not prone to calculating the consequences of his actions,” Khamenei said in remarks broadcast on state television, “but it is possible to bring this kind of person to wisdom.
“U.S. policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response,” Khamenei added.
He also addressed rumors about his health — a subject that is rarely discussed openly in Iran. Last month, there was speculation his health had deteriorated seriously.
“Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumors about death and health to demoralize the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran. They are facing a nation,” Khamenei said.

TITLE: Landis Will Not Participate in Tour
AUTHOR: By Julien Pretot
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has said he will not take part in this year’s race, the French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD) announced on Thursday.
AFLD said they had postponed their disciplinary hearing into Landis scheduled for Thursday after the American promised not to participate in any race in France until the end of 2007.
Race organisers said he tested positive for the male hormone testosterone from a sample taken during his come-from-behind win in the 2006 Tour.
“Mr Landis has asked the AFLD, in a letter read by his lawyer during the hearing, to have the possibility to first defend himself in front of the American disciplinary body (the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency),” AFLD said in a statement.
“He says in this very letter that he promises not to take part in any race in France until the end of 2007, in particular in the 2007 Tour de France.
“The AFLD subsequently decided to postpone the examination of his case to a date that will be set according to the course of the procedure before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.”
In his letter, of which Reuters obtained a copy, Landis wrote: “Let me assure you that I fully share the goal of preventing illegal doping…”

SAME FACTS
He added, though, that two disciplinary hearings in the U.S. and France dealing with the same facts could lead to confusion and so asked for the postponement of the French case.
“In this case, and in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I agree voluntarily not to participate in any professional or amateur cycling event in France until December 31, 2007, and in particular the Tour de France 2007.”
The 31-year-old has also been charged with a doping offence by USADA and will have a separate hearing before it on May 14, his representative Michael Henson said on Wednesday.
Landis, who has denied any wrongdoing, tested positive after an astounding comeback in the last mountain stage of the 2006 Tour in the French Alps, a day after a poor performance appeared to have knocked him out of contention.
If found guilty, Landis faces a two-year suspension from the sport and the possibility of becoming the first Tour winner to be stripped of his title, although the Californian could then take the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
His lawyers say that the samples were mislabelled by the French laboratory which conducted the tests, the testing process was unreliable and that the rider never in fact tested positive.
Testosterone can speed up recovery after exercise and generally improves stamina and strength.

TITLE: Petrova Powers Into Paris Open Quarter-Finals
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — Russian Nadia Petrova made light work of Germany’s Martina Muller to reach the quarter-finals of the Paris Open with a merciless 6-1 6-2 victory on Thursday.
Fourth seed Petrova, who will play compatriot Dinara Safina for a place in the last four, wrapped up a straightforward win in 51 minutes.
The world number seven, who beat Safina in their two previous meetings, built her success on a highly reliable serve and broke her opponent four times.
Earlier on Thursday, Russian Anna Chakvetadze recovered from a shaky start to reach the last eight with a 4-6 6-4 6-4 victory over Spaniard Anabel Medina.
Eighth seed Chakvetadze will next play either holder Amelie Mauresmo or Nathalie Dechy,