SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1274 (40), Friday, May 25, 2007
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TITLE: 38 Killed In Blast At Coal Mine
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A methane explosion tore through a coal mine in southern Siberia on Thursday, killing at least 38 workers, emergency officials said, in the latest deadly accident to hit Russia’s ailing mining industry.
The blast at the Yubileinaya mine is the second to hit a mine owned and operated by OAO Yuzhkuzbassugol in two months — prompting a harsh warning from Russian industrial watchdog Rostekhnadzor, which said regional officials had sought to close down the facility in the past.
“The owner and administration of the mine has repeatedly allowed violations of safety conditions of mine operation,” the agency said.
The explosion occurred about 1,700 feet underground at the mine near Novokuznetsk, about 1,850 miles east of Moscow. A total of 179 miners were either brought to surface or made it out on their own, emergency department spokeswoman Natalia Lukash said.
Seven of those rescued were injured and emergency workers were looking for three miners still missing, she said.
Irina Andrianova, another emergency department spokeswoman, said 217 people had been working in the mine at the time of the blast. 
Her statement that the death toll had risen to 38 appeared to account for all those who had been in the mine.
Kemerovo regional Governor Aman Tuleyev said the blast may have been caused by the collapse of a coal wall where drilling was taking place.
The blast highlighted the hazardous state of Russia’s mining industry, which fell into disrepair when government subsidies dried up after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It also came just over two months after 110 people died in a methane explosion at the Ulanovskaya mine in the same region. 
That blast was the deadliest accident in more than 60 years in Russia’s mines.
Rostekhnadzor said Yuzhkuzbassugol’s license might be suspended. The company is a subsidiary of coal and steel producer Evraz SA, which partly owned by billionaire Roman Abramovich.
On Tuesday, Rostekhnadzor fired or suspended five regional officials in connection with the March blast at Ulanovskaya.

TITLE: Putin Slams U.S. Plans for Missile Defence
AUTHOR: By Veronika Oleksyn
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VIENNA, Austria — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday stood firm in his country’s opposition to a U.S. missile defense system, saying it could lead to “a new spiral in the arms race.”
Putin also downplayed tensions with the European Union while both acknowledging that Russia should listen to outside criticism and cautioning others not to patronize Moscow on human rights issues.
The Russian leader’s comments came at a joint news conference with Austrian President Heinz Fischer during an official visit that began Wednesday afternoon and wrapped up Thursday.
Putin’s trip also had a distinct business flavor, exemplified by an announcement late Tuesday that Russian and Austrian companies had signed a slew of contracts totaling more than $4 billion.
The U.S. made a formal request in January to place a radar base in a Czech Republic military area southwest of Prague and 10 interceptor missiles in neighboring Poland as part of plans for a missile defense shield that Washington says would protect against a potential threat from Iran or North Korea.
“What is happening in Europe that is so negative that one has to arm Eastern Europe with these new weapons?” Putin asked reporters.
“It won’t lead to anything but a new spiral in the arms race,” he said. “We consider this totally counterproductive and are trying to demonstrate this to our partners.”
Putin noted that the reach of Iranian missiles was not enough to hit Europe. “There are no sensible arguments, no sensible reasons” for the plan, he said.
The Russian leader did not comment on the British government’s move to seek the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, a suspect in the poisoning death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
Putin also said he and Fischer had talked about last week’s tense summit with European leaders in Samara, Russia.
“I don’t think we have particular problems with the EU,” Putin said, adding that Russia has always had difficulties with its immediate neighbors and that its past — the Soviet Union — was to blame.
With EU expansion, problems between Russia and some of its neighbors have now become issues on a European level, Putin said, adding this didn’t contribute to “the rapid development of relations.”
In response to a reporter’s question about human rights, Putin said Russia should listen to international criticism but noted that unjustified arrests and beating incidents also happened elsewhere.
“I think we in Russia must listen to criticism brought against us,” Putin said, but added that patronizing by others was “not acceptable.”
Putin, who headed to Luxembourg on Thursday, was accompanied to Vienna by a high-powered delegation, including aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Alexei Miller, head of Gazprom.

TITLE: Berezovsky: Murder Suspect in Danger
AUTHOR: By Tariq Panja
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky said Wednesday that the life of the man accused of killing former spy Alexander Litvinenko could now be in danger because of what the suspect knows about the plot.
British prosecutors said they have sufficient evidence to charge Andrei Lugovoi with the killing of Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who died in November after being poisoned by the radioactive substance polonium-210.
Berezovsky told The Associated Press that the poisoning had been carried out on behalf of the Russian government and that Lugovoi could be “killed within the next two or three years” because of the information he knows.
The tycoon, now living in London after falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has long accused the Russian government of being behind the plot to silence outspoken Kremlin critic Litvinenko, but Moscow has always denied the allegations, describing them as baseless and ridiculous.
“He is the suspect of the plot in London, but he is also the witness of the plot in Moscow, and that is more dangerous,” Berezovsky said of Lugovoi in a telephone interview.
“I tell you there is no doubt in Russia Lugovoi will be killed,” he said. “They don’t want to keep him alive because he is a witness of Putin’s crime.”
On his deathbed, the 43-year-old Litvinenko accused Putin of being behind his killing. He had also accused Russian authorities of being behind the October killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the deadly 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that stoked support for Russia’s second invasion of Chechnya.
Putin held a brief news conference in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, but he did not mention Litvinenko nor was he asked any questions about the case.
Litvinenko met with Lugovoi and two other Russians, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, on Nov. 1 at London’s Millennium Hotel, hours before falling ill. He died Nov. 23 in a London hospital where his hair fell out and his skin turned yellow before he suffered organ failure.
Berezovsky and Litvinenko were both granted asylum in London in 2000, and Britain has repeatedly rejected Russian requests to extradite the billionaire on fraud charges, saying he would not get a fair trial.
Lugovoi, now a wealthy businessman, was once Berezovsky’s chief bodyguard in Moscow, and organized security for Berezovsky’s daughter when she traveled to Russia last year. He has denied involvement in Litvinenko’s death, saying the accusations against him are politically motivated.
British officials said Wednesday they were preparing a formal extradition request for Lugovoi after the Foreign Office summoned Russia’s ambassador Tuesday to urge his country’s cooperation. Russian officials have said they will not hand him over, citing a law prohibiting the extradition of Russian nationals.
Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov played down the potential for diplomatic repercussions in the standoff between Britain and Russia — Europe’s leading energy supplier.
“I don’t see a big connection between the Litvinenko case and the development of Russian-British relations on the whole,” Ivanov said.
But failure to produce Lugovoi risked worsening relations between the two countries, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government policy. He said Britain has received no formal response from Moscow.
One Russian lawmaker from a party that generally supports the Kremlin urged Lugovoi to travel to London.
“I would appeal to Lugovoi personally that he go to England and not create problems. If he is convinced of his innocence, he can fully prove his innocence with the help of a lawyer,” Alexei Mitrofanov, of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, told the lower house of parliament, RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

TITLE: Estonian Claims Kremlin Behind Attacks on Web Sites
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Estonia has created a stir with its accusations that Kremlin-based hackers targeted government web sites. But it is not alone in grappling with cyber attacks.
Hackers in recent months have targeted outspoken pro-Kremlin youth groups, opposition forces, ultranationalist organizations and media outlets, crashing their web sites with what is known as Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks — the same type of attack that Estonia says was launched against its sites.
And by all appearances, cyber attacks are becoming a popular means of silencing political opponents, and some observers see the recent wave of attacks as a rehearsal for upcoming State Duma and presidential elections.
Targeted organizations almost without exception blame political opponents.
“It’s clear that the attacks were inspired and ordered by the Kremlin, no matter who executed them,” Alexander Averin, spokesman for the banned National Bolshevik Party, said of a DDoS attack on his group’s web site that left it offline for about 30 days in February and March. “It was an attempt to suppress the opposition’s resources.”
Hackers this year have also attacked the sites of groups as politically disparate as the ultranationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration; the pro-Kremlin youth groups Nashi, Young Russia and Mestniye; and The Other Russia, the opposition coalition that has organized a series of Dissenters’ Marches this year.
Alexander Kalugin, a spokesman for Young Russia, said a six-hour DDoS attack on his group’s web site in March was likely the work of Estonian nationalists angered over its protests outside the Estonian Embassy over plans to relocate a Soviet World War II monument in central Tallinn that sparked a recent diplomatic dispute.
“We were burning Estonian banners and trampling an effigy of the Estonian president,” Kalugin said.
The Movement Against Illegal Immigration had 40 of its regional web sites struck by DDoS attacks from early February to early April, said Alexander Belov, the organization’s leader.
Belov blamed the security services for carrying out the attacks under the pretext of battling extremism.
Not only political organizations have been attacked. Two of the country’s last independent-minded media outlets — the Kommersant newspaper and Ekho Moskvy radio — both had their web sites targeted earlier this month.
Kommersant web editor Pavel Chernikov said the May 2 attack was likely retribution over the transcript of self-exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky’s questioning by Russian investigators in London over the poisoning death of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.
Ekho Moskvy editor Alexei Venediktov said the attacks, which paralyzed the station’s site from May 1 to May 4, were the work of “political forces not interested in people’s free access to information.”
“This attack was a rehearsal ahead of State Duma elections on how to subdue an informational web site,” Venediktov said.
The radio station has appealed to the Interior Ministry to open a criminal investigation into the attacks.
Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, echoed Venediktov’s assessment, calling the attacks on opposition web sites an “information war” aimed at “suppressing freedom of speech on the Internet.”
But experts say there is little chance that the hackers will be brought to justice in these attacks, or those on Estonian sites.
At the height of the Russian-Estonian dispute this month over the relocation of the Soviet monument, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet issued a sharply worded statement that “cyber terrorist attacks” against Estonian government web sites had been traced to computers in the Russian presidential administration.
NATO has since sent a computer expert to Estonia to assess the ongoing attacks, which Estonia says started April 27, and Estonian Defense Minister Madis Mikko has likened them to military strikes.
In a DDoS attack, hackers use a so-called botnet, a network of computers that have been covertly infected to run malicious software. The botnet bombards a web site or server with requests from thousands of computers across the globe, thus making it inaccessible to legitimate web traffic. A computer owner might not even know that his computer is infected and sending the requests to a target server.
This is why the Estonian claim that the attacks came from the Russian presidential administration “may have some grounds and may not,” said Mikhail Polyakov, who, when reached by telephone, identified himself as a top adviser in the administration.
Polyakov’s name appeared as a contact on a list of IP addresses from which Estonia says the DDoS attacks have been conducted, a copy of which the Estonian Foreign Ministry provided to The St. Petersburg Times.
The list includes the names, phone numbers and the work addresses for people who had registered with the IP addresses, and one of the addresses included is 4 Staraya Ploshchad, where the headquarters of the presidential administration are located.
The IP addresses in the Estonian list belong to various Russian government structures, including the Duma and the Federation Council, Polyakov said.
But even that doesn’t mean Duma deputies or senators were somehow associated with the attacks, experts said.
“A professional connects to the server through anonymous IP addresses, and in this case there’s no way he can be tracked down,” said Yury Mashevsky, a computer virus expert with Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab.
“It’s rare to find the true criminal,” said Paul Sop, chief technology officer of the London-based Prolexic Technologies, which specializes in mitigating the consequences of DDoS attacks.
According to the Russian Criminal Code, anyone convicted of hacking can face up to two years in prison, while spreading computer viruses carries a maximum three-year sentence.

TITLE: Kasparov Urges EU to Play Role
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: STRASBOURG, France — Opposition leader Garry Kasparov urged the European Union on Wednesday to use its weight to press for a free and democratic presidential election in Russia next year.
The European Parliament gave the former chess champion a platform from which to launch a stinging attack on President Vladimir Putin, a week after authorities prevented him and other protesters from traveling to a Russia-EU summit.
Kasparov rejected suggestions that support for his United Civil Front group was waning and predicted a “severe political crisis” inside the Kremlin by the end of the year as rivals within Putin’s camp fight to succeed the president.
“We are going to use all our resources, though limited, to... ensure the election in March 2008 is not a fake one. We hope Europe will support us in this fight for solid, democratic institutions in Russia,” Kasparov said at a news conference with European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering.
“I have no doubt Russia will be facing a severe political crisis by the end of the year because of the inability of the current regime to come up with a unified candidate to succeed Putin,” he said, forecasting that some Putin backers might defect to the opposition.
Kasparov’s appearance at the EU legislature coincided with a European tour by Putin, going from Austria on Wednesday to Luxembourg on Thursday.
Kasparov said his group’s failure to draw large crowds to its protest rallies was partly because of fears of harsh treatment by riot police, questioning the credibility of opinion polls that show Putin has wide popular support.
“Having 5,000 on a Moscow street is more impressive than having 100,000 on a Paris street protesting,” he said.

TITLE: Amnesty Claims State Pressure Is Mounting
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Authorities have intensified pressure on civil society and the independent media and are turning a blind eye to the growing number of hate crimes targeting foreigners, immigrants and sexual minorities, Amnesty International said in a report released Wednesday.
The criticism from Amnesty is the latest in a growing chorus from human rights groups and Western nations about society under President Vladimir Putin.
In its 2007 global report, Amnesty said authorities “deliberately fomented fear to erode human rights,” restricting freedom of expression.
“The authoritarian drift in Russia has been devastating for journalists and human rights defenders,” the report said, noting the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and new laws clamping down on rights organizations.
Civil and nongovernmental groups are “left vulnerable” to new government regulations and the country’s leaders are failing to confront “racism, xenophobia and ideologies that promote hate crimes,” the report said.
Authorities have also ignored the abduction of civilians in Chechnya, which it called a “forgotten” conflict, it said.
Ella Pamfilova, the chairwoman of the Kremlin’s human rights council, said authorities should consider the report, but disagreed with some aspects, including on rights abuses in Chechnya.
“I respect their viewpoint and unbiased work, but the situation in Chechnya has improved dramatically,” Pamfilova said.
In a separate report released Wednesday, Amnesty accused federal forces of kidnapping and torturing people with impunity in Chechnya despite Kremlin assurances that the restive republic was returning to normal.
In the 22-page report — titled “What Justice for Chechnya’s ‘Disappeared?’” — Amnesty wrote that while the number of disappearances had dropped, kidnappings were still commonplace.
“The incidence of ‘temporary’ disappearances, when individuals are arbitrarily detained and held in incommunicado detention while the authorities deny knowledge of their whereabouts, is high,” Amnesty said. “During the incommunicado detention, the individuals are at a very high risk of torture and other ill-treatment in order to extract a ‘confession.’”
Federal soldiers and rebels have also kidnapped and murdered people, Amnesty said, and although Chechen authorities have investigated kidnappings, there have been virtually no convictions. “Impunity for human rights abuses has prevailed,” Amnesty said. 
“The authorities have failed in virtually all cases to investigate and prosecute the serious human rights violations.” Amnesty said the second war, which started in 1999, has killed around 25,000 people and turned thousands more into refugees. Human rights groups say that up to another 5,000 people are missing.
AP, Reuters

TITLE: Experts: City to Become AIDS Capital
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As St. Petersburg joined the international community on Sunday to commemorate the World AIDS Memorial Day, local health experts said that newly-released statistics suggest that the city could in the future see the highest incidence of mortality from the disease in Russia.
Last year’s record hike to 501 AIDS deaths in St. Petersburg was more than double the mortality figures for the disease in 2005.
When 65 new cases were added to the list in less than three months into this year, making a grand total of 1,824 cases since 1987, Professor Aza Rakhmanova, head of St. Petersburg’s Infectious Diseases Inspectorate said “it’s a sign the city will have more AIDS victims to mourn this year, and perhaps, the next.”
And Galina Volkova, deputy chief physician at the St. Petersburg Center for the Prevention of AIDS and Other Infections, and Dr. Galina Stepanova from the same institution have that the city has registered 301 deaths from AIDS this year so far — 17 percent of those registered as HIV-positive in the city.
The Ministry of Health and Social Development registered 10,800 cases of AIDS deaths across the nation last year.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 2.9 million people across the world died of AIDS last year, bringing the total to more than 25 million people since the start of the outbreak about 23 years ago, four years before Russia had its first case made public. 
Last year saw 4.3 million new HIV-positive people to form a total of 39.5 million as the year ended in a rate that took one person victim in every six minutes. 
Russia closed its annual register with a total of 380,000 HIV-positive people at year-end.
However, Rakhmanova said the situation in St. Petersburg could have been worse had it not been for the “noted rise in public awareness and the fact that HIV has ceased to be a death sentance to the carriers owing to the latest medical breakthroughs reached not only in the 
prolongation of the patient’s life span, but also allowing the patient to lead an active life.” 
Of 346 babies born to HIV-positive mothers last year, only 7 percent contracted the virus, while the rest were saved thanks to maternal ART treatment for their mothers, Rakhmanova said. 
As in the recent past, intravenous drug users topped the chart in last year’s HIV-infection rate in St. Petersburg, sharing 65 percent of the general toll that included 7.5 percent sex-related cases. 
The rest had their means of infection not determined, according to Rakhmanova.
New HIV cases in the city last year were comprised of 4,078 people mostly males aged between 19 and 40 including 39 foreigners from CIS countries, boosting the total of registered cases in St. Petersburg to 33,981.
This is a rate of 89.3 persons per 100,000 — more than four times the national average, according to health experts.
Girls in the 15-18 age group now account for 40 percent of new cases — nearly double the previous rate. 
The number of victims among homeless children also sky-rocketed to 30 percent last year from 5.9 percent only two years before. 
More than 22,000 prison inmates in St. Petersburg became HIV-positive during the  five-year period that ended in 2004, according to City Hall.

TITLE: Duma Ratifies Treaty On NATO Military Exercises
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Wednesday endorsed a key treaty on joint military exercises with NATO that streamlines the organization of drills and defines the status of foreign troops during training — an issue that has hampered such events in the past.
Deputies voted 328-90 with no abstentions to ratify the 1995 agreement among members of the Partnership for Peace program, an agreement between the alliance and former Soviet militaries. Russia signed the agreement in 2005.
The treaty now goes to the Federation Council, where it must be approved to be ratified.
The agreement, which was introduced to the parliament by the Kremlin, eases procedures for countries to send troops, weapons and other equipment to states hosting the exercises and formalizes their status there. According to the document, foreign troops would fall under the jurisdiction of the host state except in cases when a direct attack against its personnel or property is made.
Russia’s failure to ratify the treaty has led to the cancellations of drills, including when it pulled out of exercises with the United States in Nizhny Novgorod last fall.
Konstanin Kosachyov, chairman of the Duma’s International Affairs Committee, said that while cooperation with NATO was necessary, ratification of the treaty did not mean Russia’s concerns about the alliance had been allayed.
“Ratification of the present agreement doesn’t annul or correct our negative assessment of certain NATO activities,” Kosachyov said.

TITLE: Duma Backs Crackdown on Beer Drinkers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Wednesday backed a ban on drinking beer in public, the latest in series of legislative measures aimed at regulating health and public behavior.
The bill passed by a vote of 377-0 in a first reading. The measure would prohibit beer drinking in streets, parks and public squares for both adults and minors. Only licensed restaurants and cafes would be allowed to serve beer and alcohol in open-air settings.
The bill, which must still go through two more readings, would impose fines of up to 300 rubles ($12) on violators. Drinking vodka and other hard alcohol beverages in public is already banned, though the restriction is rarely enforced.
On Friday, the Duma will take up a bill imposing new restrictions on smoking on planes, trains, boats and other public places.

TITLE: Island of Aphrodite Is Breeding Opportunity
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Business City Guyot, a company that operates the four-star boutique hotel Guyot and a business center in St. Petersburg, is to sell real estate abroad. Guyot, in cooperation with Leptos Group and the General Consulate of Cyprus in St. Petersburg, will sell residential real estate in Cyprus.
“We have created a new department that will sell real estate mainly on Paphos. We signed a partnership agreement with Leptos Estates. We have also signed an agreement with the Bank of Cyprus and a Russian bank,” said Valery Zizenberg, president of Guyot.
Cyprus is the warmest country in Europe, with an average of 340 days of sunshine a year, and high average per capita income, Zizenburg said. Among other advantages of the island he evoked the time zone in common with Russia and similarities in terms of religion as well as the new international airport located in Paphos.
“You could buy property cheaper in Croatia or Bulgaria but you’ll get a house in a country where it is winter for half the year,” Zizenberg said.
Zizenberg praised the high quality and variety of property on sale in Cyprus, including apartments, villas and townhouses.
Leptos Estates is the largest construction company in Cyprus. Leptos Group also offers consulting, property management and maintenance services.
George Gabrielides, director of Leptos Calypso Hotels, said that Leptos established its office in Moscow 15 years ago and now has a representative in St. Petersburg. The company offers property for sale in Greece, Crete and of course in Cyprus.
Prices for real estate in Cyprus are similar to prices in St. Petersburg.
“The price depends on the location. It could be located by the sea, in the mountains, in town. However all the property is located in condominium developments,” Gabrielides said.
Price for apartments start from $150,000, for villas from $250,000, Gabrielides said. According to him, about 200,000 Russians visit Cyprus every year. Some of them stay for up to three months. There are three Russian newspapers and two Russian schools in Cyprus.
Among other advantages indicated by Gabrielides were the low cost of living while the “standard of living is very high.” “A meal for two with wine in a restaurant costs about $20,” he said.
Foreigners that own property could lease it out using Leptos as a go-between. Foreigners can also get a mortgage from a Cyprus bank for up to 70 percent of the property value. Gabrielides noted that interest rates depend on the type of currency, though said that in any case the figure is rather low — 3.5 percent to five percent a year.
Gabrielides said that most Leptos clients come from Germany, Great Britain and Scandinavian countries. Property buyers from Russia account for only five percent of its clients. “But we believe that Russians will buy more in the future,” Gabrielides said.
“I’m confident that cooperation between two companies as large as Business City Guyot and Leptos will be successful. As General Consul I promise that visa processing will remain as straighfoward as it was before,” said Demetris Samuil, General Consul of Cyprus in St. Petersburg.
“Cyprus is to enter the Schengen area, and owners of property in Cyprus will automatically receive Schengen multiple visas and the opportunity to travel across Europe,” Samuil said.
According to Polina Yakovlyeva, the head of Elite Real Estate at Knight Frank St. Petersburg, imminent entry into the EU, as well as causing property prices in Cyprus to rise, had attracted the attention of foreign investors.
“The amount of private oweners registered in Cyrpus grew 40 percent in 2006 compared to 2005 and 240 percent compared to 2004,” she said.
Yakovlyeva said that Cyprus is the only island where fifty percent of property-owners are Russian. 
“The increase in demand can be explained by low taxes and low market risk,” she said. At the same time, many Russians prefer to simply rent property in the high season, she said.

TITLE: Exploiting Russian Backwardness
AUTHOR: By Nikita Savoyarov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia lags behind most the developed world in Internet development but investsment opportunities in St. Petersburg in particular remain vast — these were the main conclusions at the Second St. Petersburg Internet Conference held May 18 at Motel Olgino. The conference, organized by Moscow’s Regional Public Center of Internet Technologies (ROCIT) and the companies1C-BITRIX and TRINET, gave voice to a number of strategies with which to exploit the backwardness of the Russian Internet market.
In terms of Internet development, St. Petersburg remains between two to three years behind Moscow, while for other Russian regions this figure is three to four years, said Alexander Aygistov, vice President of ROCIT. Given that Moscow itself is three to four years behind the average figure for the developed world, the situation requires serious attention, he said.
According to the Committee for State Statistics, there were 26 million Internet users officially registered on Russian Internet space (.ru) in 2007. Three million new users are expected this year. Other statistics show a total of 28 million Internet users in Russia over the age of 18, or 25 percent of the population. There were about 700,000 .ru domain names at the beginning of the year.
Internet advertising grew strongly last year, by 87 percent, and is now worth a total of $187 million, but it remains far behind traditional media, where advertising amounts to $6.49 billion.
The four main themes discussed at the conference were advertising, security, the use of Linux- and OpenSource based software, as well as the opportunities for earning money using the Internet. 
The latter was addressed by Roman Yushko, Commercial Director of TRINET, who demonstrated the Online & Offline models of earning by way of the project “virtual trade complex PIK” (ePIK.ru). Using a variety of different tools, the project aims to increase competitiveness, the number of visitors and the volume of sales for tenants. 
Domain names are another means of earning money with the Internet. Generally this involves selling, either directly or by auction, registered names in the secondary market. According to Pavel Khramtsov from RUcenter, head of the project stat.nic.ru., the highest price paid for a .ru domain name (travels.ru) was $19,000, paid at the beginning of this year. 
A representative series of Internet success stories was evoked by Reksoft’s Dmitry Rudakov, alluding to the Internet-shop www.ozon.ru  (1997), payment service www.assist.ru (1999), and the online printing service for digital photos, www.pixart.ru (2004). Using these examples he named the vital ingredients for a successful investment, among which was experience, including the experience of unsuccessful projects, having a good team and keeping a watch on the market, new technologies and research. 
The St. Petersburg market is attractive for many reasons — the multitude of niches, low competition and the generally low cost of projects. This will undoubtedly be aided by the 10-fold growth in the Internet market forecast by the Ministry of IT and communications of Russia for 2007.

TITLE: Toyota’s Plants Local Seeds of Self-Sufficiency
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Toyota’s Shushary plant, due for completion in December, will produce a total of 16,000 cars in 2008, the company’s chief representative in St. Petersburg said Tuesday.
The Japanese carmaker also plans to localize the production of components, potentially lowering production costs by 10 to 15 percent, Ichiro Chiba said. 
According to Chiba, Toyota has completed construction of the factory on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and will now install production equipment and begin Phase 2 of recruitment for the plant, which will employ about 600 workers in total.
Chiba declared himself “satisfied” with the personnel recruited so far, many of which are, according to him,”coincidentally” former employees at St. Petersburg’s Ford assembly plant.
The Shushary plant, which cost $150 million, will eventually have a capacity of 50,000 cars a year three or four years after beginning production and may eventually produce 200,000 cars year, on the scale of Toyota’s other plants in Europe.

TITLE: Budget Revenue Concern
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s state budget collected 149 billion rubles ($5.75 billion) less than planned in the first quarter as the price of oil and tax collection was lower than expected, Deputy Finance Minister Tatiana Golikova said Thursday.
“It is correct to be concerned,’’ Golikova told reporters at a briefing Thursday in Moscow. “We’re waiting on data for the first five months to see if adjustments are needed.’’
The first quarter does not necessarily demonstrate a trend for the entire year, although the government will take steps if the shortfall persists, she said.
Currently there are no plans to take money from the Stabilization Fund to pay for the shortfall, she said.
Of the shortfall, 132 billion rubles were earmarked for the country’s oil fund, she said.
Russia, the world’s largest energy exporter, posted a record government budget surplus of 2 trillion rubles ($80 billion) last year. 
The government missed its budget revenue target in the first quarter of this year, as prices for oil and gas were lower than forecasted by the government.

TITLE: Norilsk Tops Xstrata’s Offer for LionOre
AUTHOR: By Robin Paxton and Alexandra Budrys
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Norilsk Nickel increased its bid for Canadian miner LionOre to 6.8 billion Canadian dollars ($6.3 billion) Wednesday, raising the stakes in its battle for the firm with Xstrata. 
Norilsk’s revised bid of 27.50 Canadian dollars per share was 10 percent higher than a rival offer from Xstrata on May 15, which had valued the world’s 10th-largest nickel miner at 6.2 billion Canadian dollars, or 25 Canadian dollars per share. 
“We believe this project to be important for our further development,” Norilsk CEO Denis Morozov said. 
He said Norilsk had a commitment from Societe Generale and BNP Paribas to arrange a financing package for the deal. 
“We are therefore ready to finance the deal with our own and borrowed funds.” 
Xstrata declined to comment. Its offer last week included a break fee of 305 million Canadian dollars that it would receive should LionOre accept a rival bid. 
Morozov said Norilsk’s latest bid had been discounted to take this into account. “This break fee has compromised a fair bidding process,” he said. 
Norilsk, which has a market capitalization of $37.1 billion, mines one-fifth of the world’s nickel and more than half of its palladium, a precious metal used in jewelry and car exhausts. 
It would become the world’s first 300,000-ton-plus producer of nickel should it acquire LionOre, whose 2007 forecast output of 40,000 tons is expected to double by 2012. 
“This acquisition makes strategic sense. Norilsk is not a growth story, while LionOre is, and they want to capture that,” said Alexander Pukhayev, metals analyst at Deutsche Bank.
Nickel prices have risen about 45 percent this year due to booming global demand for the metal — used in making stainless steel — and investor appetite for commodities. They hit an all-time high of $51,800 per ton on May 9. 
LionOre shares have risen 56 percent since the bidding war began on March 26. 
But shares of Norilsk dropped 7.80 rubles, or 4.1 percent, to 185 rubles on the MICEX exchange and Renaissance Capital warned a winning bid could damage the miner’s valuation. 
Analysts said acquisitions were crucial as declining ore grades mean Norilsk’s mines in the Russian Arctic are processing more raw materials to produce the same amount of metal. 
“This acquisition could potentially change investors’ views of Norilsk over time,” Pukhayev said, adding a greater world presence would cut political risk attached to the company. 
Norilsk’s latest offer is 48 percent higher than Xstrata’s original bid of 4.6 billion Canadian dollars. This offer was countered on May 3 by a 5.3 billion Canadian dollar billion bid from Norilsk. 
Analysts were divided on whether Norilsk’s latest offer would be the knockout bid. “We believe a counter bid against this would leave too little scope for value creation and that Xstrata will now prefer to accept the 305 million Canadian dollar break fee,” Numis Securities analyst Simon Toyne said. 
But Alfa Bank analysts said in a note, “We believe that Norilsk’s offer is not the last step and Xstrata can try to raise its bid.” 
Vedomosti, citing a source close to Norilsk, reported that the company’s board had voted 8-1 in favor of a second revised offer. Only Mikhail Prokhorov, the co-owner who is selling his share to partner Vladimir Potanin, voted against.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Aeroflot Profit</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Aeroflot, eastern Europe’s largest airline, said profit more than doubled in the first quarter on increased ticket sales and prices.
Net income jumped 115 percent to $69.3 million in the period, the company said in a statement handed out before a news conference in Moscow Thursday. Revenue advanced 37 percent to $663 million, according to preliminary results calculated to International Financial Reporting Standards.
Aeroflot is attracting more travelers as Russia’s economy, fueled by rising oil prices, expands for a ninth consecutive year. The carrier joined the SkyTeam alliance of Air France-KLM Group and Delta Air Lines Inc. last year and is now bidding for Italy’s Alitalia SpA.

<b>Rosneft Plans </b>
KRASNOYARSK (Bloomberg) — Rosneft plans to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars’’ to upgrade the Achinsk refinery in eastern Siberia, Interfax reported, citing Chief Executive Officer Sergei Bogdanchikov.
The Krasnoyarsk regional administration expects Rosneft to invest $1 billion in the refinery, which can process 6.5 million tons of oil a year, the news service said, citing an administration official it didn’t identify. 
Rosneft bought the Achinsk plant at a bankruptcy auction of Yukos Oil Co.’s Siberian assets on May 3.

<b>OECD Praise</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s plans to split its oil fund and project government spending three years into the future are the country’s “most important’’ recent policy development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.
The steps represent an attempt at “prudent management of oil windfalls over the long term,’’ the OECD said in its 2007 Economic Outlook report, published Thursday.
Russia, the world’s largest energy exporter, began a transition to three-year budget planning this year to make government spending more efficient. 

<b>Bougrov Chairman</b>
NORILSK (Bloomberg) — Andrei Bougrov, managing director of Interros Holding Co., was named chairman of OGK-3, a Siberian power generator controlled by GMK Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s largest mining company.
Yulia Basova, a deputy chief executive officer at Norilsk, was elected deputy chairwoman of the utility, Ulan-Ude, Siberia-based OGK-3 said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
Interros, owned by billionaires Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov, and Norilsk Nickel, controlled by Interros, together have seven of the 11 seats on OGK-3’s board.

<b>Doubling Up</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Ruukki Group Oyj, a Finnish investment company, says it is doubling its investments in pulp and lumber production in Russia to 1.1 billion euros ($1.48 billion), and may expand its projected pulp mill and sawmill in Kostroma, northeast of Moscow.
Ruukki will finance the mills by issuing as much as 250 million euros in shares as well as taking on debt, the Helsinki-based company said in a stock exchange statement Thursday. Evli Pankki Oyj is managing the share issue, which is directed primarily at institutional investors who do not already hold shares in Ruukki Group.

TITLE: A New Kind of War
AUTHOR: By Anne Applebaum
TEXT: And now for a quick quiz: A European country — a member in good standing of NATO and the European Union — has recently suffered multiple attacks on its institutions. Can you (a) name the country, (b) describe the attacks  and (c) explain what NATO is doing in response? 
If you can’t, don’t worry: NATO itself doesn’t quite know what it is doing about the attacks, despite the alliance’s treaty, which declares that an armed attack on one of its members is “an attack against them all.” The country is Estonia — a very small, very recent member of NATO; the attacks  are taking place in cyberspace; and while the perpetrators aren’t exactly unknown, their identities  can’t be proved either.
Which creates a dilemma, or rather several: Is this an “armed attack”? Is the NATO alliance obliged to respond? And if yes, how? None of these questions have clear answers. And if you thought that terrorists headquartered in ungovernable bits of the undeveloped world were the West’s worst problem, think again. 
To add an extra layer of complication to this story, it’s important to understand that its origins lie not in the high-tech cyber-future but in the Cold War past. Several weeks ago, the Estonian government decided to move a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from its place in the center of Tallinn to a cemetery outside of town, together with the remains of the Soviet soldiers who had been buried beneath it. That might not sound like a casus belli, but to the Russian minority in Estonia, most of whose families arrived in the country after the Red Army drove the Germans out in 1945, that statue had become a rallying point, as well as a justification of their right to remain. To the Estonians, one-tenth of whom were deported to Siberia after 1945, the statue had become a symbol of half a century of Soviet occupation and oppression. When the statue was removed, a riot ensued; an ethnic Russian protester was killed; hooligans attacked the Estonian ambassador in Moscow; and, a few days later, web sites of the Estonian government, banks and newspapers began to go down.
Elsewhere this might not have mattered quite so much. A defense information specialist from another newish NATO member state told me, somewhat ruefully, that his country wouldn’t be vulnerable to a cyber-attack because so little of its infrastructure is sophisticated enough to use the Internet. But Estonia — “e-Stonia” to its fans — practices forms of e-government advanced even by Western European standards. Estonians pay taxes online, vote online, bank online. Their national ID cards contain electronic chips. When the country’s cabinet meets, every member carries a laptop. When denial-of-service attacks start taking down Estonian web sites, it matters.
As is the way of these things, of course, the attacks’ precise origin cannot be determined: Unlike classic terrorism, the essence of modern cyber-warfare is its anonymity. Though some attacks did appear to come from PCs belonging to the Russian presidential administration, others came from as far afield as Brazil and Vietnam. As a result, even the Estonian government’s experts have backed away from directly accusing the Russian government. After all, angry hackers can organize a “ botnet” — a network of computers that have been remotely hacked and forced, unwittingly, to send out spam or viruses — anywhere. Indeed, “patriotic” Chinese hackers have made a specialty of this sort of assault, using computers all over the world to attack both Japanese and U.S. government web sites at moments of high tension. Both the anonymity and the novelty may turn out to be part of the appeal, particularly if, as some in NATO now believe, the attacks are Russian “tests” of the West’s preparedness for cyber-warfare in general and of NATO’s commitment to its newest, weakest members in particular. Some believe the Russian government is experimenting with different tactics, trying to see which forms of harassment work best: the verbal attacks on Estonia, the Russian oil pipeline to Lithuania that mysteriously needs repairs, or the embargos on Polish meat products and Georgian wine. 
If that is the case, surely the lesson of the past three weeks is that cyber-warfare has a lot going for it: It creates no uproar, results in no tit-for-tat economic sanctions, doesn’t seem like a “real” form of warfare and doesn’t get anyone worried about Europe’s long-term energy needs. NATO did, in the end, quietly send a few specialists to Estonia, as (even more quietly) did the Pentagon. 
A few Europeans complained a bit at a summit over the weekend, too. But there the affair will end — until whoever forced the Estonian government out of cyberspace comes back online, better armed for the next battle. 

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

TITLE: No Backing For Stability
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: In the leadup to elections, it’s not enough to try to give money to the needy. If an economy claims to be of the market variety, you have to help the markets as well. This might explain President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion to invest state money in stagnating blue chip stocks.
The blue chips in question are, for the most part, oil and gas companies, and current sluggish stock markets reflect their problems. The taxation regime in the oil and gas sector has resulted in significantly lower profits for these companies in the last two quarters. 
An injection of funds accumulated from the taxation of extraordinary energy company profits into the markets might lead to some speculative rise in share prices, but is unlikely to produce the fundamental conditions necessary for stable growth in the future.
Putin’s suggestion reflects the attitudes of a large number of government officials who are unhappy with the conservative policies of the Finance Ministry. Opponents of the fund believe it is possible to use the funds in such a way as to boost gross domestic product and reap better returns, without seriously boosting inflation.
Today, as the budget surplus shrinks and state expenditures continue to grow, there is rising pressure to break open the piggy bank, and Putin appears to be tempted.
In his state-of-the-nation address, he announced increased spending of about $27 billon, along with suggesting that state pension fund shortfalls could be covered with oil and gas tax revenues. He didn’t directly refer to the stabilization fund, but many officials and analysts came away with the impression that the fund is no longer the sacred cow it once was.
Investing or spending this money means converting the necessary foreign reserves to rubles, which will put upward pressure on domestic currency, as Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin pointed out in public comments on Monday and Tuesday. 
At the beginning of May, Putin was warning that a strong ruble could hurt Russian manufacturers. On Monday he seemed content that the Central Bank has done little to keep the ruble down. Apparently, the ruble has been left to its own devices. True, a reduction in the country’s trade surplus might eventually allow the Central Bank to buy less foreign currency, which would reduce pressure on the ruble and inflation. At the same time, though, the pressure from government spending looks set to rise.

This appeared as an editorial in Vedomosti.

TITLE: Of Rivers, Bogs and Souvenirs
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: There is an interesting souvenir on my desk that serves as a fitting symbol for the global economy. It is a model of an Istanbul mosque I bought for 100 rubles in a little village shop in Dagestan. I understood when I bought it that it was probably not made locally and likely came from somewhere like Turkey. When I turned it over, however, it was stamped, “Made in China.”
Russian state television informs us that the country’s biggest problems are with Estonia, for moving a World War II monument to fallen Soviet soldiers from the center of Tallinn, with Poland, for blocking negotiations on a new EU cooperation agreement with Russia over a Moscow ban on the import of Polish meat, and with the United States, which is apparently turning into some sort of “Fourth Reich” and trying to impose its views on the rest of the planet.
In reality, the country’s main problem consists in this: My souvenir would have cost much more than 100 rubles had it been made in this country. Fire inspectors would have visited the factory director — and left a little richer than when they came. The deputy mayor would be the next caller, and would also leave a little better off. The FSB would agree to overlook the danger that the souvenir mosque might be connected to radical Wahhabism in exchange for some of the proceeds. By the time the souvenir was finally produced, it would cost 1,000 rubles and still be of inferior quality to the Chinese version. You can’t blame Estonia, Poland or U.S. President George W. Bush for this.
What we might call the great river of the global economy flows relentlessly into the future. In addition to this river, there are, if you will, a number of individual economic ponds. Some are connected to some degree to the great river, while others are completely isolated. Some of the isolated examples have turned into bogs, with their own peculiar brand of swamp creatures — North Korean President Kim Jong Il, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and some of the officials cum oligarchs we now see in the Kremlin.
These bogs also have their own special fauna: bottom-dwelling sanitation inspectors, flesh-eating Federal Security Service agents, Kim Il Jong-loving ideologues, volunteer guards of the Islamic Revolution, and so on. These creatures could not survive in the great river. Despite their enormous jaws, flesh-tearing teeth and tough hides, they would perish in the great river’s free-flowing waters.
These creatures cannot survive in neighboring bogs either. The inhabitants of the various ponds have nothing to offer each other but friendship. The Investment Bank of Belarus does not open a branch bank in Venezuela. North Korea does not borrow ideology from the Islamic Revolution, even if it is on friendly terms with Iran. Neither country’s ideology is competitive outside its own pond. The Chinese souvenir I purchased in Dagestan could find a market anywhere.
The greatest fear for the inhabitants of these ponds is the belief that the inhabitants of the great river want to take over their bog. This fear is groundless. Those of the great river are too interested in their own affairs — and profits — to worry much about the bogs. Whales don’t often swim up river.
Of course, sooner or later the great river, by simple virtue of its size and force, will wash away any intervening dams and obstacles. There is nothing personal or even malicious in this. It is simply a question of hydrodynamics. The only considerations are the time lost by the ponds in remaining isolated, and the harmless fish and crayfish that might have thrived in clean water rather than living out their lives in the ooze and pond scum that their local television tells them is actually the purest water in the world.

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

TITLE: Cutting edge
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: La Sega del Canto — the eccentric Finnish novelty-comedy duo that plays in St. Petersburg on Friday — was named after its main instrument, the singing saw. Reflecting the band’s sharp sense of the absurd, they also translated the name into Italian. 
“The idea of the band is to make people smile, to do some experiments. Tools for that are music, improvisation, comedy, theater — anything,” band member Markus Pulkkinen wrote in a recent e-mail.
The saw is played by Jouni Salo, also known as J.J. Calo, who also supplies hilarious monologues in (deliberately) broken, heavy accented English, while Pulkkinen, whose stage name is Mr. Pulp, sings and plays guitar, pump organ, flute, maracas and mouth organ.
The two met in 1995 in the Finnish town of Jyvaskyla, where Salo worked as an actor in the local theater and Pulkkinen studied physics, musicology and arts management. 
They started an improvisational theater group, with Salo as a director and Pulkkinen as a musician, before forming La Sega del Canto two years later.
“At first, we tried to start a band with four saw players, but it sounded awful,” Pulkkinen recalled. “Then we decided to try as street musicians, the guitar and the saw. And it worked — the combination of sounds of saw and guitar was great. And because we had done theater, we decided to use theatrical elements in our performance. Playing in streets was great schooling for our band.”
The band got its breakthrough with a street performance in the Finnish town of Pori, when they were noticed by the director of the Pori Jazz Festival, Jyrki Kangas. 
“He saw us in the street and said, ‘After one hour — main stage,’” said Pulkinnen. “We played two songs for 10,000 people and after us there were, for example, David Byrne and Gary Moore. After this we believed in our band — it would work.”
Salo’s side-splitting monologues are partly prepared but mostly improvised.
“And good improvised stories can be used again,” said Pulkinnen.
La Sega del Canto’s repertoire includes unlikely versions of international pop anthems such as “We Are the World” or “My Heart Will Go On,” as well as popular classical and traditional songs.
“[It’s] songs we like, songs that are possible to play on the saw,” said Pulkinnen about the band’s repertoire. “Classic songs — evergreens. But we are very lazy.”
One of the band’s best-known songs is “Oravanpesa,” or “Squirrel’s Nest,” from its 2002 debut album “Das Kekkonen.” 
The song takes an old Finnish children’s tune and incorporates the famous sitar sequence from The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” — but instead of the sitar, La Sega del Canto plays it with, of course, the singing saw.
“When we rehearsed this song for our first CD, we decided to steal a little Beatles because ‘Norwegian Wood’ has something to do with forest, and a squirrel lives in forest,” said Pulkinnen.
Last year, the band released its second CD, “Songs for Games.” 
La Sega del Canto’s albums have included renditions of several Russian songs, such as “Iz-za Ostrova na Strezhen” (From Beyond the Island Into the Open), also known as “Stenka Razin,” and “Black Eyes” (Ochi Chyorniye).
“We very much like Russian music,” Pulkkinen said. “The Finnish music tradition is very Russian — melancholic melodies are famous in Finland. A lot of Russian songs are very popular in Finland.”
Apart from playing in the band, Salo continues to work as an actor in the theater, while Pulkkinen is a professional composer and producer. He is currently composing a 45-minute program for a dance troupe and is also involved with children’s theater.
Immersed in his own music work, Pulkkinen does not follow the latest music trends, he confessed.
“I don’t listen to music very much, because I make it for my profession,” he said.
“The last CD that I bought was Tom Waits’ 3-CD box ‘Orphans.’ The radio is on in the car when we travel, and we get some ideas from there.”
Rock music from Finland has become popular internationally in the past few years, and, even if it is mostly trivial pop metal, Pulkkinen sees the progress as positive.
“The Finnish music business is quite young,” he said.
“I am happy for those bands who have broken internationally — although they are not very good bands...,” Pulkkinen said without naming names. 
“International markets are growing for all kinds of Finnish music, and I think that there will be much more interesting music to come.”
In St. Petersburg, La Sega del Canto will perform with drummer Kristian Voutilainen. 
Voutilainen is best known as a member of Elakelaiset, the band notorious for rearranging international pop hits in the style of the Finnish traditional dance music humppa. He also plays with Pulkkinen as a duo called Crap With Feeling.
“Kristian Voutilainen is great musician and we met him first time when we toured together in Germany; we have the same agent there,” said Pulkkinen.
“These days Kristian —actually his name is Ema Hurskainen — plays often with us. The connection with all of us is that we like the avant-garde, we like other bands and ways to make music and everything. We are good friends now.” 

<i>La Sega del Canto performs at The Place on Friday. www.lasegadelcanto.net</i>

TITLE: Chernov's choice
TEXT: An opposition rock concert called <b>This Is Our Town</b>, scheduled to be held during City Day festivities on Sunday, has been stopped by the authorities, the organizers said.
The original location for the concert, which was to feature musicians such as <b>Mikhail Borzykin</b> of <b>Televizor</b> was to be Pionerskaya Ploshchad, the square in front of the Theater of the Young Spectator, according to the initial plan. 
The place is memorable for the April 15 <b>Dissenters’ March</b>, the anti-Putin rally, whose participants were attacked and brutally beaten by police special forces as they peacefully headed toward the nearest metro after the rally had ended. 
The rallies are promoted by the Other Russia, an umbrella organization of diverse opposition groups led by Garry Kasparov, Eduard Limonov and Mikhail Kasyanov.
After the application for a concert was rejected by the authorities under a fabricated, the organizers felt, pretext, they came up with a new location, Ploshchad Sakharova, the square on Vasilyevsky Ostrov named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Permission was granted — only to be denied after a couple of days.
“[The concert] was banned by Smolny [City Hall],” said Olga Kurnosova, the local coordinator of the United Civil Front, part of the Other Russia.
“When I went to negotiations to [St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko’s office at] Smolny on Monday, we agreed that we will organize [the concert] on Ploshchad Sakharova, but yesterday we got a reply that we can’t have it there either, because allegedly there is some other celebration there, and we have been sent to the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Park [in the city’s outskirts].”
Kurnosova said the concert had to be canceled because, since it is banned from television, the opposition has no means of informing the public about the change at such short notice. 
“It’s an unprecedented situation, because a Smolny official, [Nikolai] Strumentov makes a promise and then doesn’t fulfill it,” she said.
According to musician <b>Mikhail Novitsky</b> of the band <b>SP Babai</b>, the canceled concert’s art and technical director, the event was to have mainly environmental and some social messages.
“Nothing outrageous was planned, we were going to sing songs about trees, about saving lakes and about ecology,” said Novitsky, who also leads the ecological group Green Wave.
“It looks like [the authorities] find something in our songs that make them feel uneasy.”
“This Is Our Town” has also been a slogan of local Dissenters’ Marches. The rallies are directed not only against current Kremlin policies, but also against destroying St. Petersburg’s historical buildings and cutting down trees to make way for massive developments that have increased in catastrophic proportions since Matviyenko was installed by Putin.
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Redefining Israeli culture
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: “Shaul Mofaz! Shaul Mofaz!” chants Habiluim, Israel’s theatrical rock ‘n’ polka group.
The song is called after the former Israeli minister of defense and presents him as a macabre version of Santa Claus who rides his sleigh from house to house giving out amputated body parts of dead soldiers to their worried mothers. 
“We organized the concert at [the Moscow art club] Bilingua, with some 400 people present, and when it finished, there were some 30 fans jumping on the stage screaming ‘Sergei Ivanov! Sergei Ivanov! [Russia’s then defense minister seen as Vladimir Putin’s possible successor],’” said Moscow-based author Linor Goralik, whose Eshkol: Contemporary Jewish and Israeli Culture in Moscow project, appears to address the pressing issues of the day and is not an isolated celebration of Israeli culture.
Day Aleph, an all-day event featuring a children’s matinee, a walking tour, a film screening and a concert, is Eshkol’s first foray into St. Petersburg, where it is planning to promote regular events about Israeli culture starting from September.
“It’s very important for us that it all is based on rapprochement of cultures, rather than demonstration of the otherness — the goal is to demonstrate Israeli culture as relevant and connected to what happens in contemporary culture on the whole,” said Goralik by telephone this week.
Although it takes place on City Day, a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg that is packed with mass events around the city, Day Aleph is not officially part of it.
“We didn’t contact anybody officially, it’s just pleasant for us that people are ready for some cultural entertainment anyway, and try to combine it somehow.”
In existence since 2004, Eshkol is sponsored by Avi Chai, a private foundation in Israel. 
“We are not another Jewish organization — for instance, imagine an Israeli analogue of the [hugely popular ska-punk Russian band] Leningrad. We brought them twice [to Moscow]. We do completely different things. We work with the culture that is alive.”
Apart from rock bands, Eshkol promotes Israeli fashion shows, theater performances, literary events and film screenings.
The choice of film for Day Aleph, the Romania-born, France-based director Radu Mihaileanu’s 2005 “Go, See, and Become” (Va, vis et deviens) is far from being a sugercoated look at modern Israel. 
A co-production between France, Belgium, Israel and Italy, the award-winning film tells the story of a black Ethiopian Christian boy who is taken to Tel Aviv when black Falashas, Ethiopian Jews, were evacuated to Israel in 1984. Showing how he tries to adapt to his new life, the film touches on the uneasy subjects of racism and religious intolerance in Israel.
“We chose it because it is simply a quality film and it’s not about common truths. We had a screening in Moscow and it was a great success,” said Goralik.
The film screening will be followed by a concert by Lampa Ladino, the Moscow-based band that performs rock-jazz versions of medieval Sephardic songs singing in Ladino, a Romance language spoken by Sephardic Jews, which derived from Old Castilian, Hebrew, Turkish and Greek. 
In St. Petersburg, the home of KlezFest, an annual Klezmer event drawing musicians from the former Soviet Union, Europe and the U.S., Lampa Ladino’s sound might come as a surprise.
“I hate any music, I don’t understand anything about it, but I know that St. Petersburg is considered to be a ‘klezmer city,’ where klezmer is everything. Lampa Ladino is the other type of band,” said Goralik.

<i>http://alef.eshkol.ru</i>

TITLE: A new voice
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The renowned American baritone Thomas Hampson makes his Russian debut on Tuesday at the Mariinsky Theater’s new state-of-the-art concert hall with a program of Liszt, Mahler and American songs.
Hampson was born in Indiana, and received his vocal training and musical education at Eastern Washington University, Cheney, and Fort Wright Spokane. 
A meeting with the composer and conducter Leonard Bernstein directly influenced and inspired Hampson’s development as a leading interpreter of the music of Gustav Mahler. The singer says he is fascinated by what he calls Mahler’s fondness of poetry. 
“It was the metaphor of the poetry that Mahler was so interested in; it is not so much the story but each word and each phrase has a kind of a metaphor for the psychology and the emotion of human beings,” he said. “And when he sets this to music, it becomes a very rich dialogue between our fantasy, our imagination and even our perception of reality. And I think Mahler’s works created to pieces of poetry produce a very rich landscape for our own imaginations.”
Hampson was first introduced to Mahler’s symphonies, before he knew the composer’s songs. For the past 30 years the performer has been keeping a close contact with this music, having sung Mahler songs every year. In 1995, Hampson sang for the first time at the prestigious Mahler festival in Amsterdam’s celebrated Concertgebouw concert hall. The singer then performed all Mahler songs in two consecutive nights to high critical recognition.
His wider repertoire includes the title roles of “Don Giovanni,” “The Barber of Seville,” “William Tell,” “Macbeth” and “Eugene Onegin.” Hampson is particularly associated with the Zurich Opera, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the OpIra National de Paris, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and the Vienna State Opera. From the large announcement on the singer’s website, Hampson is clearly excited by his Russian debut this week.
“The Russian classical composers are fundamental and profoundly important for classical music,” he said.  
A globe-trotting performer, Hampson carefully compiles his international recital program, with much attention to what the audiences would like to hear, what they understand and appreciate.
“This preparation helps me to choose the music that the public do not know and can discover during the concert,” Hampson said. “Of course, being an American singer and living in Europe it is always quite fun to sing songs that no one has heard. I have lived in Vienna for over 25 years but essentially a musician like myself, we live in a suitcase. But every year I have been back in the States for at least half of my time.”
“I am a professional musician, and I respect the rules of the industry but what I sing and what I choose to sing are very much artistic decisions,” he said. “When musicians spend a lot of time traveling, they become somewhat cosmopolitan. You sort of have to become cosmopolitan, simply because it is too much trouble to travel all the time. So if you do not enjoy at least some part of this experience of meeting new people, the fascination of visiting new places and exposure to new cultures, you would either become very frustrated as a person, or not a very good artist. It is one or the other.”
Hampson sees his Russian debut as an extension of his artistic and professional development. 
“The influences and the knowledge of Russian classical music and the love for it is enormous in the west,” he said. “Yet there are a lot of challenges in the industry, and the more open and mobile Russia can be, the better it would benefit the entire world. The idea of going to Russia for a classical recital seems very natural to me, and I am very happy to be able to do it. It is very exciting.”
With his professional interests shared between Verdi, Mahler and Liszt, in his leisure time Hampson indulges in jazz. 
“What I play in my car, for instance, depends largely on how far I am going to drive but generally it is jazz,” he said. 
“In terms of just enjoyment, it could be Miles Davis or Oscar Petersen. Also, it may sound strange but with all my passion for so much repertoire I really did not know much about Shostakovich. So now, nearing my Russian debut I have been trying to listen to some more of this composer. I have been through his symphonies and the string quartet.”

<i>www.hampsong.com, www.mariinsky.ru</i>

TITLE: Over the rainbow
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: What do Little Red Riding Hood fleeing the wolf through a forest of skyscrapers, naked men having a steam in the banya, Chagall-like lovers flying into the air, one ton of sand and 20 tons of water all have in common? The simple answer is that they are all things that can be seen during the upcoming Rainbow Festival, which opens at TYuZ on May 31.
Founded in 1921, TYuZ (Teatr Yunovo Zritelya) is the world’s oldest children’s repertory theater and has a long tradition of showcasing important international music, dance and visiting theater companies. 
Throughout its history TYuZ has been home to some of the most innovative productions for children and, perhaps more surprisingly, for adults, winning countless awards and building a loyal following along the way. In recent years, the U.K.’s Stereolab, Tindersticks, and David Sylvian as well as Russell Maliphant have all appeared in its newly renovated amphitheatre.
Next week sees the opening of the Eighth International Rainbow Theater Festival. Including seven theater company from Russia and seven from abroad, the festival promises more than a few surprises over the course of the seven days and nights it will run.
Past festivals have offered pieces ranging from re-interpretations of classics to entirely new productions, but one thing they have all shared in common is a willingness to experiment and a commitment to the art of live theater. 
This year’s festival looks set to follow suit and, according to Alexei Moskin, the festival’s International Director, “Some of the most exciting names in world theater will be bringing new work to St. Petersburg for the festival. In many cases this will be the only chance for local audiences to see these very special performances by theaters from across Russia and, of course, from abroad.”
Russian theaters will be represented by troupes from Moscow, Novosibirsk, Magnitogorsk, Oryol and Nizhniy-Novgorod. 
From Moscow, the respected MKhAT will bring a new work to St. Petersburg for its local premier. The much hyped production, “Carmen Etudes,” by rising-star choreographer Alla Sigalova is a pure dance piece based on the same novel by Prosper MIrimIe that has inspired everyone from Bizet to choreographer Matthew Bourne and filmmaker Carlos Saura and has received nothing but rave reviews wherever it has been seen.
Perhaps the most intriguing Russian submission is from the Magnitogorsk Drama Theater who will present Alexander Ostrovsky’s “The Storm” (1860) as staged by Lev Erenberg. The story follows the troubled life of Katya Kabanova, which ends badly in the waters of the Volga. In this production the set will include a pool of water containing 20 tons of the stuff, taking the trend for realism in the theater to new and improbable heights.
The international section of the festival programme is no less ambitious and will include work by troupes from Finland, Belgium, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Croatia and the U.S. 
At least one play, Eugene Ionesco’s dark and disturbingly comic “The Chairs” in which an elderly couple receive invisible guests, will be performed in English by the University of Richmond Theater from Virginia. Directed by Italian Paolo Landi, who has produced programming for the BBC among others, it is an absurdist exploration of the irony of life and should appeal to the Russian appetite for the dark and bathetic. 
Another highlight of the Festival is the production by Finland’s Dance-Theater Hurjaruuth. An inventive rendition of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” it uses puppetry and circus techniques in a dumb-show that updates the tale for both children and adults to enjoy together. 
From Belgium, the JosI Besprozvany Company will present “Apropos de Butterfly” — a political take on the Madam Butterfly story with multimedia elements and will include English super-titles.
Not to leave local talent out of the act, TYuZ is also planning to showcase several off-program productions including the theater’s own recently premiered and critically acclaimed “Poor Folks” based on Dostoevsky’s short novel. Beautifully staged and finely acted, the piece unfolds within the intimate confines of the theater’s studio stage and has already garnered rave reviews since its premier last October. 
Of particular interest at a theater that is first and foremost dedicated to the city’s youth will be a performance of Oscar Wilde’s “The Child Of A Star.” Presented by the children of St. Petersburg’s Boarding School No. 51 – an orphanage – the piece took Grand Prize at the recent Bryantsev Festival of Children’s Theaters, and is a fitting reminder that children can be actors as well as spectators.

TITLE: Killing fields
AUTHOR: By Catherine Merridale
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The story that Lynne Viola has set out to tell in “The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements” may seem familiar enough. Her subject is the fate of the so-called “kulaks,” the peasants designated as class enemies on account of their supposed wealth or bourgeois political attitudes. These unfortunate people — hundreds of thousands of them — were forcibly driven from their homes and farms between 1929 and 1931 as part of the campaign of agricultural collectivization. Some were executed more or less immediately, but the majority were herded into crowded rail cars heading north and east. Two decades after glasnost, there is little that we do not know about the human cost of Soviet development. Piles of evidence already testify to the cruelty and also the counter-productivity of Soviet policy in the 1930s. Anne Applebaum’s comprehensive study of the gulag, drawing on newly opened archives, leaves little to the imagination when it comes to the brutality of Josef Stalin’s camps. Somewhere in the middle of this, however, the kulaks’ fate has been overlooked. That is, accounts of collectivization mention their deportation, and studies of the gulag (Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s included) offer a glimpse of suffering, but there have been few systematic studies of these former peasants’ fate in exile. Viola’s book sets out from here, and her story adds considerably to our understanding of the dismal workings of Stalin’s regime.
Viola, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, has worked in this field for more than 20 years (her first book, “The Best Sons of the Fatherland,” took a rosier view of collectivization, but that was before the Soviet archives opened), and few can equal her knowledge of archival and monograph sources. In the present book, she combines an impressive range of primary-source material from government and local archives with excerpts from the testimony of survivors. At a time when any testimony must come from witnesses who were mere children when disaster struck, it is the documents that really drive the story, bringing high-level decisions, midlevel bureaucratic incompetence and the tragic reality of helpless citizens’ lives into focus for the first time. The cynicism of an elite and the tragic inappropriateness of ideological zeal are chronicled, but it is not for these stories alone that this book matters. The deportation of the kulaks was the first mass uprooting of a population under communist rule (plenty more would follow after 1939), and the details of the human tragedy, to say nothing of the decisions that shaped it, have much to tell us about the logic and bitterness of the Soviet revolution from above.
Viola begins with the liquidation of the kulaks as a class (this was a slogan, as well as a policy, after 1929), the ideologically driven campaign to rid the countryside of so-called “counter-revolutionaries” and “bourgeois” on the eve of the mass collectivization of private farms. Her treatment of the decision-making process is brief and perhaps confusing, but the policy was itself confused, originating from ideology but evolving with bewildering force when the big idea encountered lived reality in villages and districts across the Soviet empire. In the space of months, over a million people, from the very elderly to infants and nursing mothers, had been dispossessed. It is a measure of the dread that peasants felt that significant numbers should have fled, committed suicide or otherwise “dekulakized themselves” before the regime’s men arrived.
What followed was mass deportation, a process that Viola follows in vivid detail. Survivor testimonies feature strongly here, but what really chills is the icy language of bureaucracy. We read, for instance, how officials in Moscow set norms and standards for each stage, specifying how many rifle cartridges each guard should receive for the journey (60), how many buckets (3) to issue to each group of 40 exiles, and how many plank beds (28) they were to share. As if these details were not stark enough, we then read how, at real stations and on the endless, miserable tracks, real people wept, shivered and starved. The spirit of revolutionary morality — that prudish, condescending humanitarianism of the self-selected vanguard — was not dead in 1930. While they supported the policy in outline (and had supported other aspects of class war), officials in senior posts, including Vladimir Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, could still deplore some details of its costs. Yet the protests of those Bolsheviks touched by the suffering of infants, and of children in general, were to no avail. By the spring of 1930, infants in makeshift “settlements” in the northern territories were dying in the hundreds from malnutrition, dysentery, typhus and epidemic measles.
The truth was that no detailed plan existed for the kulaks’ future. Ideology determined that class enemies should be removed from Russia’s heartland, and the same ideological cast of mind — optimistic, certain of its own merciless ground — had sketched their futures as if new settlements, food and productive employment could be conjured from forest and rock. In their new homes, mere dots on a map of the taiga, the kulaks had to build from scratch. Planning and provision developed, as Viola puts it, “on the fly.” One new expedient was to offer young children a ticket home, the chance of life at the cost of family unity. “One wants involuntarily to scream,” an eyewitness recalled, “together with those old people who are accompanying the dozens of children.” The adults who remained were expected to clear and settle virgin land in a few months.
The state, in the shape of the security police under Genrikh Yagoda, then put the exiles to work in forests, mines and fields. True, the expense of transporting and feeding the kulaks would turn out to be roughly double the value of the revenue they earned over the years (repressive policies are seldom economic), but once the settlements existed they had to be seen to function. Accordingly, the kulaks’ ideological “re-education” would take the form of hard labor. In theory, there was a fixed term for this phase. The prescribed period for exile was initially given as five years. As the people toiled, however, a new cloud gathered over their futures: To free them would mean unleashing a potentially destabilizing group of malcontents to disturb the peace of Soviet civilians.
With characteristic cynicism, the security police solved the problem by decreeing that the “rehabilitation” of former kulaks should not confer them the right to leave their exile. Worse, in July 1937, a new measure, known as Order 00447, “the operation to repress former kulaks, criminals, and other antisoviet elements,” provided for their re-arrest. Coinciding with the wide-scale repressions of the Great Terror, this new wave of brutality ensured that thousands of people would remain in penal exile in the coming years. Only the advent of war, during which the state needed every able-bodied fighter it could muster, brought change to the special settlements, and even then release was hardly freedom.
Viola is to be congratulated for assembling the details of these people’s story. The “unknown” gulag was, to some extent, a model and precedent, but its story also shows how policies are made and deformed, how inhumanity develops from perverse but self-righteous intentions. In the end, it is not irrational cruelty that makes this story so terrifying, but its narrative of detailed, careful, hypocritical neglect.

Catherine Merridale is Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author, most recently, of “Ivan’s War: The Red Army, 1939-1945.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: If someone builds a beach resort in the shape of a palm tree, it can only be a matter of time before the first Russian pop star moves in. And lucky Tvoi Den readers were given an exclusive photo shoot the other week of singer Valeria and her producer husband Iosif Prigozhin splashing in the sea in Dubai, where they have bought a holiday home.
The Palm resort, a series of artificial islands cunningly camouflaged as a giant palm tree, is also said to be home to stars including David Beckham and Pamela Anderson. And now Valeria, the blonde pop singer behind such hits as “Little Clocks,” has bought a luxurious apartment for a fabulous sum, Tvoi Den raves. 
Apparently, the star will live in a 168-square-meter apartment that will be decorated in the “Oriental style,” and will be rubbing shoulders with Robert De Niro and the Beckhams. 
The tabloid doesn’t seem to be too confident of its facts, however, despite boasting of its exclusive photo-reportage. 
One photo shows the star walking in a marble hallway, which it says is the vestibule of the building where she has bought the apartment, but another shows the family frolicking in the sea in front of a construction site with no windows, which is apparently where their apartment will be. I just hope they’re not the victims of some elitny real estate fraud. 
Naturally, the Prigozhin clan are not the first Russian celebrities to buy a second home in the sun. In fact, judging from the tabloids, you can barely rollerskate along Miami Beach without tripping over a permatanned Slavic pop star — although their bodyguards would probably trip you over first. 
Komsomolskaya Pravda reported last year that my favorite pop veteran, Valery Leontyev, bought a house in Miami 15 years ago, and since then his wife Lyusya has lived there permanently, working as a hairdresser for the city’s poodle population — a rumor that I certainly want to be true. 
The tabloid said that the house is furnished with animal skins and is also home to 10 dogs — a decoration scheme that might be a bit confusing after a few too many Pink Ladies. However, I would believe anything of Leontyev, who once welcomed Moskovsky Komsomolets into his Moscow apartment, and revealed that he even has a leopard-print television.
The same report said that Miami has also attracted pop star Kristina Orbakaite, who has bought a “small house” with its own beach, and the pop singer couple Leonid Agutin and Anzhelika Varum, who bought a house in the Russian quarter. And then, there’s Alla Pugachyova, who is buying a house worth $2 million, KP wrote earlier this year.
It’s quite nice to think of the Russian pop stars cruising around the Art Deco buildings in their Hummers, perhaps waving to each other, or perhaps proudly cutting each other dead, still incensed over some unflattering comment, just as Pugachyova is said to ignore State Duma Deputy and crooner Iosif Kobzon, who wrote harshly of her in his memoirs. Luckily, I don’t think he has a house in Miami — yet. 
If the expat pop population keeps increasing at the current rate, Miami Beach may turn into Brighton Beach for rich people — perhaps a rare case of the real estate market being influenced by back-to-back broadcasts of “Miami Vice” on Russian television in the 1990s. 
I can only hope that another long-running Russian favorite, “Santa Barbara,” is having a similar effect in California. Surely the Capwells can’t have lived and died gruesomely over so many episodes in vain.

TITLE: A touch of romance
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: <b>Enoteca Divina</b> // The Arch of the General Staff, 2 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. // Tel: 5700111 // Open daily 12 a.m. through 11 p.m. // Major credit cards accepted // Menu in Italian and in Russian // Dinner for two with alcohol: 3,030 rubles ($ 116)

If you are looking to propose to your girlfriend and want to hear the sacramental “Yes” as a reply, then look no further. Enoteca Divina, situated inside the famous archway leading into Palace Square, is arguably the most romantic place in the city. The restaurant is also an elegant statement that shows that with less-than-outstanding food and service — but with magnificent design, a relaxed atmosphere and helpful staff — restaurants can succeed. 
A half-minute walk from the noisy, traffic-clogged stress of Nevsky Prospekt, you find yourself experiencing the pleasant surprise of a completely different experience. Tranquility, low lighting (the restaurant does not have windows), candles and quietly spoken waiters — the restaurant offers the ultimate in relaxation. 
Or at least this is true until a 900-ruble check ($35) for a 50-milimeter shot of grappa arrives.
What is also surprising is the service. The waiter (although trying his best to be accommodating and who was very friendly) didn’t know much about the restaurant including what its name means. 
He was prepared to run back and forth to consult the chef and the barman, admittedly. But the barman in turn was not able to make any cocktails at all. The extensive wine list (or rather a heavy folder) fully made up for the absence of cocktails. 
In keeping with the name (which can be roughly translated as a “divine wine tasting room”), Enoteca Divina offers a great selection of wines, from cheap but decent per-glass options of Alcamo (190 rubles, $7.3) or Valpolicella (150 rubles, $5.8) all the way to a 3-liter bottle of Masseto Tenuta Dell’Ornellaia costing a whopping 160,000 rubles ($6,187). It is also a good place to try Italian beer. We liked the dark Dell’ Farro for 590 rubles ($22.80) a bottle. 
As for the food, the 320 rubles ($12.40) Caesar Salad can be only described as adequate — not extremely delicious, but eatable enough. 
The lentil soup does exactly what it says on the tin, in this case, boiled lentils sprinkled with some olive oil. So it was not clear why the dish whose main (and almost the only) ingredient is one of the cheapest pulses on the Russian market costs 400 rubles ($15.50) a bowlful. But the 500-ruble ($19.30) veal chops in tomato sauce justified its price to the last dime. 
Although lacking in decoration, the dish was very tender and satisfying. 
So was the wild mushroom risotto for 450 rubles ($17.40).
When speaking about this pillar of Milanese cuisine, Enoteca Divina should be considered a meeting point for St. Petersburg risotto fans. While some Italian restaurants in the city (like Il Patio) for no apparent reason no longer offer risotto, here an entire page of the menu is dedicated to the dish.
Our verdict: Enoteca Divina is a simply divine place for a romantic rendezvous. Your date will be smitten with the dIcor and your good taste in restaurant picking, relaxed after wine tasting, and as a result drunk with love. And lovers have no need to be irritated with less than knowledgeable waiters and pricey food.

TITLE: Back to the bounding main
AUTHOR: By Jeannette Catsoulis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: “The immaterial has become material,” announces the East India Company’s scheming Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) early in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” He could be referring to the recent resurrection of the pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), flush with life and his expanded role in the trilogy. Or he could be speaking of his newfound dominion over the Flying Dutchman and its squid-faced captain, Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), whose excavated heart is now in Beckett’s possession. 
More likely, though, the words are a subliminal reassurance from the director, Gore Verbinski. After the bloated shenanigans of the previous entry, “Dead ManOs Chest” — perhaps the only pirate movie to see the need for a Ferris wheel — Verbinski is reminding us why we should ever trust him again.
This third and perhaps final episode in the swishy, swashbuckling saga goes some way toward achieving that goal. The cannibals, coconuts and landlocked locations have been replaced by the high-seas high jinks that made the first film so enjoyable. And the palpable relief as the myriad plotlines rush toward some semblance of resolution has made everyone quite giddy; even our passion-deferred lovers, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley), appear marginally less bored with each other. Or at least less bored than we are with them.
Filmed sequentially with its predecessor, “At WorldOs End” is less concerned with ends than inversions, presenting a society where the lawless practice democracy and their rulers engage in tyranny. The crown has declared a state of emergency, civil rights have been suspended, and naysayers are lined up to be hanged. 
In one of the film’s most bizarre sequences, the condemned begin to sing, belting out a dirge among the rolling tumbrils and swaying nooses. (Tardy audience members may think they’ve stumbled into a performance of “Les Miserables” by mistake.) The song reaches Elizabeth, in a skiff heading for the Pirate Brethren Court in Singapore (I am not making this up), and for a while the movie becomes a watery opera with a distinctly Oriental flavor. 
By the time Chow Yun-Fat appears, as the grumpy pirate lord Sao Feng — complete with an entourage of old-Hollywood coolies — the Gilbert and Sullivan vibe is beginning to wear. After electing Elizabeth pirate king (the Brethren know who wears the trousers in this trilogy), the pirates set out to clobber the British before Davy Jones and his seafood-combo crew can do the same to them. 
This will require the help of the priestess Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), whose role has clarified but whose diction remains unintelligible. “Therr is a cahst to be ped en thah end,” she warns mysteriously, mangling her vowels like a voodoo version of Inspector Clouseau. 
Having blown Tia up to Godzilla size, however, the screenwriters, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, have no further use for her; in her new incarnation as the sorceress Calypso she amounts to little more than crabs and raging wind. Considering she is afforded only one conjugal visit every 10 years — and that from a man who breathes through a blowhole — her bad temper is entirely understandable.
But what of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow? Following his unfortunate encounter with a giant cephalopod at the end of the last movie, this one finds him trapped and hallucinating in Davy Jones’s Locker, an arid limbo of rolling dunes and raging heat. Because he is Jack, his hallucinations are all about himself (the real love affair in these movies has always been between Jack and his mirror), and Verbinski fills the screen with an army of mincing clones in kohl eyeliner and fancy head scarves. 
Forever above the fray and beside the point, Depp’s devilish buccaneer is the lightfooted device that holds the franchise together; as he sashays from battle to bar, impervious to insult and musket alike, Jack’s very narcissism is his protection. He’s an inverse superhero.
Though the film is filled with the expected special-effects wizardry, its most stunning and surreal moments are also the most peaceful: an army of crabs transporting the Black Pearl over dunes and into the ocean, and a flaming sunrise viewed through tattered seaweed sails. A disappointing cameo by Keith Richards, still alive and flaunting the look of hard-won dissipation that reportedly inspired Jack’s personal style, is in a special-effects category of its own. Perhaps he should have rented a copy of “Performance” and taken notes from Mick Jagger. 
Because of the abundance of unpleasant human characters, all of whom lie, cheat and betray one another at the drop of a flounder, the burden of creating an emotional connection with the audience must be borne, ironically, by characters whose humanity has long since evaporated. From the pathos of Davy — still playing the organ like an invertebrate Phantom of the Opera — to the tragic yearning in the barnacle-encrusted face of Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), “Pirates of the Caribbean: At WorldOs End” reminds us that great acting can transcend even the most elaborate makeup. 
Even so, if the story is to continue, its creators will need more than Jack’s limp wrists and Will’s limp resolve. In the prophetic words of Barbossa, “There’s never a guarantee of comin’ back, but passin’ on — that’s certain.”

TITLE: Russia’s French Open Romance
AUTHOR: By Gennady Fyodorov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Paris and the French Open have always had a special place in the hearts of Russian tennis fans.
It was there that Yevgeny Kafelnikov made his historic breakthrough in 1996 when he became the first Russian to win a Grand Slam title.
Eight years later, on the same red clay of Roland Garros, Anastasia Myskina became the first Russian woman to be crowned a Grand Slam champion, lifting the Suzanne Lenglen trophy after beating Yelena Dementyeva in an all-Russian final.
Paris was also the site of Russia’s greatest tennis triumph when it beat France 3-2 in the 2002 final to clinch its first Davis Cup title.
Next week, Russians once again will be out in force for their annual assault on the French Open, though two names from the past will be missing.
Myskina has not played on the tour since the start of the year, while Dementyeva has contemplated retirement after battling injuries earlier this year.
Others, though, are ready to pick up the challenge.
World No. 2 Maria Sharapova leads the Russian contingent.
Although the U.S. Open champion has not had a good buildup to the clay season, pulling out of several high-profile tournaments with a shoulder injury, she is in confident mood after reaching the fourth round last year.
“I have the same goal in every tournament, that is to win it,” said Sharapova, 20, who will have an added incentive to do well, as she could overtake Justine Henin as world No. 1 if the Belgian flops in Paris.
World No. 3 Svetlana Kuznetsova wants to go one better than last year, when she lost to Henin in the final.
To do that, the Russian, who has lost four finals this year including back-to-back ones at the German and Italian Opens, must find a way to overcome her nerves on big occasions.
“Maybe it’s mental — something that only happens in finals. I know I can play much better,” Kuznetsova said after a 7-5, 6-1 defeat by in-form Jelena Jankovic in Rome last Sunday.
Nadia Petrova, who won three titles on clay leading up to last year’s French Open, Dinara Safina, who upset Sharapova on her way to reaching the quarterfinals in 2006, and newcomer and world No. 10 Anna Chakvetadze, also have a chance.
Russia’s men have not done as well as the women on the Paris clay in recent years, although world No. 3 Nikolai Davydenko reached the quarterfinals last year and the semifinals the year before.
It will be tough, however, for him — or anyone else for that matter — to upset defending champion Rafael Nadal, who had his 81-match winning streak on the surface, dating back to April 2005, snapped by Roger Federer on Sunday.
Igor Andreyev, the last man to defeat the Spaniard on clay before Federer, is always a threat, as is Russia’s 2002 Davis Cup hero Mikhail Youzhny, who has beaten Nadal twice in the past eight months, albeit on hard courts.
Marat Safin may have been past his prime when he was considered one of the main titles contenders in Paris, but the former world No. 1 is still strong enough to cause an upset or two.
“I’m gradually trying to regain my form. It’s just a few things here and there that must be improved and I can be my former self again,” Safin said last week. “The French Open is one of my favorite tournaments and if I could finally win there it would be a dream come true.”
 In other news, the All England Club confirmed Wednesday that HawkEye technology will be used at this year’s Wimbledon championships. 
It was announced last month that the multicamera system which tracks the flight of a moving ball would be introduced, as it has been at the hardcourt Australian and U.S. Opens.

TITLE: PM Vows to Uproot Militants
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIRUT — Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora vowed in an address to the nation on Thursday his government would uproot Islamic militants battling the army in a Palestinian refugee camp. 
“We will work to root out and strike at terrorism, but we will embrace and protect our brothers in the camps,” Saniora said in a televised speech, insisting Lebanon has no quarrel with the 400,000 Palestinian refugees who live in the country. 
His address came a day after the Lebanese defense minister issued an ultimatum to the Fatah Islam militants barricaded in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp — many of whom are believed to be Arabs from other countries — to surrender or face a military assault. 
Saniora said the Fatah Islam militant group holed up in the camp was “a terrorist organization that claims to be Islamic and to defend Palestine” and was “attempting to ride on the suffering and the struggle of the Palestinian people.” 
Saniora also said that Lebanon would never become the “playground” for international conflicts, a declaration that appeared aimed at Syria. 
Saniora spoke after a senior Lebanese military official disclosed Thursday that troops on Tuesday had sunk two small boats carrying Islamic militants who were trying to flee a besieged Palestinian refugee camp via the Mediterranean sea. 
The official said all militants on the boats were killed, but did not specify how many died in the incident. 
He spoke under customary conditions of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. 
“They were trying to flee from the coast next to the Nahr el-Bared camp,” the official said. 
“They took advantage of a lull in the fighting Tuesday and tried to escape,” he said. “There were no survivors.” 
The official said soldiers with heavy machine guns blasted the two rubber dinghies on which the militants were attempting to escape. 
Earlier Thursday, sporadic gunfire erupted inside Nahr el-Bared where Islamic militants are holed up after refusing an ultimatum by Lebanon’s defense minister to surrender or face a military onslaught. Fighters from the al-Qaida-inspired Fatah Islam militant group barricaded in the Palestinian refugee camp vowed not to give up and to fight any Lebanese assault. 
It was not clear what sparked the shooting, as a truce appeared to be still holding since Tuesday afternoon. Half a dozen soldiers followed by an armored car and a light vehicle headed toward a forward army position at the camp’s northern entrance. Lebanon’s government appeared to be preparing in case the showdown sparks violence elsewhere in the country. In a sign of the danger, a bomb exploded Wednesday night in the Aley mountain resort overlooking Beirut, a 90-minute drive south of Nahr el-Bared. The blast, which injured 16 people, was the third in the Beirut area since Sunday. 
Police said all but two of thewounded had been released from hospital. Fatah Islam has denied responsibility for the bombings, but many Lebanese fear more blasts if the siege continues.

TITLE: Inzaghi’s Goals Prove Berlusconi Right
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATHENS, Greece — AC Milan president Silvio Berlusconi did a lap of honor BEFORE the Champions League final against Liverpool.
Maybe he knew what was coming.
Italy’s former Premier got his hands on the famous trophy again Wednesday after Filippo Inzaghi scored two goals in a 2-1 win over Liverpool in the Champions League final.
It was Milan’s seventh European Cup in the 52-year history of the continent’s most prestigious soccer competition, and its third appearance in the final in five years.
Flanked by security staff and surrounded by photographers and TV cameramen, Berlusconi walked in front of the Milan fans before the kickoff at the Olympic Stadium and then watched the players’ warm up.
The match was a repeat meeting of the 2005 final, when Milan tossed away a 3-0 halftime lead to lose to Liverpool on penalties after a 3-3 draw that became one of the greatest finals in the competition’s history.
This time, Milan needed a chunk of good fortune to get started.
Inzaghi accidentally deflected in a free kick by Andrea Pirlo in the final minute of the first half. But he ended a well-worked move to take Kaka’s pass and run clear to shoot past Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina in the 82nd.
“The first goal is a scheme that the coach designed,” Inzaghi said. “Sure, you need a little luck, but Pirlo is great at hitting me. The first goal opened up the game, but the second was certainly more beautiful.”
Although Dirk Kuyt’s header pulled Liverpool within a goal with a minute to go, this time there would be no extra time and no penalty shootout.
“It’s the fifth victory for me, and still very beautiful,” said captain Paolo Maldini, who captured his fifth winners’ medal in the competition and shows no sign of giving up a month before his 39th birthday.
“Finishing with this trophy would be nice, but I want to play in the Supercup, and another Serie A championship. Then there is the Intercontinental Cup. And then I want to try to win the Champions League again next year. It’d be fantastic.”
Inzaghi’s second goal was set up by Kaka, who wound up as this season’s leading scorer with 10 goals.
“It is very nice to win the Champions League,” the Brazilian said. “I’m very happy because in 2005 we lost. What happened in 2005 was strange. For just six minutes we played not so good and paid for that, and today we could do what we want.”
Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti now has two winners’ medals as a coach to go with the ones he won as a Milan player in 1989 and ‘90.
“This joy has to be shared with all those close to the club, all those who have sustained us, and all the fans,” Ancelotti said. “It was a very difficult game, much like our season. We started slowly but grew in confidence as the game went on.
“(The game) wasn’t spectacular, but Liverpool is a team that can stop you playing.”
Milan midfielder Gennaro Gattuso said the team was finally over its loss in Istanbul.
“The defeat two years ago will stay with me for a lifetime,” he said. “But this is a different story. It’s our turn to celebrate now.”
Milan moved within two of Real Madrid’s record of nine European Cup triumphs while Liverpool stays with five.
Maldini, who scored a rare goal in the opening minute in Istanbul, made a mark as soon as the game in Athens kicked off. He made his eighth appearance in the competition’s final, tying the mark Gento set in 1966.
This time, Milan scored in the final minute of the half rather than the first.
Kaka went down under a challenge from Xabi Alonso outside the Liverpool area and Pirlo’s free kick brushed Inzaghi and deflected past Reina.
“I thought we started well,” Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard said. “We were in control just how we like to be, but when you do that you’ve got to score. They got the first goal, with a bit of luck, but it was a big lift for them.”
Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez, who also led Valencia to the UEFA Cup title in 2004 before moving to Anfield, said his team was unlucky to concede Inzaghi’s deflected goal.
“We lost against a good team with top-class players,” Benitez said. “The first half we played really well, but conceded a goal, a deflection, through bad luck.”
Gerrard had a chance to equalize in the 61st when Gattuso gave the ball away 25 meters from his own goal and the Liverpool captain ran clear. He didn’t get any power on his shot, however, and Dida raced off his line to make a blocking save.
Gerrard’s failure to score reflected his lack of influence on the game. Usually adept at surging through from deep positions, he had been told to support Kuyt and the plan clearly didn’t work.

TITLE: Iran 3 to 8 Years From Nuclear Weapons
AUTHOR: By Robert Wielaard
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LUXEMBOURG — The head of the UN nuclear agency said Thursday he agreed with CIA estimates that Iran was three to eight years from being able to make nuclear weapons and he urged the U.S. and other powers to pursue talks with the Islamic country. 
The best way to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear arms is “through a comprehensive dialogue,’’ International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told a news conference in Luxembourg. “One way to do that, rather than to continue the rhetoric, is to... sit down together.’’ 
On Wednesday, the IAEA reported that Iran’s uranium enrichment program was expanding in defiance of UN demands that it be suspended, findings that could lead to new sanctions against the country. 
The report also warned that the IAEA’s knowledge of those activities was shrinking. 
“We are moving toward Iran building [nuclear] capacity and knowledge, without [the IAEA] in a position to verify the nature or scope of that program,’’ ElBaradei said. 
ElBaradei would not offer his own view of when Iran would be able to produce nuclear weapons. But he added, “I tend to agree with [CIA estimates] that even if Iran wanted to go to nuclear weapons it would not be before the end of this decade or sometime in the middle of the next’’ three to eight years. 
Iran insists it has no intention of pursuing nuclear weapons — as the U.S. and its allies fear — saying its program is only for producing an alternative source of energy. 
Pushed by the United States, France and Britain, the UN Security Council has imposed sanctions twice against Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, which can produce both fuel for a reactor and the material for a nuclear warhead. 
ElBaradei said the United States should take “inspiration’’ from negotiations that have recently defused the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear activities — even though the North has yet to fulfill its pledge to scrap its weapons program. 
ElBaradei attended a conference of about 60 nuclear arms technology experts from a dozen nations, including the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and Sweden. 
In an opening address, ElBaradei said the U.N. needs a far more “agile and systematic approach for responding to cases of [nuclear] proliferation.’’ 
He said the acquisition of nuclear arms technology by India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea showed the current shortcomings. Monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty must be “drastically reformed,’’ he said.

TITLE: French Lab Attacked
AUTHOR: By Michael Miller
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MALIBU, California — Lawyers representing Floyd Landis renewed their attack on the French laboratory that analysed the Tour de France champion’s urine samples before the nine-day public doping case ended on Wednesday.
Maurice Suh, Landis’s chief attorney, said in his closing statement that he had proved that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA’s) case against his client was “a disaster”.
In a sustained attack on the Chatenay-Malabry laboratory (LNDD) outside Paris, Suh said technicians there had made errors in every phase of the testing of Landis’s urine, including “rule violations, incompetence and miscalculations”.
He added: “We believe in clean sports, we believe in clean athletes, we believe in real science. What we do not believe in is incompetent laboratories and cherry-picked data.”
Suh laid out what he described as “a chain of errors” by the lab, including poor quality control, bad chromatography and deleted data.
However, USADA lawyer Richard Young said the case relied on relatively simple science that proved American Landis had taken the performance-enhancing hormone testosterone during last year’s Tour de France.
“He cheated the rules of cycling and he got caught,” Young added.

PANEL DECISION
Although the arbitration hearing held at Pepperdine University is now over, the panel is not expected to reach a decision for at least a month.
Earlier on Wednesday, British mass spectrometry expert Simon Davis said he was “flabbergasted” by the way LNDD technicians operated.
Davis, an observer for Landis when the samples were re-tested at the LNDD in April, said data from the lab had been manipulated and that critical evidence had been removed from the lab’s computer hardware.
“Frankly, I was flabbergasted when I saw they were reprocessing it manually,” he said, referring to how the LNDD technicians had reprocessed the results.
Davis said he had expected the re-testing of Landis’s samples to be performed on modern software instead of the 10-year-old version used for the initial analysis last year.
At issue is whether Landis’s remarkable comeback in one of the 2006 Tour’s toughest hill-climb stages was the result of his taking a synthetic form of the male hormone testosterone.

TITLE: Phillies OvercomeMeltdown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: The Philadelphia Phillies survived a bizarre ninth-inning melt down.
“I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in baseball,” Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said. “It ranks with the rest of them.”
For the Phillies, the ninth-inning toll Wednesday night included two ejections, two defensive gaffes, an injury to Brett Myers and a blown four-run lead. They regrouped in the 10th, when Abraham Nunez singled home the tie-breaking run with two outs for an 8-7 victory over the Florida Marlins.
“The weirdest inning of all time,” center fielder Aaron Rowand said.
“It was a mess,” catcher Rob Barajas said.
The Phillies led 7-3 going into the ninth and brought in Myers. After Dan Uggla drove in two runs with a triple, Hanley Ramirez bunted to first baseman Greg Dobbs, who decided against taking the sure out at first and instead went home. His ill-advised throw was too late for a play on Uggla, allowing Ramirez to reach and making the score 7-6.
“I still can’t grasp what I did,” Dobbs said. “It might be the stupidest play in the history of baseball.”
Ramirez scored the tying run in the ninth when he slid under Barajas, who stood waiting with the ball but failed to crouch low enough to make the tag for the game’s final out. Barajas and Manuel disputed the call and were ejected, but Manuel later acknowledged TV replays showed Ramirez was indeed safe.
“I couldn’t believe we didn’t get the guy at the plate,” Manuel said.
Two pitches later, Myers threw a wild pitch, immediately grabbed his arm above the elbow and quickly departed for the clubhouse.
“It didn’t feel right,” he said. “I felt weird out. It was one of those things where, ‘I’d better not throw another pitch. Something might happen.’”
Myers might return to Philadelphia for further examination, the Phillies said.
The Phillies got their revenge in the 10th.
Jimmy Rollins led off the with a single, advanced on Rowand’s bloop single and took third when center fielder Alfredo Amezaga misplayed the ball for Florida’s third error.
Nunez’s single off Kevin Gregg (0-2) scored the unearned run. He finished 2-for-3 with three walks and three runs scored.
Clay Condrey (2-0) replaced Myers. With the bases loaded, Todd Linden lined to Condrey, sending the game into extra innings.
Condrey pitched a scoreless 10th, and the Phillies climbed to .500 for the fourth time in the past week. They haven’t been above .500 all season.
Because they won, the Phils were sheepish rather than distraught.
“It feels like a win,” Manuel said. “I don’t know how, but we got it.”

Mets 3, Braves 0
At Atlanta, Oliver Perez pitched seven strong innings and David Wright hit his fourth homer in the last four games for New York, which increased its lead over Atlanta in the NL East to 2 1/2 games.

Nationals 12, Reds 7
At Cincinnati, Ryan Church returned to Washington’s lineup with a pair of homers and a career-high six RBIs, keeping the Nationals on their offensive tear.
The Nationals hit a season-high four homers during their biggest run splurge in more than a year. Brian Schneider and Ryan Zimmerman also homered.

Cardinals 5, Pirates 3
At St. Louis, Kip Wells ended a seven-game losing streak with seven strong innings and was backed by home runs by David Eckstein, Jim Edmonds and Chris Duncan.
All of the homers came off Ian Snell (4-3), who had allowed only two in 58 2-3 innings all season.

Rockies 2, Diamondbacks 0
At Phoenix, Colorado’s Jeff Francis allowed five singles in seven innings to improve to 7-1 lifetime against Arizona.
Francis (3-4) allowed only two runners to reach second base. He walked two and struck out four. Brian Fuentes got three outs for his 13th save in 14 chances.

Padres 2, Cubs 1
At San Diego, Kevin Kouzmanoff hit a two-run homer and David Wells allowed one run in seven innings.
Kouzmanoff homered off Sean Marshall (0-1) to put San Diego ahead 2-1 in the seventh inning. It was his second homer in two games.

Giants 9, Astros 1
At San Francisco, Bengie Molina had four RBIs and the Giants completed a three-game sweep of Houston.
Molina had two hits including his fourth career triple, and Ray Durham added two RBIs for the Giants, winners of four straight. Barry Zito (4-5) allowed one run and four hits in seven innings.
Barry Bonds had the night off.

TITLE: Hamilton Looks for Sparkling Drive
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MONACO — Formula One leader Lewis Hamilton had a taste of Monaco’s millionaire lifestyle on Wednesday when he was handed a diamond-studded helmet to wear in Sunday’s showcase grand prix.
“I’m blinged out. I got bling on my helmet, how cool is that,” enthused the 22-year-old rookie at a presentation organised by diamond company and McLaren team sponsor Steinmetz on one of the larger floating palaces moored in the Mediterranean principality’s exclusive harbour.
Hamilton and double world champion team mate Fernando Alonso will wear helmets with ‘Monaco 07’ written in white diamonds on the side.
The helmets will then be auctioned for charities chosen by the drivers.
Both drivers flanked a model wearing the ‘Ponahalo’, a necklace made up of at least $50 million (25 million pounds) worth of stones cut from one 316 carat rough diamond — the largest to come out of the De Beers Venetia mine in South Africa.
The necklace, paraded under the watchful gaze of security guards, will be shown to some of the world’s wealthiest individuals over the grand prix weekend before being sold to the highest bidder — assuming the unspecified reserve price is reached.
Both McLaren drivers were also given $10,000 rings, each one with a tyre tread motif in diamonds, to keep.
Hamilton, the youngest leader in the history of the championship with a two point advantage over Alonso after four races, could become the first rookie to win the most glamorous race of all.
However he said he felt at home in his extraordinary surroundings.
“I’m fit, probably fitter than I’ve been all season, and more relaxed than I’ve been all season,” he told reporters.
“This is the best race of the season, and already the atmosphere is building up. I can really feel it. I’m just so excited to be here, standing on the back of the biggest boat I think I’ve ever seen,” added Formula One’s first black driver.
“But then, driving the streets of Monaco is any driver’s dream.”
Hamilton has finished all four of his races so far on the podium, the first rookie to achieve that feat, and has been runner-up in his last three grands prix.
Brimming with confidence, he saw no reason why the run of success might not continue.
“We just need to remain consistent. We’ve only had four races, and it’s already been an amazing journey just to get here,” he said.
“I just need to keep on enjoying it, making sure I keep my feet on the ground. With this sort of weekend it’s easy to just start floating — well we are floating at the moment — because it’s an amazing experience.
“I am really, really enjoying it.”