SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1282 (48), Friday, June 22, 2007
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TITLE: Expert On Hate Crime Violently Attacked
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One of Russia’s leading experts on racial issues and hate crimes was violently attacked on Tuesday in what her colleagues and human rights advocates see as an attempt to force the expert to change her testimony in a high-profile legal case. 
Valentina Uzuniva, was attacked by a female assailant, wearing a mask and was dressed in camouflage, who hit Uzunova several times on the head and took a dossier on a court case Uzunova has been working on dealing with charges of extremism. The assailant also took Uzunova’s earrings.
Uzunova, 59, who received treatment in the Alexandrovskaya Hospital, sustained a concussion and hematomas on her head. Her condition was described as satisfactory on Thursday. The expert was attacked at about 6 p.m. on Tuesday outside 7 Ulitsa Podkovyrova, when she was on her way back from visiting the relatives of her former colleague, Nikolai Girenko, a prominent expert on ethnic issues, who was gunned down on exactly the same day in 2004.
Girenko was shot through the door of his apartment, when he went to answer the doorbell. His killers have not yet been identified.
Uzunova had received threats of violence before, her colleagues said. After a recent anonymous nighttime call, in which the caller threatened to execute the expert and her family if she did not help to clear a defendant now facing extremism charges in court, Uzunova appealed for police protection but without success. The request was turned down as the police claimed there was lack of evidence of a credible threat. 
The police established the location of a phone booth used to make the phone call but failed to establish the identity of the caller.
The case in question concerns a retired submariner Vladislav Nikolsky, who is facing charges of distributing extremist literature and forming a nationalist group. Uzunova had been give expert testimony in the court on Wednesday but the hearing was cancelled because of the attack. 
The assailant, who attacked Uzunova, took the materials on the Nikolsky case.
Uzunova’s colleagues and human rights advocates said they have no doubts that extremists were behind the attack.
Alexander Vinnikov, a senior official at the St. Petersburg Union of Scientists and regional coordinator of the nationwide non-governmental movement “For Russia Without Racism,” said the Nikolsky case was coming to an end.
“Uzunova had enough evidence in her hands for the judge to convict Nikolsky during the next hearing,” Vinnikov.
Yuly Rybakov, a prominent human rights advocate with the St. Petersburg rights group Memorial, is convinced an organized extremist group was behind the attack.
“She definitely had been followed, and in all likelihood, her phone had been bugged; the assailants had to know about her plans and visits in great detail to be able to get to her when she would be carrying the case materials, when she would be in a deserted quite place and when she would be on her own,” Rybakov said. “It requires timely and careful preparation with a certain number of people involved.”
Rybakov accused law enforcement agencies of a biased and negative attitude towards anti-fascist campaigners. 
“I am not surprised Uzunova did not get protection after that dangerous threat,” he said and brought his own first-hand experience in to strengthen his point. 
Several years ago, when Rybakov was a deputy in the State Duma, he learnt that two extremist groups had been planning to assassinate him. 
The lawmaker contacted the police and, providing all evidence available to him, asked for police protection, or at the very least, for his phone  calls to be monitored and recorded. His request was turned down. 
“I then went public about the threats, and made a speech at the Duma about it to protect myself,” Rybakov said. 
“In most cases, the prosecutors openly show their contempt to anti-fascists and democrats, sometimes with outright insults.”
His worries are shared by many of his counterparts. Human rights lawyer Olga Tseitlina, who represents the Kacharava family in the case of student anti-fascist campaigner Timur Kacharava, who was stabbed to death in 2005, is bewildered by what she calls “the attemps to present anti-fascists as a radical youth group of extremist character.”
“The defendants’ lawyers [in the Kacharava case] almost make it sound as if Timur got what was coming to him and the judge and prosecutors just turn a blind eye,” Tseitlina said.
Kacharava was stabbed to death outside the Bookvoyed book shop near the Oktyabrskaya Hotel early on a November evening in 2005 by assailants described as “skinheads.” 
The student’s activism also included delivering food aid to the homeless.  
Natalya Yevdokimova, an advisor to Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the Council of Federation, urged the authorities to commission an in-depth analysis and assessment of the scope of extremism and nationalism in the city and for the results to be widely publicized.
“It does not help that only human rights groups are aware of the issues; ordinary people do not get the picture at all,” she said. “The circumstances of and around these crimes — which are often classified as robberies, hooliganism or homicide [without a hate motive] — remain obscure to them.”
See related story: http://www.sptimes.ru/story/22068.

TITLE: Deputy PM Offers Airlines Some Relief
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A drive to scrap hefty import duties on foreign aircraft gained a powerful supporter Wednesday as First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said it was “normal and natural” to lift duties on those types of planes that are not made in Russia.
Ivanov’s comments, during a visit to an aircraft maker in Voronezh, came after Russian carriers signed a flurry of deals to buy Western planes at this week’s Paris Air Show.
Russia could lift the 20 percent import duty for types of airplanes that it does not produce, such as several models made by Boeing and Airbus, Ivanov said. “We consider it normal and natural to lift duties,” he said during a visit to planemaker VASO. “We are not going to close Russia to international cooperation.”
Ivanov did not name the foreign models he had in mind, but said Russia would be unable to produce similar jets in the near future. Ivanov was last year appointed chairman of the United Aircraft Corporation, a state-run holding company created to boost the industry’s performance.
The country’s leading airlines have long called for the import duties to be scrapped. Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref has also backed scrapping import duties on certain types of planes.
A decision to cancel import duties, if the government makes it, could apply to some of the recent agreements to buy aircraft from Airbus and Boeing. Carriers are shopping around for new planes to meet soaring demand in the Russian travel market.
Airbus won several fresh contracts from Russian carriers at the Paris Air Show. On Wednesday, it signed a deal to sell to Aeroflot 22 revamped A350 wide-bodied aircraft worth $3.2 billion at list prices, which confirmed a March purchase commitment.
Earlier this week, Airbus also won orders from Aeroflot for five A321 planes and from S7 for 25 single-aisle medium-haul A320s. Earlier this month, Aeroflot and S7 agreed to buy 37 of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliners cumulatively, with deliveries due to start in 2014.
As well as opening up to foreign planes, Russia must build more of its own aircraft, Ivanov said. It should work to become the world’s third-largest planemaker after Airbus and Boeing by 2025, with a goal to reach 12 percent of global sales, instead of the current 1 percent, he said.
In Voronezh, Ivanov oversaw the signing of $846 million worth of contracts by Ilyushin Finance Company to supply Russian cargo planes, such as the Ilyushin 96-400 and the Tupolev 204C, to four domestic carriers.
Airlines that have long lobbied for the lifting of import duties on foreign-made planes welcomed Ivanov’s words of support. S7 spokesman Ilya Novokhatsky said it was a strong sign that the government would go ahead with the idea.
If that happens, Russian carriers would only have to pay a value added tax of 18 percent — also payable now — on certain imported airplanes, which would put them in an equal position with foreign airlines, he said.
Aeroflot, a longtime advocate of such a measure, hoped that the government would implement Ivanov’s vision for aircraft imports, company spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said Wednesday.
Ilyushin Finance Company, which specializes in the leasing of Russian aircraft, saw the potential lifting of import duties as no threat to Russian producers. They can only make a limited number of the Il-96-400, a wide-bodied long-range plane, and that leaves room for Western competitors, Ilyushin Finance CEO Alexander Rubtsov said by telephone.
In Voronezh, Ivanov said that the Il-96-400 was less economical than its Western counterparts.
It is most likely that the government could lift import duties on long-range Boeing 787s and Airbus 350s as well as medium-range Airbus 320s, said Maxim Isayev, an analyst at Rye, Man & Gor Securities.
Given a lack of competitively priced planes of this class in Russia, a cancellation of import duties would foster greater imports of these aircraft and would not negatively impact the country’s aircraft industry, Isayev said.
“Its only positive that the first deputy prime minister stated this straightforwardly,” Isayev said.
The country’s air travel market is expanding by 10 percent annually, Novokhatsky of S7 said.

TITLE: NGO Head Victim of ‘Stupid Oversight’
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — On Jan. 21, Manana Aslamazian walked through customs at Sheremetyevo Airport with a little more undeclared cash than is allowed.
Five months later, she faces a decade or more in prison, and the nongovernmental organization she heads — the Educated Media Foundation — is in tatters.
Little wonder that Aslamazian is on extended vacation in Paris.
“I am going to work in America, Asia, Africa and Europe, pay my taxes in Russia, and wait until the court finally figures out why my personal mistake, for which I am ready to accept a fair and appropriate penalty, became the excuse for suspending the work of a large organization that brought a lot of benefit to the country,” the Armenian-born Russian said in a statement.
The Educated Media Foundation is a U.S.-funded NGO that trains journalists, including those from state-connected media such as NTV television.
Aslamazian could not be reached Wednesday, but her lawyer Viktor Parshutkin said she would not be back in Russia until authorities dropped the charges, which he in turn called “absolute rubbish,” “a joke,” and “politically motivated.”
Aslamazian has acknowledged her guilt from day one, calling her airport transgression a “stupid oversight.”
After stepping off a flight from Paris, she failed to declare the 9,550 euros — which she said were a debt collected from a friend in France — in her bag. Any amount worth more than $10,000 must be declared.
In Aslamazian’s case, that was around $2,400 too much. Aslamazian’s money and documents were confiscated at the airport.
Three months later, about 20 officers from the Interior Ministry’s economic crime department arrived at the NGO’s offices in central Moscow with orders to search the premises and seize all documents and computers.
Aslamazian said at the time that the officers had told her the search was linked to a criminal investigation into the Sheremetyevo incident. No further explanation was given, she said.
Then last month, tax authorities froze the NGO’s bank accounts, citing incorrectly filed tax reports. Again, Aslamazian rejected the charges as a coordinated effort to shut the group down.
Moscow’s Golovinsky District Court is expected to rule Thursday on the legality of the raid. During a hearing Wednesday, lawyer Parshutkin learned for the first time that his client had been officially charged with smuggling, which carries a maximum five-year sentence.
Interior Ministry investigative committee official Natalya Vinogradova, who was acting as a prosecutor in court, said Aslamazian was charged on June 15, Parshutkin said.
“We have never received a piece of paper with any charges,” Parshutkin said.
He said he met Vinogradova on June 13 and she had asked to arrange a meeting with Aslamazian. Partushkin said that was not possible.
Vinogradova could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.
Aslamazian could be hit with even more charges. Vinogradova told the court Wednesday that she had found evidence of illegal business activity and money laundering after inspecting computers and documents seized from the NGO’s office in April, Parshutkin said.
“Vinogradova said she sent the material to the Prosecutor General’s Office for further examination. It’s absolute rubbish,” he said.
Convictions in all three charges could result in a prison sentence of more than 10 years.
Court officials could not be reached for comment late Wednesday. But Igor Tsokolov, head of the investigative committee of the ministry’s organized crime department, told Kommersant in comments published Wednesday that authorities were ready to charge Aslamazian with a “gross violation” of the Criminal Code.
Aslamazian, Parshutkin and more than 2,000 media professionals recently signed an open letter to President Vladimir Putin that complains authorities view the foundation as a threat to Kremlin-friendly reportage.
Parshutkin said Wednesday that authorities knew full well the April raid was illegal. “Because of that, no court wants to deal with this case,” he said. “Everyone is passing the buck.”
The Golovinsky District Court handed the case to the Savyolovsky District Court because it was closer to the foundation’s offices and therefore within its jurisdiction. After a delay to the case in May, it was inexplicably sent back to the Golovinsky District Court.
A spokesman at the Prosecutor General’s Office, which is to examine the computers and documents for evidence of money laundering and illegal business activity, referred all questions to the Interior Ministry.
Pavel Klimovsky, a ministry spokesman, first said he knew nothing of the case and later declined immediate comment.

TITLE: Parties Retain Street Adverts
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Wednesday it would submit an amendment to the State Duma that would allow political parties to use billboards for campaign ads.
The service recently notified the Central Election Commission that it believes any political information on billboards violates the federal law on advertising and that the commission therefore should ban parties from using billboards.
The current law allows billboards to carry information on products and services that can be bought and sold, whereas political ads do not fit these criteria, the service said in a statement posted on its web site.
The statement said the amendment had been drafted and sent to the Kremlin, government and Central Election Commission for review.
It was unclear whether the Duma would consider and pass the bill in time for the upcoming campaign for the Duma elections in December.

TITLE: Race Murderers Get  39 Years After Retrial
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A 20-month jury trial rocked by judicial flaws that initially led to acquittals, prompting public condemnation and a retrial, ended Tuesday with the St. Petersburg City Court sentencing four white supremacists a total of 39 years in jail for murder. 
The court sentenced Andrei Gerasimov to 14 years in a high security prison for masterminding and taking part in the killing of 29-year-old Congolese student Roland Epassak in September 2005. Viktor Orlov, the youngest culprit in the group aged between 19 and 26, was sentenced to 7 years in jail, while Andrei Olenov and Yury Gromov will each serve a 9-year term.
The group’s defense lawyers said they will file an appeal against the verdict with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if an appeal lodged in the Russian Supreme Court is rejected.
After sentencing was passed a small picket of discontented nationalists, and friends and relatives of the convicted men gathered outside the court building on the Moika embankment waving placards “Shame to Fascist Prosecutors!” and “It Could be You in Their Place!”
The 20-strong crowd was led by Yury Belyayev, leader of the extreme nationalist Freedom Party which was outlawed in 2004, who is currently serving an 18-month suspended sentence for promoting hate.
“They [nationalists] have been dealt with a serious blow today,” said Ruslan Linkov, head of the Democratic Russia human rights movement. 
“But in the meantime anything should be expected of the wounded wild animals they are.” 
Linkov reminded people of non-Slavic appearance and their Russian sympathizers to the watchful of nationalist reaction to the case.
Tuesday’s sentencing followed  a guilty verdict issued last Thursday by a panel of a dozen jurors who voted 10/2, a week after the prosecution and the defense had delivered final statements.
It was the end of a retrial that had been ongoing since February, following the original trial in July in which the suspects were acquitted by a jury that was branded “inefficient” by human rights advocates and high profile politicians.  
“I took the case under my own patronage, followed it closely and the prosecutors did an excellent job proving guilt beyond any doubt; yet a bunch of inefficient, semi-literate jurors let the criminals go!” Governor, Valentina Matviyenko said in response to the public outcry against the acquittal last year.
The Supreme Court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial.
“Such verdicts are counter-productive in relation to the war on xenophobia and extremism,” said Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, condemning courts acquittals in all three jury trials for hate murders in St. Petersburg last year.
Gryzlov was referring to the trial of suspects in the murder of 9-year-old Tajik girl Khursheda Sultanova in February 2004 under the charge of “hooliganism” which resulted in suspended sentences for those accused of the slaying.
A day after that killing, Neo-Nazis stabbed 9-year-old African-Russian girl Lillian Sisoko in the throat on the doorstep of her apartment building in downtown St. Petersburg. 
Gryzlov was also referring to the dropping of hate crime charges against the killers of Vietnamese student Vu An-Tuan in October 2004 resulting in a conviction on lesser charges and light sentences. 
The retrial in the Epassak case had a new jury and also heard fresh evidence and new witnesses.
They included witness testimonies by two of Epassak’s compatriots who were with him minutes before the assault and the Russian girlfriend he was going to meet when he was attacked in the courtyard of a building on 8 Prospekt Nauki. The evidence also included video footage of the attack from a closed circuit camera on a nearby building.
The retrial was not without its hitches, however. The new jury had one of its members disqualified for allegedly having a criminal record.
Epassak’s murder was the first in what would become a wave of violent hate crimes to hit St. Petersburg in which nine people were killed and several others hospitalized within the space of a year. Although most of the victims were members of the African community, the city’s smallest minority group, others in the spree included a Russian anti-fascist activist Timur Kachareva, a student at the St. Petersburg State University, Indian medical student Nitesh Kumar Singh and two women from the Caucuses and Central Asia.

TITLE: Zyuganov Ready to Fight for Kremlin
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Wednesday he was ready to run for president next year and castigated opposition coalition The Other Russia as a Western stooge.
At a news conference, Zyuganov described himself as “one of the five or six most experienced politicians in Russia” and said that such a leader “must be ready to fight for the presidency.” Although the party will officially nominate its candidate at its congress later this year, Communist Party deputy head Ivan Melnikov called Zyuganov’s nomination a foregone conclusion.
Zyuganov did not run in the 2004 presidential election, in which his party was represented by State Duma Deputy Nikolai Kharitonov. Kharitonov finished second to President Vladimir Putin in the election, capturing 13.69 percent of the vote. Putin won with 71.31 percent.
Five other people have declared their intention to run in the March election. The movement led by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov nominated him as its candidate at a conference earlier this month. Former Central Bank chief Viktor Gerashchenko has said he also would run, as have Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky last week said he would run., dealing another blow to hopes of the country’s increasingly marginalized opposition agreeing on a common candidate.

TITLE: Probe Into Deaths of 15 Ends
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors have wrapped up the investigation into the murder of 15 women whose bodies were discovered in a mass grave in the Urals in February, prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Eight men have been charged with the rape and murder of the victims, aged 13 to 26, most of whom were forced to work as prostitutes. Defense lawyers are now studying the case materials in preparation for trial, Interfax reported.
Prosecutors did not specify when the trial might begin.
The mass grave was found outside the town of Levikha, situated between the cities of Nizhny Tagil and Yekaterinburg in February. 
The victims disappeared from 2002 to 2005. Those identified include a 15-year-old girl and her 13-year-old friend, both of whom disappeared in July 2005.
The two girls were lured to an apartment, raped and told they would have to work as prostitutes, prosecutors said.

TITLE: Hitching with Logistical Licence
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sterkh Corporation has opened the largest logistics complex in the Northwest. Occupying 60 hectares territory at the junction of thef Vyborgskoye Schosse, Gorskoye Schosse and the ring-road, Logopark complex will handle up to 8,000 units of transport vehicles a month, the managing company said Tuesday in a statement.
The multifunctional complex will offer the whole range of services for cargo storage and customs registration — St. Petersburg Customs Department and Central Excise Customs Department are based on its territory as are warehouses for temporary storage and cargo handling, office and parking areas.
“The development of the logistics business in Russia demands that a wider range of services is offered to clients. And all the services should be offered in one place. Obviously, large logistics complexes will beat the competition, and Logopark is the first complex of that kind in the Northwest,” said Vladimir Pyatakov, general director of Sterkh Corporation.
“Such complexes will provide transparency in terms of the customs registration process, it will simplify control over flows of cargo for state bodies, free the city roads from large trucks, improve the environment and reduce crime in the customs business,” Pyatakov said.
The new complex is expected to act as a substitute for the inefficient customs departments located throughout the city meaning trucks would not have to travel through residential districts.
Igor Vlasenko, head of the Northwest Customs Department, confirmed that the Federal Customs Service plans to close customs departments inside the city and introduce several large logistics complexes on the outskirts, which is stipulated in the regional development program.
“The city is literally suffocating from the high number of large lorries. And St. Petersburg is developing and continues to attract investors which means the more and more cargo to be transported. Customs departments should operate more efficiently. And the new logistics complex should help,” said Leonid Bogdanov, chairman of the City Hall Committee for Legislation, Law Enforcement and Security.
Logopark is equipped with a modern security system. Sterkh expects that monthly customs payments will account for 3.5 billion rubles ($134.6 million). The complex is conveniently located for cargo transported between Finland and Northern Europe and Russia.
Sterkh Corporation has currently invested about $30 million into the complex. By 2010 the company plans to have invested $200 million to $400 million into the development.
The complex is owned by Osinovaya Roscha Ltd. and has been leased for 10 years (till 2012) to the Korcord company, a subsidiary of Sterkh Corporation. Sterkh Corporation unifies a number of logistics and brokerage companies offering customs services in the Northwest region. Last year its subsidiaries processed cargo of $461.5 million.
Local real estate experts repeatedly decry the deficit of logistics areas in St. Petersburg. 
“We estimate the total volume of high quality logistics areas in St. Petersburg to total about 350,000 square meters. That’s really not enough considering the growing interest logistics operators are showing in the city and the increasing volumes of cargo,” said Kirill Malyshev, head of logistics at Colliers International. 
In a further development this week, AKM Logistics, a subsidiary of Venture Investments & Yield Management LLP, announced the construction of an A-class logistics complex in St. Petersburg on Moskovskoye Schosse. The 32.8-hectare complex will offer 165,000 square meters of warehousing. Total investment is expected at $150 million. The first part of the complex is expected to open by August 2008.

TITLE: EnergoProekt Frames Its Metal Advantage
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local company EnergoProekt has opened a plant for the production of metal frames used in construction. As well as using the frames in its own projects, the company wants to meet growing demand from retail and logistics companies and power enterprises.
EnergoProekt specializes in power networks. The company was founded in 2004 bringing together former employees of local projection institutes Leningrad Bureau of Complex Projection, Sevzapenergosetproekt and Zapadselenergoproekt.
“We have been planning to create a subsidiary, that will supply metal frames, projection and assemblage works in the Northwest region, for a long time,” Vladimit Bulavchik, general director of EnergoProekt, said at a press conference Tuesday.
Managers investigated the production and construction techniques used in Western Europe and the United States. 
The project took about a year and a half and over three billion euros ($4.05 billion) in investment. The new plant, which was built in Pushkin, Leningrad Oblast, will be managed by a separate company — EnergoProekt Stalkonsruktsia.
The company expects turnover to reach one billion rubles ($38.5 million) by the end of 2007. By the end of the year production would also increase from the current level of 500,000 tons a month to 800,000 tons.
“We know our competitors, their volumes of production and future plans. Considering the pace of market growth over the last two to three years we think we could easily produce 500,000 tons a month and even more,” Bulavchik said.
A number of St. Petersburg companies make metal frames. Major producers include Pulkovo industrial and construction company, Rybatskoye and UIMP-Engineering.
Igor Vasilenko, general director of EnergoProekt Stalkonsruktsia, estimated the market to grow 70 percent a year.
“The companies currently operating in this market are not satisfying the demand for metal frames,” Bulavchik said. Among the advantages of the metal frame, Bulavchik listed its reliability, convenience and the short time needed for its assembly, as well as its cheapness relative to brick. He claimed that all work — from projection to assembling the building — takes six months.
“We cannot build in the city center because of the strict building regulations there. In the new districts, however, metal frames are widely used,” Bulavchik said.
The company relies on demand from construction companies, retailers like IKEA and Lenta, logistics companies, industrial and power enterprises, oil and gas companies. 
“The power and construction industries are in the middle of an investment boom,” Vasilenko said.
The company already serves Lenenergo and TGK-1. By the end of 2007 the company will have orders for 78 power substations. At the moment managers are negotiating with Nissan and General Motors to supply the metal frames for their new car assembly plants that are to be constructed in St. Petersburg, Vasilenko said.
Bulavchik said that about 25 percent of orders come from power companies and about 75 percent from construction companies and other private enterprises.
A local retail company confirmed that the interest in metal frame technology is very high.
“Maksidom uses metal frames for the construction of its new stores because it speeds up the construction process,” said Sergei Golikov, general director of Maxidom retail chain.
“If all other factors are pretty equal, then the time required for construction becomes a crucial factor when we choose a projection and construction company,” Golikov said.
However the price and quality are also important, he added.
Construction of Maxidom stores usually takes about a year, but the latest store on Vyborgskoye Schosse was built in just over nine months.

TITLE: EOS Seeks $800 Million in Share Sales
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — EOS Russia, a Swedish investment company, wants to raise $800 million in share sales by offering a one-stop-shop equity option for the Russian power industry to replace Unified Energy System, which is being dismantled.
Unified, the Moscow-based national utility, is being broken up into at least 24 power-generation and grid companies before July next year to spur competition. Investors will receive a stake in each unit according to their holding in the utility.
“For many investors, getting shares in more than two dozen power companies instead of one will be a nightmare in terms of compliance and there won’t be the same liquidity,’’ EOS Director Sven Thorngren said Wednesday by telephone from Tallinn, Estonia.
EOS, registered in the Cayman Islands, became the first equity firm to offer access to the Russian power market via its $250 million worth of shares in Unified and its subsidiaries. The company raised $94 million in an initial public offering last week on the First North stock market in Sweden, after selling $23 million in stock to a Canadian investor and $186 million in a May asset swap. Investors including Robur AB and DWS Investment GmbH agreed to swap their Russian power stocks for EOS shares before the Swedish company sold 6 million new shares in the IPO at 4 percent higher than the company’s net asset value. EOS has a mandate from shareholders to sell 31 million more new shares that could raise $500 million at the IPO price, Thorngren said.
Investors including Eric Kraus, who manages the Nikitsky Russia Fund in Moscow, said a well-priced one-stop-shop option could be attractive for cutting through the analytics needed to track what is the world’s biggest utility by installed capacity.
“With Unified’s disappearance, it will be harder to buy into the sector,’’ Kraus said by phone from Moscow. “There’s an entire zoo of generators out there and pouring through reams and reams of their data would be confusing and disorientating.’’
The utility’s shares trade at about a 20 percent discount to the sum value of its units because of concerns about the complexity of the government-led industry overhaul, said Alexander Kotikov, an analyst with Troika Dialog.
“Plus, there’ll most likely be a period of illiquidity while some of the new companies spun off during the breakup of Unified are allowed to be traded by the market regulators,’’ Kotikov said. “The two-month or so pause in trading is an issue for some investors.’’
The split-up of Unified assets will also probably bring more clarity to the power industry, eliminating the trading discount, Kotikov and Standard & Poor’s analyst Eugine Korovin said.
Russia’s power industry will become more transparent and predictable in terms of earnings after the state installs a new system to regulate power-supply contracts during the fall, Korovin said in a report June 19. The system will “make it easier to pass full costs to end-users,’’ Korovin said.

TITLE: Putin Merges Shippers Into $5-Billion Giant
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree merging the country’s top energy shippers in a move to create a $5 billion national shipping giant and help develop the country’s huge offshore oil and gas projects.
“You know that I have signed a decree forming a new company on the basis of the two existing ones — Sovcomflot and Novoship,” Putin told Sovcomflot’s chief, Sergei Frank, RIA-Novosti reported.
Russia has been seeking to merge Sovcomflot and Novoship for several years, in line with the Kremlin’s strategy of enhancing control over the strategic energy sector by creating mighty state giants. 
“In the context of consolidation of the two companies a tanker company is being created that will be certainly ranked among the world’s five top tanker firms,” Frank told Putin.
Frank, a former transportation minister, said the united company would have total assets of close to $5 billion. He said that the company might go public in the future but did not give other details.
State-owned Sovcomflot has a fleet operating 52 vessels with a total deadweight capacity of 4.16 million metric tons.
Novoship, or Novorossiisk Shipping, in which Russia has a majority stake, has 60 vessels with a total deadweight capacity of around 3.7 million tons.
Sovcomflot already serves the ExxonMobil-led Sakhalin-1 offshore oil project and operates Rosneft’s Belokamenka floating storage facility near Murmansk.
In January, Rosneft and Sovcomflot set up a joint venture to serve Rosneft’s offshore projects.

TITLE: Kimmitt Urges More Investment into U.S.
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — U.S. Treasury Deputy Secretary Robert Kimmitt invited Russians to invest in the U.S. and urged the Russian government to help American companies invest in Russia.
“There was tremendous growth’’ in foreign direct investment to the U.S., which reached $169 billion last year, the highest level since 2000, Kimmitt told the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow Thursday. “FDI creates jobs. It’s an important lubricant for the global economy, but it creates jobs at home.’’
Kimmitt arrived in Russia yesterday for talks with government officials on investing Russia’s oil windfall in U.S. securities, clarifying rules for foreign investment in Russian strategic sectors and inviting the world’s 10th biggest economy to invest in the U.S.
Approximately 4 percent of America’s workforce, or 5.1 million people, work for companies with headquarters overseas, Kimmitt said. Those jobs are important for the U.S. economy because they produce 10 percent of all capital investment, 15 percent of annual research and development investment and 20 percent of the country’s exports, he said.
“We are open to investment,’’ Kimmitt said. “We’re going to work hard to keep investment barriers low and we hope that the same will be the case in Russia and other trading partners of the United States.’’
Of 1,430 cross-border transactions in 2006, 92 percent didn’t raise any security concerns, which means only 113 were reviewed by a government committee, according to Kimmit. There are “statutory prohibitions’’ on majority foreign ownership of airlines, media, nuclear enrichment and some transportation companies in the U.S.
The “vast majority’’ of cross-border deals will also be approved after the U.S. adopts new legislation on foreign investment, he said, adding it will probably be adopted ``by the end of the summer.’’
Russia’s government is also drafting a bill to clarify rules for foreign investment in the nation’s strategic industries and will submit it for parliamentary vote in the “near future,’’
Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Naryshkin said on June 18. The bill includes aviation, space and military equipment among the 39 industries, defined as strategic.
A government commission chaired by the prime minister will be set up to allow or reject foreign bids for majority stakes in Russian companies in strategic industries, according to the bill.
The commission would have to make a ruling on the bid in three months and no later than six months for special cases,according to Naryshkin.

TITLE: Russian Standard Vodka Sees Sales Growth of Up to 60%
AUTHOR: By Maria Ermakova and Ellen Pinchuk
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian Standard Vodka, the distilling arm of Russian Standard Corp., forecast growth in sales of as much as 60 percent this year as more drinkers purchase its spirits.
Revenue will rise at least 50 percent from about $250 million in 2006, billionaire owner Roustam Tariko said Thursday in an interview. The Moscow-based company’s domestic sales climbed 30 percent last year, and foreign revenue jumped between 50 percent and 60 percent, he said.
“Growth in premium and super-premium brands will continue in Russia,’’ said Tariko, 45. “It’s not about volume, but about quality’’ of grain and vodkas made from it.
The distiller began selling its vodka in the U.S. last year to expand from Russia, where it controls more than two-thirds of the premium vodka market. Spirits makers based in Russia, the world’s biggest vodka producer, face intensified competition from foreign rivals Diageo Plc, owner of the Smirnoff brand, and Pernod Ricard SA, the distributor of Stolichnaya vodka.
The U.S. vodka market will expand by 22 percent to about $14.6 billion in 2011 from $12 billion last year, according to market researcher Euromonitor International.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Kazkakh Loan</b>
LONDON (Bloomberg) — Kazkommertsbank, Kazakhstan’s biggest bank by assets, is getting a $300 million syndicated loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and two other banks.
The Almaty, Kazakhstan-based bank will use the loan to finance retail mortgages and loans to companies outside the construction, oil and gas industries, the EBRD said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
Kazkommertsbank is borrowing $100 million from the EBRD for seven years and $200 million from Calyon and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation Europe Ltd. for five years, the London-based EBRD said.

<b>Aberdeen Property </b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Aberdeen Property Investors, a fund of U.K.-based Aberdeen Asset Management Plc, plans to invest as much as $1 billion in Russia, Vedomosti said Thursday.
Aberdeen plans to invest in Moscow and St. Petersburg real estate, as well as in the regions, the newspaper said, citing Vladimir Adveyev, a partner of S.A. Ricci/King Sturge, which is advising Aberdeen. 
The fund will initially buy existing warehouses, and office and commercial space, Vedomosti said. 
Aberdeen plans in October to open a St. Petersburg office, which will be headed by Ole Dall-Hansen, Vedomosti said.

TITLE: Protection, Central Asian Style
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Shlapentokh
TEXT: Recent deals between President Vladimir Putin and the heads of Central Asian states have secured Russia a role in the delivery of some, if not all, natural gas from these former Soviet republics to Europe. But Putin’s success here in outmaneuvering the United States was not a simple result of Moscow pressure or of vague “Eurasianist” ties that some Russian pundits claim have underpinned a Slavic-Turkic symbiosis since the Mongol conquest. The main factor was much simpler. The Central Asian leaders weren’t just looking for ways to fill their coffers, but also for some security in the event of problems like the uprising in Andijan, Uzbekistan, in 2005 or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. In short, they were looking for a “krysha” — literally “roof,” but a form of protection in Russian slang.
In the search for a krysha, the Central Asian rulers had two options.
The first was the United States, which still has military bases in the region. But a close look at the U.S. performance in Iraq and Afghanistan was unlikely to give them the impression that the U.S. military machine offered much in the way of protection.
The possibility of a U.S. defeat in Iraq and of a retreat on a broader geopolitical front cannot be understood without examining the “Rumsfeld doctrine” and its ultimate collapse. The end of the Cold War was seen by most Americans not as a windfall put in motion by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and accomplished by President Boris Yeltsin, but as legitimate confirmation of the efficacy of U.S. policy, including its military doctrine. The doctrine, named after former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, assumed that U.S. technological preponderance would form the basis for victories ahead. Future wars would involve conflicts between machines and computers more than traditional, human soldiers.
The doctrine seemed to work well enough — even before it was formulated — in the 1999 bombardment of the former Yugoslavia. The United States was the first country in the post-Cold War era to engage in a “preventive” war. U.S. President George W. Bush, therefore, is less the spiritual descendent of President Ronald Reagan, as was claimed, than of President Bill Clinton. So the strategy was the logical outcome of the general geopolitical designs of U.S. leaders (both Democratic and Republican) and should not be attributed just to Bush. Things went well: The Serbs capitulated quickly after a few bombing raids, and NATO losses were minimal. The application of the same strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq has not worked.
At the beginning, things seemed to be going marvelously well. The Taliban forces in Afghanistan disintegrated in a few days, and Saddam Hussein’s plan to transform Baghdad into a new Stalingrad went nowhere. Bush cheerfully made his “Mission accomplished” speech and the neoconservatives were dreaming of a blitz to Damascus and Tehran. But things soon went awry. The multiethnic and multidenominational residents of Iraq, and of Afghanistan in particular, found it easier to survive amid the destruction wreaked on their cities than had the residents of Belgrade. For quite a few Afghans, the expression “bombed back to the Stone Age” is meaningless, as the Stone Age has not been put that far in the past there.
Both countries were also more resistant in another respect. They have been the scenes of horrific violence for generations, so killing and death have become almost common. Only the brutal rule of Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan provided some modicum of stability and order, regardless of the cost. As soon as they were removed, chaos followed. The Iraqis became engaged in a brutal guerilla civil war and terrorist attacks against the Americans and each other.
The entire American military strategy crumbled: In dealing with guerrillas and terrorists, sophisticated weapons and computers are about as useless as they are in fighting crime in “bad neighborhoods” in big U.S. cities. Russia might have something to offer here. The Russian armed forces, according to some analysts, are in better shape today than five or 10 years ago. It is not military modernization but its widely criticized pre-modern character that makes it a better krysha than U.S. forces.
The problem is that U.S. soldiers are few in number and favor working from their bases and venturing outside them only in armored vehicles. It is a different case with the Russian army, which is still, like in Soviet times, based on conscription and can provide the commander-in-chief with as much cannon fodder as he needs. Soldiers patrol the countryside on foot, so their chances of engaging and defeating the enemy are much better than those of U.S. soldiers. They are also more likely to get killed, but this is not as big a problem when there are so many more who can be sent. Proof that this is the case has already been provided in Chechnya.
Prior to the American invasion of Iraq, the war in Chechnya was seen as a complete failure. Given the U.S. experience in Iraq, things look different. Whereas the United States is talking about pulling out after just four years, Russia has managed to sustain an almost 15-year conflict with much higher losses, and it continues to smolder. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov is a convenient thug, who, with his own cutthroat army, does at least part of the dirty work for the Russians. “Chechenization” has fared much better than “Vietnamization” or “Iraqization.”
And this is what the Central Asian rulers saw when they looked at the U.S. military machine. They realized that it shares the attributes of many other U.S. products. From automobiles to health service and education, U.S. goods carry a hefty price tag and are marketed well, but are often of dubious quality. Under the conditions, Russia’s wares looked more attractive.
Russia’s place as the chief patron in Central Asia will also come at a price: Like the United States, Russia is now likely to become the target of the Islamists.

Dmitry Shlapentokh is a professor of history at Indiana University.

TITLE: Enduring Corporate Structures
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The State Duma has passed a bill on first reading establishing a corporation devoted to nanotechnology. This state-owned entity will carry out commercial activities tax-free, and receive 180 billion rubles ($6.9 billion) in funding for research and development in this high-tech field.
Strangely, whole sections of the bill refer to a charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences that was never approved by scientists at the academy. The charter was adopted so that Mikhail Kovalchuk could be installed as commercial director of the institution. Kovalchuk currently heads the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s leading nuclear research facility. A few years ago, former presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin referred to Kovalchuk’s family as “Putin’s purse.”
This is just one of the state-run corporations intended to promote Russia’s development. First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov’s speech at last week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum made it clear for ministers that in Russia’s “sovereign democracy” the key is to promote similar pet projects of their own.
Now ministers are storming the Kremlin with proposals. The Finance Ministry has already presented a project for the “long-term social and economic development” of the country. Similarly the aviation industry is predicting that by 2020 it will realize a “breakthrough civil aircraft construction project in cooperation with leading foreign firms, while retaining Russia’s role as system integrator.”
Until now, economic analysis and science fiction were considered separate fields, but the Economic Development and Trade Ministry has managed to achieve a synthesis.
Now consider the facts. The Soviet-era research and development establishment was unable to keep up with scientific advances in the United States. Further, the Soviet Union collapsed due at least in part to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s embargo on the sale of certain advanced technologies.
One advantage of the Soviet research system was that although huge sums were often spent to no purpose, it was impossible to actually steal anything. With state-owned corporations operating in a free market economy, it is a different story. It is like setting up bottomless money pits with direct lines to private accounts in Geneva banks.
An economy based on corporations like these ends up a hybrid between socialism and capitalism. Taxpayers provide the capital, but the profits go to individuals. The best example of such an economic system was that under Turkmen autocrat Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi, or “Father of All Turkmen.” His state-owned collective farms handed over their entire cotton harvests to the government at no cost, but the firms that reaped the profits selling the cotton were private. When asked why he held government funds in private overseas accounts, Turkmenbashi answered: “to prevent government officials from stealing them.”
The Russian economy, which until recently was dominated by big business, is now controlled by individuals in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle whom he has placed at the head of state corporations. This is a drawback from an economic standpoint: A business owner is interested in developing the strategic potential of the enterprise, while an appointed chief’s main motivation is to remain plugged into the income stream. This makes it easier to control the company. If the company is privately owned, removing someone from the top requires legal action, while someone appointed to run things can simply be fired.
Corporations with charter capital provided by an autocrat’s decree and designed to channel profits to those close to the sovereign were not unusual in feudal economies, but they are rarely found in the market variety. Trying to succeed in modern fields like nanotechnology and civil aviation construction via these archaic throwbacks should prove an interesting experiment.

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

TITLE: War and remembrance
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass visited St. Petersburg last month to read from his latest book “Peeling the Onion” (2006) at the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.  
The book, which can be described as an auto-biographical novel, reveals that the 79-year old writer, for many decades an outspoken left-leaning critic of Germany’s treatment of its Nazi past, was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. Grass was accused of hypocrisy after admitting his membership for the first time in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 
In Der Speigel during the scandal that followed, conservative historian Joachim Fest said: “After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late. I can’t understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off.”
Grass, who found fame with his 1959 book “The Tin Drum,” was visiting St. Petersburg for the third time after trips in the 1970s and 1980s. However it is the first time Grass had given a public reading of his work in St. Petersburg.
Smoking a pipe and sipping red wine at a desk, Grass was informal in the stiffly academic environment of the Grand Hall of the Philological Faculty. 
The hall was packed with students, teachers, and fans of German literature as well as those who have read “The Tin Drum” and those who simply came to gaze at a Nobel laureate. Whenever Grass glanced above the dark rims of his glasses, he saw hundreds of faces listening attentively to him and reading the Russian translation on a large screen next to his desk.
Grass began by reading a chapter from his 2002 novel “Crabwalk,” which is a fictionalized account of a modern-day journalist determined to investigate the real-life story of the World War II passenger vessel Wilhelm Gustloff.
The ship was evacuating thousands of German civilians from Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland, where Grass was born) in January 1945 when it was sunk by three torpedoes from a Soviet submarine led by Admiral Alexander Marinesko, later a highly-acclaimed Soviet hero. As many as 10,000 people were thought to have died in the attack. 
The stories of the survivors, among whom is the future mother of the main protagonist, mix with a setting in contemporary Germany as the protagonist’s son keeps a blog about the ship’s fate. This little-known story, with its distinct human-interest angle, obviously touched the hearts and piqued the interest of Grass’ audience in St. Petersburg, many of whom grew up knowing very little about the Wilhelm Gustloff — despite the fact that the St. Petersburg submarine museum is named after Marinesko and he is remembered with monuments in Kaliningrad and Kronshtadt. When asked why he chose this particular story, and not, say, the bombing of Dresden, Grass answered that the late Kurt Vonnegut had already done that in his novel “Slaughterhouse 5,” while the Gustloff episode remains to a great extent unknown.
Grass also read from his latest novel “Peeling the Onion.” With its revelations of his Waffen-SS past, it was not surprising that most of the questions asked of Grass both after the reading and during a later meeting with journalists dealt with World War II, questions of history, totalitarian societies and dictatorships of the 20th century, as well as analysis of current politics. 
Grass gave a candid account of the Waffen-SS scandal. 
“It was made into a sensation, although I never made a great secret out of it. But I was glad that my family and my friends supported me and in a way the most important thing for me then was to give life to the book, to divide the destiny of the book and of myself. So as a therapeutic measure, and since in my second profession I am a graphic artist, I began writing poetry and drawing in order to express what I felt back then. This new book of poetry and drawings came out in spring earlier this year.” 
However, nationalism continues to be a hot political issue. According to Grass, today’s right-wing extremism does not have much to do with fascism, although it still can be perceived as a threat. One side of the problem, Grass said, is modern politicians who go to the extreme with populist speeches and policies that support hate toward others. Another alarming aspect is the accessibility of extremist viewpoints on the Internet. 
“Young people are easily attracted by pressure, by brutal power… they can easily believe in many things… The Second World War began when I was 12 and ended when I was 17. When Hitler came to power, I was six. We knew no other ideology, and the Hitler Youth [was a] movement [that] was [an act of] demonic genius: camping, singing by the bonfire, whatever can be attractive and promising to young people. We were blinded.”
Grass thinks that such potential threats continue to exist no matter which stage of development a society has reached. 
“I am totally convinced such an extremist movement can also be observed in Russia,” Grass said. Young people, he said, are “vulnerable to any ideology, especially if there’s only one around. They’re easy prey.”
Discussion turned to the collapse in relations between Estonia and Russia earlier this year after Estonian authorities moved a Soviet-era World War II monument from a location in downtown Tallinn to a war cemetery. The move, revealing deep divisions between Russia and Estonia about the war and the meaning of the post-war Soviet occupation of Estonia, was perceived by Russia as a slap-in-the-face to the memory of Soviet sacrifices during the war.
“First of all one should treat monuments with respect, and in Estonia they didn’t seem to have any piety. But then one has to admit that Russia also overreacted and I’d very much like that Russia and the Russian president would react in a more decent and dignified way. You just have to look at proportions: Russia is a big country, and Estonia is very small, and Russia obviously overreacted.” 
Grass said that many in Germany argue that endless discussions about World War II should wind down and that it is time to move on. “But whenever we say there’s enough discussion, there appear new, previously unknown facts and that makes us re-think and remember history over and over again. It would be good, if, also here, President Putin would meet with journalists or write a book about his service with the KGB, to tell people what kind of events he witnessed, what he lived through. It would be unarguably useful.”
Grass spoke about the relationship between history, reality and art. To him, literature should always reflect reality, and even though the latter can be monstrous, cruel and disgusting, its main task is not to make real life more beautiful. 
As he said, “my topic was always to show the times of the 20th century.”
“It was my destiny to be born in the 20th century and live through all the terrors of National Socialism, to see soldiers on both sides, to see time beyond the borderline of humanistic ideals.” 
Wherever there’s ideology, it is always unproductive for art: censorship provokes deviations, Grass argued. 
“Sometimes literature lives its own life — with, for example, Joyce or Proust discovering inner monologues. But literature is widening, expanding the borderlines of reality, making all that’s happening richer. Take futurism for example…  Or various genres of the early 20th century trying to understand a human being within the vortex of a city, of a megapolis. Art can turn the view of a watcher, audience, reader.” 
The 79-year-old author also couldn’t avoid a question about the so-called death of traditional literature. 
“It’s fashionable to say that the sun is setting on literature. They say the Internet is becoming more important — but I don’t believe in it. The book is left for intellectual reading, it’s an intimate act, it is something impossible to substitute. The book reaches the hearts and minds of a minority, but it has always been so. If there’s a technical catastrophe, all the electricity is gone, one can always light up a candle and continue reading a book.”

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: <b>Sonic Youth</b> was unhappy about the sound quality of a gig they played in St. Petersburg in 1989. Was the band happier after its concert here on Monday?
The show caused a mixed reaction as Russian bloggers attacked <b>Light Music</b>, the promoter of the Sonic Youth concert, again for the poor sound quality.
The show was held at Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa, a rebuilt riding school, notorious for its poor acoustics, lack of ventilation and a tendency to keep the audience outside for hours before concerts are scheduled start (about 90 minutes this time.)
But local musicians that had something to do with the show defended the promoter.
<b>Yevgeny Fyodorov</b>, the frontman of <b>Tequilajazzz</b> that opened for Sonic Youth at the Monday concert, said it was “a dream come true.”
“It’s another dream come true to see Sonic Youth as they should be seen not like it was the last time, and it was great. To meet them and chat with them, to play a concert together. It’s pure joy for a fan.”
Fyodorov said the sound was as good as it could have been in such a venue.
“The people who deal with the sound are absolutely responsible and one of the best in this country, and they did everything that could be done in such a room. The thing is that the acoustic possibilities of this venue are made for giving orders to guys who ride horses, rather than for playing music. 
“Unfortunately, there are very few venues in St. Petersburg, where such concerts can be held, and we have to deal with the very poor acoustic conditions of this concert hall. Nothing can be said here, because everybody knows that it’s very hard to adjust the sound there. As far as I remember, only two artists sounded okay there — [Russian singer] Zemfira and David Byrne.”
“Considering the musical peculiarities of Sonic Youth, it all added up to a great noise, and of course it was difficult for an unprepared public to understand. The soundmen are not to blame, it's the specifics of the venue, nothing can be done about it.”
Musician <b>Seva Gakkel</b>, who assisted the promoter in dealing with certain technical aspects of the show, said that sound quality just does not matter.
“The acoustics do not matter  to me at all,” he said.
“The acoustics are always different, there no such a thing as the perfect sound anywhere, except for specially constructed, calculated acoustic spaces, where everything is adjusted and checked carefully. In such shacks [as Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa], a priori there can’t be any sound.”
“The sound was adequate to the sound of the band, it plays like that, and I got what I expected; it met my ideas about this band, my memories ideally. I was again in contact with something real.”

<i>—By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Behind the facade
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg is changing. Controversial skyscrapers are transforming the city’s landscape, new buildings are being built in old neighborhoods, and ancient tramlines are giving way to motorways. Not all the changes are happening on a grand scale visible to all. Behind the facades, the city’s infamous courtyards, little by little, are transforming too. Some are already lost and some will soon be gone forever. 
But thanks to the St. Petersburg-based architectural photographer Vladimir Antoshchenkov, the fading beauty of the city’s back yards and their surroundings are being documented. 
“Courtyards of Petersburg,” an exhibition running at the National Center of Photography until July 16, is based on Antoshchenkov’s book of the same name and consists of photographs taken between 1976 and 2006. 
“I’m amazed that this subject has not yet been developed in greater detail. It literally asks to be photographed,” Antoshchenkov said when he opened the exhibition Wednesday.
Antoshchenkov called the show “extremely timely.”  The series of photographs ”would have been an impossible job to accomplish at present,” he said, referring to St. Petersburg’s rapid transformation. 
The iconic St. Petersburg dvor is so much more than the grim Dostoevskian corner which people imagine. Through Antoshchenkov’s lens, courtyards are fraught with poetry and intimacy, and surprisingly beautiful. 
 “When my daughter-in-law gave me [Antoshchenkov’s book], I started to wander around St. Petersburg trying to find places from the book. I found myself in a completely different dimension,” exhibition visitor Genriyetta Zharygina, who introduced herself as a “complete stranger to the world of photography,” told the St. Petersburg Times. 
“This place for example gave me a very unpleasant impression in reality, but in the picture it looks astonishing,” Zharygina said to her friend pointing to an urban landscape of “Great Ventilation,” taken in 2005 near Sennaya Ploshchad. Although some of Antoshchenkov’s shots are called “On Alert,” “The Dim Light of a Gateway,” and simply “A Grim Archway,” he said he tried to avoid St. Petersburg’s slums. 
“It’s scary to go inside the real slums, I was trying to keep away from such areas. But if the images of them found my camera, it means there’s something truly special about them,” he said.
Many professional photographers admire the work of Antoshchenkov.
“Many photographers have tried to repeat Antoshchenkov, but, sorry, we can’t, said photographer Alexander Roshchin at the opening.
“I sometimes see a courtyard I want to take a picture of, but then I say to myslelf — ‘Stop, this yard belongs to Antoshchenkov,’ and I put the camera down,” he said.

“Courtyards of Petersburg” runs until July 16 in the National Center of Photography, 35 Bolshaya Morskaya. Tel. 314 1214, www.ncprf.org

TITLE: Fresh AIR
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: <i>French music duo AIR perform live on Saturday marking the start of this year’s Stereoleto series of summer concerts.</i>

French guitarist Nicolas Godin compares his band AIR’s modus operandi to the intricate workings of a  Faberge egg.
“I am fascinated by little things,” said Godin speaking by phone from Paris earlier this month. “The way we build our songs in our home studio, we make little pieces of music, and actually I am fascinated by something from Russia called Faberge eggs — the little eggs that the tsar used to buy for his wife, and also I am fascinated by watches — you know when you open a watch, you look inside at all this mismatch of things.  I think the way we work is like that.” 
AIR’s latest album is called, appropriately, “Pocket Symphony,” with a more ambient, more atmospheric sound than the band’s early hits such as its breakthrough track “Sexy Boy.”
“Yeah, it’s true, that’s because before that we did an album for Charlotte Gainsbourg, and we wrote a lot of songs for her, so we were fed up writing songs — we wanted to do something more instrumental and more ambient, with no structure like a chorus and a verse, a chorus and a verse. We wanted to do something more free-form album,” said Godin who formed AIR with keyboard player Jean-Benoit Dunckel in 1995. 
Despite the difference in approach, “Pocket Symphony” uses Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and musicians Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, who all worked on “5:55,” the album that relaunched the music career of film actress Gainsbourg, the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, last year.
“But [Godrich] can do any kind of music. He did [Radiohead’s frontman] Thom Yorke’s album, which is electronic and uses a lot of synthesizers and computers. He can do anything,” said Godin.
“[Cocker and Hannon] are very Francophile, they love France and they live in France. We did the album of Charlotte Gainsbourg with them: Jarvis and Neil wrote lyrics for the songs that we composed for Charlotte, so we decided to make a song all together just for us.”
Cocker wrote the lyrics and supplied his vocals to a track called “One Hell of a Party” and co-wrote, with Hannon, the lyrics to “Somewhere Between Walking and Sleeping”), with Hannon’s vocals on it. It may take a while to recognize the Pulp singer’s vocals when he sings with AIR.
“Yeah, when he works with us, he sounds different,” said Godin. “When we use a drummer, the drummer doesn’t play drums like he plays with other people. We make them sound original.”
AIR’s early fans included Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, who said that the most interesting music was coming from France, rather than the U.K., when he spoke to The St. Petersburg Times in 1998.
“Yeah, it’s cool, I’ve been a fan of   Pet Shop Boys, but you know, [the French electronic pop revival of the 1990s] was a wave, now it’s gone, every year there’s a wave of something interesting. Maybe one day there will be a big new wave with all kind of bands from Russia, ” said Godin.
The idea of collaborating with Gainsbourg stems from an accidental encounter at a concert, according to Godin. 
“We met her at a Radiohead show, and Nigel was there, and we decided to do an album all together that night,” he said.
AIR’s stellar encounters include rubbing shoulders with such figures as David Bowie.
“We did a remix of one of his songs, called ‘Better Future,’ and we did a show in New York two weeks ago because he asked us, at Madison Square Garden,” said Godin, meaning the Highline Festival that Bowie curated.
Godin, who said he was waiting for the new White Stripes album, said he listens to Bright Eyes, Wilco and the new French band Justice.
Better known for its accomplished studio work, when AIR performs in Russia for the first time, it will be backed by extra musicians on stage, according to Godin. 
“When we play live, we have to have musicians to play with us, so we have five people on stage, to reproduce what we do in studio,” he said.  “We have, like, 12 keyboards on stage.”
Ten years and five albums since “Sexy Boy,” AIR has been through many changes.
“I think each album is different, we change all the time and we don’t have any direction,” said Godin.

AIR performs as part of Stereoleto series of music events at Lenexpo on Saturday.

TITLE: Hell or high water
AUTHOR: By Rodric Braithwaite
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: For most of us, the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin of June 1905 is etched in our minds by images from Sergei Eisenstein’s great film: the sailors refusing the rotten meat, the brutal officers preparing to shoot them down, the sudden explosion of violence, the massacre of innocent townspeople on the Odessa steps, the cheering sailors of the Black Sea Fleet as the ship sails defiantly past them on its way to freedom.
The film was commissioned by the triumphant Bolsheviks for the 20th anniversary of the mutiny — one of the mutiny’s leaders actually took part as an extra. But did the mutiny really happen like that? Or did Eisenstein distort the story to pander to the demands of the politicians, or to meet the requirements of his own artistic conscience? 
In his new book about the mutiny, the first in English for many decades, Neal Bascomb shows that Eisenstein was often close to the mark. Bascomb gives us a broad, and sometimes confusing, account of the historical background. 
The Russian Empire is reeling under the successive blows of military defeat at the hands of the Japanese and growing unrest at home as peasants and workers become increasingly dissatisfied with their lot. The sailors in the navy, like the soldiers on land, are themselves the children of rural poverty and urban squalor. They are ripe for revolt.
Aboard the battleship Potemkin, the most powerful vessel in the Black Sea Fleet, a small group of sailors dream of taking over their ship, and bringing the rest of the fleet over to their side by the force of example. Then, almost by accident, there is an armed scuffle over the rotten meat. Captain Yevgeny Golikov, his deputy, Commander Ippolit Gilyarovsky, and five other officers are killed. The sailors’ leader, Grigory Vakulenchuk —  cool, measured, decisive — is mortally wounded, and becomes the mutiny’s first martyr. His place is taken by the fiery and impulsive Afanasy Matyushenko. The mutineers are left with the awkward task of deciding what to do next.
The rest of the story is a mixture of tragedy and comedy. The sailors take the ship into a restless Odessa to get supplies. The city’s military commander reacts with lethal force. The harbor is laid waste. Townspeople are massacred. The battleship gingerly lobs two shells at the military headquarters. It misses, and the mutineers cease fire for fear of killing their own brothers, the workers of the city. In the middle of all this mayhem the mutineers make a collection for Gilyarovsky’s wife and daughter. Matyushenko is given safe passage to hand over the money to a general who, Bascomb tells us, is disgusted when this common sailor insists on getting a receipt.
Telegrams fly back and forth between St. Petersburg and the admirals, who struggle to keep the fleet together as it totters on the brink of disintegration. The admirals hope to recapture the Potemkin. The mutineers hope that the other ships will join them. Neither happens. The mutineers begin a fruitless odyssey across the Black Sea, until their coal and water runs out, their determination falters, and they are forced to seek refuge in Romania. Many eventually find political asylum in Britain and South America. After meeting the exiled Lenin, Matyushenko returns to Russia to continue the struggle. He is caught and executed.
The significance of the mutiny on the Potemkin was considerable, but it was above all symbolic. The mutinies that gripped the British Navy in 1797 had more immediate potential for disaster; they paralyzed the Channel Fleet and opened the country to invasion. The British Admiralty reacted with a mixture of concession and severity. Several ringleaders were hanged, but conditions of life for the sailors were improved. When the admirals appealed to their patriotism, the sailors willingly sallied forth against the French and the Dutch and defeated them. Had they not done so, Admiral Vincent would have boasted in vain when he told Parliament, “I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
The circumstances surrounding the Potemkin mutiny were different. Despite the defeats in the Far East, Russia did not risk an invasion of its heartland from the sea, so appeals to the patriotic feelings of the mutineers could make little practical impact. Nor could the mutiny have brought down the tsarist regime by itself. It was only one of many such incidents — the massacre outside the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday six months earlier, the strikes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the “red cockerel” which flew across the land as peasants burned down one country house after another. Odessa had already seen much violence before the Potemkin arrived in the harbor. It was the combination of all of these events that forced the tsar to grant a tentative constitution in October 1905, and gave Russia the glimmer of hope for a more liberal, democratic and prosperous future. Without Eisenstein, the mutiny might now be almost forgotten.
Bascomb writes in the generous belief that it is worth recovering “the truth of [his protagonists’] lives, and the reasons they sacrificed them.” But there is a strange hole at the core of his narrative. Was the mutiny part of a wider plan to subvert the Black Sea Fleet, or was it not? The British author Richard Hough speaks in “The Potemkin Mutiny” of a broad subversive organization across the whole of the Fleet. 
That brief, lucid and gripping account dates from 1960, when the historiography was still dominated by orthodox Soviet scholars trying to demonstrate that the mutiny was inspired, if not wholly guided, by the Social Democrats, or rather by Lenin’s Bolshevik faction. Bascomb sometimes appears to argue that the mutineers rose up more or less spontaneously in the name of the common people, while the professional revolutionaries — the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the Social Revolutionaries — sat in their coffee houses writing fiery pamphlets and exploiting the mutiny for their own propagandistic purposes. And yet he also speaks throughout of a mysterious “Tsentralka,” a Center, a “revolutionary sailor organization” that mapped out the strategy of mutiny, held secret meetings of its potential leaders, and issued operational orders once the mutiny began. Matyushenko, says Bascomb, triggered the mutiny prematurely, before the Tsentralka was ready. But Bascomb does not say who was in the Tsentralka, where they came from, what their political affiliations were, how they were organized, or what happened to them when it was all over.
All of this we need to know if we are to understand the wider ramifications of the mutiny. What we do know is that the revolution of 1905 was brought about by an elemental surge among the whole people — workers, peasants, soldiers, sailors, intellectuals, liberal politicians, professional revolutionaries.
 Their hopes of a better future for their country were extinguished by a combination of Tsar Nicholas II’s boneheaded obstinacy, the appalling advice he got from his closest intimates, the devastating impact of World War I, and the ruthless willpower of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Whether Russia could have taken a happier course if one or all of these factors had been absent is, of course, impossible to say.

Rodric Braithwaite is a former British ambassador to Russia and the author, most recently, of “Moscow 1941: 
A City and Its People at War.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: If you’re going to broadcast a recorded concert and pretend it’s live, it’s best to check the footage for large clocks. This simple rule was ignored on Rossia television the other evening, when it gave two hours to a patriotic concert on Red Square, offering plenty of sweeping shots of the Kremlin clocktower. But then again, the channel also celebrated the Russia Day holiday by giving its New Year’s Eve show another airing, so you could never accuse it of overestimating its viewers.
Some might find the sight of Nikolai Baskov crooning among fake fir trees and fake snow a touch disturbing in the middle of June. However, Rossia kicked off the evening with four hours — yes, four — of a New Year’s pop concert. Suddenly, the final of the “Minute of Fame” talent contest on Channel One looked like quite an attractive option. And congratulations to little Maxim, who won the top prize with his accordion playing.
Rossia’s strange time continuum went on with its next item: a live concert on Red Square titled “Young Russia.” A note on the screen said it was a “direct broadcast,” but I couldn’t help noticing that the sun was still shining on Red Square although it was dusk outside my window a few metro stops away. I know they seed the clouds for the national holidays, but surely even the lords of the Kremlin don’t have that kind of power.
Disappointingly, the shots of the clock revealed that Red Square time was running around 45 minutes behind the rest of the city, presumably so that any untoward incident could be edited out of the concert footage. Though I wonder if they needed to bother. The tight line of OMON troops controlling the crowd certainly looked as if it knew what it was doing.
The concert was unusual because it brought out some grizzled rockers who sing live and still have plenty of fans from way back when — qualities that rarely ensure television coverage. But the die-hard fans may not have been too pleased to see Alisa, Agata Kristi and Chaif perform in front of a sea of Nashi flags and United Russia banners. In a surreal moment, the crowd sang along — word perfect — to one of the hits of Kino, the counterculture idols of the 1980s, their matching flags and T-shirts glinting against the Lenin Mausoleum.
It was a strange concert, ostensibly free and public, but in fact the tickets were harder to get than George Michael’s. I looked on the event’s web site earlier this week and it explained that I would have to go to an office to get a flyer and then go to the Karl Marx monument — the organizers prob ably weren’t being ironic — to collect my ticket. And I suspected that it might be a bit crowded, what with the other 29,999 expected people standing in line.
The best moment came when Alisa leader Konstantin Kinchev was standing on stage, his hand pressed to his heart. Suddenly the camera cut to a Nashi cheerleader, sorry I mean commissar, called Maria Drokova. In a breathless voice, she read a message about how we should help our fellow citizens, visit children’s homes and make Russia an “economic and political leader.” Then it was time to headbang again.
At the end, all the participants gathered on stage and sang the Russian anthem — although there seemed to be a discrepancy between the number of mouths moving and the sound being produced. Also, I failed to spot the operatic sopranos among the black-clad rockers. Then the camera swept around the crowd that had been so fluent on its Kino lyrics. And would you believe it, they weren’t singing, either.

TITLE: Pizza palace
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Olli’s Pizzeria // 34 Kazanskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 320 0600. // www.ollis.ru // Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. // Credit cards accepted. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with beer 675 rubles ($26)

They say pandas are endangered. But no one shed a tear when the Golden Panda on Kazanskaya Ulitsa finally died a death at the end of last month. Menacing the corner with Grivtsova since 2000, this restaurant was notoriously dark and dim, and served up a pitiful simulacra of Chinese food that at the time helped tarnish the reputation of this noble cuisine in St. Petersburg. No more. The smart brains behind Olli’s, a chain of pizza restaurants, launched their latest outlet at No. 34 on June 8.
Olli’s, according to a blurb on the back of the menu, has a history: “On Sept. 3, 1956, in a small city in the south of Italy, Mario Olli opened a pizzeria on the first floor of his house. There are thousands of such ‘home-style’ restaurants in Italy, but the pizzeria established by Mario Olli became…” Yada yada yada, you get the picture. The point is that Pizza Olli’s is now a worldwide chain serving more than 60,000 customers and more than 35,000 take-out pizzas a year. 
St. Petersburg is already home to five older Olli’s that are spread about its outer residential districts. The new Olli’s is the first to be established in the center of town, and its take-out service has already become a hit with the hardworking staff of business daily Vedomosti, which shares an office with The St. Petersburg Times. The take-out menu features at least 50 pizzas, four pasta choices, four salads, and a couple of desserts — check out its impressively high-tech online ordering service at www.ollis.ru — and Olli’s has a liveried little van and a scooter to make the deliveries, decked out in its trademark green, red and yellow color scheme. 
The Kazanskaya outlet is also enlivened with this jaunty look, and, although the table layout in its two halls is similar to the Golden Panda that went before it, gone is the dinginess of that miserable place. Instead there are enlarged photographs of Venice, Florence and Rome on the walls and the functional furniture of fast food joints the world over. Everything is exceptionally clean, although only time will tell if this remains so. 
The waitress was very polite and helpful, as if buoyed by the sunny atmosphere, and served starters of spaghetti carbonara (100 rubles, $3.80) and a chicken “Capanna” salad (95 rubles, $3.60) promptly. Both dishes were satisfactory for this level of dining. The pasta was served in a gloopy cream sauce with oversalted bacon, chewy bits of chopped onion, with a whole egg yolk nestled on top. Likewise, the salad — a pile of leaves and strips of chicken breast — was well presented but didn’t stand out. 
Olli’s serves draught Zolotaya Bochka beer — increasingly the choice of, shall we say, the lower end of the market — at a rock-bottom 55 rubles for 0.5 liter ($2.10). The beer looked and tasted like pond water. However, it is important to remember that the first glass of Zolotaya Bochka, or “Golden Keg,” always tastes like pond water and that it improves only with the fourth glass.
The pizza we ordered was a standard ham and mushroom affair (230 rubles, $8.80 for the 30 centimeter or middle sized option) with some shrimps tossed on top for 60 rubles ($2.30). The dish arrived very quickly and it soon became clear why: the pre-made base had been warmed over and the extra ingredients had simply been tossed in its direction, without the extra grilling needed to heat them up and melt them into the cheese. 
Mamma Mia! What would Senor Olli make of that?

TITLE: Killer instinct
AUTHOR: By Stephen Holden
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Who knew that serial killing is an addiction that sufferers hope to overcome by attending A.A. meetings and murmuring the serenity prayer? That, at least, is how the buttoned-up title character of  “Mr. Brooks,” a nutty variation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” deals with such inconvenient urges. “I’m an addict,” he announces at a 12-step meeting while withholding the true nature of his cravings.
This preposterous character, played by Kevin Costner, is one of several afflicted with thrill-killing compulsions in a movie in which half the population of Portland, Oregon, seems to suffer from homicidal dementia.
Earl Brooks, a successful box manufacturer, is the Portland Chamber of Commerce’s man of the year. A model citizen, ideal husband to his wife, Emma (Marg Helgenberger), and devoted father to his daughter, Jane (Danielle Panabaker), Earl leads a lurid double life.
As the notorious Thumbprint Killer, he is also a maniac whose specialty is slaughtering young lovers, arranging their bodies into amorous poses, meticulously vacuuming the crime scene and signing it with the victims’ thumbprints. Earl’s fiendish alter ego, Marshall (William Hurt) — an imaginary figure who leans over Earl’s shoulder while he’s driving — flashes an evil grin and tempts him with descriptions of the fun they could have if only Earl would give in to his darkest impulses.
“Mr. Brooks,” alas, is not a comedy. A werewolf movie masquerading as a thriller, it looks like a canny attempt by Bruce A. Evans, its director and screenwriter (with Raynold Gideon), to establish a “Saw”-like franchise using the names of fading ’80s stars to lend the project a semblance of respectability. If it is not as sadistic as the “Saw” and “Hostel” movies, it is as malignant in its insistence on the omnipresence of evil.
Another would-be killer is a peeping-Tom photographer calling himself Mr. Smith (the comedian Dane Cook), who observes Earl’s double murder of a couple who amuse their neighbors by having sex with the lights on and the shades open. Days after the crime he confronts Earl with his evidence and demands to be let in on the fun. He won’t go to the police if Earl takes him along on his next homicidal spree.
Also on the rampage is Thornton Meeks (Matt Schulze), a convicted serial killer known as the Hangman, who strings up his victims in public places and scrawls mocking graffiti on their corpses. Newly escaped from prison, this standard-issue monster makes a vengeful beeline for Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore), the humorless police detective who sent him to jail. Because Tracy has also been assigned to the case of the Thumbprint Killer, she obviously has her hands full.
Finally there is Earl’s baby-faced daughter, who drops out of college in her freshman year claiming she is pregnant. When the police visit the Brooks home to question Jane about a classmate’s murder, Daddy instinctively senses the unbearable truth. “She has what I have,” he declares to Marshall, wringing his hands.
Now we know: Serial killing is in the blood, a curse passed down from generation to generation.
This tightly plotted movie throws in an extra subplot involving Tracy’s ugly divorce from a younger, cheating gigolo (Jason Lewis) whom she married on the rebound and who now demands millions. (The screenplay goes through elaborate contortions to try to explain why a wealthy heiress like Tracy would work as a policewoman, but the explanation doesn’t wash.)
Tracy is the most wooden screen performance of Moore’s career. Looking exhausted and tense, the actress is as expressive as a wax museum effigy. That is not the case with Costner and Hurt, who pull out the stops to play a horror-movie tag team. In their scenes together Costner’s sinister but tortured Earl and Hurt’s gleefully sociopathic Marshall do a sadomasochistic soft shoe shuffle of psychological bullying and whining.
Marshall is a creepy flesh-and-blood extrapolation of the inner voice inside anyone who has considered raising hell for the sheer thrill of it. In the world of “Mr. Brooks,” there’s no greater kick than acting like a really bad boy and getting away with it.

TITLE: U.S. Envoy Travels To N. Korea
AUTHOR: By Jae-Soon Chang
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — The chief U.S. nuclear envoy made a rare trip to North Korea on Thursday in a surprise bid to accelerate international efforts to press the communist government to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Christopher Hill’s trip came ahead of the expected resumption of six-nation talks next month following the resolution of a key financial dispute that had blocked progress.
The trip is Hill’s first to North Korea, as well as the first by a U.S. nuclear envoy since the latest crisis with the North over its nuclear development began in late 2002.
APTN footage showed Hill arriving at Pyongyang’s airport in a small jet in a steady downpour. His five-member delegation was met by Ri Gun, the North’s deputy nuclear negotiator.
“We want to get the six-party process moving,” Hill, standing under an umbrella, said in the APTN film. 
“We hope that we can make up for some of the time that we lost this spring and so I’m looking forward to good discussions about that,” Hill said.
Hill and Ri were shown walking together and chatting in a friendly manner.
“We’re all waiting for you,” Ri said. In response, Hill said he “got the message on Monday and we had to work fast to find an airplane,” suggesting the visit was hastily arranged and based on a North Korean invitation.
North Korea, which carried out its first nuclear test explosion in October, promised in a landmark agreement struck in February with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. that it would shut down its bomb-making nuclear reactor at Yongbyon by mid-April.
Progress was stalled by the financial dispute between Pyongyang and Washington involving $25 million in alleged North Korean illicit funds. That dispute was resolved in recent days, and although North Korea still hasn’t shut the reactor, it invited UN monitors next week to discuss a shutdown.
Last year, North Korea openly invited Hill to visit the country, but Washington did not accept the offer.
“I think the U.S. is trying to keep North Korea from dragging its feet any longer” now that the banking dispute is resolved, said Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea expert at Korea University. “Unless something is done right now, North Korea could stall for time on another pretext.”
Nam said the North appears to want to reaffirm concessions it would get from Washington before it closes down and seals the reactor, including removing Pyongyang from the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism.
Hill planned consultations on Thursday and Friday on the nuclear issue “to move the process forward,” the State Department said in a press statement.

TITLE: Federer, Henin Top Grass Seeds
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Four-time defending champion Roger Federer and top-ranked Justine Henin were seeded No. 1 for Wimbledon on Wednesday.
Rafael Nadal, last year’s runner-up, was seeded No. 2 ahead of Andy Roddick. Maria Sharapova, who won the 2004 title at 17, is seeded No. 2, followed by Jelena Jankovic. Defending champion Amelie Mauresmo was seeded fourth.
Two-time winner and Australian Open champion Serena Williams is No. 7 at the third Grand Slam tournament of the year, which begins Monday. The draw will be held Friday.
In determining the seedings, Wimbledon took past performances on grass into account. The seedings at other Grand Slams mirror the rankings.
Venus Williams was seeded 24th, seven places above her ranking because of five final appearances in the past seven years. The most recent of her three titles came in 2005, when she became the lowest seeded player to win the women’s title at No. 14.
The top 18 women are seeded according to their WTA ranking. Henin, the French Open champion, will attempt to improve upon her losses in the 2001 and 2006 Wimbledon final.
Below the top three men, there were mostly minor movements against the rankings. Fifth-ranked Novak Djokovic was moved up to the No. 4 seeding after winning in Estoril, Miami and Adelaide this year and losing to Nadal in the French Open semifinals.
Eleventh-ranked Tomas Berdych was seeded No. 7, switching places with Tommy Robredo, while Marcos Baghdatis was the biggest beneficiary of the system. The Cypriot player, who lost to Nadal in straight sets in last year’s semifinals, was seeded at No. 10, six places above his ATP ranking.
Lleyton Hewitt, the 2002 champion, was No. 16, three spots above his ranking.

TITLE: Sammy Hits 600th Home Run
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DALLAS — Sammy Sosa joined an elite club on Wednesday, hitting his 600th home run against his former team. Meanwhile, two younger sluggers hit key home runs to rally baseball’s hottest teams to victories.
Sosa became the fifth member of the 600-homer club, hitting a solo shot in the fifth inning of Texas’ 7-3 victory over the Chicago Cubs, his former team.
“It was something that cannot be explained,” Sosa said. “Getting my 600th against the Chicago Cubs, and my first team (was) the Texas Rangers. It’s like everything clicked. My emotions, I don’t know what they are.”
After driving a 1-2 pitch to right-center for a solo shot in the fifth inning of Texas’ 7-3 victory, Slammin’ Sammy bounced out of the batter’s box with his trademark hop and thrust his right fist into the air before reaching first base. He was mobbed at home plate by his teammates while the scoreboard showed pictures of all five members of the elite club: Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Sosa.
The home run came off Jason Marquis (5-4), the 364th pitcher the 38-year-old Sosa has homered off in his 18 major league seasons. “It was a cutter I left up in the zone,” Marquis said. “I went away from my strength and he made me pay for it. Other than the fact that it cost us the game, it doesn’t really matter.”
After going into the dugout, Sosa came out for a curtain call. He blew kisses to the crowd and acknowledged the Cubs’ dugout by pounding his chest with his fist, and Chicago manager Lou Piniella pointed back toward the slugger. Sosa had never faced the Cubs before the series opener Tuesday night.
In other Interleague action, it was Detroit 8, Washington 4; Cleveland 10, Philadelphia 6; Toronto 12, the Los Angeles Dodgers 1; Boston 11, Atlanta 0; St. Louis 7, Kansas City 6, 14 innings; Florida 5, the Chicago White Sox 4; Baltimore 7, San Diego 1; Seattle 7, Pittsburgh 0; Oakland 5, Cincinnati 3; Minnesota 7, the New York Mets 2; and Arizona 7, Tampa Bay 4.

TITLE: 27 EU Leaders Meet for Tense Summit
AUTHOR: By Constant Brand
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium — Leaders of the European Union’s 27 nations gathered to discuss a new EU treaty Thursday, two years after French and Dutch voters rejected a draft constitution.
Negotiations were expected to be tough, with Poland and Britain standing firm in their opposition to parts of the proposed treaty, drafted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the summit host.
Poland’s prime minister was threatening to veto the plan unless his country was given more voting power to compensate for lives lost during World War II. Under the EU’s weighted voting proposal, population is key and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski argued that his country would be much larger if not for the war.
Warsaw also has renewed its demand that the new treaty include a reference to Europe’s Christian heritage — something Merkel is keen not to include.
Merkel, attending pre-summit talks with other conservative leaders, appealed for her counterparts to “work in a spirit that will allow us to reach fair agreements because the EU has to be able to act to solve the many problems in this world.”
The EU was thrown into crisis in 2005 when voters in France and the Netherlands rejected its draft constitution, which was designed to streamline decision-making as the bloc absorbed ex-Communist nations from eastern Europe.
Leaders are hoping to reach agreement on what to keep from the old constitution, what to throw out and what needs to be modified. All 27 nations agree that the EU must move quickly to adopt a new rulebook to streamline the complex decision-making system crafted years ago when it was still a union of 15.
But opponents argue that Germany’s 11-page plan is a ploy to push ahead with the charter in defiance of the Netherlands and France, where voters firmly rejected the constitution in referendums in 2005.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, attending his last EU summit before stepping down next week, said he would reject any new treaty that did not meet tough British demands to limit EU powers.
Merkel said guidelines are needed on how to govern the EU so that Europe can deal with pressing issues such as climate change and globalization.
On Tuesday, Merkel presented her counterparts with a list of issues she wants included in negotiations on a new treaty.
Germany and many other states want to salvage as much as they can from the derailed constitution already approved by 18 member nations. They argue that the sensitive compromises within it, which took more than three years of negotiation, is the only way forward.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said compromise was essential to resolve deep divisions over the future of the expanding bloc.
“We should not think about alternatives,” Steinmeier told reporters, adding he and Merkel were “trying to build bridges to member states who are skeptical.”
Merkel’s draft mandate recommends removing the touchiest issues within the draft constitution. That includes stripping the text of any reference to symbols — including the EU’s blue-and-gold, star-spangled flag; its Beethoven anthem, and the motto “United in Diversity,” which many felt hinted at the creation of a European superstate.
She also proposed dropping the title “constitution” and calling it a the “Treaty on the Functioning of the Union” instead. Berlin wants EU nations to finalize the treaty in the months ahead.
The proposal recommends giving national parliaments more say in drafting EU laws, a key Dutch demand — but recommends that the EU retain essential elements of the aborted constitution, notably on decision-making and areas where the EU wants more powers.
Britain opposes greater EU powers over policing and foreign policy and does not support making a new EU human rights charter legally binding, a move that London fears could hurt its control over domestic laws, like labor rights.
If the leaders can agree on what to include, there will be a conference of experts from the EU nations over the next six months to draft a new treaty.

TITLE: $163 Mln
Thaksin Bid Backed By Man City
AUTHOR: By Trevor Huggins
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester City said on Thursday that the Premier League club were backing an 81.6 million pound ($162.6 million) takeover bid led by ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
City said its board intended to recommend the bid from UK Sports Investments, a vehicle indirectly controlled by Thaksin and his son and daughter, Panthongtae and Pinthongta Shinawatra.
The move came hours after Thaksin, who has been based in London since being ousted in a bloodless coup last September, was formally charged by Thai state prosecutors with “official misconduct” over a property deal involving his wife.
Commenting on the board’s response to his offer, Thaksin said in a statement: “We share a determination to take the club back to its rightful place at the highest level of competition in both the FA Premier League and European football.
“I am in no doubt of the responsibility associated with leading Manchester City and pledge to the fans, players and staff my utmost commitment to the future success of this great club.”
A successful bid is widely expected to see the appointment of former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson as manager, taking over the vacancy after Stuart Pearce was sacked last month.
The Swede has been out of the game since stepping down after last year’s World Cup, where England made a quarter-final exit on penalties to Portugal.
There was set to be a mixed response from City fans.
Alan Galley, chairman of the Manchester City Supporters Club, welcomed the Thaksin bid, telling Sky Sports News: “The club’s been drifting for a long, long time and we need to make progress.
“We’ve got nothing sorted out at the moment — no pre-season, no nothing. Some of the players have left and there’s nobody coming in... (now) we can see light at the end of the tunnel.”
Galley was less sure about Eriksson’s reception, saying: “He may not be a popular choice among the rank and file fans. It may be that he will have to get everything right first time.”

GOLDEN YEARS
Now a lacklustre Premier League club, City’s golden years spanned the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when they were league champions (1968) and winners of the FA Cup (1969), League Cup (1970, 1976) and European Cup Winners Cup (1970).
Galley also expressed reservations about what would happen if Thaksin’s problems in Thailand were to mount.
Though $1.5 billion in Thaksin family bank accounts were frozen by Thai authorities last week, Thursday’s filing at the Supreme Court is the first formal legal action taken against him since the coup.
Judges are expected to rule on July 10 whether to proceed with the charges. If convicted, Thaksin could face up to 10 years in jail and a fine.

TITLE: Crowd Kills Man After Car Accident
AUTHOR: By Liz Peterson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AUSTIN, Texas — Police on Wednesday were pleading for witnesses to help them track down members of an angry mob that beat a man to death after the car he was riding in apparently struck and injured a child.
Investigators were struggling to piece together what happened Tuesday when David Rivas Morales died defending the driver from members of a crowd. 
There could have been anywhere from two to 20 attackers, Austin Police Commander Harold Piatt said.
The car in which Morales, 40, was a passenger had entered an apartment complex’s parking lot when it struck a 2-year-old boy, Piatt said. The boy was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The driver got out of the car to check on the child and was confronted by several people, Piatt said. 
When they attacked the driver, Morales got out of the car to protect the driver and was attacked as well. Police said no guns or knives were used.
The driver got away and is cooperating with investigators. Police identified the child as Michael Hosea Jr.

TITLE: Pakistani Scholars Pay Respect to Bin Laden
AUTHOR: By Rana Jawad
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ISLAMABAD — Pakistani Islamic scholars honoured Osama bin Laden in response to Britain’s knighthood for Salman Rushdie, as a senior ruling party member said he would not hesitate to kill the novelist.
Meanwhile the country’s religious affairs minister, who caused outrage by remarking that the award given to the “Satanic Verses” author justified suicide attacks, announced that he may visit Britain next month.
The Pakistani Ulema Council, a private body that claims to be the biggest of its kind in the country with 2,000 scholars, said it had given Bin Laden the title “Saifullah”, or Sword of Allah, its top accolade.
“We are pleased to award the title of Saifullah to Osama bin Laden after the British government’s decision to bestow the title of ‘Sir’ on blasphemer Rushdie,” council chairman Maulana Tahir Ashrafi told AFP.
“This is the highest title for a Muslim warrior.”
Bin Laden has been blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. He is widely believed to be hiding on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Later Afzal Sahi — the speaker of the Punjab province assembly and a member of the Pakistan Muslim League party that backs President Pervez Musharraf — said during a debate that he would murder Rushdie if he saw him.
“I am a Muslim and then a politician and it is ordained in Islam that the punishment for a blasphemer is death. If this man comes in front of me I will definitely kill him,” he said in response to a question by an opposition MP.
During a protest by thousands of people in Lahore against Musharraf’s suspension of the Pakistani chief justice, a large part of the crowd briefly chanted “Death to Britain, Death to Rushdie”, witnesses said.
The neighbouring Islamic republics of Pakistan and Iran both summoned the British envoys to their countries on Tuesday as the row spread over the Rushdie award, which was announced on Saturday.
Britain hit back by expressing “deep concern” over the comments on suicide attacks by religious affairs minister Ijaz-ul Haq.
Haq — who later withdrew the remarks saying that he meant only that the award would foster extremism — said he now planned to visit Britain.
“Yes, I may travel to Britain next month as a British delegation has invited me to guide them on how to engage khateebs and imams (sermon deliverers and prayer leaders) in a constructive dialogue,” Haq told AFP.
The British delegation met Haq on Monday and included representatives from Britain’s Home Office and Foreign Office with responsibility for engaging with the Islamic world and preventing extremism, he said.
“I can confirm he did meet the delegation but I am not aware of any invitation,” said Aidan Liddle, a spokesman for the British High Commission (embassy) in Islamabad.
Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto has called on Haq to resign.
Haq is the son of military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977 until his death in a mysterious plane crash in 1988. His father introduced Islamic punishments to the country including death for blasphemy.
A comment piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph said that if Pakistan was so angry about the issue, it should return the 480 million pounds (955 million dollars) in aid promised by Prime Minister Tony Blair last year.
“If this is tainted money, it can presumably be returned,” it said.
But in the Pakistani federal parliament Pakistan Muslim League president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain said that Blair was “personally and mentally against Muslims.”

TITLE: People’s Police Rules
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — China’s police have been given new orders — no strangely dyed hair, no beards, no sideburns; and leave your scarfs and jewellery at home.
The Ministry of Public Security has issued the order to “establish a good image for the people’s police”, domestic media said on Thursday.
“When police are in uniform on duty, they are not allowed to wear scarfs or jewellery, paint their nails, or have colourfully dyed hair,” the Beijing News said, citing the new rules.
“Male police officers cannot have long or curly hair, sideburns, shave their hair bald or have beards,” it said, adding female police officers cannot have hair longer than shoulder length.

TITLE: Manduro Wins Prince of Wales Stakes
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ASCOT, England — Manduro won the Prince of Wales Stakes at Royal Ascot on Wednesday, holding off Dylan Thomas by 1 1/4 lengths on the run to the line after having overtaken Sir Percy.
Manduro, the 15-8 favorite trained by Andre Fabre with Stephane Pasquier aboard, swept past long time-leader Sir Percy with 300 meters (yards) left as last year’s English Derby winner began to tire.
Although Christophe Soumillon kept pace on Dylan Thomas, Manduro held on to win for the third straight time this season while Pasquier captured his first Royal Ascot victory.
Fabre said the 5-year-old colt will definitely race in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Ascot on July 28, and maybe the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, Paris, on Oct. 7.
“He’s a top-class miler and pace is not a problem for him,” Fabre said. “I’m convinced he’ll get a mile and a half (2.4 kilometers). He’s entered in King George and the Arc in the obvious target.”
The field of six horses started slowly in the 350,000-pound (US$690,000; Y518,000) race with Sir Percy, which usually prefers to swoop, setting a modest pace. The Derby winner finished last.
Red Rocks, winner of last season’s Breeders Cup Turf, never got close to the lead — even with inform jockey Frankie Dettori in the saddle — and finished fourth behind Notnowcato.
In the Royal Hunt Cup, jockey Jimmy Fortune collected his third victory of the day and fourth in two days when he guided 9-1 shot Royal Oath home by four lengths in a field of 26. He had earlier triumphed on Tariq in the Jersey Stakes and Nannina in the Windsor Forest Stakes.
Meanwhile, English 2,000 Guineas winner Cockney Rebel was found to have fractured his offside pelvis when finishing a disappointing fifth in the St. James Palace Stakes on Tuesday.
Cockney Rebel hung badly to the left in the closing stages as he finished behind the winner Excellent Art and was initially thought to have pulled a muscle.
“We got him to the surgery this morning and gave him a scan which showed the fracture,” trainer Geoff Huffer said Wednesday. “It’s not life-threatening but that’s racing, I’m afraid. It’s too early to say, but he could be out for a month or two.”