SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1284 (50), Friday, June 29, 2007
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TITLE: Mariinsky II Back on Track, Costs ‘Optimized’
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Construction work on the Mariinsky Theater’s new building, known as Mariinsky II and planned as an additional, modern theater to run alongside the Mariinsky’s historic venue, will finally begin fully in July as officials gave the go-ahead to the troubled project on Tuesday.
The proposal for the new building for the famous St. Petersburg opera and ballet theater was approved by Glavgosekspertiza, the state body in charge of building permits, after 286 objections from experts were removed from the design, according to the web site of the North-Western Directorate for the Construction, Reconstruction and Restoration of St. Petersburg, or NWDCRR, the regional representative of the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography.
A design by world-renowned architect Dominique Perrault has been reworked by the Russian firm Georekonstruktsya-Fundamentproekt since a contract with the architect’s French practice, which won an international competition to design Mariinsky II in 2003, was annulled in January this year.
Responding to reports that the cost of the building had soared, officials said these had been “optimized” and the quoted sum of 9.535 billion rubles ($369.4 million) is significantly less than the one calculated by Perrault’s office.
The initial sum of 6.07 billion rubles ($235.5 millon) was “just a rough calculation of the architectural concept” prepared for the competition, not to be confused with the “serious document of the project’s detailed calculation of 11.2 billion rubles ($433.8 million), submitted by Perrault’s company in October 2006,”  the NWDCRR’s  head of public relations, Yekaterina Bogolyubova told the St. Petersburg Times on Thursday.
The estimate was improved through the calculation of cost of different materials and technology, she said. 
As for the changes in the design, “you won’t be able to see the difference,” Bogolyubova said.
“It’s true that the building now looks rather different from its 2003 version, but these changes didn’t happen overnight,” she said.
“If, originally, the building’s dome looked airy, almost like a golden veil, now the structure looks much more solid, but these changes were made by Perrault himself long ago before the project was handed over to the Russian architects,” Bogolyubova said in a telephone interview.
After the project was improved by Russian planners, Perrault’s design  remained almost unchanged with the exception of first floor open galleries designed to help visitor evacuation in case of fire, she said.
Other changes include making the theater’s roof capable of bearing heavy snowfalls and coordinating the dome with the building’s frame, NWDCRR’s website reported Wednesday.
In 2006, Perrault’s design failed to get approval from the Russian government due to “criticism of a serious nature,” according to a statement from NWDCRR, published in January. 
The building’s safety, stability and the absence of coordination between the design of its different parts were among the prime concerns of the state.  
After the approval was not given, Perrault called Mariinsky II “the abandoned project.” 
In a statement published Jan. 29, Perrault said that from 2003 his company had been developing a detailed project, strictly adhering to the deadlines. 
 “Once again this situation clearly demonstrates the difficulties in organization of real cultural and technological cooperation with Russia,” Perrault said.

TITLE: Governor Supports Liberal For Post
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Having failed to elect a city ombudsman for nine successive years, St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly will make a new attempt on Wednesday.
Human rights advocate Yuly Rybakov has received surprise backing from Governor Valentina Matviyenko, a target of Rybakov’s criticism in the past. A former political prisoner, a fierce critic of City Hall’s policies and a member of liberal party Yabloko, which has also irked Matviyenko with relentless and uncompromising attacks on her record, Rybakov is one of the most unlikely figures in the city’s political landscape to receive such an endorsement.
Competing with Rybakov will be Natalya Yevdokimova, an advisor to Sergei Mironov, speaker of the Federation Council; and United Russia parliamentarian Igor Mikhailov, who previously suggested that the city ombudsman’s position is superfluous and should be scrapped altogether.
It is not uncommon for the parliament’s lawmakers to act against their declared goals or principles. In 2005, during his tenure as a lawmaker for the Party of Life, Stanislav Zybin campaigned to close the city’s Charter Court. But this did not stop him from becoming the judge presiding over the court later that year.
The United Russia faction, which boasts 23 out of the 50 seats in the city parliament, and the Communist faction that has 9 seats said they would support Mikhailov in Wednesday’s vote. 
A group of local human rights advocates and liberal politicians sent an open letter to the parliament warning that Mikhailov’s victory would be a farce and calling the candidate a puppet manipulated by pro-government political forces.
Regional ombudsmen are elected by local assemblies to ensure the protection of citizens’ rights in a range of spheres, from consumer rights to freedom of the press. 
There are 34 ombudsmen in Russia, although there are 88 subjects in the Russian Federation and each region has the right to elect an ombudsman. The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly has been trying unsuccessfully to elect an ombudsman for the past nine years. 
“The main thing that is wrong with Mikhailov is not his notorious claims that the job of ombudsman is unimportant but the man’s servility,” said political analyst Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the political council of the local branch of Yabloko. “In the whole of St. Petersburg he is only willing to protect the interests of one voter — the governor — with the exception, of course, of his own people. So far he has supported the governor’s every step.”
Yury Vdovin, deputy head of St. Petersburg’s branch of the international human rights group Citizens’ Watch, says that top-level city authorities have never been interested in having an independently-minded ombudsman in the city, largely because the city administration is itself responsible for many human rights abuses. 
“The right person for the job must be someone who is unbiased and equally distanced from all structures, be they judicial bodies or the administration,” Vdovin said. “There has always been a very strong pro-governor lobby in the city parliament, and such a person would never stand a chance of being elected.” 
Human rights advocates often complain that it proves difficult for a candidate with a background in non-governmental organizations to get elected, whereas former state officials, civil servants and law enforcement agents have proved more successful. 
Maxim Reznik, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko, questioned Matviyenko’s sincerity in endorsing Rybakov and suggested the governor may be playing tricks with citizens in order to improve her public image, which has recently suffered in a series of controversial moves, including her applying pressure against opposition rallies and her unpopular support for the construction of a city center skyscraper to house energy giant Gazprom’s headquarters.
While some critics say that in modern Russia — notorious for corruption, violations of human rights and a system of justice that is often accused of not being even-handed — it is more honest to live without an ombudsman, Vishnevsky said that a respected human rights advocate in the job, even if they seem toothless enthusiasts who set themselves against a corrupt machine, can do much to help the people.
“The police and prosecutors cannot afford to ignore or tell lies to such a person because the next day the ombudsman will go public, call them liars, put them to shame, and be trusted,” Vishnevsky said. “The tragedy is that this sort of person is not getting elected, and we often see token figures in the job across the country.”
Human rights activist Leonid Romankov, who ran unsuccessfully for the ombudsman’s job in 2003, said at this stage doing the job well requires an ability to deal with law enforcement agencies and the judicial system.
“It is important to be able to deal with people like, for instance, the head of the city police, since the police are infamous for using violence against those they detain; the city’s prosecutor general, because the judicial system is known to be tied to and serving the administration; the head of the local prisons department of the Justice Ministry, because prisons are overcrowded and the conditions are horrendous, and so on,” he explained.

TITLE: Food Poisoning Spoils Enka’s Recipe for Success
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MENDELEYEVO, Moscow Region — About 100 shabbily dressed men waited patiently in a snaking line to the front door of a peeling wooden shack that serves as a canteen.
In a small village, just off Leningradskoye Shosse, and very far from home, lunch was being served at the Morozovka camp for migrant construction workers.
Despite it being a workday, the laborers, instead of working on the construction of the $600 million Sheremetyevo-3 terminal, were recovering.
Last week the camp was one of two sites at the center of a major health scare when food given to the workers was suspected of causing a salmonella outbreak that left several hundred workers hospitalized.
Police began a criminal investigation into the suspected food poisoning, and Enka, the Turkish firm building Sheremetyevo’s new international terminal, could face losing its right to hire foreign laborers. Such a ban would hit Enka hard. Enka, like its main competitors, relies heavily on migrant labor at its work sites, which have included Moskva-City and IKEA.
Morozovka, one of the camps run by Enka, is a fenced-off hodgepodge of a half-dozen low, long barracks. A former vacation resort, it houses six men to a room and 600 men in all from Turkey, Russia and various former Soviet republics, mainly Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Such camps, where workers can earn less than $350 per month, are worlds away from the skyscrapers, Western consultants and billion-dollar deals of Moscow’s surging real estate market.
On Tuesday afternoon, with construction crews decimated by the outbreak, the three rickety minibuses that ferry workers on the daily trip of roughly 20 kilometers to their work stood idle by the compound’s gate.
Ali, a gaunt man in a grubby, open-necked shirt and crumbling sandals, who had moved from Turkey to find work several years ago, stood at the back of the lunch line.
“Yes, I was ill,” he said in broken Russian. “We were all ill, about 1,000 of us, but I am better now.” He thought that the outbreak had come from eggs, he said. Like his workmates, he said he did not want to give his full name, for fear of being fired.
Next to Ali, a middle-aged man with graying hair, who spoke only the odd word of Russian, nodded his head in response to a vomiting gesture. He said, “Yes,” and smiled, revealing a pair of gleaming gold incisors. When asked if they would agree to be photographed, the men were quick to refuse.
“They have forbidden us from talking and we would lose our jobs if they found out,” Ali said.
At the entrance to one of the barracks, just past a line of four wooden outhouses, men stood in torn pajamas behind white tape meant nominally to demarcate a quarantine zone. Sitting in an office inside, Enka’s personnel director, Azamat Kutlugildin, recounted the sequence of events.
“On June 19 in the evening two workers fell ill and then a further eight and so on,” Kutlugidlin said. “We soon called in the emergency medical services.”
The local authorities said in a statement the infection began at another camp, Iskorka, about 20 kilometers from Morozovka. 
The outbreak spread to Morozovka three days later, the statement said.
This week, entrance was barred to the Iskorka camp and a security guard said all the workers had been taken away.
Andrei Barkovsky, a spokesman for Moscow region Governor Boris Gromov, said that Enka workers from two sites were taken to about 10 hospitals across the region. As of Tuesday, 232 workers were still hospitalized, local authorities said.
“According to current information, the illness has been diagnosed as salmonella. It has been established that the food was delivered to the construction workers from Moscow,” the Moscow region prosecutor’s office said in a statement Monday.
Despite local officials blaming the outbreak on salmonella in the food given to the workers, Kutlugidlin remained skeptical.
“It was not salmonella. No one has shown me any official forms showing that it is salmonella from our food,” he said. “Most likely those first two [workers] brought some sort of infection into the camp.”
Kutlugidlin shrugged off suggestions that construction work at Sheremetyevo was being hampered, and insisted that almost all the sickened workers were now better.
“Today we received permission to get back to work. Yesterday and today we had days off, but tomorrow we will go back to work,” he said.
“I myself ate at that very canteen on the day that the outbreak happened. I fell ill as well, but now I am better,” he said. “Now almost all the people are already better. There are some in this building who are still under observation but they are not ill.”
Aeroflot, a major partner in the Sheremetyevo-3 project, insisted Wednesday that work on the terminal had been restarted and would not be delayed by the sickness outbreak. Talks were going on with subcontractors about hiring extra labor, the airline said in a statement.
Work on Sheremetyevo-3 began as long ago as 2001 but has been delayed by an ownership dispute. The new terminal is intended to be the airport’s showcase facility, in place of the current international terminal that was built for the 1980 Olympic Games.
The sickness outbreak could have far more serious repercussions for Enka, a company with almost 20 years of experience in Russia.
After prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the causes of the outbreak, reports surfaced that Enka could be stripped of its license to employ foreign laborers.
“There is this possibility and that has been spoken about,” Kutlugidlin confirmed.
He said that he had met with the head of the Health and Social Development Ministry’s watchdog, chief epidemiologist Gennady Onishchenko, in the past few days, in an attempt to resolve the situation.
Repeated calls to Onishchenko’s office for comment went unanswered this week.
The regional prosecutor’s office said the workers who fell ill and the managers at Enka would be questioned as part of the criminal investigation.
A spokeswoman for Enka’s managing director, Burak Ozdogan, said company officials were meeting Wednesday to discuss the matter. Ozdugan would not comment further, she said.
Asked about conditions at the Morozovka camp, Kutlugildin said it had been checked repeatedly and approved by government agencies.
A statement from the administration in the Solnechnogorsky district, where the outbreaks occurred, however, criticized Enka over its lack of care for its workers, saying that local authorities had been forced to step in and feed them.
“Due to the failure of ... Enka to fulfill its obligations toward the workers that remained behind in the camps, hot food was handed out,” the statement said.
The local administration said it had fed 1,200 people on Friday and 550 on Saturday.
Samad Shokhin, a spokesman for Migration and Law, an information center that helps migrant workers from Central Asia, said the incident highlighted how difficult conditions were for the workers.
“It is difficult to say that the conditions in such camps are adequate,” Shokhin said. 
“These men come looking for work and are willing to live in any conditions to earn money.”
The workers are usually paid either by the hour or the job and send remittances of about $200 per month to their families back home, he said. Workers were rarely provided with medical insurance and often cheated out of money by their employers, he said.
Shokhin said it was not the first instance of widespread food poisoning on major construction projects, and cited as a recent example the construction site at a major new Moscow hotel set to open soon.

TITLE: 17 Jailed For HIV Infections
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan — A Kazakh court jailed 17 health workers on Wednesday for infecting dozens of babies with HIV but provoked outrage from parents for sparing four senior officials from incarceration.
Ten babies have died as a result of being infected.
The doctors and officials went on trial in the southern city of Shymkent on charges of criminal negligence for allowing the infections through blood transfusions.

TITLE: FSB Kills Ex-Gitmo Prisoner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A man formerly held in the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was killed Wednesday in a shootout with security agents in Kabardino-Balkariya, the Federal Security Service said.
Ruslan Odizhev was killed amid gunfire that erupted when agents tried to arrest him and another man, the FSB said in a brief statement.
The statement said Odizhev was a suspect in the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk and that he took part in a 2005 attack on police and government facilities in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkariya. 
That attack left 139 people dead, including 94 militants.
The FSB said Odizhev was the “spiritual leader” of Yarmuk, an Islamic extremist organization connected to an array of violence in the region.
The regional prosecutor’s office said Odizhev was killed in Nalchik and that three homemade explosive devices were found on his body. 
It said he and a rebel named Anzor Tengizov were cornered by agents in the courtyard of an apartment building across the street from a mosque in the central part of the city.
Odizhev was one of seven Russians released from Guantanamo Bay in 2004; his whereabouts recently had been unknown.
In March, Human Rights Watch charged that the seven had been tortured or harassed and abused by law enforcement agents since their return.

TITLE: No Warming of Ties Seen Under Brown
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gordon Brown’s appointment as British prime minister Wednesday will do little to thaw frosty political ties with Russia, analysts said.
For Russia, the Scot is something of an unknown quantity. The former chancellor of the exchequer is not a Russia expert, and his grounding in economics may act as his political compass.
“He will have to walk a tightrope,” said Alex Bigham, spokesman for the Foreign Policy Centre, a Labour Party-connected think tank in London.
Bigham explained that Brown’s priority would be to prod Russia on human rights and diplomatic issues while encouraging bilateral investment.
Maria Ordzhonikidze, secretary general of the Brussels-based EU-Russia Centre, said Brown’s policy on Russia would depend on his policy toward the European Union. “The more independent the U.K.’s policy is from the EU, the stronger position Russia will find itself in with its ‘divide and rule’ approach to its European partners,” Ordzhonikidze said in e-mailed comments.
Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of the Politika think tank and chairman of the Public Chamber’s international affairs commission, said Brown’s premiership would marginally benefit Russia.
“He has no established line on Russia, but he is less pro-American and less of a Europhile,” he said.
Nikonov said Brown would not shift Britain’s policy on sticking points such as extradition requests.
Relations, already fraught by a spy scandal last year, in which Russia accused Britons of spying with fake rock, and by a dispute over the British Council, plummeted to a post-Soviet low after Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence officer with British citizenship, was murdered in London in November.
Britain wants Russia to hand over former intelligence officer Andrei Lugovoi to stand trial for the death. President Vladimir Putin has called the request “stupidity.”
Russia, in turn, wants Britain to extradite businessman Boris Berezovsky on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Berezovsky, who calls the charges politically motivated, is to be tried in absentia in a Moscow court on Monday, and has told his lawyers not to participate in the proceedings.
Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen rebel envoy also living in London, is wanted in Russia on charges of terrorism.
“You need the political will to solve these problems,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday. “We are hoping that [Brown’s appointment] will prove to have a positive effect.”
Peskov said he did not know Putin’s feelings about Brown. “Economic relations are good. Improving other relations must be a high priority,” he said.
Brown’s spokesman, Damien McBride, could not be reached.
The Middle East Quartet — the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia — announced late Wednesday that it had chosen former Prime Minister Tony Blair as its special envoy to kickstart peace talks in the region. The decision came after a reluctant Russia finally signed on.
The British Embassy was unaware of Brown’s immediate plans for Russia.

TITLE: Poll: Trust in Putin Falls Abroad
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Although President Vladimir Putin is popular at home, his worldwide image has declined, a survey released on Wednesday said.
Only in China, Ukraine and a handful of African nations do most people express trust in Putin’s foreign policy, according to an international survey by the U.S. nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
But in a measure of how unpopular U.S. President George W. Bush has become, the poll showed that his foreign policy is less trusted than Putin’s by U.S. allies Britain, Germany and Canada.
“Even though there is a mixed view of the United States around the world, there is increasing disapproval of the principal cornerstones of [U.S.] foreign policy,” Pew chief Andrew Kohut said.
About half in the United States say they have little or no trust in either Bush’s or Putin’s conduct of foreign affairs.

TITLE: Alfa Sees Risk Of State Attack
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank said it might become a target for state acquisition or liquidation in view of developments surrounding Russneft, Yukos and Sakhalin-2.
In a note to investors that accompanied a $500 million Eurobond float offer, the bank said recent state takeovers of private companies was a risk factor that investors face in Russia.
A tax investigation into Yukos resulted in the imprisonment of its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the sale of its assets, while both the government and Gazprom pressured Shell to relinquish its control of Sakhalin-2, the bank said in the memorandum, Vedomosti reported Wednesday. The bank said both Yukos and Sakhalin-2 put a question mark on the security of private property, the rights of investors and the independence of the courts in Russia. In addition, “they negatively reflected on investment in the Russian economy, especially in the oil and gas sector,” it said.
Alfa Bank’s owners have a stake in TNK-BP, which last week sold control of the Kovykta gas field to Gazprom after coming under state pressure.
The bank said it had cut back on its business dealings with Russneft, whose owner Mikhail Gutseryev is at the center of a tax investigation, but “there is no guarantee that either the bank or its clients will not become the next victim.”

TITLE: Music Giants Form  
Digital Platform
AUTHOR: By Gavin Haycock
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Two of the world’s biggest music giants and two Russian record labels launched a wholesale digital distribution platform in Russia on Thursday, a market dominated by piracy across the entire entertainment industry.
Warner Music and Sony BMG said they had formed a new business called Digital Access with Russian industrial group, Access Industries and music labels Soyuz and Nikitin Records.
The new Moscow-based platform will distribute music, full-track audio downloads, ringtones, video clips and color images into both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Digital Access is expected to officially start trading during the fourth quarter.
As a wholesale offering it will work with rights owners, content providers, mobile operators and on-line stores in making music available from the companies’ extensive catalogues rather than dealing with consumers directly.
“This is a strategic investment that we believe will play a pivotal role in unlocking the potential of the dynamic Russian music market,” said Warner Music International Chairman and Chief Executive Patrick Vien. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Warner Music entered the Russian market late last year with a deal to supply songs and ringtones to Russia’s No. 2 mobile phone operator Vimpelcom and music companies have been signing deals with mobile phone operators, partly as a way to try and combat widespread piracy in the country.
Earlier this month, U.S. lawmakers branded Russia and China as the two biggest copyright thieves in the world.
The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which represents movie, software, music and book companies, has estimated that its members lost $2.18 billion in Russia in 2006.
Digital Access Chairman Oleg Tumanov said the new platform would try and establish relations with all market players interested in developing a legitimate digital content market in Russia and the CIS to help shape standards and business models.
Access Industries is a New York-based conglomerate focused on media, real estate, natural resources and chemicals headed by Russian-born American industrialist and founder Len Blavatnik, a billionaire who made his fortune in the oil industry.

TITLE: Fiat Launches Joint Venture
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MILAN — Italian automaker Fiat SpA announced plans Thursday to form a joint venture with Russia’s Samotlor-NN to produce the Daily, a light commercial vehicle used to carry goods or as a minibus or ambulance.
The companies plan to invest about 50 million euros ($67.2 million) in the venture, with Fiat’s Iveco commercial vehicle unit holding a 51 percent share and the Russian company 49 percent.
The companies aim to produce 25,000 units, mostly for sale in Russia and other ex-Soviet states.
In a separate deal, Fiat said its auto parts unit Magneti Marelli signed a letter of intent to create a joint venture with Avtopribor of Russia to make electronic instrument clusters for motor vehicles. 
Magneti Marelli will have 51 percent and Avtopribor will have 49 percent.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Reserves Rise</b>
MOSCOW  (Bloomberg) — Russia’s foreign currency and gold reserves rose to a record $406.6 billion in the week ended June 22, after falling in the previous seven days, the central bank said.
The reserves, the world’s third biggest, advanced by $1.6 billion, after shrinking by $1.5 billion in the previous week to $405 billion, the bank said in an e-mailed statement Thursday.

<b>Dairy Board</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Wimm-Bill-Dann, the Russian dairy group, elected a senior Groupe Danone SA executive to the board after the Paris-based yogurt maker lifted its stake in the company, Interfax reported Thursday.
Shareholders voted in Danone Vice President Jacques Vincent at an annual meeting Wednesday, the news service said, citing an unidentified person familiar with the meeting’s results.
Igor Kostikov, the former chairman of Russia’s Federal Securities Commission, was also elected to the board, according to Interfax. 

<b>Eurasia Loss </b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Eurasia Mining Plc, a precious metals explorer, posted a narrower full-year loss after administrative costs declined.
Eurasia posted a loss of 989,522 pounds ($1.98 million), or 0.81 pence a share, from 1.44 million pounds, 1.43 pence, a year earlier, London-based Eurasia said Thursday in a statement distributed by the Regulatory News Service.
The miner plans to raise additional financing over the next 12 months, the statement said.

<b>Alitalia Jobs</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Air One SpA owner Carlo Toto plans to slash 2,350 jobs at Alitalia SpA, Corriere della Sera reported, citing a plan he presented to labor unions Wednesday.
Toto wants to add one more flight a day on the Rome-Milan corridor, the most lucrative route in Italy. He plans to push 550 Alitalia employees into early retirement and eliminate 1,400 ground staff, 100 flight attendants and 300 pilots.

<b>Gas Bottlenecks</b>
ASTANA (Bloomberg) — Kazakhstan has cut its forecasts for output of natural and petroleum gas by 12 percent because of pipeline bottlenecks.
The nation now plans to pump 70 billion cubic meters of gas in 2015, according to a Kazakh Energy Ministry report distributed in London on Thursday. Baktykozha Izmukhambetov, Kazakh Minister of Energy, said a year ago that Kazakhstan planned to pump 79.4 billion cubic meters in 2015.

<b>Yevroset President</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Yevroset, Russia’s largest mobile-phone retailer, appointed Alexei Chuikin president as the company prepares for a share sale next year. Chuikin will replace Eldar Razroyev, who is leaving the company on July 2, Chairman Yevgeny Chichvarkin said Thursday at a press conference in Moscow.

TITLE: Lukoil Profit Falls 23 Percent
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Lukoil, Russia’s largest non-state oil producer, said profit fell 23 percent in the first quarter as costs rose and prices declined.
Net income slid to $1.3 billion, or $1.56 a share, from $1.69 billion, or $2.04 a share, a year earlier, Moscow-based Lukoil said in a statement distributed by the Regulatory News Service on Thursday. That’s five percent less than the $1.37 billion median estimate of nine analysts in a Bloomberg survey.
Rising export taxes, transportation and operating expenses, and declining oil prices have eaten into the company’s profit, which reached a 10-quarter low of $1.04 billion in the fourth quarter. Lukoil shares pared gains to 1,993.8 rubles, up 0.4 percent, at 12:35 p.m. in Moscow, after rising as much as 2.2 percent earlier Thursday.
“These negative factors were partly offset by increased hydrocarbon production,’’ Lukoil said in a separate statement today. Revenue rose 4.7 percent to $15.7 billion from $15 billion a year earlier. Lukoil boosted output of oil and natural gas available for sale by 7.3 percent from a year earlier.
Operating expenses advanced 56 percent to $1.44 billion, as the cost of extracting resources rose. Excise and export taxes climbed 22 percent to $3.27 billion.
Lukoil plans to spend $100 billion by 2016 to almost double output and refining and triple its market value to $200 billion.
The company, 21 percent owned by ConocoPhillips, is expanding in countries with lower tax rates than Russia.

TITLE: Danish Farmers Show That Pigs Can Fly
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Danish farmers are going to make pigs fly after new European Union rules on animal welfare made it longer and riskier to send them to Russia by truck.
Dan-Invest is planning to fly a total of 20,000 pigs this year and next for breeding at its five joint ventures in Russia, board chairman Kent Skaanning said Wednesday.
“Now we are discussing in our company if we should fly the pigs tourist class or business class,” Skaanning said jokingly by telephone from Hemmet, Denmark. “They are going to Russia to work for us, so it has to be business class.”
Pig farming in Russia is growing rapidly, while Denmark offers some of the world’s best breeding stock. But getting the pigs to Russia posed a challenge after EU rules went into effect at the beginning of this year that say livestock can travel no more than 24 hours without a 24-hour rest. Not only do the rules make the four-day trip to Russian farms twice as long, but they also increase the risk of the pigs contracting an infection on the way, Skaanning said.
“It’s important for us to protect the pigs,” he said. “When the pigs reach the destination, we have a risk that they will be ill.”
Flying pigs to Russia will come at twice the cost but take only five hours at most, Skaanning said. He said a Russian airline has offered to fly 600 pigs at a time, he said. That would make about 24 planeloads of pigs.
The pigs will be flown to the Krasnodar region, where Dan-Invest has three joint ventures, and the Tambov region, home to two more ventures. Dan Invest, a group of investors and farmers dedicated to projects in Russia, intends to breed 300,000 pigs every year at just one of its farms in the Tambov region.
The EU introduced the rules on animal transportation in response to concerns voiced by animal rights advocates, said Philip Tod, EU spokesman on health and consumer protection. “We are aware that the conditions for animal transportation can be difficult and there have been many expressions of concern from the public in Europe,” he said by telephone from Brussels.
EU officials believe the new rules will not harm trade because they provide a balance between the need to trade and animal welfare protection, he said.
Russian law sets no rules for livestock transportation, said Alexei Alexeyenko, a spokesman for the Federal Service for Veterinarian and Vegetation Sanitary Supervision. But that could change in the next three years after Russia and the EU started a project earlier this month to harmonize their agricultural legislation, he said. 
It is common practice now for veterinarians to accompany shipments of livestock and allow the animals periods of rest, Alexeyenko said. “Owners are interested in their livestock arriving alive and well,” he said.

TITLE: More Comfortable With a Familiar Agenda
AUTHOR: By Alexander Golts
TEXT: It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that the lead up to the meeting between President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush beginning July 1 would be spent discussing whether the two would be able to reach agreement related to Moscow’s offer for the joint use of an early warning radar station in Azerbaijan.
Skeptics about the offer argue that the Gabala station is designed to chart the path of ballistic missiles and predict their trajectories. If it is clear that a rocket is headed for Russia, the military and political leadership is informed of the fact, giving them sufficient time to order a counterstrike. The system was built in the era of mutual assured destruction, when security was guaranteed by the ability to inflict severe damage on any aggressor. This is why the Gabala station has no targeting capabilities. For this reason it is unlikely that it can be integrated into the type of anti-missile system the United States is trying to develop.
Optimists argue that the necessary upgrades would be much less expensive and effective than building a new array in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Both of these arguments seem pointless to me.
The fate of Putin’s proposal has little, if anything, to do with the ability of the radar location system in Gabala to intercept Iranian rockets. The argument surrounding the station is a case of pure politics.
In a move directed at U.S. public opinion, Bush has decided to begin the deployment of a strategic missile defense system, even though its effectiveness is seriously in doubt. The Czech Republic and Poland, looking to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States, and not at all because they are afraid of Iranian rockets, expressed their willingness to allow elements of the system to be installed in their countries. Putin’s stance is that the U.S. system represents a threat to Russia, and he has tried to frighten Washington with threats of an “asymmetrical” response, including retargeting Russian missiles at Europe. All of this bears only an oblique relation to any kind of serious military planning or analysis of real threats and risks.
All the same, Bush is unlikely to make the choice between the Czech and Azeri radar station options based on which is more effective from a security standpoint. He will choose based on a consideration of what is more important politically: to demonstrate strategic cooperation with Moscow or to show solidarity with “New Europe.” The choice is a difficult one, and the Bush administration is likely to put off making it for as long as possible. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already said that the Gabala option might not preclude the installations in the Czech Republic and Poland. So the Russian side raised the stakes, with the chief of the General Staff, Yury Baluyevsky, quickly accusing the Pentagon of trying to undermine the Russian proposal.
In a situation like this the simplest solution is for both sides to settle down for extended negotiations. Baluyevsky said that talks between Russian and U.S. military officials could open after the two presidents meet at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, the scene for next week’s talks.
That there will be talks at all has to be seen as a clear victory for Putin. Since the signing of the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions in 2001, he has been trying to bring about a renewal of talks covering nuclear weapons. This is not because Moscow sees the U.S. missiles as a serious threat to its security. It is simply because the nuclear sphere is the one area in which Russia is almost on even terms with the world’s sole remaining superpower. The very fact that discussions are being held raises Russia’s status, returning it to that of a great military power.
Washington has steadfastly avoided these sorts of negotiations. But now, when Putin is virtually accusing the United States of preparing for nuclear aggression, Washington can sit down to talks to demonstrate its peaceful intentions.
But that’s not even the biggest victory for Putin. It appears that he has been able to change the agenda in relations between Russia and the West completely. If Putin still plans to hold on to power after his second term expires next year, contrary to constitutional stipulations, it helps to stir up Western reaction. How else can you explain his angry jibes about foreigners trying to “instruct” Russia. Abandoning all diplomacy in the days leading up to the meeting with Bush, Putin has reverted to the propaganda of the Soviet era to brand the United States: “We have never used nuclear weapons against a civilian population. We have never sprayed chemical agents over thousands of square kilometers and never poured on any small country a volume of bombs seven times greater than that dropped during all of World War II, as was the case with Vietnam. Yes, there is much to talk about in the history of every country and of every people. It is unacceptable to allow them to fix guilt upon us. What about them?”
Putin is altogether unwilling to listen to uncomfortable questions about rights and freedoms in Russia, so he has tried to shift attention to the agenda of more than 20 years ago — the problems of conventional weapons in Europe and of strategic anti-missile defenses. In so doing, Putin is acting as if the 10 U.S. anti-missile interceptors to be installed in Poland by 2012 are a threat to Russian security. This has allowed him to set the agenda.
Western leaders, given their own inability to stop Kremlin backsliding on democracy, will gladly go along on discussing problems related to weapons and military technology.

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

TITLE: Nanotech Offers Little Science
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov has compared the country’s nanotechnology program with the Soviet atomic project. Like the atomic project, according to Ivanov, the nanotechnology program will alter the times.
It should be noted that there is one big difference between the Nanotech corporation, spared the requirement to pay taxes and with access to all the state money it needs, and the Soviet atomic project.
The atomic program was headed by the great nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov.
The nanotechnology project will be headed by Mikhail Kovalchuk, who was unable to gain membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences, and one of two brothers who former State Duma Speaker Ivan Rybkin christened “Putin’s wallet.”
The atomic project involved great scientists like Yuly Khariton, Yakov Zeldovich, Vitaly Khlopin, Andrei Sakharov, Zoya Yershova and Georgy Flyorov, who already serving at the front in World War II, wrote Josef Stalin a desperate letter calling for work on a prototype for an atomic bomb.
The members of the commission for nanotechnology include Evraz co-owner Alexander Abramov, Severstal general director Alexei Mordashov, Rosneft head Sergei Bogdanchikov and Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin.
Little is known of the scientific capabilities of Yakunin, Mordashov and Bogdanchikov. The reader can go look up the index of academic citations for Kovalchuk on his or her own.
Soviet science was founded by idealists — Abram Ioffe, Dmitry Rozhdestvensky and Leonid Mandelshtam — great minds who studied in the West and returned to the Soviet Union to found scientific schools.
The Soviet Union deceived the scientists the first time, cutting them off from active scientific intercourse outside the country, after which the physicists began to run away.
It betrayed them a second time when the shootings began. At the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute, one of the country’s greatest scientific schools, three department heads were shot: Lev Shubnikov, Lev Rosenkevich and Vadim Gorsky. Both heads of the institute, Alexander Leipunsky and then Ivan Obreimov, were arrested. Two communists, the Austrian Alexander Viseberg and the German Friedrich Hautersman, were graciously handed to Adolf Hitler after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Stalin remembered the scientists when he learned of the atomic bomb. As one scientist joked darkly, the chief consequence of the atomic project was the salvation of Russian scientists. Even when Soviet scientists put forward pioneering ideas — in the field of radar, rockets or jet engines — Stalin only became interested when spies informed him of similar projects in the West. Questions of technical progress were decided by the secret services and not by scientists.
The scientists were not to be trusted under any circumstances. The memoirs of scientist Anatoly Alexandrov recount a comical incident. In 1949, he was sitting up at night coating a semi-sphere of plutonium with nickel. Suddenly, a group from the secret police entered. “What are you doing,” they asked. “I’m coating this semi-sphere of plutonium with nickel,” he answered. “How do you know it’s plutonium?” they asked.
When the Soviet Union fell, scientists fled West, while the secret police — the ones who asked how Alexandrov knew it was plutonium — stayed behind to rule the country.
And now they are starting up a new atomic project, improved and without the scientist. And, of course, without a bomb at the end.
What I’m afraid will be at the end are Swiss bank accounts. The scientists were unable to decide where funding would come from and where it would go. Those in charge of the nanotechnology don’t suffer from this handicap. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.

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

TITLE: Hopper’s highway
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Dennis Hopper, the American actor, director and artist, was in St. Petersburg last week to open an exhibition of his work at the State Hermitage Museum. Known primarily as an actor, Hopper’s biography reads like a catalogue of some of the most celebrated films made in Hollywood in the last 50 years. But that didn’t stop him from also becoming an artist; making photographs, paintings and assemblages that share the same concerns as some of the most important art of the 20th century.
As a young man just starting out, Hopper was signed to a contract at Warner Brothers in 1953, during the last days of the classic Hollywood studio system. Things were off to a good start for the handsome 18-year old when he acted in his first film for the legendary director Nicholas Ray. That film, “Johnny Guitar” (1954) starring Joan Crawford, became a cult classic and received great acclaim from the likes of French director and film theorist FranIois Truffaut and other leading lights of European cinema. It was Ray who went on to make “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), starring James Dean with whom Hopper worked in both that film and in “Giant” (1956) — two of the ill-fated Dean’s three films. About Dean, Hopper has always been clear. “There was never anyone like him. He was one of the greatest actors I ever met.”
But Hopper’s day in the sun was to be short-lived, and it wasn’t long before the combination of shake-ups at the major studios and a clash of tempers landed Hopper out of a job and set him on a path that would see him crossing the U.S. and meeting everyone who was anyone in the world of art and cinema. 
After notoriously giving a director a hard time by refusing direction for more than 80 takes over several days, it was nearly impossible for Hopper to find work again until the late ’60s. During that period he became a member of the Actor’s Studio in New York where he perfected his craft with Lee Strasberg alongside Shelly Winters, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, Martin Landau and many others.
If Hopper’s career as an actor had more downs than ups during the early-’60s, everything changed for him with “Easy Rider” (1969). Hopper’s first directorial effort, he co-wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern and Peter Fonda and together they found a new way to make films that launched the era of independent film production. Filling the void left by the disappearance of classical Hollywood, Hopper’s first directorial effort was so successful that it simultaneously created a platform for  counterculture and single-handedly ignited the youth market.
Never one to compromise his vision, Hopper was given carte blanche for his following film and made the over-the-top “The Last Movie” (1971) — which it just about was for Hopper. A daring mix of high-art self-referentiality and slapstick comedy, it had more to do with Godard and the French New Wave than most audiences were prepared for and its spectacular failure (though well-regarded today) kept Hopper from directing for almost a decade. 
Following with the brilliant “Out of the Blue” (1980) which Hopper also directed, and rock-legend Neil Young’s eccentric “Human Highway” (1982), Hopper was in danger of sailing off into the nether world of booze and drugs. But starting with “Apocalypse Now” (1979), through to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986), and beyond, Hopper has created some of the most memorable characters ever seen on screen. 
As an artist, Hopper started to take photographs in the early ’60s when he was between films. “I am a compulsive creator,” the actor said, “who started filling the void between acting jobs with art.” And at certain points in his volatile career he had more than enough time to put his camera and unique sensibility to work. 
“They used to call me the tourist,” Hopper said, “because I always had my camera hanging around my neck.”
But far from being a tourist, Hopper was an intimate of some of the greatest names in Hollywood and New York during the turbulent ’60s. During this tumultuous and fertile period in popular culture, Hopper made beautiful pictures of his friends, in the process documenting an era and prefiguring artists like Nan Goldin and a whole host of photographers who blur the distinction between fine art, journalism and the diarist’s craft. 
With his photos of artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Wallace Berman and Andy Warhol, Hopper makes history sing while at the same time creating images that capture the mood of the era and show, perhaps better than anyone else, what it was like to be in Los Angeles during the ’60s. 
“Los Angeles is not a pretty town. It looks like it was built for the next earthquake,” he quipped. But the work at the Hermitage doesn’t betray this and feels like a love song to that and the other cities on which he turned his lens. 
The exhibition on view at the Hermitage, with its billboard-sized paintings, assemblages, film, and now classic black and white images, is one of the best to hit town in a long while. When Hopper and Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky opened it last Thursday, Hopper said he felt it was “important to show work from the ’60s when there was a great wall between us [Soviet Russia and the U.S.].” 
Also addressing the importance of the work in Russia, long-time friend and an artist/filmmaker himself, Julian Schnabel flew in from Cannes to lend his not inconsiderable weight to the proceedings. 
He made his opinion clear by saying,  “It is important for people to understand the privilege of seeing such important work here.”
A joint project between the Hermitage and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation with support from RIGroup, the show firmly places Hopper in context while letting the work speak to a new generation.
Hopper, who has always had difficulty integrating the worlds of actor and artist, said, “It was difficult for people to take me seriously. At the time, they just thought, ‘Who is this guy? He’s just an actor’.” 
Flash-forward 40 years and there’s no chance of anyone not taking Hopper seriously anymore — it’s all there for everyone to see; up on the wall and larger than life.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Polish punk is making itself felt in the city, with <b>19 Wiosen</b> having arrived in St. Petersburg to perform at Tsokol last Sunday. 
The band, which has been in Russia for about a month traveling in its van to such places as Volgograd, will perform on Friday at new bar <b>Belgrad</b>. The bar was launched by Fidel owners and Dva Samaliota musicians Anton Belyankin and Andrei Gradovich earlier this month.
19 Wiosen formed in 1989 in Lodz, a city in central Poland that the band describes as the “Polish Manchester” on its web site — “because of its 19th century factory architecture, fallen industry, full unemployment and, of course... a strong tradition of underground and specific, alternative music.”
Acknowledging the strong influence of its home city, the band is said to have been influenced by early 1970s proto-punk bands such as The Stooges, 1980s U.K. bands such as The Fall and Stranglers, East European urban folk — and Johann Sebastian Bach. 
The band’s lyrics, written by vocalist Marcin Pryt, have been described as “apocalyptic” and “futuristic” (English translations are available on 19 Wiosen’s web site.)
The band, which wrote and recorded its latest album, “Pedofil” (The Paedophile), earlier this year will perform alongside <b>Pitsunda 84</b>, an electro-pop punk project by 19 Wiosen’s guitarist Konstanty Usenko, and <b>Processor Plus</b>, an electro project by the band’s keyboard player Grzegorz Fajngold. Usenko will also appear as DJ <b>Kostek</b> spinning Communist-era Polish pop music.
Oriented toward punk and alt-rock concerts, Belgrad is a promising addition to the network of indie bars that have grown around the popular student and expat hangout Datscha, which opened three years earlier. 
Another new place to check out is <b>Achtung Baby!</b>, a bar located next to music club Mod, specializing in indie rock and electro-punk under the art direction of Mila Skvortsova, who also performs as DJ Starling.
The allegedly glamorous  <b>Stereoleto</b> “festival,” which has shrunk into a two-part music event this year, will feature Norway’s <b>Datarock</b>, Iceland’s <b>Cocktail Vomit</b> and Japan’s <b>DJ Krush</b> on its second and last night on Friday. 
Light Music, the local promoter behind the event, will also bring the German pop band Da Phazz to perform at Verandah More, the summer bar that it books acts for, on Thursday.
Don’t miss a chance to relax on the grass near the Russian Museum listening to some of the city’s leading jazz bands as well as foreign guest musicians when a free outdoor concert takes place as part of the <b>White Night’s Swing</b> jazz festival at 1 p.m. on Saturday.


<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Strings attached?
TEXT: The 8th International KUKART puppetry festival continues this week.

Friday, 29 June
5 p.m. “Hell’s Bells & Furtive Folly”
Compagnie DRIFT, Zurich, Switzerland 
Directors — Beatrice Jaccard, Peter Schelling. The Theater of the Young Spectator (TYuZ)
7 p.m. GALA PERFORMANCE by The Obraztsov State Central Academic Puppet Theater, Moscow, Russia. Director – Yekaterina Obraztsova. Bolshoi Puppet Theater

SatURDAY, 30 June
6 p.m. “Hell’s Bells & Furtive Folly”
Compagnie DRIFT, Zurich, Switzerland. Directors — Beatrice Jaccard, Peter Schelling. The Theater of the Young Spectator (TYuZ)
7 p.m. The Obraztsov State Central Academic Puppet Theater, Moscow, Russia. Director – Yekaterina Obraztsova. Music Hall 
21.00 “Ibsen and Strindberg”
(Russia-Norway-Sweden-Macedonia) White Theater, St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky Museum 

SUNDAY, 1 July
7 p.m. The Obraztsov State Central Academic Puppet Theater, Moscow, Russia. Director – Yekaterina Obraztsova. Music Hall 

MONDAY, 2 July 
8 p.m. CANON DANCE THEATER 
with assistance of the Cultural Committee of the St. Petersburg Administration presents Dance Works Rotterdam (Netherlands):
“Man’s figures/ Good tempered clavier.” Hermitage Theater 

TUESDAY, 6 July 
8 p.m. “Underground”
David Dorfman Dance Company (U.S.). The Theater of the Young Spectator (TYuZ)

TITLE: Time and motion
AUTHOR: By Katya Madrid
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A U.S. video artist mixes imagery of inert and living objects to question the notion of time in works to be shown this summer.

They say repetition is the key to learning, so is it surprising that a college professor should choose it to be the quintessence of his artistic expression? Such is the predominant mechanism that drives the rich and elegant creations of Dr. Peter Freund, a San Francisco Bay Area-based video artist. 
Freund had his St. Petersburg debut last week at the DO Gallery, in the historic center near Letny Sad. The event was a sneak preview of a full retrospective of his work scheduled as part of the Open Cinema International Film Festival of short films to be held at the Peter and Paul Fortress on Aug. 17-19, and the Rodina theater Aug. 21–25 (www.artbereg.ru).
Since DO Gallery opened its doors in March 2006, the gallery has proven to be one of the most reliable places for quality contemporary art in St. Petersburg. It is a curious place that hosts a wide range of events, from film screenings to sculpture exhibitions, graphic arts exhibitions to poetry readings. 
Although all its events are by invitation only, all one needs to do is contact the art director, Yelena Tunina ( tulen@eu.spb.ru ) and express interest in a particular subject matter. The gallery functions as a meeting place of ideas, not simply a place to pass time “for lack of something better to do that evening,” as Tunina says. 
When DO is not having an event, and even when it is, it is also Tunina’s home. This ties into the very roots of the name and concept of the gallery, as DO stems from the Russian word domashniy, or pertaining to the home. But as any worthy artistic endeavor, there are several layers of meaning. DO also refers to the first and last note in an octave; in Chinese, DO means path or way; and in English, we have the verb to do. All of these subtle attributes nicely reflect Tunina’s aspirations for her gallery.
Freund’s work was right at home in this environment. He refers to his films as projects. A project is something one does, but these are videos that are also meant to be projected. Freund examines mass media as a whole, as a means of projecting one’s ideas on to others, and the role of the viewer as the active participant in this process as the receiver and translator of information. Video is a time-based medium. The collection of images that come together are inextricably tied to the time that it takes them to move across the screen, as a projectile missile, by definition, cannot serve its function when still. 
Time is a running theme in Freund’s work. In his film Caption, that uses as its basic structure the Jorge Luis Borges poem “AntelaIion de amor,” we see the words “Fiction of time destroyed.” Though this phrase is not in itself a key moment in this particular film, it reflects a greater attitude of the body of work. 
The title “Time Based Correction,” is both a delicious play on a technical term used in the film industry, and a testament to the idea that time changes meaning and rewrites history. The film uses footage from the Army-McCarthy hearings of spring 1954 to tell its own story about human behavior and body language by carefully choreographing movement through the use of repletion—a favorite technique of the videographer. 
The reorganization of both sound and image means, Freund says, that form and content merge. This is problematic, because, being a purist, the artist does not fill in the soundscape with “noise” that would smooth over the seams. 
The result is to knock the viewer out of the film again and again. How easy it would have been to add the sound of a scratched up old record to make the transitions less jarring. But then, he would risk the drift of our short attention spans, a topic he picks up in the “Insistence of the Letter.” Instead, the audio fabric of the piece is an equal partner to the video in its complexity, as is the written word — in subtitles. 
Certainly the choice of subject matter is not accidental, for political consciousness is present in many of the films — a point that did not escape the Russian audience. Yet, Freund’s work is at least as much about the art of video making, as distinct from the art of filmmaking, as it is about politics. It questions the very nature of communication, and provokes the viewer to think about the art form. There are no simple answers. 
For Freund, art is not politics, and politics is not art, though there is an art and politique to both. The beauty lies on the border between the two. This marginal quality is what sets his work apart from both art flicks and political propaganda. 
Freund also addresses time comparatively. In “Musique Inerte,” the relative time of stone, sensuously photographed statues that lures the viewer into the world of objects, butts against the dizzying pace of humanity. Living flesh flickers in and out of existence, while the monuments to civilization persist, enduring the elements. Time is liquid. 
These films document political life reassembled into a dance of bodies and words. 
They are a play on matter, hypnotic not because of repetition, but rather due to rhythm and light.

TITLE: My brilliant career
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Red-and-black billboards beside the city’s highways feature a single word: “Gastarbeiter,” or guest worker, a German term now often used by Russians to refer to migrant workers from the C.I.S. and further afield. The hoardings are part of a promotional campaign for a debut novel by young writer Eduard Bagirov, which was published last week with a massive print-run of 100,000 copies.
The novel is 80 percent autobiography, Bagirov said in an interview last week, smoking in the publisher’s loft-style office. Like the book’s hero, Yevgeny, the author was born in Turkmenistan to a Russian mother and Azeri father, and came to Moscow at the age of 21 to find work. Both Bagirov and his fictional hero earn their first cash from selling cheap plastic back-massagers and then graduate to working in real estate, transport and construction.
“I’ve had a lot of jobs,” Bagirov said, laughing. “I used to unload sacks at Kazansky train station. Then there were more intellectual jobs: I opened a real estate agency, a transport agency — I worked with passenger buses. I worked as the art director of a club. I was a casting director at a model agency. I’ve done everything.”
Arriving in Moscow with no higher education, relatives or registration documents, Bagirov had to sleep rough at some points, he said. He also had the problem of being a convicted criminal who had served time in prison before his move to the capital — as did the book’s hero. The author didn’t want to specify what he was convicted for, saying only that it wasn’t a serious offense.
The book depicts the ups and downs of Yevgeny’s career. Early on, he makes a mint through door-to-door selling of massagers that “broke two or three days after purchase, whether or not they were used.” But he fails to pay kickbacks to the local mafia, which burns down his office.
He then gets into the real estate business, providing his clients with nonexistent landladies for a modest pre-payment. But then one of the hoaxed clients turns out to have influential relatives, so Yevgeny gets out — just in time — before his colleague is featured on a television crime-watch show.
His next job is in a more legitimate sector, chartering buses, but he soon gets a more tempting offer to organize the construction of state-sector buildings. “You have to provide a relatively good quality of work,” his mentor tells him. “The buildings have to stay standing properly for at least a couple of years.” However, high earning power comes with high risk, and Yevgeny faces a move back to square one.
While the word gastarbeiter is often used to refer to manual laborers who live in Moscow on a temporary basis, Bagirov stressed that the book is not about such workers. “If you’re talking about the unskilled laborers who build roads and houses, those are of course completely different people,” he said. “This book isn’t about them. This book is about thinking people who care about what job they do, who care about how they live.”
The book portrays official discrimination against immigrants, such as police hitting and stealing from traders at the bazaar at Hotel Sevastopol, and also discrimination on a personal level, such as when Yevgeny’s girlfriend calls him “limita” — a Soviet term for guest workers. But Yevgeny himself becomes dismissive of migrant laborers. One dies after falling at his construction site, and the hero thinks angrily, “A worthless Ukrainian roofer — no one even counts them — is able to destroy all my work and contracts.” 
“I don’t want to live in a container,” Bagirov said. “Unskilled laborers come here with a totally different aim. They have families and children in their own countries, they come here just to earn.” The author said that he considered himself a Muscovite after three months in the city and that he never goes back to Turkmenistan. “There’s no reason to. I’m a Russian citizen. I’ve lived in this city for more than a decade. It’s my favorite city. I won’t ever leave.” 
The book was easy to write, Bagirov said. “It’s just a narrative, really. I didn’t have to make up anything.”
He said the book has a moral message, despite the shady nature of some of Yevgeny’s enterprises. “There are some moments in the book when he can make a lot of money by cheating someone but he doesn’t do it,” he said. “The book is about how a person tried to survive in Moscow but at the same time remain a human being, with a clean conscience.”

“Gastarbeiter” by Eduard Bagirov is published by Populyarnaya Literatura.

TITLE: In cold blood
AUTHOR: By Saul Austerlitz
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The recipe for an action hero is a well-guarded secret, albeit one that has changed little since the days of Mickey Spillane. A liberal splash of violence, a dash of sex, a pinch of political or underworld intrigue, and voila! — Airport Novel Souffle. Served hot, it can feed millions (empty calories notwithstanding), but prepared incorrectly, the dish can be downright revolting. Brent Ghelfi’s debut entry into the field retains much of the classic recipe, featuring an amoral, shadowy operator who proceeds through a brutal world on his own terms, with one major shift: This Jason Bourne stand-in is Russian, and the setting for “Volk’s Game” is the capitalist wonderland of Putin’s Russia. 
Alexei Volkovoy is one of the many businessmen looking to turn post-communist speculation in his favor, dabbling in a wide variety of lines: “drugs, identity theft, pictures, and a Russian brides operation that caters to the middle classes of America and industrialized European and Asian countries.” 
Volkovoy is also, secretly, still a colonel in the Russian Army, working covertly for a general with his fingers in every pie worth tasting in Moscow. Volk, as he is known, is the product of a harsh childhood and even harsher experiences on the battlefield: “Dead mother, disappeared father, late-era Soviet poverty, and five years of killing or worse in Chechnya.” It is the killing in Chechnya, which cost him a leg, that informs his daily work in Moscow, with the brutality of that internecine struggle contributing to his irrepressible sweet tooth for gore. It is a taste that Ghelfi shares with his hero, as “Volk’s Game” is splashed with blood and speckled with untold horrors. 
The novel’s complex interplay of double-crosses and betrayals begins with Volk being summoned for his expertise in a field far removed from his traditional business: high art. An old friend, Arkady, and an art restorer named Lipman have jointly hatched a plan to swipe a Leonardo da Vinci buried in the Hermitage’s vaults, and sell it for a tidy profit to a collector who does not mind stolen goods. Volk, prodded by his general, agrees to help out, and is flummoxed when Lipman betrays him, looking to grab the priceless painting for himself. With this initial push, “Volk’s Game” bobs in shark-infested waters, where Russian military officers, Azeri gangsters, psychotic ex-soldiers, vicious Chechens and — worst of all — art dealers uneasily interact in the competition for a piece of Leonardo. Behind all the intrigue lies the possibility of a genuine, heretofore undiscovered Leonardo “Last Supper” on canvas — one far better preserved than the Milanese mural, and of inestimable cultural value. Just call it “The Da Vinci Kod.”
Volk is a stitched-together amalgam of opposing attributes: a cold-blooded killer with a soft spot for old women and former soldiers; a calculating manager of risk reduced to jelly by Leonardo’s “Leda and the Swan”; an equal opportunity merchant of death who is a part-time, closet progressive. His partner, in every sense, is the teenage war orphan Valya, an Uzi-toting minx with a lesbian lover on the side, a victim of the cruelty and senselessness of Chechnya just like Volk. Ghelfi relishes Volk’s lack of interest in morality, finding pleasure in each iteration of his protagonist’s cruelty, but occasionally seeks to redress the balance by assigning him an act of generosity: tucking 100 rubles in a drunken sailor’s jacket, or finding a new home for an abandoned baby. Ghelfi’s heart is not in such charitable impulses; his preference is for guns and the ballet of bullets, and the gush of language he reserves for such outbreaks of violence is indicative of his tastes: “The barrel of the WinMag cracks her teeth when I shove it into her mouth. I let a moment tick past to allow the horrible realization to dawn in her eyes, which are wide and wet like watery blue globes. When I can see that she knows what’s coming I pull the trigger and shower brains and bone all over the chamber.” 
The prevailing color here is less red than purple, with Ghelfi not-so-secretly enamored of his hero’s propensity for casually dispensed atrocity, and inclined to excessiveness in his poeticizing of the horrific. Volk is Spillane’s Mike Hammer in Cyrillic, a sharp thinker who finds that every question requires the same answer: “I don’t know what the right thing to do is. Who really does in these cases? So I choose the way I would prefer and blow a round through his head to end it fast.” The violence is casually horrific, tossed off, often forgotten as soon as it is employed: “Finger lock, wrist lock, a shiver of snapping bone more felt than heard over the pounding beat of the music, and he falls away.”
Art is offered as a civilizing counterpoint to these 32 flavors of violence, a node of peace in a distinctly unpeaceful world. However, as humans are wont to do, even peace is squabbled over, and the promise of untapped Leonardos prompts new founts of destruction and degradation. Volk happily immerses himself in the squabbles, but Ghelfi reserves his deepest horror for those who do not share his sentiments about the elevatory powers of art. We know Chechen militant Kamil is truly a baddie when, in a fit of rage, he destroys five or six of the Hermitage’s treasures. Slicing up people — understandable; but slicing up paintings? Now that is just uncool.
As numbing as the violence in “Volk’s Game” may be, it does serve its purpose of indelibly rendering a brutal world of the powerful and the damned, where oligarchs and politicians duke it out with the impoverished, the weak and the needy as pawns in their endless struggle. Between the bullets, Ghelfi engages in social observation, of the pox-on-both-your-houses type. Volk takes no sides because there are no sides to take. 
“Volk’s Game” aims for pulse-pounding entertainment, hoping to hook enough readers to ensure a Volkovoy series of novels, and as such it is mostly successful. Its overly detailed plot occasionally leads to unnecessary confusion, but Ghelfi smoothes over any such rough patches with the uniformity of his prose. More troubling is the novel’s dedication to its violent tropes. Violence is undoubtedly part and parcel of the Russian way of life, as any student of history knows; but the relish that Ghelfi takes in Volk’s exploits is downright unsettling.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of “Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes.”

TITLE: On the verge
AUTHOR: By William Whitehead
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Bistro EntrIe // 6 Nikolskaya Ploshchad // Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. // Credit cards accepted // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with beer 2080 rubles ($80)

Wandering along a picturesque stretch of the Griboyedov canal, the promise of good cooking emerges from trails of broken beer bottles in a neat row of small maroon blinds that adorn the faIade of Bistro EntrIe. 
It was only the rather clumsy touch of having the bistro’s name emblazoned on every single one of these blinds, about eight in all, that coarsened this beacon of refinement with the inimical pallor of destitution. 
While it might be easy to dismiss EntrIe as one more example of well-executed contemporary French style lacking in a certain self-assured elegance, we felt no desire to confront the deception here, patent in its smattering of class-conscious clientele and the wide surface of stylized fleur-de-lis (when you can apprehend four different reflections of yourself with an exceedingly minimal shift of the eyes you’ll start to believe any old notion of sophistication). 
And the mirror technique indeed made good use of a potentially awkward corner space between the back of two sofas, capitalizing in the process on a view of the gold-domed Nikolsky Cathedral on one side and the dilapidated Nikolsky market on the other.
Not for the purist, another thing we appreciated was the self-playing piano that, given the right choice of music, can be mood enhancing without at the same time restricting one’s intake for fear of upsetting the pianist.
Other things that merely verge on the superior were the service: willing, polite if not particularly learned; the stylish menu’s English variant that included pestry, herbals, rubbit and lattice (unforgivable given the city’s wealth of talented native speakers willing to take up badly paid work on the side); a perfectly cooked duck breast (320 rubles, $12.30) lacking that certain something (we resorted to mountains of salt); and the duck terrine (350 rubles, $13.50) initially tasty then bland with an overpowering dollop of red onion confit sitting helplessly alone alongside.
By the time the main courses had come along this growing number of impressions might have left an inexperienced reviewer dizzy with detail, especially given the policy of free corkage while the bistro awaits its stock of wine. While most people took advantage of this rare opportunity, we resisted popping down to the local wine store and tried a Flemish grape beer instead, which, at 140 rubles ($5.40) for 0.25 liters, was not cheap, but quite exquisite nonetheless, particularly when one normally lives adrift in a local sea of faceless lager.
Another sensational moment came in the form of horseradish potatoes that accompanied a tender rabbit confit (450 rubles, $17.30), which itself was neither dense nor dry.
As for the dish journalist Raymond Sokolov called a “white goddess” and “a milkmaid...pure and playful,” a French white veal stew (490 rubles, $18.85) might not evoke anything of the literary kind but most will find its creamy, rosemary-infused sauce satisfying.  
French historian Jean-Louis Flandrin, who wrote a book on white veal stew, called it “a family dish and haute-cuisine at the same time” and while it would be fair to say that most dishes at EntrIe particularly live up to the haute-cuisine part of the equation, it nevertheless makes a stab valiant enough to satisfy locals of even average pretensions.
It all filled up the stomach and to such an extent that not even the “best Iclair in town,” as the waiter belatedly informed us, could tempt us to hang around for more.

TITLE: Bruce rebooted
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: The gasping, grunting and oozing hard-body slab that muscles, and sometimes crawls, through “Live Free or Die Hard” sure looks like John McClane. Older if apparently no wiser, the blue-collar super-cop from the “Die Hard” franchise has lost his hair, his foul mouth and apparently his nicotine itch, but he still has the same knack for trouble, the adrenaline-pumping, cheerfully anarchic kind that causes cars to ignite, bodies to fly, eardrums to pop and hearts to race and gladden. He’s also lost his sneer, but sneering is cheap, and movies are expensive, especially when your star has pushed past 50 and slid off the power lists.
A lot has happened in the 12 years since Bruce Willis yippee-kai-yay-ed in “Die Hard With a Vengeance” with a glowering Samuel L. Jackson in tow. During that time Mr. Willis’s star has expanded and collapsed through hits and duds and plenty of personal off-screen noise. The world has changed too, of course, and with it the action-flick coordinates: for one, Arnold Schwarzenegger runs California, while the sober, nonwisecracking likes of Matt Damon’s Bourne rules the bad-boy roost. For another: Willis has become an increasingly appealing character actor, the kind who punches up a scene or two (“Alpha Dog,” “Fast Food Nation”) or an entire movie (“16 Blocks”), mostly by playing it not so nice and very easy.
Life or age or something has mellowed Willis. He no longer enters a movie like God’s gift, as he did almost two decades ago in the first “Die Hard,” lips pursed as if he alone were in on the joke — which, given the fat salary he was earning, perhaps he was. In “Live Free or Die Hard” he enters swinging, fist smashing through hard glass and sinking into soft flesh. He’s making a point and so is the movie, namely that McClane (and Willis) is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before. And look, he’s not laughing, not exactly, even if the film ends up a goof.
An unexpectedly funny goof, at that, despite everything, including the mayhem and somewhat creepy plot. The screenplay attributed to Mark Bomback, who shares the story credit with David Marconi, has the whiff of multiple writers, as action-driven productions generally do. It originated with a 1997 story (dubiously titled “A Farewell to Arms”) by John Carlin in Wired magazine about the potential for a cataclysmic, nation-crippling “information war,” which mutated and stalled, picking up new writers and equally doubtful names (“WW3.com,” “Die Hard 4.0”). Somewhere along the development line, the real world intruded, which is why the original idea about an information war now includes a plausible-sounding or at least not entirely outlandish hook to Sept. 11 — hence, the creepiness.
In most Hollywood action movies, references to Sept. 11 as well as to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often tacked on or displaced, used for decorative flag-waving or scenes of torture. “Live Free or Die Hard” tries to engage the real world more directly than most studio-made fantasies, with a logic-defined plot involving a disgruntled government security expert. That would be Thomas Gabriel, who seems partly inspired by the counterterrorism expert Richard A. Clarke and partly informed by Bill Gates and is wholly played by the pretty Timothy Olyphant, dressed in black and wearing Maggie Q on his arm. Olyphant has many charms, but annihilating menace is not one of them. Willis nonetheless keeps any incredulity in check along with his sneer.
Despite its jaw-jutting title, with its evocation of revolutionary America and radical individualism, “Live Free or Die Hard” keeps a tighter rein on McClane, dialing down his man-against-the-world attitude to a low hum. He’s still more or less alone, at least existentially, though, as per the action playbook, he quickly picks up a sidekick and audience surrogate in the hacker impersonated by Justin Long (flicking between annoyance and amusement).
But McClane is also unequivocally playing for team America, helping the F.B.I. and its no-nonsense, supremely capable deputy director, Bowman (Cliff Curtis), who runs the sillily named cyber division with blinking monitors and scurrying minions. Heroic in deed and in acquaintance, Bowman knows to side with McClane, saving his contemptuous looks for the guy from Homeland Security.
Nothing on Len Wiseman’s rIsumI — he previously directed the two “Underworld” flicks, wherein the Goth kids really are vampires — suggests that he could wrangle both Willis and this new film’s nerve-jangling action to such satisfying effect. At least on the second count he has received terrific help from a sprawling cast of stuntmen-women and (and the stunt coordinator Brad Martin), who do a great deal to advance the film’s old-school mayhem.

TITLE: Brown Unveils Cabinet
AUTHOR: By Phil Hazlewood
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — New British Prime Minister Gordon Brown unveiled his senior ministerial team Thursday, appointing a loyal ally as chancellor, the first ever woman home secretary, and the youngest foreign secretary for 30 years.
Alistair Darling, 53, succeeds Brown as chancellor of the exchequer, while David Miliband, 41, replaces Margaret Beckett as foreign secretary. He is the youngest person to hold the post since David Owen in 1977.
The former environment secretary, tipped as a future Labour Party leader, said he was “tremendously honored and absolutely delighted” to be appointed and pledged to bring leadership and be “patient as well as purposeful”.
The announcements came less than 24 hours after Brown replaced Tony Blair as prime minister and both Darling and Miliband’s appointments had been widely expected.
Brown also appointed Jacqui Smith, 44, to the post of home secretary following John Reid’s departure.
Known for her unswerving loyalty to the party, she is the first woman to hold the position and was one of the 101 original “Blair babes” elected to parliament in 1997 when Blair became prime minister.
There was also a return to high office for Blair’s former home and foreign secretary Jack Straw. He was appointed justice secretary, while Des Browne was re-appointed as Defense Secretary.
But as Brown spent his first full day in the job, Blair dominated the headlines following the announcement of his appointment as an international envoy to the Middle East soon after his formal resignation Wednesday.
In his first detailed comments on his new role, which he said he will start immediately, Blair said it was “a huge challenge”.
“I have to prepare the ground for a negotiated settlement, and the key to that is to prepare the Palestinians for statehood,” he told the Northern Echo in an interview published Thursday. “It is a fundamental issue.”
Brown, newly installed at the British prime minister’s official residence in Downing Street, said his friend-turned-rival was “exceptionally well placed” to take on the Middle East role and was “delighted” he had been named to the post.
But as Brown unveiled his Cabinet, the Press Association news agency quoted unnamed sources as saying Blair had been questioned by police for a third time over the so-called “cash for honors” investigation.
The probe, launched in March 2006, centers around allegations that wealthy financial donors to political parties had been illegally offered seats in the unelected upper House of Lords.
Blair has previously been questioned as a witness, not a suspect, but has seen two of his closest aides arrested and questioned.

TITLE: Sky The Limit For Bernard
AUTHOR: By Sophie Greuil
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ST. RAPHAEL, France — The sky is the limit for France’s Alain Bernard, who has just burst into the limelight by swimming the second fastest 100 meters freestyle of all time.
The 24-year-old clocked 48.12 seconds at this week’s French championships, second only to Pieter van den Hoogenband’s 47.84 mark in swimming’s blue riband event.
However, Bernard is looking at the bigger picture rather than focusing on the Dutchman’s world record.
“To set that world record as a goal would be setting myself a limit and doing that would only slow down my progress,” Bernard told Reuters in an interview.
“It would be a dream to break it but there is a huge gap between 48.12 and 47.84, months of hard work. The last step is always the toughest to climb.
“I must take my time to get there and work on my technique. Taking my time to go fast — that has always been my motto.”
Bernard indeed took his time to make the world sit up and take notice, but there is no doubt he is now a top sprinter.

STAY HUMBLE
At the French championships, the 1.96 meters tall Bernard also won the 50 freestyle in 21.76 seconds to share third spot on the all-time list with American Gary Hall Jr.
“That 100 meters mark, I see it as the best in my career, nothing more, nothing less,” said Bernard, who grew up admiring Russia’s Alexander Popov, whose best 100 time he has now eclipsed.
“I don’t see myself as the best, the boss or anything like that. I need to stay humble. That’s the only way I can get better.”
Bernard said one thing that could put the brakes on his progression was recurrent back pain, a result of a rapid growth spurt as a teenager.
“After a hard training session, my back gets painful,” he said. “It’s something I keep working on. I need to make sure the pain does not affect my mental strength and my determination to go fast. So far, it hasn’t.”
Bernard politely shrugged off a suggestion anything illegal might have helped him make such a sudden impact.
“This is primarily the result of seven years of hard work,” he said. “It has nothing to do with chance or anything else. I will never do anything stupid to win a tenth of a second.”

TITLE: Federer Sets Up Safin Meeting
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WIMBLEDON, England — Roger Federer won his 50th straight match on grass Thursday, beating 18-year-old Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina 6-2, 7-5, 6-1 to reach the third round at Wimbledon.
The four-time defending champion had led 2-0 in the third set before rain halted play Wednesday. When they resumed, the top-ranked Swiss needed only 11 minutes to complete the match, winning three straight games before Del Potro held serve in the sixth game.
Federer broke the Argentine five times and saved the only break point he faced. The No. 1-seeded player finished with 33 winners and made only 23 errors — one less than Del Potro.
Federer, trying to become only the second man in the Open era to win five straight titles at the All England Club, will next face two-time Grand Slam champion Marat Safin. The Russian beat Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan 6-4, 6-2 7-6 (4).
French Open finalist Ana Ivanovic advanced to the third round in the women’s draw, beating Meilen Tu of the United States 6-4, 6-3. The sixth-seeded Serb reached the fourth round last year.
Also, No. 8 Anna Chakvetadze defeated Tatyana Poutchek of Belarus 6-2, 6-1, while No. 10 Daniela Hantuchova, No. 12 Elena Dementieva, No. 14 Nicole Vaidisova and No. 15 Patty Schnyder also won.
No. 29 Francesca Schiavone of Italy lost to Aravane Rezai of France 6-4, 2-6, 6-4.
A decade after Martina Hingis won at the All England Club, she’s just happy to be playing. On Wednesday, she reached the third round by beating Aiko Nakamura of Japan 6-1, 6-2.
“I’d say I was a little bit more chubby back then,” Hingis said, pinching her cheeks. “I think as a teenager, you’re just really growing into a phase that you gain weight. I’m definitely not proud of the way I looked.
“When I was holding the (Wimbledon) trophy, it didn’t matter. It was just a great moment at that time. I grew out of it. You have to be in better shape today.”
Hingis was quick enough on Wednesday to finish before rain halted play.
Eight singles matches were suspended in progress; 10 never began.
On Centre Court, Tim Henman and Feliciano Lopez, who were at 1-1 in the first set, resumed their match.
Also, second-seeded Rafael Nadal was paired against Werner Eschauer of Austria. No. 4-seeded Novak Djokovic and 2002 champion Lleyton Hewitt were also due to play second-round matches.
In women’s play, defending champion Amelie Mauresmo was to face Yvonne Meusburger of Austria, with second-seeded Maria Sharapova against Severine Bremond of France, and three-time champion Venus Williams against Hana Sromova of the Czech Republic.
Two-time Wimbledon champion Serena Williams was among the women who reached the third round on Wednesday before the weather worsened. She had a 7-6 (4), 6-3 victory over Alicia Molik of Australia.
Other women advancing to the third round included No. 1 Justine Henin and No. 3 Jelena Jankovic.
After returning to the tour in January 2006, Hingis was named comeback player of the year. She reached the quarterfinals at the Australian Open in January, and is ranked No. 11 by the WTA.
“I didn’t put any sights on anything particular,” said the ninth-seeded Hingis, who missed the French Open with an injured hip. “I just wanted to come back and play. That’s all.
“I’m building up. I can only get better. Every day I’m winning on condition and match practice, also confidence.”

TITLE: Arabs Doubt Blair’s Chances as Envoy
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Wright
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CAIRO — Arabs said on Thursday they doubted former British Prime Minister Tony Blair could succeed as Middle East peace envoy because of his unpopularity and because he is too close to Israel and the United States.
They said Blair had little credibility in the Middle East because he took part in the invasion of Iraq, opposed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year and failed to follow up on many promises to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The skepticism about Blair’s mission as envoy for the international Quartet extended from opposition Islamists to former and current officials of conservative Arab governments nominally friendly towards the United States and Britain.
One exception was the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which is dependent on U.S. and Israeli help in its conflict with the Islamists of Hamas.
The Quartet — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — appointed Blair on Wednesday, the day he stepped down after 10 years as British prime minister.
The choice of Blair was seen in the Middle East as a present from U.S. President George W. Bush for his years of support for Bush’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Former Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said the choice was a mistake because of the perception that Blair is biased, arising from his closeness to the U.S. administration.
“This was a way for the Americans to honor his friendship but I think they should have found a better way to honor him, a way where he would have a chance of success, and I honestly don’t believe he has any chance of success,” he told Reuters.
A senior Arab diplomat, who asked not to be named because of his position, said that in his new role Blair could in theory change his attitude and act as an honest broker.
But even if he did change, Blair would probably meet the same fate as former envoy James Wolfenssohn, he added.
“Wolfenssohn was incredible but he was not allowed to play a role because of the policies adopted by Israel... Is Israel ready to take steps encouraging not only to Blair but also in the quest for peace? I have my doubts,” he added.
Islamists in the Arab world said they had no expectation that Blair would make any contribution to Middle East peace.

ANALYSTS SCEPTICAL
“His subservience to Bush and the fact that he walked in Bush’s shadow do not augur well,” said Mohamed Habib, deputy leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement.
“It is the U.S. administration that acts and which does everything necessary for its own interest. Blair cannot be independent in his vision from what the U.S. administration wants,” he told Reuters.
An aide to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza and prime minister in the Palestinian government dismissed earlier this month, said the Islamist movement did not expect Blair to be even-handed. Hamas controls Gaza and faces isolation by Israel, the United States and the European Union.
“He has always adopted the American and Israeli positions,” added the aide, Ghazi Hamad.
Political analysts in Lebanon, North Africa and the Gulf were also skeptical about the prospects for Blair’s endeavor.
“The appointment of Blair is a big mistake. He is not the ideal man for the peace process in the Middle East. His alliance with the United States ... will weaken his role as a mediator. I do not think he will succeed in his mission,” said Algerian political analyst Ismail Maaref Ghalia.
Moroccan analyst Miloud Belkaid said Blair could use his new role to try to improve his reputation. “But the dynamics of the broader situation in the region are working against such an ambition, from Iraq to the Palestinian territories,” he added.
“I don’t know how he (Blair) is going to be able to compensate for his history towards many issues that he dealt with in the Arab world... I imagine that his mission is going to be difficult and complicated unless he takes some extraordinary steps, which I doubt,” said Lebanese analyst Rafik Nasrallah.
Bahraini analyst and editor Mansoor Al Jamri said Blair’s previous record would taint his chances of success.
“He’s going to be seen as a spokesperson for the U.S. administration and the pro-Israeli lobbies,” he added.

TITLE: Israeli President Cuts Deal, Pleads Guilty to Sex Charges
AUTHOR: By Jeffrey Heller
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Israeli President Moshe Katsav pleaded guilty on Thursday to committing sexual crimes against women employees in a plea bargain that will keep him out of jail, Israel’s attorney-general said.
Under the deal, Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz retreated from his stated intention to charge Katsav with rape but said the president, whose term expires next month, would resign and that “shame will accompany him forever.”
“From Israel’s first citizen, he turns into a criminal convicted of sexual offences,” Mazuz told a news conference, insisting he had not given a special break to a public figure.
An attorney for one of the victims expressed outrage at the plea bargain and a women’s rights’ advocate said it would discourage other women from complaining about sexual crimes.
The unprecedented case against an Israeli head of state has stirred powerful emotions in a country where women’s groups have long complained that authorities shrug off sexual harassment in workplaces.
As part of the arrangement, which Mazuz said Katsav had signed, the president pleaded guilty to charges he committed a string of indecent sexual acts against one woman who worked for him and sexual harassment of another female employee.
Mazuz said Katsav, who could have faced a maximum seven years in jail for the offences, would receive a suspended sentence and pay compensation to the women. Katsav had denied any wrongdoing.
Zahava Gal-On, a left-wing legislator and women’s rights advocate, accused Mazuz of moral cowardice.
“Victims of sex crimes will believe they do not have any shield,” Gal-On told reporters.
Kinneret Barashi, an attorney for one of the women, cried foul, saying her client “feels she is a victim for the second time.”
Israeli news reports said Katsav would hand in his resignation later in the day and it would then go into effect within 48 hours.
The Justice Ministry said in January it planned to accuse Katsav of raping an ex-aide and sexually assaulting three other women who worked for him.
But Mazuz said prosecutors concluded that pressing ahead with the original charges would have led to “not inconsequential problems of proof and evidence” during trial.
One of Katsav’s lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, said the plea bargain “was not a victory because he was convicted.”
Katsav has been on leave of absence from his largely ceremonial post since plans to indict him were announced in January.

TITLE: Russia’s Paradoxical Winter Bid
AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — With banana trees growing in gardens along its Black Sea beachfront, Russia’s summer resort city of Sochi does not fit the usual image of a Winter Olympic Games venue.
Sochi is bidding to host the 2014 Games and on July 4 in Guatemala the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will announce whether it or the two other shortlisted bidders — Salzburg in Austria and Pyeongchang in South Korea — has won.
On the face of it, the Sochi bid is a paradox, attempting to stage a winter games in a semi-tropical city with not much in the way of winter sports pedigree.
The city’s first and only ice rink was put up temporarily to coincide with a visit by IOC inspectors this year.
“At the moment, most people come to Sochi to get a tan and have a swim in the summer,” said Alexander Zhukov, a deputy prime minister and part of the Sochi bid team.
But in the mild winter, when the temperature only occasionally dips below zero, cars can be seen driving through the city with skis strapped to their roof.
The reason for this is a quirk of nature. A few kilometers outside Sochi the road climbs sharply and enters a tunnel beneath the mountains. On the other side, it emerges into deep winter.
“That is the uniqueness of the city,” said local resident Eduard Filippov. “In Sochi it will be raining and you will have a temperature of 12 degrees Celsius, and then when you go through the tunnel the snow is up to your knees.”

CHEERING CHILDREN
The other asset touted by the Sochi bid organizers is public enthusiasm for the games.
Opinion polls quoted by the organizers show 80 percent support nationwide for staging the games in Sochi — unsurprising in a country fanatical about ice hockey and cross-country skiing but which has never hosted a Winter Olympics.
As with many things in Russia, the state plays a crucial role.
The cheering crowds of children who greeted the IOC inspectors throughout their visit to Sochi may have been helped by the local officials cancelling all lessons in schools, Russian media reported.
President Vladimir Putin has said his government will underwrite the cost of the games and he will go in person to Guatemala to support the bid at the IOC session.
At his beachfront home near Sochi, Andrei Korutun is worried about the Olympics. His village was founded by a group of Old Believers, a strict branch of the Russian Orthodox faith who never drink and wear long beards.
Many fled abroad to escape persecution but the community near Sochi returned from exile and settled there in 1911 after Tsar Nicholas II gave them plots of land.
If Sochi wins, a few of the houses will be demolished to make way for the Games’ coastal hub, slated to be built in the fields behind the village.

TITLE: Rig Protests Dominating Rest
AUTHOR: By Alexander Smith
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VALENCIA — A New Zealand protest against Alinghi’s rig dominated the America’s Cup rest day on Thursday as a five-member race jury conducted a closed-door hearing at race headquarters in Valencia. Swiss syndicate Alinghi levelled the best-of-nine series 2-2 on Wednesday, beating the Kiwis by 30 seconds to ensure one of the closest contests in the Cup’s recent history.
America’s Cup officials said the hearing, which began at 09:00 GMT, could take “some time” as the jury go through the technical details of the protest over the way Alinghi’s mainsail is attached when it is hoisted up the mast.
The mainsail is pulled up using a piece of rope called a halyard, which is then fastened using a halyard lock.
Under the strict racing rules of the America’s Cup, the crews must be able to drop their sails from the deck.
Race officials inspected Alinghi’s SUI100 and Team New Zealand’s NZL92 as the boats returned to port following Wednesday’s race, which Alinghi had led from the start.
An Alinghi crew member scaled the mast during the inspection, which included checking whether the mainsail could be released off the halyard lock without assistance, but the team said it had asked permission to do so.

TITLE: Jang Quits College
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SEOUL — South Korea's world weightlifting champion Jang Mi-ran has been forced to quit college after her former team invoked a rarely used rule on team registration.
Jang upset Wonju City provincial government by moving to a new club earlier this year, prompting them to take action, Korean media reported on Thursday.
The Olympic silver medalist had to abandon her studies because of the Korea Sports Council's policy banning employed athletes from competing as students.
The rule is rarely invoked in South Korea but Jang opted to leave college rather than risk censure in future competitions.
The 23-year-old is planning legal action.