SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1289 (55), Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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TITLE: Gang of 17 Kills Tatar In Attack
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Police said Friday that they have detained a female suspect in the murder of a 23-year old native of Tatarstan in southern Russia, on Friday after he was stabbed to death on July 1 near Avtovo metro station in the Kirovsky district of the city.
A graduate of the St. Petersburg Agrarian University, Damir Zainullin had been employed as a part-time night watchman and was on his way to work from the metro when he was violently attacked by a gang.
A surveillance camera installed on a nearby building recorded a total of 17 people attacking and brutally beating the man. The attack started with a punch to Zainullin’s face. The recording shows a rapid escalation of the tragic incident.
The video also shows assailants slicing Damir’s stomach with a knife then torturing him further with broken bottles.
Representatives of the Tatar community in St. Petersburg said they believe the murder to be racially motivated.
However, prosecutors are not classifying it as such. Rather, the murder is referred to as a spontaneous street homicide, committed by what the St. Petersburg City Prosecutor’s office spokeswoman identified as “an informal group,” avoiding terms like “extremist” and “racist.”
The St.Petersburg police press office reported on Monday that the female suspect, who allegedly gave Zainullin a fatal stab in the stomach, turned herself in to the police and confessed. She is currently being interviewed.
Human rights groups describe the state of ethnic tolerance in the city as “disastrous.”
“Dark-skinned foreigners are facing an enormous wave of hostility, with beatings and verbal insults being commonplace, and even murder already a regular event,” said Ruslan Linkov, head of the liberal organization “Democratic Russia” that monitors hate crimes and human rights abuses.
Stefania Kulayeva, head of the Northwest Center for Social and Judicial Assistance to the Roma Community, which is part of the Memorial human rights group, said the wave of terrorist attacks that swept over the country between 2001 and 2004 has left a bitter side-effect: a vicious stereotype has formed in Russian society.
“A typical visual description of a terrorist in Russia is that of a person ‘with dark skin, dark hair and black eyes’,” she said.
“Ordinary Russians have seen and heard that description so many times that this frightening and hated image has become deeply rooted.”
Zainullin’s’ friends have created a Russian-language page dedicated to his memory, which can be visited at http://damirzainullin.livejournal.com
TITLE: Britain
To Expel 4 Russian Diplomats
AUTHOR: By David Stringer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Britain will expel four Russian diplomats over the Kremlin’s refusal to extradite the key suspect in the murder of a former KGB agent fatally poisoned in London, the foreign secretary said Monday.
David Miliband told Parliament he had taken the steps because the Kremlin had failed to properly respond to the “horrifying and lingering” death of Alexander Litvinenko.
It was the first time since 1996 that Britain had used the sanction, which was likely to be met with retaliation from Moscow.
“The Russian government has failed to register either how seriously we treat this case or the seriousness of the issues involved, despite lobbying at the highest level and clear explanations of our need for a satisfactory response,” Miliband told lawmakers at the House of Commons.
Moscow has refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman and former KGB agent, to stand trial in London over the killing. Lugovoi has been named by British prosecutors as the chief suspect in the case.
Russia’s formal rejection was received a week ago by Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, which in turn spurned a Russian offer to try Lugovoi in Russia.
“The heinous crime of murder does require justice,” Miliband said. “This response is proportional and it is clear at whom it is aimed.”
Britain’s Foreign Office declined to specify the rank or position of the four Russian diplomats to be expelled, who had yet to leave the country.
“We have chosen to expel four particular diplomats in order to send a clear and proportionate signal about the seriousness of this case,” Miliband said.
Litvinenko died Nov. 23 in a London hospital after ingesting radioactive polonium-210. In a deathbed statement, he accused Russian President Vladmir Putin of being behind his killing.
The ex-security agent said he first felt ill after meeting Lugovoi and business partner Dmitry Kovtun at London’s Millennium Hotel.
A waiter who was working at the hotel said he believed a poison had been sprayed into a pot of green tea, according to a British newspaper report Sunday. Norberto Andrade told the Sunday Telegraph that when he later cleared the table, the tea looked more yellow than usual and became “thicker — it looked gooey.”
Miliband said Lugovoi had offered the tea to Litvinenko and that he later “suffered a horrifying and lingering death in front of his family. His murder put hundreds of others, residents and visitors, at risk of radiation contamination.”
Traces of polonium-210 were found at around a dozen other sites in London, including three hotels, a stadium, two planes and an office building.
In Britain, 700 people were tested for polonium contamination and 670 were tested abroad — including Lugovoi. All were eventually released.
International agreements mean that Lugovoi could be extradited if he travels outside Russia, Miliband said.
Miliband said London has suspended visa facilitation negotiations with Russia and is reviewing cooperation on a range of issues. Britain and Moscow had been working on a process to speed up the issuing of visas, but will halt cooperation, the Foreign Office said.
Russia’s ambassador to London met with Sir Peter Ricketts, a senior aide to Miliband, shortly before lawmakers were told of the expulsions.
In March 1996, Moscow ordered out nine British diplomats, alleging that they were part of a spy ring. Britain expelled four Russians in response.
TITLE: City Hall Pledges Billions to Fight Cancer
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In an effort to battle what looks like a cancer epidemic in the city with Russia’s highest incidence of the disease, City Hall has earmarked 5.2 billion rubles ($ 2 million) for a cancer prevention campaign.
In St. Petersburg, two percent of the city’s population — or every 50th resident — suffers from cancer.
Yury Shcherbuk, head of the City Hall’s Health Committee, said numbers of cancer cases in the city have been steadily growing. In 1999, there were 80,000 cancer sufferers in town, while in 2007 the figure exceeded 100,000 people.
The lion’s share of the program’s budget will be spent on upgrading local clinics, with 1.7 billion rubles allocated for this purpose. The new program is also focused on funding additional amounts of chemotherapy courses, repairing local hospices and running early prevention programs.
“In many local hospitals, the facilities — for example, radiological equipment for chemotherapy — have become outdated,” Shcherbuk said. “Highly-qualified doctors have a limited chance of helping the patients if the equipment available in their hospitals is not sufficient to cope with the illness.”
Alexei Barchuk, chief oncologist of St. Petersburg and North-Western region, said most cancer cases in Russia are diagnosed too late for doctors to be able to save peoples’ lives when the illness has already progressed to a terminal stage.
“Part of the problem is that many Russians do not trust the doctors and contact them only when it gets absolutely unbearable,” Barchuk said. “On the other hand, many clinics are not adequately equipped to allow for a timely cancer diagnosis.”
Every year, more than18,000 new cases of cancer are registered in town.
In 70 percent of new cases the disease is in its final or advanced stages, Scherbuk said.
The official said that one of the main reasons for the depressingly high cancer rate is age.
“In most cases, cancer affects the elderly, and with over a quarter of its residents being over the age of 60 — and the proportion will soon be pushing one third — demographically St. Petersburg finds itself in one of the most complicated positions,” Shcherbuk said.
In men, the most frequent oncological disease is lung cancer, accounting for 19 percent of all cases, while breast cancer holds the leading position in female patients. Every fifth female cancer patient suffers from breast cancer.
Brand new Western medicines are becoming available to Russians but most people either do not qualify for a free prescription or the medicine that they need is not available from local pharmacies. Unused prescriptions then pile up in drawers, while patients’ families and friends struggle to collect the money to buy the drugs elsewhere.
According to research conducted by the Moscow-based corruption watchdog INDEM in 2006, half of all bribes in Russia are paid to doctors, and more than 20 percent of Russians have reported not being able to get the treatment they need because they could not afford the bribe for it.
St. Petersburg doctor Stanislav Dyomin, head of the charity Stary Gorod, said a worrying number of Russians have to resort to bribes in order to receive the treatment they are entitled to.
“If you fall ill or need an operation, the cost of getting yourself into a well-equipped hospital can be from $1,500 to $3,000,” Dyomin said.
“In some clinics, relatives have to pay to get the most feeble patients washed and their bed-linen changed. They are charged for syringes and injections, for treatments and medicines.”
TITLE: Teacher Convicted of Causing Suicide
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A St. Petersburg schoolteacher has been found guilty of driving a student to suicide in a case that has been described by prosecutors as unprecedented.
The Krasnoselsky Federal Court last Tuesday convicted Vera Novak to a four-year suspended sentence including three years of probation.
“During the investigations it was established that Vera Novak, a teacher of 14 year-old Roma Lebedev, was constantly insulting and humiliating him. She ordered him daily to clean the classroom to make up for his inability to contribute towards some of the school’s needs,” read a statement from Russia’s Prosecutor General Office, published July 10.
According to the court’s ruling, Novak is also suspended from teaching for three years and will have to pay the boy’s grandmother, who has been his legal guardian since the death of his mother, 300 hundred rubles ($11) in compensation.
Novak pleaded not guilty and said she intends to appeal, Fontanka news reported.
Before the sentence was due to be read, she claimed that the case contained “many falsifications,” and that the notes of her interviews as well as those with other teachers were “rewritten on repeated occasions,” Fontanka news quoted Novak as saying.
Lebedev’s body was found under a St. Petersburg railway platform in September 2005. In the suicide note found in Lebedev’s pocket, the boy blamed Novak for his death.
“In the note, he said he couldn’t take the humiliation from his teacher,” Tatyana Peskovskaya, a spokeswoman for the St. Petersburg transportation police, said soon after the body was found.
The boy’s grandmother, Tatyana Lebedeva, said she did not have the money for school repairs [allegedly 300 rubles] and her grandson had been embarrassed to be kept after class.
“Everyone was going home, and she would say, ‘Roma, get the cloth and broom.’ ... But he was a 14-year-old boy. He had some pride,” Lebedeva said on Channel One television in 2005. “[The teacher] said that all the children had paid up through the end of the year. And [she said], ‘You have your mother’s pension.’”
“Does his mother have a ministerial pension?” she said, referring to herself. “I get 2,500 rubles.”
“It’s the first criminal investigation of its kind,” Yelena Ordynskaya, the chief assistant to the St. Petersburg prosecutor told St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
“A case involving Article 110 of the Criminal Code [the crime of driving someone to suicide] has never been opened involving a teacher before. Facts like this were never known to us, at least in the period of ten years,” Ordynskaya said.
The suicide has drawn attention to the control that teachers have over children in their charge. It came just after a mother in Omsk complained that her 8-year-old daughter’s gymnastics teacher had forced the girl to stand naked on a table with one leg held in a vertical position above her head as punishment for allegedly stealing candy from another student.
In March 2003, a fifth-grade student tried to kill herself by swallowing needles after a teacher caught her smoking and forced her to eat cigarettes.
TITLE: President Pulls Plug On Arms Control Agreement
AUTHOR: By Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a decision that threatens to raise tensions with the West, President Vladimir Putin declared over the weekend that Russia would suspend cooperation on a key European arms control treaty signed in the closing years of the Cold War.
Putin’s decree, posted Saturday on the Kremlin’s web site, says Russia will suspend its obligations under the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe after 150 days due to “exceptional circumstances affecting the security of the Russian Federation and requiring immediate action.”
The agreement, known as the CFE Treaty, was signed in 1990 and limits the number of conventional armed forces that may be deployed in Europe. An amended version of the treaty was signed in 1999.
Representatives of NATO countries condemned Putin’s move. “We are not at all happy with Moscow’s decision,” Sven Mikser, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian parliament, said Sunday by telephone from Tallinn.
Mikser linked the decision to a recent “aggressive” trend in Russian foreign policy.
NATO called the development “a step in the wrong direction.” The alliance was expected to hold talks on formulating a response early this week.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet president when the treaty was first signed, said Sunday that he backed the suspension.
“It would be utterly incomprehensible if Russia were the only country to follow the treaty, and the other side hadn’t even ratified it,” Gorbachev said, Interfax reported.
The suspension is not a surprise. Putin first floated the idea in his state-of-the-nation address in April, and he linked it to U.S. actions that have angered Moscow, especially plans to deploy a missile shield in Central Europe.
Saturday’s presidential decree made no mention of the missile shield, however. It focused instead on the failure of NATO countries — especially the alliance’s new members in Eastern Europe — to ratify the updated version of the treaty signed in 1999. It also criticized U.S. plans to deploy forces in Bulgaria and Romania.
The original CFE Treaty, signed in 1990 by 22 nations of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact, led to major reductions in the deployment of non-nuclear armaments all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains.
It became out of date, however, after the Soviet Union broke up and former Warsaw Pact countries started joining NATO.
An amended version of the treaty was signed in Istanbul in 1999. The amended treaty replaced the old system of limits with a complex set of ceilings on the conventional forces that may be stationed in each country.
Russia has ratified the amended treaty, but no NATO country has done so. Kremlin officials have voiced frustration about this for several years.
The United States and other NATO countries have insisted that before they can ratify the treaty, Russia must first fulfill the so-called Istanbul Agreements — a set of declarations, signed along with the treaty in 1999, in which Russia agreed to withdraw troops from Georgia and Moldova.
Russia maintains peacekeepers in breakaway regions of Georgia and Moldova. Western governments, however, argue that the troops are used to prop up pro-Russian regimes in the separatist enclaves of Abkhazia and Transdnestr. Moscow has argued that there is no legal link between the Istanbul Agreements and the amended CFE Treaty, and that NATO countries should go ahead and sign the treaty regardless of whether Moscow has withdrawn its troops yet. In turn, Western governments have said Moscow’s position violates the spirit of the 1999 agreement. “Logically, the Istanbul Agreements form an integral part of the overall framework,” said Mikser from Estonia, which is not a signatory of the treaty.
The impact of Putin’s decision to suspend cooperation on the CFE Treaty was not fully clear Sunday. But the Foreign Ministry seemed to downplay any potential fears that Russia could use the suspension to return to Cold War-style levels of force in Europe.
“In the period of suspension, Russia will not be bound by any limits on conventional forces,” the ministry said in a statement on its web site Saturday. “However, the actual number of Russian armaments will depend on the evolution of the military-political situation.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Poet Prigov Dies
MOSCOW (AP) — Dmitry Prigov, one of the most influential poets of the post-Soviet era, died early Monday in a Moscow hospital, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported. He was 66.
Prigov had been in intensive care since suffering a heart attack July 7.
He and his close friend Lev Rubenstein were leaders of the so-called conceptualist school, which arose in unofficial Soviet art in the late 1960s. They were the first in Russia to see performance as a form of art.
Airplane Brawl
ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) — A Russian plane flying from St Petersburg to Doloman, Turkey, had to turn back midflight after a drunken brawl over a young woman spun out of control, police said in a statement Friday.
Three young Russians boarded the plane drunk Thursday and “continued their party on board.”
“One of them took a fancy to a girl but she did not want to socialize with the new admirer,” police said.
On rejection, the passenger slapped the woman on her face several times. Another passenger immediately rose to defend her.
“A fight began, the situation started to get out of hand and the crew made the only right decision — to turn back.”
The three drunk men were detained on landing at St. Petersburg’s airport. They faced fines of “dozens of thousands of dollars,” police said.
Scientologists Closed
St. Petersburg (SPB) — The St. Petersburg City Court has closed down the city's Scientology Center, accusing it of offenses such as unlicensed teaching and other activities not stated in its charter, Interfax reported Friday.
Scientology is a religion started in the 1950s by U.S. writer L. Ron Hubbard which aims to help its adherents achieve more in life, but it has often been accused of being a cult.
“According to the charter of the Scientologist Center, the objective of the organization is propaganda of the philosophical ideas and teachings of L. Ron Hubbard as guidance for a human being in life. However, propaganda of Hubbard's ideas and teachings was in effect supplanted by unlicensed educational activities that were conducted on a paid basis and fell outside the law of the Russian Federation 'On Education',” the prosecutor's office told Interfax.
Metro Repairs
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) – The metro line between Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskogo and Sadovaya stations will be closed for repair at weekends between July 21 and August 12, Regnum news reported Monday.
Ligovsky Prospekt and Dostoevskaya stations will be closed, but at Vladimirskaya Station, on a different line, trains will pass without stopping.
TITLE: London Waiter Tells Poisonous Story
AUTHOR: By Jennifer Quinn
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — The poison that killed former security services agent Alexander Litvinenko was sprayed into his tea, a waiter who served the man’s table at a hotel bar said in an interview published in a British newspaper on Sunday.
The witness account in The Sunday Telegraph is the first to be made public, and provides new details on how the poison, a highly radioactive substance called polonium-210, might have been delivered.
On Sunday, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said his country was “seriously considering all its options” in relation to the case.
Norberto Andrade, the head bartender at London’s Millennium Hotel, said he believed he was deliberately distracted as he tried to serve a gin and tonic to the table where Litvinenko was sitting with Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman and former security services agent, and two other Russians, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, on Nov. 1.
Although he did not see it happen, Andrade told the newspaper he believed that at that moment the poison was sprayed into a pot of green tea on the table. He said investigators later told him that traces of the poison were found all over the table and floor and on a picture above where Litvinenko was sitting, leading him to conclude that the poison must have been sprayed.
“When I was delivering the gin and tonic to the table, I was obstructed,” Andrade said, the newspaper reported. “I couldn’t see what was happening, but it seemed very deliberate to create a distraction. It made it difficult to put the drink down.
“It was the only moment when the situation seemed unfriendly and something went on at that point,” Andrade added.
Later, after clearing the table, Andrade said he noticed that the tea looked more yellow than usual and became “thicker — it looked gooey.”
Litvinenko, who had become an outspoken Kremlin critic, later fell ill and was taken to a London hospital. He died Nov. 23, and in a deathbed statement accused President Vladimir Putin of being behind his killing — a claim Russia has denied.
Britain has sought to extradite Lugovoi to stand trial in the murder, but the Prosecutor General’s Office formally refused to transfer him. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday that Britain was considering ways to respond.
In an interview with the BBC on Sunday, Miliband said “a very serious crime” had been committed and that Britain would reveal its response “in due course.”
“I don’t want to say anything more about that, except that we are considering seriously all of our options,” Miliband said, refusing to say what those options could be.
British officials are currently considering how to deal with Moscow’s insistence that it will not allow Lugovoi to stand trial in London over the killing.
Last week, the British Foreign Office declined to speculate on whether it would expel Russian diplomats from London, but a spokesman said ministers would likely present potential options to Parliament.
TITLE: Lawyer Flees Russia Over ‘Political’ Case
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Lawyer Boris Kuznetsov has fled the country in the face of possible charges of disclosing state secrets, a case he and his colleagues say may be politically motivated.
Kuznetsov said he left because his arrest would have made it difficult for him to defend his clients properly and that his work defending high-profile clients was behind the charges.
“None of this is happening by accident,” Kuznetsov said Friday, speaking by mobile phone from an undisclosed location.
He added that he would continue to coordinate the defense for his current clients by telephone.
Kuznetsov refused to say how or when he left the country, citing concern for the safety of those who assisted him.
Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court ruled Wednesday that Kuznetsov had disclosed state secrets by submitting an appeal to the Constitutional Court over a Federal Security Service (FSB) wiretap of his client, former Federation Council Senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan. The court ruling came at the request of the City Prosecutor’s Office.
City Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Valentina Titova refused to say Friday whether a criminal case against Kuznetsov had been initiated.
A Moscow City Court spokeswoman, who did not give her name, said such a case “apparently” had yet to be opened.
Colleagues at Kuznetsov’s firm, Kuznetsov and Partners, said Friday that they had no information about Kuznetsov’s whereabouts and had not been able to contact him for several days.
Beside Chakhmakhchyan, who is charged with accepting a $300,000 bribe as part of a sting operation, his clients have included Manana Aslamazian, head of the Educated Media Foundation, and Igor Sutyagin, a scientist sentenced by a jury to 15 years in prison after being convicted of high treason in 2004.
Kuznetsov also has represented the interests of the family of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in her apartment building in October.
“They want me out of a number of cases, including that representing the interests of Polit-kovskaya’s family,” Kuznetsov told Kasparov.ru, the web site of Garry Kasparov, a leader of opposition coalition The Other Russia.
Two high-profile lawyers said Friday that Kuznetsov had acted properly in defending his client.
“A lawyer is obliged to protect his defendants and to file appeals,” said Mikhail Barshevsky, the government’s representative to the Constitutional Court. “The Tverskoi District Court ruled incorrectly, and this shows that judges simply don’t understand the lawyer’s function.”
Genry Reznik, who has defended numerous high-profile clients against government charges, said he thought Kuznetsov’s fears of political prosecution were warranted, but that he could not see what dividends such a prosecution could deliver for the government or security agencies.
“If [Kuznetsov’s case] is the result of a desire to make things difficult for the lawyer, then it does not show those in the Federal Security Service who started this in a good light,” Reznik said. “This will be a total embarrassment in the eyes of the international community.”
An FSB spokesman said Friday that the agency does not comment on “speculation.”
Kuznetsov said he would consider seeking political asylum somewhere abroad if there were any threats to his family’s safety and that he might seek redress at the European Court of Human Rights if he could not reach some kind of agreement with Russian justice officials, Kasparov.ru reported.
He added that he hoped that the situation could be sorted out without having to resort to either measure.
Kuznetsov’s lawyers, Robert Zinovyev and Viktor Parshutkin, now have 10 days to study the Tverskoi District Court ruling and decide whether to appeal it in the Moscow City Court, Kuznetsov said.
If charged and convicted, Kuznetsov could face up to three years in prison.
TITLE: Lukashenko to Shut Down NGOs Funded by the U.S.
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MINSK — President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday vowed to shut down nongovernment organizations found receiving U.S. funding, saying Belarussians who take such financing are destroying the country.
Lukashenko also demanded that Washington stop supporting Belarussian opposition parties. He and other top members of his government have been hit with travel and financial sanctions in the European Union and the United States.
Lukashenko did not name any specific NGOs, but said they would be closed quickly.
“Those who bring money into Belarus illegally, they are destroying themselves with this money,” he said.
U.S. President George W. Bush “needs to deal with his own problems — Iraq, other hot spots the United States has created — and worry less about those countries where they’re trying to support the opposition,” he said.
“Bush has significantly more problems then we do. Here’s one place where money can be sent: the inflation of the dollar has taken on horrifying sizes,” he said.
Earlier this year, a dispute with Russia over cheap energy exports resulted in a showdown that led to Russia sharply hiking oil costs for Belarus, whose Soviet-style command economy is still heavily reliant on cheap Russian supplies.
Lukashenko subsequently sent signals that he sought to ease relations with the West, but the EU and the United States demanded his government release all political prisoners as a condition for talks.
“When the Europeans begin proposing some kind of step-by-step strategy, this embarrasses me,” he said.
Belarus is among several former Soviet republics that have targeted nongovernmental organizations after seeing the key role that foreign-funded groups played in uprisings that toppled the governments of Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004.
President Vladimir Putin early last year signed a law that required all nongovernmental organizations to reregister with the government under tighter rules and to open their financial books to closer state scrutiny.
AP, SPT
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Harassment Study
MOSCOW (SPT) — Government harassment of civil society decreased this year, according to a new study by Agora, a Kazan-based human rights organization.
There were 106 reports of state harassment of activists in 38 regions from January to June of this year, Dmitry Kolbasin, a spokesman for Agora, told Interfax on Friday. By comparison, there were 118 such reports from 35 regions last year, Kolbasin said.
The most common form of harassment was pressure on nongovernmental organizations from the Federal Registration Service, Kolbasin said. One out of 10 reports of harassment involved actual physical attacks on activists.
Missionary Arrested
MOSCOW (SPT) — A Sakhalin court on Friday sanctioned the arrest of a U.S. missionary suspected of trying to bribe a local official, Interfax reported Friday.
Hio Sun Pak, a 65-year-old U.S. citizen and Pentecostal pastor, was placed under arrest on suspicion of offering a local immigration official 300,000 rubles ($11,700) to close an investigation into the use of illegal migrant workers, Tatyana Kutuzova, a spokeswoman for the Sakhalin Prosecutor’s Office, told Interfax. The missionary’s interpreter, who was detained along with Pak in a sting operation last week, was released on condition that she not leave the region, Kutuzova said.
Deserter Arrested
MOSCOW (SPT) — An army deserter who was on the run for four years has been arrested in northern Moscow, Interfax reported Friday.
The 24-year-old man, who was identified by his last name, Parusov, was detained Thursday night at the entrance to his home on Planernaya Ulitsa, a police source told Interfax.
He will face charges of desertion, which carry a penalty of up to five years in prison. He could escape jail time if it is determined that he fled under duress, RIA-Novosti reported.
Parusov left his army unit in the Smolensk region in 2003, Interfax reported. He has been living in Moscow for the past four years.
Fewer Work Permits
MOSCOW (SPT) — The government has issued only about 1.1 million work permits so far this year to foreigners from countries that have visa-free agreements with Russia, a senior Health and Social Development Ministry official said Friday.
At the current rate, the government will likely issue around 2.5 million work permits by the end of the year, less than half of the 6 million work permits set aside for migrants from visa-free countries, Alexander Safronov, head of the ministry’s department overseeing labor relations, said, Interfax reported.
Mayor Investigated
MOSCOW (SPT) — Novgorod Mayor Nikolai Grazhdankin is under investigated on suspicion of abuse of office and misuse of city funds.
Grazhdankin is suspected of misspending more than 25 million rubles (almost $1 million) from city coffers from 2004 to 2006 and illegally closing off auctions to acquire 60 apartments for the city government, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement. Grazhdankin has denied the charges, saying they are politically motivated.
Several governors and mayors have been investigated recently.
Faith Monitored
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan (AP) — Kyrgyzstan will tighten regulation and surveillance of religious groups in the largely Muslim nation, a government official said, citing concerns about extremist groups.
TITLE: Kamchatka Struggles to Keep Traditions
AUTHOR: By Olesya Dmitracova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PIMCHAKH, Russia — Listening to enigmatic Koryak-language songs and eating traditional salmon soup and cutlets in this village, it is easy to imagine that indigenous cultures still thrive on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula.
In fact it is only the sheer tenacity of local Koryaks, Itelmens, Evens and other aborigines, that keep centuries-old customs and languages from dying out in Russia’s wild Far East after much was eroded by Soviet rule.
“Native people must live on. Without them this land will be poor and it will be impossible to bring meaning to this land,” said Vera Koveinik, who heads the ethnic community of Pimchakh, 40 kilometers from regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
When Russians began settling in Kamchatka — a volcanic region 12,000 kilometers and nine time zones east of Moscow — in the second half of the 17th century, up to 11,000 Koryaks lived here fishing, herding deer and hunting whale and walrus.
Three centuries of pervasive Russian and Soviet influence and intermarriage have left an indelible mark on Kamchatka’s Koryaks, who now number around 7,300 — by far the largest indigenous group on the peninsula.
“Everyone of my generation speaks the Koryak language, knows the customs, dances and dishes like in the ancient times. But some of our children don’t know anything at all,” said folk performer Lidia Chechulina, slightly breathless after dancing to the beat of a deer-skin drum and the music of her own voice.
Her songs, sung in a guttural language reminiscent of Chinese, describe the beauty of the tundra, volcanoes and the sea, she explains. She adds that songs, one for each person, accompany Koryaks all their lives and act as a charm.
“Our parents preserved everything as it was before the (Bolshevik) revolution,” added Chechulina, a small, bubbly woman in her 50s.
Probably the most effective Soviet assimilation policy was that of forcibly putting Koryak children in state-run boarding schools to teach them the Russian language and customs.
“The Soviet culture was imposed on them,” said Andrei Samar, a researcher at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the People of the Far East.
Since the children came back home only once or twice a year, he adds, they knew very little about their native culture let alone traditional skills such as the difficult and dangerous trade of hunting at sea.
Some of those children, now adults, and their parents are actively working to revive indigenous cultures.
Many schools offer classes in Koryak and other aboriginal languages as an extra-curricular activity, and families observe ancient holidays. There are also efforts to expand deer herding in regions where it is dwindling rapidly.
The Pimchakh community organizes summer camps in the village where children learn about ancient traditions and do crafts.
The regional government says it runs cultural programs and provides financial aid for ethnic communities.
But Koveinik says there are no signs in Kamchatka in any of the indigenous languages and no monuments to celebrate the aboriginal culture and history.
“The government probably helps somehow. I don’t know, I wouldn’t say so,” said Chechulina, wearing a traditional suede-and-fur overcoat, a headdress made of beads and soft leather boots meant to protect from moss and mosquitoes in the tundra.
Hardly any aborigines wear such costumes every day and many are university-educated, but the way they talk retains traces of their ancient spirituality rooted in still practiced shamanism.
Pimchakh leader Koveinik, an Itelmen, told the audience after the community ensemble’s performance they were privileged.
“You are today the richest people, you’ve received so much power and energy,” she said.
TITLE: Kadyrov Seeks More Oil Wealth
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has reiterated his accusation that Moscow is withholding too much of the region’s oil wealth — a new sign that he is taking a more assertive line.
Kadyrov, a 30-year-old former rebel who swears allegiance to President Vladimir Putin, who put him in power, has disavowed the separatist cause. But in an interview with Izvestiya published Friday, Kadyrov said the federal budget was earning revenues from oil production in Chechnya but failing to send funds the region had been promised for reconstruction.
“Everything is destroyed here, but the money is not being handed out,” he said. “The federal government takes away our money, our oil and our taxes. They take this and they take that and then they say to us: ‘Come on, rebuild.’
“We ask them how much money, and they do not give us a single ruble. ... If you ask for 15 billion rubles ($590 million), they give you 5 billion.
“If in other regions they had a situation like this with financing, everyone would have come out onto the streets and protested, but we just keep waiting.”
Millions of dollars have rebuilt Chechnya’s shattered capital, Grozny, and the Kremlin has allowed Kadyrov’s popularity to soar by associating him with the resurgence of the republic.
Kadyrov in return has hunted down rebels, but his growing power inside his region has attracted enemies within the Kremlin.
In Friday’s edition of a weekly newsletter on Chechnya from U.S.-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation, journalist Andrei Smirnov said there was growing unease about Kadyrov in high places in Moscow.
“The criticism of Kadyrov comes as the first sign of growing distrust in Moscow,” he wrote.
TITLE: Student Refuses to Operate on Strays
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Yulia Ananyeva decided to study to be a veterinarian, she did not expect that she would have to catch healthy stray dogs and cats and operate on them.
When the veterinary school in the Far East city of Blagoveshchensk told her to round up a stray, she rebelled and was forced out, she said.
“These are living beings, and not things that you can cut up and then throw away,” Ananyeva said.
Ananyeva’s plight casts a spotlight on the little-discussed practice of using animals in experiments at veterinary schools nationwide. International veterinary associations and animal rights groups condemn the Russian method as inhumane.
Ananyeva’s problems started when she started studying pet surgery at the Institute of Veterinary Medicine at the Far Eastern State Agrarian University in Blagoveshchensk. As part of the course, students were expected to take turns catching animals and bringing them to the school to operate on.
Last September, Ananyeva said, she was told to bring in an animal by teacher Anatoly Chubin for a lesson on the effects of shock.
“I asked him where to get the animal. He said that I needed to catch the animal on the street,” Ananyeva, 27, said in a telephone interview from Blagoveshchensk.
Typical operations on the healthy animals included the removal of kidneys or the extraction of an eye, she said. The animals were usually put to sleep after the operation.
This is a practice that has been going on for years, said Ananyeva and Natalya Kalinina, a teacher at the institute.
“So many animals had been caught in the area around the institute that there weren’t any left and it was difficult to find stray animals,” Ananyeva said.
Students at the institute swapped stories of how they had to go to animal shelters or answer advertisements offering cats and dogs to “a good owner” in order to bring animals to class.
Ananyeva refused to take part.
She and a third-year student, Yelena Kocherga, began collecting signatures from students asking for the practice to be stopped. When that had no effect, they went public. They enlisted the help of Kalinina, who teaches ethics at the institute, and together held a news conference.
Not long after the news conference in September, the institute called off the practice surgeries completely.
“It was our small victory,” Kalinina said.
But the institute did not take kindly to the scandal. “They threatened me with a court case but then realized that this was not good for them and quieted down,” the teacher said.
Ananyeva and Kocherga both failed their surgery exams last month.
Kalinina said Ananyeva faced strong pressure from the institute to leave, with teachers telling her classmates that she was to blame for the suspension of surgeries.
“She was forced to leave,” Kalinina said.
An institute administrator, who refused to give her name, said by telephone that Ananyeva had left the university because she had failed her exam. The rector did not return repeated calls over the past week.
Chubin, the teacher who Ananyeva said had asked her to find a stray animal, also could not be reached for comment.
Kocherga’s mother, a veterinarian, reacted with disgust to her daughter flunking. “She has helped me from the age of 10 in the clinic, but associate professor Chubin persistently obstructed Lena in the exam,” said Margarita Kocherga, in a statement released by animal rights organization Vita. “It is my university too, and I am ashamed that ... there are teachers who force students to mutilate animals and corrupt children’s souls.”
Kocherga passed the exam on a second attempt.
The Blagoveshchensk school is not an exception in its use of such methods.
“Unfortunately, such things do happen,” said Sergei Sereda, the head of the Association of Practicing Veterinarians.
The methods used in Blagoveshchensk brought condemnation from international veterinary organizations.
No European country would ever use such methods, said Clara Esposito, spokesman for the Brussels-based Federation of Veterinarians of Europe. Russia is not a member of the association.
TITLE: Russian
Oil Pipeline Plan Raises EU Fears
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: LONDON — A new Russian crude oil export pipeline may cut supplies to refineries in Hungary, Slovakia, Germany and other central European countries, PVM Oil Associates said Friday.
Russia plans to build a new link that will deliver at least 1 million barrels of oil per day for export by tanker from the port of Primorsk on the Baltic Sea.
The pipeline will also reduce supplies of Urals, Russia’s major export blend of oil, to refiners in Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, PVM managing director Johannes Benigni said.
The new, 1,000-kilometer pipeline will run from Unecha, near the Russian-Belarussian border, to Primorsk. It will cut deliveries of Urals through the Druzhba inland pipeline to Europe, forcing Central Europe’s refiners to buy more expensive oil from elsewhere, PVM said.
“The reduction of supplies through the Druzhba line will wipe out the price advantage of lower pipeline tariffs compared to seaborne barrels,” Benigni said in a statement. “Thanks to cheap crude supplies, refiners along the pipeline enjoy healthier margins than their counterparts who depend on supplies from sea.”
Central European refineries will have to pay from 50 cents to $4 more per barrel for seaborne oil deliveries, PVM said.
TITLE: Power Machines Signs Turbine License Deal
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: German supplier of equipment and engineering solutions Siemens AG has signed a license agreement with one of the largest industrial enterprises in Russia, Power Machines, to produce new power-generating turbines. According to the agreement Power Machines will produce, sell and provide technical maintenance for the modernized gas turbine, SGT5-2000E, the two companies said Friday in a statement.
Siemens handed over the technology and license to Power Machines until 2027. Siemens will also supply all new technologies to Power Machines, if the turbine is modified.
“The license agreement with Siemens will enable Power Machines to supply more reliable and efficient gas turbines to customers. I am sure that our mutually beneficial cooperation will develop in the future as well,” said Boris Vainzikher, general director of Power Machines open joint-stock company.
Earlier Siemens and Power Machines established Interbureau, a joint venture.
The turbine assembly line will be located in St. Petersburg at the premises of this joint venture.
Interbureau has produced about 30 gas turbines of the previous modification of the turbine, the GTE-160. About 60 percent of parts for these turbines are produced locally, mainly by Power Machines subsidiaries Leningradsky Metal Plant and Zavod Turbinnykh Lopatok.
Compared to the older modification, the new gas turbine is of larger power capacity and can withstand higher temperatures.
In the future Power Machines plans to expand its assortment of gas turbines focusing on the predicted demands of power generating companies.
In particular, Power Machines plans to introduce new modifications of turbines with a capacity of 65 megawatts to 278 megawatts.
According to estimations by Power Machines’ experts, the market for turbines of that type in Russia will increase to 15,000 megawatts by 2011.
“This agreement ensures our joint business and allows us to speed up the new agreements on other licenses which Siemens is to hand over to Power Machines. It will create opportunities for Siemens to strengthen its role as a reliable technological partner in Russia,” said Michael Suess, head of power generation department and member of the board of Siemens AG.
Transfer of technologies is a reasonable option for foreign companies to develop in Russia, industry watchers said.
“The advantages of license agreements are obvious. The company does not have to invest into its own infrastructure and uses the existing production facilities, as well as getting royalties from the partner,” Roman Golovadsky, a lawyer at DLA Piper, said.
“Of course, there is always a risk of unauthorized use of the technology. The significance of this risk is defined mainly by the quality of the agreement.”
Golovadsky considered 20-year agreements rather rare for Russian companies. “But considering the specific product and conditions of its commercialization, it’s quite normal,” he said.
A number of foreign companies are using license agreements for establishing production lines in Russia. One example is a joint venture between General Motors and AvtoVAZ.
“The potential of Russian companies is growing. I think, the number of license agreements will increase in the future, and this process will be mutual. We already saw a number of cases when Russian companies and research institutes transferred technologies to foreign businesses and vice versa,” Golovadsky said.
TITLE: Confidence Returns As RTS Passes 2,000
AUTHOR: By Simon Shuster
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The RTS index at last broke through the 2,000-point barrier last week, reaching an all-time high of 2,061 points as the stars came into alignment for recovering local markets.
Almost every major sector gave investors a reason to buy.
British-Australian miner Rio Tinto’s top-dollar takeover of Canadian aluminum miner Alcan on Thursday boosted global valuations for the metals sector and made Russian firms such as Mechel look cheap. The miner jumped 8.9 percent for the week.
Comstar (CMST), the country’s leading broadband Internet provider, saw an astounding two-day rally of 21.6 percent after four brokerages in as many days upgraded the stock, and Sberbank (SBER) got momentum from its upcoming share split, gaining 5.7 percent for the week.
Agriculture stocks such as Razgulyai (GRAZ) got a boost from the state’s five-year plan, announced Thursday, to spend $43 billion on supporting this sector. The grain producer was up 6.3 percent.
Even the oil and gas names, which have seen a dearth of positive catalysts in recent months, found support from surging oil prices.
The price of Brent for August delivery was trading above $76 per barrel at the end of the week, the highest level since September. Rosneft gained 4.8 percent Thursday.
Gazprom’s announcement that it would partner up with France’s Total in developing the Shtokman field in the Barents Sea helped its stock rise 4.1 percent in the last two days of the week.
More general market sentiment was also rosy Thursday morning, as traders woke up to hear the news that U.S. indexes had seen their biggest one-day rally in almost five years. Taking this for a cue, along with similar news from Asia, investors bought “almost indiscriminately,” according to Alfa Bank, and the RTS and MICEX both gained almost 3 percent on Thursday alone.
This followed a disappointment earlier in the week, when the RTS closed a fraction of an index point shy of the 2,000 mark, only to fall back by more than 1 percent Tuesday.
UralSib fretted on Friday morning over whether the rally was “another false dawn, of which there have been so many this year,” but the RTS held above the elusive and psychologically important benchmark, gaining another 0.6 percent that day.
Perhaps the biggest credit for the jump should go to the outstanding liquidity conditions, as overnight rates on the foreign exchange market were just above 3 percent last week, allowing traders to borrow money cheaply for investments.
Nearly $4 billion was traded on the MICEX exchange Thursday, 55 percent higher than its four-week daily average, according to Deutsche UFG.
The week before, these rates were even lower. Standing at only 2.4 percent, they allowed investors to act fast on news of Sochi’s successful 2014 Winter Olympics bid, which set up the bullish mindset last week.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Laundering Law
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin instructed the Cabinet and the Central Bank to amend a law on money laundering and financing terrorism, the presidential press service said in a statement Friday.
The amendment will require all bank transfers by individuals of more than 600,000 rubles ($23,600) in foreign currency to undergo special scrutiny, the statement said. The legislation will be submitted to the parliament for consideration, according to the statement.
Kudrin Gets VTB Post
LONDON (Bloomberg) — VTB Bank named Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as chairman of its supervisory board, the bank said in a statement Friday.
Members of the board elected Kudrin at the annual general meeting, the bank said.
Gref Deputy Resigns
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref accepted his deputy’s resignation, Interfax reported Friday.
Gref declined to say who would become deputy economic development and trade minister after Andrei Sharonov’s resignation is accepted by the prime minister. Gref was speaking in Omsk, Interfax said.
Sharonov, who has held various government posts for the past 16 years, has said he is choosing among several job offers from companies, including an offer from Troika Dialog, according to the news agency.
Gref currently has four other deputies: Kirill Androsov, Andrei Belousov, Vitaly Savelyev and Stanislav Kuznetsov.
RusAl to State?
MOSCOW (SPT) — RusAl chairman Oleg Deripaska said in an interview published in the Financial Times on Friday that he would be willing to transfer the aluminum giant back to the state if the need arose.
“If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up,” Deripaska said in the interview. “I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.”
Deripaska’s comments follow media reports earlier this month that RusAl could float on the London Stock Exchange by the end of the year.
Lada Model Scrapped
MOSCOW (SPT) — AvtoVAZ this month stopped making its Lada 110 model, which it has been producing for the last 10 years, Interfax reported Friday, citing a company statement.
The carmaker will now replace the older car with its new model, Lada Priora, which the company began producing in April. AvtoVAZ will continue to manufacture spare parts for the Lada 110, Interfax reported.
July Consumer Prices
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Consumer prices will probably rise 0.7 percent this month, Economic Development and Trade Ministry officials said, Interfax reported.
Prices in July will increase at the same monthly pace as July last year, said Andrei Klepach, head of the ministry’s forecasting department, the news agency said.
Consumer prices increased 0.3 percent in the first 10 days of July, said Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref, Interfax reported. Klepach and Gref were speaking in Omsk.
LUKoil Refinery Unrest
BUDAPEST (Bloomberg) — LUKoil’s Bulgarian refinery workers staged protests in front of the unit’s headquarters in Burgas on Friday to protest the firing of three people, Sofia-based Novinite news agency reported Friday, without citing anyone.
Protesters claim the three were fired for setting up a trade union, while the company said planned payroll cuts made their jobs redundant, the news agency reported. Workers earlier last week blocked a motorway to demand shorter hours and more paid vacation, it said.
Gazprom Roadshow
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Gazprom plans a benchmark eurobond nominated in dollars in July, a banking source said Friday.
The source said the roadshow would start next week. Gazprom last placed a dual-tranche bond in June, raising 700 million euros at 79 basis points over mid-swaps and 800 million euros at 115 basis points over British gilt.
Gazprom Hydro Stake
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom may sell its stake in the Zagorsk hydroelectric power plant, said the deputy head of Hydro-OGK, the country’s largest hydropower producer, Interfax reported Friday.
Gazprom may sell its stake now or wait until shares in Hydro-OGK start trading, Hydro deputy CEO Vasily Zubakin said, the agency reported.
Turkmen Oil Venture
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian oil companies want to revive a plan to develop fields in the Caspian Sea off Turkmenistan, said Rosneft executive Valery Rusakov, Interfax reported Friday.
Kirovsky Reinvests
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The largest industrial enterprise in the Northwest, Kirovsky Zavod, will reinvest its 2006 profit into production. The company will not pay dividends, Interfax reported Friday.
Net profit at Kirovsky Zavod accounted for 217 million rubles ($8.5 million) last year — a 40 percent increase on 2005 figures.
Authorized capital stock is 1 million rubles ($39 million).
Bank Bankrupt
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Central Bank of Russia eliminated the acting administration of St. Petersburg Bank for Reconstruction and Development (SPBRR) and declared its bankruptcy, Interfax reported Friday.
On May 3, SPBRR’s license was revoked because of credit insolvency and violations of federal laws and other regulations. SPBRR is owned by ZAO Kapital (19.75 percent), OOO Viktorel (18.66 percent), OOO Galilei (15.74 percent), OOO SZTs TOOP (14.13 percent) and ZAO AVK Investment Company (9.55 percent).
Concrete Results
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — LSR Group will invest $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion into development by 2010, Interfax reported Friday.
By 2010 the group will complete a cement plant and a brick plant in Leningrad Oblast. By 2009 the group will launch gas concrete plants in Ukraine and Lithuania and modernize the plant in Latvia.
Last year, LSR Group reported 1.1 billion rubles net profit, estimated according to IFRS — a fourfold increase on 2005 figures.
Revenue increased by 61 percent last year up to 21.11 billion rubles.
Bad Alcohol
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg department for consumer market supervision rejected more than 2,000 liters of alcohol as being defective this year, Interfax reported Friday.
More than 1,200 companies were investigated and 143 lots of alcohol were rejected.
The department levied penalties for 2.7 million rubles. 41 companies and 376 people were charged. Nine criminal cases started and 16 cases are being investigated in courts.
Hermitage Auditors
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The State Hermitage Museum has signed an agreement with BDO Unicon audit and consulting company, Interfax reported Friday.
According to the three years term agreement, BDO Unicon will be consultants to the Hermitage during its national and international projects, auctions and processing of customs documents for exhibits.
Mortgage Increase
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — VTB Group increased its mortgage portfolio by 80 percent up to $1.681 billion, RBC reported Monday.
In the first half of 2007 VTB acquired mortgages from other banks for $75.6 million.
By the end of the year VTB will increase this figure up to $300 million.
The total mortgage portfolio is expected to increase to $3 billion.
TITLE: Brazil Case Raises Stakes for Berezovsky
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Brazil has issued an arrest warrant for Boris Berezovsky on suspicion of money laundering at Sao Paulo football club Corinthians, a step that raises the stakes in the billionaire’s standoff with the Kremlin.
The warrant piles more pressure on Berezovsky, whose trial in absentia on fraud charges began in Moscow last week. Russian prosecutors have also accused him of fomenting a coup.
Berezovsky, who denies wrong doing, on Friday dismissed the Brazilian warrant as “an extension of the Kremlin’s politicized campaign” against him.
If sent to face trial in Brazil, Berezovsky could be in danger of being handed over to Russia. Britain and Brazil signed an extradition treaty in 1997, and a Russian-Brazilian extradition treaty came into force in January.
A Brazilian federal judge, Fausto Martin de Sanctis, in Sao Paulo on Thursday ruled to freeze the football club’s bank accounts and said he would ask for an Interpol arrest warrant for Berezovsky and two other suspects, including Kia Joorabchian, a one-time business associate of Berezovsky’s who briefly owned Kommersant in 1999.
Brazilian authorities have accused Berezovsky of laundering money by bankrolling the management group Media Sports Investment (MSI), which bought control of Corinthians in 2004. Joorabchian ran MSI, registered in the British Virgin Islands, until August, but Brazilian authorities believe that Berezovsky provided the funding.
“MSI belongs and has always belonged to the accused, Boris Berezovsky,” Brazilian court documents claim, the Financial Times reported Friday. The documents were based on taped telephone conversations over the past 18 months, the newspaper said.
MSI and Corinthians denied the charges on Thursday and said they obeyed all laws, Reuters reported. Berezovsky last year denied he had links to MSI.
Two or three European countries would follow Brazil’s lead in the near future, a Moscow source said, Interfax reported. The Brazilian warrant was the result of joint work by several countries to fight organized crime, the source said.
“The arrest warrant for Berezovsky that was issued by the Brazilian court is just the first step,” the source said. “A number of other countries, which have complaints about the entrepreneur, will take similar measures in the near future.”
The latest allegations against Berezovsky led Russian television newscasts Friday, with extensive reports in the afternoon and evening bulletins.
Apart from a statement denouncing the “Brazilian story” as “an extension of the Kremlin’s politicized campaign” against him, Berezovsky did not respond to requests for further comment passed to his London office on Friday.
Berezovsky’s associate Alex Goldfarb said he believed the charges would have been impossible without the involvement of Russian prosecutors.
The prosecutors had apparently told their Brazilian counterparts that Berezovsky made his money in Russia fraudulently, thus prompting the belief that anything Berezovsky’s spent money on should be regarded as an attempt at money laundering, Goldfarb said.
“Berezovsky is not a criminal, but a political and personal foe of [President Vladimir] Putin,” Goldfarb said by telephone Friday from New York. “President Putin uses his government’s resources to get Berezovsky in every country.”
Despite denying links to MSI, Berezovsky offered to invest $50 million in the construction of a new stadium for Corinthians in 2005. Brazilian prosecutors questioned Berezovsky at a Sao Paulo airport for several hours in May 2006 in connection with their investigation into MSI. Four months later, he said he had no interest in football assets.
MSI acquired control of Corinthians under a 10-year deal that gave the company 51 percent of the club’s profits in return for paying off its debts and investing in new players. After MSI spent millions of dollars on the club, Sao Paolo prosecutors opened an inquiry into the origin of the money.
“Who would invest this much money in a soccer team that has been in the red for years? And why?” prosecutor Jose Reinaldo Guimaraes Carneiro said when he started his investigation in February 2005, The Associated Press reported.
Later that year, Carneiro said the inquiry was looking into possible involvement by Berezovsky in money laundering. “There is enough circumstantial evidence indicating that the MSI-Corinthians partnership is being used for the laundering of money, most of which was received from Boris Berezovsky,” Carneiro said.
The timing of the Brazilian warrant could hardly come at a worse time for Berezovsky. Apart from the Russian cases against him, fresh allegations about links with Joorabchian could receive huge publicity, as Joorabchian's name has been splashed across the sports pages of British newspapers in recent days in connection with the controversial transfer of former Corinthians player Carlos Tevez from London club West Ham to Manchester United.
Last summer Joorabchian brokered the transfer of Tevez and fellow Argentine international Javier Mascherano from Corinthians to West Ham. The deal, which saw MSI retain the rights to was eventually deemed be in breach of English Premier League rules and led to West Ham being fined $11.2 million.
TITLE: State Offers Up Foreign Yukos Assets
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government began taking bids Monday for an overseas unit of bankrupt oil firm Yukos that controls a 49 percent stake in Transpetrol, Slovakia’s pipeline operator.
The Federal Property Fund will take bids for Yukos Finance BV through Aug. 13 and hold an auction Aug. 15, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported Saturday.
The starting price is 7.6 billion rubles ($299 million), the government newspaper said.
Yukos Finance’s assets include the proceeds from the sale of a 54 percent stake in Lithuanian refinery Mazeikiu for almost $1.5 billion and the 49 percent stake in Transpetrol worth $100 million to $200 million.
Yukos’ 13.7 billion rubles of accounts receivable will also be auctioned Aug. 15, at a starting price of 11.5 billion rubles, Rossiiskaya Gazeta said. Accounts receivable is money owed, but not yet collected, for goods or services.
On Wednesday, Yukos receiver Eduard Rebgun said he believed Yukos and its former owners still might have more than $10 billion in property and assets abroad, which he said he would fight hard to recover.
Slovakia’s economy minister, Lubomir Jahnatek, said in March that his country, which owns the remaining 51 percent in Transpetrol, wanted to buy back the Yukos stake and hoped that it would reach a deal by the end of this year.
Bloomberg, Reuters
TITLE: MMK Planning to Invest $2Bln Into Auto, Building
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works, or MMK, the country’s third-biggest steelmaker, plans to invest $2 billion to boost production for the construction and automotive industries, chairman Viktor Rashnikov said Friday.
The steelmaker signed contracts with four companies, Rashnikov said in Magnitogorsk. The plant will supply Germany’s SMS Demag and SMS Mevac, Fata Hunter, a unit of Italy’s Finmeccanica, and Ukraine’s Novokramatorsky Machine-Building Plant.
Magnitogorsk, which owns the country’s largest stand-alone steel plant, will spend $1 billion on building a mill for producing an annual 2 million tons of automobile body sheet, Rashnikov said. The new facility, which should be opened in 2010, will boost the company’s output from 12.5 million tons of steel last year to 16 million tons by 2012, he said.
“Russia’s metals industry is entering a new phase,” Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko told reporters in Magnitogorsk. “We are adopting new technologies and boosting productivity.”
Russia is one of Europe’s fastest growing car markets as international automakers, such as General Motors, Ford and Toyota either set up or expand production facilities in the country. Sales of foreign cars, including those made in the country, surged 70 percent to 720,143 in the first half of this year.
The new mill will also supply hard-drawn semi-finished rolled products for the Magnitogorsk-Atakas mill in Turkey. Magnitogorsk said in May that it planned a $1.1 billion mill in southern Turkey to produce 2.6 million tons of hot- and cold-rolled steel.
The company will also reconstruct over three years its hot-roll mill to produce 5 million tons of steel a year.
TITLE: Total to Get Reserves Under Shtokman Deal
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Total signed a long-awaited deal Friday to develop the giant Shtokman gas field with Gazprom that will allow it to book part of the Arctic field’s lucrative reserves.
Total CEO Christophe de Margerie and Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Ananenkov signed a 25-year deal to develop the first phase of Shtokman, a field set to supply huge amounts of gas to Europe and North America when it comes on line within the next decade.
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller, who remains ill with a kidney ailment, did not attend the signing at Gazprom headquarters, but announced the surprise deal in a statement Thursday.
Total, which had been seeking entry into Shtokman for years, will take a 25 percent stake in the field’s operating company. Gazprom has reserved the right to sell a further 24 percent to one or two of the companies still hoping to join the project, but will maintain a 51 percent controlling stake.
It will also hold full control of license holder Sevmorneftegaz and “be the owner of the whole amount of hydrocarbons to be extracted,” Miller said in Thursday’s statement.
Gazprom and Total provided further details of the deal on Friday, fulfilling analysts’ predictions that the French firm would be allowed to book some of the field’s reserves in exchange for the huge financial commitment and risk it would undertake during the project’s difficult development.
“It’s a technicality, but yes, we can book reserves,” de Margerie said after the signing, news agencies reported. “In as far as we are taking risks, and when you take risks you can book reserves.”
A Gazprom spokesman confirmed that Total would be able to book part of the field’s estimated 3.7 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves, but said the exact amount had yet to be decided.
“Total will have a 25 percent stake, but it would be more accurate to say it will be able to book up to 25 percent of the reserves,” the spokesman said, declining to be identified in line with company policy.
The details of the deal were still being worked out, he added.
Gazprom set up a special purpose vehicle in order to operate the field, allowing it to maintain 100 percent control over license holder Sevmorneftegaz. Sevmorneftegaz general director Yury Komarov also attended the signing.
The special purpose vehicle, which will organize the design, financing, construction and operation of Shtokman’s first phase, will govern the project for 25 years, Total said in a statement after the signing of the framework agreement.
The agreement foresaw the start of “joint project implementation activities” in July 2007, the statement said, without providing further details.
Shtokman, located some 550 kilometers offshore and deep under the Barents Sea, is one the world’s largest — and most difficult — gas fields.
Analysts had predicted that Gazprom would be forced to reverse its decision in October, when it halted talks on participation by foreign oil companies.
Gazprom insisted afterward that it would only bring in foreign firms as contractors, preventing them from booking reserves — a key indicator for shareholders.
Norway’s Statoil and Norsk Hydro, which are due to be merged Oct. 1, and U.S. firm ConocoPhillips remain in the running for the 24 percent stake that Gazprom could still dole out.
Charlie Rowton, a spokesman for ConocoPhillips, said the company remained interested in participating in the project. “We maintain a steady dialogue with Gazprom, but can provide no further detail,” Rowton said in an e-mailed response.
A senior executive at one of the Norwegian firms told Reuters on condition of anonymity Friday that the merging group was optimistic that it could strike a deal.
Analysts say Gazprom’s timeline for the project, of gas production by 2013 and LNG production by 2014, is ambitious.
TITLE: Rosneft Eyes $3.6Bln Loan
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Rosneft will borrow about $3.6 billion from Western and Russian banks, the firm said Friday, in a step that would further add to its heavy debt load.
The state-controlled oil firm, which has this year spent over $20 billion to buy assets of bankrupt oil firm Yukos at forced auctions, did not say whether it would use the proceeds to refinance its earlier debt or for other purposes.
The money will come from a syndicate of Western banks, which will lend $3.25 billion for five years, while the country’s second largest bank, VTB, will provide another 8.4 billion rubles ($329.5 million), the company said.
Rosneft’s debt has been fluctuating at around $30 billion this year, as it had secured a record $22 billion in bridge financing from Western banks to buy Yukos’ top assets.
Its most recent debt deals include a $2 billion syndicated loan and a $2 billion eurobond, which is less than the $5 billion it planned to issue, Interfax reported, citing an unidentified person close to the transaction.
The bonds will have maturities of five years and 10 years. Banks will stop taking orders for the debt Tuesday, Interfax said.
Rosneft is also working on a convertible bond to refinance the $22 billion loan and has said it may float some additional stock.
The company plans to slash its debt to $15 billion by 2010 by using its own profits and proceeds from the planned sale of noncore assets.
Reuters, Bloomberg
TITLE: School of Management Aims to Go Global
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Professor Valery Katkalo, Dean of St. Petersburg University’s Graduate School of Management, talks about the school’s 14 years of work to date, its ambitious development plans for the future and the creation of a vast new campus on one of the city’s historic palace and park ensembles.
What are the key goals of the Graduate School of Management?
Our project is part of a national priority project in education with the very ambitious goal of building a Russian business school with a strong international brand in business education. Essentially, the task is to take the school to the upper rankings of business education by 2015. Clearly, this means the creation of a school that is both compatible and competitive with the leading business schools of the world.
What experience have you developed over the last 14 years as a school within the university, and how will it assist you in achieving that goal?
For us, to achieve this goal it’s crucial that we choose the right business model for such a school. If we take the top ten or even top one hundred business schools in the world ,we can see that almost all of them, or at the very least 90 percent, are university business schools. They are mostly in-house business schools at major research universities. This is a model typical for all American business schools. Cambridge and Oxford created their business schools recently, in the 1990s, the London Business School is, formally, part of London University, the Rotterdam School of Business is part of the Erasmus University. So this general trend and this business model is very well known and respected.
Our school was opened in 1993 as a new faculty of St. Petersburg University and we were very committed from the very beginning to this university model for the business school. We started pretty much from scratch, and had four faculty members and 33 bachelor students, but we had three major assets from the very beginning.
Firstly, we are part of the St. Petersburg University, the leading university in the country which, really, not only gives us an umbrella brand but also establishes very high standards for educational and research excellence.
Secondly, we were a very international school right from the beginning. Our co-founding partner was the Haas School of Business at the University of California in Berkeley. Today we have 24 partners among leading European and American schools with whom we exchange students and faculty, and we have numerous joint research projects.
The third important asset is that right from the beginning, we were very keen on corporate relationships. We were probably the first business school in this country to create an international business advisory board, with John Pepper, former CEO of Procter & Gamble worldwide, as chairman.
How many students do you have at present and what programs do you offer?
At present we have about 1,400 students. Most of them are still in our undergraduate division, but we have both Master’s and Executive MBA programs and some retraining degree programs. We plan to develop a school with a large, diversified portfolio of programs and we will of course develop very strong research capabilities here at the school.
How does the school plan to finance all this expansion?
Being inside the university means that we will have diversified sources of funding. At the moment, we’re receiving what we might call seed capital for the business school from the government, but in the near future the government will seriously reduce its funding and we will operate on two major sources of funding – tuition revenues and endowment funds.
What other competitive advantages have you managed to develop in the 14 years that the school has been operating?
We’ve shown that we’ve been very strong in internationalizing the school. This year we will have about 100 European students coming here for a semester on exchange programs which work on the credit transfer system. As I mentioned, we have 24 partners. These are top European and North American schools, so we’re not interested in just getting foreigners – we’re shooting for the schools which can, of course, contribute to our reputation. And we get two benefits here immediately. Firstly, we’re bringing in students from top schools, which has a direct and indirect impact on quality control. And secondly, we’re getting quotas for our students to go there, so it’s really a two-way street.
Does that exchange extend to teachers too?
Not on the same scale, obviously. Having exchanges of professors is a very costly exercise, but with the investment that we’re getting from the government and from business we are now able to invite top international caliber professors to teach here. And from September, 2007, we will have about 6 professors teaching at the school for a semester or on a modular basis and we’re planning on increasing this number exponentially.
How strong is the incentive to run programs in English?
In the future, most of our programs will be run in English. At the risk of stating the obvious, business is now global, and when we talk about the internationalization of programs at the top business schools it’s not just a question of teaching in English, it’s a question of what you understand quality standards in business education today to be. So, I would say that it’s an issue of quality and, of course, an understanding that if we’re in business education then we should be training people for international careers
By international careers, I mean that our graduates may even be working for Russian companies but in the international dimension of their activities or our graduates may work for multinationals operating in Russia. If you look at today’s job market in Russia, you will see that multinationals and the best Russian companies are competing for the same kind of employees. It’s already, more or less, a war for talent between these two clusters of companies.
So English language is a tool but it’s also much more — it’s an indicator of the level of quality of your program. English language programs allow you to attract international faculty. And, in turn, you really upgrade the professional capabilities of the Russian-native professors. All this means that in the future I think that we will probably only preserve two programs in the Russian language – one of the formats of the executive MBA, mostly focused on the regions, and the bachelor program, which, according to the current Russian legislation, must be predominantly in the native language. Nevertheless, we are also introducing a number of English-language courses into the bachelor program.
In what other ways will the programs offered be developed in the future?
The School of Management has effectively been renamed the Graduate School of Management because very important conceptual changes are underway here. First of all we are expanding our graduate programs.
We’ve fixed the intake into our bachelor program at about 200 per year. The areas of growth will be Masters programs, Executive MBA programs and we’re taking three programs with us from the past – the Bachelor, the Master’s of International Business and Executive MBA in the Russian language. All these three programs are very successful in the marketplace.
In parallel to this, however, we’re now designing and preparing three new flagship programs. They are, firstly, a full-time MBA which will take about 16 months, will be entirely in English and will be an internationally positioned program. Secondly, an international executive MBA which will be on a modular basis in partnership with some leading western school or schools. And thirdly, a much longer term project – a PhD program in management. At the moment we have a small doctoral program, but we really need to have an internationally recognized program.
How do research projects arise? Ideas are suggested by the students or the faculty or companies approach you?
We’re working in a field that is developing very dynamically globally. There are certain areas in finance theory, in strategic management research and in marketing and organizational behavior which have been very actively developing in the world over the last twenty to thirty years.
So, we test internationally generated theories in the Russian field to see, for example, how corporate life cycles theory is applicable to the stories of Russian companies or in building from small entrepreneurial firms to successful mid-sized companies. These are fascinating projects, of course.
In all this research, there’s another advantage of being part of the St. Petersburg University – we are able to capitalize on all the resources of the other faculties of the university. In our entrepreneurship studies, for example, we are using a lot of field questionnaires and people from the Sociology Faculty. In finance theories and research, say, the math involved is very important and we are able to bring some very strong people from the Math Faculty, people who are experts in applied math.
What are the plans for the new campus?
In July of 2006 the presidential administration granted the university a very unique piece of real estate for the Graduate School of Management project. It’s 104 hectares on a historic palace and park ensemble, which formerly belonged to the son of Nicholas I, Mikhail Nikolayevich – that’s why it’s called the Mikhailovka. We have to renovate and upgrade the existing buildings. There’s the palace, the kitchen house, stables and a greenhouse. The stables, for instance, will be turned into the main building of the school with the classrooms and the professors’ offices. But then we have to build new facilities. Dormitories, for example. Our third job will be to restore the historic park, which brings additional uniqueness to this future campus.
How much will the faculty have to expand to provide for the new campus and where will the teachers be found?
The school is designed to be quite sizeable by Russian standards. We’re talking about 1,800 students, not including executive education. Of that number, only 800 will be on bachelor’s programs, with the rest in graduate programs. For that size of school we will need about 100 to 120 faculty members full-time. At the moment we have 70.
The advisory board is also a very important part of the project. In early June we had our second meeting of the International Advisory Board which is chaired by First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, and we have a very representative group of top Russian companies taking part. On the Russian side we have Vladimir Potanin, Oleg Deripaska, Vladimir Yakunin, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, Vladimir Kostin, and on the international side we have top executives from Procter & Gamble, Citibank and L’Oreal, just to mention a few. And, of course, Minister Gref and Minister Fursenko are members, along with Governor Matviyenko and the Rector of the university, Ludmila Verbitskaya. We also have several deans from the top international business schools. So we really have very important constituencies of our project on this Board.
How will you know if you’ve achieved your goals? What will be the benchmarks for your success?
By September 1, 2010, we have to open the new campus and have all the programs launched.
Then we will need another three or four years to get what’s called triple-crown accreditation – that’s three major institutional accreditations (EQUIS, AACSB, AMBA).
If we can get them all, becoming the first school in Russia to do so, that will be very important evidence of the fact that we are comparable with the top schools in the world.
That will be, in effect, our entrance ticket to the top rankings.
TITLE: Send Me Your Tired and Your Overworked
AUTHOR: By Ezra Klein
TEXT: The most astonishing revelations in Michael Moore’s new film, “SiCKO,” have nothing to do with health care. They’re about vacation time. French vacation time, to be precise.
Sitting at a restaurant table with a bunch of U.S. expats in Paris, Moore is treated to a jaw-dropping recitation of the perks of social democracy: 30 days of vacation time, unlimited sick days, full child care, and social workers who come to help new parents adjust to the strains and challenges of child-rearing. Walking out of the theater, I heard more envious mutterings about this scene than any other.
“Why can’t we have that?” my fellow moviegoers asked.
The first possibility is that the United States already does. Maybe that perfidious Moore is just lying in the service of his French paymasters. But sadly, no. A recent report by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research suggests that Moore is, if anything, understating his case. “The United States,” they write, “is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.” Every other advanced economy offers a government guarantee of paid vacation to its work force. Britain assures its work force of 20 days of guaranteed, compensated leave. Germany gives 24. And France gives, yes, 30.
The United States guarantees zero. Absolutely none. That’s why one out of 10 full-time U.S. employees, and more than six out of 10 part-time employees, get no vacation. And even among workers with paid vacation benefits, the average number of days enjoyed is a mere 12. In other words, even those of us who are lucky enough to get some vacation typically receive just over one-third of what the French are guaranteed.
This is strange. Of all these countries, the United States is, by far, the richest. And you would think that as U.S. wealth grew and productivity increased, a certain amount of U.S. resources would go into, well, Americans. Into leisure. Into time off. You would think that Americans would take advantage of the fact that they can create more wealth in less time to wrest back some of those hours for themselves and their families.
But instead, the exact opposite has happened.
The average man in the United States today works 100 more hours a year than in the 1970s, according to Cornell University economist Robert Frank. The average woman in the United States works 200 more hours. And those hours are coming from somewhere: from time with kids, friends, spouses, even sleep. The typical American, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, sleeps one to two hours less per night than his or her parents did.
This would all be fine if it were what Americans wanted. But that is not the case. One famous 1996 study asked associates at major law firms which world they would prefer: The one they worked at, or one in which they took a 10 percent pay cut in return for a 10 percent reduction in work hours. They overwhelmingly preferred the latter. Elsewhere, economists have given individuals sets of choices pitting leisure against goods. Leisure doesn’t always win out, but it is certainly competitive. Yet Americans are pumping ever more hours into work, seeking ever-higher incomes to fund ever-greater consumption. Why?
A possible answer can be found in Frank’s work. He argues that the U.S. economy has set its incentives up to systematically underemphasize leisure and overemphasize consumption. Much of what Americans purchase are called “positional goods” — goods whose value is measured in relation to the purchases of others. Take housing. Would you rather live in a land where you had a 400-square-meter house and everyone else had a 600-square-meter house, or one in which you had a 300-square-meter house and everyone else had a 200-square-meter house? Given this choice, studies show that most respondents pick the latter.
Being concerned with one’s relative position rather than one’s absolute position is not irrational or merely motivated by envy. In order to retain your relative standard of living, you need to keep up with the purchases of others in your income bracket. Retaining your relative position also ensures that you don’t send the wrong signals when a client comes over for dinner. Houses, cars, clothing — they all help send those signals. And because the rich in the United States keep getting richer, they’re caught in what Frank calls “expenditure cascades” in an effort to keep up. Their purchases raise the bar for the group right below them, which in turn increases the needs of the next income set.
This makes the purchase of positional goods more pressing and urgent than nonpositional goods. And so they “crowd out” their less context-contingent cousins. People want to spend less time at work, but they also want to retain and improve their standard of living relative to their neighbors — and the latter triumphs, time and again.
This isn’t because people are stupid, or irrational, or don’t know what they want. Rather, it’s because the incentives are all fouled up. Frank calls it a “smart for one, dumb for all” problem, but it’s really just a classic failure of collective action. An individual would be made worse off were he to opt out of the positional competition unilaterally. But Americans would all be better off if they decided collectively to ratchet down the economic one-upmanship and instead devote a bit more time to the leisure they claim to desire.
In the sweltering Washington, D.C. summer, there’s nothing worse than wearing a necktie when the thermometer reads 35 degrees Celsius and the humidity is so thick you could swim laps. But on your own, there’s not much you can do about this state of affairs. If you’re the only one who shows up dressed down, you’ll look bad for it. But if your office, or meeting, were to decide collectively to ease the dress code, all would be better off.
This is what the European Union just did, imposing new regulations on its bureaucrats barring ties in the summer. Cutting down on air-conditioning costs was the rationale, but centralized action was the only way to end the practice. Otherwise, every individual would still have had the incentive to show his commitment by dressing in a tie. Only the collective could remove that spur.
So too with vacations. Very few individual workers in the United States can ask for four weeks of vacation. It is not only outside the benefits of their job but far outside the culture of their workplace. The incentives for most every individual, particularly if they want to keep their position and amass a reputation as a good employee, is to abide by those norms.
But if the crowd outside “SiCKO” was any indication, most people would love a substantial increase in vacation time. This is what other advanced nations have pursued, using the government’s role as an enforcer of collective sentiment to legislate the preferences that individuals could not, on their own, enact.
In the United States, it has been left to the individuals, and thus the average U.S. worker only takes 13 days of vacation a year, and many get none. They could do better, but that would require sidestepping American individualism for a moment and engaging in some American collectivism.
Ezra Klein, whose blog is at EzraKlein.com, is a staff writer at the American Prospect. This comment appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
TITLE: Putin Didn’t Have a Prayer
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Russia’s winning of the right to host the Sochi Olympics in 2014 must be the happiest event that has happened for Russia in the last couple of years.
International Olympic Committee members were given the red-carpet treatment when they came to Sochi. They stayed at Oleg Deripaska’s elite hotel consisting of 24 swank rooms with interior decorating done by the same designer who did work for the queen of Belgium.
Looking back, Russia had no real chance of winning this contest because Olympic officials gave Sochi the lowest possible rating. The main argument against Sochi was that every Olympic facility has to be built from scratch. Moreover, no one has any idea how to solve transportation problems.
Russia’s saving grace, however, was that the IOC’s final decision was made by bureaucrats rather than the experts who visited Sochi. On the eve before the IOC announced its decision, President Vladimir Putin personally met with every key IOC bureaucrat, even though it was clear after the preliminary vote that Pyongchang would be the likely winner.
The only thing that saved the day for Russia was the Lord’s intervention. Or perhaps Putin’s.
I don’t know what Putin said to the IOC members. I do remember, however, Putin telling U.S. President George W. Bush some time ago about a cross that he found after a fire in his dacha. And Bush informed the whole world after the “lobster summit” in Maine, that Putin cannot tell a lie. Since not all of the IOC members are Christian, Putin could not mention the story about the cross to them. On the other hand, he could have modified the story by saying that, in addition to the cross, he also found a Quran and Buddhist beads unscathed by the fire.
Whatever the case, every member of the IOC looked Putin straight in the eyes and understood that this person truly cannot tell a fib. Even if Putin said there would be no more traffic jams in Russia, he would be telling the truth.
Putin is certainly able to pull off this feat. After all, when North Korea hosted the Youth Festival in Pyongyang in 1989, there were no traffic jams because everybody over 40 years of age was evicted from the city. Why not oust everyone who could possibly cause traffic jams in Sochi? Authorities could give only tourists, athletes, service personnel and journalists access to the city.
This is wonderful news because the $12 billion allocated for the Olympics will create a gold rush — particularly for bureaucrats if you consider the kickbacks typically payed by construction companies for lucrative building contracts.
It is wonderful because it will do more than give Putin a chance to develop a new southern capital at the expense of state funds and Russia’s oligarchs. It should be noted that Putin, who adores recreation, receives guests more often in Sochi — and in extreme cases at Novo-Ogaryovo — than in the Kremlin.
The Sochi victory is wonderful for a different reason.
Imagine this: Putin flies to Guatemala City to attend the IOC meeting. He personally meets with each IOC member. Nonetheless, the members of the committee decide against Sochi based on the low rating given by the experts.
If this happened, Russians would have cried: “Again the West has offended us. See how much the West hates us? The evil hand of the imperialists of the Fourth Reich have reached Sochi.”
What a nightmare! This have would meant disgrace for Russia, a formal break with West and a third term for Putin.
Thank God those nasty scoundrels in the West remained our friends, placing their trust in Putin and keeping their boundless faith in Russia’s bright future.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Russophobia, Anglophobia and Lugovoi
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Kiselyov
TEXT: There has been much talk in the past couple of days that Russian-British relations are undergoing an unprecedented crisis. According to The Times of London, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Moscow’s refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the leading suspect in the killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London last year, “extremely disappointing.” Next week, the British Foreign Office will present a report to the British parliament regarding the Litvinenko murder investigation. As a result, the Foreign Office is preparing a series of retaliatory measures against Moscow.
Not surprisingly, Russia has returned the favor. The Russian ambassador to London, Yury Fedotov, last week accused the British of Russophobia, and he accused the British police of equating every Russian with the mafia. According to Fedotov, Britain’s animosity toward Russians has become a serious problem. This hatred takes the form of discrimination and harassment against Russians in stores, hotels, restaurants and on the streets across Britain.
To be honest, I haven’t heard such rubbish in a long time. I have been to London dozens of times and I haven’t encountered any type of Russophobia. On the contrary, the British have always been the epitome of hospitality and courtesy. Maybe I have been lucky during my visits to Britain, but many of my friends, who have lived in London for many years, were surprised, to say the least, when they heard the Russian ambassador’s statement.
To be absolutely fair, among our fellow countrymen who travel to London, you can find Russians who have long ago gone berserk after amassing so much wealth. They squander their money, are openly rude and scandalous, and they make public scenes. And in light of this, Russians complain about how the British look upon them with contempt.
It is good that the British can put the Russian nouveau riche in their place. Their behavior has really gotten out of hand — so much that it is a disgrace to our country.
But the largest disgrace is what is happening in Moscow. This is where the real Anglophobia gets blown out of proportion. It has reached the level of hysteria: the massive accusations of espionage; the pressure applied to nongovernmental organizations which have received grants from Britain; the closing of excellent English-language courses sponsored by the British Council; our Nashi youth movement riffraff, who terrorized the British Ambassador Tony Brenton with the tacit consent of Russian authorities; and the various anti-British publications in the pro-Kremlin press.
As regards Russia’s refusal to extradite Lugovoi, I can agree with this decision in principle because the law should be above everything. And the Constitution, which protects Russian citizens from extradition, should always be observed.
But it seems to me that if our government acted differently, Britain would not have taken the firm position that they have now. It is unfortunate that our so-called “elite” absolutely don’t want to understand why the British reacted so sharply to the Litvinenko case. (In reality, the Russian “elite” is no elite at all, but, in most cases, complete rabble, who have no sense of responsibility for the fate of our country and who are concerned only about stuffing their pockets with loads of money and running away to London in time.)
Regardless of how you feel about Litvinenko, a crime has been committed and a person has been killed with a highly radioactive substance. Moreover, dozens of Londoners were subjected to the risk of deadly poisoning. Unlike Russia, British society is not accustomed to a situation where such serious crimes go unsolved (we have the exact opposite situation). In this crime, all of the evidence leads to Russia: The polonium that killed Litvinenko most likely originated from Russia and it is even more likely that Lugovoi executed this killing. Although Russian law prohibits Lugovoi’s extradition, it by no means prohibits Russia from carrying out a thorough investigation of Lugovoi’s alleged participation in the murder.
What is really going on in this case?
Eight months have passed since we found out that Litvinenko died from polonium-210 poisoning. During this time, the Russian authorities could have easily clarified whether the polonium used in the killing came from the few Russian enterprises that produce this rare substance. Russian law enforcement agencies could have also investigated the many facts quoted in the press that link Lugovoi to Litvinenko’s murder.
A confession alone cannot be used as evidence to prove that the accused committed a crime. We learned this hard lesson from the Stalin-era prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, who ordered the execution of thousands of people who confessed to crimes only after being tortured. This is also true for the opposite case: Denying a crime is not sufficient proof of innocence.
Lugovoi’s actions remind me of the old Russian saying regarding absolute denial: “This doesn’t concern me, I don’t have the slightest idea of what you are talking about and I am completely innocent.” Lugovoi claims that he has no idea whatsoever how the polonium landed on his body and why his footprints have been found in all the places where he was present — in London, in Moscow, on board the British Airways flights that he took and even in the British embassy on Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya. Enemies probably planted the polonium.
It seems that all of Lugovoi’s words are eagerly accepted as the truth. The Russian prosecutor initiated a criminal case in the Litvinenko murder, but it is impossible to determine his exact status in this case. Is he a witness? An accused? A representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “If we find concrete evidence of Lugovoi’s guilt, perhaps we will consider taking legal action against him in Russia, but we haven’t received such evidence.”
If you read the official records of Berezovsky’s and Zakayev’s interrogation with Russian investigators in London, you can find out a lot about the way Russian prosecutors are treating this matter. Most of the questions have no relation to the murder investigation whatsoever — they were asked with the obvious intention of finding out more about Berezovsky’s acquaintances and their whereabouts.
Meanwhile, Lugovoi held a press conference and claimed that Berezovsky and Litvinenko were recruited into the British intelligence service. It was clear that at this press conference, Lugovoi read a statement prepared for him by someone else, and his statement was broadcasted by major pro-government television stations — as if it were the highest truth. Moreover, the FSB initiated a criminal case of espionage solely on the basis of Lugovoi’s statements, although it failed to state who exactly is the target of the espionage case. The only concrete people that Lugovoi named were Berezovsky and Litvinenko.
I don’t want to say that the British intelligence service does not operate in Moscow, for example, under diplomatic cover. They probably do. Just as the Foreign Intelligence Service probably works in London and dozens of other capitals under diplomatic cover. Moreover, I will tell you a startling fact: intelligence officers use people as important sources of information and try to recruit them as agents. We recruit the British. The British recruit Russians. This has always been the case and will be so for a long time. This is the way of the world.
You could fan the flame on these espionage cases, declare agents who are working in Russia legally as persona non grata and kick them out of the country. If we do, the British will answer in the same exact way and we will return to the level of Russian-British relations of the early 1970s, when there were massive reciprocal expulsions of British and Soviet agents working under diplomatic cover.
What is the point of all this? To punish the British for their unwillingness to strip Berezovsky of his status as a political refugee? Will this obsession of the Russian authorities of nailing Berezovsky at all costs turn into insanity?
Again, I am convinced that if the Russian justice system had a sincere interest in working with British prosecutors and investigators in order to confirm or deny the accusations against Lugovoi, there would probably be a thaw in the Russian-British crisis. But the exact opposite is happening, and this only strengthens the suspicion that Lugovoi is deeply entangled in the Litvinenko murder and that the Russian authorities are covering up for him.
Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst.
TITLE: A Political IQ Test
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie
TEXT: Intelligence is limited by reality, but stupidity knows no bounds. For that reason, it can be quite creative, conjuring up all sorts of things that should never have existed in the first place. U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision to counter an Iranian threat by placing missile interceptors in Poland falls squarely into that category.
Yes, a deranged Iranian leader could conceivably launch a nuclear first strike. That act would, however, be the apex of Shiite self-immolation if it were launched against Europe, the United States, Israel or Russia. Iran’s main interest in acquiring nuclear weapons is to deter attack (and to pressure its neighbors). The world’s attention is now focused on U.S. ineptitude after its defeat of Saddam Hussein. But what impressed Iran most was how quickly and easily the United States defeated an enemy that Iran fought for nearly a decade.
The interceptors are unlikely to work in the first place. The technology has not proved very promising. In a New York Times op-ed piece on Wednesday, technology and security expert Theodore Postol, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advocates the United States and Russia joining in an anti-Iranian missile shield program but admits his truest feelings in parentheses: “(Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether missile defense will ever be very effective, something I’m quite skeptical about.)” In other words, the U.S. and Russia will counter a low probability threat with an even lower probability defense system.
Any anti-missile system can only detect missiles fired from land. No Star Wars would stop Russian subs in the Atlantic from striking New York. And the Iranian navy has at least three Russian-made subs, possibly with terrain-skimming Novator 3M-14 missiles, which can be nuclear tipped and are immune to radar jamming in their approach phase. Their target presumably would be Tel Aviv.
Politically, Poland was a poor choice of venues for the placement of the interceptors. Not only have the former Warsaw Pact nations been absorbed into NATO — against assurances to the contrary throughout the 1990s — but now Warsaw itself is going to allow U.S. rockets on Polish soil. These rockets will not be aimed at Russia, but it is uncomfortable having rockets in its neighbor’s yard, especially if relations with that neighbor have not been overly amicable. And what if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly started lobbying to place anti-anti-missiles outside Minsk?
How genuine is Russian anger over the anti-missile system and how much of it is political? To some degree, the outrage is a real reaction to yet another humiliating move by the West. This was bad enough when Russia was weak and had to swallow everything, but intolerable now that it has regained power and prestige.
President Vladimir Putin’s response was to offer to share a radar facility Russia rents in Azerbaijan (and one under construction in the Krasnodar region.) The dramatic and unforeseen move elicited admiration from aficionados of international events. It put the United States on the defensive while it acknowledged its right to build such a system. The United States sputtered: We’ll consider the possibility but without giving up our original intentions. A first deputy prime minister and 2008 presidential contender, Sergei Ivanov, grossly upped the ante, threatening to base new missiles in Kaliningrad if the Americans didn’t cooperate.
Pundits weighed in from both sides. Sergei Markedonov of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis saw joint use of the Azeri facility as a way of “preventing another Cold War.” Postol agreed, “Cooperating with Russia on missile defense is the perfect way” to prevent another Cold War.
It would be a pleasant irony if one of the many ineptitudes of the Bush administration did in fact lead to better relations between the United States and Russia, but I wouldn’t bank on it.
Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”
TITLE: Iraq Is Letting Georgia Produce Some Security
AUTHOR: By By Matthew Collin
TEXT: The sign by the parade ground at Georgia’s Krtsanisi military training headquarters reads: “NATO Security Guarantee.” Next to the barracks, on the edge of a road, is a huge, sculpted relief map of the country, which include the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These two visual indicators define Georgia’s desires: to join the Western military alliance and to win back the separatist territories.
When I visited the base, however, the soldiers had other things on their minds because they were only days away from flying out to join the U.S. mission in Iraq. Their mission will be to tackle suspected insurgents in a volatile area near the Iranian border. Not that they seemed too concerned about the prospective terrors ahead. “A Georgian soldier is afraid of nothing,” Vakhtang Diasamidze, 24, insisted firmly but calmly. “We know it is possible that terrorists could set off explosives and there could be lots of casualties. But we’re ready to eliminate this risk.”
I met 21-year-old Tamari Gamezardashvili, a slight, dark girl, just as she was just about to practice flushing out a nest of militant fanatics. “This mission means a lot to my homeland,” she declared. Gamezardashvili is one of around 30 female soldiers who are off to Iraq. An unusual calling for a woman? “The most important thing is motivation,” she responded firmly. “You have to have a soldier’s soul.”
U.S. military experts have been training the Georgian army since 2002. This is part of Georgia’s attempt to modernize its once-tattered, post-Soviet forces, which may increase its chances of joining NATO. As the sign at the Krtsanisi base suggests, this is also seen as a guarantee of Georgia’s security amid its disputes with big, bad Russia and those pesky Moscow-backed separatists.
The soldiers I met are part of Georgia’s own little surge, as it raises its troop numbers in Iraq to 2,000. When I asked why a small, somewhat impoverished nation was about to become the third-largest contributor to the U.S. mission in Iraq, both the U.S. ambassador to Tbilisi and the deputy defense minister responded with the same phrase: Georgia wants to be seen as “a producer as well as a consumer of security” — in other words, a credible partner for the West. There is also the issue of gratitude to the United States, which has invested heavily in the government of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
But questions remain about whether the public here is prepared for the casualties that could occur as Georgian soldiers take on more dangerous missions. Right now, Iraq is something of an abstraction for some Georgians. But body bags could make it very real indeed.
Matthew Collin is a Tbilisi-based journalist.
TITLE: The Matter With History
AUTHOR: By Mark H. Teeter
TEXT: When the presidents of Russia and the United States met earlier this month in their curious Maine event, with its awkward clinches and realpolitik rabbit punching, there was at least one concept on which the two self-described “friends” could agree wholeheartedly: History matters. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin have recently shown a remarkable new interest in this discipline, and both have begun inviting historians to their homes for consultations. Given the intentions of these particular mortals, however, Clio, the muse of classical history, is probably not rejoicing on Mount Olympus.
Bush volunteered in a recent speech that he has taken to reading history. Aware that his legacy will be judged through the current war and the books people write about it, he has reportedly been “summoning historians ... to the White House for discussions on the fate of Iraq.” Yet Bush still seems oblivious to the history of his own political judgments. Since October 2003, he has used the term “progress” at least five times to describe the course of events in Iraq, modifying it successively as “really good,” “steady,” “good,” “incredible” and “inspiring.” At Thursday’s news conference, the trend continued with progress now apportioned into “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” modes. Perhaps Bush’s historian-visitors can explain how four years of continuous progress can produce a situation in which victory is simply “not an option” to use the words of the national security adviser to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
The surge in Bush’s historical interest is less a search for explanations than an attempt at pre-emptive exoneration. “When presidents have screwed up and want to console themselves,” noted a veteran Washington observer last week, “they think history will give them a second chance. It’s the historical equivalent of a presidential pardon.” After all, this president may have reasoned, if I can spring former U.S. White House adviser “Scooter” Libby after his perjury and obstruction of justice convictions, can’t I find some loyal historians to write a get-out-of-fiasco-free card?
This simultaneous ignorance of history and desire for its sanction may appear hard to beat in a bare-knuckles chutzpah match, yet Putin does not seem intimidated. The Russian president is not only a formidable bruiser of the historical record, he has now taken to tutoring his homeland’s history teachers so that the rising generation of Russian students can understand their own past correctly — as their president sees it.
In 2005, Putin described the demise of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Not only does such short-order cooking of the history books demean the victims of last century’s genuine geopolitical catastrophes — two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet gulag and terror-famines, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia — it ignores the fact that in a score of world capitals no longer subject to Soviet oversight, the end of the U.S.S.R. remains a cause for rejoicing.
The Soviet-demise remark was not an isolated historical hyperbole. Putin and his aides have accused Estonians of “trying to rewrite the history of World War II” through Tallinn’s department of parks and monuments; likened U.S. global “hegemony” to that of the Third Reich; compared the mass murder of Soviet citizens by their government with U.S. wartime use of the atomic bomb; and affirmed that Josef Stalin, the infamous genocidal tyrant, was “the most successful Soviet leader ever.” These and other pulse-stopping pronouncements appear in a new Russian high school history text, whose author Putin recently invited to his residence, along with other historians, for an encouraging chat.
Some sobering Russian voices have been raised against these attacks, calling them “dangerous and harmful” and a sign of the Kremlin’s “distrust” of its people. Izvestia’s Alexander Arkhangelsky even warns that the weight of such ideologized history from above could sink Russia’s weak educational system: “[Teachers] without talent will prosper,” and “new sources of corruption will flourish.” Theater director Lev Dodin mourns that Russians are “afraid of our own past” — so the state is encouraging “collective amnesia” and “nationalism is becoming the soul of our era.”
In the Soviet period, as one saying had it, the future was always certain while the past remained unpredictable. Bush and Putin — two lame-duck presidents and suspiciously sudden history buffs — want to dictate new pasts for us. We shouldn’t buy either. If they invite me, a history teacher, to the White House or Kremlin, I’ll certainly accept — but they should know in advance that it’s going to be a long chat.
Mark H. Teeter teaches English and Russian-American relations in Moscow.
TITLE: Russia Beats U.S. to Reach Fed Cup Final
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BOSTON — Nadia Petrova and Yelena Vesnina beat Wimbledon champion Venus Williams and Lisa Raymond in the decisive doubles contest to give Russia a 3-2 win over the United States in their Fed Cup semi-final on Sunday in Stowe, Vermont.
Petrova, returning to the court after saving Russia from elimination in Sunday’s second singles, and Vesnina registered a 7-5 7-6 victory, claiming the second-set tiebreaker 7-1, to lift Russia into the final.
Winning two critical matches on Sunday was especially sweet for the 25-year-old Petrova, who felt she squandered chances in a three-set singles loss to Williams on Saturday.
“I was very disappointed after losing to Venus when I had everything in my hands and then I broke down,” said Petrova. “I couldn’t handle the nerves and the pressure.
“So, I thought, OK, I’ll let it go. So today I got to do everything...make it up to them. I did it today. It just feels great. It feels fantastic.”
Williams was also playing her second match of the day after beating Anna Chakvetadze 6-1 6-4 in Sunday’s opening singles.
“I definitely felt good going out there,” the 27-year-old Williams said. “It was just a couple points here and there. I felt like I missed some shots that I should have made.”
The triumph put Russia into the final against defending champions Italy, who also needed a victory in doubles on Sunday to defeat visiting France in their semi-final.
Also stepping up for Russia was 20-year-old Vesnina, who hit three winners and an ace in the tiebreaker.
“It’s one of the best moments in my life. I was so nervous before the match,” said Vesnina, who credited Petrova with giving her confidence. “This match was just unbelievable, just incredible.”
Entering Sunday’s action tied at 1-1, Williams gave the U.S. team a 2-1 lead by beating Chakvetadze. After 41st-ranked Meilen Tu lost to Petrova 6-1 6-2 to level the tie at 2-2, U.S. captain Zina Garrison called on Williams to replace Vania King as Raymond’s doubles partner.
Tu, a late addition to the squad for injured Serena Williams, made her Fed Cup debut in place of King, who was beaten on Saturday by Chakvetadze in the first singles match.
Russia captain Shamil Tarpischev was confident about hosting Italy in the Fed Cup final on Sept. 15-16.
“This match will take place in Moscow,” Tarpischev said. “I think we have a better chance against Italy than we had against U.S.”
TITLE: Strong Quake Rocks Japan, Nuclear Plant
AUTHOR: By Koji Sasahara
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KASHIWAZAKI, Japan — A strong earthquake struck northwestern Japan on Monday, destroying hundreds of homes, buckling roads and bridges and causing a fire at a nuclear power plant. At least five people were killed and hundreds were injured.
The quake hit the region shortly after 10 a.m. local time and was centered off the coast of Niigata state. Buildings swayed 160 miles away in Tokyo. The hardest-hit area appeared to be Kashiwazaki, a city of about 90,000 in Niigata
Japan’s Meteorological Agency measured the quake at a 6.8 magnitude. The U.S. Geological Survey, which monitors quakes around the world, said it registered 6.7.
“I was so scared — the violent shaking went on for 20 seconds,” Ritei Wakatsuki, who was on her job in a convenience store in Kashiwazaki. “I almost fainted by the fear of shaking.”
Flames and billows of black smoke poured from the Kashiwazaki nuclear plant, which automatically shut down during the quake. The fire, in an electrical transformer, was put out about two hours later and there was no release of radioactivity or damage to the reactors, said Motoyasu Tamaki, a Tokyo Electric Power Co. official.
Tsunami warnings were issued along the coast of Niigata but later lifted.
A series of smaller aftershocks rattled the area, including one with a 5.8 magnitude. The Meteorological Agency warned that the aftershocks could continue for a week.
The quake hit on Marine Day, a national holiday in Japan, when most people would have been at home.
Five people in their 70s and 80s — four women and one man — died after buildings collapsed on them, said Takashi Morita, a spokesman for the National Police Agency in Tokyo.
National broadcaster NHK reported more than 700 people were hurt, with injuries including broken bones, cuts and bruises.
Nearly 300 homes in Kashiwazaki — a city known mainly for its fishing industry — were destroyed and some 2,000 people evacuated, officials said.
The quake buckled seaside roads and bridges, and left fissures three feet wide in the ground along the coast.
A ceiling collapsed in a gym in Kashiwazaki where about 200 people had gathered for a badminton tournament, and one person was hurt, Kyodo reported. The quake also knocked a train car off the rails while it was stopped at a station. No one was injured
Several bullet train services linking Tokyo to northern and northwestern Japan were suspended. More than 60,000 homes were without water and 34,000 without gas as of late Monday. More than 25,000 households in the zone were without power.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, campaigning in southern Japan for parliamentary elections later this month, was to return to Tokyo to deal with the quake, and the government had set up a task force, reports said.
“We want to do all we can to ensure safety ... and to quell everyone’s concerns,” he said.
Niigata Airport, which had suspended flights shortly after the quake, resumed services after finding no damage.
Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries. The last major quake to hit the capital, Tokyo, killed some 142,000 people in 1923, and experts say the capital has a 90 percent chance of suffering a major quake in the next 50 years.
In October 2004, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit Niigata, killing 40 people and damaging more than 6,000 homes. It was the deadliest to hit Japan since 1995, when a magnitude-7.2 quake killed 6,433 people in the western city of Kobe.
TITLE: Olmert, Abbas Meet For Talks
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday to discuss selective security amnesties designed to shore up his West Bank administration against rival Hamas Islamists.
The meeting at Olmert’s Jerusalem residence lasted about two hours. There was no immediate comment after it broke up.
Israel has described its decisions to free 250 low-security Palestinian prisoners, mostly from Abbas’s Fatah faction, and suspend kill-or-capture missions against 180 Fatah gunmen as goodwill gestures that could beget new peace talks with Abbas.
Such summits have been taking place every few weeks, billed by both sides as confidence-building talks.
Later on Monday, U.S. President George W. Bush was to make a speech in Washington that a senior aide said would reassert his support for Fatah leading the way to a Palestinian state coexisting with the Jewish state.
The aide said Bush will also speak about the role of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as new envoy for the Quartet of Middle East mediators — the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia — which convenes on Thursday.
With 1.5 million Palestinians under Hamas rule in Gaza and the Islamist group refusing to recognize Abbas’s dissolution of its government, the Western-favored president needs to find a way forward.
TITLE: U.S. Riders Left Behind In France
AUTHOR: By Jamey Keaten
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TIGNES, France — No more Lance. No more Landis. And their American successors are off to a lackluster start this year, jeopardizing an eight-year winning streak by U.S. riders at the Tour de France.
Denmark’s Michael Rasmussen won the eighth Tour stage on Sunday to grab the overall leader’s yellow jersey that was won by Tour champion Lance Armstrong from 1999-05 and Floyd Landis last year.
Sunday’s 102.5-mile trek from Le Grand-Bornand to Tignes was the second of three Alpine stages, and many contenders just want to stay within striking distance of the leader.
Levi Leipheimer is shaping up as the biggest American threat in a competitive field. The Discovery Channel team leader placed sixth in the 2005 Tour, ninth in 2004 and 13th last year.
Many riders expect the final shakeout in the three-week race to take shape in three tough stages in the Pyrenees mountains at the start of the third week and a time-trial a day before the July 29 finish in Paris.
“Levi’s been planning to have his best form for the Pyrenees,” Discovery spokesman P.J. Rabice said. “Today, he said he stayed with the group he needed to.”
After eight stages in 2006, three Americans — Landis, David Zabriskie and George Hincapie — were within 2 1/2 minutes of the lead. At the same time a year earlier, five of the top 14 in the standings were U.S. riders.
This year, Leipheimer is 13th overall, 3:53 back of Rasmussen. Among the other top Americans, veteran Chris Horner of the Predictor-Lotto team is 25th, 6:29 behind, and Discovery’s George Hincapie trails 45th, 20:19 back.
Hincapie, a former lieutenant of Armstrong who briefly entertained title hopes at last year’s Tour, finished 17:26 back of Rasmussen on Sunday.
“This year, George is trying for stage wins,” Rabice said.
The American streak of wins is already in doubt. An arbitration panel is considering whether Landis should keep his title after testing positive last year for synthetic testosterone in the 17th stage.
Tour organizers no longer consider Landis the 2006 champion, and while they don’t have final say, his name has an asterisk next to it in the race guidebook noting his win lies in the balance. He says he didn’t cheat and has criticized the French lab behind the test.
Doping revelations like the one regarding Landis, along with several admissions of cheating by present and former riders over the last year have tarnished the sport’s image.
Rasmussen, the Tour’s best climber for the past two years, left open the prospect that he could challenge for the Tour title this year, which could favor mountain specialists.
“I’m a climber, and a pure climber,” Rasmussen said. “If I have to go all the way, and take the yellow jersey all the way to Paris, I will have to climb faster than I have ever done in my life.
“There’s still two more weeks of racing and I still have 110 kilometers of time-trialing to negotiate. And I think I’ve proven in the past that it’s not exactly my specialty.”
The Danish rider won his third stage in four Tour appearances, clocking 4 hours, 49 minutes, 40 seconds. Spain’s Iban Mayo was second, 2:47 behind, followed by his compatriot Alejandro Valverde, 3:12 back.
Rasmussen took his first yellow jersey from German rider Linus Gerdemann, who trailed several minutes behind. Rasmussen holds a 43-second lead over Gerdemann and a 2:39 gap over Mayo.
Many overall race favorites stayed close, but pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov, nursing injuries to both knees, lost time to his main rivals and sat 5:23 back of Rasmussen in 22nd place.
“The team was incredible today,” Vinokourov said of his Astana teammates, which helped escort him to prevent him from losing too much time. “We tried to limit the damage ... I’m holding onto hope.”
Among other likely contenders, Valverde is fourth overall, 2:51 behind Rasmussen. Vinokourov’s teammate Andrey Kashechkin is 2:52 back, Cadel Evans of Australia trails by 2:53 and Christophe Moreau of France is 3:06 off the leader’s pace.
It was a bad day for Gerdemann’s T-Mobile team — just a day after he took the yellow jersey. The team’s Australian leader, Michael Rogers, injured his shoulder in a crash and dropped out, as did British teammate Mark Cavendish, who crashed twice in earlier stages.
Another T-Mobile rider, Patrik Sinkewitz, hit a fan while riding to his hotel after finishing the stage.
TITLE: Brazil Thrashes Argentina in Copa
AUTHOR: By Brian Homewood
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MARACAIBO, Venezuela — Brazil produced a ruthlessly efficient performance to beat old rivals Argentina 3-0 on Sunday and win the Copa America for the second time in a row.
Despite starting as outsiders, Brazil stung Argentina with a fourth-minute goal from Julio Baptista. Argentina captain Roberto Ayala, making his 115th appearance, then put through his own goal before halftime.
Daniel Alves added a third as Argentina coach Alfio Basile, who won the 1991 and 1993 tournaments in a previous stint with the team, lost a Copa America match for the first time in 19 outings.
With playmaker Juan Roman Riquelme absent, Argentina could not find their previously flowing game, and were muscled out by the powerful Brazilians, who committed 37 fouls.
It was a bitter pill for Argentina, who lost on penalties to the same opponents in the 2004 final and were facing a Brazil team without Kaka and Ronaldinho, who asked to be rested from the tournament.
It was also their third successive defeat against Brazil by a three-goal margin, Brazil having won 4-1 in the Confederations Cup final in 2005 and 3-0 in a friendly last year. Brazil coach Dunga, on the other hand, celebrated his first title only 11 months after taking over following last year’s World Cup quarter-final defeat to France.
“We came here to rescue the self-esteem of the Brazilian supporter, the worker who leaves home early in the morning and comes back at late night and whose only satisfaction is when Brazil wins,” he said.
He warned that Ronaldinho and Kaka would both have to fight to regain their places.
“Obviously, the player who comes is ahead of the player who doesn’t,” he said. “If a player comes and does well, how can I take him out of the team?”
Argentina coach Alfio Basile refused to talk to reporters.
His side had scored 16 goals in five games before the final while Brazil lost to Mexico in the group stage and needed a penalty shootout to beat Uruguay in the semi-finals. Argentina was also attempting to end a 14-year title drought stretching back to its 1993 Copa America title under Basile.
With the temperature at kickoff time around 32 Celsius and the tropical sun still burning, a cagey opening had been expected but instead Brazil snatched a quick lead.
A long crossfield ball by Elano found Julio Baptista on the left and, as Ayala held off, the player known as ‘the Beast’ advanced menacingly and unleashed a shot into the top right hand corner.
Riquelme rifled a shot against the post five minutes later and forced a brilliant save from Brazil goalkeeper Doni.
But Argentina’s usual flowing game was interrupted by systematic Brazilian fouling, while their defence was always shaky.
Maicon nearly added a second in the 17th minute when Roberto Abbondanzieri fumbled his low shot and the same player forced Javier Zanetti to clear off the line one minute later.
Five minutes before halftime, Daniel Alves, who replaced the injured Elano, produced a dangerous inswinging cross from the right and Ayala turned the ball into his own goal.
Brazil continued to frustrate Argentina after halftime as goalkeeper Doni and Gilberto were both booked for time-wasting. Daniel Alves then produced the killer punch with a clinical shot into the bottom right-hand corner.
TITLE: Former First Lady Mourned in Austin
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: AUSTIN, Texas — Past the images of escalating chaos in Vietnam, the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the triumphant entry into space, at the top of a marble staircase at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, thousands of mourners filed past the coffin of Lady Bird Johnson on Saturday.
Mrs. Johnson died Wednesday at the age of 94. At her funeral Saturday afternoon at Riverbend Centre, representatives of first families stretching back almost a half-century came to pay respect.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York sat next to her husband, former President Bill Clinton. To Mr. Clinton’s right was the first lady, Laura Bush. Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, sat on Mrs. Bush’s other side.
To Mrs. Carter’s right sat another former first lady, Nancy Reagan, and in the next row was Barbara Bush, wife of former President George Bush.
Mrs. Johnson would have been no stranger to the complicated tangle of ambition, achievement, respect and rivalry embodied by those gathered.
Bill Moyers, who was Mr. Johnson’s press secretary, recalled the tragedy that seemed to touch Mrs. Johnson’s life at every turn, including the death of her mother when Lady Bird was only 5 years old and the event that resulted in her husband ascending to the Oval Office.
Mrs. Johnson was with her husband, then vice president, two cars behind President John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas.
“I have moved on stage to a part I never rehearsed,” she told reporters.
TITLE: Zenit Goes Top After Rostov Win
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Zenit St. Petersburg beat Rostov 2-0 to reclaim the top spot in the Russian premier league from Spartak Moscow on Sunday.
Argentine striker Alejandro Dominguez put Zenit ahead just before the break and Russian international Alexander Arshavin added a second goal in the final minute.
Zenit goalkeeper Vyacheslav Malafeyev saved a Rostov penalty in the 40th minute.
The St. Petersburg team leads the table on 30 points from 16 matches, with Spartak second, a point behind, after beating Amkar Perm 1-0 on Saturday.
Champions CSKA Moscow were beaten 1-0 by city rivals Dynamo on Saturday.
TITLE: U.S. Presidential Hopefuls Boost Campaign Spending
AUTHOR: By Jim Kuhnhenn
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — It didn’t matter whether they raised more money or not, most presidential candidates certainly boosted their spending in the second quarter of the year.
More on staff. More on travel. More on consultants.
Democrats outraised Republicans about $80 million to $50 million from April through June. But Republicans kept pace with Democrats on spending — nearly $50 million spent on both sides.
The Democrats’ money advantage was helped in large part by the extraordinary fundraising of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. He raised $32 million for the primary; she raised $21.5 million.
But even as they raised more money, the better financed Democrats were chary about spending it all.
Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, spent half of what he raised in the second quarter. Clinton spent 60 cents for every primary dollar raised. John Edwards raised $9 million and spent $6.4 million.
That was not the Republican model. John McCain raised $11.3 million and spent $13 million. Mitt Romney had to lend his campaign $6 million to stay even with his spending for the quarter. The pattern was similar among GOP candidates with lesser finances. Only Rudy Giuliani, the Republican with the most cash on hand, kept his spending below his fundraising.
Obama and Clinton ended the quarter with $34 million and $33 million in the bank, respectively — formidable figures for two of the leading Democratic White House contenders.
The Republicans’ penchant for spending beyond their fundraising was especially apparent with McCain, the senator from Arizona. The McCain camp ended up spending more in the second quarter and raising less, even though their first quarter fundraising had left them with less cash on hand than Romney or Giuliani,
McCain’s payroll alone was the highest of all presidential candidates except for Obama’s for the first six months of the year. He ended the quarter with $3.2 million cash on hand and nearly $1.8 million in debts. McCain’s biggest debt was $750,000 owed to an Internet consulting firm connected to his new campaign manager, Rick Davis.
Payroll was by far the single largest expense — about $16 million total for all candidates in the second quarter. Romney spent the most of all on advertising — about $5 million. Consultants of all stripes were popular, particularly financial consultants, who earned a total of more than $3 million from various candidates.
Travel took its toll on budgets. Candidates altogether spent more than $8 million to get around the country. Some got better deals than others. John Edwards paid $230,660 to fly on a private jet owned by Dallas trial lawyer Fred Baron, Edwards’ national finance chairman.
Obama’s campaign paid nearly $3 million for travel during the quarter and spent about $1.3 million in telemarketing, one of its top single expenses. Clinton listed $1.1 million in travel expenses and $380,000 owed to an air charter company.
TITLE: Man Held In Doctor’s Terror Plot
AUTHOR: By Michael Perry
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SYDNEY — The Australian government stopped an Indian doctor on Monday from being released on bail by canceling his visa and ordering him into an immigration detention center. He faces terrorism charges linked to British car bombings.
Dr. Mohamed Haneef, 27, has been in custody since July 2 but was only charged on Saturday, sparking criticism by civil rights groups of his 12-day detention without charge.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) have charged Haneef with “providing support to a terrorist organization” because he left his mobile phone SIM card with his second cousin, one of those linked to the attacks in London and Glasgow.
Two car bombs primed to explode in London’s theater and nightclub district were discovered early on June 29. The following day a jeep crashed into the terminal building at Glasgow airport and burst into flames.
Two people in Britain have also been charged in relation to the attacks. All but one of the eight original suspects are medics from the Middle East or India.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has defended anti-terrorism laws which allowed Haneef to be detained for 12 days before being charged, saying the laws are essential to protect Australian citizens.
An Australian court magistrate on Monday granted Haneef A$10,000 (U.S.$8,700) bail, saying he had no known links to a terrorist organization and that police were not alleging that his SIM card had been used in relation to the British terror plot.
Haneef’s barrister Stephen Keim argued for his release, saying the case against Haneef was “extremely weak.”
But within hours the Australian government stopped Haneef’s bail release by canceling his visa and ordering him placed in Sydney’s Villawood immigration detention center.
“I reasonably suspect that he has or has had an association with persons engaged in criminal activity, criminal conduct, namely terrorism in the U.K.,” Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said.
TITLE: Injury Could Mar Beckham’s Debut
AUTHOR: By Mark Lamport-Stokes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — The only cloud on David Beckham’s horizon as he spent this weekend relaxing with his family in their new Beverly Hills home was his swollen left ankle.
He twisted the ankle while playing for England against Estonia in a Euro 2008 qualifying match last month, and aggravated it in his final appearance for Real Madrid 11 days later.
Since then, Beckham has been on holiday with his wife and three sons and was scheduled to report for his first day of training as a Los Angeles Galaxy player on Monday.
“My ankle is still slightly swollen,” the 32-year-old told reporters after being formally introduced as a Galaxy player at the Major League Soccer (MLS) team’s home stadium in Carson, California.
“I ran on it for the first time about four days ago in London. It felt slightly unstable so there’s still a bit of work to do.
“I’ll be getting that done over the next couple of days though massage and treatment and hopefully a bit of running. It should be all right for the game against Chelsea.”
Beckham, the biggest name to move to the U.S. since soccer greats Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff in the 1970s and early eighties, hopes to make his debut in a Galaxy shirt in an exhibition match with FA Cup holders Chelsea on July 21.
Galaxy club president and general manager Alexi Lalas has never doubted the fitness of his high-profile signing.
“We were very fortunate that David had this time apportioned out so that he was going to get the rest because his injury was something that just required time,” Lalas told Reuters.
“He had that time but this is a long-term project and we are not going to put him in any situation that puts him at risk and therefore doesn’t help the team.
“However, David Beckham takes care of his body and understands his body. He is much more rugged than people give him credit for, and I have no problems seeing him playing, and playing well, well until his mid- and possibly late-thirties.”
Beckham, signed by the Galaxy from Spanish giants Real Madrid on a five-year deal worth $32.5 million, agreed.
“I might be 32 years old, but I’m as fit as I was when I was 22 and I’m as eager as I was when I was 14,” he said with a smile. “So I’m ready for it.”
With his holiday not officially over until Monday, the golden boy of English and European soccer plans to spend as much time as possible with his family in their $22 million, six-bedroom Beverly Hills mansion.
TITLE: Jumper Speared by Finnish Thrower
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: ROME — A long jumper who was hit by a javelin at the Golden League meeting in Rome was dismissed from hospital on Saturday.
French jumper Salim Sdiri was rushed to Rome’s Gemelli hospital on Friday after being hit by a javelin thrown by Tero Pitkamaki of Finland.
Pitkamaki slipped at the end of his run-up, sending the javelin sailing 80 metres into the long jump warm-up area where it struck Sdiri in the torso.
Despite the horrific images of the accident, Sdiri’s wound was not as serious as first feared.
The javelin pierced only three centimetres into his body. Doctors released him after inserting five stitches — three external and two internal — and ruling out possible complications.
A shocked-looking Pitkamaki held his head in his hands after the incident but managed to regain his composure to take his fourth throw in the competition.
In January, Olympic decathlon champion Roman Sebrle was impaled by a javelin in a training accident.
The Czech world record holder was hit in the right shoulder while crossing the field at his training camp in South Africa and needed 11 stitches in the wound.
The incident has led to concerns over the safety of athletes ahead of the Norwich Union British Grand Prix in Sheffield, U.K., on Sunday.
But organizer Michelle Dite told the Press Association she has already been in discussions with U.K. Athletics officials in South Yorkshire and has confidence in the safety procedures in place.
“There is a very strict procedure for javelin. It is a system that has been built into the sport...so there is a series of events that have to take place before it is safe for a javelin to be thrown,” Dite said in comments posted at www.sportinglife.com.
(Reuters, SPT)
TITLE: Murderous Suicide Bombings Plague Iraq
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIRKUK, Iraq — Twin suicide car bombings exploded within 20 minutes of each other in the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, killing at least 71 people and wounding around 150 in attacks targeting a Kurdish political office and ripping through an outdoor market, police said.
The attacks began around noon when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-packed vehicle near the concrete blast walls of the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Soon after, the second bomber attacked the Haseer market, 700 yards away, destroying stalls and cars, said Kirkuk police Brigadier Sarhat Qadir.
The outdoor Haseer market — with stalls of vegetable and fruit sellers — is frequented by Kurds in Kirkuk, a city where tensions are high between the Kurdish and Arab populations.
In Baghdad, a string of attacks Monday morning killed at least nine people. In the deadliest, a roadside bomb exploded as an Iraqi army patrol passed in the Boub al-Sham area on the city’s northeast outskirts, killing five soldiers and wounding nine others, an army officer said.
U.S. troops launched a new offensive south of Baghdad against insurgents Monday, aiming to cut off another staging ground for attacks on the capital.
For the past month, U.S. and Iraqi forces have been waging offensives in the region southeast of Baghdad and in the city of Baqouba, 35 miles to the northeast.
At the same time, the U.S. military has been carrying out a stepped-up security sweep in Baghdad, hoping to bring calm to the capital and boost the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The U.S military said in a statement that the new sweep, code-named Marne Avalanche, was “aimed at preventing the movement of weapons, munitions and insurgents into Baghdad. It did not give an exact location of the offensive, but in recent days U.S. commanders have said they plan new operations to cut off an insurgent supply route southwest of the city, running from western Anbar province.
Violence appears to have eased in Baghdad in recent weeks — but attacks, including deadly car bombs, remain a daily occurrence.
For the second day in a row, a car bomb hit the central district of Karradah on Monday, exploding near Masbah Square, killing one person, wounding three others and leaving nearby shops burned, a police official said. On Sunday, a car bomb went off about a half-mile away, killing 10 people.
Also, mortar shells hit a residential area in Abu Dhsir, a south Baghdad Shiite enclave surrounded by Sunni neighborhoods. The attack killed three civilians and wounded six others, said another police official.
On Sunday, 22 bullet-riddled bodies were found dumped in various locations of Baghdad, apparently the latest victims of sectarian violence, police said. All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the reports.
Meanwhile, with parliament scheduled to convene Monday, Iraqi politicians were trying to end a pair of boycotts of the legislature that are holding up work on crucial reforms sought by Washington.
The top Sunni party, the Iraqi Accordance Party has refused to attend parliament to protest the removal of the Sunni speaker of parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani. The Shiite-dominated parliament voted June 11 to remove al-Mashhadani because of erratic behavior and comments that frequently embarrassed al-Maliki’s government.
Sunnis also want the government to set aside an arrest warrant against the Sunni culture minister, accused of ordering an assassination attempt against a fellow Sunni legislator.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, the Accordance Front leader, met Sunday with al-Maliki to discuss the Sunni boycott. After the meeting, al-Dulaimi’s spokesman, Muhannad al-Issawi, said that the boycott would continue and if the speaker were replaced, the decision should be made by the Sunnis and “not imposed” by Shiites and Kurds.
But al-Dulaimi was more optimistic about a settlement that would allow the Sunnis to return.
“Things are, God willing, on their way to being resolved,” al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press. “The pending issue of al-Mashhadani and that of the minister of culture will be solved by the end of the week, and things will go back to their normal course.”
TITLE: IAEA Confirms Closure of N. Korea Reactor
AUTHOR: By Kwang-Tae Kim
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — U.N. inspectors have verified that North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor, the watchdog agency’s chief said Monday, the first on-the-ground achievement toward scaling back Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions since the international standoff began in late 2002.
The main U.S. envoy on the issue, meanwhile, said that the United States is looking to build on the momentum and will start deliberations on removing North Korea from a list of terrorism-sponsoring states.
North Korea pledged in an international accord in February to shut the reactor at Yongbyon and dismantle its nuclear programs in return for 1 million tons of oil and political concessions. However, it stalled for several months because of a separate, now-resolved dispute with the U.S. over frozen bank funds.
The shutdown over the weekend was confirmed by a 10-member team of IAEA inspectors, said Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“The process has been going quite well and we have had good cooperation from North Korea. It’s a good step in the right direction,” ElBaradei said, speaking in Bangkok ahead of an event sponsored by Thailand’s Science Ministry.
The Yongbyon reactor, about 60 miles north of the capital, generates plutonium for atomic bombs. North Korea conducted its first nuclear test explosion in October.
On Monday, South Korea sent the second of two initial shipments of what eventually will be 50,000 tons of oil to reward North Korea for the reactor shutdown.
The first arrived Saturday, prompting North Korea to begin the shutdown of the Yongbyon. The second shipment departed Monday, South Korea’s Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung said.
The North’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday that further progress under the disarmament accord would now depend “on what practical measures the U.S. and Japan, in particular, will take to roll back their hostile policies toward” North Korea.
In an interview with The Associated Press, U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill laid out an aggressive agenda of steps Washington hopes can be made in the reconciliation process as Pyongyang lays aside its nuclear weapons program.
“If North Korea wants to denuclearize, all of this stuff is very doable,” Hill told the Associated Press.
A first step will be the North declaring a complete list of its nuclear programs to be dismantled.
However, the North has yet to publicly admit to embarking on a uranium enrichment program — which the U.S. in 2002 alleged it had done, sparking the nuclear crisis. Washington wants the facilities disabled by the end of the year so that they cannot be easily restarted, Hill said.
Along with the oil deliveries, Hill said the U.S. would look at other incentives for the North, such as humanitarian aid.
“We have never had a quarrel with the North Korean people,” he said.
“We have wanted to help the North Korean people and will continue to look for options, look for ways which we can do that.”
The U.S. will also discuss starting the process to remove the North from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, Hill said. The designation rankles Pyongyang, which has not been tied to a terrorist attack since it bombed a South Korean plane in 1987.
TITLE: Savagery and Success
TEXT: Dear Readers:
HAS SOMETHING that you’ve read in The St. Petersburg Times startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Is there something going on in our community that you think our readers should know about? Do you have an idea, information or a suggestion that might make life easier for the rest of us?
If so, please write and tell us what’s on your mind.
We welcome letters to the editor and have devoted this space to printing your opinions. You may write in English or in Russian. Feel free to praise us, criticize us or give us new ideas. Do you detect a bias in our coverage? Let us know. Think we did a good job? Please tell us.
You can send your letter directly to the editor by e-mail at letters@sptimesrussia.com; by fax at (812) 325-6080; or by post to The St. Petersburg Times, 4 St. Isaac’s Square, St. Petersburg, Russia, 190000. If you are writing from abroad, send it to The St. Petersburg Times, Box 8, 53501, Lappeenranta, Finland.
All we ask is that you include your full name, the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch with you.
We do edit letters for grammar and revise them to conform to our house style. We also must reserve the right to cut long letters in order to fit the available space and to give everyone a chance to speak out. However, we make every effort not to distort your points or to water down your feelings.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Shocking Story
The following letter was received by The St. Petersburg Times on July 6.
Editor,
My friend’s father, 77-year-old St. Petersburg pensioner Nikolai Mikhailovich Iliychyov, died in a local old people’s home on Feb. 21, 2007.
I am writing to your newspaper to tell the tragic story of this man’s last days which can terrify any sane human being.
After the death of his wife, Nikolai Mikhailovich had been getting physically weaker and more feeble. His memory was not serving him well, and he would occasionally get lost when leaving home.
His son Mikhail, who could not spend enough with him to be sure of his safety, placed the old man in the St. Petersburg psychoneurological nursing home No. 6.
Upon his departure for the nursing home, located in the village of Smolyachkovo in the outskirts of St. Petersburg, the pensioner was crisp and was able to walk down the stairs and get into the car without help.
When he was admitted to the home, the old man was promptly placed under “quarantine,” which in that case meant that his son was not allowed any visits.
Mikhail called the clinic to inquire about his father’s condition.
On Feb. 9 the doctors said the pensioner “slept well,” while on Feb. 12 he was reported to be “limp/flabby.” On Feb. 14 Mikhail was told that his father was almost always asleep, but when he offered to bring vitamins for him, his offer and other suggestions of help were firmly rejected.
On Feb. 19 Mikhail received a phone call from the clinic. The doctor said his father had fallen into a coma. By lunchtime on the same day, when Mikhail rushed to the clinic, his father was still unconscious.
Mikhail also noticed that within his short stay in the clinic, his father, who had had a stable weight of 65 kilograms, lost between 10 and 15 kg.
Nikolai Iliychyov died on Feb. 21, less than two weeks after being accepted by the nursing home. His rapid disease can hardly be explained by natural causes.
His son is convinced that the personnel had been lax in feeding the patient and caring for him. Rather, it looks highly likely that the doctors, eager to get rid of the old man, were speeding up his death and most probably were carelessly treating him with unreasonably strong medications with severe side effects.
It is also highly suspicious that the clinic’s staff made no effort to send a patient in an apparently rapidly deteriorating condition — especially when it progressed into a coma — to a specialized medical institution, where more efficient treatment could be provided.
Perhaps, the doctors cared less for the patient and sought to hush up their own lack of professionalism that ultimately led to severe exacerbation of the patient’s condition.
But this story does not end with the death of the patient. What happened next is a blood-chilling barbarity, the scale of which is extremely difficult to conceive. On the day of the funeral, a nurse informed the relatives that the corpse had some small body parts missing.
One of his ears, she said, was eaten by rats. When the body was examined, it turned out that things were actually much worse: the rats claimed part of the man’s chin, nose, his entire tongue and upper lip, one full ear and part of another one. It was eventually established that the nursing home’s neglected morgue was located within two meters from its stock of containers with kitchen waste.
Despite all the efforts of the pensioner’s son Mikhail to punish those responsible, the only result of an investigation carried out by City Hall’s Committee For Labor and Social Protection was that the director of the morgue received a written reprimand.
This formal measure against the management of the nursing home can hardly correspond with the savagery, tragedy and absurdity of the incident.
It is difficult to reconcile with the indifference, incompetence and impunity of such medical institutions in which the patients are treated as a biological mass, deprived of any thoughts, feelings and senses.
Can Russian citizens expect any respect for their rights in a society, where the humiliation of a disabled old man during his last days, and even after his death, was punished with nothing more than a formal warning note?
Alexander Yatsenko, St. Petersburg
Asylum Threat
In response to “Britain Considers Its Next Step in Standoff,” published Friday, July 13, page 1:
Editor,
I would in no way condone the murder of Mr. Litvinenko, particularly in view of the bizarre method used to kill him, which could have resulted in the most serious consequences for many ordinary people.
However, as an Englishman resident in England, I am more than a little cynical about the posturing of some our politicians and really can’t see why they are so keen to take in an alleged criminal from Russia when we already have a country full of proven and de facto criminals from all over the globe who have absolutely no right to be here and pose a constant and grave threat to us.
I think I would prefer our politicians to concentrate on returning a few of them to wherever they belong before doing anything else. I also detect the whiff of hypocrisy when taking into account that there may well be those who Russia would like returned to them to answer a few little queries.
Far from that happening it seems that we prefer to grant asylum, and even have such people taking part in television debates on current affairs.
Pete Bell, Nottingham, England
Olympic Reaction
In response to “Counting the Real Cost of the Olympics,” published Tuesday, July 10, page 14.
Editor,
I don’t know who should have won the bid, but I know Russia should not have.
• It is 2007. Seven years from now I know that the president or chancellor or prime minister of Austria and South Korea will be a man or woman freely, legally elected under a constitution. I barely understand the Russian system today and can’t for the life of me imagine what Russia will be like in 2014, seven years from now. Have we forgotten that it has been only 18 years since the infamous Berlin Wall fell? Do any of us doubt that if he is still alive, Putin will be running Russia? Illegally?
• Korea, directly, and Austria, through the European, give foreign aid to countries like Guatemala. Russia gives aid, too, but to whom? We will never know but I suggest that the list probably includes enemies of freedom around the world such as Hizbollah and Hamas.
• I don’t need a visa to visit Austria or South Korea. Have you tried lately to get a visa to visit Russia, that still-paranoid remnant of the evil empire? It’ll set you back a lot of time and a lot of money. Russia is not freely accessible. Period. What a great site for the Olympics, no?
• Austria is a safe country. South Korea is arguably even safer. Have we forgotten Ingushetia and Chechnya? By the way, they lie north of Sochi.
Finally, the same day the win was announced (July 4) the Russian Deputy Prime Minister was threatening to put missiles in Kaliningrad. Olympic spirit?
Carlisle Johnson, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Editor,
I think it’s fantastic that Sochi has won. It’s really good for such a great country. I’m very happy for the Russian people.
Jason Harvey, Newcastle, Australia
Bad Planning
In response to “Mariinsky II Back on Track, Costs Optimized,” published Friday, June 29, page 1
I personally feel that the construction of modern architecture in St. Petersburg is an ill-advised route for the great city to take.
I visited the city last year and what struck me the most was how glorious the architecture was. Modern architecture already possesses a reputation for becoming dated very rapidly. I also am surprised at the carelessness displayed by attempting to build a second Mariinsky Theater when it is already quite clear how impressive the existing one is both in appearance and history.
Cities like St. Petersburg do not need to be tarnished by sterile modern buildings. I speak as a British citizen who was in awe of the incredible examples of baroque and neo-classical architecture to be found in St. Petersburg. I am of the opinion that one of the great appeals of this city is how a person can feel that they have gone back in time to the land of the tsars. This mood will be destroyed if plans to build modern buildings are approved.
One only has to look at the mistakes made in the city of London during the last thirty years to see how destructive modern architecture can be to the face of a city.
John Torrie, Essex, Great Britain
Civilized Verdict
In response to “Race Murderers Get 39 Years After Retrial,” published on Friday, June 22, page 3
Editor,
Wonder of wonders! I never expected that racists would be punished in Russia. As an Indian former student who studied in Russia, I feel that it is really a miracle of a verdict.
In Russia, people take pride in themselves as civilized and progressive, but all their actions are to the contrary.
This verdict has proved for the first time that they can indeed be civilized and progressive.
As the country where I studied for seven years, deep inside I feel love towards Russia.
In international issues I feel like supporting Russia most of the time. But when I remember the brutal racism and inward support of officials for neo-nazis, I end up thinking the contrary.
I used to like Russia and Russians, but when you are attacked just because of your skin color, then I think that it is a barbaric, uncivilized and only outwardly progressive country.
For the first time, after knowing the verdict, I feel that Russia indeed can be civilized.
Name Witheld, Kerala, India.
Plaque Plea
In response to “Russians Concerned About Large Wealth Gap,” published Friday, June 15, page 1
Editor,
Having made over 100 business and educational trips to Russia over the last 18 years, I can agree with the concern regarding the large wealth gap — and I can understand why this situation exists.
In such a material rich country, being in the right place at the right time when the riches were freed made many millionaires.
Combine this with a culture whose economic development relies upon tributes to city and regional leaders, which the west call “bribes” but which indeed are tributes, one can see why the wealth gap came and why it is widening.
But what I can never understand, when I see hospital toilets and overgrown, weed infested cemeteries at the back of beautiful churches etc., is that the new rich do not accept the opportunity of correcting this.
Can you imagine walking to the back of a church and seeing an immaculate looking cemetery, at the cost of two gardeners, and seeing a brass poster saying “This cemetery is maintained by the Russian Patriot Boris Michaliavich Stolyarov” and a plaque on the door of the hospital toilet saying “These toilets were built and are maintained by the Russian patriot Sergei Alexandravitch Tchoumakov”?
Plaques could be on wards, schools and parks — the opportunity is endless for these new rich, who could have printed after their names “who is a patriot of…” with a long list of their “patriot” developments. Even an organization could be a “patriot”. The opportunities are endless and I think The St. Petersburg Times is in the right place to open the flood doors to this opportunity. Just do it, for a missed opportunity will be taken by someone else.
William Finley. Leeds. Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Polonium Theory
In response to “Putin Slams Extradition Request” published on Tuesday, June 5.
Why is every newspaper article referring to the “murder” of Alexander Litvinenko as if it is somehow certain that it indeed was a murder? Why is there no discussion of the most plausible scenario — that this was an accident in handling a hazardous material.
Polonium is a very volatile substance and it evaporates in room temperature. Strong precautions must be taken when it is handled. What if this was just an accident in which Litvinenko was in possession of a container of polonium and there was a leak in the container? Then, when it was certain that he had received a lethal dose, he could have decided to make the most of it by accusing his enemies of murder.
I think that such a scenario has much more credibility than a hypothesis of murder. Accidental deaths by polonium poisoning have been documented before. Then there are of course lots of questions about the source, the destination and the intended use of such a polonium shipment.
Reino Ruusu, Espoo, Finland