SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1290 (56), Thursday, July 19, 2007
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Police Back Berezovsky Assassination Allegation
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — British police said Wednesday that they arrested a suspect last month in London on suspicion of conspiring to kill self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky.
“The man was released into the custody of immigration officials two days later,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said by telephone.
Berezovsky, an ardent Kremlin opponent, said at a news conference in London that he left Britain on June 16 after police warned him his life was in danger. 
“Putin is personally behind this plot,” Berezovsky said, adding that he had received threats before.
Berezovsky first revealed the plot in an interview published in The Times of London on Wednesday.
The Kremlin has denied similar claims in the past.
Berezovsky said he flew to an unidentified destination on June 16. He returned a week later after London police called him with the message that it was safe to return.
The police did not say why the man was handed over to immigration officials, but a British Home Office spokeswoman said immigration authorities would have become involved if a person were in the country illegally.
British media reported Wednesday that Scotland Yard intercepted a man at the London Hilton on Park Lane hotel.
An eyewitness said by telephone that television crews were gathered Wednesday afternoon around the entrance to the hotel, situated a short walk from Berezovsky’s office in Mayfair.
Berezovsky said he holds many meetings in the hotel because of its proximity. A Scotland Yard spokeswoman refused to comment on whether the arrest had been made at the hotel.
The day Berezovsky fled, his close associate Alex Goldfarb returned to London from a business trip to Hamburg, Germany, with Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, who was celebrating her birthday.
Goldfarb said he first became aware of a “serious security alert” when he and Litvinenko turned up for a birthday barbeque that evening at the house of Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen rebel envoy wanted in Russia on charges of terrorism.
A large number of plainclothes and uniformed police officers had gathered outside the house, Goldfarb said.
“They told us that they were very concerned for our safety,” Goldfarb said by telephone from London. “Then I called Boris, who was invited but wasn’t at the party, and he told me about the police warning.”
At the news conference, Berezovsky said the Kremlin wanted to kill him for two reasons: He was a witness to the murder of Litvinenko and he funds the political opposition in Russia.
Last year, the Federation Council approved a request by Putin to grant him the right to defend “the human rights and freedoms of citizens [and] the sovereignty of the Russian Federation” by using security forces outside of the country. In 2004, two Russian agents were convicted in Qatar on charges of killing Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev with a car bomb.
Berezovsky said threats to his life in Britain began even earlier.
In 2002, Scotland Yard police met Berezovsky at his home in Surrey, southwest of London. “They told me, ‘Some Chechens are plotting to kill you,’” Berezovsky said, adding that the police subsequently offered him extra protection, which he accepted, he said.
In April, FSB-connected friends visited Berezovsky in London, where they warned him of an imminent attempt on his life, he said. “They said: ‘Someone you know will come and kill you, and not even try to hide it.” The would-be killer would portray the crime as the result of a business quarrel, the friends said.
“Two months later, what happened was exactly how they said,” he added, in reference to the June plot.
Berezovsky said that although he was withholding some information at the request of Scotland Yard, he did not know the identity of the suspect.
Berezovsky is wanted in Russia on charges including money laundering and calling for a violent coup, charges he denies.
He told reporters he was willing to stand trial “on any charges” in any country his lawyer considers to possess an independent judiciary. He offered Denmark and Sweden as examples.
Russian officials, meanwhile, were skeptical of the allegations.
“In order to distract from his combination of money laundering and fraud, he is trying to present himself as a political opponent and draw attention to his own persona,” said Yury Fedotov, the Russian ambassador, Interfax reported.
“The stories that Berezovsky is always thinking up are conjured out of thin air,” said Mikhail Grishankov, a senior member of the Duma’s Security Committee.
In what many read as a sign of increasing tensions between Britain and Russia, two Russian military jets were dispatched from their base in the Arctic Circle on Tuesday and headed toward British airspace, British media reported.
The British Air Force scrambled fighter jets to intercept the planes, which turned back before they entered British airspace.
On July 4, Russia officially refused Britain’s request to extradite Lugovoi, a former Federal Guard Service officer. Britain has charged him with the murder of Litvinenko, who died of radiation poisoning on Nov. 23, three weeks after a meeting with Lugovoi in a London hotel.

TITLE: Spat Escalates as Russia Expels 4 Diplomats
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia said Thursday it will expel four British diplomats and suspend counterterrorism cooperation with London, the latest move in a mounting confrontation over the radiation poisoning death of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.
Britain had announced Monday the expulsion of four Russian diplomats and restrictions on visas issued to Russian government officials after Moscow refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, accused of killing Litvinenko in London last November. The dispute marks a new low in relations between Moscow and London, which had already been troubled by Russia’s opposition to the war in Iraq, Britain’s refusal to extradite exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky to face embezzlement charges, and by Kremlin allegations last year of spying by British diplomats.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin announced the expulsions after summoning British Ambassador Anthony Brenton to the ministry and informing him.
Kamynin described Russia’s response as “targeted, balanced and the minimum necessary.” He contended that Russia was forced to respond, saying Britain had made a “conscious choice of worsening relations with our country.”
U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed disappointment.
“We obviously believe that the decision to expel four embassy staff is completely unjustified and we will be doing everything to ensure that they and their families are properly looked after,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Moscow to heed British demands and extradite Lugovoi — the first time America’s senior diplomat has weighed in on the dispute.
“This is an issue of rule of law to our minds, not an issue of politics,” Rice said at a news conference in Portugal, where she was attending a conference on Middle East peace. “It is a matter of Russia cooperating fully in what is simply an effort to solve what was a very terrible crime committed on British soil.”
Russia says such extraditions are prohibited by its constitution and characterized Britain’s demand as an attempt to interfere in Moscow’s internal affairs.
“We are disappointed that the Russian government should have signaled no new cooperation in the extradition of Mr. Andrei Lugovoi for the alleged murder of Alexander Litvinenko,” Miliband said.
“We are, however, much heartened that over the last 36 hours across the international community, European countries, the EU as a whole and the United States should have put out such positive statements about the need to defend the integrity of the British judicial system, and that is something that we shall be taking forward with the international community over the next few days and weeks,” Miliband said.
Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic, died Nov. 23 after ingesting radioactive polonium-210. From his deathbed, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind his poisoning.
A letter from Russia’s ambassador in London denounced claims of Kremlin involvement in Litvinenko’s murder.
“It is preposterous to assert that the killing of Alexander Litvinenko ‘appears to have the clear backing, if not the active assistance, of the Russian government,’“ Ambassador Yury Fedotov wrote in a letter to The Times, responding to an editorial published Tuesday.
Fedotov said there is nothing sinister in Russia’s refusal to hand over Lugovoi, and reaffirmed Russia’s offer to put him on trial at home if British authorities provide enough evidence.
Fedotov, who has been uncharacteristically visible in British media this week, said that how far the standoff goes depends on the “political will” of the British government.
“The Russian government values its relations with the U.K. and respects its laws and constitutional arrangement,” Fedotov wrote. “A close relationship, of course, requires that the British government does the same.”
British police said Wednesday that it had apprehended and deported a suspected Russian assassin who was reportedly planning to murder Berezovsky in June. The tycoon accused the Kremlin of being behind that plot.
Kamynin also said Russia would stop issuing visas to British officials and seeking British visas for Russian officials until London provides more information on the restrictions it has imposed.
“Until the new procedure is explained, Russian officials will not request British visas. And analogous requests by British officials will not be considered,” he said.
He also said Moscow would suspend cooperation against terror.
“To our regret, cooperation between Russia and Britain on issues of fighting terrorism becomes impossible,” Kamynin said.
He did not elaborate, and the extent of current cooperation — with ties already damaged by Russian intelligence services’ accusations of British spying — was unclear.

TITLE: Airborne Drunks Face Travel Ban
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: After a charter flight from St. Petersburg to Turkey was turned back last week when three drunk men started a brawl on the airplane, injuring a female traveler, Russian authorities are discussing the possibility of a complete alcohol ban on board Russian flights.
The idea was voiced by Yury Zakharenkov, head of the Russian Interior Ministry’s department for Public Safety on Transport.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Zakharenkov said his office will throw its weight behind the ban. 
“If we really want our air travel to be safe, then this measure is a must,” he said. 
“Otherwise, those who heavily overdose on alcohol will inevitably create potentially dangerous situations for fellow travelers.” 
On July 13, after a charter flight to Antalia, Turkey, had been in the air for more than two hours, an argument between three drunken young men escalated into a fist fight. 
The brawl began after one of them started demanding the attention of a fellow female passenger. Failing to win her affection, the man gave the woman a slap in the face. When another tourist tried to defend the victim, the fight got out of control, and the cabin crew’s intervention failed to stop it. The captain took the decision to return to St. Petersburg. 
The plane flew to Antalia later that evening — but without the brawlers.
International air safety rules forbid the passengers to drink their own alcohol on board, but many Russians ignore the rule. Also, large numbers of Russian travelers get drunk long before boarding.
Tatyana Demenyeva, deputy head of the Northwestern branch of the Russian Tourism Industry Union, said that, regrettably, bans will not help the situation unless Russians review their drinking habits.
“It is a highly embarrassing thing to admit, but for many Russians words like ‘relaxation’ and ‘unwind’ imply a reckless, ungovernable booze-up which starts right after passing passport control,” Demenyeva said. “Besides, many people are extremely scared of flying, and getting drunk is a common remedy here.”
Sergei Bykhal, press secretary of Transaero Airlines told web portal Turist.ru this week that several Russian airlines have started compiling so-called blacklists of passengers with a history of rowdiness. He said the airlines reserve the right to refuse to fly trouble-makers in the future. Bykhal said airlines are ready to exchange their databases on the clients.
RST’s Demenyeva is against using the blacklists against the passengers. In her view, the practice of denying someone a ticket on the grounds of a previous incident would be discriminatory.
“Anyone would have paid for their mistakes by the time of their next flight,” she said. “Violations of air safety rules involve huge fines, and a court case like that it is a highly humiliating process to be involved in.”
Rossija Air Carrier looks set to sue those responsible for last Friday’s brawl for 1 million rubles ($38,000) in damages, Zakharenkov said.
The 150 passengers who were on board on the Antalia flight have the right to seek financial compensation for “moral damage” under Russian law.
As a possible solution, Demenyeva suggested introducing hefty fines for the passengers who get on board in a drunken state — even if they do not behave aggressively toward others — and distribute a leaflet explaining the system of fines with every airplane ticket sold in Russia.
“Faced with a detailed written warning, travelers are bound to show more caution,” she said. 
Russian travelers have long been notorious for their drinking habits and rampant indulgence in alcohol.
In a string of incidents in February 2002, musicians from two prestigious orchestras hit a sour note with alcohol-fuelled antics on two separate flights to the United States.
Members of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic got drunk and behaved improperly on the first leg of an eight-hour transatlantic crossing from Amsterdam. 
In that widely publicized case, the crew serving the flight recalled the Russian musicians talking loudly, walking around in a state of inebriation, throwing objects around the cabin and consistently ignoring warnings from the cabin crew.
The musicians were eventually put off the United Airlines flight at Washington’s Dulles International airport, but were allowed to resume their flight to Los Angeles the next day.
That same month when the Mariinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra was traveling from Helsinki to New York, some the musicians drank strong liquor they had brought with them and engaged in loud disputes with each other.
Following the incident the Finnish air carrier discontinued it agreement with the Mariinsky as the company’s principal international air carrier.

TITLE: Correction
TEXT: In an article headlined “Teacher Convicted of Causing Suicide” (Tuesday, July 17) misstated the compensation that a court ordered schoolteacher Vera Novak to pay Tatiana Lebedev following the suicide of her grandson Roma Lebedev. The correct amount was 300,000 rubles ($11,540).

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Compensation</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg City Court on Wednesday refused to increase compensation to relatives of victims of air crash near Donetsk, Ukraine, in August 2006, Interfax reported. 
The Pulkovo Airlines TU-154 plane was heading to St. Petersburg from Anapa, south Russia, when it crashed killing all 160 passengers and 10 crew. 
“The judgement, made by Court of Moskovsky district, was not changed,” said Vitaly Yusko, a member of the victims’ relatives group.
“We are waiting for judgements on other appeals. After that we will go to the European Court in Strasbourg.”

<b>For the Record</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Crime figures for the past six months show that 68,500 crimes were registered in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported. 
In comparison with the same period last year, the total amount of crimes that have been registered has reduced, and the crime rate in St. Petersburg is lower than in Russia on average.

TITLE: Children’s Charity Plans Advanced Support Center
AUTHOR: By Karina Papp
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A roundtable held on July 12, organized by the St. Petersburg charity Parents Bridge, heard how the problem of Russia’s abandoned children and the children’s homes in which they often end up need a rethink.
Parents Bridge presented plans for a new center to help systematize its work with children up to seven years old. In cooperation with state bodies, abandoned or cruelly treated children would be transferred to this center after being identified by the department of social protection, a school, polyclinic, other charities or even neighbors. The state would retain administrative control of the center, since non-state organizations do not have access to the necessary documents.
But the assignment of social workers or “crisis managers” to work with families as a whole before children are abandoned is a key aim of Parents Bridge’s approach. 
“Social problems — unemployment, homelessness, lack of documents, alcoholism, drug addiction, family conflict — are not the only factors that contribute to the abandonment of children,” Marina Levina, president of Parents Bridge, said. “On the basis of operational experience, we consider that any family, in which relations between children and parents break down, is in crisis.”
Levina added that it is not only poor families that get into trouble.
“Our crisis service often receives calls from successful, well-off men who shout ‘I hate my child and I don’t know what to do!’  Many people think that it is simply necessary to give material aid to a family, visit it once, and the problem will be solved,” Levina said. “But after five years’ work, we can assert that it is not so. The primary factors that influence family breakdown are psychological and spiritual. Such families should be divided not into social categories, but on the level of crisis.”
The new center is fully planned but awaits financing. It is estimated that the center will cost 7.5 million rubles ($290,000) per year to run. By comparison, the care of 415 children in children’s homes costs $830,000 a year. It is hoped that funds will be forthcoming in 2008, as Russia has declared this as the Year of The Family.
Legislative assembly deputy Pavel Soltun said: “We are able to realize this program only after the governor’s understanding and acceptance of the appropriate decision by City Hall.”
Presenting five-yearly results, Levina said that Parent’s Bridge had been involved in 769 cases when there was a threat of child abandonment. In 287 of these cases, families themselves asked for help, while other cases were referred to Parents Bridge by maternity hospitals. 
In 406 of the cases, children remained with their families, meaning that Parents’ Bridge has had a success rate of 53 percent. Levina added that without the work of the charity during the past five years, this figure would represent four additional children’s homes for St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Police Arrest Arkhangelsk Mayor
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck and Svetlana Osadchuk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Law enforcement officers stormed the apartment of Arkhangelsk Mayor Alexander Donskoi on Wednesday and took him to a detention facility, sharply escalating an ongoing battle between him and the region’s governor.
The officers forced their way into Donskoi’s apartment Wednesday afternoon and carried him out to a waiting police car, despite protests by doctors present that his blood pressure was dangerously high, Donskoi’s aide, Eduard Gainutdinov, said by telephone.
Gainutdinov said he was speaking from the apartment. A woman could be heard wailing in the background.
Regional prosecutors said in a statement that Donskoi, 37, was detained on suspicion of illegally dipping into city coffers to pay for bodyguards for himself and his family. Prosecutors are now deciding whether to charge him formally with abuse of office, the statement said.
If charged and convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison.
Donskoi was formally charged in February with faking his university diploma and participating in illegal business activities while in office, but he had been free on condition that he not leave the city. He has said repeatedly that he is innocent.
Donskoi’s legal problems began shortly after his November announcement that he planned to run for president next year. He has said the Kremlin tried to pressure him into staying out of the race.
But he has also been embroiled in a dispute with Arkhangelsk Governor Nikolai Kiselyov.
On July 11, Donskoi posted a video on the City Hall-connected Archicity.ru showing a man resembling Kiselyov puportedly accepting a bribe. Kiselyov said in a statement posted on the regional administration’s web site the following day that the video was a fake and part of a “dirty” campaign connected with the upcoming election season.
“I have already gone to the authorities [in connection with the video],” Kiselyov said in the statement.
Donskoi’s 16-year-old son, Alexander, said Wednesday’s detention was Kiselyov’s “revenge” for the video.

TITLE: U.S. Language Teacher Drowns in Local Lake
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An American citizen drowned in the early hours of July 8 as he swam in a lake in Leningrad Region, local media reported, quoting police sources.
Two St. Petersburg residents who were with the man alerted police using a mobile phone to say that their friend, Richard Hooley, was missing presumed drowned in Lake Vuoksa near Baryshevo, 47NEWS reported on July 12.
Hooley, 29, worked as an English teacher in a St. Petersburg language school. 
A spokesperson for the U.S. Consulate General in St. Petersburg, Mary E. Countryman, confirmed that “the consulate was involved in a case of a death of an American citizen,” but declined to give further details, citing the absence of permission from the next of kin to publicize details of the incident. 
According to Hooley’s friends, the tragedy happened during a camping trip to Lake Vuoksa, a popular weekend destination for Petersburgers. 
“I wasn’t there but basically what happened is that he was swimming and then the current pulled him out too far and he could not swim back,” Robert Bothwell, Hooley’s friend and former roommate, said. 
“He was a very social person. Richard was here for only about two years, but he had a surprising number of friends already — Russians, foreigners, different kinds of people,” Bothwell said. “Most people will remember him as being very generous with a big smile and a big heart.”
A memorial service for Hooley was held in St. Petersburg at the Christian University Chapel on Saturday.  It was set up as a service for support and prayer because Hooley’s body had not been found at that point.
The police could not be reached for comment on Wednesday, but Bothwell said the body was found last week. 
Originally from Minnesota, Hooley moved to St. Petersburg in 2005 to learn the Russian language and teach English. 
The tragedy has left many in the language teaching and expatriate communities in shock.
“It was really a shock for everybody, because he was a young, healthy and happy guy,” Jennifer Davis, a friend of Hooley’s, said Wednesday. 
“I heard his students really loved him, especially the young kids. He was good with teenagers. He was a really great guy; we’ll miss him a lot.”

TITLE: Ivanov Quits Security Council
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday accepted the resignation of Igor Ivanov as secretary of the Security Council.
Putin appointed Ivanov’s little-known deputy, Valentin Sobolev, as acting secretary of the presidential advisory body. Sobolev, 60, is a general in the Federal Security Service.
Ivanov said Wednesday that he planned to work on a new book and teach at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
“What I have no plans to do is get involved in politics,” he said, Itar-Tass reported. Alexander Golts, security writer for the online Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, said Ivanov’s resignation might indicate the start of a further shuffling of posts. At the same time, Golts said, “the most sensible explanation” for Ivanov’s stepping down is that “someone has his eye on his position.”

TITLE: City Cuts Spending On Okhta Center Project
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg government has decreased its planned spending on the Okhta Center — Gazprom’s controversial construction project to be sited on the Neva embankment near the Peter the Great Bridge.
At a meeting of the St. Petersburg government Tuesday amendments were approved to the “Law on the special program for the construction of an administrative and business center in St. Petersburg”, the press service for the St. Petersburg governor said Tuesday in a statement.
“The city will get 49 percent of shares in the Public and Business Okhta Center limited company. When construction is completed, we will have the new premises at our disposal. It will provide double and even triple benefits to St. Petersburg. We have to explain this to the citizens,” St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko was quoted in the statement as saying.
According to the agreement signed by the Gazprom and Gazpromneft companies on May 27, 2007, the construction will be financed from two sources — the city budget and private investors.
As a result of the latest amendments, budget funding of this project will decrease by 50 percent. Of the total construction cost of 60 billion rubles, 51 percent will be provided by Gazpromneft and “Public and Business Okhta Center” and 49 percent by the St. Petersburg budget.
The city government will get a 49 percent stake in the company that owns the center and will own a corresponding share of the completed property.
Instead of the committee for construction, the committee for state property management will be Gazprom’s partner in this project.
Matviyenko emphasized that at the moment the industrial area is in a poor state and requires modernization. The rationality of replacing it with a business center is undoubted, she said.
Following a request from City Hall, Gazpromneft added a significant number of social infrastructure elements to the project, Matviyenko said, including residential areas and cultural and sports facilities for public use.
She stressed that the height of the main building is still a subject for discussion. However, architectural nuances would not stop the project from being realized, Matviyenko said.
Okhta Center is to be completed in 2016. The center, occupying 71.4 hectares of land, will become the largest office center in Europe. Gazprom and its subsidiaries will occupy 16 percent of the facilities, tenants will occupy 49 percent and social infrastructure will account for 35 percent.
“When analyzing the project for the Okhta Center you just can’t use criteria such as the pay-back period. It’s a political project in the first place,” said Oleg Barkov, general manager of Knight Frank St. Petersburg.
“If a historical parallel is to be found, the construction of the Admiralty in St. Petersburg was once a symbol of Russia becoming a sea empire,” he said.
However, Barkov admitted, the project could be commercially profitable if parts of the center will be leased. 
In seven years the expenses could be covered, he said.
“If the additional commercial areas will be developed, the normal pay-back period would be five years for office centers and almost immediate return for residential areas. Investors will be highly interested in developing those areas, including the largest western conservative investors,” he said.
“In other respects it would be a purely social project with a large number of public areas — exhibition halls, concert halls and sports areas. Investment into such premises for the city is a social obligation in the same way as the construction of schools and nursery schools,” Barkov said.

TITLE: France, Gazprom Deny Deal
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom on Wednesday denied it was seeking assets from merging French firms Gaz de France and Suez, amid speculation that French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised the Kremlin he would support the move.
Analysts expect France to offer a reciprocal to Gazprom after the state-run gas giant’s decision to award French oil major Total a share in developing the coveted Shtokman field last week.
“Regarding the rumors, we deny them,” a Gazprom spokesman said. “Negotiations on buying GDF or Suez assets are not going on.”
Prime-Tass news agency, citing an unidentified source, reported late Tuesday that Sarkozy had pledged his support during a phone call with President Vladimir Putin on July 11, the eve of Gazprom’s decision on Shtokman.
A senior adviser in the Elysee Palace denied that Sarkozy had made the promise during the phone call.
“The issue did not come up,” said the adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There is no deal. There is no link between the two issues.”
Prime-Tass said Sarkozy told Putin  that he would support Gazprom bids for several Suez assets, which the French company is to sell off to obtain European Commission monopoly clearance for its delayed merger with GDF.
The report identified the assets as a Distrigas liquefied natural gas terminal in Massachusetts and the Zeebrugge LNG terminal in Belgium, as well as power assets in France and Belgium. Gazprom deputy head Alexander Medvedev first floated the idea last August, France’s La Tribune reported at the time.
Spokespeople for GDF and Suez declined to comment.
As the Kremlin moves closer to completing its strategy of bringing major oil and gas projects into its fold, it has moved to phase two — striking direct deals with European firms in a bid to circumvent opposition to its plans of energy expansion.
“Russian companies are growing, and the limits of the Russian market naturally become very tight,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. 
“Our closest ally is Europe. Predictably, the first market of attention for big Russian companies is the European market, especially in the field of energy.”
Analysts said any moves into the French market after the Shtokman deal would be consistent with the Kremlin’s policy of expecting access to European markets in exchange for allowing Western oil firms to operate in its increasingly lucrative developments.

TITLE: State to Give London Stock Exchange Imperial Dossier
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: The Natural Resources Ministry will inform the London Stock Exchange of its finding that the oil reserves of Imperial Energy do not match those in Russian records, an official said Wednesday.
The report will be delivered next week by two agencies supervised by the ministry that have responsibility for monitoring reserves of natural resources and their exploitation, the official said.
Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said last week that a working group, drawn from the ministry, auditors and oil companies, had found that the reserves declared by London-listed independent oil company Imperial Energy were artificially inflated.
Imperial Energy has rejected the accusations and said auditor DeGolyer&MacNaughton’s estimates were based on true and correct information.
The group studied deposits of Imperial Energy’s units, Nord Imperial and Alyansneftegaz, estimated by D&M.
“On three of five deposits [Kiev-Yevganskoye, Festivalnoye and Snezhnoye], reserves estimated by the auditor and registered at the state balance differ by a factor of several times,” the working group’s report said.
It also said the commission took into account the difference between reserves classification accepted in Russia, and the globally recognized SPE classification used by auditors.
The official also said that Imperial’s exploration licenses for the three fields would expire in 2008.

TITLE: U.K. Developer To Invest $1Bln In Hotel Sector
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — London & Regional Properties, the British real estate developer owned by Ian and Richard Livingstone, plans to spend at least $1 billion on projects in Russia in the next 12 months, David Geovanis, head of the company’s Russian unit, said in an interview.
The investments will include a chain of hotels that the company is building for Hilton Hotels, Geovanis said Tuesday.  Separately, London & Regional is constructing a hotel in St. Petersburg that’s due to open in September.
“Prices will continue to grow and we want to be there first to take advantage of this dramatic growth,” said Geovanis. “The value of assets that we have already bought has gone up so much.”
London & Regional has invested about $689 million in Russia since 2005. The company, based in London, spent the money on developments ranging from residential properties to office buildings, as well as existing malls.

TITLE: Insurers Skeptical of New Car Legislation
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: New legislation on compulsory third party liability motor insurance (OSAGO) has raised serious concerns among both insurers and drivers. Experts believe that tariffs could increase, quality of service could deteriorate and a number of insurers could go bankrupt as a result of the proposed changes.
From July 26, 2007, a new scheme for the calculation of insurance rates will be in force. The idea is to increase insurance payments to drivers who have had accidents and award bonuses to those drivers who have kept their insurance record clean. 
“These rules should already have been in force from February of this year. However, the law requires us to take into account all the accidents related to the insured person and the car. There was no way we could collect this information. Moreover, we could not even compile it in the appropriate format,” Andrei Znamensky, head of the OSAGO department of Russky Mir, said Thursday at a press conference at the Rosbalt news agency.
According to the new rules, the insured person is responsible for filing the information on his car accidents.
“The application form became more complicated. Any mistakes would allow the insurer to break the agreement. If the mistakes were ill-intentioned, all payments made according to this agreement would be recovered from the person in court,” Znamensky said.
It would be a difficult task to file and check every single fact. “One person could own several cars, while the insured car could be driven by an unlimited number of his friends and relatives,” said Yury Berkhman, deputy director of the ASK insurance group.
Besides the additional paperwork, experts criticized the underlying concept itself. “Dishonest drivers will remain unpunished. We still do not have a unified information center on car accidents,” Berkhman said.
Dmitry Troyan, chairman of the regional branch of the Russian Association of Car Drivers, considered the bonuses offered to drivers insignificant in comparison with the penalties.
More changes are likely to be introduced next year. Drivers would receive compensation from their insurance companies, which would then in turn demand compensation from the offender’s insurer. At the moment, victims of car accidents apply to the offenders’ insurers for compensation.
Also, if the estimated damage is less than 25,000 rubles ($960), drivers will be allowed to handle the accident documents themselves without the mediation of road police.
“Considering the bad general culture of driving, the idea of allowing drivers to file documents is frightening,” said Sergei Soloviev, head of the accident commissars department at LAT assistance company.
Experienced drivers will swindle the victims, he warned, while insurance company experts will act in their own interests. Znamensky also forecasted mass fraud.
“OSAGO payments are increasing in all regions. In about two years they would exceed insurance premiums. The quality of service will decrease, insurers will exhaust their financial resources,” said Sergei Brovko, marketing director of Reso-Garantia.
Troyan forecasted that about 40 companies could go bankrupt, while others will start market wars.
“During the first three years of OSAGO insurance companies cashed in in this market, and the Russian Union of Car Insurers earned good profits by selling licenses to the first comers,” Troyan said.
About 60 percent of insurance companies in Russia operate only on paper, he said, which will cause lots of problems when insurers start demanding compensation from each other.
Troyan was also skeptical about the simplification of the procedure for accident registration. “The driver will blame everyone on earth in order to prove his right to compensation to the insurance company, making the documents pure works of fiction. I really doubt that he’ll ever get those 25,000 rubles without the road police acting as witnesses in his favor,” Troyan said.

TITLE: Trutnev Floats Oil Proposal
AUTHOR: By Tanya Mosolova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government has revived the idea of tax breaks for offshore oil and gas deposits, and will discuss it with global oil majors Tuesday following a landmark deal with France’s Total over the huge Shtokman gas field.
The Natural Resources Ministry said Monday that its chief, Yury Trutnev, would meet executives from ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total and Chevron among other firms Tuesday.
“Among the issues to be discussed ... will be possible ways for further tax differentiation aimed at increasing inflow of foreign investment into the [resources] sector,” the ministry said.
The government has long mulled tax breaks for eastern Siberia, Timan Pechora and its offshore seas but last year decided to limit the number of regions to one — eastern Siberia, which is heavily dominated by state-controlled majors Gazprom and Rosneft.
Analysts have said tax breaks for Timan Pechora dropped off the list as it was heavily dominated by LUKoil, and the Kremlin had little incentive in giving privileges to the private firm.
“At that time, Russia also had a very vague idea as to how it wants to tap its offshore fields. The situation is very much different now after the Shtokman deal,” said Valery Nesterov from Troika Dialog.
Gazprom agreed last week to bring Total into the Shtokman gas field. Total would become a development partner with a 25 percent stake in a firm that will own $15 billion worth of first-phase infrastructure.
Total said it would be able to book reserves from Shtokman, although Gazprom will remain the field’s license holder as well as the sole owner of gas produced.
Foreign majors have suffered a number of setbacks in the past years in Russia, with Shell being forced to cede control to Gazprom in its $22 billion Sakhalin-2 project after months of pressure from state authorities.
Last month, TNK-BP sold control to Gazprom in its Kovykta gas field. The sale has further soured the outlook for foreign deals in Russia, a mood which was quickly reversed by the Shtokman deal.
Analysts say it could become a new constructive, rather than repressive,  way of cooperation offered by the Kremlin.
“The Shtokman deal gave a much clearer idea of what foreign firms could expect from Russia — there will be no production sharing or access to licenses. The best foreigners can expect is to become development partners,” Nesterov said.
Natural Resources Ministry spokesman Nikolai Gudkov said the ministry was primarily focused on encouraging Russian companies to develop new untapped regions, although foreign investments were also important.
“If new tax breaks are approved, it will be up to Gazprom to decide how to make them work for foreign partners, such as Total,” Gudkov said.

TITLE: Industrial Growth Up 10%
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Industrial output grew by 10.9 percent in June, posting the first double-digit gain since May 2006 as manufacturing boomed, the State Statistics Service said Wednesday.
The figure smashed economists’ expectations of a 6.4 percent year-on-year gain, and the government is now likely to revise up its forecast that the economy will grow by 6.5 percent this year.
“Rock and roll — what a number,” said Al Breach, chief economist at UBS.
“We have had a 7.5 percent growth forecast from the beginning of the year and the government is moving in that direction. We have always been saying the risk is to the upside: We have a real boom going on here at the moment.”
Growth accelerated from 6.7 percent in May in year-on-year terms.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Chevron Venture</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Chevron wants a 49 percent stake in a joint venture with oil producer Gazprom Neft, Chevron CEO David O’Reilly told Vedomosti in an interview published Wednesday.
Gazprom Neft CEO Alexander Dyukov said in June that he wanted his company to raise its stake in the venture to 75 percent from 30 percent. 

<b>Gazprom Bond </b>
LONDON (Reuters) — Gazprom will stick to its plan to start a $1 billion-plus bond roadshow Friday, despite volatile markets and political tensions between Moscow and London, sources said Wednesday.
“The deal is going ahead — absolutely. Gazprom has priced bonds in difficult market conditions before,” a London banking source said Wednesday.
Heavily indebted, state-controlled oil major Rosneft this week scrapped a multibillion-dollar issue just after finishing a roadshow, blaming market volatility. 
VimpelCom’s Licenses</b>
MOSCOW (Reuters) — VimpelCom has won its first two licenses to operate GSM wireless networks in the Far East of the country, the organizer of the auction said Wednesday.
VimpelCom, which has failed in previous attempts to break into the region, received the licenses to operate in the Jewish autonomous region and the Magadan region, the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage said in a statement on its web site. 

<b>Pipe Project </b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Naryshkin has been named as chief coordinator for the East Siberia Pacific Ocean oil pipeline project, a government source said Wednesday, RIA-Novosti reported.
The pipeline project, which is designed to have annual capacity of 80 million tons of crude oil, was started in April 2006 and will provide oil to the Asia-Pacific market.
Naryshkin’s appointment was announced during a Cabinet discussion on the pipeline project. 

<b>New Reactors</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will spend 90 billion rubles ($3.5 billion) on two new nuclear reactors at a power plant near St. Petersburg as the country expands its atomic energy capacity to cut reliance on fossil fuels, the Leningrad region announced in a statement on its web site Tuesday.
Rosenergoatom, the state-owned nuclear power plant operator, will add a third and a fourth reactor to the Leningradskaya plant, each with a capacity of 1,150 megawatts, by 2016, the statement said. Construction will begin in 2011.

TITLE: For the Sake of One Man
AUTHOR: By Bret Stephens
TEXT: In the six or seven years in which they interacted on a regular basis, President Vladimir Putin’s police state and journalist Fatima Tlisova had a mostly one-way relationship. Tlisova’s food was poisoned (causing a nearly fatal case of kidney failure), her ribs were broken by assailants unknown, her teenage son was detained by drunken policemen for the crime of not being an ethnic Russian, and FSB agents forced her into a car, took her to a forest outside the city of Nalchik and extinguished cigarettes on every finger of her right hand, “so that you can write better,” as one of her tormentors informed her. Last year, the 41-year-old journalist decided she’d had enough. Along with her colleague Yury Bagrov, she applied for, and was granted, asylum in the United States. Tlisova and Bagrov are, as the wedding refrain has it, something old, something new: characters from an era that supposedly vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago. Now that era, or something that looks increasingly like it, seems to be upon us again. What can we do? 
The most important task is to get some facts straight. 
Fact No. 1: The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is not provoking a new Cold War with Russia. 
That seems to be the view of Beltway pundits such as Anatol Lieven, whose indignation at alleged U.S. hostility to Russia is inversely correlated with his concerns about mounting Russian hostility to the United States, its allies and the likes of Tlisova. In an article in the March issue of the American Conservative, the leftish Lieven made the case against the administration for its “bitterly anti-Russian statements,” the plan to bring Ukraine into NATO and other supposed encroachments on Russia’s self-declared sphere of influence. In this reading, Putin’s increasingly strident anti-Western rhetoric is merely a response to a deliberate and needless U.S. policy of provocation. 
Yet talk to actual Russians and you’ll find that one of their chief gripes with this administration has been its over-the-top overtures to Putin: Bush’s “insight” into Putin’s soul on their first meeting in 2001; U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s reported advice to “forgive Russia” for its anti-American shenanigans in 2003; the administration’s decision to permit Russian membership in the World Trade Organization in 2006; the “lobster summit” earlier this month at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport (which Putin graciously followed up by announcing the suspension of Russia’s obligations under the 1990 Treaty on  Conventional Armed Forces in Europe). 
This isn’t a study in appeasement. But it stands in striking contrast to the British government’s decision on Monday to expel four Russian diplomats over Putin’s refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the former security services officer suspected of murdering Alexander Litvinenko in London in November with a massive dose of polonium-210. “The heinous crime of murder does require justice,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said  Monday. “This response is proportional, and it is clear at whom it is aimed.” 
Now turn to Fact No. 2. Russia is acting with increasingly unrestrained rhetorical, diplomatic, economic and political hostility to whoever stands in the way of Putin’s ambitions. 
The enemies’ list begins with Putin’s domestic critics and the vocations they represent: imprisoned Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky; murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya; harassed opposition leader Garry Kasparov. It continues with foreign companies that have had to forfeit multibillion-dollar investments when Kremlin-favored companies decided they wanted a piece of the action. It goes on to small neighboring democracies such as Estonia, victim of a recent Russian cyber-war when it decided to remove a monument to its Soviet subjugators from the city center. It culminates with direct rhetorical assaults on the United States, as when Putin suggested in a recent speech that the threat posed by the United States “as during the time of the Third Reich” include the same claims of “imperialism and diktat” in the world. 
None of these Kremlin assaults can seriously be laid at the White House’s feet, unless one believes the lurid, anti-Western conspiracy theories spun out by senior Russian officials. 
And that brings us to Fact No. 3. Russia has become, in the precise sense of the word, a fascist state. 
It does not matter here, as the Kremlin’s apologists are so fond of pointing out, that Putin is wildly popular in Russia. Popularity is what competent despots get when they destroy independent media, stoke nationalistic fervor with military buildups and the cunning exploitation of the church, and ride a wave of petrodollars to pay off the civil service and balance their budgets. Nor does it matter that Putin hasn’t renationalized the “means of production” outright; corporatism was at the heart of Hitler’s economic policy, too. 
What matters, rather, is nicely captured in a remark by Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin regarding Britain’s decision to expel the four diplomats. “I don’t understand the position of the British government,” Kamynin said. “It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.” 
That’s a telling remark, both in its substance and in the apparent insouciance with which it was made: The whole architecture of liberal democracy is designed primarily “for the sake of one man.” Not only does Kamynin seem unaware of it, he seems to think we are unaware of it. Perhaps the indulgence which the West has extended to Putin’s regime over the past seven years gives him a reason to think so. 
On Monday night, Tlisova was in Washington to accept an award from the National Press Club on behalf of Politkovskaya. “She knew she was condemned. She knew she would be killed. She just didn’t know when, so she tried to achieve as much as she could in the time she had,” Tlisova said in her prepared statement. “Maybe Anna Politkovskaya was indeed very damaging to the Russia that Putin has created. But for us, the people of the Caucasus, she was a symbol of hope and faith in another Russia — a country with a conscience, honor and compassion for all its citizens.” 
How do we deal with the old-new Russia? By getting the facts straight. That was Politkovskaya’s calling, as it is Tlisova’s, as it should be ours. 

Bret Stephens is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where this first appeared.

TITLE: Oligarchs Brought Down to Size
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: In a recent interview with the Financial Times, RusAl owner and billionaire Oleg Deripaska declared that, “If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up.”
Every oligarch has been making similar oaths to prove their loyalty to President Vladimir Putin. The only exception was former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom the Kremlin turned into a textbook case to show other oligarchs what happens when you don’t swear allegiance to Putin.
“I just got lucky,” Deripaska said in his interview with the Financial Times. “It is as if wealth has rained down on me from the heavens.”
Just lucky?
At the end of the 1980s, when most other young physicists frittered away their time not working, Deripaska had a sixth sense of how to make money by selling raw materials on the market. He went to work for TransWorld Group, one of the most powerful corporate empires of the early 1990s. At a time when former Soviet company directors still thought owning corporate stocks could land a person in jail, Deripaska and TWG bought up shares in the Sayansky Aluminum Plant. The plant had been on the verge of closing after bandits brazenly made the rounds of the various workshops and unloaded aluminum anywhere they could find a buyer. As the company’s young new director, Deripaska is said to have slept at the factory for months, losing teeth due to the fluoride in the water in the same way sailors did during the voyages of the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
In order to buy up the shares, TWG brought in Vladimir Tatarenkov, the local reputed mobster. No one knows how Tatarenkov managed to obtain the shares. Maybe he bought the shares or simply seized them. But when the shares landed in Tatarenkov’s hands, Deripaska squealed to the police, declaring, “I decided to fight against organized crime.”
Tatarenkov was determined to kill Deripaska, having made several attempts on his life. Tatarenkov approached Anatoly Bykov, the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant director at the time, and suggested he pay some type of honorarium in return for the hit, arguing that Bykov had reason to fear Deripaska’s growing influence in the aluminum business. But Bykov declined, reportedly saying, “He’s your enemy, not mine.”
It was Deripaska who led a mutiny of Russian managers against the TWG empire, diluting its ownership stake in the Sayansky Aluminum Plant by emitting new TWG shares.
With all those nights spent at the Sayansky factory, the deadly feuds with Tatarenkov and Bykov, and the uprising against TWG — can it really be said Deripaska was “just lucky”?
In 1730, Peter the Great’s comrades helped create the New Russia. They were strong, cunning, and corrupt. They were also extremely clever, calling to the throne the unintelligent and weak Anna Ivanovna and placing very severe limitations on her powers. Those who had sought to impose limits on her power had done so to preserve their own influence, and not for the good of others. But once she ascended to the throne, she exercised her new authority by tossing those limits out. Those in power always have the upper hand.
The oligarchs, like Peter the Great’s compatriots, were tireless, talented and ruthless. Not one of them became a billionaire by chance. But when the oligarchs selected Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, they were not concerned with the rights of others. They only thought about advancing their own rights and freedom. But these same heavy hitters, who enjoyed unprecedented wealth and power for such a long time, now stand meekly on the steps of the gallows. In an attempt to buy time or to keep at least some portion of the plundered fortunes for themselves, the oligarchs are now saying to their president: “Your Majesty, all that is mine is yours. Take what you wish.”

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

TITLE: The British are coming!
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions between the U.K. and Russia over the crisis caused by the poisoning of Kremlin opponent Alexander Litvinenko in London last year, the timing might have been better for an impressive cultural mission from Britain to St. Petersburg on Friday to promote tolerance through music. But true fans will nevertheless welcome the British guests.
Headlined by pop singer Lily Allen, the lineup of the British Council-promoted open-air event U.K. Flavours includes such acts as Dub Pistols featuring The Specials and Fun Boy Three vocalist Terry Hall, radical Anglo-Asian rappers Fun-Da-Mental, Guyana-born dub musician and producer Mad Professor, reggae band Misty In Roots and bhangra duo Tigerstyle.
According to Toby Brundin, the British Council’s art manager in London, the artists were chosen to represent U.K. multiculturalism, with a stress on Caribbean and Asian cultures.
“There’s a strong concept behind this event,” wrote Brundin from his office in London this week.
“We went through a number of ideas for this. For the U.K. artists, I thought about all the different musical subcultures that exist and the historical threads that run through them, and how we might illustrate this. In the end we have two main threads.
“Firstly, we can look at the influence of Caribbean culture on U.K. music. In the ’60s small Jamaican clubs in West London played ska music (early reggae, which was known in the U.K. as ‘Bluebeat’) and these became popular with adventurous white kids, particularly the Mods (for example, The Who). This created a connection between the two scenes that ten years later gave birth to bands like The Specials and the familiar 2-Tone ska scene with its mixed race bands. And now we have Specials singer Terry Hall performing with the Dub Pistols, to show where this development has got to 25 years after that!”
“Misty In Roots are representatives of the classic era of U.K. reggae which arose at the same time as punk in the late ’70s, and was equally political and assertive. Artists like Misty In Roots, Steel Pulse and Aswad were some of the first to raise issues about racial equality on a very public basis in the U.K. without mincing their words. So Misty is important not just musically but socially in our history. 
“Mad Professor, who is coming with a seven-piece live band unusually, is a legend in a different form of Caribbean music: dub. He moved to the U.K. at the age of 13, and along with Adrian Sherwood from On-U Sound and artists like African Head Charge has actually developed a distinctive sound for U.K. dub which has made it the global center for this music now; and dub has an amazing global reach, with festivals from China to Bulgaria to South America.”
Headliner Allen, the 22-year-old pop singer who sold over a million copies of her 2006 album “Alright, Still” and topped the U.K. charts with her single “Smile” that same year, has also been influenced by Caribbean music and was seen performing The Specials’ ska song “Gangsters” with Terry Hall at the Glastonbury music festival last month.
“Lily Allen demonstrates just how far Caribbean music has fused into U.K. music since those early days of the 1960s,” said Brundin.
“She is a very popular artist in the U.K., and appears in the papers on a daily basis, and yet few people would notice that her music is very much based on Caribbean music; samples from an old Calypso track dominate the song ‘LDN,’ and she often uses that loping reggae beat. However, over the last 40 years this music has become so familiar to British listeners that they probably would not detect its origins.”
“So that is the Caribbean thread. Then we have two artists that represent some elements of South Asian culture in the U.K. (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka). Tigerstyle are a fantastic production outfit from Glasgow and they show the journey bhangra has made in the U.K. from a traditional Punjabi dance to banging club music which is now exported from Britain back to India, and across the world — remember Panjabi MC? Recently bhangra started to fuse with R&B and black music genres and Tigerstyle are very much part of this modernizing trend, working with an MC.
“Fun-Da-Mental have already established a reputation in Russia. They are a band that is impossible to easily define: are they punk? hip-hop? dance? Something of all of them. And they are also a modern band that is unafraid to express a lot of the difficult issues around identity and multiculturalism, and the leader of the band, Aki [Nawaz], will be taking part in the seminars the day before the event. I understand they have a big following in Russia now based on previous live shows.”
Promoting tolerance in St. Petersburg, notorious for its increasing rate of hate crimes, is logical, though Brundin argues that it is a general problem.
“Tolerance is always an issue in any complex society, particularly in the urban environment,” he said.
“The U.K. and Russia are both post-imperial societies and that leaves a fascinating but complicated legacy which is not always easy to deal with. Multiculturalism is a word that is much used without necessarily being clearly understood. To me, music is an excellent way of illustrating what multiculturalism actually means. In a country like the U.K. a multitude of influences have contributed to what our music is today, but that doesn’t make it less British.”
“And why St. Petersburg? Well, my colleagues at the British Council St. Petersburg originally came up with the original idea because they feel that there are excellent opportunities for the British Council to contribute to building greater trust and understanding between the U.K. and Russia through our shared experiences of multiculturalism, and by addressing together the challenges that our two societies are facing in terms of community cohesion. Feedback from our partners in the city authorities and other key players confirmed this view, and so the project was born. The point is that St. Petersburg is one of the most diverse cities in Russia and its most fascinating one.”
To represent the local scene, a pair of Russian bands were added to the lineup — Moscow rappers W.K? and local reggae/funk band I-Laska.
“Of course Russia and particularly St. Petersburg has its own booming ska and reggae scene with artists like Ska-Jazz Review and even Leningrad, and I-Laska illustrate just what a global music this now is,” said Brundin.
“I’m afraid I know less about them than I do about the U.K. artists but I’m looking forward to seeing them.”
According to Brundin, U.K. Flavours is a long-term commitment for the British Council.
“We have already set money and resources aside for follow-up events later this year and in the spring of next,” he said.
“The program for this weekend includes the festival, a day of seminars examining issues of tolerance and race relations in our two countries, and a film screening on Sunday evening. 
“Future events will be shaped from the experience and learning that we gain from this weekend’s activities because we’re very keen for U.K. Flavours to develop organically, as a project that is shaped through close collaboration with our Russian partners. One possible future project could be connected to the fact that we’re bringing over some wonderful costumes used in the Notting Hill Carnival and if these prove popular we could organize some workshops with schools for children to build their own costumes to their own designs.”
Brundin said the artists taking part in U.K. Flavours are fully informed of and support its message of tolerance. 
“I think that what makes the British Council an attractive partner is that we have a long-term commitment to the countries in which we work,” he said. 
“The British Council has been present in St. Petersburg since 1994, and our team has an in-depth understanding of the local environment and culture. Our U.K. artists really appreciate this when they talk to us about the projects that we’re working on together.
“We always try to discuss any project we are doing with the participants involved, whether artists or anyone else, because we want them to be coming with full understanding and commitment to what we’re trying to do. Every project we do has an underlying point and it’s important that people take that on board. I also think it’s very important for British musicians traveling abroad to know something about the culture they are visiting to be better able to communicate and share. Ideas about Russia in the U.K. can be surprisingly out of date, just as the opposite is sometimes true. 
“Multiculturalism and community cohesion are important issues in Russia which need to be discussed… and as I found out more about the ethnic diversity of Russia I became fascinated by it. Through this event, and the seminar on Friday, I hope I will learn a lot more about how Russians approach this topic today. As I mentioned before it is actually an issue everywhere, especially in Britain after the recent terrorist attacks. We have also had a lot of migration from Eastern Europe in recent years, and for example Poles now make up our largest ethnic minority, so this has brought to light a whole new set of issues. The world never stops changing and one never arrives at a solution, but we can at least do our best to understand the situation in which we currently find ourselves and to understand our fellow human beings.”
A seminar on tolerance, featuring Aki Nawaz, an outspoken musician with Fun-da-Mental, will be held at the British Council’s office at 32 Nevsky Prospekt at noon on Friday. Franco Rosso’s 1980 “Babylon”, a legendary reggae music film, will be screened at Dom Kino at 2 p.m. on Sunday.


U.K. Flavours will be held at the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress from noon to 11 p.m. on Saturday. www.britishcouncil.org/russia-arts-uk-flavours-festival.htm

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: The Kremlin’s view of Russia as a besieged fortress, surrounded by enemies, i.e. NATO, has been embodied in a song and a video by Moscow rappers <b>Diskoteka Avariya</b>.
Called “Zlo” (Evil), the video uses archive footage of Bolsheviks destroying Russian churches early last century, Germany’s Nazis and the victorious Soviet army, but, closer to the end, switches to packs of dollars and the Bronze Soldier, the World War II-era Soviet monument in Tallinn whose transfer from the city center to a military cemetery caused Kremlin fury.
“You’re besieged from the east, the south, the west and the north // From the sea, from the surface, from space,” raps the band.
The song warns the listener about western influences (“There is an alien inside you who controls your thoughts”) and dismisses the “starred-and-striped paradise.”
The band suggests the listener should recall “great-grandfather’s medals” and the “righteous sword left to you by your great ancestors,” and states, “Only one who fights wins // And let it, the bitch [NATO?], come closer.”
“They did for the Yankees, they are brave,” rave the band’s teenage fans in various web forums. The Kremlin seems to have liked the band’s “patriotic” effort as well, as it was booked to open the concert program of the summer camp for pro-Putin youth group Nashi on Tuesday.
The Kremlin-backed Nashi, who have recently been besieging the Estonian embassy in Moscow, abusing the Estonian flag and harassing the ambassador as part of an anti-Estonian campaign, have gathered, they claim, 10,000 members for a period of training and indoctrination from such figures as Kremlin ideologist Gleb Pavlovsky. Nashi’s goal, as put by its leader Vasily Yakimenko, is “to make sure that everyone who is against [Putin’s course] loses,” according to Kommersant.
Nashi camp’s website proudly lists the bands Umaturman, Zemfira, BI-2, Vyacheslav Butusov, Korol i Shut, Kukryniksy, Ariya, Masha i Medvedi, Nochniye Snaipery, SerGa, Multfilmy, Znaki and Velvet as having performed at the camp in the past two years. But most of them were only in it for the money, apparently. 
When asked, Butusov’s Moscow manager claimed he saw no difference between performing at the Nashi camp and at a corporate party. “It was not political, because we did not perform on a square under slogans,” he said by phone last year.
But singer Zemfira admitted she was wrong when she performed there in 2005.
“It was my mistake,” she was quoted by Kommersant as saying.
“When you are offered an excessively high fee, it means there’s something fishy about it, you have to look into it. I should’ve been more attentive, I’ve been taught a lesson.”

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: The Ultimate challenge
AUTHOR: By Chris Jones
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Maybe you’ve seen them playing in parks throughout St. Petersburg.  They have names like JuPiter, Dogma and Flying Steps, and yell “Hammer!” “Huck!” and “Layout!” while they chase a little flying disc down a field. Who are these groups, and what are they doing?  They are Ultimate Frisbee teams, and they are one of the newest ways people are staying in shape in St. Petersburg.
Ultimate Frisbee (Ultimate for short) is a sport developed in the 1960s in the U.S.  It is similar to soccer and American football, but uses a flying disc (the frisbee) to score points.  It is usually played on a converted soccer pitch with two teams of seven players.  Games last 60-100 minutes — depending on points scored — and are about as physically demanding as a full soccer match.
According to George Fedorov, founder of local team JuPiter, the sport has grown rapidly in Russia because it is a low cost, high fun workout.  
“It’s a non-contact sport and we referee ourselves, so the games are friendly — there is a lot of joking and camaraderie between teams,” Fedorov said. “However, the sport is physically demanding, so we also get a great workout.” 
Since coming to Russia ten years ago, Ultimate has expanded to almost 20 teams nationwide.  
“Most teams are in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Veliky Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod,” Fedorov said. “In St. Petersburg we have five teams, a women’s team and four open [mixed] teams. There are probably 150 players in St. Petersburg alone.”
The teams compete throughout Northwest Russia, and regularly travel to the Baltic States and Europe to play in European and World championships.
Alina Dunayeva, a member of women’s team Dogma, said several teams have just returned from a tournament in Nizhny Novgorod and this weekend several will play in a regional championship in Pskov.  
“In August, the women’s national team will travel to England to play in the European Championships,” Dunayeva said. “We also compete against other teams in St. Petersburg on a regular basis.” The background of players varies widely. 
“Some players are experienced former athletes, and compete in every tournament,” Dunayeva said. “Others have little sports background and just play in the St. Petersburg area to stay in shape — it totally depends. I learned to play in the United States, so I have a different background than most players, and I play twice a week.”  
Players range in age from their late teens to mid-30s, with most in their early to mid-20s.  Most are Russian, and are either students or working professionals.
Kirill Skrygan, the current captain of JuPiter, said the sport is addictive. 
“I just discovered Ultimate a year ago and fell in love with the sport.  George and his teammates trained me, and now I am captain of our team,”  Skrygan said. “It is fun, keeps me in great shape, and I’ve made a lot of good friends — I play every week and can’t get enough!”  
According to Fedorov, teams regularly hold open practices for new players.  

Do you have a recreational club you want people to know about?  
Contact: brown@sptimesrussia.com
<hr>
FAQ
Can I Play?
Yes!  Most teams are actively seeking new players, no experience necessary.

What do I need?
Just bring yourself, a desire to train hard, and a decent pair of sports shoes (cleats if you have them).  The teams will teach you and provide any other equipment.

What does it cost?
$2-5 per game for field rental (practices are often free). Eventually you’ll want to buy a Frisbee ($15).

Where do they play?
Teams practice and compete on fields throughout the city. There are also open games on Sundays, on the beach in Solnechnoye in summer and by the main lake at Ozerki during winter.

What team will I play on?
When you contact George or Alina, let them know if you want to play on a men’s, women’s, or mixed team, and your athletic background. They will set you up with the team best matching your experience level and interests.

Do I need to speak Russian?
It helps, but is not necessary. Most teams have several players with good English skills who can get you started.

Where do I sign up?
Here are two local contacts:
George Fedorov – Coordinator, JuPiter Open Team. Tel. 89219921393, e-mail – discman@rol.ru
Alina Dunayeva – Coordinator, Dogma Women’s Team. Tel. 89117166991, 
e-mail – alina.dunaeva@gmail.com

TITLE: Renaissance man
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The exuberance of physical power, a signature feature of the sculptural language of 16th-century master Michelangelo, took center stage at a new exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum that opened Tuesday in the Twelve Column Hall.
Showcasing two marble sculptures by the legendary Italian artist, set against sumptuous modern black-and-white photographs by Aurelio Amendola, the display also celebrates fine carving, the elegance of shape, and natural grace. 
Michelangelo’s so-called Crouching Boy — the only sculpture by Michelangelo in the possession of the Hermitage — is shown alongside a sculpture of David (Apollo) from the collection of the National Museum of Bargello in Florence. Both works date from the 1525-1530s.
Originally designed for the Medici Chapels in Florence, the Crouching Boy oozes tension and mournful restraint. The figure is trapped in a circle of emotional resignation. By contrast, it is the spirit of freedom that David radiates. The standing man appears to be relaxed, as if liberating himself from a marble mantle.
The two sculptures could have possibly even been kept under one roof within the walls of Michelangelo’s studio five centuries ago.
“We will probably never be able to find out whether the two sculptures ever existed within the same walls,” said Cristina Acidini Luchinat, superintendent of Florence museums. “If it did happen, then the likeliest possible period was around 1530-1532, when Michelangelo was working on a series of sculptures for the Medici Chapels in the San Lorenzo church, in his Via Mozza studio.”
Florence’s San Lorenzo was the parish church for the Medici dynasty. The basilica serves as the burial site of all the principal members of the Medici family.
Sergei Androsov, one of the project’s curators, said historical context is important for understanding the spirit of the sculptures.
“At that moment Michelangelo was contemplating leaving his beloved Florence for good,” Androsov said. “The motifs of grief, sorrow and escapism that can be traced in the two sculptures were inspired by the events in the artist’s own life.”
The historically turbulent 1530s, when Florence was besieged by the forces of Emperor Charles V, were Michelangelo’s last years in the city. In 1534 he fled Florence for Rome.
“The exhibition’s advantage is in the juxtaposition of the sculptures and exquisite photography, which unveils new visual angles for the ancient masterpieces,” said Vladimir Matveyev, deputy director of the Hermitage. “The photography ignites a dialogue with the sculpture and takes the audiences on a captivating journey.”
In his photographs, Amendola strives to capture the essence of a detail and concentrate on a whimsical shadow. The resulting experience of watching his work is like slowly drowning in nectar. Following the footsteps of Amendola, the visitors gradually view the sculpture, exploring it from different angles and distances.
“I am thrilled by being able to photograph sculpture and architecture,” Amendola said. “I take photographs not only of the works of the great masters of the past, like, for instance, Donatello or Bernini but also of contemporary sculpture. 
The benefit of dealing with the patriarchs is that they cannot possibly express any annoyance with my work,” he joked.
Born into a noble family in1474 in Florence, Michelangelo was sent to a family of stone carvers for training. When Michelangelo grew up he often said that his passion for carving was probably rooted in his early years in the stone-cutting shop. 
But his father had envisaged another career for his son. Years later Michelangelo — already an established sculptor, architect, artist and poet — recalled his father’s fury: “When I told my father that I wished to be an artist, he flew into a rage, saying that ‘artists are laborers, no better than shoemakers.’” 

The exhibition can be seen through Sept. 23 in the Hermitage’s Twelve Column Hall.  www.hermitagemuseum.org.

TITLE: Castles in the air
AUTHOR: By Nicole Rudick
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In 1931, Izvestia announced an open competition  —  the largest such in Soviet history  —  to design the Palace of Soviets, a grand structure to be built on the site of the soon-to-be demolished Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In addition to such foreign luminaries as Thomas Lamb, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, whose entries were commissioned by the Soviet government, the competition included submissions from homegrown avant-garde architects like Moisei Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers and Aleksei Shchusev. 
The winning plan, however, selected in 1933 after several additional rounds of competition, was a paragon of heavy Soviet classicism, not least for the main structure’s colonnaded wedding-cake design, topped by an 18-meter statue of a worker (the design was updated in 1934 to feature a gigantic 100-meter statue of Vladimir Lenin instead).
Yet the results of the competition point not to a repudiation of the modernist style but rather to the Soviet state’s desire to signify its power and authority. Modernism’s lucid transparency was unsuited to the task. With the end of the First Five-Year Plan in 1932, the leaders aimed to represent their achievements in the great push to the future using a grand and unequivocal language that would speak both to the masses and to the world. (It was boasted that the Palace of Soviets would be the tallest building in the world, outstripping even  —  and perhaps especially  —  New York’s Empire State Building.) The ability of monumental architecture to illustrate Soviet success nevertheless sounded the death knell for the modernist style in Russia, which had begun to make its mark only a decade before.
When architectural photographer Richard Pare first arrived in Russia some 70 years later, he sought out these modernist remains and found not a handful of extant buildings but some 70 constructions  —  factories, residential and government buildings, power plants, workers’ clubs, department stores and sanatoriums  —  in cities from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Baku and Sochi. 
His archive of 10,000 negatives bears out his discovery, and a generous selection of these images, captured over the course of more than 10 years, forms the subject of a magnificent new book, “The Lost Vanguard,” and an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art set to open this week.
Pare’s mission in Russia quickly became twofold: Whereas he initially set out to renew and replenish photographic documentation of this brief period in Soviet culture, noting that the same poor-quality images representing the same buildings recurred in most studies of the era, he stumbled upon a substantial legacy in ruins and determined to record these crumbling and neglected edifices before all traces were lost. 
In this latter role, he becomes both poet and mourner, at once celebrating a building’s “radical purity” and grieving for its ill fortune. Of the Vasileostrovsky Factory Kitchen in St. Petersburg, Pare observes: “In its decay, the building expressed its originality in a way that had been long since lost with the accretions of ill-considered modifications…. Leaving at last, I passed a fire made of parts of the building itself, left smoldering on the floor. I had disturbed men resting from tearing scrap metal from the ruins; they disappeared as I approached, leaving only the embers.”
Konstantin Melnikov’s cylindrical house in the Arbat district of Moscow is unique among Pare’s finds, for it remains the only single-family dwelling in the modernist style constructed in a city renowned for cramped communal living quarters  —  and the architect himself lived there until his death in 1974. 
That such a structure survived in Moscow’s center at all is a wonder, given not just later hostility to the ideals of the avant-garde but the massive Soviet-era projects  —  most ultimately unrealized  —  that would have made a footprint so large as to stamp out any differing mark. (The house’s fate is currently undecided. Melnikov’s son, Viktor, lived there until his own death last year and bequeathed half-ownership to the state on the condition that it be preserved  —  along with Konstantin’s paintings, sketches, and architectural drawings  —  as a museum. The site’s current estimated value of some $40 million no doubt has developers salivating.)
These architects, like their counterparts in other branches of the Soviet avant-garde, worked within a laboratory of ideas and influences, producing, Pare notes, a modernist language that expressed a “kind of muscularity and energy.” 
A squat bus shelter in Sochi  —  a rare example of street architecture  —  resembles a rustic Greek temple. The Gosplan Garage in Moscow features playful geometric details: rectangular windows set at a 45-degree angle slice into the block of the building, while a large circular window, evoking the movement of a wheel, frames the garage’s workshop. 
The Water Tower for the Socialist City of Uralmash, in Yekaterinburg, is defined by a barrel structure resting on six thin columns and sliced on one side by a tightly wound flight of stairs partially enclosed in a slender white rectangle. Set on the edge of town, the tower both resides within the landscape as a distant boundary marker and offers a means to survey the surrounding area. 
Yet when Pare speaks of modernism’s characteristic “stripping away all but the most essential elements,” his words suggest a second meaning: In the years of privation following domestic and foreign upheaval, communal shelter and industrial infrastructure were in high demand while materials and a trained workforce were scarce. 
“Very few of the laborers,” he points out, “had ever held a ruler, let alone a plasterer’s float.” But shortages gave way to technical innovation, through a reliance on past building methods  —  applying plaster over a lath substrate, for instance  —  and a utilization of alternate materials  —  working around a dearth of steel by using steel plates to join wooden trusses. 
In many cases, glass transformed otherwise compact, efficient buildings into enthusiastic participants in the new utopia. Structures such as Moscow’s Zuyev Workers’ Club and Mostorg Department Store, the Pravda and Izvestia buildings, and the Vasileostrovsky Factory Kitchen unite modernism’s simplicity of line with large, often unbroken panels of this transparent, gleaming material. In this particularly “revolutionary” quality, one is reminded of the towering glass architecture prefigured in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s proto-science-fiction novel, “We”: “A solemn, bright day. On days like these you forget about all your weaknesses, imprecisions, sicknesses, and everything is crystalfixed and eternal  —  like our new glass.” 
Pare bookends this volume with Vladimir Shukhov’s Shabolovka Radio Tower and Shchusev’s Lenin Mausoleum. 
Among the images of the tower is a shot straight up the center of the colossal structure, with its stacked hyperboloids and latticed grid work diminishing into space  —  a vantage that mirrors that assumed by Alexander Rodchenko in his 1929 photograph of the same tower; the perspective in this example of Rodchenko’s early work was revolutionary for offering a novel way of viewing the new culture. 
Shchusev’s building makes an equally apt close, for his blood-red stone and black granite edifice stands simultaneously as a prime example of modernist principles and as “the dark heart and signifier of the Soviet regime.”

Nicole Rudick is managing editor of Bookforum.
<hr>
The Lost Vanguard:
Russian Modernist Architecture 
1922 – 1932
By Richard Pare

The Monacelli Press
348 Pages. $85

TITLE: In The Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When Edgard met Lena, he was a tiger tamer turned reality show contestant, while she was a budding pop singer who took third place at the Eurovision Song Contest. After a few playful phone calls and a trip to see Johnny Depp at the multiplex, they felt ready for something more: the cover of last week’s Hello! magazine and seven inside pages.
Yes, Eurovision was two months ago, but the contestants for Russia and Ukraine just won’t fade decently into oblivion. While drag queen Verka Serdyuchka has been complaining of a hate campaign following her second place, the leader of the Russian girl band Serebro, Yelena Temnikova, has publicly announced her romance with circus artist Edgard Zapashny.
She met her muscle-bound beau when he was fighting on Channel One’s “King of the Ring” celebrity boxing show — which he went on to win. Eyes met across a crowded stadium, but she pretended to support his opponent; he took it on the chin and asked for her number. And no woman could have resisted those tiger-print shorts.
Somewhat bizarrely, the photo shoot in Hello! shows the couple at Domodedovo Airport. Apparently they chose this setting because Lena is always flying around on tour, not because they haven’t actually told each other where they live. Lena had just arrived from Krasnodar, the magazine wrote, although I was impressed by her resourcefulness in having three different outfits to wear at the shoot, none of them crumpled.
Naturally, cynics might suspect Lena and Edgard’s PR people of playing Cupid, and the couple’s body language certainly looked a little stiff. But the couple assured Hello! that their relationship is for real. In fact, Lena confessed that she has already tried marrying someone for publicity purposes and she didn’t like it.
Her one-time husband, Alexei Semyonov, crawled out from the woodwork soon before Eurovision. He gave some heartwarming quotes to tabloid Tvoi Den, saying that Lena had to win at Eurovision “because otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in her leaving me in the lurch.” 
The pair met while appearing on the television talent contest Star Factory and invited journalists to their wedding. Then he followed a job offer to Kiev and she — aged 18 — decided to stay in Russia. That was that, until the tabloids dug him up. Lena told Hello! that they tied the knot “not in a serious way, for the press.” She didn’t make it clear whether they are now divorced but said “that person is nothing to me.”
The love life, and orientation, of Andrei Danilko, aka Verka Serdyuchka, is much more mysterious. “Something happens about once a month, but I’m happier on my own,” he commented obliquely in OK! magazine last month. The intriguing interview also revealed that the reclusive comedian grew up in a house without a bathroom and never takes off his baseball cap.
Far more predictably, newspapers have been reporting on a conspiracy against Serdyuchka after she possibly sang “Russia Goodbye” at Eurovision. Various reports have said that she was disinvited to festivals in Sochi and Latvia and edited out of a concert shown on Channel One — which happens to broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest.
It’s all rather baffling. In an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets on Wednesday, Danilko was noncommital, saying dismissively that “Russian television shows are reporting on an alleged ban on my concerts” but going on to hint at a negative attitude from “people from a certain channel.” 
Miaow. This could be a job for Edgard.

TITLE: Rustic elegance
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Receptoria Gourmet Boutique and Restaurant // 10 Admiralteisky Peospekt. Tel. 312 7967 // Open 12 a.m. until the last customer leaves (orders accepted until 11.30 p.m.) // Menu in Russian and English // Lunch for two without alcohol 3,754 rubles ($144)

Receptoria, a corner of French rustic elegance opposite the Admiralty Gardens, offers a warm welcome from the maitre d who invites guests into this small shop and restaurant with a broad smile. 
Inside the first room dark wooden shelves groan under the weight of gourmet chocolate, specialty coffees, glowing jars of fruit preserves and glinting bottles of dark olive oil. One wall is dominated by an enormous chilled cabinet stuffed with a huge range of French cheeses, arranged in weighty blocks and peeking through grease proof paper, Italian cold cuts and fancy fruit juices. Receptoria's “gourmet boutique” is reminiscent of nothing less than a corner of Fortnum & Masons or Harrods food hall - and the goodies on offer are priced accordingly with small chocolate bars and packets of coffee costing hundreds of rubles each. The cheeses are more reasonably priced at between 100-150 rubles ($4-$6) for 100 grams.
Cheese is a dominant theme at Receptoria. Past the boutique are its two dining halls, each seating about 20 people, which are decorated in a subtle array of creamy tones. The walls are the color of Brie, while the low arched brick ceiling is reminiscent of lumpy cottage cheese. Tables are set with starched linen and modern silverware, with rolls of cinnamon and occasional walnuts strewn around for effect. The chairs are a modern take on French farmhouse furniture, and a dark wooden wine cabinet is lined with straw. Hand-painted maps of French regions are lit gently by large candles, slowly melting like vanilla ice cream.
Such surroundings encourage dreams of irresistible food and the menu doesn't disappoint. With dishes ranging from around 300 rubles ($11) to 2,000 rubles ($77) this is certainly not a modest lunch option. But dishes such as Homemade Ravioli with Ceps and Foie Gras on a Bed of Artichoke Mousse (670 rubles, $25) and Tartar of Crabmeat with a jelly of Forest Berries and Citrus (580 rubles, $22) are a chance to indulge passions rarely expressed. The five ravioli had been gently fried so that a crumbly crust contrasted with the softly flavored artichoke sauce underneath and they were topped with an amazing cheese foam, each mouthful exploding with rich flavors. The crab salad, presented in a tall glass, was topped with slices of peeled grapefruit and sprinkled with basil, dill and parsley, followed by a layer a crab and ending with an apple and foxberry jelly. The saltiness of the crab contrasted the bittersweet fruits and aromatic herbs to make a light and lively dish.
In contrast to this riot of gourmet creativity, the languid and arrogant service bordered on the edge of being rude. The waiter was absent for what seemed like hours at a time, and when he did appear he tried to snatch unfinished dishes off the table. Once he literally sneered at a guest from behind her back. Perhaps he heard that French garcon behave this way, but this a myth that ought not to be emulated. Women should be warned that if a man accompanies them, the menu they are given will not have prices in the assumption they will not be paying.    
Main courses rely heavily on luxuriant combinations of such ingredients as duck, venison, asparagus, fruit comfit, oysters and sea bass, with such sophisticated examples as Truffle Tagliatelle with Parmigiano Reggiano (740 rubles, $29) and Foie Gras medallions with figs, roasted nuts and port sauce (792 rubles, $30). Lighter for lunch was Ricioli with Gorgonzola, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Walnuts and Rucola (629 rubles, $24), a squirming nest of pasta al dente, cubes of cheese, crumbly nuts and supersweet tomatoes drowning in a rich cheese sauce. Cheese even features in the dessert menu: for example, a stupendous, featherlight cheese sorbet on a chocolate crust with zingy marmalade that resembled a cheesecake made for angels (420 rubles, $16).

TITLE: A sparrow in flight
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: As if acknowledging the challenges it faces in finding an American audience, “La Vie en Rose,” Olivier Dahan’s long, feverish film biography of Adith Piaf, notes that its heroine, an incomparably bright star in the French cultural firmament, never quite caught on over here. After a less than rapturous stateside reception, the film’s Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard) observes that Americans just don’t get her, and though she seems to have a good time in New York and California, the incomprehension appears to have been mutual. She won’t even try a corned beef sandwich at a Manhattan delicatessen.
But Dahan’s film goes some way toward bridging the gap. This is not because it explains Piaf’s appeal — though it does offer viewers a chance to sample the glories of her voice — but rather because it assimilates her life neatly into the conventions of the musical biopic. It turns out that we Americans don’t have a monopoly on singers and composers who emerge from traumatic childhoods, battle drug addiction, pursue difficult love affairs and win the hearts of millions. It also turns out that, while musical idioms sometimes have a hard time crossing the barriers of language and culture, certain narrative clichIs are universal.
So if you have seen “Ray” or “Walk the Line,” you will hardly require a summary of “La Vie en Rose,” which flings its subject back and forth in time, simultaneously charting her rise from the tough streets of Paris and her decline into drug abuse and ill health. There are tearful confrontations, moments of bliss and betrayal, tantrums and onstage collapses, love affairs and business deals, all of it punctuated by the big, expressive, unmistakable singing of Piaf herself, as Cotillard, wide-eyed and fine-boned, lip-syncs along.
The celebrity biopic is decidedly an actor’s genre. The number of great movies made out of great artists’ lives is tiny, especially in proportion to the number of supposedly great performances these movies have occasioned. In this kind of picture the story, the production design and the mise-en-scIne need only provide adequate scaffolding for a heroically superfluous act of impersonation.
No one else could possibly be Adith Piaf, or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles (or Truman Capote or Muhammad Ali or anyone else on the ever-growing list). Their larger-than-life self-sufficiency adds a thrilling element of risk to the task of portraying any of them on film. Or so it would seem. Really, though, the audacity involved in taking up such a challenge predisposes audiences (and critics) to applause, as does the durable popularity of the originals. So it is hard not to admire Cotillard for the discipline and ferocity she brings to the role. But it is equally hard to be completely swept up in Dahan’s dutiful, functional and ultimately superficial film.
“La Vie en Rose,” which Dahan wrote as well as directed, has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it’s a complete mess. Resisting the habit of starting at the end and flashing back to the beginning, it begins at the late middle, goes back to the beginning, comes back to the near-end, jumps around in the early and middle-middle and then noodles around between a bunch of almost-ends and the really absolutely final end, with a quick, baffling detour into an earlier part of the early middle. Clear enough?
The main casualty of this willy-nilly narration is any coherent sense of Piaf’s personality. It may be that Dahan and his collaborators did not want to subject their heroine to the indignity of psychological explanation, preferring to let her charisma rule the screen without qualification or compromise. And it is true that Cotillard is a dynamic, quick-witted performer, one whose sheer force of will goes some way toward showing how a funny-looking, abrasive street urchin could become the idol of postwar France.
But not quite far enough. Who was Piaf? The miserable childhood, with its saving moments of tenderness, is duly noted. Papa was a circus contortionist, Mama was a hopeless drunk, and little Adith lived for a while in Grandma’s brothel, where she was befriended by a soulful prostitute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) and where she was briefly blinded by keratitis. Later Adith and her best pal, Momone (Sylvie Testud), sing on the streets of Paris — actually Momone makes faces and swigs wine while Adith belts out the songs — where Adith is discovered by a nightclub impresario (GIrard Depardieu).
He gives her a stage name. (Piaf means “sparrow.”) She is a hit. He is murdered. She is a suspect. What really happened? We don’t know, but in any case she soon moves on to a new mentor, and then to a love affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). Also at least one marriage, several car accidents and one brilliantly shot sequence, by far the best in the movie, in which she learns of a lover’s death.
To help us sort though it all, dates appear at the bottom of the screen. Oddly, the years of the Second World War are left out, an omission that seems puzzling given that Piaf is known to have aided the Resistance during the Nazi occupation (even as she continued to perform). But many of Dahan’s dramatic choices are puzzling, and his breathless camera movements seem driven more by desperation than by enthusiasm.
In the end, as often happens in movies of this kind, “La Vie en Rose” is saved by Piaf herself. Most of the songs in the film are accompanied by subtitles. (An exception is “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the signature of her last years.) They are hardly necessary, given the undiminished power of that voice. Unfortunately the movie isn’t either.

TITLE: Blast In New York Examined
AUTHOR: By Adam Goldman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Tests showed a deadly steam pipe explosion in midtown Manhattan did not leave asbestos in the air, but the chemical was found in some solid debris and dust that settled, city officials said Thursday.
Tests were continuing, but the Office of Emergency Management said in a statement that long-term health problems were “unlikely.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg had said the possibility of asbestos contamination was the main health worry after the skyscraper-sized blast Wednesday evening, which killed a woman and left a gaping crater less than a block from Grand Central Terminal. Some pipes carrying steam through the city are wrapped in asbestos, which causes fatal lung disease, though the disease is often linked to prolonged exposure.
Crews worked overnight to assess and repair the damage after the eruption that sent people running for cover as debris rained down. About 30 people were injured, at least four seriously, officials said.
For some witnesses, the explosion, dust, debris and chaos were frighteningly reminiscent of the scene on Sept. 11, 2001. But officials quickly ruled out terrorism and said the explosion was caused by the rupture of the 83-year-old steam pipe.
“We were scared to death. It sounded like a bomb went off, just like 9/11. People were hysterical, crying, running down the street,” said Karyn Easton, a customer at a salon a few blocks from the site of the blast. “It was really surreal.”
Officials took eight air samples in the area around the explosion, and none came back positive for asbestos, the emergency-management agency said. But six of 10 samples of debris and dust came back positive.
Several blocks around the site of the explosion remained cordoned off early Thursday, although residents who were already in the area were allowed to stay. The city told them to keep windows closed and air conditioners set to recirculate indoor air instead of drawing it from outside, and anyone exposed to the falling debris was instructed to wash carefully and isolate soiled clothing in plastic bags.
City engineers warned that up to six feet surrounding the giant hole might be in danger of further collapse. Stretches of several major thoroughfares remained closed early Thursday, and city officials said workers would not be allowed into office buildings in a zone that covered several blocks.
Steam and dirt boiled from the ground for hours after the initial eruption, generating a tremendous roar and spraying vapor as high as the top of the nearby Chrysler Building. The 200-degree steam was under 150 pounds of pressure per square inch when it exploded near East 41st Street and Lexington Avenue.

TITLE: New Doping Scandal Overshadows Tour
AUTHOR: By Jamey Keaten
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MARSEILLE, France — Halfway through the Tour de France, no compelling newcomer has broken through, no favorite has emerged and doping allegations have surfaced yet again.
Cedric Vasseur became the first French rider to win a stage this year, but his victory and the Tour were overshadowed by the announcement of the doping test on cyclist Patrik Sinkewitz during a training session last month that turned up high levels of testosterone.
The announcement of the case by Germany’s cycling federation of the T-Mobile team member, who crashed into a spectator on Sunday and withdrew from the Tour, returned the cloud of doping on a race that had reached its midpoint Wednesday.
The results of Sinkewitz’s “A” sample, announced in Germany shortly before the stage began, quickly spread through the field on Wednesday.
Vasseur handled that field as he narrowly outsprinted four other cyclists in a breakaway group during the 142.6-mile 10th stage from Tallard to Marseille under a searing sun to cross in 5 hours, 20 minutes, 24 seconds. It was his first win at cycling’s biggest race since 1997.
Michael Rasmussen retained the overall leader’s yellow jersey, finishing safely in 30th place among his top rivals. The Dane is two minutes, 35 seconds ahead of second-placed Alejandro Valverde of Spain, and 2:39 in front of fellow Spaniard Iban Mayo in third.
Wednesday’s stage didn’t alter the standings among the remaining contenders, many of whom were recovering from three rides in the Alps. Two time trials and three stages in the Pyrenees await before the July 29 finish on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.
The T-Mobile team, which has enacted some of the toughest anti-doping measures in the sport in response to doping controversies, has been trying to rebuild among young riders. Sinkewitz is 26. T-Mobile temporarily suspended Sinkewitz.
He has five days to decide whether to request a B sample test. If that also comes back positive, he faces a possible ban. He also would be fired by his team and have to pay back his annual salary.
“The entire team was stunned,” T-Mobile sporting manager Bob Stapleton said. “It was quite a shock to everybody, but ... they’re fighters, they came here to compete.”
While the results took two weeks to come to light, Sinkewitz and four teammates were tested June 8 during a training run in the Pyrenees mountains -- where the race heads next week.
“It’s not possible. I know nothing about it,” Sinkewitz told the German news agency DPA. “I am about to have surgery. I can’t deal with it now.”
T-Mobile said Sinkewitz was undergoing surgery on his jaw at a Hamburg, Germany clinic, a consequence of Sunday’s crash. The revelation was a blow for T-Mobile.
Jan Ullrich, a former team leader who won the Tour in 1997, retired this year after he was mentioned in the Spanish anti-doping probe known as Operation Puerto.
Two German public television stations that had been broadcasting the Tour responded by saying they were dropping their coverage “until further notice.”
Patrice Clerc, the president of Tour organizer Amaury Sports Organisation, expressed “stupefaction” at the revelations and called it “paradoxical” that the German broadcasters had halted their coverage.
He said riders “are playing Russian roulette, in a way, when they are tempted to cheat.”
The next major change among the leaders is likely to come in Saturday’s 13th stage -- a 33.6-mile time trial in Albi. Rasmussen has admitted he’s not strong in such races against the clock.
Thursday’s 11th stage favors sprinters, taking the peloton along a mostly flat, 113.4-mile ride along the Mediterranean from Marseille to Montpellier.
Among the remaining contenders, Cadel Evans of Australia is fourth, 2:41 back; Frenchman Christophe Moreau is sixth, 3:18 behind; Carlos Sastre of Spain trails by 3:39 in seventh, and American Levi Leipheimer is ninth, 3:53 off the pace.
Germany’s Andreas Kloeden, one of the world’s best long time-trial specialists who was runner-up to Lance Armstrong in 2004, is 3:50 back, and his Astana teammate Alexandre Vinokourov is 8:05 behind.
The main favorites finished in a pack that finished 10:36 behind Vasseur, whom they gladly let race ahead because he is still 36:05 back in the overall standings.
Vasseur, who turns 37 in August, says this year will be his last in the sport.
“I think I can leave cycling with my head held high,” he said. “I am happy to offer France the first win on the Tour.”

TITLE: 36 Killed in Pakistan Suicide Bombings
AUTHOR: By Zarar Khan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KARACHI, Pakistan — Suicide bombers hit a convoy of Chinese workers in southern Pakistan and a police academy in the north, killing 36 people and wounding 54 as violence swept further across the country.
The convoy was passing though the main bazaar in Hub, a town in Baluchistan province near the port city of Karachi, when a moving car blew up next to a police vehicle, officials said.
Hub police chief Ghulam Mohammed Thaib said 29 people were killed, including seven police. About 30 other people were wounded, some critically.
“It was laden with very heavy explosives but due to our spacing and our security measures, Allah has been very kind,” Major General Saleem Nawaz, a commander of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Constabulary said.
The police “sacrificed their lives and the Chinese friends were absolutely safe,” Nawaz said on Dawn News television.
The Chinese citizens worked at a lead extraction plant in Dudhar in Baluchistan and were temporarily leaving the area for Karachi due to security concerns, police said.
Some officials suggested the bomb was remote-controlled. But Thaib and Nawaz, whose men also were guarding the minibus carrying some 10 Chinese technicians and engineers, said it was a suicide attack.
Television pictures showed how the blast ripped off the front of several roadside shops. Several damaged cars and buses lay rammed into one another among a tangle of bricks and clothing.
In the northwest, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives when guards prevented him from entering the parade ground of the police academy in Hangu, 45 miles southwest of Peshawar.
The bomber killed six bystanders and one policeman, and another 24 people were wounded, academy chief Attaullah Wazir said.
Suicide attacks, bombings and shootings blamed on Islamic extremists and a bloody army siege of radicals in Islamabad’s Red Mosque have killed about 270 people in Pakistan so far this month, stirring doubts about the country’s stability.
Much of the violence has been in North West Frontier Province, especially the frontier region of North Waziristan, where pro-Taliban militants last weekend declared the end of a 10-month-old peace deal.
On Wednesday, militants bombed and strafed an army convoy near Miran Shah, North Waziristan’s main town, killing 17 troops. At least eight militants died in clashes with security forces in the area.
President General Pervez Musharraf insists the accord — under which the military scaled back its operations in the U.S.-led war on terror in return for pledges from tribal leaders to contain militancy — offers the best long-term hope of pacifying the region.
Intelligence analysts in Washington say the pact has given al-Qaida new opportunities to strengthen their operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and beyond.
Pakistan said this assessment lacks substance.
“It does not help simply to make assertions about the presence or regeneration of al-Qaida in bordering areas of Pakistan. What is needed is concrete and actionable information and intelligence sharing,” the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
Musharraf on Wednesday urged moderate Pakistanis — many of whom are pressing him to resign and restore civilian rule — to help him take on extremists.
Adding to the tension, a suicide bomber on Tuesday killed 16 people at a rally for Pakistan’s suspended chief justice, whose legal battle with Musharraf has galvanized opposition to military rule. A verdict in the case is expected as early as Friday.
Critics accuse Musharraf of leading Pakistan toward civil war and using the crisis to shore up U.S. support for his eight-year-old military regime. There is growing concern that year-end elections will be postponed. However, Musharraf insisted Wednesday that the ballot would go ahead.
The Hub attack follows the July 8 slaying of three Chinese men in a rickshaw workshop in Peshawar, which drew protests from Beijing, a key ally of Pakistan, and a pledge from Islamabad to protect some 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese nationals here.
Officials have suggested the Peshawar attack was linked to the then-ongoing army operation against Islamabad’s Red Mosque. Troops moved in after Islamic radicals from the mosque kidnapped several Chinese women they accused of being prostitutes.
However, ethnic Baluch insurgents have been blamed for at least two past attacks on Chinese nationals.
“These anti-state elements were also involved in the previous attacks against Chinese citizens,” Baluchistan Interior Minister Mir Shoaib Nosherwani said.
China is helping build a deepwater port in Gwadar near the Iranian border that Baluch nationalists view as a symbol of the resource-rich but impoverished province’s exploitation.

TITLE: Malaysian Soccer Falls Into Crisis
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia’s cabinet wants answers for the “national disaster” that culminated in the firing of football coach Norizan Bakar after the national side’s latest Asian Cup loss, to Iran.
The Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) has been ordered to report to the cabinet committee for sports at its meeting on July 31, the New Straits Times reported Thursday.
“Most of the cabinet members are utterly disappointed by what has happened with the national team,” Sports Minister Azalina Othman Said told the newspaper.
“FAM’s failure is a national disaster and it shouldn’t be this way.”
Triple champions Iran coasted to a 2-0 win over Malaysia to finish top of group C at the Asian Cup on Wednesday. Malaysia’s loss followed embarrassing 5-1 and 5-0 routs by China and Uzbekistan.
Norizan, 46, said he had been given his marching orders before the latest defeat.
The losses have left Malaysian football in disarray, with the sport’s deputy president stepping down along with two independent council members.
“FAM must tell us what the problem is and the government is ready to help,” Azalina said.
Football is one of the country’s eight core sports, meaning the government supports and funds its development from the grassroots, she said.
“But instead of getting better, football is going from bad to worse. The tone in the cabinet was sad when discussing this matter. Most of the ministers are very upset, the same as many Malaysians who have voiced their disappointment,” Azalina was quoted as saying.
Malaysia’s long-standing football chief on Monday promised to overhaul the sport’s management but rejected calls to follow his son’s lead and quit over the Asian Cup debacle.
Sultan Ahmad Shah announced an inquiry into the losses to China and Uzbekistan. 
Ahmad, who took over FAM in 1984, said he would lead a team of senior FAM officials to look into the defeats, which contrasted sharply with the performances by fellow hosts Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The sultan also said he would launch an “overhaul” of FAM.
“Upon completion of the national team’s final match in the competition, we will call for an inquiry,” he said, according to the state Bernama news agency.
The sultan’s son, Tengku Abdullah Ahmad Sultan Shah, on Sunday announced his resignation as FAM’s deputy president in the wake of the Asian Cup performances.
FAM independent council member Khairy Jamaluddin, the prime minister’s influential son-in-law, also stepped down on Monday.
Public disillusionment has been highlighted by dreadful attendance for the Asian Cup.
One local restaurant Wednesday night screened Uzbekistan’s shock 3-0 win over China instead of the home team’s match.
“Malaysia cannot play,” said one of the restaurant workers.

TITLE: Tiger Woods Boosted By Rulebook Quirk at Open
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARNOUSTIE, Scotland — As if Tiger Woods doesn’t have enough talent, a British Open rules official helped him along Thursday.
Woods, who opened with a 2-under 69 at Carnoustie, pulled his tee shot into deep rough left of the 10th fairway, and the ball settled on a strand of television cables.
The official for the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, Alan Holmes, gave him relief within one club length. 
That enabled Woods to take a free drop in trampled grass, allowing him to hit a long iron just short of the green. 
From there, he hit a nifty pitch over the edge of a pot bunker and holed an 8-foot putt to save par.
“That was a weird drop,” Woods said. 
“I was probably as surprised as anybody.”
Stranger still was the explanation from Holmes. He was asked why Woods was given relief and said the ball was on TV cables. 
When someone suggested the cables are supposed to be moved, Holmes replied, “They’re fixed.”
But they weren’t.
Mark Roe, a former European Tour player now working for the BBC, went over to the cables and moved them 3 feet. 
Roe later approached the officials and said Holmes had given Woods the wrong ruling.
“I most certainly did not,” Holmes said.
It was a significant break, as Woods had 167 yards to clear the burn and 199 yards to the green. 
From his original lie, he probably could not have hit anywhere near the green, and might have had to play short of the burn.
“I didn’t ask for it,” Woods said. “The guy just said I could.”

TITLE: Building Collapse in Mumbai Kills At Least 26, 15 Injured
AUTHOR: By Ramola Talwar Badam
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MUMBAI, India — At least 26 people were killed and 15 others injured when a seven-story building collapsed in Mumbai, officials said Thursday as rescue workers pulled survivors and bodies out of the rubble.
Several others were feared trapped in the rubble of the residential building in Mumbai’s Borivali neighborhood, said Gopal Shetty, a state lawmaker. The building collapsed late Wednesday.
Rescue workers toiled through the night, often pulling aside chunks of masonry with their bare hands, in an attempt to find survivors.
“The priority is to rescue people who may be trapped inside,” Shetty said.
By Thursday morning, cranes were brought in to lift large slabs of concrete and workers began removing bodies from the rubble. However, rescue efforts were hampered by sporadic monsoon showers.
Seven people, including four women, were plucked from under mounds of concrete, twisted metal bars and mud by rescuers who carried them to a nearby hospital on makeshift stretchers.
Some relatives waited anxiously by a white board at the hospital where names of the dead were posted, while others chose to huddle under umbrellas at the site waiting and hoping for survivors.
“My uncle and aunt are dead,” said a weeping Sushil Kothari. “We can’t reach my cousins. They aren’t answering their phones. Why is this happening?”
Witnesses described the chaos of the collapse.
“There was a huge sound and a crash,” said Meghna Parekh, who lives nearby. “We rushed out and all we saw was this huge mountain of mud and no building.”
The building housed several stores and a clinic in addition to residences.
It was not immediately clear what caused the collapse, and the government had launched an inquiry, said K. Dhode, an official at the state disaster control center.
Shetty said poor quality cement may have been used in the construction of the 20-year-old building.
However, J. Phatak, a senior city official, said residents reported extensive renovations to the building by a jewelry store on the ground floor of the building.
Mumbai authorities routinely demolish shoddy buildings ahead of the monsoon rains but this building was not listed as dangerous, Phatak said.

TITLE: Sunnis End Boycott, 
2 U.S. Troops Charged
AUTHOR: By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Sunni lawmakers ended their five-week boycott of parliament Thursday, raising hopes the factious assembly can make progress on benchmark legislation demanded by Washington. The U.S. announced that two American soldiers have been charged with killing an Iraqi.
The 44 members of the Iraqi Accordance Front attended Thursday’s session after striking a deal with other blocs to reinstate the Sunni speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who was ousted by the Shiite-dominated assembly last month for erratic behavior.
Al-Mashhadani is expected to resign. Shiite legislator Hassan al-Suneid, an aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said al-Mashhadani’s return came after secret conditions that should not be made public.
The Sunnis ended their walkout two days after Shiite lawmakers loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ended their boycott after officials accepted their demands for rebuilding a Shiite shrine damaged by bombings.
Those two boycotts had paralyzed the 275-member parliament, which is under strong criticism from U.S. critics for failing to approve key legislation and for plans to take a month’s vacation in August at a time when American and Iraqi troops are dying on the battlefield.
The sensitivities displayed by both the Accordance Front and al-Sadr’s allies indicates the depth of suspicion and sectarian rivalry prevalent in Iraq after more than four years of war.
On Thursday, the U.S. military said an Army lieutenant colonel had been relieved of command in connection with the murder charges, which were filed this week against two soldiers —  Trey A. Corrales of San Antonio and Christopher P. Shore of Winder, Georgia.
Each was charged with one count of murder in the death, which allegedly occurred June 23 near the northern city of Kirkuk, the U.S. said in a statement.
No further details were released, but the statement noted that the charges are allegations and neither of the two soldiers has been convicted.