SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1295 (61), Tuesday, August 7, 2007
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TITLE: Human Rights Group Join Forces
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Disappointed by the recent election of Igor Mikhailov, a United Russia politician as the first St. Petersburg ombudsman, a wide range of local human rights groups joined forces to establish the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council, an umbrella group aimed at voluntarily carrying out the ombudsman’s duties.
Member organizations include, among others, human rights groups Citizens’ Watch, Memorial, Soldiers’ Mothers, For Russia Without Racism, the League of Voters, the environmental organization Bellona and the non-governmental Museum of Galina Starovoitova foundation.
Two alternative candidates for the ombudsman’s job — Yuly Rybakov, head of the human rights faction of the local branch of liberal Yabloko party and Natalya Yevdokimova, an advisor to Sergei Mironov, head of the Federation Council — have also joined the new association.
In a press statement distributed Friday the council members said thatt the new organization had been created as the result of an “acute need to consolidate all human rights efforts in the wake of the dangerous tendency of human rights in Russia shrinking at high speed.”
In their opinion, violations of human rights have escalated in the country.
Human rights advocates accuse the City Hall of “failing to recognize an equal partner in the local human rights community when it comes to solving or even discussing these issues.”
“The situation continues to deteriorate, with hazing in the army, the police using torture to get confessions and the persecution of the liberal opposition and independent journalists all on the rise,” Rybakov said.
Following Mikhailov’s election in July, Yabloko called for the formation of a city council of ombudsmen with experts delegated by the city’s non-governmental organizations and human rights groups as many local human rights advocates and democrat politicians expressed high scepticism in Mikhailov’s will and ability to act in the interests of ordinary people.
“Mikhailov is a ruling-party stooge, cynical to the core,” said Maxim Reznik, head of the local branch of Yabloko. “Most organizations working in the field of human rights find it impossible to collaborate with him.”
The Human Rights Council will monitor human rights abuses in the city and make the results public. Human rights advocates will also prepare an annual report and conduct a regular examination – from a human rights perspective — of amendments to the Russian and St. Petersburg legislation and new laws that are passed.
The local branch of Yabloko has recently found itself an informal center for helping victims of human rights abuse. A series of Dissenters’ Marches organized by The Other Russia coalition in the spring, ended in police violence against the protesters and bystanders. After the events made international headlines, drawing criticism from foreign governments, victims of police beatings and relatives of those who suffered in the clashes flocked to the party’s local headquarters for support, advice and legal help.
Valery Zhelanov, whose son’s violent arrest was caught in cell phone images, says he had made repeated phone calls to City Hall about the incident but found no sympathy, leading him to seek support from Yabloko.
“The Smolny clerks would not listen to me, and even said I was calling the wrong place,” he said. “The clerks there would not give me any advice on the matter whatsoever, and showed absolutely no compassion.”
One of the council’s priorities is the development of a policy for combating nationalism and ethnic hatred.
Yevdokimova said an in-depth analysis and assessment of the scope of extremism and nationalism in the city is essential. The results, she said, must be widely publicized.
“It does not help that only human rights groups are aware of the issues; ordinary people do not get the picture at all,” she said.
“The circumstances of and around these crimes — which are often classified as robberies, hooliganism or homicide without a hate motive — remain obscure to them.”
TITLE: Sochi Gets Missile Defense
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia on Monday deployed new air defense systems capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, and the air force chief said the weapon could be used to protect 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Colonel-General Alexander Zelin said he already had made an official proposal to use the S-400 missile defense system to provide security for the games.
“The organizing committee will prepare the city for the Olympics, while we will prepare air-defense systems and ensure the security of the games,” Zelin was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
The S-400 is capable of hitting aerial targets at ranges of up to 250 miles and altitude of up to 99,000 feet, far exceeding its predecessor, the S-300, Russian news reports said. The first S-400 units — which each include a missile launcher, a radar and a control vehicle — were put on combat duty Monday near Moscow.
Zelin and other officials boasted of the new system’s ability to engage difficult targets, such as ballistic missiles’ warheads and stealth aircraft.
Asked whether the S-400 could also be used in a proposed joint missile defense system with European nations, Zelin said “the issue should be considered in detail.”
“If relevant directives and orders are received, we’ll take up this task and work on it,” Zelin was quoted as saying.
Russian military officials have proposed using the S-300 and the S-400 as part of a prospective joint European missile defense that Russia has discussed with NATO nations.
These discussions have not yielded any practical results, and prospects of a deal looked bleak amid Russia’s increasingly strained ties with the West.
Russia has strongly opposed U.S. plans to deploy missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. President Vladimir Putin shrugged off U.S. claims that they are directed against potential missile threats from Iran and said they threatened Russia’s security.
TITLE: Prosecutor: Crime Is Going Down
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After a decade as a Mafiosi-rocked city, followed by five years as the hate-crime capital of Russia, St. Petersburg may finally be emerging as a symbol of calm, according to an official report in which the city registered the nation’s lowest crime rate in the first six months of this year.
However, a sharp rise in economic, drug and organized crime still tarnishes the image of the city and the North-West Federal District, according to the report.
The District has registered 165,370 crimes, 5.1 percent lower than for the same period last year, and a greater fall than the nation’s overall 4.6 percent decline, says the Prosecutor’s report.
The District’s Deputy Prosecutor General, Alexander Gutsan, said that for every 100,000 inhabitants in his jurisdiction there have been 1,213.4 crimes since the beginning of the year, down from 1,268.7 crimes in the same period last year.
However, organized crimes jumped 41.1 percent over last year’s figures, to 1,586, and drug crimes increased by 19.3 percent.
According to Gutsan’s report, organized drug crimes also experienced an 18.5 percent increase, and the 4,034 individual drug dealers who have been arrested represent an increase of over a third over last year.
In white-collar crime, corruption cases tripled, to 6,029, while economic crimes leapt up 32 percent, from 35,193 incidents last year to 46,455 this year, according to the report.
Indeed, “worse is that we have noted a sharp increase in crimes involving unusually large amounts of money and expensive assets” said Gutsan, who claimed a more than 13 percent rise in this kind of offense.
“We’ve been prompted to take extra measures to tackle corruption... it’s like a chronic disease that has infected the whole nation,” said Gutsan.
Gutsan was referring to Prosecutor General Yury Chaika’s July 23 decree creating new anti-corruption squads in every territorial subject of the federation, under the control of the prosecutor’s office, with wider executive powers.
The prosecutor’s report also showed 1,216 murder cases, a drop of 19.7 percent from the same period last year. According to Gutsan, the police forces solved about 87.1 percent of these murders — a rate slightly higher than the national average.
However, Gutsan believes that a solution to human and civil rights offenses is needed. While disciplinary and administrative measures were taken against more than 5,000 offenders during the six-month period, only 96 criminal cases are currently in court. Gutsan did not provide comparative figures from the same period for last year.
For non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which frequently complain that the police harass them with false accusations of financial crimes, anti-government activities and extremism, Gutsan delivered some good news.
“I’ve never heard of any human rights or charity organization or any public organization that has ever been involved in crime; that’s news,” said Gutsan in response to a question about whether any criminal charges had been pressed against such organizations.
The Russian government has repeatedly voiced allegations that foreign governments operate in Russia under the guise of NGOs, and recently passed a new law restricting NGO activities.
Commenting on violent hate crimes, Gutsan said “most of the crimes in this category were related to media hate promotion, dissemination of xenophobic literature and fascist symbols.” He claimed that 21 persons are currently undergoing trials for hate crimes, and that criminal charges in this category increased by 85 percent over last year.
However, Gutsan expressed discontent over the failure to apprehend a
suspect in the murder of anti-fascist ethnographer Nikolai Girenko, more than three years after he was gunned down in his apartment, an incident that caused an outcry among international human rights organizations. Discussing the murder of a Senegalese student, Lampzer Samba, who was also gunned down in April of last year, Gutsan said, “the case is in court,” contradicting several media reports. However, he declined to elaborate on the case.
TITLE: Russia Agrees to Write-off Afghan Debt
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The finance ministers of Russia and Afghanistan on Monday signed an agreement under which the Kremlin writes off 90 percent of Afghanistan’s $11 billion debt and raises the possibility of writing off the remainder.
Russia is by far the biggest creditor nation for Afghanistan, mostly for weapon sales during the Soviet era, and the debt-forgiveness arrangement is a significant boon for the impoverished, war-shattered country.
Under the agreement, signed by Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and his Afghan counterpart, Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, 90 percent of the debt is forgiven and remaining amount to be restructured for payment over 23 years, Kudrin said at a news conference.
However, Kudrin said, the remaining amount could be written off if Afghanistan successfully completes reforms under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative of the International Monetary Fund.
The HIPC program requires countries to undertake reforms and to develop a strategy for poverty reduction. Afghanistan last month was declared to have reached the so-called “decision point” at which a country is declared to have met the initial HIPC criteria.
TITLE: Deripaska’s U.S. Visa Gets Withdrawn
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: SOUTHFIELD, Michigan — Oleg Deripaska, who plans to invest $1.5 billion in Canadian auto-parts maker Magna International, has had his U.S. visa revoked, the company said.
Deripaska was asked in 2006 to refrain from entering the United States “pending the resolution of certain unspecified questions that had arisen within the government,” Magna said Thursday in a U.S. regulatory filing that included information sent to shareholders for a vote on the investment plan.
He “subsequently learned his visa was revoked, although he was not given written notice of the revocation or the alleged facts upon which the revocation was based,” Magna said.
Deripaska had gotten a multiple-entry visa in 2005, Magna said.
Deripaska in April denied a Wall Street Journal report that he had lost permission to enter the United States when the accuracy of statements he made to the FBI was questioned. His office said in an e-mailed statement on April 19 that he had a valid multiple-entry visa and had received no notification of any change in its status.
The U.S. State Department declined to comment Thursday. Magna said Deripaska still had permission to enter Canada and that he and his representatives continued to have discussions with the U.S. government about a new visa.
Under Deripaska’s proposed investment in Magna, he would become the biggest holder of Magna’s Class A shares. Magna shareholders are to vote on the plan at an Aug. 28 meeting.
TITLE: City to Get Private Sub Museum
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russia’s only surviving Soviet submarine of the S-189 class, now docked at the Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment opposite the Admiral Nakhimov monument, is set to become a new private museum in the city.
Andrei Artyushin, the head of the project, said all seven compartments of the submarine will be accessible, including the torpedo room, two living compartments, the central control compartment, the emergency compartment housing the escape hatch and life-saving appliances, the electric motor room and the engine compartment.
“The living compartments will fully reproduce the real conditions back in the Soviet years and the Cold War,” Artyushin said. “There is a wealth of personal memorabilia of retired submariners: private belongings, books, photographs and paintings. The goal is to recreate the atmosphere, and let the visitors really feel it.”
The museum is privately sponsored, with the funds provided by a former submarine officer, now an entrepreneur. A team of retired submariners will look after the property and offer guided tours.
Igor Kurdin, head of the St. Petersburg Submariners’ Club, told RIA-Novosti that the museum is housed in an S-189, the last of 215 submarines of the series built in the 1950 and 1960s.
Assembled at St. Petersburg’s Baltiisky Shipyard in 1955, the submarine was in use for more than 35 years, until it sank near Kronshtadt naval base in the early 1990-s. The submarine was raised from the seabed in the fall of 2005.
Although an inauguration ceremony was held Friday, the museum will be able to welcome its first visitors only after all the necessary paperwork, including permits from the sanitary and fire inspectorates, has been completed.
“The submarine will be able to receive its first visitors in six months at the earliest, as it will be necessary to modernize the interior,” Kurdin said.
Artyushin said the submarine may eventually change its location, but will remained at its site until all preparations are completed.
TITLE: 2,000 Left Homeless By Quake
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: About 2,000 people in a Far East fishing town have moved into temporary tent camps after a powerful quake hit near Sakhalin island, killing two people, injuring 12 and leaving apartment buildings in ruins, officials said Friday.
The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.4, struck on Thursday on the southern tip of Sakhalin, just north of Japan, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said. A second quake of magnitude 5.9 struck a few hours later.
The worst hit was the port town of Nevelsk, home to 17,300 people. One woman died when the roof of the town’s Palace of Culture collapsed. A man there died of a heart attack. Twelve people remained hospitalized Friday, Sakhalin regional emergency agency spokeswoman Olga Shekhovtseva said.
Tent camps were set up for about 2,000 people forced to move out of 31 apartment buildings that were badly damaged, some of them beyond repair, Shekhovtseva said. About 200 children were sent away to summer camps.
Inspectors found that at least 11 buildings with 410 apartments were destroyed, Sakhalin Governor Ivan Malakhov said. He said another 20 buildings containing 710 apartments needed major renovations.
“It is either impossible or dangerous to live there before they are repaired,” Malakhov told journalists in Nevelsk, Interfax reported.
The spokeswoman said there was no panic in the town, where tremors are not unusual.
(AP, Reuters)
TITLE: Governor of Novgorod Submits His Resignation
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Just over two months after being criticized by the presidential envoy to the Northwest Federal District, Novgorod region governor Mikhail Prusak, one of the country’s longest serving regional leaders, resigned unexpectedly Friday.
President Vladimir Putin has appointed Deputy Agriculture Minister Sergei Mitin as acting governor. The regional parliament will meet on Tuesday to vote on his confirmation, Anatoly Boitsov the speaker of the parliament, was quoted as saying by Interfax on Sunday.
The announcement of Prusak’s resignation was posted on the Kremlin web site late Friday.
Oleg Onishchenko, chief federal inspector in the region, told NTV that Ilya Klebanov, President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Northwest Federal District, had experienced no problems with Prusak, but analysts said there was little doubt that the governor was forced out.
“He took the hints from the presidential administration,” said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank.
Prusak’s departure was preceded by the resignation of two of his deputies, growing tension with the mayor of the city of Novgorod and pointed criticism from Klebanov.
Klebanov criticized what he called the region’s “criminal environment” during a visit to Novgorod at the beginning of June to discuss law and order in the region, according to his web site.
“Extortion, murder, arson and raiding” are all used in business competition in the Novgorod region, Klebanov said.
There was no answer at the envoy’s office Sunday.
“We saw the news on television,” a woman who picked up the phone at Prusak’s office said before hanging up.
Two of Prusak’s deputies, Nikolai Ivankov and Nikolai Renkas, resigned in recent months. Ivankov is currently under investigation for fraud and abuse of office.
Prusak, 47, who has been in power since 1991, was re-elected three times by huge margins — in 1995, 1999 and 2003.
“He never got less than 70 percent,” Pribylovsky said. “Even if you count 10 percent of that as fraud, that is still popular.”
“He had a reputation as a modernizer,” said Pribylovsky.
Prusak tried to open up the regional economy and turned the region into one of the leaders in the country at attracting foreign investment. Multinational Cadbury Schweppes was the highest profile of the foreign companies to open operations there.
The region, with a population of 694,700 and noted for its chemical and forest industries, attracted $861 million in foreign investment from 1994 to 2003, the region’s web site says. Enterprises with some level of foreign investment produced more than 60 percent of the region’s gross domestic product in 2003.
Prusak’s proposed replacement, Mitin, 56, was born in Nizhny Novgorod and has worked as deputy in three different ministries under Putin.
He is a member of United Russia and will have the support of the party, State Duma speaker and United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov said Saturday.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Hooligans Busted
ST. PETERSBURG — At a soccer match between Dynamo Moscow and St. Petersburg’s Zenit team in Moscow on Saturday, police detained 69 hooligans, the majority of whom were inebriated, Fontanka.ru reported.
More than 1,000 policemen and interior troop officers were on duty to provide for security and maintain order at the game, including riot police and officers accompanied by service dogs.
In order to avoid further problems after the game, police escorted buses of Zenit fans out of the city to the intersection of the Leningrad Highway and the Moscow Ring Road.
Bergman Tribute
ST. PETERSBURG — Evenings of film will be given on Aug 15. in memory of the director and playwright Ingmar Bergman, who died on July 30 on the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea aged 89, Regnum.ru reported.
The event will take place at the Saparov Kinoclub at the Rodina Cinema at 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa and at Pulkovo Film at 15 Sheremetyevskaya.
City Heat Wave
ST. PETERSBURG — An anticyclone over the Neva region at the weekend caused temperatures in St Petersburg to soar with a maximum temperature of 26 deg. Celsius, Fontanka.ru reported.
Midday temperatures were 3.2 degrees higher than the average for this time of year.
American Hospitalized
MOSCOW (SPT) — An American citizen was hospitalized in Moscow on Saturday with brain injuries and multiple stab wounds, Interfax reported.
A Moscow clinic notified the city police Saturday that an American man had been admitted at 7:50 a.m.
The man, whose name was provided in Russian only and spelled as Ryan Akes, had been apparently hit on the head and stabbed in both thighs, the agency quoted the unidentified clinic’s official as saying.
Paratrooper Killed
MOSCOW (SPT) — One paratrooper was killed and six others injured when they were electrocuted while swimming in a Vladikavkaz fountain Thursday on Paratroopers Day, local emergency officials said Friday.
North Ossetia Emergency Situations Ministry officials cited electrocution by a power cable as a probable cause of the death of Alan Kuzhev, 24, a native of Kabardino-Balkaria.
“The initial version was that the paratrooper had impaled himself on something metallic, but there are no visible injuries to his body,” Interfax reported Friday.
The death occurred at around 10 p.m. on Fountain Square during a concert dedicated to the celebrations, Interfax reported.
Taking to the fountains across the country is a long-standing tradition for paratroopers to mark the holiday.
Supplies Sent to Station
MOSCOW (AP) — An unmanned Russian cargo ship carrying over 2.5 tons of supplies, equipment and gifts blasted off for the international space station Thursday, officials said.
The Progress M-61, mounted atop a Soyuz-U booster rocket, lifted off as scheduled at 9:34 p.m. from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.
The ship was to deliver oxygen, water, food and scientific equipment to the station’s crew — Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov and U.S. astronaut Clayton Anderson.
The cargo ship was also carrying two spare computers to back up those that failed in June, briefly disabling orientation and oxygen production on the Russian side of the station. The breakdown was fixed, and the computers have since been functioning normally.
NGOs Sent to Grozny
GROZNY (Reuters) — Humanitarian organizations operating in Russia’s troubled Chechnya region expressed concern Friday over an official ultimatum that they should move their offices to the Chechen capital or be banned.
Chechen government officials told representatives of more than 20 nongovernmental organizations on Wednesday that they had two weeks to move their regional headquarters to Grozny.
Nearly 30 NGOs work in Chechnya assisting people who suffered in a decade-long separatist war.
TITLE: U.S. Man Convicted On Sexual Assault Charges
AUTHOR: By Maryclaire Dale
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHILADELPHIA — A wealthy motel owner was convicted Friday of traveling to eastern Europe to sexually assault impoverished boys in exchange for money and gifts.
Anthony Mark Bianchi, 45, was found guilty of virtually all the charges he faced in federal court. He faces more than 20 years in prison under sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said.
Bianchi was convicted of having sex with or attempting to have sex with at least a half-dozen boys on foreign soil, including in the isolated Moldovan village of Trebujeni, on trips from late 2003 to 2005.
Bianchi’s case is among more than 50 that have been brought under a largely untested 2003 law that puts Americans accused of preying on children overseas on trial in U.S. courtrooms. About 30 people have been convicted, including a teacher and a Peace Corps volunteer.
The logistics of bringing victims and witnesses to a U.S. courthouse many time zones away raises constitutional issues that legal scholars expect will reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mark Geragos, the high-profile lawyer representing Bianchi, said prosecutors hobbled his case by threatening to arrest his Moldovan co-counsel for alleged witness intimidation if he came to Philadelphia to testify. U.S. District Judge Bruce Kauffman granted Geragos a post-trial hearing on the issue.
“It’s hard enough to win against the U.S. government when you have a defense. It’s next to impossible when they cripple you,” Geragos said Friday.
During the three-week trial, most of which was heard through translators, the Moldovan boys testified that Bianchi invited them to have dinner or go bowling with them, and before long made sexual advances.
One boy said Bianchi raped him, while another said he was assaulted while he was intoxicated. Another said Bianchi asked to sleep with him in his bed in his family’s small apartment — and that he fled when Bianchi started fondling him.
But one seemingly bewildered boy, asked to identify his alleged attacker, spent more than a minute looking around the crowded courtroom before admitting, “I don’t see him.” The charge involving him was withdrawn.
In closing arguments, prosecutors asked why a middle-aged American man would travel to a remote part of the world to meet boys and play children’s games with them.
Geragos said his client enjoyed traveling to offbeat destinations and had no ulterior motives for giving the boys gifts. He noted discrepancies in the boy’s statements, and suggested they told prosecutors what they wanted to hear to snag a trip to the United States.
“I am as confident as I can be that the verdict will not stand given everything that transpired in this case,” Geragos said.
Most of the boys came to the United States without so much as a piece of luggage for the one-week trip, Mann said. U.S. officials provided them with clothes, meals, hotel rooms and a few supervised excursions, prompting cries from the defense that prosecutors enjoyed an unfair advantage.
Bianchi, who has been in prison since his January 2006 arrest, showed little reaction as the jury read its verdict. Kauffman set his sentencing for Nov. 1.
Bianchi was previously convicted of similar charges in Russia and was sentenced to three years in prison, but was soon released under an amnesty bill.
TITLE: Courts Asked for 3rd Shot at Zhak
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — It might have been the end of Valery Zhak’s ordeal: For the second time, a jury acquitted him of charges that he hired a hit man to murder a developer in a property dispute.
But for the second time, prosecutors have appealed his acquittal, and Zhak, a director of musicals on the Moscow stage, could face a third trial.
“Of course we thought it was over,” the 66-year-old impresario said, surrounded by case files in his apartment. “A jury’s verdict should be final.”
But not in Russia.
There is no effective protection against double jeopardy, and juries that vote to acquit seldom have the last word.
Jury trials, banned by the Bolsheviks, were reintroduced in 1993 in a signature reform of the post-Soviet era. But legal experts say they have been weakened by a criminal justice system compromised by politics, corruption and authorities who presume guilt.
“The system has distorted and undermined jury trials,” said Sergei Pashin, a retired federal judge who helped write the law reinstating them.
Jury trials are under siege, Pashin and others say, by authorities angered because jurors render not-guilty verdicts far more often than judges do. About two out of 10 defendants tried by juries are acquitted — it takes seven votes on a 12-person jury to convict — compared with fewer than one in 100 tried by judges.
Prosecutors “are not used to proving anything,” said Karinna Moskalenko, a human rights lawyer. “Usually, they come to court and before they even open their mouths, the judge already agrees with them. They say, ‘We say it is so, so it must be so’ — and this does not work in a jury trial.”
Only the most serious crimes warrant a jury, and only if a defendant requests one. And even then, prosecutors pressure them not to do so, said lawyer Viktor Parshutkin, who represents Zhak.
They can tell defendants they’ll get harsher sentences if convicted by a jury, or they can reduce the charges to make defendants ineligible for trial by jury, Parshutkin said.
Last year, only 700 of 1.2 million criminal cases were tried by a jury.
Judges have traditionally sided with the prosecution, beginning with giving prosecutors the upper hand in selecting jurors, turning them into “a toy in the hands of the authorities,” Pashin said.
Some lawyers claim that state security agencies infiltrate juries with operatives who will vote to convict, or blackmail jurors into providing information that can be used to challenge acquittals. Juries are sometimes disbanded midtrial, which lawyers suspect is a pretext for removing jurors likely to acquit.
Igor Sutyagin, an arms-control researcher accused of selling secrets to an alleged CIA front company, was hauled into court on treason charges. Midtrial, the jury was mysteriously dismissed and a second impaneled — one that included a former intelligence agency employee. Sutyagin was convicted in 2004.
Rights advocates say Sutyagin, who was sentenced to 15 years, is one of several scientists wrongly accused of spying by authorities under President Vladimir Putin, a KGB veteran.
Valentin Danilov, a physicist accused of espionage, had his acquittal by a jury thrown out by the Supreme Court and is serving a 14-year prison term after being convicted in his second trial.
Russia’s high court tossed out almost three-quarters of jury acquittals in the first half of 2006, said Mara Polyakova, director of the Independent Council for Legal Expertise.
A verdict can be overturned simply if a defendant tells the jury that police tortured him into confessing.
As in the West, jurors sometimes return surprise acquittals, which foes of jury trials use to discredit them.
Zhak used jurors’ distrust of authority to his advantage by portraying himself as a fighter for justice who antagonized corrupt local officials.
Zhak was arrested in August 2005 on charges of offering a hit man $25,000 to kill the developer of his apartment building in a pricey neighborhood near the Tretyakov Gallery. His purported motive was to gain control of commercial space in the building.
Zhak was acquitted and released in June 2006, but prosecutors won an appeal, claiming the judge had misdirected the jury.
After a second jury trial, Zhak was acquitted in April.
Zhak claimed he was framed because he fought for tenants’ rights and had uncovered a shady real estate deal between his alleged target, Soyun Sadykov, and corrupt local officials. Sadykov, a leader of Russia’s Azeri community, claims the juries that acquitted Zhak were motivated by bias against his people, and that Zhak was able to “buy the jurors, the judge and walk free.”
Zhak, meanwhile, awaits word on whether he would face a third trial. Not surprisingly, he believes passionately in the jury system.
TITLE: Case Against Lugovoi Still Possible in Russia
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday that Russia might open a criminal case against Andrei Lugovoi, whose extradition Britain is seeking on charges of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, if London provides proof of his guilt.
“If we are convinced — just like [Britain] — that this is a serious case, then we have a wealth of precedents when we would open a criminal case of our own, hold court hearings and read out the verdict,” Lavrov was quoted by national news agencies as saying.
Lavrov, making a stopover in China after a regional conference in the Philippines, said, “If the British side has the proof which convinced them 100 percent of Lugovoi’s guilt, then we are ready to receive and study it.”
Britain and Russia have each expelled four diplomats in a spat over the murder of Litvinenko, a former Russian security services agent who had become a British citizen.
London has demanded that Moscow extradite Lugovoi, also an ex-security services officer, so that he can be put on trial in Britain for Litvinenko’s murder.
Russia has refused to do so, citing the Constitution, which forbids the extradition of citizens.
Moscow’s chilly relations with London have been exacerbated by Britain’s hosting of anti-Kremlin emigres wanted by Russia.
They include London-based tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who has accused Putin of being behind Litvinenko’s murder. The Kremlin has called these allegations nonsense.
Britain has refused to extradite Berezovsky.
Asked whether Russia could, theoretically, exchange Lugovoi for Berezovsky, Lavrov replied: “Why on earth? As for Berezovsky, we sent to London all the materials which legally are in line with all extradition requirements.
“As for Lugovoi, we haven’t seen such materials.”
TITLE: Belarus Spared Gas Supply Cut
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Belarus was spared a cut in gas supplies on Friday after paying part of its $456 million debt to Gazprom, which said Minsk should pay in full within a week or see its gas deliveries reduced by 30 percent this winter.
Beltransgaz on Friday paid $190 million toward the debt it owed Gazprom for gas supplies, meeting the deadline 15 minutes before time, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said.
Gazprom had said it would reduce supplies to Belarus by 45 percent at 10 a.m. Moscow time on Friday if the debt were not settled.
The European Union welcomed the deal and canceled an emergency meeting it planned to convene on Wednesday.
“Today they sent us a payment document,” Kupriyanov said by telephone, referring to a Belarussian delegation that came to Moscow for last-minute talks Thursday night.
“At least we are seeing some real headway,” he said, adding that the next deadline was set for Aug. 10.
He later told Ekho Moskvy radio that Gazprom would cut gas supplies by 30 percent if Beltransgaz failed to pay the outstanding amount by then.
Beltransgaz spokesman Vladimir Chekov confirmed that the payment of the first installment has been made, adding, “We are receiving the full amount of gas.”
“Following an assessment this morning, we came to the conclusion that the dispute is on the way to being settled amicably,” said Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for the European Commission, which is the European Union’s executive.
“We see no urgency at this moment,” he said by telephone from Brussels.
Selmayr added that the EU officials would review the gas supply situation at a regular meeting of the Gas Coordination Group in the fall. No date has yet been set for the meeting, he said.
A delegation from Beltransgaz, headed by acting general director Vladimir Mayorov, arrived in Moscow late Thursday for last-minute talks, after the collapse of negotiations on a $1.5 billion loan that Minsk hoped to use to pay off its debt to Gazprom.
Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said Thursday that he had issued orders to tap into the country’s dwindling reserves, accusing the Kremlin of seeking to appropriate the economy.
After securing a week’s grace Friday, a senior Belarussian official attacked Gazprom once again.
According to the agreement between Beltransgaz and Gazprom, 45 days should have been provided to settle any disputes, meaning Gazprom ought to have set the final deadline at Sept. 7, Belarussian Energy Minister Alexander Ozerets said by telephone.
Gazprom’s Kupriyanov said the 45-day period was related to court dispute resolutions. In case of payment arrears, Gazprom needed only to notify clients of upcoming supply cuts 48 hours in advance, he said in e-mailed comments.
Artyom Konchin, an oil and gas analyst at brokerage Aton, said there were no guarantees that the incident would not be repeated.
“It looks like you have to resort to extreme measures [when dealing] with [Belarus],” he said.
TITLE: Putin Favors Ruble Traders to Slow Inflation
AUTHOR: By Ye Xie and Bo Nielsen
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to keep inflation from accelerating depends on favoring foreign-exchange traders over the country’s oil and gas companies.
Putin will probably allow the central bank to double the ruble’s pace of appreciation this year because he has few options outside the foreign exchange market to rein in consumer prices, according to strategists at Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG. Russia’s 8.5 percent inflation rate is three times faster than any other Group of Eight country.
Rising prices threaten Putin’s 80 percent approval rating and may reduce his influence after he leaves office in March. While a stronger currency would cut import prices, it also erodes profits from sales of oil, natural gas and minerals when converted into rubles. Russia is the world’s largest energy exporter.
“The stronghold that Putin has on the popular vote will be challenged if inflation becomes an issue,’’ said Timothy Seymour, chief operating officer of Red Star Asset Management, a hedge fund in New York with 80 percent of its portfolio in Russian assets. “The ruble will rise.’’
Russia’s central bank, which controls the ruble’s price, let the currency appreciate twice this year against a benchmark of dollars and euros by a total of 1 percent. The ruble now trades at 25.5593 per dollar. The basket consists of 45 percent euros and 55 percent dollars.
Bank Expectations
The ruble will gain 2 percent against the basket until year- end, boosting the currency 4.3 percent to 24.5 per dollar, said Zurich-based UBS, the world’s biggest money manager. The currency will rise to 24.7 per dollar this year, according to estimates by Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, the second- biggest U.S. bank by assets.
The ruble should be about 40 percent higher, New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co., the third biggest U.S. securities firm, said.
“The ruble is undervalued,’’ said Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “Attempts to keep the currency pegged are putting great upward pressure on inflation.’’
Consumer prices, led by a 26 percent rise in crude oil this year, have risen three straight months, surpassing the government’s 8 percent target in June. Wages increased 15.2 percent in June from a year earlier, sparking a 14.7 percent rise in retail sales, Russian Federal Statistics Service data show.
Buying Dollars
The economy expanded 7.9 percent in the first quarter, the fastest pace in six years. Record capital inflows of $67 billion this year and revenue from energy sales has forced the central bank under Chairman Sergey Ignatiev to buy dollars to control the ruble’s rise, leaving the nation with $417 billion in reserves, behind only China and Japan.
A 1 percent appreciation of the ruble cuts the inflation rate by 0.3 percentage point, according to central bank estimates. That would limit funds available to energy companies for investment by as much as 2 percent, according to Merrill Lynch. Energy sales accounted for 22 percent of Russia’s $1 trillion economy last year.
Putin, a 54-year-old former KGB agent, has overseen average annual economic growth of 6.8 percent in his seven years as president, the most among major European countries. The price of oil tripled to a record $78.77 last week from about $24 a barrel at the end of 2000. Taxes from energy sales account for more than half of federal revenue, according to Merrill Lynch.
Public Opinion
Preserving the public’s approval is important if Putin wants to influence the choice of his successor, according to Rory MacFarquhar, a Moscow-based economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the world’s largest securities firm by market value. Putin is constitutionally barred from serving a third consecutive term.
“Although Putin won’t be in the presidential seat he plans to be in control of the country,’’ MacFarquhar said.
Inflation reached 127 percent in 1999, the year after former President Boris Yeltsin defaulted on $40 billion of domestic debt and let the currency devalue. Putin has said he plans to cut inflation to about 5 percent by 2010 and make the economy one of the world’s five biggest by 2020.
Foreign investors lured by the sale of state assets have poured the record $67 billion into Russia this year, according to the Economy Ministry. Money supply rose 53.3 percent in June as the central bank printed rubles to buy dollars flowing across the border.
Putin’s Dilemma
Raising benchmark interest rates above the current 10 percent would only lure more money into Russian assets, said Oliver Weeks, an economist in London for New York-based Morgan Stanley. Lowering rates would encourage consumers to spend and not save.
“It’s a dilemma,’’ said Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “If inflation runs away, it certainly won’t help Putin. The central bank is worried higher interest rates will entice more inflows.’’
The rise in commodity prices has “placed a lot of pressure on the ruble to appreciate,’’ said Mark Mobius, who overseas $42 billion in emerging-market stocks as managing director at Templeton Asset Management Ltd. in Singapore. He holds $3.5 billion in Russian stocks. “The ruble will probably appreciate further.’’
Raphael Marechal, who helps manage $4.4 billion in emerging- market bonds at Fortis Investments in London, plans to boost holdings of ruble bonds by 50 percent this year to profit from the ruble’s accelerating gains.
“The central bank has to let the ruble appreciate,’’ Marechal said. “It has no other tool to fight inflation.’’
Oil Producers
Russia isn’t the only oil producer to suffer from inflation as crude, traded in dollars, hits record highs. Kuwait allowed its dinar to strengthen twice by a total of almost 2 percent last month after ending the dollar peg in May as a weak dollar boosted the prices of imports.
Oil producers have surpassed Asian central banks as the largest pool of global savings, accumulating an estimated $500 billion in 2006 alone, according to research by Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co. The firm, a unit of Munich-based Allianz SE, manages the world’s biggest bond fund.
State-run Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, said profit declined 25 percent in the first quarter as the ruble rose 11.7 percent adjusted for inflation against the company’s trade partners. The company will invest $5 billion this year to improve its oil fields.
Putin said at a Cabinet meeting on April 9 that the ruble shouldn’t “undercut’’ manufacturing, according to the government’s official web site. “This deserves special attention,’’ he said.
‘Under Pressure’
Russian carmakers are already struggling as sales of imported cars jumped 60 percent to 510,000 units in the first half of this year. Textile production fell 4 percent in June from a year earlier.
Putin “is under pressure from manufacturers,’’ said Maxim Oreshkin, chief analyst at OAO Rosbank in Moscow, Russia’s ninth- largest bank by assets. “For them, a stronger currency is a real problem,’’ said Oreshkin, who worked for the central bank from 2002 to 2006.
The ruble is up 20 percent against the dollar since a record low of 31.96 in 2002. The currency is 9.6 percent stronger than it was before the 1998 default, when it fell 50 percent on a trade-weighted basis, according to an index removing inflation published by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York.
TITLE: Deripaska, Mordashov to Fight it Out
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja and Simon Shuster
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Oleg Deripaska on Friday applied to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to buy 82 percent of Power Machines, the country’s largest turbine maker, putting him head-to-head with steel baron Alexei Mordashov for control of the company.
The bid comes after a similar move by Mordashov, who applied to the service for control of the turbine maker last month. Mordashov offered July 27 to buy a 30.4 percent stake in the firm from Vladimir Potanin’s Interros, which said the same day it was selling out.
To get a majority in Power Machines, Deripaska or Mordashov would also have to buy out state utility Unified Energy System or German engineering giant Siemens, which both hold blocking stakes of 25 percent plus one share.
While Power Machines would not appear at first sight to be much of a catch — it posted first-half losses this year of 591 million rubles ($23.2 million) — the firm should see a lot of new business as UES plans to install 40,000 megawatts of new capacity over the next five years. That is the equivalent of about 100 average turbines, worth around $350 million each.
Power Machines accounts for 90 percent of the country’s domestic turbine production, but so far foreign firms have snapped up nearly all the turbine orders during the UES expansion program. Power Machines’ shares rose 0.5 percent on the news of the bid Friday, valuing the company at $1.3 billion.
It is the second bid by Deripaska, the country’s second-richest man and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, for control of Power Machines. In mid-2005, the anti-monopoly service approved his bid to buy a controlling stake in the firm, a few months after Siemens had its own bid rejected on competition grounds.
No talks took place then, however, between Basic Element and Interros, and later in 2005 Interros agreed to sell 22.4 percent in the company to UES.
The rejection of Siemens’ bid was seen as a turning point for foreign investment in the country, as the Kremlin has sought to establish increasing control over strategic sectors of the economy. Since then, Shell and BP have been pressured into giving up control of major oil and gas projects, and the government last month submitted long-delayed legislation restricting foreign investment in 39 strategic sectors of the economy.
This time the struggle for Power Machines is likely to boil down to a battle of the titans between Deripaska and Mordashov, as UES chief Anatoly Chubais last week dismissed the chances of a foreign firm winning control. At a groundbreaking ceremony for a General Electric turbine at a Moscow region power plant, Chubais said he wanted to see the UES stake in Power Machines sold in a tender to a “Russian, private, strategic investor.”
“All three words are vital to me,” he said. “I am talking about a Russian, and by no means a foreign firm ... and namely a private strategic investor, not a commercial investor.”
Both Mordashov’s and Deripaska’s firms would seem to fit that description. Chubais said he would “oppose in principle” any foreign company gaining control of the turbine maker.
Before Interros can sell, however, it must get approval from UES and Siemens, both of which have pre-emptive rights to the stake.
“Interros has already come to us with a proposal, as it had to have, and we have received their proposal,” Chubais said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “Either we can buy out our co-shareholder [Interros] in place of the current buyer, or we can allow the current buyer to do it in our place.”
Chubais did not elaborate on who the would-be buyer was, and UES spokeswoman Margarita Nagoga said Friday that a decision would be made by August 31.
Olga Antonova, a spokeswoman for Mordashov’s Severstal, on Friday declined to comment on his Power Machines bid, saying: “We do not comment on that topic at all.”
A spokesman for Deripaska’s Basic Element was more candid, confirming that Basic Element had “definitely submitted an application” to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to acquire an 82 percent stake.
The anti-monopoly service confirmed that it had received Deripaska’s application, RIA-Novosti reported.
Siemens declined to comment on whether it would use its option to buy the Interros stake or whether it was interested in selling its own stake Friday.
The bids by Deripaska and Mordashov came through offshore units Stephens Capital Ventures SA and Highstat Ltd. respectively, Bloomberg reported Friday. Deripaska has been on a spending spree over the last year, paying $1.6 billion for 30 percent of Strabag, Austria’s largest construction firm, and increasing his stake in Hochtief, Germany’s largest building company, to 9.99 percent in a deal estimated by Vedomosti to have been worth about $520 million. Russian Machines, controlled by Deripaska, has also reached a deal to invest $1.54 billion in Canada’s largest auto-parts manufacturer, Magna International.
In March, Deripaska completed a mega-merger comprised of his Russian Aluminum, Viktor Vekselberg’s SUAL and Swiss-based Glencore’s aluminum assets. The resulting company, United Company RusAl, is the world’s largest aluminum producer.
Deripaska is currently in talks to buy midsize oil company Russneft. The firm’s owner, Mikhail Gutseriyev, last Monday said that he was selling up after several months of state pressure, but later retracted his statement.
Mordashov last year tried to merge Severstal with European steelmaker Arcelor, but was outbid by Mittal.
n
Russia’s competition regulator said on Monday it was extending by up to two months its review of a request to buy up to 100 percent of turbine maker Power Machines by a company owned by steel tycoon Alexei Mordashov.
“We will extend the deadline for our review,” said Dmitry Kupov, deputy head of the department for supervision of the industrial and construction sector at the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS).
He told Reuters the authority wanted to check whether the Mordashov structure applying to make the bid for Power Machines had other machinebuilding assets. He said the maximum term of the extended probe was two months, though he said it could take less time than that.
Reuters
TITLE: Illogically, Norilsk is Weathering Storm
AUTHOR: By Simon Shuster
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Take an oil company — cut the price of oil in half and it should not be hard to guess what happens to the stock. But when it comes to nickel, the same logic does not seem to apply.
On Friday, the brutal correction in nickel prices, which have fallen more than 40 percent since May, dipped another 2 percent to reach a 9-month low of $29,325 per ton. Meanwhile, Norilsk Nickel, the largest nickel producer in the world, has weathered the correction without flinching.
Its stock has gained nearly 12 percent during the three months that nickel prices have been tanking. In the same period, it has outperformed the hydrocarbon sector by nearly 10 percent, even though the oil price has been seeing record highs.
As with most market successes, analysts chalk this one up to good luck and good planning.
What brought the price up in the first place was certainly luck, mainly in the form of soaring demand for nickel, a hard, silvery metal used to make steel.
But collusion on the London Metal Exchange also seems to have played a role. Market rumors suggested that two unidentified brokerages were controlling 80 percent of the nickel trade on the exchange, and were manipulating prices. The exchange stepped in June 9 to tighten its regulations, but by then the price had already peaked.
The record high came on May 9, taking the price in London to $51,800 per ton, nearly four times more than long-term forecasts for fair nickel prices, which value one ton at around $13,000.
“To put that in perspective, it would be like the price of oil hitting $200 per barrel,” said Vladimir Zhukov, metals analyst at Alfa Bank. “At that point, a correction was unavoidable and analysts were very careful to price it in as early as possible.”
This kept the markets from reacting to the correction as a negative surprise, Zhukov said, and at the same time, Norilsk offset the news with some positive surprises for the market. In July, it purchased Canadian nickel producer LionOre for $6.8 billion, extending its international reach into LionOre’s African mines and helping immunize it from Russia’s political risk, which has been sapping value from other local giants. It has also moved ahead with acquisitions in the power sector, and plans to spin off an electricity holding that will go pro rata to its shareholders.
Zhukov, who values the future holding at $9.4 billion, said this translates into $51 of new value for every Norilsk share, perhaps enough to make the nickel price correction seem irrelevant.
Some banks, however, are wary of the company. “We don’t see anything in the market that’s going to drive nickel prices back up,” said Tom Mundy, vice president of equity strategy at Renaissance Capital. “So we would advise investors to stay away.”
But whatever its future, Norilsk looks to have passed through the worst of the storm, and the country’s oil and gas firms might do well to take a lesson.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Novolipetsk Profit
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Novolipetsk Steel, Russia’s fourth-biggest steelmaker, said profit declined 2.8 percent in the second quarter as costs for raw materials rose.
Net income fell to 10.67 billion rubles ($419 million) from 10.98 billion rubles in the same period last year, the Lipetsk-based company said on its web site Monday.
Sales advanced 9.3 percent to 37.91 billion rubles, in results calculated to Russian standards.
Russian accounting standards “differ materially’’ from U.S. standards and “are not comparable,’’ Novolipetsk said.
Norilsk Board
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov asked GMK Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s biggest mining company, to call a shareholder meeting to elect a new board.
Onexim Group, Prokhorov’s holding company, sent a letter requesting the extraordinary general meeting Monday, Moscow-based Norilsk said in an e-mailed statement. The Norilsk board will consider the matter on Aug. 9, the company said.
Lion’s Share
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Lion Capital, the buyout firm that owns Orangina, agreed to buy Nidan Soki, Russia’s third-biggest juice maker. Terms of the takeover weren’t disclosed.
The Moscow-based maker of “Moya Semya’’ juices has annual sales of about $270 million and employs 2,500 people, London-based Lion said in an e-mailed statement Monday.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. advised Lion and is providing loans to fund the buyout.
Sovcomflot Net
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Sovcomflot, Russia’s largest shipper, said profit rose 7 percent in the first half as it carried more cargo.
Net income advanced to $103.2 million from $96.7 million in the same period last year, the state-run company said in statement on its web site dated Aug. 3. Revenue climbed 28 percent to $314.5 million under international standards.
The Moscow-based company will complete the acquisition of smaller rival Novorossiisk Sea Shipping Co. by the end of the year to form the world’s fifth-largest shipper.
Victoria Low
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Shares of Victoria Oil & Gas, an investor in energy projects in the former Soviet Union, fell to their lowest in more than two years after the company said a new well in Kazakhstan wasn’t commercially viable.
The well, in Kazakhstan’s Atyrau region, isn’t deep enough for oil extraction, the London-based company said Monday in a statement distributed by the Regulatory News Service.
The depth of oil hadn’t been “accurately determined on existing seismic maps,’’ the company said. “Oil saturations in this horizon are not sufficient for commercial production.’’
Operating Cambodia
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Altimo, Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s telecommunications company, said it bought a provider in Cambodia as it plans to expand in growing markets.
Altimo bought 90 percent of Sotelco, which provides services using the global system for mobile communications standard in Cambodia, the Moscow-based company said in an e-mailed statement late Aug. 3.
“The level of mobile penetration rate in Cambodia, at just over 10 percent, is relatively low,’’ offering “an exciting opportunity,’’ Dmitry Vosianov, Altimo’s director for Southeast Asia, said in the statement.
Altimo, which counts $20 billion in telecommunications assets, including stakes in Russia’s mobile-phone operators VimpelCom and MegaFon, has said it wants to expand beyond the saturated Russian market to sustain growth.
Altimo has opened representative offices in Indonesia and Vietnam to look for opportunities in Southeast Asia.
Saudi Contract
ATHENS (Bloomberg) — Intracom Telecom won a $1.2 billion contract to install a fiber optics network in Saudi Arabia, Greek newspaper Imerisia said Monday, without citing anyone.
The contract was awarded by Integrated Telecom Co., or ITC, a rival of Saudi Telecom Co., the newspaper said. ITC wants the network to reach all buildings and residences in Saudi Arabia, according to the report.
Intracom Telecom is majority-owned by Sitronics, a Russian maker of microelectronics. Greece’s Intracom Holdings SA owns 49 percent of the company. Saudi Telecom Co. is the biggest telephone company in the Saudi kingdom.
Deripaska and Coal
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska may bid for the Elga coal field in the far eastern republic of Sakha in a September tender, Kommersant reported.
Basic Element, Deripaska’s holding company, has begun talks to buy coal company Yakutugol and Elga, Kommersant said Monday, citing an unidentified person close to Yakutugol.
Mechel and Alrosa are interested in buying the 75 percent of Yakutugol and the 69 percent of Elga that will be sold in September, Kommersant reported. Evraz Group and Glencore International AG have also discussed purchasing the assets with the governments of Russia and Sakha, the Moscow-based newspaper said.
Kalashnikov Plants
IZHEVSK (Bloomberg) — Russia will start building two plants in October to make Kalashnikov assault rifles in Venezuela, the first country to win a production license for the guns since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Production of the AK-103 in Venezuela is scheduled to begin “by the end of 2009 or the start of 2010,’’ said Vladimir Grodetsky, head of state-run arms maker Izhmash. One plant will produce AK-103 assault rifles and the other will produce .762 caliber bullets, Grodetsky said in an interview Monday in Izhevsk, the central Russian city where Izhmash is based.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez discussed the factories with President Vladimir Putin in June during his fifth trip to Russia. Chavez is continuing an arms buildup that has cost more than $4.3 billion since 2005.
Kazkom Assets
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Kazkommertsbank, Kazakhstan’s biggest lender, said assets more than doubled in the last year as it benefited from the country’s oil-fueled economic boom.
Assets jumped to 2.78 trillion tenge ($22.3 billion) on July 1 from 1.17 trillion tenge a year earlier, the Financial Supervision Agency said on its web site Monday. The bank’s net income almost doubled to 21.2 billion tenge in the first half from 11.3 billion a year earlier, the agency said.
The Almaty-based lender raised $846 million in an initial public offering in November and another $957 million from existing shareholders in January. The London-traded company’s equity capital almost tripled to 241.6 billion tenge from 87 billion tenge. The economy of Kazakhstan, holder of 3 percent of the world’s oil, expanded 10 percent in the first quarter.
Total banking assets held by banks also doubled in the period, to 11.2 trillion tenge, the agency said.
Nuclear Repairs
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Ukraine shut down Unit 1 at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant Monday for unscheduled repairs, Interfax reported, citing the plant’s press service.
Radiation levels aren’t abnormal and the plant plans to complete the repairs on the power-generating unit by August 12, the news agency reported.
Ukraine operates 11 nuclear reactors, three of which are shut down for scheduled repairs, the country’s Energy and Fuel ministry reported on Aug. 1.
Novatek Stakes
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russia’s No.2 gas producer Novatek said on Monday it has acquired a 25 percent interest in each of three companies holding exploration licences in the northern Yamal-Nenets region for an undisclosed sum.
Novatek bought the stakes in Oiltechproduct-Invest, Petra Invest-M and Tailiksneftegas, developing gas fields in the northern region, which accounts for over 90 percent of Russia’s natural gas output and 20 percent of the world’s production.
Novatek, in which gas monopoly Gazprom has a 19.4 percent stake, has ambitious production growth targets of 30 billion cubic metres of gas this year, increasing to 45 bcm by 2010 and 65 bcm by 2015.
TITLE: Gazprom Postpones Bond Sale
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom postponed a planned sale of bonds Friday, prompting Fitch Ratings to withdraw assigned grades for the debt.
Fitch said it was withdrawing the ratings for Gazprom’s bonds after the sale was postponed. The firm would have assigned Gazprom’s debt a rating of BBB-, its lowest investment-grade rating, the company said in a statement Friday.
The sale of bonds by Gaz Capital SA, a unit of Gazprom, was to have comprised the 12th and 13th portions of debt from the company’s bond issuance program, according to the ratings firm.
Gazprom was marketing a sale of 30-year bonds denominated in dollars last month, said a person familiar with the sale of the debt, who asked not to be identified. ABN Amro and Morgan Stanley were managing the sale of the debt for Gazprom.
A person familiar with the situation said the bond sale was being seen as next week’s business, despite comments by Fitch that the sale had been postponed until later this year, Dow Jones reported later Friday.
Fitch also said it was withdrawing its BBB- rating from an earlier planned bond sale canceled by Rosneft.
More than 50 companies from U.S. carmaker Chrysler to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’ Alliance Boots postponed or reworked debt sales since mid-June as investors shunned riskier assets amid concern that U.S. subprime mortgage-related losses will spill into other parts of the debt markets.
TITLE: New Gas May Bring Tax Breaks
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia may give gas export monopoly Gazprom and other firms tax breaks to tap new fields in East Siberia and the arctic Yamal peninsula following similar breaks for oil producers, an official said.
“Both Yamal and East Siberia are being discussed ... It could become a good spur for both Gazprom and independent producers to increase production,” Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Kirill Androsov told reporters Thursday. He said a decision could be made in the fourth quarter of 2007 or the first quarter of next year.
Russia counts on East Siberia, Yamal and the Arctic shelf as future areas of growth in oil and gas production that will allow it to compensate for flagging production in West Siberia and have enough crude to fill new pipelines to Asia.
Androsov also said Gazprom had pledged not to use cash when merging its power assets with coal and power assets of energy major SUEK. “We have received pledges from Gazprom that the deal would not involve cash injections. The management believes it can be done that way,” he said.
Media reported earlier this week that the two firms have postponed the merger due to asset valuation differences.
Gazprom’s assets are worth around $4.8 billion, while SUEK’s assets are currently estimated at $6.3 billion as it plans to contribute coal assets to the new venture alongside its power stakes.
TITLE: Itera to Spend Billions Building Minsk-City
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MINSK — It may be better known as the capital city of Europe’s last dictatorship but Minsk is looking to turn itself into an international financial and business hub.
Now, oil and gas giant Itera looks set to invest tens of billions of dollars in a massive new business and residential center in the heart of the city.
Conceived along the same lines as the ambitious Moskva-City project, the 300-hectare Minsk-City would eventually dwarf even its Russian counterpart.
On Tuesday, representatives from Itera’s construction arm, Interainvest Holding, held a meeting with Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk to discuss the project.
“During the meeting, Itera’s interest in broadening its cooperation with Belarus was underlined,” the company said in a news release. “As part of this we discussed Itera’s involvement in constructing the Minsk-City residential and administrative business center.”
The Minsk-City proposal put forward by Itera envisions living space for up to 38,000 inhabitants, high-rise administrative-business complexes and a central 80-story skyscraper. The project would be built in the Aeroport district of the city, Itera said in a statement.
The project could cost around $30 billion, Russian media reports said.
Work is slated to start on the project in 2009, the official Belarus press agency reported.
The Minsk-City project was first mooted in May when Lukashenko set Minsk’s City Hall a timetable to come up with plans for the development, a statement from Lukashenko’s office said.
Since being elected president of Belarus in 1994, Lukashenko has faced a barrage of international criticism over his perceived authoritarian rule, a clampdown on opposition parties and rigged elections.
In 2004, the United States introduced a series of targeted economic sanctions against Lukashenko’s government for undermining the country’s democratic processes and for human rights abuses. Asked how viable the Minsk-City project is, Mihails Morozovs, managing partner of Colliers International in the Baltic states and Belarus, said many people had doubts about the feasibility of the Moskva-City project to begin with.
“It is a question of how long-term your horizons are,” Morozovs said.
If Lukashenko is personally behind the project, this could help speed the drive toward development, Morozovs said, citing Mayor Yury Luzhkov’s personal backing for projects in Moscow.
“If Minsk wishes to be recognized not only on the political but also on the business map of the future, then it has to have certain infrastructure. Minsk-City is one of the key points in this strategy,” Morozovs said.
At present there are only around 70,000 square meters of Class A and Class B office space in Minsk, a very low figure for a city of 2 million people, Morozovs said.
Morozovs said there were both negative and positive aspects of working in Minsk, citing “serious administrative control” over the market. He said developers in Minsk faced greater difficulties than in Moscow. Any major architectural development would have to go hand in hand with massive investment into basic infrastructure, such as road and rail, Morozovs said.
TITLE: Finnish Builder Gets a New Lift
AUTHOR: By Sami Torma
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HELSINKI — Finnish builder YIT’s April to June profits rose more than expected, boosted by strong housing demand and increasing business in Russia, sending its shares sharply higher.
YIT’s operating profit in April to June rose to 78.5 million euros ($108 million) from 60 million euros in the same period a year ago, and compared with the average of 76 million euros expected by analysts in a poll.
“The outlook for 2007 is still favorable. Great need for housing in the large cities of Russia enables us to expand our residential production over the long term too,” YIT chief executive Hannu Leinonen said in a statement.
April to June operating profit at YIT’s construction unit, which generated 44 percent of group turnover in the quarter, rose to 51.5 million euros, beating all analysts’ expectations in the poll, which ranged from 42 million euros to 49 million euros.
“The market outlook for the developer contracting of housing is estimated to remain solid on the whole in YIT’s market areas,” it said.
YIT, which is the largest foreign builder in fast-growing Russian markets, expects to start building 4,500 apartments there this year. It is aiming to start building 2,700 apartments in its home country Finland.
Operations in Russia generate still less than 10 percent of group’s turnover.
“The outlook for revenue growth is supported by the strong order backlog, the continuing [economic] boom and YIT’s major investments in the Russian market,” the company said.
YIT’s sales in the quarter rose to 939 million euros, beating the average estimate of 909 million euros in the poll, but they were within the range of estimates.
TITLE: Russia’s Black Earth Lures Foreign Farmers
AUTHOR: By Robin Paxton
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BELINSKY, Russia — On Russia’s fertile Black Earth, two Englishmen are making money where other investors saw only risk.
“All of this was derelict land last year. We’ve turned it into fields of golden wheat,” operations director Colin Hinchley says as he drives through a field six times the size of an average British farm.
Moscow needs investment to cut its dependence on food imports and, as the two Britons start turning a profit from the farm they have run for five years, others are being tempted to swap home for Russia’s wide open lands.
Hinchley and Richard Willows, general director of Heartland Farms, form half the expatriate community in Penza, a city of 600,000 people 650 km (405 miles) southeast of Moscow.
Both own property in a city where every 10th loaf is baked from their wheat.
“We’re not trying to create Little England in the heart of Russia,” says Hinchley.
“At first people weren’t sure — ‘Are they going to come and rob us blind?’ — but now there’s a buzz about the place.”
Russia has made agriculture, which collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union, one of four priority areas for development, offering tax breaks to those willing to invest in its fields.
Penza’s coat-of-arms shows three wheatsheafs, representing the agricultural roots of a region located towards the eastern end of the Black Earth belt of fertile soil that stretches from eastern Europe to the Volga River.
Hinchley and Willows, a former grain trader, were running demonstration farms in the region when local governor Vasily Bochkaryov invited them to stay.
“The governor said: ‘We’ve half a million hectares sitting idle. Can you help?’” says 45-year-old Hinchley, who was feted as a ‘Hero of the Penza Soil’ at a ceremony this year.
Bochkaryov led a delegation to Britain in February to drum up interest among other farmers. Two Scots have already made a reconnaissance trip and are planning to lease land in Penza.
49-YEAR LEASE
Heartland, formed in 2002, is owned by British property developer Robert Monk. An initial outlay of 4 million pounds ($8.2 million) allowed the company to get started.
Foreigners cannot own land in Russia, but Heartland has leased 12,000 hectares for the maximum 49-year period and is acquiring 15,000 more in the Belinsky region of Penza, near the birthplace of writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov.
This year will be the first that Heartland turns an operating profit — up to $1 million, Willows estimates. With world commodity prices near record highs, this could double in 2008 as more derelict land is brought back into production.
Heartland has brought modern farming technology to an area where scythes are still used. Clear title deeds and knowledge of land laws, as well as a presence in the local community, are key. Heartland is the shirt sponsor of Penza’s two rugby clubs.
“Colin and I committed to live here to make this work, and that’s what is needed,” says Willows, 54, who left rural Lincolnshire behind to come to Penza.
Heartland employs 75 people, which will double after the new land is taken on. Tractor drivers earn an average monthly wage of 200 pounds ($410), slightly more than on neighbouring farms. Employees can receive bonuses of up to 25 percent monthly and work year-round, where before they were laid off in winter.
Willows also recognised the need to stamp out drunkenness, the scourge of farm labourers throughout Russia. Workers are docked half a month’s wages for being drunk on the job.
“We understand life can be tough in the villages. But if you’re drunk at work a second time, you’re fired.”
PROFITABLE CROPS
Eight combine harvesters, each worth $350,000, sit in a wheat field as harvest time approaches, their drivers crouch nearby smoking cigarettes as pop music blasts from the cabs.
In another field, 22-year-old Alexander Molostvov starts his 12-hour shift ploughing derelict land for winter sowing.
“When I was a kid this was a collective farm. We are preparing it again for planting. Wheat, maize — it’s all very profitable now,” he says at the helm of a GPS-guided tractor.
Older workers, who remember the collective farms, appreciate the modern farming methods.
“We didn’t work the land with trade in mind. Now we work with accounts, with plans,” Vasily Nadeyev, Heartland’s chief agronomist, says as he checks grain samples for moisture.
Half of Heartland’s produce is contracted to multinational companies with a presence in Russia. The company was the first to supply malting barley to Sun Interbrew Ltd.’s brewery. Now seven Penza region farmers are doing so.
“The difference is European management and technique,” says Willows. “It’s difficult to introduce, but worthwhile in the end.”
TITLE: Olympics May Hit Old Believers
AUTHOR: By Olesya Dmitracova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NOVOIMERETINSKAYA BUKHTA, Krasnodar region — Sochi can relish its victory in the race to host the 2014 Winter Olympics but some local residents fear for their homes ahead of large-scale construction work.
Ivan Tereutov’s ancestors spent a century wandering in exile in Turkey before they returned to their native Russia and settled in Novoimeretinskaya Bukhta, a quiet corner in a large valley on the Black Sea coast near Sochi.
Now, though, the Olympic Park — comprising the Olympic Village, media centers, hotels and many competition venues — will be built on their doorstep. It is unclear how many people, if any, will have to move. But local residents believe their way of life will change dramatically.
Standing in his neighbor’s garden among rows of carefully tended vegetables, Tereutov shakes his gray beard, which tumbles down his chest. “Our forefathers are buried here,” he said. “No one is going to leave.”
Tereutov and his neighbors are “Old Believers” — religious purists expelled from the Orthodox church 300 years ago because they rejected church innovations like baptizing believers by sprinkling water instead of immersing them completely.
Marked out by their beards and strict religious rites, they were persecuted at home for their beliefs. Many fled abroad, an exodus that created communities of Old Believers in Latin America and the United States that still exist today.
In a gesture of reconciliation, Tsar Nicholas II invited Tereutov’s ancestors back home in 1911 and gave them the plots of land they have been farming ever since.
At the beginning of this year, local residents heard some of their houses would have to be demolished to free up space for the Olympic buildings. When the International Olympic Committee came to Sochi, they staged a public protest against these plans.
Andrei Braginsky from the bidding committee defended the proposals at the time, saying those affected would be paid at market prices for their land.
But prominent local campaigner Andrei Korutun says the compensation is several times less than the real market price, which will only increase as the Olympics loom.
Local people say the regional governor has since publicly assured them that no homes would be knocked down, but uncertainty persists.
“These are just promises. When I personally met the regional governor and the Sochi mayor, they promised this but said they could give no guarantees,” Korutun said.
“We are for the Olympics but we are against resettlement,” said Andrei Petrov in the shade of a sprawling grapevine by his house, where he was born in 1948 and lives with his family.
“We would be sorry to leave here and be put up in ‘bookstands,’” he said in a dismissive reference to cramped apartment blocks.
“We are used to living on land all our lives.”
After Sochi was proclaimed the 2014 Olympics host earlier this month, the local administration sought to reassure residents.
Alexei Khraban, who is in charge of Olympic preparations in the mayor’s office, said that whatever happened in the area would be done in accordance with Russian law.
“No one will be forced out or have anything taken away,” he said at a news conference.
But laws in Russia can change quickly, with the parliament rubber-stamping presidential proposals, and corruption is widespread. Property rights are a gray area in Russia, and few believe they will be protected.
“We live in an unstable country. We don’t know what to expect,” local Old Believer Lyuba Logareva said.
A major problem is that most Novoimeretinskaya Bukhta residents do not have documents showing that they own their property. Those trying to register their land face Russia’s notorious red tape and protracted delays.
“If the law says it is our property it will be harder to talk to us from a position of force, so we are trying to make it legal,” local resident Alexander Koval said.
The local authorities had until recently been discouraging people from legalizing their property, saying there is an unwritten moratorium on Novoimeretinskaya Bukhta, Korutun adds.
Korutun says Old Believers are not against holding the Olympics in the Sochi area.
But he added: “If you move these old people out of here they are going to die. It is like a tree — if you take up its roots it dies.”
TITLE: Far East Shipper’s Share Offering Raises $206 Million
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VLADIVOSTOK — Far Eastern Shipping Company, or FESCO, said Friday that it had raised $206 million through a rights share issue equivalent to 15 percent of its expanded equity capital.
Of the offering, existing shareholders exercised their pre-emptive rights for 83.7 percent, at 16.83 rubles apiece, to raise about $171 million. The remainder was placed on the market at 17.85 rubles per share, raising $35 million.
The country’s top container shipping firm has said it will use the proceeds to reduce debt and finance investments.
It plans to acquire a stake in a container terminal in a European Union country, as it develops a joint venture with Russian Railways to move goods by rail across the country.
TITLE: A New Approach to Consumer Lending
AUTHOR: By Oleg Ivanov
TEXT: The relationship between borrowers and credit organizations has captured the attention of the government, the general public and the mass media. This is due to the sharp growth in consumer-credit lending and the subsequent conflicts between financial institutions and their customers.
At some point, the dispute between individual lenders and borrowers risks growing into a larger confrontation of “banks vs. society.” Willingly or unwillingly, the Central Bank and the Prosecutor General’s Office have assumed the role of arbitrators in this argument.
Russian banks have experienced amazing growth and success in the booming consumer-lending market. It is a well-known fact, however, that many banks have employed somewhat controversial practices in their lending policies, although they do not violate Russian law. In the absence of national rules and standards regulating consumer credit, creditors have a great deal of freedom to create their own terms — fines, additional commissions, the ability to make unilateral changes to the contract, and so on. In the bank-consumer equation, banks have the clear advantage.
The boom in consumer credit has brought to light several important issues for society. First, existing laws have not adequately protected the interests of borrowers. Neither the current Civil Code nor special laws and consumer safeguards have been able to fulfill this task. In addition, the responsible regulatory agencies — the Federal Consumer Protection Service and the Central Bank — have not developed general standards and protections to meet the needs of the consumer-credit market.
Bankers, more than anyone else, have a strong, vested interest in dispelling misunderstandings about the banking process among the general population. Banks are not interested in the short-term gains of taking advantage of inexperienced bank clients. On the contrary, banks would like to see the formation a long-term consumer-lending market composed of diversified, sophisticated and active borrowers.
Russians currently lack access to adequate and unbiased information that would allow them to fully understand the issues related to their personal finances. The result is that consumers experience serious difficulties in choosing among banking services for insurance, mortgages, consumer credit and deposits, and they have only the most superficial understanding of their tax obligations and pension rights.
For this reason, most Russians are still quite distrustful and cynical toward banks, specifically, and the financial sector, in general. From the other side of the conflict, lenders are disappointed in borrowers’ lack of knowledge of consumer lending and disturbed by their sometimes irresponsible attitude toward repaying their debts.
The most acute financial literacy problem is in the sphere of consumer lending. This subject remains something of an unknown for a significant percentage of the population, who only recently felt comfortable with the idea of “living in debt.” Experience has shown that individuals who want to obtain credit have not always been capable of understanding the subtleties of consumer-credit terms and conditions. At the same time, the fact that general legal provisions for credit contracts exist and are in force has not guaranteed full regulation of the consumer credit market.
The Association of Regional Banks has responded to the situation by developing concrete projects aimed at meeting the needs of government, business and consumers. We are beginning a large-scale venture called “The Financial Alphabet,” which is a mass media project involving the Internet, television, outdoor advertising and print media. One of its goals will be to inform young people about the features of new financial services such as bank cards and consumer credit.
The working group of the association includes representatives from the 20 of the most active banks, and it has developed a draft of a new consumer-credit law. The law would introduce for the first time an understanding of effective annual percentage rates, collecting practices for overdue loans, credit brokers and credit cards. At the same time, changes are being made to the law regarding advertising, the Civil and Criminal codes and banking legislation.
In addition, the bill will expand borrowers’ right to receive more accurate and clearer information on the real costs of credit services. It will also regulate the terms by which banks may refuse credit to a consumer. At the same time, the legislation includes provisions protecting and guaranteeing the right of lenders in the event borrowers fail to uphold the terms of the loan contract.
Moreover, the law is designed to limit unfair practices on the credit market while preserving the balance between the interests of the lender and the borrower. The law will list all types of fees that the lender may establish, including fines and commissions. It sets out the rights of lenders when providing ancillary services, while making clear that such services cannot be made obligatory or otherwise forced on the client.
The right of creditors to freely choose insurance companies is also strengthened.
Regulatory practices are significantly broadened for situations when borrowers do not fulfill their obligations. Lenders are given the right to create a credit history of borrowers, even without their permission. Rules for regulating the operations of collection agencies and credit brokers are also provided.
In accordance with worldwide practice, the legislation contains detailed regulations on the use of advertisements during the signing of the consumer loan contract. Moreover, information concerning the issuance, use and repayment of loans must be provided in writing. The law also provides the consumer with two basic rights: the right to cancel a loan contract within 14 days after receipt of credit and the right to make early repayment of the debt.
This consumer-lending law is necessary for both banks and borrowers. The banking community and the entire financial sector is now ready to declare its priorities and articulate its vision of future prospects.
Russian banks have reaped large dividends from the growth in consumer lending in the last five years. On the other hand, certain clouds have gathered over the consumer-lending market: the rate of growth in consumer credit has dropped from 100 percent to 60 percent annually, interest margins have dropped by almost 50 percent, operating expenses have risen and monetary liquidity has decreased.
It is now time to think of new approaches and new ways to increase the effectiveness of the financial system. This will be possible only when all three of the interested parties — bankers, society and the government — begin to trust one another more.
Oleg Ivanov is vice president of the Association of Regional Bankers and adviser to the State Duma Committee on Credit Organizations and Financial Markets.
TITLE: The Information Black Market
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Sonin
TEXT: Can economics teach us a lesson on how to teach history? It turns out that it can. There is a law in economics stating that when suppliers cannot meet the demand of consumers for whatever reason, this results in deficits and the emergence of a black market. All attempts to fight against deficits without increasing supply only lead to even higher black market prices.
Twenty years ago, this was true of practically every consumer good, although the greatest deficit during Soviet times was not in goods, but in information. Limited access to economic, political and historical information — so important for government institutions to operate effectively — had a harmful impact on society in general, even if it did not directly affect everyday life. And just like the consumer markets, the deficit of historical information led to a black market in which true information — so anathema to the Communist authorities — was combined with some astonishing myths.
President Vladimir Putin’s remarks in June regarding history textbooks that are funded by foreign grants demonstrates that he doesn’t understand the real problem. A significant part of Russia’s history has been written by foreigners. What’s more, only foreigners have critically examined Russian history, the greater part of which is known through foreign works only.
It would be impossible to imagine an academic course covering, for example, the history of Russian economics in the 20th century, without including the work of Alexander Gerschenkron, Alex Nove, Gregory Grossmann, Abraham Bergson and Paula Gregory — and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Russia has not produced anything even close to this level of scholarship, nor does it have a higher school of economics with economic historians who could write books of comparable quality. I cannot speak about other fields, but in the historical sciences, Russia is lagging behind the West — perhaps by decades.
All of the talk about an “anti-Russian bias” in foreign works smacks of populism; professional, highly qualified historians have higher standards than this. The main problem is not that corrections need to be made to textbooks, as some assert. To produce a qualified and meaningful discussion on Russia’s history, it is not enough to attract patriots. They must be highly qualified specialists in history. In the same way, showing love for a patient is not enough to treat him; the doctor must have a specialized medical education.
But let us return to the black market. History, like other humanitarian sciences, is enriched not by a unanimous interpretation of facts and events, but by the constant clash of differing views and alternative approaches.
For example, the question as to when and on which side Russia joined World War II proves this point.
The debate is whether Russia entered the war when its forces crossed the Polish border on Sept. 17, 1939, or when German forces crossed Russia’s border on June 22, 1941. It would be impossible to understand history without knowing both arguments.
But everyone, including the president, should know that choosing one date and one argument over the other can’t solve the issue. Any effort to force a particular interpretation on people — even the most patriotic — will only lead to a greater desire to obtain alternative information on the black market.
And, when all of this information is mixed together, who will know how much of it is true and how much is false?
Konstantin Sonin is a professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR.
TITLE: Between Hamas and Abbas
AUTHOR: By Alexei Malashenko
TEXT: Why did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas come to Moscow? The visit — his fifth, or by some accounts, sixth — had originally been planned for an earlier date, but Abbas postponed the trip due to turbulent events at home. In June, the militant opposition group Hamas staged an “Islamist revolt” and seized power in the Gaza Strip, branding the head of the Palestinian Authority a traitor. Under these difficult circumstances, Abbas, of course, could not make his planned visit.
Although the situation has not stabilized, tensions have died down a bit, and Abbas, taking advantage of the uneasy pause, traveled to Moscow.
Abbas can only win from the Moscow visit. Russian authorities had no plans to saddle the president of the Palestinian Authority with new projects and proposals. The Kremlin also made Abbas’ life easier by avoiding any discussion that the Palestinians should behave more diplomatically toward Israel.
To be sure, Russia is in no position to offer its own original plan for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This “stagnation” in Middle East initiatives began during the Soviet era, when it became clear that there were no viable alternatives to the Camp David summits.
So Abbas did not come to Moscow so much to listen to Russia’s ideas and plans. His real interest, as always, was to receive military, technical and financial assistance. Moscow promised all three. President Vladimir Putin even promised Abbas 50 armored personnel carriers, but only on the condition that he not use them in the internal Palestinian conflict.
And solving this internal conflict is perhaps the most important reason for Abbas’ visit. The main Middle East battlefield today has unexpectedly become the new Palestinian-Palestinian conflict, not the old Palestinian-Israeli one. In light of this, Russia’s role as a key player in the Middle East has unexpectedly grown.
Why should this be a surprise? It is well known that this is not the first time Moscow has attempted to position itself as an intermediary between followers of radical Islam and everybody else — that is to say, Europe and the United States.
Hamas’ parliamentary victory in January 2006 became a sort of unexpected justification for Moscow to start a public dialogue with radical Islamists. In addition, it has given Russian diplomats an opportunity to find their own niche in the Middle East peace process. Moscow has the chance to conduct itself as a “sovereign” nation. It also gives Russia a chance to support its claims that it performs a unique function among members of the Middle East Quartet — composed of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States — in solving the Palestinian-Israeli and Palestinian-Palestinian conflicts.
Immediately following Hamas’ parliamentary victory, Russia hoped to achieve the impossible — recognition of Israel — when they invited leaders of Hamas to Moscow for talks. Those hopes did not pan out, however.
As it turns out, Hamas has dug in its heels. The group not only refused to compromise, it managed to divide the Palestinians. Hamas has undermined Abbas’ leadership, and it has essentially foiled any hopes for a Middle East settlement.
On the other hand, Russian diplomats have a new opportunity to reconcile the Palestinian groups, which bitterly oppose each other. Moscow contends that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t be resolved without internal agreement among the Palestinians. The internal Palestinian dissension has turned out to be much deeper than originally thought, however.
While Abbas was in Moscow, he tried to deny that the disagreements with Hamas were discussed. Within Hamas, however, this issue was openly acknowledged. On the eve of Abbas’ visit, Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal called Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s office to say that Hamas was ready to recognize Abbas as the sole leader of the Palestinian Authority.
For Russian diplomats, that phone call might have been a sign of their success, were it not for one problem: Hamas itself is divided into two factions — radicals headed by former Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and moderates led by Meshaal. Haniyeh’s group is clearly not ready to give unqualified recognition to Abbas as the Palestinian Authority’s leader.
Hamas might very well have been counting on the possibility that the Foreign Ministry would put pressure on Abbas to be more conciliatory in his dealings with the Islamists. It is obvious that those hopes were unjustified. Moscow is actually closer to the position held by Abbas, who, in addition to being the successor to former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, also defended his doctoral thesis in Moscow.
Moreover, Russia cannot ignore the fact that the majority of Arab nations — most notably, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — have little sympathy for Hamas. It is not surprising that they recently condemned Hamas’ violent takeover of the Gaza Strip.
The fact that Abbas in Moscow reiterated his unwillingness to both negotiate with Hamas and to restore the coalition government does not mean that Russia will give up its role as an intermediary in the Middle East talks. All the more so considering that among the other members of the Middle East Quartet, some believe that negotiations must include Palestinian Islamists who, by the way, enjoy support from a considerable percentage of the Palestinians.
In all likelihood, Abbas left Moscow in a good mood. He met with Putin, who once again expressed his support for the Palestinian president. Moreover, Abbas received some material assistance. With regard to the Kremlin’s declaration that unity is needed within the Palestinian Authority, Moscow’s leaders were in agreement that such unity can only be achieved when all sides acknowledge Abbas as the leader of the Palestinian Authority.
From Moscow, Abbas traveled to Ramallah in the West Bank, where he met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday. In contrast to the Russians, the Americans are very active; they are constantly presenting or refining new proposals. Persistent rumors are circulating today that Israel and the Palestinians are on the verge of reaching some new agreement. It would be nice to believe.
But what should we do about Hamas?
Alexei Malashenko is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
TITLE: Birds of a Feather
AUTHOR: By Andrei Piontkovsky
TEXT: In the latest interview given by former security services officer Andrei Lugovoi, whose extradition on suspicion of murder is being sought by Britain, there was a remarkable moment that doesn’t seem to have been fully appreciated.
Lugovoi, who was somewhat reserved but, at the same time, beaming with pride, mentioned that when he is seen in public, he usually finds himself surrounded by people who want to shake his hand, congratulate him on his valor or ask for his autograph.
“Well, haven’t you thought about a career in politics?” the interviewer asked. It is a pity he did not pursue this topic in more detail because it certainly deserves the attention.
Surprisingly enough, Lugovoi seems not to have questioned why Russians were so eager to get his autograph. Were they showing solidarity with a victim unjustly hounded by the Crown Prosecution Service?
Give me a break! When did Russians ever ask victims for their autographs? I have myself been attracting the interest of the Prosecutor General’s Office for several months now and have yet to encounter a single autograph hunter. In Russia, you get asked for your autograph if you have made it, if you are a proper hero — a hockey player, a cosmonaut or a war hero.
The list of unspeakable crimes allegedly committed in the course of Alexander Litvinenko’s brief life grows longer every day. The animosity toward Litvinenko among self-righteous Russian patriots has reached a very high level; they relish the fact that this traitor received such a severe form of punishment as payback for his sedition.
Of course, this should not be interpreted to mean that these patriots agree with the Crown Prosecutor Service’s official accusations of who stands behind the Litvinenko killing.
A new species of “homo putinicus” has been created in large part thanks to the meticulously professional work of the television propaganda machine.
Consequently, homo putinicus feels a great sense of pride in Lugovoi’s achievements.
At the same time, it feels deep indignation regarding the fierce campaign in the West unleashed against Lugovoi by the slanderers of Russia. Homo putinicus fiercely defends its position on these issues without the slightest understanding of its inherent self-contradiction.
This entire episode speaks to the mystery of the Russian “holistic” mentality, on which Slavophiles and Eurasians expounded at such length for so many years and which has proved so difficult for foreigners to understand. But returning to the interviewer’s question: Is this not the ideal solution to the problem of President Vladimir Putin’s heir, which is threatening to divide the nation’s elite?
If we compare two potential presidential candidates, Lugovoi in 2007 and Putin in 1999, the number of obvious similarities is astounding: the same modest social background; the same KGB alma mater; a similar style of speaking, which at times includes the use of criminal jargon; the same mentality; and the same hatred toward “enemies of the people.”
In addition, there is another, highly significant shared circumstance: Both of them at the start of their political careers were largely indebted — perhaps even totally indebted — to Boris Berezovsky. Moreover, both Lugovoi and Putin subsequently had serious fallouts with Berezovsky.
Would the sybaritic, globe-trotting Lugovoi really want to take over the reins and put on Monomakh’s Cap? After all, the job of president is very difficult and exhausting. Look at how Putin’s face changed over the course of the last eight years as president. Lugovoi’s face has also changed markedly during the last eight months of news conferences.
Whatever the case may be, Lugovoi and Putin are two living portraits of Dorian Gray — two faces of the new Russia that is “getting off its knees.”
Andrei Piontkovsky, a member of Russian PEN Centre, is an independent political analyst.
TITLE: No Reason to Be Afraid of Rupert Murdoch
AUTHOR: By Alastair Campbell
TEXT: It has been Rupert Murdoch’s good fortune and also his misfortune to have been demonized as the great media bogeyman of our times.
It has been his fortune because it gives him a profile and an edge that can leave some scared by his business acumen, his will to win and what many perceive as his thirst for power. It has also been Murdoch’s misfortune because it means the world’s understanding of him is perhaps not as rounded as it should be, nor his success as heralded as it might be.
It was therefore interesting to be in New York last week when Murdoch’s stalking of Dow Jones & Company and The Wall Street Journal finally succeeded. The howls of angst and anguish and the dire warnings about what he might now do to the newspaper and its standards were deeply familiar to someone like me, who was a London journalist in the 1980s as Murdoch established himself as a dominant British media player.
Back then, Murdoch’s rise to power involved at times bloody battles with print unions and their supporters as he sought to take commercial advantage of then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s desire to break the grip of organized labor.
By comparison, more recent takeovers and acquisitions have been relatively painless. He stalks, he pounces, he defies the howls of anguish, shoulders get shrugged as another title goes to the Murdoch empire, then the world moves on.
That standards in British newspapers have fallen in recent years is in my view beyond dispute, and in that Murdoch has been so dominant in the marketplace, clearly he has to be somewhere in the mix when it comes to handing out the blame. But to pretend, as some are trying to do, that he is somehow single-handedly responsible for all that is bad in the news media is not just intellectually lazy — it also misses the point.
The point is the pace of change. When I started out in newspapers 28 years ago, “the media” for most people meant a newspaper your family read daily and the television news for a few minutes. Today, the scope and scale of the news media are unrecognizable by comparison.
The advent of 24/7 news has arguably been the single biggest factor in altering the nature and tone of newspapers. With television and radio becoming the most immediate purveyors of information, newspapers have changed. Many have become players as well as spectators in the political debate, something that suits the style of Murdoch, with his clear and conservative worldview.
In Britain, much is made of the political influence of Murdoch’s biggest daily tabloid, The Sun, which switched from Tory to Labour in 1997 and is therefore thought to have helped Tony Blair become prime minister. In my view, The Sun was in part led to that decision by Murdoch, who saw in Blair a genuinely modernizing figure serious about moving Labour closer to the political center.
But more important was that Sun readers were moving in the same direction, liking what they saw and heard of Blair. Would Blair have lost the election if The Sun had stayed with the Tories? I don’t think so. Would The Sun have lost readers if it had stayed with the Tories? Probably not. Would it have lost credibility? Yes.
As to the question of his interference in matters of editorial content, we are kidding ourselves if we pretend that the personalities who own newspapers do not have an influence on editorial stance and posture. Murdoch does not really need to interfere directly. His editors know exactly what he thinks and he is rarely far from their thoughts.
Based on my experience with Murdoch, he is businessman first, journalist second and power player third, though admittedly they all mix in together.
But it is worth pointing out that my only direct experience as a staff journalist working for him was as a political columnist and assistant editor on a newspaper (now defunct) that was avowedly left of center, and in which if there was Murdoch interference I never detected it. I also worked for Robert Maxwell. Now there was an interfering proprietor.
When people look at the Murdoch-owned Times of London, now tabloid in format, and say it is not what it was, that is true. But nor is the world it reports upon, and nor is the business world in which it operates. And love him or hate him, consider his influence to be benign or malignant, at virtually every step of change, Murdoch has been ahead of the game.
When he introduced the 24-hour news channel Sky News to Britain in 1989, analysts predicted that it would not survive. Fox News got much the same reaction when it first hit screens in the United States. Now it hits an awful lot of them.
He has also been ahead of many of his rivals in his understanding of the Internet. Then throw in publishing and film and some of the deals done there and you see a mogul who can legitimately tell his senior executives, as he recently did: “You all think I’m too old. I think you’re too old.”
One of Murdoch’s former editors, Richard Stott, who also edited my book, in which Murdoch is the single most mentioned media figure, once told me that Murdoch basically despised politicians. I’m not sure that is entirely accurate.
But he certainly tracked them closely with a view to what good or bad they could do to his business interests. And doubtless some who he felt might threaten those interests may have felt the pain of the occasional editorial whack.
But in the advanced democracies, though power structures have changed, elected leaders continue to hold enormous power. Murdoch is a huge global media player. If politicians are intimidated by him, that is their problem. If they make the wrong calls out of fear of his editorial wrath, they shouldn’t have been elected in the first place.
And if journalists don’t like working for him, there are more media jobs now than at any time in the history of humankind. He was involved in making that happen, too.
Alastair Campbell, a spokesman and adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1994 to 2003, is the author of “The Blair Years.” This comment appeared in The New York Times.
TITLE: Death Toll Reaches 347 in Southern Asia
AUTHOR: By Biswajeet Banerjee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LUCKNOW, India — Floodwaters receded in parts of monsoon-soaked South Asia on Monday but the death toll rose to 347, officials said. Millions remain displaced and homeless, and authorities fear waterborne disease could spread.
Thirteen bodies surfaced in eastern Bihar state as six major rivers started receding, Manoj Srivastava, the state disaster management secretary, said Monday.
A 17-year-old died Sunday when he fell from the rooftop of his marooned village home into the flood waters while trying to catch a food packet dropped by an Indian air force helicopter in Darbhanga district, said Upendera Sharma, the district magistrate.
That raised India’s overall death toll in the past week to 191.
The death toll rose to 156 in Bangladesh, with 36 more deaths reported nationwide Monday, the Information Ministry said.
In a late night television address Sunday, the Bangladesh’s military-backed interim leader Fakhruddin Ahmed appealed to all Bangladeshis to join army and government efforts to aid the flood-affected people.
“Any natural disaster like floods brings an opportunity for the nation to stand united,” Ahmed said. “Let us stand beside the helpless flood-affected people hand in hand, imbued with the sprit of human welfare and patriotism.”
The South Asian monsoon season runs until September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent, a deluge that spreads floods across the region and kills many people every year.
Indian officials say more than 1,200 people have died in their country alone since monsoon season began in June. Scores of others have been killed in Bangladesh and neighboring Nepal, where floods have hit low-lying southern parts of the country.
Some 19 million people have been driven from their homes in India and Bangladesh in recent days. At least 2 million people have found themselves marooned and unable to reach safe ground, though relief supplies have been airlifted to many.
Relief supplies have been air-dropped over the worst-hit areas of India’s Bihar state, but some stricken residents have ended up fighting with each other in their desperate attempts to grab food parcels, officials said.
Flood victims living in makeshift camps said the state administration should provide them money or rebuild their devastated homes. Kedar Nisar, a 62-year-old boatman, complained Monday that he had received only 22 pounds of rice from the government in the past week.
“I need money to rebuild my home,” said Nishat as he prepared to return to his village home in the Maharjganj area in Uttar Pradesh state.
Water levels in three rivers, Ghagra, Rapti and Gandak, in Uttar Pradesh state have started receding.
“Water levels in other rivers have also either started receding or are constant,” said Mahindra Awasthi, a spokesman for the Central Water Commission in Lucknow, the state capital.
“If this trend continues it will give a big respite to the millions of marooned people,” he said. The meteorological office forecast minimal rains in north and northeastern India during the next 24 hours.
As rains eased doctors and paramedics started supplying medicine to people to prevent diarrhea, skin allergies and other waterborne diseases, said S.K. Gupta, an Indian army officer.
Army doctors treated 235 people suffering from waterborne diseases in makeshift camps near Gorakhpur, a town 155 miles southeast of Lucknow, said Gupta, who is commanding a unit involved in relief operations.
“Our effort is to prevent the outbreak of an epidemic,” he said.
TITLE: England Pack Crush Wales in Warm-up
AUTHOR: By Mitch Phillips
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Number eight Nick Easter scored four tries as England produced an impressive forward display to destroy an under-strength Wales by a record 62-5 in the first of their three August World Cup warm-ups on Saturday.
Though questions remain about the make-up and effectiveness of their backs, who displayed little cutting edge, the world champions’ awesome pack showed that they remain a match for anyone in the game.
With the sun beating down on Twickenham, England scored nine tries, Jonny Wilkinson converting seven of them, to record their highest score and biggest winning margin against Wales.
Easter, scrum-half Shaun Perry, flanker Joe Worsley and lock Steven Shaw all made impressive statements while center Andy Farrell finally showed glimpses of the talent that made him such a star in rugby league.
“I thought Andy Farrell had his best game for England,” said coach Brian Ashton, who has to name his 30-man World Cup squad by August 15.
“I’m pretty pleased with that performance, there was a lot of pressure in the build-up to the game because these players knew they were the first 22 to have a shot at the World Cup squad.”
EXPERIMENTAL SIDE
There were few plus signs for Wales, however, with their experimental side on the back foot all day. “That was a hard 60 points to watch,” said coach Gareth Jenkins.
“It’s tough in any circumstances coming to Twickenham but today England dominated us as a pack and strangled us.
Easter, in his fifth international, scored the first two tries after 14 and 20 minutes — both shoves coming in the wake of sharp breaks by Perry.
Lock Steve Borthwick added a third to set up a 22-0 halftime lead and the English assault continued unabated after the break with Easter’s third touchdown.
Perry was then credited with England’s fifth but after the match he said the honour belonged to Easter — making him the first England forward to score four in a game since Neil Back against the Netherlands nine years ago.
Wales threw on the replacements to try to stop the hemorrhaging and, in a rare attack, finally found space for Dafydd James to score in the corner.
But it proved a brief respite as England scored their sixth try with a vintage charge by Lawrence Dallaglio, on as a replacement for Easter.
Perry was then officially on the scoresheet before Wales fell apart in the final minutes to allow Jason Robinson and Mathew Tait free runs to the line.
England face France back at Twickenham next week before completing their preparations against France again, in Marseille, on August 18.
TITLE: Woods Cruises to Victory By Eight Shots at Firestone
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AKRON, Ohio — Firestone always seems the perfect place for Tiger Woods to show his best stuff.
This year, the timing could not have been much better.
In the final event before the final major of the year, Woods buried Rory Sabbatini and the rest of the field yesterday at the Bridgestone Invitational for an eight-shot victory, sending his confidence soaring as he left for Southern Hills and the PGA Championship.
“This might just give me a little more confidence,” Woods said.
It was a command performance on a challenging course, reminiscent of some of his major victories.
He was determined to play the final round without a bogey, just like the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, and Woods showed more emotion over saving par with a 12-foot putt on the final hole than any of his birdies in his 5-under-par 65. He finished at 8-under 272.
He was the only player to finish under par at Firestone; the only other times he had done that were his two U.S. Open victories. After turning a one-shot deficit into a six-shot lead on the front nine, Woods left everyone else playing for second.
“The whole idea was to win this event, but be playing well going into next week,” Woods said. “I feel I made some nice strides this week, and I feel very good going into next week ... I feel like I’m in better shape heading into this one than I do going into the last major.”
Sabbatini took another step backward. The fiery South African lost a one-shot lead to Woods in the Wachovia Championship this year, then said Woods looked “beatable as ever.” Not on this course.
It was the second time Woods has strung together three straight victories at this World Golf Championship, and he tied a PGA Tour record by winning for the sixth time on the same course. Jack Nicklaus won six Masters at Augusta National, and Alex Ross won six times at the North & South Open at Pinehurst No. 2 at the turn of the 20th century. He also won for the 14th time in 25 tries at the World Golf Championships.
“This one felt good,” Woods said.
Sabbatini closed with a 74, just as he did in the final group with Woods at Wachovia. Justin Rose saved par on the final hole for a 68 that left him tied for second. He thought he had a chance with four birdies through eight holes until he saw a leader board with Woods in firm control.
“I thought, ‘Oh, well, we’re playing for second,”’ Rose said.
Woods started the final round one shot behind Sabbatini. When they made the turn as the rain began, white flags were more appropriate than umbrellas. Sabbatini was shaken to the point that he ordered a spectator removed.
Woods essentially won by picking up five shots during a five-hole stretch on the front nine, but the ninth hole was absurd. Everyone in the final group was all over the map and headed for big numbers, with Woods the wildest.
He hooked his tee shot so far to the left the ball found the rough on the 10th fairway. Then he tried to slice his approach around the trees, only to drop from a branch and hit a 58-year-old woman in the arm, coming to rest in the crook of her arm. After taking a drop, Woods pitched over the green, then chipped in for par.
Sabbatini took five to reach the green and made double bogey, and as he walked toward the 10th tee, a spectator said: “Hey, Rory, still think Tiger is beatable?” Sabbatini turned and glared. He barked at a police officer and demanded — with an obscenity thrown in — that the fan be taken “out of here.”
“I spent too much of the day trying to hack the ball back out to the fairway,” Sabbatini said. “And it made a long day.”
Asked if he would temper his comments in the future, Sabbatini looked indignant.
“Why?” he said. “I hope I inspire him and play well enough that I can give him a good challenge.”
TITLE: Bomber Kills 28 In Iraq Attack
AUTHOR: By Hamid Ahmed
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber slammed his truck into a densely populated residential area in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar on Monday, killing at least 28 people, including 19 children, local authorities said.
The attack occurred in a crowded Shiite neighborhood of the religiously mixed city, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad.
The powerful blast caused houses to collapse in the morning as many families were getting ready for the day ahead, and officials said the death toll could rise.
“Rescue teams are still searching for casualties among the rubble,” said Ali Abbo, the head of the human rights committee.
He said the hospital in Tal Afar had been filled to capacity, forcing the ambulances to take many victims to Dahuk, about 45 miles to the north.
At least 40 others were wounded in the attack, said Brig. Gen. Rahim al-Jibouri, commander of Tal Afar police.
The attacker drove a dump truck filled with explosives and covered with a layer of gravel, Brig. Gen. Najim Abdullah said, adding that at least 19 children were among the 28 killed.
Within an hour of the attack, authorities imposed a complete curfew on the city, he said.
The United States and Iran, meanwhile, held expert-level talks on security issues in Baghdad, more than two weeks after the ambassadors of both arch-enemies agreed to establish a committee to discuss efforts to stabilize Iraq.
The American delegation was led by the U.S. Embassy’s counsellor for political and military affairs, Marcie B. Ries, embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said.
Iraqi president Jalal Talabani hosted the sides, who sat at three separate conference tables in an Iraqi government office.
“His excellency expressed hope that the long-awaited Iranian-Iraqi-American meeting will succeed in achieving security and stability in Iraq,” Talabani’s office said in a statement. “The president hopes that Iran will play a positive role in finding a way to achieve the ambitions of the Iraqi people.”
The talks come as the U.S. military steps up accusations that Tehran is arming and training Shiite militants to attack American forces.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the U.S. second-in-command, said Sunday that rogue Shiite militiamen with Iranian weapons and training launched 73 percent of the attacks that killed or wounded American forces last month in Baghdad, nearly double the figure six months earlier.
Odierno did not provide a total number of militia attacks but said Iran has sharply increased its support for the fighters ahead of a September report to Congress on progress in Iraq, leading to the surge in rogue militia action.
“Because of the effect we’ve had on al-Qaida in Iraq and the success against them and the Sunni insurgency, it’s now shifted and so we are focusing very much more on the special groups of the Jaish al-Mahdi here in Baghdad,” he told The Associated Press in an interview, referring to the Arabic term for the Mahdi Army.
“They tend to be breakaway groups from Sadr who tend to be funded by Iran, armed by Iran and trained by Iran,” he said.
Tehran has denied U.S. allegations that it is fueling the violence in Iraq.
TITLE: Upbeat Sharapova Eyes U.S. Open Defence
AUTHOR: By Matthew Cronin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SAN DIEGO — Maria Sharapova was feeling confident about her U.S. Open defence after beating Patty Schnyder to win the San Diego Classic on Sunday.
Sharapova won the San Diego title 12 months ago, finding the rhythm which carried her to the last grand slam title of the year at Flushing Meadows.
“After winning here and then winning the Open, you want to do the same thing,” the world number two told reporters. “Last year I won here and went to In and Out Burger, and this year I want to get in the car, go there again and drive the same way.”
Hampered by a shoulder injury all year, Sharapova had struggled to find her best form until San Diego.
She was crushed by Serena Williams in the Australian Open final, by Ana Ivanovic in the French Open semi-finals and by Venus Williams in the fourth round of Wimbledon.
But after taking a rest and abbreviating her service action to ease her shoulder pain, the Russian found her stride in San Diego, only dropping one set and beating a number of good opponents, including Tatiana Golovin, Sania Mirza, Anna Chakvetadze and Schnyder.
“All those girls can be very dangerous, but you can run into someone ranked 50 or 60 who has nothing to lose and plays her best against you,” Sharapova said.
“I never underestimate any opponent. I have to concentrate on what I have to do and not what they are doing, because if you strongly believe in what you are doing, you are in good hands.”
Sharapova will be the top seed at next week’s tournament in Los Angeles before taking two weeks off to prepare for the U.S. Open which starts on Aug. 27.
“I have to maintain and improve,” she said. “I’m hoping to find a high level and be fresh.”
TITLE: Peace Talks Set for Darfur
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ARUSHA, Tanzania — Almost all of Darfur’s splintered rebel factions have agreed to hold peace talks with the Sudanese government within three months, UN and African Union officials said Monday.
After four days of meetings, the rebel factions reached a “common platform” for talks with the government on issues such as power- and wealth-sharing, security, land and humanitarian issues, the AU’s envoy to Darfur, Salim Ahmed Salim, and the United Nations special envoy to Darfur, Jan Eliasson, said in a statement released after the meeting.
“They also recommended that final talks should be held between 2-3 months from now,” according to the joint statement from Eliasson and Salim, the chairman of the meeting.
Ending the conflict between the government and the ethnic African rebels who rose up against it four years ago is seen as key to ending attacks on civilians by Sudan’s army and allied militias known as the janjaweed. More than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been displaced.
An important rebel leader, Abdel Wahid Nur, was absent from the rebel talks, however, complicating efforts to reach any agreement. Nur, who leads a major faction of the large rebel Sudan Liberation Movement group, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that his group was boycotting the talks because it wants the killings in Darfur to stop before any negotiations begin.
The UN Security Council unanimously approved a 26,000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur on July 31 to try to help end the fighting.
TITLE: Hackers: Networking Sites Flawed
AUTHOR: By Jordan Robertson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAS VEGAS — Social networking Web sites such as MySpace.com are increasingly juicy targets for computer hackers, who are demonstrating a pair of vulnerabilities they claim expose sensitive personal information and could be exploited by online criminals.
The flaws are being demonstrated this week at the Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, which draw thousands of people to Las Vegas each year for five days of training and demonstrations of the latest exploits.
Black Hat, the more genteel of the two events with heavy industry sponsorship and big admission fees, ended Thursday with some 4,000 attendees. Defcon, larger and more roguish, started smoothly Friday, without any of the registration problems that irked fire officials last year and caused lengthy delays. Organizers said more than 6,800 people attended the first day, with more expected Saturday.
There was a moment of drama in the afternoon when organizers received a tip that an undercover NBC producer was covertly filming some of the sessions. The woman was identified during one of the presentations, and she hustled away from the convention site without comment.
An NBC spokeswoman said the network doesn’t comment on its newsgathering practices. Defcon organizers said NBC had been offered press credentials but declined.
Infiltrating password-protected social networking sites has been an increasingly fruitful area of study for hobbyists and professional computer security researchers.
One hacker, Rick Deacon, a 21-year-old network administrator from Beachwood, Ohio, says he’s discovered a so-called “zero-day” flaw — or a problem that hasn’t been patched yet — in MySpace that allows intruders to commandeer personal Web pages and possibly inject malicious code.
Deacon is scheduled to present his findings Sunday. So far, it only affects older versions of the Firefox Web browser and does not affect Internet Explorer, he said.
The attack uses a so-called “cross-site scripting” vulnerability, a common type of flaw found in Web applications that involves injecting code onto someone else’s Web page.
The vulnerability could not be independently verified, but experts said these types of attacks are a particular problem for social networking sites, where it’s difficult to police the content of the millions of posts each day.
Deacon said the flaw he discovered requires that a user click on a link that leads to a Web page where the computer’s “cookie” information is stolen. Deacon said he discovered the problem several months ago along with several other researchers and alerted MySpace, but the company didn’t fix the problem.
“Facebook and MySpace both patch things that they find, but it’s like a sandbox,” Deacon said. “There’s so much. And there are probably hundreds more cross-site scripting vulnerabilities there. There’s no way they can find them all.”
A MySpace spokeswoman declined to comment specifically about Deacon’s presentation. The company said in a statement that “it’s our responsibility to have the most responsive, solely dedicated 24-7 safety and security team, and we do.”
In a separate demonstration, Robert Graham, chief executive of Atlanta-based Errata Security, showed a program for snooping on the computers on public wireless networks to steal the “cookie” information and hijack e-mail accounts and personal Web pages on social networks.
In his Black Hat presentation, he took over the e-mail account of an audience member using Google Inc.’s Gmail service. Graham said his program demonstrates the vulnerability of public wireless connections.
“Everyone has gotten into their minds that passwords over WiFi are toxic, so let’s fix that, and they have,” Graham said. “What I’m saying is that everything else is just as toxic.”
Graham’s demonstration would not have worked if the audience member had been using the encrypted version of Gmail.
Google declined to comment specifically on the presentation but said the company is expanding its capacity to enable automatic encryption for all Gmail users.
TITLE: China’s Hormone-free Pig Out
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — China will breed pigs using hormone-free food for next year’s Olympic athletes to avoid false-positive doping tests, Beijing’s latest step to cool worldwide concern about the quality of Chinese food.
The official pork supplier’s announcement came as the government promised a nationwide food quality crackdown to restore trust after a string of scandals.
Qianxihe Food Group said the pork from its pigs, which will be raised in secret locations, would not cause Olympic athletes to fail doping tests due to residual antibiotics and steroids.
“Anti-doping concerns during the Olympics have caused officials to tighten food safety regulations so that athletes will be guaranteed food quality,” company spokesman Niu Shengnan said.
The use of antibiotics and growth stimulants to boost yields in meat and vegetables is widespread in China.
TITLE: Boy Rescued After 6-hour Ordeal Adrift on Red Sea
AUTHOR: By Matti Friedman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — An 8-year-old Israeli boy spent six hours floating in the Dead Sea alone at night after his father left him there by accident during a family trip, police said Sunday.
They said they would not press charges against the errant parent.
The Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth and one of Israel’s most popular tourist attractions, has an abnormally high salt concentration that allows swimmers to float on the surface.
Rescue workers said the boy, Shneur Zalman Friedman, from Jerusalem, was in the sea with his father and two brothers on Thursday evening when currents swept him away from shore, without anyone else noticing.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the family was part of a large group visiting a beach reserved for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men — who do not bathe in the presence of women — away from main public areas.
His father left the water with other members of the group and only noticed the boy was missing as darkness fell, Rosenfeld said.
A major search by police helicopters and volunteers in motorboats finally found Shneur about 2 miles from the shore early Friday after six hours in the strong-smelling, corrosive water, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav of the Zaka rescue organization said.
The boy was dehydrated and frightened but otherwise healthy, he said. Shneur told his rescuers he remained calm throughout the ordeal, saying prayers and thinking about his school friends as he floated in the darkness.
“The boy said that he didn’t try to swim, he just drifted with the current,” Rosenfeld said.
The mineral-laden waters of the Dead Sea helped keep the boy afloat but could have choked him had he panicked and swallowed large quantities, said Omer Cohen of the Megilot volunteer rescue unit.
After hours of fruitless searching, workers had all but given up hope of finding the boy alive.
“We thought we were looking for a body,” Cohen said. “We were surprised to find the boy alive and well.”
TITLE: United Beat
Blues On Penalties
AUTHOR: By Trevor Huggins
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United’s victory over an injury-hit Chelsea in the Community Shield will give Alex Ferguson a lift and Jose Mourinho a reminder of some very unhappy memories.
United triumphed 3-0 in a penalty shoot-out at Wembley on Sunday after an unusually combative showcase game finished 1-1 in the regulation 90 minutes.
Unbowed after losing 1-0 to Chelsea in May’s FA Cup final, United showed plenty of the attacking flair which had wrested the Premier League title from Mourinho’s men last season.
Ryan Giggs opened the scoring in the 35th minute, forwards Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney were a constant menace, while Patrice Evra made some penetrating runs down the left flank.
It was promising stuff, pending the return from injury of two United strikers, Louis Saha and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, and the impending debut of a third, Carlos Tevez.
United’s firepower will be further increased by two other newcomers, Brazilian midfielder Anderson and Portuguese winger Nani, a second half substitute in north London.
Add the tenacity of England holding midfielder Owen Hargreaves, who made his United debut in a pre-season friendly on Saturday, and the future looks bright for Ferguson’s side.
“We’ve identified the potential of a couple of players who we believe will eventually develop into top players in Nani and Anderson,” Ferguson purred.
“Tevez... has shown he could be one of the best strikers in the world.
“Hargreaves, with his experience of Europe and his speed, will definitely shore up the midfield in terms of defending, especially defending against a counter-attack.”
On top of that, Ferguson also has captain Gary Neville and playmaker Paul Scholes to come back from injury.
INJURY WORRIES
Tackling an improved United is going to be tough. But it will be tougher still if Chelsea have another year of injuries.
Captain and defensive pillar John Terry, keeper Petr Cech and wingers Arjen Robben and Joe Cole were out for long spells last term, while Didier Drogba kept them alive with 33 goals.
It was more of the same on Sunday with Terry and Drogba among nine absentees from a game which Chelsea began without a recognised striker.
The missing comprised forwards Drogba, Andriy Shevchenko and Salomon Kalou, midfielders Claude Makelele, Arjen Robben and Michael Ballack, plus defenders Terry, Paulo Ferreira and Wayne Bridge, while Frank Lampard played with a broken toe.
Fortunately, Chelsea are a resilient side. Michael Essien and John Obi Mikel make a formidable central barrier, and there was a promising goal from new French winger Florent Malouda.
But Chelsea never really looked as if they could overpower the champions, given the resources available. The season has yet to start and Mourinho already needs his luck to change.
TITLE: Alonso Feels Hamilton Factor
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BUDAPEST — As if they did not already have enough to worry about, Formula One leaders McLaren could face the real risk of Fernando Alonso walking out at the end of the season.
With the double world champion seemingly no longer on speaking terms with 22-year-old British rookie Lewis Hamilton after a turbulent Hungarian Grand Prix weekend, the speculation was rife.
“One thing’s for sure, Alonso won’t be at McLaren next year,” a senior figure at another team told Reuters at the Hungaroring.
While nothing is certain in Formula One, other than that there will always be intrigue and speculation, the sentiment was strong enough for team boss Ron Dennis to face questions about the Spaniard’s future.
“There is an inevitability that these things are rumoured and discussed in other teams,” he told reporters after a race that saw Alonso stripped of pole position and demoted five places on the starting grid. Hamilton, elevated to pole, led every lap and celebrated his third win in 11 races to go seven points clear of his disgruntled team mate.
He said afterwards that Alonso, who finished fourth, had not spoken to him since Saturday.
“We have two drivers who are contracted for several years into the future,” said Dennis, who pulled off a coup in signing Alonso from Renault at the end of 2005, with the Spaniard joining a year later.
“We will respect our part of that bargain and that part of the situation. We hope that the drivers respect theirs because that’s what a contract is about.”
MCLAREN SAVIOUR
Hamilton’s astonishing debut has unsettled the champion, who had hoped to arrive at McLaren as the saviour after a 2006 season without any wins for the Mercedes-powered team.
If he had hoped for number one status, he was sadly deceived. McLaren are big on parity between their drivers with no exceptions.
“It is a challenging situation to manage and I fully recognise that,” said Dennis, who has been fighting fires within and without after a spying controversy over leaked Ferrari information broke out last month.
“But that goes with my job. I have to take any decisions that are in the interests of the team.
“We are most definitely going to maintain a very firm commitment to our principle of equality.”
Alonso complained early in the season that he had yet to feel fully comfortable within the team and reports since then have suggested that the situation has deteriorated.
A Spanish flag in the crowd on Sunday summed up the feelings of many Spanish fans about their hero’s position — “McLaren=Traidor (Traitor)”.
If Alonso were to leave, the rumour-mill suggests that a return to struggling champions Renault would be the most likely option, although a sabbatical could be another.
Renault have yet to confirm their 2008 line-up and team boss Flavio Briatore made clear at the weekend that he was in no hurry to do so.
“I know nothing about that. We have never had any discussions about that,” Briatore said on Sunday when asked about the rumours.
“This is a McLaren problem, not mine.”
TITLE: Police Arrest the ‘French Spiderman’ for Climbing
AUTHOR: By Sofia Van Holle and Henrique Almeida
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LISBON — A French daredevil climber, who has scaled skyscrapers around the world, was arrested once again on Monday after reaching the top of a bridge overlooking Lisbon.
Alain Robert, 44, also known as the French Spiderman, used no ropes when he climbed the 190 metres over the Tagus River during rush hour on Monday. Robert said he had been arrested more than 100 times for climbing buildings.
“I’m still at the bridge with the police,” he told Reuters by phone after the climb. “It was a very difficult job because the wind was strong and the cables on the bridge kept on swinging.”
A helicopter hovered above Lisbon’s 25th of April bridge — similar to San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge — filming Robert for a documentary while hundreds of commuters looked up.
“I hope the documentary that is being filmed will land me some advertising contracts in the future,” the world’s most famous urban climber said.
Two policemen standing at the top of the pillar arrested Robert for trespassing. He will have to pay a fine of 120 euros before being released.
Robert first climbed a building at the age of 12 when he got locked out of his apartment and decided to mount the eight stories up to an open window.
He has since climbed more than 70 buildings around the world, including Chicago’s Sears Tower in 1999.
“I don’t see myself as risking my life,” he said in an interview before his latest climb. “Getting arrested isn’t fun but it shows people the values of freedom and courage.”
Robert was proclaimed 60-percent disabled after landing on his head from a 15-metre drop 25 years ago. Although he now suffers from epilepsy and vertigo, his confidence is unwavering.
“I learned to do things with my body as it is now. Most of my accidents happened long ago, I became a stronger climber because of them,” he said.
Asked whether he thought about retiring, Robert said: “I don’t think about it yet, I don’t want that pressure. While my body still works I’ll keep going.”
TITLE: Israeli, Palestinian Leaders Meet
AUTHOR: By Karin Laub
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERICHO, West Bank — Ehud Olmert on Monday became the first Israeli prime minister to visit a Palestinian town since the outbreak of fighting seven years ago, meeting under heavy guard with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to talk about the creation of a Palestinian state.
Olmert, who began his visit by saying he came to discuss “fundamental issues,” took a security risk in coming to the biblical desert town, but also gave a symbolic boost to Abbas, who stands to gain stature by hosting Olmert on his own turf.
Accompanied by two helicopters, Olmert arrived by motorcade at a five-star hotel just a few hundred yards from a permanent Israeli army checkpoint on the outskirts of Jericho. The two men embraced outside the hotel, with Olmert telling Abbas in English, “I’m delighted to see you.”
The meeting ended three hours later, and Olmert’s convoy left Jericho.
The meeting was held in one of the West Bank’s most peaceful areas. However, it posed a challenge to Olmert’s security detail, since Abbas’ security forces in the West Bank are still weak. Abbas’ troops failed to prevent Hamas militants from seizing the Gaza Strip by force in June.
The meeting also tested renewed Israeli-Palestinian security coordination in the West Bank, following the fall of Gaza to Hamas. The Israeli army sealed checkpoints around Jericho, while Palestinian police blocked roads around the hotel.
The Abbas-Olmert meeting is one in a series of sessions, meant to prepare for an international Mideast conference in the U.S. in November.
However, both sides appear to have conflicting expectations.
The Palestinians hope the two leaders will sketch the outlines of a final peace deal, to be presented to the U.S. conference, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Monday.
The four core issues of a future peace deal are the final borders of a Palestinian state, a division of Jerusalem, a removal of Israeli settlements, and the fate of Palestinian refugees.
“What they need to do is to establish the parameters for solving all these issues,” Erekat said. “Once the parameters are established, then it can be deferred to experts” for drafting.
However, Olmert suggested a slower pace.
“I came here in order to discuss with you the fundamental issues outstanding between Israel and the Palestinian Authority hoping that this will lead us soon into negotiations about the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said at the start of the talks, flanked by Israeli and Palestinian flags with Abbas standing beside him.
David Baker, an official in Olmert’s office, said the core issues would not be discussed now.
The leaders will discuss humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and Israeli security concerns, as well as the institutions of a future Palestinian state, Baker said.
Baker said the meeting is a signal of Israeli good will, adding that Olmert “intends for this to be a productive meeting to enable progress with the Palestinians.”
Both sides said the meeting will also deal with easing daily life in the West Bank, including the removal of some of the checkpoints erected after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000.
Abbas and Olmert previously agreed to try to restore the situation to what it was before the uprising, including returning full Palestinian control over West Bank towns and cities.
The Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday quoted Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as telling Israeli officials that his security forces aren’t ready yet to assume control of Palestinian towns. Fayyad’s aides were not immediately available for comment, but a senior Palestinian security official in the West Bank town of Bethlehem confirmed that assessment.
The Israeli military has been slow to dismantle roadblocks and ease control over Palestinian towns, citing concerns that Abbas’ forces are not strong enough to prevent attacks on Israelis.
Illustrating the issue, Olmert’s motorcade passed through one of the army’s checkpoints, at the entrance to Jericho. The checkpoint was erected after the outbreak of the uprising, and has controlled Palestinian traffic in and out of the town ever since, often causing long delays for motorists.
The Abbas-Olmert meeting place is surrounded by symbols of a bygone era of optimism, as well as the failures of peace talks. Across the street from the Intercontinental Hotel is the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, a reminder of a problem that has festered for decades.
The hotel was built in the late 1990s, when peace between Israelis and Palestinians appeared close. The hotel is next to the Oasis Casino, which opened at the same time. The casino was hugely popular with Israeli gamblers until the Israeli military prevented all Israelis from entering West Bank cities at the start of the uprising. Palestinian militants later used the building for exchanges of fire with nearby Israeli troops.
The last meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Palestinian soil was in 2000, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak held talks with Abbas’ predecessor, the late Yasser Arafat, in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Palestinians in Jericho appeared to have low expectations from Monday’s meeting.
Mahmoud Santarisi, 35, said he would be pleased if the meeting led to the removal of one Israeli checkpoint and allowed him to visit Jerusalem, off-limits because of Israeli security restrictions.
“We hope for a good life, to be able to go to Jerusalem, to make money, and live in peace together. But Israel and the Americans will never give us a state,” Santarisi said.
Monday’s meeting is part of a recent flurry of peace efforts sparked by Hamas’ takeover of Gaza in June, after a five-day rout of Abbas’ Fatah movement. The Hamas victory led Abbas to form a moderate government in the West Bank which has received broad international backing, while Hamas remains largely isolated in Gaza.
In an effort to shore up Abbas, Israel has released 250 Palestinian prisoners, resumed the transfer of Palestinian tax money and granted amnesty to Fatah gunmen willing to put down their weapons.
The efforts have also seen a visit to the region by new international Mideast peace envoy Tony Blair, an unprecedented visit by an Arab League delegation to present an Arab peace plan to Israel, and the U.S. plans for a regional conference.
In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri criticized Abbas for meeting Olmert, saying the meeting was “aimed at beautifying the ugly image of the Israeli occupation before the world.”
“All meetings will be of no benefit to the Palestinian people,” Abu Zuhri said.
TITLE: Johansson Ends Wait With Russian Open Win
AUTHOR: By Gennady Fyodorov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NAKHABINO, Russia — Sweden’s Per-Ulrik Johansson shot a final round five-under 67 to cruise to a six-stroke triumph at the rain-affected Russian Open on Sunday and clinch his first victory in a decade.
The 40-year-old, playing in only his third European Tour event this year, made five birdies to set a record lowest score for the tournament of 23-under-par 265 to better the mark of last year’s winner Alejandro Canizares of Spain by a stroke.
Dutchman Robert-Jan Derksen, who started the day four strokes behind Johansson, bogeyed the ninth after a flawless round on Saturday to finish second with a three-under 69 and a 271 total.
Scotland’s Alan McLean was third, a further stroke back.
“I haven’t won in 10 years so it feels incredible,” Johansson, who now has six titles, told a news conference.
“I played some good golf since then but I haven’t played this well so I’m very, very pleased.”
The former Ryder Cup player, whose last victory came in August 1997 when he successfully defended the European Open in Ireland, also boosted his bank account by 244,250 euros ($336,710) after earning just over 54,000 euros in 2007 before this event.
Bad weather disrupted the $2 million tournament over the first two days.
The organisers were forced to suspend play on Friday after a downpour drenched the course at the Moscow Country Club in suburban Nakhabino, waterlogging the greens and fairways.
Play was also stopped for more than three hours on Thursday.
Despite the nasty weather, Johansson was delighted with his short game.
“I think my putting was the best I’ve ever putted through a whole tournament. I can’t remember making that many putts,” he said.
“My long game was okay and I kept the ball in play but every time I got the ball on the green I felt like I had a chance for a birdie.”
The Swede, who earned a two-year Tour exemption with his victory, was not even disappointed that his sensational 62 on Friday did not count as a course record because of the flooded fairways.
“If I had to chose between the course record and winning I would take the win,” he said, adding that his victory was also an early birthday present for his eldest daughter Stella, who turns four on Monday.
TITLE: Male Flyer Has Violent Trip
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A former international rugby player was among the passengers who helped to subdue a man who became violent during a domestic flight Monday, police said.
The man apparently became agitated after failing to take his medication and attacked a nearby passenger as the flight from Auckland came in to land at Wellington, Sergeant Roly Gascoine said.
Other passengers, including former New Zealand All Black Ofisa Tonu’u, restrained the man for about 10 minutes and handed him over to police who were waiting when the airplane touched down, Gascoine said.
Tonu’u said the man began swearing and became violent toward the end of the trip. Tonu’u and another man forced the 42-year-old into a seat after seeing him throw punches at another male passenger.
“I managed to pin him down into this aisle seat and then launched myself on him and tried to restrain him from jumping at this guy,” he told National Radio.
He said he sat on the man until police arrived.
Gascoine said the man had not taken his prescription medicine, without providing details.
“He became increasingly agitated during the flight and ultimately assaulted a man sitting near him,” he said.
“The assault wasn’t so serious that there was a real danger to the flight, crew or passengers, but it obviously upset passengers.”
The man was detained by police so he could be assessed by mental health authorities.
TITLE: Potter Power
AUTHOR: By Victor Sonkin
TEXT: The “Harry Potter” books have long outgrown the realm of children’s literature, and their language is far from simple; there are relatively few readers in Russia able to tackle the English-language original. For the seventh and last book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” most will have to wait until December, when Sergei Ilyin and Maya Lakhuti will have translated it for Rosmen publishing house, the holder of the rights to the books in Russia. But there are other ways to get hold of it.
Less than 24 hours after the book’s release, major chunks of some chapters appeared on Russian-language web sites. These were the result of so-called “distributed translation,” when a text is divided between a large group of people. Both the quality and consistency of such translations can, of course, be criticized.
The trendsetter for Russian translations of the saga was Marina Litvinova, a professor of English at Moscow Linguistic University. After complaints about the first book’s translation, Rosmen hired her to translate books two through four. Litvinova’s attempts were verbose and didactic, and for the fifth installment the publishers employed a star team of the very best translators — Viktor Golyshev, Vladimir Babkov and Leonid Motylyov. It was much better, but for some reason the sixth book was again translated by a different team, Ilyin and Lakhuti. All five translators of the last three books had to follow Litvinova’s terminology and strict editorial control.
Several “Harry Potter” books were translated by mathematician Maria Spivak. She did it for fun and for her friends, but the texts soon found their way on to the Internet. Vivid and personal translations, they were considered by many fans to be the best. They were hunted down by Rowling’s attorneys, but for Spivak it was a career-changing opportunity — she is now working for major publishing houses.
In London, lines of fans camped by major downtown bookstores long before midnight last Friday, when the new book went on sale. Rowling hosted a mammoth reading at the Natural History Museum, and “Harry Potter” became the first book in a long time to reclaim the concept of an “opening night” from the theater and movie world.
At 3:01 a.m., exactly the same time as in London, the central Moscow bookstore Moskva opened its doors to Russian readers who couldn’t wait. Some celebrities were spotted, among them the prolific author Dmitry Bykov, who promised he would write a follow-up to the saga. The book sold for 1,001 rubles, more than double the price it costs in London.
TITLE: Cruz Smith Still Writing in Stalin’s Shadow
AUTHOR: By Jon Fasman
TEXT: What does a successful crime novel do? What does a successful mystery do?
A provisional distinction between the two genres might be this: A crime novel focuses on the setting — the city and the neighborhoods, sure, but also the social networks — in which the crime was committed; it tends to be, as George Pelecanos, a master crime novelist but not really a mystery writer, said, a “whydunit” rather than a “whodunit.”
Mystery refers to plot: Something happened; what really happened isn’t what appears to have happened; and our protagonist must figure out who did it and why, while overcoming social, intellectual and personal obstacles.
Martin Cruz Smith made his blockbusting name in both genres at once with his 1981 novel “Gorky Park,” which worked as both a crime novel and a mystery: In the former role, it evoked to its readers a milieu — late Brezhnev-era Moscow, in all its dreary, crumbling, imposing, beautiful, stagnant human glory — and in the latter, it was powered by a lean and shimmering plot.
Better still, it had at its center a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist in the police investigator Arkady Renko.
Dogged, beleaguered, honest and wry, Renko was forever on the political outs with his superiors. Smith also gave Renko a personal demon in the form of his father, a Soviet general and favorite of Josef Stalin who rose to prominence using precisely the sort of ruthlessness, political manipulation and indifference that the son lacked. Renko was a recognizably Western archetype (“Western” as in non-Russian, but also “Western” as in cowboy hat and six-shooter: Gary Cooper in a fur hat) through which American readers were allowed behind the Iron Curtain.
Through his investigations we saw Moscow at street level, and if that seems unremarkable in 2007 (particularly to readers of The Moscow Times), in 1981, in the American Midwest, say, it was nothing short of revolutionary.
Everything about “Gorky Park” ran contrary to the Reaganite worldview: The villain was a wealthy American; Renko’s superiors were sybarites who cared less about ideology than about their position at the trough.
And Renko, when faced with the choice at the book’s end whether to defect or return to the system he so obviously (but quietly) hated, went home.
It is a testament to Smith’s literary skill that all of this seemed believable: Nothing was preachy or staged, and there wasn’t a soapbox in sight.
He balanced plot and atmosphere (no mean feat) well enough to make an easy transition to film, which, though horribly miscast (William Hurt is far too self-regarding and placid for the hangdog Renko, and Lee Marvin too rough and virile for the moneyed Osborne) and shot not in Moscow but in Helsinki, at least benefited from a Dennis Potter script.
Both book and film have held up well.
As has Renko himself: “Stalin’s Ghost” is the sixth Renko novel and a sort of bookend for Smith. “Polar Star” saw Renko exiled to a Soviet trawler in the Bering Sea for his sins in “Gorky Park”; “Red Square” put him in Moscow in 1991’s fateful August; in “Havana Bay” he traveled to a Cuba with a Soviet hangover; he visited Chernobyl in “Wolves Eat Dogs”. In “Stalin’s Ghost,” Renko returns to Moscow, where corruption is born no longer of Soviet political stagnation but of the opportunism of modern Russia.
The title refers both to a literal apparition, which may or may not have appeared on a Metro platform as an evening train pulled out, and to the immanent figurative specter of the butcher that hangs, unexpurgated and unreckoned with, over every development in Russian history that followed him.
Eight people on the last car of the last train of the night saw the actual ghost (or the supposedly actual ghost, as opposed to the metaphor) waving from the platform of Chistye Prudy station. Six of the eight witnesses were pensioners; a recurring motif in this book, in Smith’s work generally, and in Russia itself is the positive recollections older Russians have of Soviet times.
The other two were a filmmaker (a down-at-heel pornographer, actually) and a girl besotted with him, and these two were, of course, the most certain and the most vocal.
When Renko is called to the scene, his boss, Zurin, recites perfectly the position of Russian officialdom (and probably many Russians too) toward Stalin:
“Stalin is a figure of undeniable historical significance, who continues to draw positive and negative reactions, but there is no reason to make him responsible for every mistake we make.”
When Renko visits the subway platform late one night to see if the ghost will pop up yet again, he finds two Americans (identifiable by their “parkas as round and bright as hot-air balloons”) who seem to be orchestrating the scene. They are freelance political consultants to a shadowy party called Russian Patriot.
Renko says it sounds like a communist front, but his ardently communist friend Platonov disagrees: “They sound like us, that’s the idea. The Kremlin brought in Americans. The Americans polled people and asked which political figure they most admired. The answer was Stalin. They asked why, and the answer was that Stalin was a Russian patriot. Then they asked people if they would vote for a party called Russian Patriot, which didn’t even exist. Fifty percent said they would. So the Kremlin put Russian Patriot on the ballot.”
A few sentences later, Smith shows Platonov stopping to catch his breath. This is a hallmark of Smith’s dialogue, and it works beautifully:
His characters sometimes tend to declaim, announce or explain rather than talk, but anytime they do that, Smith softens it with a show of humanity. One might be tempted to call it a trick if it didn’t work so consistently well.
The question that drives the book, then, is what is Russian Patriot. Who is fronting them, and why?
The investigation takes Renko to Tver, and allows Smith to discourse on questions of appearance versus reality and the danger of manipulating image and history for political gain.
These questions matter not just in Russia, whose president has shown himself to be an ardent devotee of media consolidation and manipulation, but in Smith’s home country, whose president has shown himself no less adept at the packaging and sale of lies and half-truths.
To Smith’s credit, he never devolves from a storyteller into a preacher; he shows rather than tells, and he doesn’t have a message so much as a wry shake of the head.
It’s a dangerous thing to call a novel relevant, because it sounds like an appeal to something beyond the writing and plot; relevant as the book is, Smith needs no such recommendation.
It is a pleasure to see Renko back on his home turf.
Long may he mope.
Jon Fasman is the author of the novel “The Geographer’s Library,” an online editor for The Economist, and writes about books, food and travel.