SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1300 (63), Friday, August 24, 2007
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TITLE: Opposition Party Faces Threat Of Eviction
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The local branch of the liberal party Yabloko announced it is under an immediate threat to be evicted from its headquarters in central St. Petersburg that the organization has rented for the past 14 years.
Maxim Reznik, head of the party's local branch, said that the City Hall's Property Committee has been ignoring Yabloko's attempts to prolong the deal.
Yabloko's previous 10-year contract with the City Hall expired in May 2006. 
“All our letters remain unanswered,” Reznik said. “It is a clear sign that the authorities are looking for alternative tenants. Making us nervous about the rent — we are aware of the fact that it can now be terminated any time — is an attempt of psychological pressure, nearing the nationwide parliamentary elections in December and a series of opposition protests planned for this fall.”
Yabloko offices are located at 46 Ulitsa Mayakovskogo in the historical city center.
The politician said it had been hinted to party activists that the building is to be sold into private hands and turned into a hotel, or handed over to a realtor. All attempts to clarify the situation via official channels of communication with City Hall have failed, Reznik said.
Boris Vishnevsky, a member of Yabloko's political council said the party sees the hand of Governor Valentina Matviyenko in the rental issue. 
“We have always paid our rent on time, and been careful tenants, so the authorities simply cannot fail us in this respect,” he said. “But what does annoy City Hall is that our headquarters are among less than a handful of remaining venues where the opposition and the people whose activities challenge the authorities, can gather.”
The St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko had in spring called for a city-wide referendum on the construction of a controversial new building to be the headquarters of Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant. 
In December 2006, a group of Yabloko lawmakers from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly sent a letter of protest to the General Prosecutor’s Office, asking that the legitimacy of the architectural contest held to select the plan for the tower and the deal between the city and Gazprom be investigated. According to the law, the Prosecutor’s Office is obliged to answer a parliamentarian inquiry within a month but no reply has been sent from Russia’s Prosecutor General Yury Chaika or his office.
Yabloko’s crusade against the tower is not over. The party is one of the main organizers of the forthcoming March for the Preservation of the Historical Center of St. Petersburg, scheduled for Sept. 8. 
These initiatives have irked City Hall and Matviyenko, who has thrown her weight behind the ambitious Gazprom tower project.
City Hall has avoided the question of whether the authorities are considering alternative tenants for the venue. On Wednesday, Interfax news agency quoted a spokesman for the City Property Committee as saying that “no official correspondence documenting the termination of the rent contract has been sent to Yabloko, and therefore any immediate eviction is out of the question.”
Yabloko’s lawyer, Olga Pokrovskaya, said Russian legislation makes it possible to terminate a rental agreement between a city administration and the tenant organization. In cases like this the authorities have to send a written note to the organization renting office space. 
“In our case, this was not done, and so, technically speaking our rental agreement is still valid, despite the fact that we do not have any documents in our hands confirming our rights,” the lawyer said. 'So far, so good.”

TITLE: Moscow Air Show Takes To The Skies
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — At the opening of the MAKS 2007 air show, half a dozen bewildered delegates from Italian industrial group Finnmeccanica sheepishly boarded a barely marked shuttle bus as the temperature was rising and their patience running thin.
As the driver pulled away, he veered as if to head in the opposite direction from the main event.
“Please,” yelled one of the exasperated Italians, “if he’s taking us back to the entrance again, someone just shoot him.”
On Wednesday, the second day of the air show, that irritation was palpable from many foreign participants and visitors. While organizers have boasted that MAKS deserves a place in the big league of international air shows, words like “amateur” and “bizarre” were more common in assessments coming from foreigners.
The most common complaints ranged from poor transport links and inadequate infrastructure to ponderous security checks, bad food and revolting public toilets.
A number of prominent officials, including Sergei Chemezov, the head of state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, have credited MAKS with climbing into the ranks of major international air shows like France’s Le Bourget and Britain’s Farnborough. This year’s event is the biggest ever, and with almost 800 companies from nearly 40 countries, foreign participation is up by almost 50 percent.
The size and scope of the event have been a constant selling point for Russian officials, who have pushed it as a symbol of a resurgent aviation industry. Alexei Fyodorov, head of the newly formed, state-run United Aircraft Corporation, said last week that the country would sell $250 billion worth of military and civilian aircraft over the next 18 years.
But some representatives of foreign firms warn that the list of inconveniences faced by participants could scuttle Russian attempts to sell both itself and its aircraft to Western investors.
“It is amateur,” said Nathalie Merand, a spokeswoman for Brazilian plane manufacturer Embraer, just as the backlighting at the company’s stand failed. “An air show is about business, and this is more like a public holiday.”
“It is very expensive to be here and it is not worth it,” Merand said, listing problems from a flooded stand to a lack of overall coordination.
Another Embraer representative, who asked not to be identified, said the company was weighing whether it was interested in returning to the next MAKS event in two years. Complaining about the poor food and arbitrary document checks by police, he said he “did not know whether to throw up or urinate” in the free portable toilets.
“All this is a very bizarre contrast to the claims that it is on the same level as Farnborough or Le Bourget,” said an official with another foreign firm. “They always claim that this is the best MAKS, but it might actually be the worst.”
Anna Abarshalina, head of communications for MAKS 2007, said she was aware of the complaints, but that senior event officials were unavailable for comment Wednesday afternoon.
The biggest gripe was getting to the site, with some participants saying it had taken up to seven hours to travel the approximately 40 kilometers from Moscow to the Zhukovsky airfield.
“They should at least have a separate entrance for the people running the exhibits,” EADS spokesman Gregor Von Kursell said. “They shouldn’t make them queue up with children and grandmothers and the toilet cleaners.”
Temperatures approaching the mid-30s didn’t help the moods of exhibitors as they were forced to wait in line. But as the air show is an obvious target for a possible terrorist attack, most said some delays were understandable.
Francois Roudier, vice president of the Le Bourget air show, described traffic and lines for security checks at the French event as a “nightmare” for organizers there as well. He said MAKS was relatively young at 15; the Le Bourget show is in its 98th year. “Crowd control can always be better,” Roudier said by telephone from Paris. “There will be solutions in years to come.” Amanda Stainer, Farnborough International’s director of exhibitions and events, said traffic snarls were a problem that organizers of the British show had been forced to address in the past.
“We got a working group together and agreed on a plan with the authorities,” Stainer said in a telephone interview. “It was a really coordinated effort.”
Measures that helped improve the traffic situation at Farnborough included limiting thoroughfares on the way to the site to one-way traffic and establishing separate lanes for buses.
Some participants were more positive about the event once inside. Rolls-Royce representative Dave Gould said that even though it took taken him five hours to get from his hotel to his stand, the event went well. “Once you’re in here, then it’s OK,” Gould said.
He said MAKS was more on a level with smaller air shows, like one in Beijing, but the rapid expansion in the Russian market meant that it was unlikely foreign businesses would be put off.
And with shashlik stands, myriad fast food, souvenir stalls and even a giant hot air balloon in the shape of a can of Baltika beer, the event had the air of a carnival or championship sports event.

Staff Writer Catrina Stewart contributed to this report.

TITLE: End in Sight for ‘Khrushchyovki’ Houses
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Hundreds of St. Petersburg’s infamous Khrushchyovki residential buildings are to be demolished, City Hall said on Thursday, in a plan that may begin by the end of this year. 
Residents of the identikit five-story blocks, named after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who pioneered their construction in the 1950s to solve a post-War housing crisis, will be moved to new flats as close as possible to their original residences, officials said. 
The plan is due to be ready for the governmental review this fall, Anna Mironova, spokesperson for the City Hall’s Construction Committee, told the St. Petersburg Times on Thursday. 
“The renovation project will begin by putting up certain areas for tender. By winning the tender, the investor receives right to reconstruct the buildings… and the project document that is being prepared at the moment aims to state that the residents must be relocated to territories as close as possible to where they used to live,” Mironova said.
“The regeneration itself will be done as follows: an investor comes to a neighborhood, then erects a new residential building, moves people from the building to be demolished to the new building, and only after that the demolition begins,” Mironova said.
But not everyone is happy with the proposed plan. 
Although so-called “wave relocation,” a practice when people are moved to newly built housing in close proximity to their old residences has already proved successful in Moscow, it will not work in St. Petersburg, Daniil Seledchik, the head of law department of Etalon-LenspetsSMU said.
Rate of return on investment in St. Petersburg is much lower than in Moscow and investors will not be interested in building a single building in a little empty area found in the regeneration zone, Seledchik said.   
Sergei Andreyev, the founder of a group that is “for protection of the rights of the citizens residing in the first wave of mass housing,” said the idea is doomed to fail.
“Firstly, the investors taking part in the auction have to bid, and therefore pay a lot of money only so that they are allowed to take part in the matter,” Andreyev, who is also a former deputy of Legislative Assembly, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
“They have to go through up to 20 different agreement procedures, and as a result, now pay attention; they are granted the right to relocate people only from the privatized apartments. The residents of the state-owned flats in the same block building have to be dealt with by City Hall,” he said. 
Andreyev believes that “this will result in a major collapse of this plan” as the relocation rates in both cases might greatly differ. Those who own their flats have to get the same number of square meters of space (the usual measure of property size and value), but those living in the state-owned accommodation are to get nine to twelve square-meters-per-person. 
“They will torture the investor, refuse to relocate and endlessly litigate,” said Andreyev.
According to statistics his organization has collated, there are 100 neighborhoods in St. Petersburg with a total of 2,400 Khrushchyovka buildings. Many of them are in a dangerous condition and need urgent renovation. Built in the 1950s and 1960s, they were only meant to last for 25 years. 
Of the 31 neighborhoods slated for renovation, only two (Kubinskaya Ulitsa and the area on the corner of Leninsky Prospekt and Ulitsa Narodnogo Opolcheniya) are more or less ready, he said. “The rest will not be dealt with within two years.”

TITLE: British Jets Shadow a Russian Bomber
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Royal Air Force jets shadowed a Russian strategic bomber that approached British airspace, Britain’s Defense Ministry said.
The incident occurred Friday, the same day that President Vladimir Putin placed strategic bombers back on long-range patrol for the first time since the Soviet breakup.
Britain’s Defense Ministry issued two photographs Tuesday on its web site showing one of the two British Typhoon F2s flying near the Tu-95 strategic bomber over the northern Atlantic Ocean.
The ministry provided few details about where and why this happened, but the Tu-95 apparently was in international airspace and approaching Britain’s skies when it was shadowed.
Air Force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky said Wednesday that the pilots had not “invaded anyone else’s airspace, and there was nothing aggressive in their action,” RIA-Novosti reported.
Drobyshevsky said the Air Force routinely notifies foreign officials in advance of long-range patrol flights. “There is no saber rattling,” he said.
Menzies Campbell, leader of Britain’s opposition Liberal Democrats, expressed concern about the photos on the web site. “These pictures convey disturbing echoes of the Cold War,” he said in a statement.
Last month, two Russian bombers briefly entered British airspace but turned back after British fighter jets intercepted them. On Friday, Putin announced that 20 strategic bombers had been sent far over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans — showing off Moscow’s muscular new posture.
Eleven Russian military planes, including strategic bombers and fighter jets, carried out maneuvers west of NATO member Norway on Friday, the Norwegian military said. Norway sent F-16 fighter jets to observe and photograph the Russian planes.
AP, SPT

TITLE: Channel One Gets Ready For Duma-Election Season
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Little more than three months before the parliamentary elections, Channel One has hired a television executive linked to United Russia to oversee its election coverage.
Opposition politicians said the appointment not only dashed their slim hopes of objectivity in pre-election television coverage but also showed tacit support of nationalism in the Kremlin. They promised to complain to the Central Elections Commission.
Andrei Pisarev, formerly head of small Moscow-based Channel Three television, was appointed to the newly created post of deputy director general in charge of elections coverage by Channel One chief Konstantin Ernst in late July, a Channel One spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Kommersant first reported the development Wednesday.
Repeated attempts to reach Pisarev for comment were unsuccessful. Pisarev told Kommersant that he was not a member of United Russia.
Pisarev, however, has been credited with advising United Russia on several initiatives, including the pro-Kremlin party’s Russian Project. The project, unveiled in February, is ostensibly aimed to promote Russian culture and language in a series of conferences across the country, but it is seen by many as an attempt to steal the nationalist vote.
“It is the Kremlin’s approval of nationalist ideology,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, deputy head of the liberal Yabloko party.
He condemned Pisarev’s appointment as an example of “the insolence of the authorities” and said Yabloko would ask the Central Elections Commission to investigate the “illegal” recruitment.
“After all, television itself determines the election result,” he said.
The Channel One spokeswoman, Larisa Krymova, said the appointment was made for “purely professional” reasons not connected to Pisarev’s political sympathies. “Pisarev is a well-known, professional director who has worked with Channel One on more than one occasion,” Krymova said.
Pisarev played a key role in Channel One’s coverage of the funeral of former President Boris Yeltsin in April, Kommersant said.
Pisarev also has covered numerous Russian Orthodox events. Before heading Channel Three, he led the Orthodox Television Information Agency.
Channel Three representatives declined immediate comment, asking that questions be sent by fax.
United Russia spokesman Konstantin Mikhailov said he was unaware of the appointment. Asked whether Pisarev was indeed a party adviser, he said, “Ask Mr. Pisarev yourself.”
United Russia dominates the State Duma, holding 305 of the 446 seats.

TITLE: Party Web Sites Hacked In Run-up to Elections
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With a week left before the start of the pre-election campaigning for the Russian Duma or the Lower House of Parliament elections scheduled for Dec. 2, signs of irregularities appeared this week as web sites of two opposition parties were hacked in what one of the party’s leaders says was pre-election sabotage. 
“In this incident I see the beginning of the election campaign,” said Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a leader of the  nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) in reference to the hacking of his party’s web site. The Yabloko party’s web site was also attacked on the same night, although it was not immediately clear if the incidents were related.
Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg regional Yabloko party has complained that the City Hall’s Property Committee (KUGI) was yet to extend the rental contract of the office building on 46 Ulitsa Mayakovskogo since its expiry in May last year. 
But Yabloko received good news in St. Petersburg on Wednesday when the city Election Commission gave the go ahead for it to take part in the elections, together with Kremlin-backed parties United Russia and a Just Russia. The Communist Party is taking part according to legislation governing electoral participation.
The law, passed in December 2005, bans independent candidates and stipulates a political party may be warned, fined, disqualified or have its registration nullified if it fails to submit to the election commission its quarterly audit report indicating about its finances.
However, according to the St. Petersburg Election Commission’s chief of the audit department Alexei Gromov, “no serious violations in financial operations, except some delays in submitting the report or short of it were detected” in the past two quarterly reports among the 22 parties participating.
The parties that entirely failed to submit audits include Russian Democratic Party, Social Democratic Party of Russia, Russian People’s Democratic Party, People’s Party of Russia and the Freedom and People’s Power Party. They are among the dozen that were either warned or fined by the election commission for either not submitting the reports or having no funds at all.
Reporting more than 9.3 million rubles ($360,000) in its regional bank account, United Russia is on top of the list of 10 parties that made money in the first six months of the year. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation with 7.8 million rubles ($303,000) is followed by Just Russia party (3.7 million rubles, $144,000), Yabloko (1.4 million rubles, $54,000), the Socialist United Party of Russia (210,000 rubles, $8,161) and Union of the Right Forces (128,000 rubles, $4,974).
The Green and the Conceptual Party of Unity are the lowest earners with virtually a symbolic amount of 21,000 rubles ($816) in their bank account. But LDPR is one of the nine parties that neither earned nor spent during the six-month period.
However, in line with the law, restrictions will be tightened in the upcoming pre-election campaign, Dmitry Krasnyansky, the deputy head of the St. Petersburg Election Commission told journalists on Wednesday. 
“A person caught campaigning without an official consent of the party he campaigns for or doing it after the permitted duration has ended, in the form of placards, banners or concerts, he will held responsible for the offense instead of the party,” he said. 
He also said “the Election Commission will be closely monitoring the media to avoid non-sanctioned agitation even if it will cost us dearly,” but added that journalists will be given the right to monitor the election and vote counts at polling stations. 
Meanwhile, plans are underway to introduce special voting identity cards to be used with national passports to avoid flaws in future elections, said Krasnyansky.

TITLE: Greenpeace Invites Governor for Trip
AUTHOR: By Isabel Stone
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko has turned down the chance to see for herself the extent of pollution in St. Petersburg’s waterways after environmental group Greenpeace invited her to take part in an inspection of the Neva in one of its boats. 
Dmitry Artamonov, the St. Petersburg director of the environmental organization, said he had invited  Matviyenko on the trip so that “ ...she will be able to satisfy herself that the catastrophic pollution of the rivers with sewage is not a figment of ecologists’ imaginations,” Regnum.ru reported on Wednesday. 
 “We want Matviyenko to be able to see the situation with her own eyes, and smell it with her own nose,” Artamonov added.
Greenpeace said it sent the invitation to Matviyenko on Wednesday, asking her to participate in a boat trip planned for Monday. 
The activists intended to show Matviyenko the most problematic and putrid sewage discharge sites, explain the results of recent research into the problem and make suggestions as to what measures should be taken to improve the situation. 
“This is a concern for all people living in St. Petersburg, therefore Valentina Matviyenko should turn her full attention to the problem of the uncontrolled dumping of untreated sewage waste,” Artamonov said.
In the invitation to Matviyenko, Artamonov wrote: “Our vessel will be waiting for you on August 27, 2007 at 10:30 on the pier where the Smolny Embankment and Ulitsa Smolnaya intersect.”
But Matviyenko’s press spokesman Natalia Kutobayeva said Thursday that the governor will not join the inspection.
“Unfortunately, Matvienko will not be able to attend,” Kutobayeva said. “She is always very busy on Mondays and she has already got other appointments arranged.”
Although Greenpeace said they contacted Matviyenko directly by sending her the invitation on Wednesday, Kutobayeva denied receiving any invitation, saying that it was a pity that Greenpeace had communicated with the governor only through the media.  
Greenpeace launched a new project to clean-up St. Petersburg’s waterways called “A Clean Neva” at the beginning of June.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Soldier goes AWOL</b>
LENINGRAD OBLAST (SPT) — A search was launched on Thursday in the Leningrad Oblast to locate a fugitive soldier in possession of a Kalashnikov machine gun, Regnum.ru reported. 
The soldier had been working on contract for the Ministry of Defense in the Vyborg region when he went missing. He is reported to have left the warehouse where he was working on Wednesday night, taking the gun with him. 

<b>20% on Booze</b>
LENINGRAD OBLAST (SPT) — The governor of the Leningrad Oblast, Valery Serdyukov, said at a conference of the regional government on Thursday, that residents of the region spend, on average, 20 percent of their incomes on alcohol, Regnum.ru reported.
The governor believes that the purchasing of such quantities of alcohol is reducing people’s chances of improving their standard of living, by preventing them from buying new places to live and participating in mortgage programs.
Serdyukov mentioned that people consuming this quantity of alcohol are spending more of their incomes on drink than on other commodities.
The average expenditure on housing and public utilities comprises on average only 16 percent of a resident’s income.

<b>TV Celeb in Rape Case</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — A court sentenced a popular member of the television quiz show “Chto? Gde? Kogda?” to a suspended sentence of 4 1/2 years Wednesday for rape and illegal imprisonment, Gazeta.ru reported.
The performer, Georgy Zharkov, 41, was convicted of keeping a 19-year-old man locked in a rented apartment in the city of Vladimir and forcing him to have sex in November 2004, the report said. The captive, identified only as Alexander, escaped the 10th-floor apartment by tying sheets into a rope and climbing out of a window. He slipped while descending, falling on an Audi sedan parked below, seriously damaging it.

TITLE: Air Firms Open Their Wings
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — The country plans to secure at least 10 percent of the world airliner market with new passenger jets that it hopes will lift its aviation industry out of its post-Soviet slump, Igor Shevchuk, the president of plane maker Tupolev, said Wednesday at the MAKS 2007 air show.
“We aspire to 10 percent of the world market,” Shevchuk said.
“Our strategic task is to take third place among the world’s aircraft-producing countries by 2015 to 2018,” said Shevchuk, who is also an executive of giant state-controlled holding United Aviation Corporation.
Shevchuk said Tupolev was developing a midrange passenger plane that would have domestic or foreign-made engines and another wide-bodied passenger plane with a range of 5,000 kilometers, able to carry up to 270 people.
“The preliminary market for such an airline is evaluated by specialists at about 200 planes,” he said. He gave no further details about the planes.
Sukhoi’s general director, Mikhail Pogosyan, said he would have 100 firm orders for the Sukhoi Superjet 100, the best hope for the country’s civil aviation industry, by the end of 2007.
“I can guarantee that, by the end of the year, solid contracts with foreign buyers will be signed,” he said.
State-run Sukhoi, which like Tupolev is part of the UAC, will deliver more than 50 military planes to the international market, as well as 20 planes to the Air Force, he said.
ItAli, an airline based in the Italian town of Pescara, was the first western firm to order Sukhoi’s Superjet 100. It placed an order in June for 10 planes, with an option for 10 more, for $283 million.
Pogosyan did not announce any new orders at a news conference during the air show.
Sukhoi on Tuesday announced a $300 million deal to supply six new fighter jets — three Su-30 and three Su-27 planes — to Indonesia, in addition to four fighter jets already delivered.
Pogosyan said he expected this year to take about 100 orders for the Superjet 100, a plane being developed together with U.S. aviation giant Boeing capable of carrying 75 to 95 passengers and due to take to the skies by the end of 2007. Domestic airlines Aeroflot and Air Union are the main buyers to date of the Superjet 100.
Sukhoi and Alenia Aeronautica, a unit of Italian defense group Finmeccanica, which holds a stake of 25 percent plus one share in Sukhoi Civil Aircraft, also announced a joint venture to sell and service the Superjet 100.
Alenia will hold 51 percent of the Venice-based venture, which will be responsible for promoting the midrange jetliner in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, the two companies said in a statement. Russia will market the craft in the former Soviet Union and the rest of Asia.
Sukhoi has firm orders for 71 of the planes and expects to have 100 by the end of the year, boosting its order book to more than $2 billion. 
The Superjet range of planes will compete against models from Brazil’s Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica and Montreal-based Bombardier, the only current makers of jet airliners with fewer than 100 seats.

n Ilyushin Finance agreed to sell aircraft to airlines in Iran and Cuba, Interfax reported from the signing ceremonies at MAKS 2007 on Wednesday.
Iran Air Tour will buy five Tu-204 midrange airliners for delivery starting in 2009 under a contact valued at more than $200 million, the agency reported. 
Cuba’s Aviaimport signed a memorandum of understanding to buy two Tu-204s and three An-148 regional jets for more than $150 million on behalf of state-owned Cubana De Aviacion, Interfax said. The aircraft will be delivered between 2008 and 2011, Interfax said. 

Reuters, Bloomberg

TITLE: Rolf Rolls Out Second-Hand Car Assistance
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The growing market for foreign second-hand cars has finally caught the attention of major dealers. By helping customers to sell-off their old cars, dealers will take a healthy commission or, better still, sell them a new replacement. 
In June the Rolf group of companies began offering assistance in the sale, acquisition and exchange of second-hand Mitsubishi Lancer and Mitsubishi Outlander models. The project, called BlueFish, was originally launched in three car centers in Moscow.
“The project is developing faster than we expected. Already in August all six of Rolf’s Moscow centers joined the BlueFish project. And now we are opening a center in St. Petersburg,” Grigory Ratz, director of BlueFish company, a subsidiary of Rolf, said Tuesday at a press conference.
Ratz hopes to occupy a specific niche, offering civilized, safe and personalized services. Besides technical diagnostics, presale repairs and a car’s legal history, Rolf will provide the buyer with recommendation on further repairs for the next 7,000 kilometers of driving.
Cars are checked according to 49 parameters. Pricing is clear and unified for any Rolf center. To give an indication, prices can be calculated on the Rolf web site. At the moment BlueFish has 400 cars in its portfolio. From them, 200 clients have ordered new cars in exchange for their old ones. Over 100 clients have already bought used cars.
Rolf plans to go national with the project, and is looking for regional partners. The company also plans to include other Mitsubishi models and add all the other brands distributed by Rolf in Russia. In St. Petersburg the company is using the Rolf-Carline dealership to start with, and later plans to add other centers.
Ratz said the response from customers has been positive. He plans to reduce the time needed for presale repairs from six to two days. At the moment the used cars are sold nine days after they first appear in the showroom. Ratz expects this period to fall to just three days. He plans to break even by the end of the year, by which time the company also wants to offer a guarantee for the servicing of used cars.
Rolf is not the only company focusing on this market segment. Renault offers similar services in its centers. Renault dealers issue certificates checking used cars on the basis of 82 parameters and investigating their legal history. Used Renault cars are available in three centers in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg and also in six other Russian cities.
Besides car dealers, a number of companies specialize in sales of used cars. One example is Moscow-based company Renaissance Auto, which offers assistance in the sale, acquisition and exchange of any brand as well as free of charge parking and presale repairs.
The company offers prepayment of up to 50 percent of the car’s value, diagnostics and loans, registration in the police’s car database and insurance services.
“Our company was founded in 2000 to unify in one car center a range of services that allow our clients to solve, quickly and efficiently, any problem with the sale or acquisition of any used car starting from the cheapest models produced at the end of 1980s and going up to recent prestigious foreign cars regardless of the car’s class, model or producer,” said Andrey Yerastov, general director of Renaissance Auto.
According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Russian car market accounted for $32 billion last year. Sales of new imported cars totaled $18.2 billion and sales of used imported cars totaled $3.6 billion. Overall sales of automobiles in all categories passed the two million car mark.
Stanley Root, partner and head of PwC automotive practice, forecast that by 2010 the imports of foreign cars will drop to as low as about 40,000 cars a year while the market for used cars will increase to $11 billion (about 900,000 used cars will be available by that time).
However the used car market lacks sales infrastructure. The absence of any equivalent to the UK Glass Guide makes pricing a voluntary decision. Development of the market is also hindered by high taxation.
The PwC survey indicates that the growth achieved in 2006 in the automotive market may stall somewhat in the coming years due to insufficient investment in market infrastructure.

TITLE: Russia Sees IMF Czech Mate
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia on Wednesday nominated Josef Tosovsky, a former Czech prime minister and central bank chief, to run the International Monetary Fund, but the Czech government immediately disowned his candidacy.
The announcement confirms news that broke Tuesday and brings a second contender into the race to head the global lender after the European Union proposed France’s former finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
But the demarche appeared to backfire as the Czech Republic — which broke away from the Soviet orbit in 1989 and joined the EU in 2004 — repudiated Tosovsky’s candidacy and instead endorsed Strauss-Kahn.
“Tosovsky is not the Czech Republic’s candidate,” Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra said through an assistant.
The Kremlin denied that it was playing politics by proposing Tosovsky, who headed the Czech central bank from 1990 to 2000 and was drafted in by then-President Vaclav Havel as caretaker prime minister during a political crisis in 1997.
“Tosovsky’s candidacy, backed by a number of states, has been proposed for professional reasons,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “The nomination is in no way aimed against Strauss-Kahn.”
The Finance Ministry did not say which other countries had backed Tosovsky’s candidacy, instead describing the economist as “the right person, in the right place, at the right time.” 
“We held broad consultations with our colleagues from other countries and are convinced that a majority of them support the election of the fund’s managing director on a competitive basis,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement. The nomination reflects a desire on the part of big emerging market nations to break a duopoly under which the EU chooses the head of the IMF while the United States picks the boss of its sister institution, the World Bank.
Tosovsky accepted the nomination, saying, “I am pleased that my proposed nomination received a positive reaction from finance ministers and governors of several countries from all regions.”
Tosovsky now chairs the Financial Stability Institute in Switzerland, a branch of the Bank for International Settlements, but is no longer viewed as an establishment figure in Prague.
The IMF job fell vacant in July after the sudden resignation of Rodrigo Rato, who was in the midst of reforming the fund to boost its monitoring of the world economy and give greater voting clout to emerging powers like China. 
The selection process is due to be completed by Aug. 31, after which the IMF board will decide who gets to head up the Washington-based institution.
The dissonance between Moscow and Prague on the IMF race may reflect strains over plans by the United States to site an anti-missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, diplomats said.

TITLE: China Courts Turkmens, Russia Pressurized
AUTHOR: By Chen Aizhu and Tom Miles
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — China is hedging against a slow-going Russian gas deal by aggressively pushing for imports from Turkmenistan, which could force Moscow to accept Beijing’s price demands or watch its Asian strategy unravel.
China’s plan to buy 30 billion cubic meters of Turkmen gas per year — more than half its current consumption — shows Beijing is as ready as its resource-rich northern neighbor to play pipeline politics to its own advantage.
At stake in the tussle are multibillion-dollar, long-term gas sales contracts for Gazprom and a more diverse supply of cleaner fuel for China’s economic juggernaut, now running mostly on coal.
“Moscow has long used the prospect of selling gas to China as a bargaining tool in price negotiations with Europe. Turkmenistan has taken a cue from this playbook and is looking to tap the China market as a hedge against Russia, its sole market,” said Trevor Houser, of New York-based China Strategic Advisory. 
“China knows how to hedge its bets too.”
The involvement of China National Petroleum Corporation, the state energy firm, in detailed commercial discussions shows Beijing is serious about the deal as it seeks to meet gas demand expected to triple to 200 bcm per year by 2020, with domestic production providing 120 bcm.
Given Beijing’s reluctance to pay for costlier liquefied natural gas, Moscow grew confident that its offer of another 60-80 bcm would be impossible to turn down, analysts say.
“They were a little bit arrogant and pompous with regard to exporting their gas to China. China didn’t appreciate that,” said Keun-Wook Paik at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. 
“Beijing’s stance was: We’ve been waiting very patiently, but if you don’t deliver what we want, we will find alternatives. If you drag your feet, we are going to prioritize Central Asian gas.”
Gas makes up only 3 percent of China’s energy consumption, but Beijing’s push to boost that share offers an opportunity to feed China’s economic boom with long-term sales along a brand new east-west route instead of to traditional European markets.
In two state visits to Beijing within two weeks in July, Turkmenistan agreed to let CNPC develop a giant gas field.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Kazatomprom Profit </b>
ALMATY (Bloomberg) — Kazatomprom, Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium miner, said first-half profit tripled, bolstered by surging prices for the fuel used in nuclear power plants.
Net income rose to 16.659 billion tenge ($133 million), from 5.544 billion tenge a year earlier, the Almaty-based company said in a statement published in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda Thursday.
Uranium prices have advanced for six consecutive years, rising from as low as $6.75 a pound in 2001, to as high as $138 this year. Prices have gained as demand from utilities expanded and stockpiles dwindled. Nuclear power accounts for about 16 percent of global electricity generation.

<b>OGK-6 Dividends</b>
ROSTOV (Bloomberg) — OGK-6, a Russian wholesale power generator, may spend 261.5 million rubles ($10.2 million) on first-half dividends after a board recommendation.
The generator’s directors approved paying shareholders 0.00978 ruble per share for the six months, after a 0.0086 ruble dividend in the first quarter, the Rostov, southern Russia-based company said in an e-mailed statement Thursday.
OGK-6 more than doubled its first-half profit to 1.52 billion rubles, under Russian accounting standards. It has a dividend yield of 0.25 percent, according to Bloomberg calculations.
The company runs half its 9,052 megawatts of installed generation capacity on coal.

<b>Novatek Profit </b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Novatek, Russia’s largest independent natural-gas producer, said profit advanced 20.5 percent in the second quarter, less than analysts expected, as prices climbed.
Net income rose to 4.22 billion rubles ($163 million) in the period from 3.5 billion rubles a year earlier, the Tarko-Sale, Siberia-based company said in a statement posted on the company’s web site Thursday. Sales increased 18 percent to 15.0 billion rubles.
The figures were reported according to International Financial Reporting Standards. 
Gorenje Net </b>
LJUBLJANA, Slovakia  (Bloomberg) — Gorenje Group d.d., a Slovenian household appliance maker, said first-half profit gained 3.7 percent as sales in Russia and Ukraine increased.
Net income rose to 6.5 million euros ($8.8 million), or 1.18 euros a share, from 6.27 million euros, or 1.11 euros, a year earlier, the Velenje-based company said Thursday in statement received from the Ljubljana Stock Exchange. Revenue gained 30 percent to 620.5 million euros from 477.8 million euros.
Gorenje, the eighth-largest appliance maker in Europe, is looking to acquire smaller companies to expand its market share. Chief Executive Officer Franjo Bobinac has said the company doesn’t want to form partnerships or become a takeover target.

<b>Prodi Trip </b>
ROME (Bloomberg) — Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said he is planning a trip to meet leaders of Kazakhstan, where he will seek an agreement to allow Eni SpA to continue its work in the Kashagan field, the largest oil discovery in 30 years.
“There are some unforeseen technical difficulties, but we will work specifically on these to find an agreement,’’ Prodi said Thursday in Novellara, Italy. His comments, reported earlier by Ansa news agency, were confirmed by his spokesman Silvio Sircana. “I’m preparing this trip with extreme care, not only with Eni’s management but also at the political level.’’

<b>Portugal Paid</b>
LISBON (Bloomberg) — Russia paid all the debt it owed to Portugal’s government and Portuguese companies, 13 years ahead of schedule.
Of the $83.6 million payment, $65.6 million was owed to the state while the remainder was owed to companies, Portugal’s Finance Ministry said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. The payment was due in 2020 under the previous debt restructuring agreements signed by both countries in 1997 and 2001.
Russia’s foreign currency and gold reserves, the world’s third biggest, have been boosted by revenue from oil and gas exports. 

<b>Cementing Plans</b>
ASTANA (Bloomberg) — HeidelbergCement AG, Germany’s biggest supplier of construction materials, will build a cement plant in Kazakhstan by 2010, tapping a building boom in the country.
HeidelbergCement will construct a 37.5 billion-tenge ($300 million) plant with a capacity of 1.8 million metric tons of cement, the country’s Economy Ministry said in a faxed statement Thursday.
The Kazakhstan economy expanded at an annual pace of 10 percent in the first half. President Nursultan Nazarbayev won an election in 2005 on a pledge to spread more of the country’s wealth among its citizens by diversifying the economy away from energy.

<b>UTair Tender</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — UTair, a Russian airline, plans to ask companies including Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Co. and Bombardier Inc. to submit bids for a contract to manufacture regional airplanes as it seeks to upgrade its fleet.
The Surgut-based airliner intends to acquire 20 new planes to replace its Tupolev 134s, Chief Executive Officer Andrei Martirosov said at the Moscow Air Show Thursday.
UTair will have an option to buy 10 more aircraft, while the original 20 planes will be delivered from 2010 to 2015, the chief executive said. The airline also plans to buy 15 used Boeing 737- 500s in the next three years. 

<b>Glass Plant </b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) -— Steinert Industries GmbH, a German company with interests in textiles and glasswork, will invest 28 billion tenge ($223 million) to build a glass plant in Kazakhstan.
The factory will have a capacity of 21.7 million square meters (234 million square feet) of sheet glass annually, the Kazakh Economy Ministry said in a faxed statement Thursday. The company, based in Blaubeuren-Asch, Germany, will complete the plant by 2010, according to the statement.

<b>Serbian Assets </b>
NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Russia’s Lukoil and airline Aeroflot may gain control of the Serbian state-owned energy company NIS and national airline JAT when they’re sold in the coming months, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Serbia has also decided to reopen a tender for RTB Bor, its largest copper mine, after lobbying from Russian metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska and President Vladimir Putin, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The possibility that Russian investors may win control of Serbian companies has fueled speculation that the Balkan nation is trading economic assets for diplomatic support over the disputed province of Kosovo, the Journal said.

<b>Coal Plans </b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Kuzbassrazrezugol Coal Co. plans to build concentration plants at its Bachatsky and Krasnobrodsky open-cast coal mines, Interfax cited company spokesman Stepan Dubkov as saying.
Each plant will cost at least 1.5 billion rubles ($58 million) and have the capacity to process 3 million metric tons of coal a year, Moscow-based Interfax said Thursday.
The plant at the Bachatsky mine is expected to start processing steam coal in August 2008 and the other plant will open in December 2008, Interfax said.

TITLE: Looking at the Arctic Through a Cold War Prism
AUTHOR: By Yury Fedotov
TEXT: It is no surprise that the United States and Canada have been discussing their strategies for the Arctic at a North American leaders’ summit in Quebec this week. 
The resource-rich region has certainly been receiving a lot of attention recently. The Canadian government last week announced plans for two new military facilities in the country’s northern extreme. A group of Danish researchers has just sent an expedition to the region and a U.S. team is conducting an important mapping exercise of the ocean floor. 
This heightened activity follows a unique event in human history. Following a long tradition of Russian Arctic exploration, State Duma Deputy Speaker Artur Chilingarov, who is also a veteran explorer, reached the seabed below the North Pole for the first time earlier this month. Cramped up inside one of two specially adapted submarines, he led a team that descended more than four kilometers to reach one of the most remote spots on Earth. In the time-honored custom of exploration, a flag was planted on the spot where the submersibles touched bottom. 
In Russia, the expedition has rightly been celebrated as a triumph of bravery and technological achievement — ranking alongside the launch of man into space and the first steps on the moon. It is a shame that not everyone has shared in this celebration of human endeavor. In some quarters, it seems that there has been a willful misinterpretation of Russian motives, accompanied by allegations of polar imperialism, land-grabbing and even the opening  of a new front in a new Cold War. 
Let us be clear. Moscow has never claimed that the placement of a flag on the Arctic floor, symbolically recognizing its part in leading this expedition, constitutes any sort of territorial right. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov moved quickly to make this point absolutely clear; President Vladimir Putin has since repeated this position. The era of planting flags as a marker of state sovereignty has long gone. 
Instead, the expedition forms part of a painstaking process by which the government is seeking to ascertain whether it has a legal claim to part of the Arctic floor under international law. The 1982 United Nations convention on the law of the sea, which sets out legal rules for all activities in the oceans and seas, says governments can lay claim to an economic zone 320 kilometers from their coast — or further if they can prove that the area in question is an extension of their continental shelf. 
Rock samples taken from the probe are being examined to see whether they form part of the Lomonosov Ridge, which stretches out from the Russian coast. After the UN demanded more evidence to satisfy a claim to the territory that Russia made in 2001, Moscow is now gathering the scientific evidence needed to establish the veracity of its case. 
Russia, of course, is not alone in making submissions for Arctic territory. The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the UN agency that decides on the merits of the claims, has so far received submissions from Brazil, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and France, and even a joint submission from France, Ireland, Spain and Britain. None of those countries has taken issue with Russia’s foray to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean through the formal mechanisms within the convention. Nor has the United States, which has not yet ratified the convention, objected to Russia’s scientific expedition. 
The U.S. State Department has made clear that “the Russian government is pursuing a claim under their right to do so as members of the Law of the Sea Convention.” 
So why has this trip to the Arctic floor excited so much attention beyond the feat of its polar explorers? 
It is linked, of course, to wider concern in the West about Russian energy resources — itself a symptom of Cold War thinking that ascribes the worst possible motives to Moscow’s ambitions. This also explains why questions have been raised about the country’s reliability as an energy partner, when it has exported energy to European markets without ever contravening its contractual obligations. 
It is the reason Russia has been accused of using energy as a political weapon by raising energy prices, even though it is charging the market rate demanded as a condition of World Trade Organization membership. It is why there is resistance to Gazprom’s involvement in European utility companies, when the company is simply engaging in the world economy. For those living and growing up in Russia, the perceptions of the country perpetuated by Cold War thinkers living in the post-Cold War world seem utterly at odds with the reality of the country today. Moscow’s claim to part of the Arctic seabed serves as the latest illustration of this. 
Its submission made in 2001 is based on the understanding that the limits of the continental shelf disputed by two or more states should be the subject of negotiations between relevant countries. The government has been clear all along that the future of the Arctic cannot be resolved through unilateralism, but only through international law and negotiation where required. 
Those seeking to address the Arctic issue on the basis of Cold War dichotomies will do little to promote a successful stewardship of the region. 

Yury Fedotov is the Russian ambassador to Britain and a former deputy foreign minister. This comment appeared in the Financial Times.

TITLE: Superpowers Should Not Get Offended
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: It’s been two weeks since a rocket was dropped in the Georgian village of Tsitelubani, and my amazement over this story grows with every day. Lieutenant General Igor Khvorov, head of the Russian Air Force Main Staff, announced that the bomb actually exploded in a different location, and that the fragments were taken from that site and buried in a hole near the village.
Meanwhile, South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity has his own take on the incident: He is convinced that the plane in question was actually a Georgian aircraft sent by Tbilisi to bomb Ossetians in his pro-Russian, separatist region of Georgia.
But the most amazing statement yet has come from the commander of the Russian peacekeeping forces patrolling South Ossetia, General Marat Kulakhmetov, who said that “the airplane flew into the conflict zone from the east, took a turn to the southwest ... released a rocket during a turn to the northeast and returned to the mountainous region.”
Why didn’t the commander mention exactly what is located to the east of Georgia, and why doesn’t he know exactly what was flying in from the east? Was it a stork? A robin? Or maybe a Russian Su-24 fighter jet? Let’s leave it for the general to figure it all out. 
In normal countries, these types of incidents are exploited for two reasons: either to demonstrate one’s strength or to accuse a neighboring county of provocation as a pretext to attack it. But in this case, it would seem the bomb was dropped so that Lieutenant General Khvorov could claim that Russia had been offended yet again.
A superpower is not a nation that everyone offends, but one that offends everyone else.
I have been told that the liberals do not love Russia, but the Kremlin masochists have shown that they are much better at not loving Russia.
As it turns out, the Georgians are not the only ones who offend Russia. For example, Russian businessmen also slighted their motherland when they managed to cut off the power in a central Moscow building in an apparent property dispute with one of the tenants. It just so happens that the city’s air defense system, which was located in the basement of the building, was also shut down. According to General Yury Solovyov, this single act delivered a blow to Russia’s defense capability.
This is strange. If Russia is truly a global superpower capable of facing up to the new “Third Reich” (read: the United States), how could a few businessmen shut down Moscow’s entire air defense system with a simple flick of a switch? I have another question for the leaders of this global superpower: Why does General Solovyov still have a job? Why hasn’t he been stripped of his epaulets and given a gun loaded with a single cartridge as a parting gift?
We haven’t heard anything like this since 2004, when Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov rebuked Vladimir Kasatonov, commander of the nuclear-powered flagship of the Northern Fleet, the Pyotr Veliky, saying that it wasn’t fit for operation. Among the items in Kuroyedov’s ship inspection report was a remark that in one cabin a “portrait hangs on the wall by a single nail, which could distort the artwork when the ship rocks.”
I don’t know why the authorities cultivate an inferiority complex among the people. Why do they constantly tell us that everyone — Georgia, Estonia, Moldova and others — is offending Russia? 
Why is it that one flip of a switch can knock out Moscow’s entire anti-aircraft defense? And why do they give foreign experts reasons to laugh at us by publicly making ridiculous remarks like those connected with the Pyotr Veliky warship inspection?
I only know one thing — no liberal could possibly be any match for our own leaders.

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

TITLE: Macho man
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — When he flexes Russia’s diplomatic and military muscle, Vladimir Putin always makes headlines.
But few could have predicted the squall of gossip and speculation that erupted after the president stripped off his shirt for the cameras while vacationing in the Siberian mountains last week.
The resulting images, prominently enshrined on the presidential web site, inspired admiration, criticism and some racing pulses among his admirers. The Russian media still can’t get enough.
The tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda on Wednesday published a huge color photo of the bare-chested president under the headline: “Be Like Putin.” Its excuse? A guide showing exactly what exercises were required to build up a torso like the Russian leader’s.
Kremlin watchers have been trying to guess what kind of political message the pictures send, given that the 54-year-old Putin has insisted he plans to step down at the end of his second term next year, as required by the constitution.
One radio talk show host speculated the photos were meant to enhance Putin’s personal appeal to voters — a strong signal that he doesn’t plan to relinquish power. When the commentator, Yevgeniya Albats, went on to suggest the half-naked photo shoot was unbecoming for a Russian leader, female listeners peppered her with e-mails expressing admiration for Putin’s physique.
Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that women who visited its web site posted comments on Putin’s “vigorous torso” and said they “were screaming with delight and showering [him] with compliments.”
Russian gay chat rooms and blogs were particularly intrigued by the photos: Some claimed that Putin, by stripping to his waist, was somehow pleading for more tolerance of homosexuality in Russia — where gays and lesbians are for the most part forced to remain closeted.
One satirical photo circulating on the Internet jokingly compared Putin’s mountain adventure with Prince Albert II of Monaco to the movie “Brokeback Mountain,” a love story about two cowboys who conceal a homosexual affair.
The Russian president, who is married with two daughters, has long cultivated an image of machismo and manliness. Well-known as a downhill skier and black belt in judo, Putin has appeared on national television driving a truck, operating a train, sailing on a submarine and copiloting a fighter jet.
These exploits have been widely publicized, thanks to the Kremlin’s control of major Russian media.
In contrast to his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, notorious for drunken antics, Putin has established an image as serious, energetic, sober and sharp-witted. In a country that worships its Olympic and other world-class athletes, he has also taken care to stay physically fit.
In interviews, he speaks avidly about judo and athletics.
“Sport has helped me form my own personal point of view on the world, on people and my approach to them,” he said in an interview posted on the Kremlin web site.
Some say it’s all part of the Putin mystique.
“He’s cool. That’s been the image throughout the presidency, cool,” said Sergei Markov, Kremlin-connected head of the Moscow-based Institute for Political Research.
But Putin’s outdoor outing last week took this manly public persona to a new level.
The prince and the president spent several days on vacation in the mountainous southern Siberian region of Tuva. Dressed in fatigues, fingerless gloves, a bush hat and chic sunglasses, Russia’s most powerful man was shown on TV broadcasts in scenic footage riding horses, rafting down a river, fishing for grayling and off-roading in a sport utility vehicle.
Amid the outdoor posturing, the image-handlers were careful to make sure Putin was shown staying on top of major events — a lesson he learned after he was criticized for failing to immediately interrupt his vacation after the submarine Kursk sank in August 2000.
Putin’s Siberian holiday coincided with the bombing of a passenger train near St. Petersburg. This time, TV footage showed him reportedly issuing orders to top ministers by cell phone from his vacation retreat.
Stanislav Belkovsky, head of the National Strategy Institute think tank, said the pictures from Tuva were nothing more than an effort to reassure Russians that Putin knows how to relax — and was preparing for retirement.
Yevgeny Volk, who heads the Heritage Foundation’s Moscow office, said the political elite increasingly views Putin as a lame duck leader and that the photos only strengthen the impression that he should no longer be taken seriously.

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: <b>NOFX</b>, a pioneering U.S. skate punk band, will perform at PORT on Tuesday. 
Formed in 1983 in Berkley before relocating to Los Angeles, the band has influenced generations of U.S. punk bands, but, surprisingly, cites such acts as Cheap Trick and Eric Clapton as its own influences.
“Well, you can’t have an attitude,” said NOFX’s Fat Max in an interview to True Punk magazine, answering the question what attributes a good punk band should have.
“There can’t be any rock stars in the band. Punk rockers are shit. Punk bands are not very good musicians typically and even if you are a good musician, I think it’s harder to type than it is to play to guitar. It doesn’t take much to play guitar —or to yell. It’s like, fuckin’ easy! Anyone can do it, anyone can learn bass guitar in about half an hour. 
“Actually I taught my 78-year-old grandmother how to play a song on bass. So if you’re a bass player and you get into some band that becomes popular then it’s no reason to think you’re better than everyone else just because you got lucky. If you’re in a punk band you can’t think you’re special but a lot of people do.”
The band released its tenth, most recent,  studio album, “Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing” last year.
Later in the week comes a concert by arguably the leading local punk band <b>PTVP</b>, due to play at PORT on Thursday. 
The band has recently released an album called “Svoboda Slova” (Freedom of Speech) and recorded another album tentatively called “Genocide” that the band hopes to release later this year. 
“‘Freedom of Speech’ is totally do-it-yourself, it cost us $200,” said PTVP frontman Alexei Nikonov by phone this week.
“We wanted to show that everybody can do rock.”
The concert comes between the two albums. 
“As it falls in-between, we will play songs from the both albums. And I will be reading new poems from my new collection which is not yet fully finished,” said Nikonov.
“Also we’ll be struggling with a synthesizer something like a cheap, old Yamaha, because we have a very good guitarist now, and I think it will be cool to have a contrast between the powerful guitar and the sharp keyboard sound, I think that’s what we need right now — our answer to emo rock.”
Those going to Moscow next week have a chance to catch a band called !!! that is due to perform at B2 club on Thursday. Also known as <b>chk chk chk</b>, the Brooklyn, New York-based band is a bunch of characters who call themselves Free Time, Flash!, Telephone, Late Dude, The Penguin, The Taxman, plus the more-conveniently named drummer Jerry Djembro Fuchs.


<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Second life
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The wedding seemed peaceful until the first punch was thrown. Then the camera jolted between various fights, capturing men chasing one another and finally focusing on a man who was lying unconscious — then faded to black.
Welcome to the world of EnglishRussia.com, the brainchild of a young web designer that has become, in less than a year, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. The site warrants daily visits for those who want to see the weird, freakish realia of Russian and Soviet life. The slogan reads, “Just because something cool happens daily on 1/6 of the Earth’s surface.”
“It is Russian culture. There are many fights at weddings. Probably 50 percent of weddings in villages have fights. It’s fun,” said the founder of the web site, a secretive 28-year-old Russian who goes by the name Tim. He refused to give his full name, saying in a telephone interview that as a serious web designer, he did not want his name associated with the web site.
He said the idea for the site struck him one day. “Just imagine how many unknown stories and photos are hidden in Chinese web sites and available only to a Chinese audience,” he wrote in a subsequent e-mail. “So we decided to start from the country we know, or, to be exact, Russia and the countries comprising the former Soviet Union.”
The site is a smorgasbord of the best photos and videos from Russian web sites, plus those sent in by readers, which both confirm and undermine national stereotypes. They are labeled with laconic introductions.
On a typical day, there are photos and videos of attractions such as a heavy metal wedding, Russian students playing Tetris by turning on and off the lights in their hostel and Belarussian police tractors. There are photos of drunks sleeping on the metro, cars buried under snow and trucks with missing wheels.
One video shows two Dagestanis who stop their car in the middle of Makhachkala and start to do the lezginka, a traditional dance, before getting back in their car and driving away.
Some readers have attacked the site, calling it anti-Russian and a disgrace.
“Someone always claims that it is anti-Russian propaganda. I assure you we didn’t receive any financial support from any foreign state or secret service,” Tim said, in the gently broken English that has become the trademark of the site. “It was started just for fun. Even now that it earns money, we don’t treat it seriously.”
Tim, who lives in both Russia and Israel, refused to say how profitable the site was a year after its creation in August 2006. The money, however, has allowed him to hire one employee, who spends most of his day searching for things to post.
The rules for picking a post are simple: The material must simply be “cool,” he said. He doesn’t worry about whether visitors might deem a posting pro-Russian or anti-Russian.
EnglishRussia.com was rated the 155th most popular blog in the world by Technorati, a U.S.-based search engine that indexes more than 94 million blogs. On high traffic days, more than 200,000 people visit EnglishRussia.com. Tim said he has turned down one offer to buy the site. He wants to see the blog break into the top 100 on Technorati, an outcome he thinks is likely.
Fifty percent of the traffic to the site comes from the United States, with only 5 percent from Russia. The country has just over 12 million Internet users, far fewer than the United States.
The most popular posting is a fish caught in the Far East that resembles a dinosaur. Pictures of strange people on the metro, such as a Stalin impersonator, are not far behind. A more recent hit is a video of a woman who lives with 130 cats in what looked like a surprisingly clean Moscow apartment.
Many of the more recent postings have moved away from what Tim called “yellow” postings, using the color normally associated with sensationalist newspapers. There are fewer pictures of the freakish and more of the nostalgic — such as pictures of a dozen Soviet cigarette packages.
“At the beginning, we were working out the style,” he said. “We noticed some people are very fond of some stories of old Russia. We try to satisfy those people as well.”
The site clearly has struck a chord, although it has not impressed everyone.
“There’s nothing original,” said Mikhail Chekanov of Rambler Media, owner of Russian search engine Rambler.ru. Chekanov said the site just takes items from Russian web sites.
The site has a comment section, which often collapses because of abuse by commentators. If a reader wants to leave a comment, he must type in a security word — usually Lenin, Stalin, KGB or vodka.
The captions on the site are often deliberately obtuse, playful or simply untrue. Under a picture of what looks like nuclear missiles, the caption reads: “While we all are peacefully sleeping, there are people in Russia who don’t sleep. They work.” Under pictures of drunken police asleep on the metro it reads, “Just another example of how you can get tired after the righteous job.”
No one, Tim said, has ever requested that the photos be removed. This may be because the wedding guests who attacked each other have not seen it yet.
“We don’t publish blood. We don’t publish violence,” he said, before remembering the wedding video. Unless, he said, it’s funny.

TITLE: A breath of fresh air
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: TALLINN — While a lot of fuss was raised by the Kremlin over the Bronze Soldier, a Stalin-era monument that was relocated from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery, there is another monument which might give a bigger, more detailed picture of the country’s history of the last 100 years.
Located in Kuressaare on Saaremaa island, the Monument of the War of Independence is a statue of a wounded soldier with a saber leaning on the rock with bronze plaques with 160 names of the fallen in the Estonian War of Independence on its back side. During this war that lasted from 1918 through 1920 the Estonians fought both communist Russian and German troops after Estonia proclaimed its independence amid the ruins of the Russian Empire in February 1918 (since the reestablishment of independence in August 1991, February 24 is Estonia’s main state holiday).
The monument was erected opposite the County Government building by famous Estonian sculptor Amandus Adamson in June 1928 to commemorate the islanders who lost their lives in the battles. In June 1940 it was one of the first monuments that was demolished by the Soviet Army that had occupied the country by then, but it was restored and erected to its place in autumn 1942, under the occupation of Nazi Germany. In spring 1945 the victorious Soviet troops destroyed the monument again, and it was again restored in July 1990.
While Kremlin propaganda accuses Estonia of pro-Nazi sympathies, both occupations receive equal treatment at the Kuressaare Castle/Museum, which is divided strictly in two halves — each devoted to the periods under the Nazis and the Soviets, and the institution in Tallinn that commemorates the times of non-freedom is called the Museum of Occupations, in plural.
Beautiful examples of Saaremaa’s natural history can be seen in a private museum in a village on Sorve peninsula, which can be reached only by a car, which are displayed alongside a huge mass of rotten mines, torpedoes and bombs, supplied with notes — “saksa” (German) or “vene” (Russian) — both inside and outside the wooden house where the museum is located. A horse skull and a horse shoe lying on the land outside recalls the practice of killing every horse on the island before retreating in battle, which was used by the both sides.
With all the respects to the past paid, Estonia offers a refreshing contrast to Russia under President Vladimir Putin. Already part of Europe, it is opening itself to the world and is looking forward, unlike Russia’s current drift toward restoring the Soviet past and isolationism.
A Russian coming to Estonia has a lot to envy, be it cleanness, better roads, or beautiful nature. Support for small businesses comes from both the state and the European Union. And the progress that the country has made over the past 16 years of independence from the Soviet Union —politically, socially and ecologically. 
Or take technology. Without even mentioning the highly successful Skype Internet-communication system designed by Estonian developers (and bought by eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005) and national ID cards with a computer chip containing the owner’s digital signatures (these were used, for instance, for the parliamentary elections held online earlier this year), every camping site in the woods appears to have an online computer and even a small cafe out of town is equipped with Wi-Fi and a website. Apart from Tallinn’s medieval beauty and the almost pristine natural environment of Saaremaa, there are plenty of other attractions in Estonia and the tourist industry uses them much as it can. 
Nature tourism is one of the most important directions for the country, whose national plant is the cornflower and national bird is the swallow. Estonia is the land where about 1,500 different species of plants and 65 mammal species such as moose, roe deer, wild boar, raccoon dog, beaver, wolf, bear and lynx, have been counted.
Apart from nature photography, fishing, bird watching and the other activities, nature tourism includes bog walking, an experience provided, for instance, by small company Seikleja.com that provides groups with “snowshoes” and, if needed, walking poles. 
Walking through an endless swamp in Soomaa National Park, an area with huge bogs and swamp forests interlaced by numerous rivers and small lakes, might seem hard and even boring after a while, but a rush of adrenaline coming some time after the trek is finished compensates. Seikleja.com also offers sea-kayaking and skating (www.seikleja.com).
Just a short drive away, there is Parnu, known as the country’s summer capital and the “Baltic Riviera” visited by about 300,000 people during the season. Built on the River Parnu in 1251, the town has been a holiday resort since the 19th century and offers luxuries that are a far cry from bog-walking.
One of the stops was at Ammende Villa, arguably Parnu’s most luxurious hotel set up in a fully restored Art Nuevo mansion built by the order of local wealthy merchant Hermann Ammende in 1904, with suites, rooms and dining halls furnished with the restored furniture from the period. In the summer time a temporary tent terrace restaurant is erected in the garden in front of the mansion, where regular jazz and quality concerts are held (recently the South-African funk band Freshlyground stopped by to perform there as part of its European tour). 
Haapsalu is a small resort town on the western coast, also with a great history and its own 15th century bishop’s castle, is a more quiet place, described in tourist guides as “romantic.”

INFORMATION 

How To Get There 
The GO Rail company operates a daily train service between Tallinn and St. Petersburg, with coupe, seated carriage and "Emperor's Lounge," a luxury car for five or six passengers with breakfast and coffee available. It departs from Vitebsk Station in St. Petersburg at 6:57 a.m. Moscow time and leaves Tallinn to return at 3:30 p.m. Tallinn time (www.gorail.ee) 
The alternative is a Eurolines bus. These depart from Baltiisky Station eight times a day, between 6:45 a.m. and 11:20 p.m. (www.eurolines.ee)
Buses to Haapsalu and Parnu depart from Tallinn’s Bus Station. Parnu is 130 km and Haapsalu is 100 km from Tallinn. There are also buses between Parnu and Haapsalu.

Where To Eat 
Muuriaare kohvik (Muuriaare Cafe), an arty cafe filled with paintings and art objects occupying a standalone wooden building. Huge portions of very fresh salads, sandwiches, quiches, tarts and cakes. “Each salad, slice of quiche or sandwich is prepared specially for you and it may take a bit more time than you expect,”  warns a notice at the bottom of the menu. With a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants introduced in Estonia earlier this year, a backyard can be used by smokers. (Haapsalu, 7 Karja, Tel: +372 473 7527. www.muuriaare.ee)
Piccadilly veinikohvik (Piccadilly Wine Cafe), a cafe complete with a wine bar room, with a menu similar to Muuriaare (see above), albeit a larger selection of drinks (Parnu, 15 Puhavaimu, Tel: +372 442 0085. www.kohvila.ee)
Ammende Villa, an a la carte restaurant with French and Mediterranean dishes served in splendid redwood interiors of Hunting Hall, Blue Dining Hall and Wine Hall. Gourmet meals both in Estonian and European traditions, a wide selection of aperitifs and wines from France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Austria. (Parnu, 7 Mere, Tel: + 372 44 73 888. www.ammende.ee)

Where To Stay 

Ammende Villa, Parnu’s arguably most luxurious hotel set up in a renovated early 20th century Art Nuevo mansion. The suites are furnished with renovated original furniture of the period, with all the modern facilities added. (Parnu, 7 Mere, Tel: + 372 44 73 888. www.ammende.ee).

For more information on hotels and restaurants, check out www.visitestonia.com, www.parnu.ee and www.haapsalu.ee.

TITLE: East is west
AUTHOR: By Hugh Barnes
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The land of onion-domed churches and hirsute priests kowtowing to icons may have seemed exotic to Renaissance Westerners, but in terms of architecture at least, Russia cut its window through to Europe long before the reign of Peter the Great. Indeed the Petrine myth of transformation in the 18th century obscures a long historical process that led to the famous watershed in Russian culture.
The architectural historian Dmitry Shvidkovsky believes that, to understand Russia, you have to take a long view of its buildings. Lavishly illustrated with photographs by Yekaterina Shorban, his new book, “Russian Architecture and the West,” begins with Kievan Rus, not with Peter the Great. Kiev and Moscow matter more than St. Petersburg. With the adoption of Christianity by Vladimir I in 988, Kievan Rus converted to stone and brick building. Until then, its fortresses, dwellings and pagan shrines had been built exclusively of wood. Masonry architecture is one of Russia’s most important traditions but, unlike timber, it was always linked to new ideas that came from abroad.
Shvidkovsky’s view of Russian architectural history is often divided into broad periods of aesthetic evolution without reference to political factors. By contrast, he takes the three major turning points in a thousand years — the Byzantine conversion, the founding of the Russian Empire after the reforms of Peter the Great, and the October Revolution of 1917 — and shows how the new type of state or ideology led to architectural change.
The Latin West cast a long shadow in Russia because the re-conquest of Byzantium was an old dream, even if that New Rome — known to the Russians as Tsargrad, or “city of Caesar” — had been superseded. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, the Russian church proclaimed Moscow the “Third Rome.” To underline the succession, Ivan the Great married Zoe Palaeologus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, at the Kremlin in 1472. His grandson, Ivan the Terrible, became the first tsar in 1547 at a coronation ceremony based on its Byzantine precursor. “For two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth,” wrote the monk Filofei of Pskov. It was a prediction that stood until the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703.
In tracing the historical path of Russian architecture, Shvidkovsky takes up the questions famously asked in the 12th century by the Russian Primary Chronicle: Who are the Russians, and where and what is Russia? “Does Russian culture belong to Europe?” he writes. “Or to one of the Eastern traditions, its closeness to the Western world being only a matter of geography? Or perhaps, as has often seemed to be the case, Russia is without analogue and has its own destiny, belonging neither to East nor to West?” Then, over more than 400 pages, he builds up a picture of Russia’s national identity by unearthing the ways in which Russian architects have answered these questions for themselves, and by examining how they modeled a world.
Each of the seven chapters takes a different style: Romanesque, the Moscow renaissance, post-Byzantine mannerism, imperial baroque, the Russian enlightenment, neoclassicism and the Soviet era. Every chapter is a kind of brilliant sketch; the author draws on an extraordinarily rich and diverse range of material to illustrate his subject. The various stabs at his topic can be read as seven largely distinct essays. Yet each is written with a keen awareness of how its theme interconnects with other styles dealt with elsewhere in the work.
Shvidkovsky also draws attention to those times when Russian architecture, at least in the east of the country, withdrew into itself and became distanced from any foreign influences. Under the Mongol empire, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Rus responded least to architectural movements occurring in the West. Here was a period of difference between the styles of building in Russia and in Western Europe, and one reflected in the almost complete absence of Gothic in Rus, despite the powerful influence, before and after, of Romanesque and the Renaissance.
Émigré architects and gardeners transformed Russia during the 18th century. One wishes that Shvidkovsky had been able to set this crucial moment in the history of Russian architecture in a wider context, but then he has already done so in an earlier book, “The Empress and the Architect,” about Catherine the Great and patronage at the court in St. Petersburg. From the year of that city’s foundation, the architectural myth of Peter creating “paradise” from the void was set against predictions of the imminent demise of the whole diabolical enterprise. In this countermythology, the “northern Eden” was a gloomy artificial place built on corpses, a phantom city haunted by ghosts seeking revenge for the victims of the tsar’s folly.
The Soviet Revolution transformed architecture with its mixture of 19th-century utopian ideas (imported form the West) about the living environment and the radicalism of the Russian avant-garde. Inevitably the figure and personality of Lenin bulks monumentally large. Everything created was the direct result of a decision taken by leadership.

Hugh Barnes’ “The Stolen Prince,” the story of Alexander Pushkin’s African great-grandfather, was published last year.

TITLE: Off the beaten track
AUTHOR: By Marina Kamenev
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Traveling in Russian winter is difficult at the best of times, but for British photographer Simon Roberts, who was compiling his book, “Motherland,” it was that extra bit challenging.
“No one is out in winter; it’s impossible to meet people, so taking portraits was really difficult, and getting my camera to do what I wanted it to do at minus 40 degrees Celsius, was close to impossible,” he said in a recent telephone interview.
The photographer became fascinated by Russia while studying Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. In 2004, he and his wife traveled for a year, covering a distance of over 75,000 kilometers, to capture the vastness of the country for the book of photographs, which came out earlier this year. Choosing the photographs to go into the book was another lengthy process: Roberts took over 5,000 frames, which he then had to narrow down to 150. “Coming from an anthropological background, it was critical that I had very different types of people in there,” Roberts said. “The rest will eventually be published and, hopefully, be used as a historical archive.”
One of the photographer’s methods for finding a wide range of subjects was arranging home-stays as he traveled. In Omsk, he stayed with a family whose daughter was taking part in a ballroom dancing competition. Roberts went along, and his picture of one of the couples appears in the book: The girl with bright blue eyeshadow and red lipstick stares regally, while her partner looks slightly afraid.
Sometimes Roberts had to knock on doors to find his subjects.
“In January, in Port Baikal, no one was walking around,” he recalled. “It was midnight, we knocked on the closest house to the railway station, and Lyuba took us in.”
The photograph of Lyuba shows a typical Russian babushka. She sits in her kitchen with clashing wallpaper, faux marble green cupboards, and a neon lemon-patterned tablecloth, looking warily into the lens. The interior is familiar to anyone who has traveled in Russia, and like many of Roberts’ images, it captures a small universality across a huge distance. 
Some outdoor scenes border on the mundane, but Roberts spotted something unusual in them. The giant bust of Lenin in Ulan-Ude’s central square is shown from behind, a sprinkle of snow giving the Bolshevik leader a toupee. A photograph of Soviet apartment blocks — identically shaped but painted in varying bright colors that stand out against the gray sky — shows their reflections on the surface of a lake filled with waste.
The photographs of nature are less depressing. One shows a father and his son climbing out of a lake on Kamchatka, after steaming themselves in their banya. Roberts traveled with the family around the area for five days. In Murmansk, he was lucky enough to see the northern lights; a photograph of a New Year’s tree in the middle of an empty square shows the stark isolation of the city in winter.
Roberts said that he didn’t intend to take bleak photographs. “I wanted to show that there is beauty in places that others might see as drab.” Nevertheless, he admitted that he avoided “chocolate-box” views of the country’s prime tourist destinations. “You’ll notice that there are no photos in there from the Golden Ring.”
Apart from a photo of a poster on Red Square, the photographs of Moscow could have been taken in any of Russia’s major cities: an elderly woman at the window of a tram, teenagers working at McDonald’s, and an old man sitting on a bench in front of an uninspiring block of luxury apartments. 
Roberts struggled to say anything positive about Moscow, which was his final destination. “A capital city is always very different to the rest of the country,” he said, “And it’s a lot nicer in summer”.

“Motherland” by Simon Roberts is published by Chris Boot.  www.motherlandbook.com.

TITLE: In the Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: She’s the former wife of a billionaire, while he is a simple Channel One television presenter. What could possibly bring them together, apart from a shared love of hair spray? Luckily it was written in the stars that Ivana Trump should do battle for a sunlounger in St. Tropez and Andrei Malakhov should be her knight in tiny swimming trunks.
Yes, Tvoi Den reported on Wednesday that Malakhov shared “two unforgettable nights” on the Cote D’Azur with Trump after they met on the beach outside his hotel and he gallantly tackled the occupants of her sunlounger — two Ukrainian businessmen, apparently, who didn’t even recognize the beehived one and claimed to have paid for her lounger. My goodness, the types you find on the French Riveriera nowadays.
Unlikely as this all sounds, Tvoi Den produced photographic evidence: Malakhov in a fedora cozying up to Ivana in a yellow sundress. Although I’m not so sure about the “two unforgettable nights.” Even the tabloid doesn’t go so far as to claim there was any funny business, but it says that Trump’s fiance, Rossano Rubicondi, ran off the beach “in hysterics” after he saw the pair chatting away, and that they then met for breakfast and “romantic dinners.”
The tabloid quotes Andrei Malakhov as saying “I wouldn’t like to talk about” his meeting with Trump, although it is a tiny bit difficult to see who else could have given the tabloid the picture — unless a Tvoi Den photographer lurks behind every palm tree in St. Tropez.
Interesting as the story was, it was a picture of Malakhov emerging from the sea Daniel Craig-style that really caught the attention. Not just because of his surprisingly impressive muscles, but also because of his choice of trunks, emblazoned with a big Dolce & Gabbana logo at a central point. Here, it has to be said, Tvoi Den failed in its duty to the nation, since its crack squad of swimsuit analysts wasn’t brought in to solve the riddle of Malakhov’s Lycra.
For the tabloid has such knowledge at its fingertips as it proved in an in-depth article about Roman Abramovich frolicking on his yacht with Darya Zhukova. Dilettantes perusing the photos might simply see a slightly paunchy man in green boxer shorts, but Tvoi Den asked a host of experts to answer the big questions: Why not Speedos? And why green?
Politician Boris Nemtsov — does he have nothing better to do? — explained that baggy shorts, or “family pants” as they are called in Russian for some reason, are a throwback to the Soviet era and “hide big male complexes.” Well, we all know Boris and his penchant for leaping into ice holes in winter wearing something tiny and clinging, so he’s obviously not trying to prove anything.
However, television presenter Anfisa Chekhova, who presents a show called “Sex With Anfisa Chekhova,” had grand visions of the man beneath the shorts. “Possibly Roman Abramovich simply physically can’t wear Speedos,” she opined. As for the color green, Chekhova took a lay woman’s view that it’s the color of dollars. “He just saw them, liked them and bought them, like Chelsea,” she summed up. 
Amazingly, a specialist in psychology, esoterica and magic, no less, backed up Chekhova. “Consciously or unconsciously, the billionaire has decided that the most pleasant color is the color of money,” said one Mikhail Kalyuzhny. But obviously there’s more to it than that. Green is the color of the heart’s chakra, which means that Abramovich feels tenderness toward Darya, he went on. If it was all about sex, Red Rom would realign his chakras by wearing orange.
And what do you know: The very next day the tabloid printed pictures of Dasha and Roma swapping the same pair of — orange — boxer shorts.

TITLE: Wunder kind
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Wunderbar // 9 Dobrolyubova Ulitsa. // Tel: 232 5523 // Open from 11 p.m. through 1 a.m. // All major cards accepted // Dinner for two with wine 1,450 rubles ($56.40)

Wunderbar, laboriously stretching a pun, can be interpreted both as “wonder bar” and as “wonderful,” and indeed the slogan of this new nightspot, written above the entrance is “life in wunderbar!” The Germany-themed place, not far from Sportivnaya metro station, is located on the ground floor of an old Jugend-stil house and is typical of the Petrograd side. 
Despite the name, Wunderbar is more of a café or restaurant, rather than a bar: the traditional bar itself is substituted with six large wooden tables, while the atmosphere suggests an intimate talk with friends over a wine glass, rather than loud youths drinking beer, singing and dancing. 
In contrast to traditional German -style bars with a Wohnzimmer (living-room) atmosphere (with or without food) in St. Petersburg, such as Datscha up to Gosti, Wunderbar is more formal and glamorous. 
Visitors are mostly middle-age upper-middle class men, dressed casually, talking non-stop on mobile-phones (luckily, quietly), either making business or private arrangements or complaining about the meaningless of life.
One of the most remarkable details about Wunderbar’s design is an old-style cupboard with wine glasses, standing right in the center of the bar. It fits well with the small candles, placed on every table, and comfortable sofas, all of which create a homey atmosphere.  
Another large element of the decor is a big TV screen broadcasting music channels, even though the actual musical background in the bar may be different. A DJ plays lounge or easy listening in the evening. 
Wunderbar offers a good selection of salads and starters, at the price range between 100 and 300 rubles ($3.80 till $11). A vegetable salad (140 rubles, $5.40) of green leaves with fresh asparagus, green onion, tomatoes and red peppers in balsamic vinegar dressing and a tomato soup (160 ruble, $6.20) are both sharp and nourishing. 
The selection of main courses is limited to three types of fricassee — chicken, seafood and pork in a sweet-sour sauce (290 rubles, $11.30). Garnish is not to be found — neither on the plate, nor on the menu. The dessert section (200-300 rubles, $7.78 till $11.60) is mainly represented by fruit salads, ice-cream and a cheese-cake. 
The beer selection is limited to Czech and French beers, costing 120 rubles ($4.60) per half a liter, while Cuvee Pierre Reserve also costs 120 rubles per glass.
Wunderbar can be certainly recommended for a relaxing evening with a glass wine and light meal, especially, after a hard-working day but don’t expect to find young loud crowds. 
The staff are polite and considerate while being relaxed and informal, with young waiters in black uniforms enjoying themselves and the music no less than the guests. 
A word of warning, however: on the days football matches are played in the nearby stadium, or after concerts at Yubileiny hall, also across the road, Wunderbar may not prove to be very calm. 
Despite its upbeat German name Wunderbar is not much like a Berlin bar, and not typical of St. Petersburg either. 
Rather, it is a curious mixture of styles and tastes that attempts to produce something new.

TITLE: Heaven’s above!
AUTHOR: By Stephen Holden
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: In “Stardust,” a sprawling, effects-laden fairy tale with the thundering stamina of a marathon horse race, Michelle Pfeiffer is Lamia, as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented. Shooting deadly green lightning from rings on her tapering long-nailed fingers, she suggests a seriously lethal beauty contestant of a certain age who will stop at nothing to seize the crown.
As the embodiment of every vain, wicked stepmother in fairy-tale literature mixed with the cauldron-tending crones of “Macbeth” (Lamia is one of three cackling sisters), Pfeiffer goes for broke with the relish of a star who figures she has nothing to lose.
The eternal youth and beauty she and her sisters covet can be attained only by cutting out and eating the heart of Yvaine (Claire Danes), an actual fallen star that, upon crashing to the ground in the imaginary kingdom of Stormhold, assumes human form. Yvaine must be found, captured and eviscerated.
But since Lamia has only a limited amount of magic to deploy before she begins to shrivel into a grotesque, balding hag, she must conserve her resources. As fire spirals from her hands like serpent tongues, she metamorphoses from a feline beauty with a sickly sweet smile into various stages of decrepitude. Her nightmare image of herself comes and goes as she unleashes and renews her powers.
By all rights Lamia shouldn’t be the center of “Stardust.” The spine of the tale is a conventional initiation story in which Tristan (Charlie Cox), a poor young villager from the English town of Wall, promises to bring the prettiest local girl (Sienna Miller) a fallen star like the shooting one that has just zoomed overhead; she gives him a week to deliver.
The town is named after the wall separating the real world from Stormhold, which humans are forbidden to enter, although there is only one ancient guard patrolling the breach. Tristan, whose father broke the rules and leapt through, is a foundling product of his dad’s liaison 18 years earlier with a witch’s slave in Stormhold.
“Stardust” is Paramount Pictures’ bid to enter the “Lord of the Rings”-Harry Potter sweepstakes with a splash. Adapted from Neil Gaiman’s four-book 1997 DC Comics mini-series, which later became a novel, it is conceived by Matthew Vaughn, the director of the seedy British gangster film “Layer Cake,” as a full-blooded action-adventure fairy tale.
Even when the movie goes haywire with an extraneous comic gambit involving an airborne pirate ship, it barrels forward with a fearless audacity. Far too many characters are crowded together for comfort, and there are serious casting errors, but the movie assumes that its churning energy, lightened with whimsy, will carry the day. And, to an extent, it does.
The most glaring of several mistakes in casting is Danes’s charm-free Yvaine, a cranky older version of her teenage character on the television series “My So-Called Life.” Even after Yvaine mellows and warms to Tristan, who discovers her in a crater and becomes her protector, Danes has a distracting habit of scrunching her features into a scowl unbefitting a supernatural heroine who aspires to live happily ever after. At a certain point you may find yourself imagining how much better “Stardust” might have been with Gwyneth Paltrow in the role.
Yvaine is pursued by an entire hunting party’s worth of characters, whose goals blur into a general stampede. It begins with the death of Stronghold’s cagey monarch (Peter O’Toole), who pits his seven sons against one another for the throne, which can be won only through possession of a ruby pendant worn by Yvaine. After fraternal massacre, three brothers remain to fight it out while the others’ ghosts amusedly comment from above like a supernatural Greek chorus.
Beyond Lamia, the movie suffers from a dire lack of strong, clear-cut characters, with one outrageous exception. 
Halfway through the story, Tristan and Yvaine are rocketed into space, where they eventually plunk down on an amphibious pirate ship suspended from a dirigible. Enter Robert De Niro in his all-time campiest screen performance as its skipper, Captain Shakespeare.
Wearing a demonic grin and speaking in a caricature of the New York mobster voice he used in “Analyze This,” he yanks the movie out of its quasi-medieval mists-of-northern-Britain past into a farcical limbo. The fearsome captain is soon revealed to have dual identities. Alone in his quarters, he exchanges his pirate duds for the costume of a cancan-dancing, boa-twirling Folies-Bergère chorus girl prancing before a mirror to the sounds of Offenbach. The crew, it turns out, knows about his tendencies but has maintained a respectful silence.
If De Niro’s zany drag routine makes as much sense in “Stardust” as a squawking kazoo solo inserted into a Mozart string quartet, it makes movie-trivia sense if you think of it as a hip response to Johnny Depp’s fey, mascara-wearing “Pirates of the Caribbean” character, Jack Sparrow. In that case, this joke about a joke is either a piece of inspired madcap fun or an excruciating embarrassment.

TITLE: Robinson Blunder Gives Germany Win
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WEMBLEY, England — Germany had virtually a whole team sidelined and still came out a winner at Wembley.
England had 11 players out, too. But after a 2-1 loss to the Germans in Wednesday’s friendly, England coach Steve McClaren seemed no nearer finding the solution to getting his team to Euro 2008.
The defeat provided little joy for McClaren, who faces two tough qualifying games at home against Israel and Russia. England is fourth in its group and also has Croatia to overcome.
Although they didn’t have to play stars such as Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Owen Hargreaves, the Germans were without Michael Ballack, Bastian Schweinsteiger and first-choice strikers Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski.
The absence of so many injured stars spoiled the latest chapter of one of international soccer’s great rivalries, but the Germans still showed why they are five points ahead in their qualifying group. 
“It’s always good when you have to make a number of changes and you see those changes work,” Germany coach Joachim Loew said. “I am satisfied to see that we can play 4-3-3 or 4-5-1. I am happy for my young players.
“Needless to say, I’m absolutely delighted. We are a very young team and you can imagine they are dancing happily in the locker room.”
Frank Lampard scored in the ninth minute then Kevin Kuranyi equalized in the 25th and Christian Pander scored with a 25-meter shot in the 40th. The result meant that the last team to beat England at the old Wembley is the first to do it at the new one.
Germany beat England 1-0 in a World Cup qualifier in October 2000 to win the final international staged at Wembley before it was demolished to make way for the 90,000-seat new one.
“There’s only one team at Wembley,” the German fans shouted in English to taunt the home fans in a crowd of 86,133.
McClaren had hoped for a confidence-boosting performance. Instead, he was dealt a blow.
“I was delighted with the majority of it and the chances we created,” McClaren said. “But disappointed with the goals we conceded. Of course, it’s very disappointing for the fans, but there are so many positives.”
There were huge cheers for David Beckham, making his 97th appearance and first since he began playing in the United States with the Los Angeles Galaxy. He played an energetic 90 minutes without showing too much discomfort from his injured left ankle.
Micah Richards, who starred as a center back in Manchester City’s 1-0 victory over Manchester United on Sunday, beat Pander and Philip Lahm on the right and pushed the ball to Lampard, who shrugged off jeers from England fans in recent games for poor performances, and drove it powerfully past goalkeeper Jens Lehmann.
The goal stung the Germans to life.
Thomas Hitzlsperger’s right-footed shot was fisted away by England goalkeeper Paul Robinson, but the ball was crossed in from the right by Bernd Schneider. Caught in trouble under his own crossbar, Robinson could only palm it down in front of his goal and Kuranyi was unmarked to prod it into an empty net.
“For 15-20 minutes we showed too much respect for our opponent and withdrew further almost to our own penalty box,” Loew said. “The equalizer was a great help and we showed much more courage and even at the end we were dominating the game.”
The Germans moved ahead with a top quality goal five minutes before halftime.
Pander, Hitzlsperger and Lahm swapped passes 30 meters out before the left back sent a rising shot to the top corner.
Almost from the restart, Michael Owen almost made it 2-2. Beckham curled in a cross from the right and, with the Germany goalkeeper grounded and unable to hold the ball, Owen was left with an empty goal to shoot at. Falling sideways and shooting from an acute angle, however, he sent the ball into the side of the net.
“I would have been more disappointed if we had not created the chances,” McClaren said. “For the first 20-25 minutes, until we let them in, we were excellent. It was the ideal game for us, a hard, physically tough game. That’s four games in 10 days for some of them.”

TITLE: Helicopter Crash, Al Qaeda Attack
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Fourteen American soldiers died on Wednesday when their helicopter crashed in northern Iraq, the military said. 
Military officials said mechanical failure appeared to have brought down the helicopter, a UH-60 Black Hawk, which crashed overnight while traveling on an operation with a second helicopter. Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman here, said the crash was being investigated. 
It was the deadliest crash of its kind since January 2005, when a Marine helicopter, a CH-53E Super Stallion, hit the ground in a desert sandstorm near the Jordanian border, killing all 31 aboard. In January 2006, the crash of another UH-60 Black Hawk, caused by insurgent fire, killed 12 service members. 
On Thursday Al Qaeda fighters kidnapped 15 Iraqi women and children after rival Sunni Arab militants repelled their attack on two villages in a fierce battle which killed 32 people.
The fighting, rare on such a large scale, underscored the growing split between Sunni Arab militant groups and al Qaeda that U.S. forces have sought to exploit as they try to quell sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands. About 200 al Qaeda fighters raided the villages of Sheikh Tamim and Ibrahim Yehia in restive Diyala province, north of Baghdad, in the early hours of Thursday after launching a mortar attack on the area, police said.
Brigadier-General Ali Delayan, the police chief of Baquba, told Reuters that 22 residents had been killed in the fighting along with 10 al Qaeda fighters.  Several wounded residents said villagers were loyal to the Sunni Arab insurgent group, the 1920 Revolution Brigade.
Delayan said the attackers had escaped with eight women and seven children as hostages.  A mosque that served the two villages was destroyed in the fighting and its imam was among those killed, he added.
Delayan said the al Qaeda attackers mortared the villages before storming into them. Rocket-propelled grenades were used in the fighting, in which three houses were destroyed.
He said the gun battle with fighters loyal to the 1920 Revolution Brigade, which has recently distanced itself from al Qaeda, was triggered by the execution of four men, including the mosque imam.
	New York Times, Reuters

TITLE: ‘Free Iraq’ Within Reach Bush Declares
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: KANSAS CITY, U.S. — President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that “a free Iraq” is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to “the allure of retreat,” they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War. 
“Then as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Bush declared in a 45-minute speech before a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention here. He added, “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”
In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies. 
The speech was the beginning of an intense White House initiative to shape the debate on Capitol Hill in September, when the president’s troop buildup will undergo a re-evaluation. It came amid rising concerns in Washington over the performance of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, who has made little progress toward bridging the sectarian divide in his country.
On Thursday, the administration is planning to make public parts of a sober new report by American intelligence agencies expressing deep doubts that the Maliki government can overcome sectarian differences. Government officials who have seen the report say it gives a bleak outlook on the chances Maliki can meet milestones intended to promote unity in Iraq.
In the speech, Bush sought to paint the conflict in Iraq in the broader context of American involvement in Asia. In one fell swoop, the president likened the Iraq war to earlier conflicts in Japan and Korea — which produced democratic allies of the United States — as well as to the war in Vietnam, asserting that the American pullout there 32 years ago led to tens of thousands of deaths in that country and Cambodia. “The question now before us,” he said, referring to Japan and Korea, “comes down to this: Will today’s generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat and do in the Middle East what veterans in this room did in Asia?”
And, in a passage that set off a bitter debate even before the speech’s end, Bush suggested a quick pullout from Iraq could bring the kind of carnage that drenched Southeast Asia three decades ago. 
“In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution,” Bush said. “In Vietnam, former allies of the United States, and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.”
With his comments Bush was doing something few major politicians of either party have done in a generation: rearguing a conflict that ended more than three decades ago but has remained an emotional touch point. 
Democrats, not surprisingly, rejected the comparison, including John Kerry, the Vietnam War veteran who ran unsuccessfully against Bush in 2004. “Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars,” Kerry said. 
At the same time, Bush was giving rare political voice to those — many of whom were in the hall — who believe the American pullout was a mistake.

TITLE: Isinbayeva, Kluft Seek History In Osaka
AUTHOR: By Gene Cherry
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: OSAKA, Japan — A trio of European women and an African distance runner could be on course for historic victories at the world championships beginning on Saturday.
Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, Swedish heptathlete Carolina Kluft, Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlasic and Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba each could set standards never before achieved in the championships.
Their chances of success, however, could be affected by Osaka’s hot and humid weather, with Isinbayeva concerned the conditions could affect her jumping.
“From my previous experience competing in Japan, I know the weather is really terrible there,” the world record holder told Russian media.
“The humidity is 90 percent, plus the fog. It makes pole vaulting very difficult, so we’ll see what happens,” she said when asked about the possibility of smashing her 2005 world record.
“In Osaka, my main goal is to win,” Isinbayeva said. “And if I have the chance, I will try to something great for the Japanese crowd.”
The holder of 20 world records, including 11 outdoors, the 25-year-old former gymnast has set world standards in each of her previous global titles. She cleared 4.91 metres to win 2004 Olympic gold and 5.01 metres — the current record — for her 2005 world crown.
The livewire Kluft hopes to become the first woman to win three heptathlon world titles.
Undefeated since 2001, the Swede has already become the first heptathlete to defend her world championship with victories in 2003 and 2005.
Croatian Vlasic will have world record on her mind in the high jump. The 23-year-old has soared a dominant 2.07 metres this season, putting her within grasp of Bulgarian Stefka Kostadinova’s 2.09 metres world record, set at the 1987 world championships.
Dibaba may face the toughest task of the quartet.
The first woman to win the 5,000 and 10,000 in the same championships two years ago in Helsinki’s cool conditions, the 22-year-old will try for a repeat double.
Victory in the 5,000 would make her the first woman to win the event three times.
A triumph in the 10,000 would be equally impressive. No female has defended her world title in the event.
Her biggest competition may come from her fellow countrywomen — 5,000 world record holder and Olympic champion Meseret Defar and, in the 10,000, older sister Ejegayehu Dibaba and Mestawet Tufa.
Twice 1,500 champion Tatyana Tomashova of Russia will miss Osaka with a foot injury. Compatriot Yelena Soboleva is the world leader.
Also from Russia, the reigning 400 hurdles champion Yuliya Pechonkina, returns but could face a tough race from 2003 winner Jana Rawlinson of Australia.

TITLE: Federer Could Face Roddick In Quarters of U.S. Open
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Roger Federer and Andy Roddick, last year’s U.S. Open finalists, could meet earlier in this year’s final Grand Slam of the season with a potential quarterfinal match looming.
On the women’s side, top-seeded Justine Henin found herself on the side of the bracket with both Williams sisters when the draw was announced Wednesday.
As Federer attempts to become the first man in the Open era to win four consecutive U.S. Open titles, the No. 1 seed could face the top two Americans in the field. Fifth-seeded Roddick and No. 6 seed James Blake are in Federer’s half of the bracket.
Federer and Roddick have combined to win the last four Opens, with Roddick taking the 2003 title. Federer won in four sets in last year’s final.
“It’s probably a lot earlier than either one of them would’ve hoped,” said U.S. Davis Cup captain and television analyst Patrick McEnroe.
The women’s defending champ, Maria Sharapova, couldn’t have hoped for a much more appealing draw, McEnroe said. Of the six players he would have picked to have a strong chance of winning, all but the second-seeded Sharapova landed on one half of the bracket. Jelena Jankovic, the No. 3 seed, and fifth-seeded Ana Ivanovic join Henin and the Williams sisters on a side loaded with big hitters.
Henin, the 2003 champ and last year’s runner-up, could face two-time Open winner Serena Williams in the quarterfinals. The eighth-seeded Williams, the surprise Australian Open champ, has been sidelined by a thumb injury since Wimbledon.
“After Australia, she made a huge believer out of me that she doesn’t need matches to win majors,” analyst Mary Joe Fernandez said.
Two-time Open champ Venus Williams, coming off her comeback victory at Wimbledon, is seeded 12th and could have to go through Ivanovic and Jankovic to reach the semis, which is where she would play her sister if they met.
“The big question is whoever gets out of that side of the draw, will they be worn out?” McEnroe said. “I think it’s a great opportunity for Sharapova. She doesn’t have to go through the toughest players in my opinion to get to the final.”

TITLE: 11 Year Old Shot Dead Playing Football
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LIVERPOOL, England — An 11 year old boy was murdered as he played football with his friends in Liverpool.  Rhys Jones died after being shot on Wednesday night in the carpark of the Fir Tree pub in the Croxteth area of the city.
Media reports said he was shot by a young killer who rode past on a BMX bicycle, with his face covered by a hood. Three shots were fired by a youth, one of which hit Jones in the neck and another hit a car, the reports said.
Chief Constable Bernard Hogan-Howe said Jones, who lived locally with his parents and 17-year-old brother, was an innocent victim.
“Both he and his family are upstanding members of the community,” Hogan-Howe told Sky News television.
“We are all determined to make sure that we sort this particular crime out and prevent it happening again,” he added.  He called on the community to help find Jones’ killer.
“Anybody who knows what happened last night, who knows who fired the weapon, who knows who provided the weapon, they need to tell us.”
Two youths have since been arrested, although it is not yet clear if they are directly responsible for the killing.  The male teenagers, aged 14 and 18, are being questioned by police on suspicion of murder.
Hogan-Howe said society should not allow a boy so young to die in such a way.
“We need to get these guns off the street and we do not allow people to run around and randomly shoot people,” he added.  More than 100 police officers are investigating the case.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she would be “as tough as it needs to get the guns off our streets”.
She told Sky News the government was tackling the problem through increased sentences for gun crime.  In an interview with the Daily Mirror, Smith said she would also order councils, courts and children’s services to use “Acceptable Behaviour Contracts.”
The voluntary agreements aim to tackle harassment and threatening behaviour after a series of high-profile killings involving young people fuelled fears that youth crime is escalating.

TITLE: ‘Unjust’ Texas Executes 400th Prisoner in 25 Years
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HOUSTON, U.S. — Houston, which leads the nation in carrying out the death penalty, executed the 400th person since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982 on Wednesday.
Johnny Ray Conner, 32, who was convicted in the shooting death of a convenience store owner in Houston in 1998, was the 21st man put to death by lethal injection in Texas this year. He spent nearly eight years on death row.
Texas resumed the practice after the Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on it in 1976. Since then, 1,092 people have been executed in the United States, including Conner, according to statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center.
Conner’s execution in Huntsville, located north of Houston, has drawn sharp criticism from death penalty opponents who argue that the practice is inhumane and does not serve as a deterrent to crime.
“It’s a pretty sad day for the progression — or lack thereof — for human rights in this state,” said Rick Halperin, president of the non-profit Texas Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty. He called the state-ordered executions “barbaric and outdated.”
On Tuesday, the European Union urged the governor of Texas to halt all executions before the state carried out Conner’s death sentence.
A spokesman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry responded in a statement: “Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens.”
In his final statement, he asked for forgiveness and told his family he loved them. He also said his execution was wrong.
“What is happening to me now is unjust and the system is broken,” Conner said. 
“At the same time I bear witness there is no God but Allah and Prophet Mohammad. Unto Allah I belong unto Allah I return.”
Conner’s was the second of five executions scheduled for this month. The state has 10 more executions scheduled in 2007.
In the United States, 38 states have the death penalty, but the overall number of executions carried out by Texas is more than four times that of any other state, according to the Texas Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty.

TITLE: South Korea Sends Aid To Flood-Ravaged North
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea  — South Korea sent its first batch of emergency aid on Thursday to relieve flooding in North Korea that has killed hundreds, and a top Pyongyang official said the North is aiming to restore basic services by the end of September.
North Korea and international aid agencies said the impoverished state was hit by some of its worst flooding in years earlier this month that ravaged farm land, destroyed thousands of buildings and left more than 300,000 people homeless.
A convoy of 34 trucks carrying emergency food rations, water and other goods left South Korea for the North on Thursday. Seoul has pledged to provide 7.6 million in aid.
Jo Yong-nam, a senior official with North Korea’s flood damage prevention committee, told a pro-Pyongyang newspaper that the communist state did not have enough shelter for its homeless and many were being asked to stay in damaged buildings.
North Korea is urgently trying to repair roads and rail lines destroyed by floods and landslides to help in the delivery of emergency aid, he said in an Internet report monitored in Seoul.
The U.N. World Food Programme, which already has a programme on the ground to feed the country’s most needy, said on Tuesday it would immediately begin the distribution of emergency food rations.
It reached an agreement with the North Korean government to provide food to 215,000 people affected by the flooding over three months. The flood aid will cost between $5 million to $6 million according to preliminary estimates, it said.
North Korea, which already battles food shortages even in years with good harvests, said about 11 percent of the land used to grow grain and maize was made useless by the flooding.