SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1303 (69), Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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TITLE: Russia Marks ‘Red Lines’ In Foreign Policy Issues
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined Russia’s increasingly muscular foreign policy Monday, laying out a series of non-negotiable “red line” issues, including Kosovo and U.S. missile defence.
“There are so-called ‘red line’ issues for Russia,” Lavrov said in a speech to students at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations. “There we cannot fail to react and we must stick to our position to the end.”
Lavrov specified Kosovo — where Russia opposes Western proposals to grant the province independence from Serbia — and opposition to US missile defense plans for Central Europe as areas where Moscow would not “horse-trade.”
His comments were the latest sign of hawkish Russian opposition to key areas of U.S. foreign policy under President Vladimir Putin, who is using massive oil and gas revenues to rebuild Russia’s military and restore its diplomatic clout.
Lavrov said some were worried by “the rapid rebirth of our country as one of the leading countries of the world.... However, this does not mean that it’s necessary to think up yet another myth about the Russian threat.”
He also used his speech — an annual occasion marking the start of the academic year at Russia’s most prestigious international affairs institute — to attack a probe by key U.S. ally Britain into the murder of fugitive Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko.
Lavrov dismissed attempts to extradite a KGB veteran over the radiation poisoning in London last year as “a noisy propaganda show.”
“Great Britain has become a voluntary, or involuntary actor in a provocation against Russia,” Lavrov charged.
The Kremlin has already shown itself ready to play hardball on Kosovo and missile defence.
Moscow, a close ally of Serbia used the threat of its veto power in July to block efforts by Western nations to secure a UN Security Council resolution giving independence to Kosovo, an ethnic-Albanian dominated province in southern Serbia. Russian officials have also threatened that Moscow could recognise the independence of separatist areas in Georgia, a Western ally south of Russia, should Kosovo be allowed to break off without Serbian agreement.
Washington has also taken a tough line on Kosovo, suggesting it could unilaterally recognise independence for the province if the United Nations fails to do so. Lavrov’s inclusion of missile defence as a “red line” issue added to a deepening diplomatic row over Washington’s wish to deploy a missile-tracking radar in the Czech Republic and anti-missile rockets in Poland.
Russia says the system is aimed at its own massive nuclear force. Washington insists the target is smaller military powers posing a potential threat to Europe, such as Iran or North Korea.
Putin, who took office in 2000 and is to step down next year at the end of his second term, has presided over rapid economic growth, mostly thanks to the country’s massive hydrocarbon output and high energy prices on world markets.
He has also enacted wide-ranging political reforms concentrating power in the Kremlin and restoring state control over much of the media.
Lavrov said “the world needs a capable Russia” and that the West should take care to avoid provoking confrontation.
“There is no need to hurry and take decisions that lead to a confrontational character..., whether this is anti-missile defence, Kosovo, or the further expansion of NATO,” he said.

TITLE: United Russia Way Out Front in Race
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma election campaign went into full swing Sunday with President Vladimir Putin signing a decree for the vote to take place Dec. 2.
But the campaign promises to be the blandest in post-Soviet history, analysts said. A landslide victory for United Russia is a foregone conclusion, and polls indicate that only three other parties will secure seats: the Communists, Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party.
The Central Elections Commission said Sunday that it was ready to make sure the 17 parties registered to participate in the race conducted their campaigns fairly, and it expressed hope that voter turnout would be high.
“The latest public opinion polls show we have good prospects for quite a high turnout,” commission head Vladimir Churov said, Interfax reported.
For the first time, however, turnout will not determine whether the elections are valid. Legislation passed by the current Duma, dominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, scrapped minimum turnout requirements.
VTsIOM, the state-controlled pollster, said in a survey released Friday that it expected turnout to reach 49.5 percent. Turnout was 55.8 percent in the 2003 Duma elections, and the law required a minimum turnout of 25 percent at the time.
Surveys by both VTsIOM and the independent Levada Center concurred that only four parties would clear the 7 percent threshold to secure seats. The current Duma raised the threshold from 5 percent in 2003.
Also, voters this time will only be able to vote for parties, not individuals. Before, the Duma’s 450 seats were equally divided between parties and candidates elected in single-mandate districts. Putin called for this change after the Beslan school attack in 2004, saying it would strengthen the political system.
VTsIOM predicted that United Russia would garner 47.4 percent of the vote, followed by the Communists (14.9 percent), the pro-Kremlin Just Russia party (11.7 percent) and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (8.8 percent).
Levada gave United Russia 59 percent and other parties about the same as VTsIOM.
Each party will be allowed to spend 1.8 billion rubles ($70 million) on the campaign, although only United Russia, which is sitting on a war chest of $13.5 million, seems capable of collecting this amount. The party raised $13.7 million in donations and membership fees in the second quarter of 2007 alone, the Central Elections Commission said.
Its closest rival in monetary terms is the LDPR, which has $4.8 million in the bank and raised $3.2 million in the second quarter. The Communists have $1.7 million and raised $3.8 million in the second quarter, while Just Russia has just $365,400 but raised $4.2 million.
Interestingly, United Russia has declared that it spent just $8,000 on advertising in the second quarter, much less than any other party has spent. United Russia, however, gets generous news coverage on state television, in part because its leader, Boris Gryzlov, is also the Duma speaker and its members chair all the Duma committees.
United Russia, widely seen as the party of bureaucrats, entered the campaign Sunday without a slogan to set itself apart in the eyes of the voters. The head of the party’s ideology department, Leonid Goryainov, and his deputies — the only people who the party’s press department said could comment on the lack of a campaign slogan — were not in Moscow last week and unavailable for comment.
The party’s point man for the elections, Andrei Vorobyov, told reporters last week that voters expected “not a competition among slogans, but a comparison between the results of each parties’ work.”
With a membership list that includes top officials in each of the country’s regions, United Russia has no need for a punchy slogan, political analysts said. “It is enough to stress all the time that United Russia has the exclusive right to be called the party of the president,” said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies.
The party’s general program, formulated earlier this year, is simply called “Putin’s Plan.” Putin, whose enormous popularity shows no signs of abating six months before the presidential vote, has not formally endorsed the use of his name on the program.
Putin invited United Russia leaders to meet with him at his residence outside Moscow ahead of the 2003 elections, and he has had them over again this year. The meetings have been covered by state media. No other party has been granted the favor of such a meeting.
The toughest race is expected to be between the Communists and Just Russia. Although the Communists are now in the lead, Just Russia, led by Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, has a good chance of overtaking them, analysts said.
“The outcome of this race has been decided by the Kremlin, which controls television coverage of the parties. Smart politicians, like Alexei Mitrofanov, felt it and ran to Mironov,” said Yury Korgunyuk, an analyst with the Indem think tank. Mitrofanov announced last week that he would leave the LDPR for Just Russia.
Just Russia, meanwhile, said it would not focus on its support of the Kremlin on the campaign trail. “We will base our slogans on three issues: labor, family and fairness,” party spokesman Alexei Morozov said.
He said this platform covered the top social issues of wages, work safety, housing, demography and pensions.
Morozov also said the campaign would focus on the regional level, with political celebrities being put at the top of the party’s regional tickets. Mitrofanov, he said, was likely to be made the party’s No. 1 man in the Moscow region, while billionaire Alexander Lebedev would lead in Moscow.
The Communists will decide their campaign slogans and strategy at a congress later in September, but both would probably echo those used in 2003, party spokesman Sergei Yelagin said.
“There definitely will be ‘Our heart beats on the left,” but we may also add one favored by our youth wing, “Better red than light blue,” Yelagin said, referring to a euphemism for homosexuals.
LDPR leaders are likely to go on train trips into the regions to gain support for the party, said Arkady Ostrovsky, a senior member of the LDPR faction in the Duma. Two of the party’s slogans are “Don’t lie and don’t be afraid,” and “What’s good for Russians is good for all,” he said.
The only liberal party with a slight chance of getting into the Duma appears to be the Union of Right Forces, according to the surveys. The party’s campaign slogans, however, might raise eyebrows.
“‘To complete building Russia’ is the name of our program,” party spokeswoman Anna Solodukha said. “We intend to continue reforms along the democratic principles set under President Boris Yeltsin, reforms that have nothing to do with Putin’s policies.”

TITLE: Experts Pessimistic About Elections
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Blatant use of government instruments in favor of Kremlin-backed parties, voter apathy and exercises in political cloning are some of the features expected in the Russian parliamentary election campaign that kicked off on Monday. The elections to the State Duma are scheduled for Dec. 2.
The major novelty of the current campaign is the introduction of a proportional electoral system — also known as the party lists system — that requires candidates to run on a registered party list, in contrast to a majoritarian system that allows independent candidates to stand.
Critics argue the changes will feed political corruption and reduce the level of accountability of deputies as the new system transfers power from voters to party managers, who will control who gets onto the lists of candidates.
A series of controversial amendments to the election law and law on political parties makes it impossible for coalitions of political parties to stand in elections. 
At the same time, smaller parties had to re-register as organizations as they no longer meet the needed requirements:  parties with fewer than 50,000 members or based in too few regions are now banned from elections. Of opposition parties in Russia, at least 17 have lost their status under the new law.
Most analysts predicts that the next parliamentary session will include four parties — United Russia, Just Russia, the Communist Party and LDPR.
“There is no intrigue as to whether the anti-system opposition has a real chance of succeeding during the parliamentary or presidential elections,” said political analyst Andranik Migranyan, a member of the Public Chamber, during a roundtable on elections in Moscow on Monday. “The intrigue of this campaign is the place that Just Russia, the second party of power, is going to win.”
Two pro-Kremlin parties, equally loyal to the president, Just Russia and United Russia have been accused by democrats of a cynical trade-off.
“They create an imitation of choice,” said Maria Matskevich, a senior analyst with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “President Putin has for some time been talking about the need for a two-party system. The creation of Just Russia takes a step toward a fictitious two-party system, with the difference between two cloned parties being only their names.”
Matskevich said the use of “administrative resources” — using instruments of government in favor of parties supported by the Kremlin — will be the key instrument of political campagning. 
“The feeling of impunity in the ruling elite has been growing,” she said. “Local parliamentary elections held in 14 regions earlier this year demonstrated that administrative resources were used to shut the liberal opposition out of elections. The opposition encountered problems in 11 regions out of 14.”
Some analysts are questioning the chances of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR) to win seats in the next Duma.
“LDPR’s chances can be judged by the amount of nationalist rhethoric in election campaigns of United Russia and Just Russia,” said Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the political council of the St. Petersburg branch of democratic party Yabloko. “It would be interesting to keep an eye on how the nationalist card is played: if you see United Russia seriously appealing to national pride, then LDPR is likely to be left behind.”
Alexander Gnyotov, head of the St. Petersburg Election Commission expects voter turnout to be 50 percent of registered voters during the December elections. There are 3.7 million registered voters in the city.
But analysts are more sceptical. Roman Mogilevsky, head of the Agency for Social Information, said the removal of the minimum turnout threshold this year resulted in a hands-off attitude from the parties.
“As regional elections demonstrated earlier in the year, parties are not seeking new voters, not trying to get more people interested in elections but rather they all target one-and-the-same group of people who traditionally go to polling stations,” he said.
For agencies that monitor political corruption the focus of attention will be the use of administrative resources by the two pro-Kremlin parties.
While state executives are forbidden from publicly endorsing any party during election campaigns this rule has often been breached, and the use of administrative resources has been mounting. 
During the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly elections in March, huge billboards mushroomed around the city showing Governor Valentina Matviyenko, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, with Vadim Tyulpanov, the local United Russia leader, shaking hands under the slogan “Together We Can Do Everything.”
Although the posters could have been confused with political campaigning, United Russia officials defended it as “social advertising.” 
Another distinct feature of recent Russian election campaigns is the use of so-called “steamers” — popular sportsmen, actors and other public figures running high on party lists and then resigning after their party has won the seats.
The tool was implemented widely during the last election campaign to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. 
United Russia “steamers” included, among others, Andrei Arshavin, a player with local soccer club Zenit, and Lyudmila Verbitskaya, rector of the St. Petersburg State University.
“Such things clearly prove that the ruling elite in Russia feels free to neglect the law,” Vishnevsky said. “As Spainish dictator Franco used to say, ‘for friends everything, for enemies, the law’.”

TITLE: Russian Team Breaks Record At Volleyball Tournament
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia may be relatively new to the world stage of outdoor volleyball, but from all indications it is quickly catching up on the competition. 
The Russian duo of Igor “Bazooka” Kolodinsky and Dmitry “Bars” Barsuk not only became the first Russian team to reach the quarter-final of the Fourth Annual Swatch FIVB St. Petersburg Open international beach volleyball tournament held at the Peter and Paul Fortress last week, they almost won it, instead falling in a valiant 14-21, 22-24 finals loss to fourth-ranked Brazilian duo Pedro Salgado and Harley Silva. 
Both the Russian men’s and women’s teams improved upon their previous standings, showing indications that Russia’s fortunes are improving for the Olympic season that begins next year. 
This was “an excellent result and we look forward to the next challenge,” said Kolodinsky. “It is our first season playing beach volleyball. We are a young team. It is great for those who cheer for us and we hope to improve to be ready for the Olympic Games.”

TITLE: BA Ordered to Pay Off Bure
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court has awarded former hockey player Pavel Bure more than 67,000 rubles ($2,600) in damages after British Airways prevented him from boarding a flight from Moscow to London.
The Tverskoi District Court ruled that the airline violated Bure’s consumer rights and awarded him 67,000 rubles in compensation and the cost of an air ticket from Moscow to London.
Bure, 36, had been seeking 20 million rubles ($780,000) in damages over the incident, which happened in November.
Bure’s lawyer, Dmitry Ragulin, said the airline pilot had mistaken his client for a football hooligan.
British Airways said three customers were removed from a Moscow to London flight in November to avoid possible disruption.
“Safety and security are of paramount importance to British Airways,” the company said in the statement.
Ragulin said he was planning to appeal to seek a greater award.
“If the British airline violated the right of such a famous person, known throughout the world as the Russian Rocket, then what about ordinary mortals?” he said. 
“If David Beckham, the British idol, was thrown off a plane by a Russian airline, then what size compensation would he have gotten?”
Bure, who earned the nickname the Russian Rocket for his explosive speed, was forced to retire from the game following a serious knee injury in 2003. He won the Maurice Richard Trophy as the NHL’s top goalscorer in 2000 and 2001.
British Airways was not represented at the hearing. A representative arrived after the start of the hearing and said the company’s lawyer was ill and unable to attend.

TITLE: City Officials Lay Out Election Plans
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Election Commission announced the completion of preparations for the pre-election campaigning for the Russian federal parliament on Monday, a day after President Vladimir Putin signed the election decree signaling the go-ahead for the race. 
As the decree comes into force following its publication in the government gazette, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, on Tuesday, the St. Petersburg Election Commission said it has partitioned the city into five electoral districts: Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern and Central Districts.
The new districts have neen drawn so that “the confusion rampant in the past, where the electoral districts overlapped one another, can be avoided,” head of the St. Petersburg Election Commission, Alexander Gnyotov, said on Monday. 
The new districts are among 153 electoral districts across Russia.
Turnout is expected to be 50 percent in St. Petersburg.
“I don’t expect more than 50 percent turnout from the 3.7 million eligible voters in the city” he said, pointing to what he called “the traditionally passive nature of the eligible voters in the city.” 
To boost the turnout, Gnyotov, citing the new law, urged students living in St. Petersburg dormitories but belonging to non-St Petersburg electoral districts to take part in the local elections. 
According to him, students, who constitute 10 percent of the eligible voters in the city, are the most passive voters. "But if properly recruited they can make a big difference,” Gnyotov said. 
“The ball is in the election campaigners’ court,” he said.
The old law did not allow non-residents of St Petersburg to vote for local deputies.
He also called upon the sailors and sea-route passenger operators to consult his commission to work out ways St. Petersburgers aboard the vessels can take part in Dec. 2 elections.

TITLE: U.S. Politican Vanik, 94, Dies
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CLEVELAND, Ohio — Former U.S. Representative Charles Vanik, who was a co-sponsor of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a measure intended to force the Soviet Union to allow more Jews to emigrate, died last week at his home in Jupiter, Florida. He was 94.
His Aug. 30 death was announced by Mark Talisman, his former chief of staff. No cause of death was given. An often outspoken liberal Democratic congressman from Cleveland, Vanik served in Congress from 1955 to 1981. He held several other public offices, from Cleveland municipal judge to Ohio state senator.
In 1974, Vanik along with Senator Henry Jackson, Democrat from Washington who died in 1983, sponsored an amendment to the Trade Act of 1974, which President Gerald Ford signed into law. The amendment effectively denies unconditional normal trade relations to certain countries that had nonmarket economies and that restricted emigration rights.
In response, the Soviet Union allowed more freedom of emigration, particularly to Jews, who had faced official prejudice.
Emigration of Soviet Jews did increase in the years after the amendment passed, but slowed to a trickle in the 1980s and became a major source of friction between the United States and the Soviet Union.

TITLE: Governors Hand In Reports On Performance to President
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — All governors were to deliver a report outlining the effectiveness of their work to President Vladimir Putin by Saturday in the first evaluation of their governance since the abolishment of direct gubernatorial elections in 2005.
The reports, however, might be used to dismiss disloyal regional leaders in the lead-up to State Duma elections in December and the presidential vote in March, analysts said.
“Now there will not be any need to wait for an emergency to replace a governor,” said Alexei Mukhin, a political analyst with the Center for Political Information, referring to the resignation of Sakhalin Governor Ivan Malakhov after Putin sharply criticized his handling of an Aug. 2 earthquake that killed two people.
In late June, Putin ordered governors to deliver annual reports on their regions by the start of September. Each report should cover 43 criteria, including general indicators such as the regional gross domestic product, average salary, unemployment level, and people’s satisfaction with education and medical assistance. But there are also more out-of-the-ordinary criteria, like the number of public library books per 1,000 people and the number of people participating in state-organized cultural and leisure activities.
This year’s reports cover 2006, according to a copy of the presidential order posted on the Kremlin web site.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Sunday that he had no information about which governors had presented their reports and could not provide further comment. Governors will be fired if they are deemed insufficiently loyal to the Kremlin, not if their performance is lacking, said Alexei Makarkin, a political analyst at the Center for Political Technologies.
“The real criteria for the evaluation of a governor’s activities would be political — that is, his loyalty and the ability to conduct the policy [dictated] by the federal authorities,” he said.
Both the governor of Sakhalin and the governor of Samara, Konstantin Titov, were replaced in August, and analysts said others might be on the way, including Mustafa Batdiyev of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Oleg Chirkunov of Perm, Nikolai Kiselyov of Arkhangelsk, Alexei Lebed of Khakasia, Alexander Chernogorov of Stavropol and Murat Zyazikov of Ingushetia.
The Gazeta daily, citing unidentified Kremlin sources, reported late last week that a reshuffle among governors would start with Batdiyev, Zyazikov and Chernogorov in the North Caucasus. The report said the three leaders’ positions would depend on a federal inspection that began in late July, the results of which would be reported to Putin by Sept. 20.
“Chernogorov has presented his report on time, and it is now in Moscow,” Chernogorov spokesman Anatoly Lesnykh said by telephone from Stavropol on Friday.
Putin’s reaction to the report was not yet known, he said. Zyazikov was in Moscow on Friday, but no information was available on his report, his spokesman, Isa Merzhoyev, said by telephone from Nazran.

TITLE: New Civilian Airport  A Possibility for City
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The likelihood that a second airport will be used for passenger services in St. Petersburg has greatly increased now that the government has published a new list of air bases where civil aviation and military air-crafts are allowed to be located together. 
According to a Russian government website, St. Petersburg’s Levashovo aerodrome — currently used for industrial, commercial and military air traffic — was added to the list which was published on August 15. The news is already attracting investors, who want to turn the military base into a general airport focusing on business aviation. 
Gazpromavia, an aviation unit of energy giant Gazprom, confirmed its interest in developing the airport Monday and said it has already prepared a business plan  and a development plan. 
“We indeed have plans related to development of this airport… first and foremost we are interested in building an airport for business, corporate and light cargo aviation,” Gazpromavia press secretary Darya Polukhina told the St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
Polukhina added that the company is aiming to turn its existing Moscow international airport, Ostafiyevo, also reconstructed by Gazpromavia from a small military terminal, into an “airport format” facility. Although, according to Polukhina, regular flights are not planned for the airport, it will be designed to accommodate charter flights.
“In any case, our priorities are to develop the region’s business aviation,” she said in a telephone interview.
Polukhina said it was too early to discuss the new airport’s investment value or a possible launch date because of the project’s complexity. 
“One can’t expect that it to be opened in 2008 or even 2009 due to the rather big investment and construction volume,” she said.
According to St. Petersburg-based news service Fontanka.ru, Levshovo already has a 2.5 kilometer runway capable of handling such mid-distance aircraft as TU-154s, Boeing-737s and Airbus A-320s. The runway is also suited to Boeing’s 777 long-distance airplane that can carry 400 people. 
It has been more than two years since the idea to turn the Levashovo military base into a civil airport was originally voiced in St. Petersburg. 
ZAO Airport Levashovo, a company purposely created for the project, signed a memorandum of understanding with military authorities, and the project was discussed by City Hall, in December 2006, Fontanka reported. 
However, Fontanka reports, Governor Valentina Matviyenko said then that “the issue is very serious, it has to be reported to me separately” and  the question was discussed thereafter.

TITLE: Chilean Student Fined $585
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors on Friday dropped a smuggling charge against a Chilean student prohibited from leaving the country since June, but she was convicted on a second charge — the illegal purchase of Soviet-era medals — and fined 15,000 rubles ($585).
The courtroom developments near Voronezh ended a summer-long ordeal for Roxana Contreras, 29, who was stopped at the airport there in mid-June with medals in her luggage. She was later charged with smuggling and the illegal purchase of state awards.
The smuggling acquittal eliminated the threat of a seven-year prison sentence over old currency she said she bought as souvenirs, her lawyer, Alexei Andreyeshchev, said by telephone from Voronezh. The court decided that it was a baseless charge, said her lawyer, who had argued that Contreras could not be found guilty because she had no intention of committing a crime.
Such a conviction would likely have prompted angry protests from Chilean officials and supporters of Contreras in the United States, where she is a graduate student in physics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
A U.S. congressman from Missouri, Todd Akin, had written to Russia’s ambassador in the United States, Yury Ushakov, in support of Contreras. He said Friday that he was very pleased that the case was resolved and that Contreras would be able to return to her research.

TITLE: A Dark Secret Hidden Amid the Economic Boom
AUTHOR: By Bagila Bukharbayeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The 15-year-old twins sleep among trash and dirt in a nook under a railway platform and spend their days at a Salvation Army shelter in a grim Moscow neighborhood.
But Denis and his sister Olesya prefer being homeless to living with their parents in Elektrostal, 58 kilometers east of the capital. They say their mother abused them physically and verbally, and then kicked them out in July, telling them to find jobs.
“It was hard at home, uneasy,” said Denis, who spoke on condition that his last name not be used.
The twins are among a growing number of children who face abuse and neglect despite an economic boom that has brought unprecedented wealth.
A report by human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin says children’s rights violations remain “systematic” and more parents are victimizing their children. While oil wealth has enriched a minority of Russians, the poverty, social decay and endemic alcoholism that are at the root of the child abuse have deepened since the Soviet collapse.
Public sensitivity to child welfare is growing, however, as Russians face up to the fact that the population has shrunk by about 4 percent per year since 1993, to 142.7 million. President Vladimir Putin sounded the alarm in 2006, saying in his annual state-of-the-nation address that the country was on the verge of a demographic crisis and that children needed special care.
Official statistics show the number of children has fallen from 36 million to 29 million over the past eight years, part of an overall fall resulting from low birth rates, an antiquated public health care system, poverty, alcoholism and crime.
Child’s Right, a Moscow-based advocacy group, says that every year about 2,000 of the country’s 29 million children aged up to 17 are killed by their parents or other relatives — a rate of about 6.9 per 100,000.
By rough comparison, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2005, the overall homicide rate for children 13 and under — regardless of the perpetrator — was 1.4 per 100,000. The overall U.S. rate for children aged 14 to 17 was 4.8 per 100,000.
Child’s Right, citing state statistics, says about 50,000 children — one out of every 580 — run away from home each year. Another 20,000 flee from state-run orphanages and other institutions.
Boris Altshuler, head of Child’s Right, tells the story of 11-year-old Vlad Yakovlev from the west Siberian city of Kurgan. Police say Vlad’s alcoholic mother starved her son and taunted and beat him. He hanged himself with the belt of a dressing gown one evening in November 2005. This year, Vlad’s mother was jailed for 2 1/2 years for driving her son to suicide.
“Many people see children as their property. There is no concept that they bear some social responsibility for their children,” Altshuler said.
Authorities can either do nothing or take the child away from parents and place him in an orphanage, Altshuler said, but there is no middle ground, such as family counseling or monitoring by social workers, and no law that obliges the state to act. “The whole country is one orphan-making factory,” he said.
He said Putin appeared to be trying to reduce the number of children in institutions. But he predicted the bureaucrats who control the $1.5 billion spent each year on orphanages and children’s homes would try to derail the effort.
“They need children like firewood to keep this system going,” he said.
With the Kremlin raising awareness, the media in recent months have paid more attention to cases such as that of a 7-year-old boy in the mining town of Guryevsk, in the Kemerovo region, who was hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver; he had been driven to alcohol abuse by his father, who wanted a drinking buddy. This year, prosecutors investigated medical workers at a hospital in the town of Orekhovo-Zuyevo, 85 kilometers east of Moscow, on suspicion of tying a 1 1/2-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy to their beds with sheets so they could be left unsupervised. The toddlers had been abandoned by their parents.
“It’s a bit shocking when you see such strong violations of children’s rights going on in a country that has accumulated such huge wealth,” said Carel de Rooy, a UNICEF representative in Russia.
Their health is becoming a higher priority, he added. But the change is probably driven more by demographic concerns than greater awareness of children’s rights, de Rooy said.
At Moscow’s Salvation Army shelter, a spacious room in a gated building, Denis, Olesya, and a dozen other homeless children wash their clothes, play table tennis and watch a video.
The twins still have a hard time talking about their experiences at home.
“Did your mother beat you?” a visitor asked. Denis looked down and nodded. Were there fights at home? Another nod.
Olesya said she liked her new “freedom,” which means begging for money at railway stations, using drugs and “dating young men.”
She said she would think about the future one day. When? “When I grow up.”

TITLE: An Undercover Housekeeper Serves Up the Dirt for the Tabloids
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Having paid 600 euros ($815) for a room in a five-star hotel, few guests would have guessed that the young woman cleaning their room was no ordinary housekeeper, but a journalist for the country’s most famous tabloid.
But the exploits of Yaroslava Tankova have been splashed all over Komsomolskaya Pravda for the last month, as she has provided tales about foreigners and prostitutes, as well as describing exploitative working conditions.
Tankova, who once also went undercover as a homeless person for a piece for the paper, worked for a month at the hotel, which was not named in the piece.
While the fact that nobody at the hotel realized she was a journalist might be a sign of poor hotel security, Tankova said this was far from the biggest problem in that area.
“You can bring anything in that you can fit in a purse, even a small caliber machine gun,” she wrote.
Tankova says she didn’t go that far, but she did smuggle in a fake pistol and large quantities of soap, which she used as a substitute for explosives in her security experiment. The newspaper’s web site features pictures of her attaching the chunks of soap under tables and beds in hotel rooms to show how easily she could have hidden explosives.
Although the paper did not print the name of the hotel, it did provide readers with some clues. At one point, Tankova says she was cleaning the rooms of the Canadian national hockey team. After the hockey World Championship in April and May, the ultimate winners of the tournament stayed at the five-star Swissotel Krasniye Kholmi.
Representatives of Swissotel Krasniye Kholmi Moscow refused to comment on the Komsomolskaya Pravda story, while those from other five-star hotels said they could not comment because they had not read any of the pieces.
Attempts to contact Tankova for comment on the piece went unanswered.
Despite its penchant for sensationalism, Komsomolskaya Pravda undercut the investigative feel by running the story every day for almost three weeks and by regularly accompanying the pieces with pictures of Tankova in a low-cut maid’s outfit that looked more like something out of a bachelor party than the drab and uncomfortable uniform she describes in her pieces.
Tankova said the housekeepers at the hotel were required to work 60 hours per week, although they are paid for only 40.
“If they had unions, this would not happen,” said Sergei Chaly, the head of the union for municipal workers in Moscow, which covers hotel workers. Chaly said the problem was widespread, as most of the city’s five-star hotels are not unionized.
As for the running of the hotel, the account Tankova provides is not flattering either, and the story of a fellow housekeeper using a guest’s toothbrush to clean a sink is not the worst of it.
At one point, Tankova writes about spotting a preteen Russian girl with a foreign man at the hotel. After overhearing a suspicious conversation, she tells the management, which refuses to do anything. 
She meets with the same lack of action after reporting that a patron had sexually harassed her.
Male guests often bring women back to the hotel, and assuming that many of the women are prostitutes, she says there was a big difference between the behavior of the foreign and Russian guests. While the Russians tend to be pretty brazen, she says, the foreigners usually look away, as if embarrassed, the next day.
While Tankova’s expose tried to bring to light some of the hardships faced by housekeepers working in the hotel, not all of her erstwhile colleagues appreciated the effort.
“Why have you let us down?” one of the workers wrote to the newspaper. “We accepted you as one of our own, and you have aired all of our dirty laundry.”
“There have been reprisals at work because of you,” the housekeeper said.
For prospective guests, Tankova offered two main pieces of advice: Don’t leave toothbrushes out and hand any tips directly to housekeepers rather than leaving them in the room.
She said money left in the room tended to be taken by other employees — her explanation for the fact that she did not make anything in tips.

TITLE: Mystery Russian to Blast Off
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A prominent Russian businessman-turned-politician is in line to become the next space tourist in 2009, Federal Space Agency head Anatoly Perminov said Friday.
Details about the person who might be the first Russian space tourist were few.
“He has personally asked me not to identify him. All I can say so far is that he is a serious, respectable person who is a businessman and politician,” Perminov told reporters, adding that the candidate was a young man, Interfax reported.
A former Federal Space Agency official familiar with the issue said the candidate was probably a State Duma deputy.
The former official, who was involved in negotiations with previous space tourists, said the candidate had not yet made a down payment or completed medical tests. “Therefore, he cannot be considered a serious candidate for now,” he said by telephone.
He said only two Russians had previously offered to pay to fly to space: Sergei Polonsky, head of Mirax Group, a construction firm, and the former mayor of Volgograd, Yevgeny Ishchenko. But neither had been prepared to foot the price tag, now $25 million.  Ishchenko stepped down amid accusations of corruption and was subsequently convicted of illegal entrepreneurial activity earlier this year. 
The Federal Space Agency so far has launched five tourists on 10-day trips to the international space station: four U.S. citizens and a South African.
Calls to Sergei Kostenko, head of the Moscow office of U.S.-based Space Adventures, which arranged previous flights for space tourists, went unanswered Friday. 
Perminov said in April that the next space tourist might be a Russian governor. He complained at the time that none of the country’s richest people, including the 53 billionaires on the Forbes 2007 list, had expressed interest in visiting space. “Perhaps they are afraid of leaving their fortunes unattended,” he said.
On Friday, Perminov underscored the need for the country to reduce its dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which it leases from Kazakhstan, for manned space exploration.
“If we create a new manned spaceship, which is provided for in our strategy until 2015, we will need a new rocket, which will require a new launch pad,” Perminov said. 
“We have not decided whether to build that pad at Baikonur or in Russia.”
Perminov did not name the spaceship, but it is widely expected to be the Energia-built Klipper, which the federal space program envisions both as a replacement for the Soyuz-TMA capsule as well as a vessel for interplanetary voyages.

TITLE: Japanese Entrepreneurs Explore City’s Potential
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: City Hall expects small and medium sized Japanese companies to follow the automotive giants Toyota and Nissan and establish their presence in the city. The authorities hope to attract high-tech companies and not only automotive enterprises.
This week a delegation of Japanese entrepreneurs from Kakamigahara City are visiting St. Petersburg to explore the city’s business opportunities. No specific agreement will be discussed during this visit, but local officials were optimistic about the prospects.
“The mere fact that the Japanese have started negotiating guarantees that we will come to a positive result. However it’s too early to talk about any definite figures,” Igor Pavlov, an advisor to the St. Petersburg governor, said at a press conference Monday.
Pavlov stated that the combined production volume of Japanese enterprises in St. Petersburg increased tenfold over the last two years. He expects the number of Japanese firms operating in the city to increase to 200 in the near future.
Takuo Kidokoro, general consul of Japan in St. Petersburg, said that during the last two years the number of Japanese companies working in St. Petersburg had increased from just three enterprises to about 40.
Most of these companies are automotive enterprises and producers of components, shipment and insurance companies. However, Kidokoro expects high-tech companies to increase their share in the future. Pavlov considered cooperation between the local and Japanese companies to be “very successful and mutually advantageous.” Last year trade turnover between St. Petersburg and Japan was reported at $260 million, he said, while total turnover between Russia and Japan was $13 billion.
In St. Petersburg, Japanese companies are offered participation in logistics, production and infrastructure projects as well as in the special economic zone in the Noidorf area, Pavlov said.
The current delegation was comprised of businesspeople from Kakamigahara — a part of the Nagoya district. Besides the Toyota headquarters, Nagoya houses two aircraft enterprises, a pharmaceutical company and several producers of electronics, cell phones, robots and industrial equipment.
The delegation includes managers of precision engineering companies, IT and software firms.
Shin Mory, Mayor of Kakamigahara City, indicated that over the last five years Nagoya’s economy grew by 136 percent while the average growth of Japanese economy was only 103 percent.
Later this month a delegation of Japanese businesspeople from other areas of the Nagoya district is expected to visit St. Petersburg along with a delegation of heavy engineering industry enterprises.
In their turn, Russian businesspeople will take part in the Second Japan-Russian Business Forum at the end of September in Osaka.

TITLE: Companies Ready To Invest Despite Global Market Jitters
AUTHOR: By Maria Kiselyova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Global financial jitters will not hamper Russian economic growth as companies continue to invest, while a liquidity squeeze may help the Cabinet fight inflation, a poll of 11 economists showed Friday. 
Economists saw full-year 2007 economic growth at a median of 7.5 percent, unchanged from last month’s forecast, and consumer price index growth at 8.5 percent, above the official target of 8 percent but slightly below last month’s 8.6 percent. 
“Despite lower corporate borrowing due to worsening external factors, Russian firms’ investment activity will remain strong,” said Anton Stroutchenevski, economist at Troika Dialog. 
“This, among other factors, will help economic growth,” he added. 
Economists saw capital investment growth at a median of 19 percent in 2007, up from 16 percent in last month’s poll, but did not specify how firms would finance their capital expenditures amid worsening global credit conditions. 
Russian firms have borrowed heavily abroad in recent years, taking advantage of low global interest rates and Russia’s investment-grade credit ratings. The firms may now face problems refinancing their enormous foreign debt, analysts say. 
Economists also saw money supply growth rates slowing to 48.5 percent in the full-year 2007 from over 60 percent earlier this year as foreign investors pull their money out of Russian assets. 
“Money supply growth rates will most likely fall because of the subprime crisis,” said Vladimir Bragin, analyst at Trust Bank. 
The country has seen a major reversal of capital flows and is estimated to see a net private capital outflow of $10 billion in August.

TITLE: Gref Optimistic Over Markets
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Volatility on world financial markets stemming from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis will not hurt foreign direct investment into Russia, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Friday.
Analysts say a liquidity squeeze in the banking sector caused by the flight of around $10 billion in portfolio capital last month might make it hard for companies and banks to refinance their borrowing and keep investing.
But Gref said investment in the real economy was still going strong across all sectors.
“We are looking at raising, not cutting, our investment [forecast]. In pretty much all sectors we are exceeding our target by half,” Gref told reporters.
“We won’t change our economic growth forecast — and we definitely won’t cut it.”
Russian officials currently target growth of around 7 percent this year.
Capital investment was up 24.7 per cent in July from a year ago.  Economists expect it to rise by 19 percent for the year as a whole. 
Gref also said he saw no reason to change the government’s forecast that inflation will end the year at 8 percent.

TITLE: Yukos Boss Gets Access
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former Yukos Oil Co. chief executive officer, won a U.S. court ruling for access to Chevron Corp. research on Yukos as he prepares to defend himself against new charges in Russia.
A U.S. District Court judge in northern California accepted that Chevron may have “valuable evidence” that could help Khodorkovsky refute charges of embezzlement and money laundering, lawyers for Khodorkovsky said on their client’s web site.
Before his arrest in 2003, Khodorkovsky was seeking to merge Yukos, then Russia’s largest oil exporter, with smaller rival Sibneft and sell a stake in the combined company to either Chevron or Exxon Mobil Corp. Yukos was eventually liquidated under the weight of more than $30 billion in tax claims.
“This is just the beginning of a global evidence-gathering process that is necessary because the procuracy of the Russian Federation is not a fact-gatherer but rather an enforcement arm of a Kremlin bent on consolidating the state theft of Yukos,’’ lawyer Robert Amsterdam said in statement posted on Khodorkovsky’s web site Aug. 31.
Amsterdam didn’t say exactly what kind of information Chevron has that may be useful. Nobody at Chevron could be reached for comment Monday.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Grain Working Group</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia, the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter, formed a group that will consider measures to curb grain prices, which may include sales from state inventories and export duties and quotas.
The “working group’’ is made up of officials from the agriculture ministry, the Grain Union and the Flour and Cereal Producers’ Union, a ministry spokeswoman said by phone Monday, declining to be identified by name because of ministerial rules.
The group will propose measures by the middle of this month, including possible export restrictions, she said.

<b>Norilsk Raises Loan</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — GMK Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of the metal, has raised $6 billion in loans to acquire Canada’s LionOre Mining International Ltd.
BNP Paribas and Societe Generale SA, who arranged the transaction, syndicated the loan to 24 other banks, according to an e-mailed statement from Norilsk on Monday. Demand from investors exceeded the size of the loans by 22 percent, the statement said.
Norilsk raised a $2.5 billion one-year loan, $1.5 billion in three-year loans and a $2 billion five-year facility linked to exports, the statement said.

<b>New Kazakh Licensing</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Kazakhstan, the third-largest grain producer in the former Soviet Union, plans to introduce licenses for grain exports to reduce speculative trading.
“This will not affect the interests of the conscientious traders and we expect the grain harvest and exports at the same level as in previous years,” Sergei Kuyanov, a spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry in Astana, said by phone Monday. The licenses will be introduced “soon,” he said, without giving further details.
Kazakhstan exported 6.4 million tons of wheat in the 11 months to June 1, according to the ministry. Global wheat stockpiles in the year ending June 2008 will drop to their lowest in more than a quarter of a century, according to the London-based International Grains Council.

<b>MTS Profits To Rise</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Mobile TeleSystems, Russia’s biggest mobile-phone company, may say second-quarter profit rose 60 percent as it added customers.
Net income probably climbed to $472 million from $295 million a year earlier, the median estimate of nine analysts Bloomberg News surveyed by telephone and e-mail. Sales at the Moscow-based company probably jumped 29.4 percent to $1.9 billion under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.
Mobile TeleSystems had more than 74 million subscribers in the former Soviet countries at the end of June, excluding Belarus which it does not consolidate, up from 64.1 million a year earlier. Besides Russia, the company is also active in Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

<b>Gazprom Gains Time</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom will have an extra month to give the Russian government a plan to develop a Siberian natural gas field it took over from BP Plc’s Russian unit, Interfax reported.
Gazprom’s deadline to present a plan on the Kovykta field was extended until the end of September, the Russian news agency cited Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev as saying in Beijing on Monday.
Trutnev agreed to push the date back after meeting Gazprom executives on Aug. 30, Interfax reported. He said full-scale production at Kovykta should begin no later than 2017, the news agency said.  
Gazprom took control of Kovykta from BP’s unit in June.

<b>Economy Booming</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s government may raise its forecast for economic growth in 2007 by the end of September, Interfax reported, citing Economy Minister German Gref.
The ministry may increase its forecast from 6.5 percent to between 7.2 percent and 7.4 percent, the news service cited Gref as telling President Vladimir Putin at a Moscow meeting on Monday.
The inflation rate in August probably reached 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, Gref told the president.

<b>Rusal in Smelter Deal</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Indonesia’s PT Aneka Tambang will this week sign an accord with Russia’s United Co. Rusal for a $4 billion  alumina smelter in East Kalimantan, Indonesia’s Energy Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro said.
The accord will be signed during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Indonesia on Sept. 6, he said. Vera Kurochkina, spokeswoman for Rusal, confirmed an agreement will be signed later this week.
“There will be signing of an agreement for a project worth total $4 billion to turn bauxite into alumina, with an initial investment of $2 billion,” Purnomo told reporters in Jakarta.

<b>Ukraine Miners Strike</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Miners went on strike at a Ukrainian coal-mining company, accusing the government of low investment and protesting against a new chief executive officer.
About 9,000 miners took to the streets Monday in the Donetsk region, the country’s coal center, Mykhaylo Volynets, the head of the Miners’ Independent Trade Union, said in a phone interview.
They were protesting conditions at Krasnoarmeyskvyhillia, a state-run company that controls four mines.
Ukraine is Europe’s third-largest coal producer after Russia and Poland, producing 80 million metric tons last year, according to the government. The country plans to increase output from its mostly state-owned mines to 82 million tons next year, seeking to reduce its dependence on natural-gas imports.

<b>Oil Prices Boost Fund</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s oil fund accumulated $5.5 billion by the end of August as the world’s biggest energy exporter benefited from the global price of crude.
The value of the so-called Stabilization Fund rose 4.4 percent to 3.41 trillion rubles, the Moscow-based Finance Ministry said on its web site Monday. The fund increased from 3.26 trillion rubles in the previous month, the ministry said.
The fund, which accumulates some of the revenue from Russia’s crude oil sales, held $58.1 billion, 44.9 billion euros and 6.74 billion pounds on Sept. 1, the statement said.
The Russian government plans to split the Stabilization Fund into two separate funds from Feb. 1 next year to better manage its windfall energy revenue.

TITLE: Ivanov Urges $100Bln for Caspian
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday that $100 billion of investment would be needed to develop oil and gas fields in the Russian sector of the Caspian Sea, Interfax reported. 
Speaking to reporters in Astrakhan, Ivanov called for the accelerated development of the port’s shipbuilding capacity to meet the anticipated increase in oil and gas output over the next two to three years, when LUKoil is due to start production at the Korchagina field.
“I believe that the capacity is insufficient at the moment,” Ivanov said in comments aired on NTV television.
Following a Cabinet reshuffle earlier this year, President Vladimir Putin put Ivanov, formerly the defense minister, in charge of overseeing industry and technology. Ivanov’s investment projections coincided with comments from LUKoil, the country’s second-biggest oil producer, that annual production in the Russia sector of the Caspian could reach 30 million tons (600,000 barrels per day) of oil and 20 billion cubic meters of gas by 2020. LUKoil expects to bring three Caspian fields onstream from 2009 to 2015. 
Nikolai Nikolayev, head of LUKoil-Nizhnevolzhskneft, said 50 new drilling rigs and 100 service vessels would be needed to develop these fields, RIA-Novosti reported. 
Oil producers have recently asked the government for tax breaks to help them develop deposits in areas such as the Caspian, where deposits are difficult to reach and infrastructure is still underdeveloped.

TITLE: New Local Business Daily is Published
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: RBK Daily launched its St. Petersburg edition Monday. In addition to the world news and national news provided by the newspaper’s Moscow office, RBK Daily St. Petersburg will offer a large section of local news.
The newspaper will be published daily Monday to Friday, and initial circulation will vary between 8,000 and 10,000 copies.
“The launch of RBK Daily St. Petersburg will fill the niche of business media. It’s a new publication with an original concept and unfailingly high quality of articles,” Artyom Inyutin, general director of RBK Media, said in a statement released by RBK news agency on Monday.
The first issue of RBK Daily St. Petersburg contained 12 pages on world and national news as well as covering business news in St. Petersburg and the Northwest region.
The newspaper has appointed Andrei Goryanov as its editor-in-chief. Formerly Goryanov was an editor at the local business daily Delovoi Peterburg.
Yury Dmitriyev, former manager of the St. Petersburg offices of Izvestia and Rossiiskaya Gazeta, has been named general director.
In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times on Monday, Goryanov said that the newspaper will be expanded to 16 pages in the near future, and the circulation will be also increased.
The St. Petersburg edition will focus on the same audience as the Moscow edition — businesspeople and people interested in business news, he said. “Therefore we will focus primarily on corporate news,” Goryanov explained.
Goryanov does not consider Kommersant a direct competitor. “Kommersant is not purely a business newspaper. They have a strong bias toward public and political news, though sometimes they do have really high quality news,” Goryanov said.
As for the Vedomosti daily, Goryanov expects the two newspapers to “overlap” in many areas.
“In Moscow, after one year of operating, RBK Daily demonstrated 10 percent less readership per issue on average compared to Vedomosti, according to TNS Gallup Media. I think in St. Petersburg we will have to occupy a similar position,” he said.
Mikhail Podushko, director for development at WorkLine Research, commented, “According to our polls, Delovoi Peterburg is the unrivaled leader. About 90 percent of the city’s companies subscribe to Delovoi Peterburg. Half as many respondents indicated Kommersant or Vedomosti,” Podushko said.
Delovoi Peterburg offers daily regional news, which Podushko considered the main reason for its success.
“RBK Daily will offer a similar format. If they observe the correct balance between regional and national news, they could take a part of Delovoi Peterburg’s readership,” he said.

TITLE: AllofMP3 Set to Resume Operations After Closure
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The owners of AllofMP3.com have announced plans to reopen the web site, barely two months after they were forced to close amid allegations they were running an illegal online music store.
“The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future,” said a statement on the web site dated Aug. 31.
“We are doing our best at the moment to ensure that all our users can use their accounts ... and order music.” 
The site was shut shortly before a July 1 meeting between Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush in Maine. The timing indicated that the Kremlin was nervous about a U.S. threat to block Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization over its poor protection of intellectual property rights.
However, a Moscow court this month acquitted AllofMP3.com’s former director Denis Kvasov of violating intellectual property laws.
MediaServices, the company that runs AllofMP3.com, said in a statement on the web site that the court ruling showed that AllofMP3.com had not broken the law.
Igor Pozhitkov, the plaintiff in the lawsuit and director of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in Russia and the CIS, said the web site’s claim was wrong.
“The court’s decision was not about the activities of AllofMP3 but about the criminal activities of its director, Denis Kvasov,” Pozhitkov said. 
“It is erroneous for anyone to interpret the court decision as allowing MediaServices to resume its activities.” 
Pozhitkov said he had filed an appeal in the Kvasov case and that all parties had to observe the status quo pending the next ruling.
The absence of a court decision banning the web site has created a legal vacuum that is being exploited by AllofMP3.com, a lawyer said.
“Since the owners ... obtained a favorable decision, and there is yet no verdict forcing them to close the site, they can [operate],” said Yevgeny Ariyevich, an international partner at Baker & McKenzie specializing in intellectual property law.
Ariyevich said, however, that since both the plaintiff and prosecutors had filed an appeal, “it may be too premature for the company to make the site operative again.”
A court decision is needed to put an end to the AllofMP3 saga, Ariyevich said. “A more straightforward way to do it is to file and win a civil action against the company, forcing it to close the resource,” he said.
Pozhitkov countered that law enforcement officials should close the site and that there was no need under Russian law to file a civil case for that to happen.
A spokeswoman for Maxim Medvedkov, Russia’s chief negotiator for WTO accession, agreed, saying it was the duty of prosecutors and the Interior Ministry to clamp down on illegal web sites.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman was unavailable for comment. A duty officer at the Interior Ministry’s computer crimes division, which began investigating AllofMP3.com in 2005, declined to comment.
Allofmp3.com, created in 2000, is thought to have earned $10 million to $14 million per year from Russian buyers alone before its closure.

TITLE: Rosneft To Issue Bonds
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: State-controlled oil giant Rosneft plans to issue ruble-denominated bonds worth 45 billion rubles ($1.76 billion) in 2007 and 2008, a banking source said Friday.
“They will be issued in three tranches,” he said.
The source said the oil firm mandated Troika Dialog, VTB and Gazprombank to organize the issue.
The first will be issued by the end of this year, the other two sometime next year, the source added. The ruble bonds will have a duration of up to seven years.
But Rosneft made it clear that the decision was not yet final.
“Directors at Rosneft need to make the decision to issue the bond, and they haven’t yet met on this,” a Rosneft spokesman said.
In July, Rosneft postponed a planned dollar bond of up to $5 billion because of market volatility.
The bond was part of a $15 billion medium-term note program to help recover debts stacked up from acquiring most of bankrupt oil giant Yukos.
At the start of 2007, Rosneft had debts of $13 billion and has since raised a further $22 billion loan from a consortium of international banks.
When delaying the bond, Rosneft said it would utilize other funding options.

TITLE: Usmanov Gunning for Bigger Arsenal Share
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko and Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Alisher Usmanov said Friday that he wanted to increase his stake in Arsenal Football Club to 25 percent and that although he was eager to play an active role in the London club, he was not seeking to buy it outright.
Usmanov’s purchase of nearly 15 percent in the club Thursday — the second investment by a Kremlin-friendly oligarch in a leading English Premier League team after Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003 — received a mixed reaction from the club’s fans and the British media, with some fearing a Russian takeover. 
“I would increase my share to a blocking stake — 25 percent — if such an opportunity presents itself,” Usmanov said. “Regardless of the size of my stake, I am ready to play an active role in the life of the club,” he said in e-mailed comments through his spokeswoman.
Usmanov’s Red and White Holdings on Thursday said it had paid $151 million for a 14.58 percent stake in the club from former Arsenal chairman David Dein.  Asked why he bought into Arsenal, Usmanov said he loved English football and had been a fan of the team, whose nickname is the Gunners, for eight years.
“In the case of Arsenal, my love for the club and a successful business opportunity coincided,” he said. “This is perhaps an opportunity of a lifetime.”
The Arsenal purchase is the latest in a series of diverse investments by the Uzbek-born Usmanov, who ranked 18th in Forbes Russia’s 2007 rich list with an estimated fortune of $5.6 billion. 
Usmanov is majority owner of the Metalloinvest mining and metals group, and runs Gazprom’s investment arm, Gazprominvestholding.
Last year, Usmanov bought business newspaper Kommersant from Badri Patarkatsishvili, a longtime associate of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. This summer, Usmanov bought into the country’s third-biggest mobile phone company, MegaFon. Both deals were widely seen as having the implicit backing of the Kremlin. Usmanov joins a growing list of Russian tycoons buying into and bidding for British football clubs. Since Abramovich bought Chelsea, Alexandre Gaidamak, the son of Russian-Israeli billionaire Arkady Gaidamak, has bought Portsmouth.
Meanwhile, Lithuanian businessman Vladimir Romanov has bought control of Scottish club Heart of Midlothian, and a bid for West Ham fronted by Kia Joorabchian, a former business associate of Berezovsky, was rejected by the East London club in September. 
Buying into Arsenal could be a smart investment for Usmanov. In a recent report, Deloitte ranked Arsenal as the world’s ninth-highest earning football club in the 2005-06 season, with total revenues rising 12 percent to 192.4 million euros ($263 million). The figures were buoyed by the club’s August 2006 move to the new 60,000-seat Emirates Stadium, which could bring in an estimated extra 58 million euros per season, the report said.
“Continued on-pitch success could see Arsenal break into the top five Football Money League clubs for the first time, and challenge Manchester United’s long-held position as the leading English club,” Deloitte said. 
Television broadcasting was the club’s largest revenue source, at 80 million euros, or 41 percent of the total, the report said.  Globally, broadcasters will pay a record $4.6 billion over the next three seasons to televise games in the world’s most popular football league, Bloomberg reported.
Under the Usmanov deal, Dein becomes chairman of Red and White, the investment company established to hold equity in Arsenal. The company is owned by Usmanov and a longtime associate, London-based fund manager and Metalloinvest chairman Farhad Moshiri. Usmanov and Moshiri share an executive box at the Emirates stadium.
Dein, an ally of Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger, was ousted from the Arsenal board in April. 
Red and White approached Dein “through a football intermediary after he stepped down from the board,” said Rollo Head, a partner at public relations firm Finsbury, which represents Red and White. 
Dein was forced to step down after he clashed with Arsenal board members, led by chairman Peter Hill-Wood, over his support for U.S. billionaire Stan Kroenke, who this year bought 12.2 percent in the club.
Dein will focus on increasing Red and White’s share in Arsenal, Head said, and reiterated that there were no plans to make a takeover offer for the club.
A Metalloinvest spokeswoman, Yulia Mazanova, said Usmanov was prepared to invest further in the club but had no current plans to mount a takeover bid.
Kirill Vishnepolsky, deputy director at Forbes Russia magazine, said he doubted that a successful market speculator such as Usmanov would want to assume full control of Arsenal.
“This is just too small a business for him,” Vishnepolsky said. “He’ll sell it in half a year,” he said of the stake.
The purchase met with a mixed reaction from British government and sports officials. 
“There is nothing wrong with foreign ownership per se, but we do want to be sure that those people who come into English football respect the local traditions,” said Anthony Wright, a spokesman for the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 
Previous British sports ministers have called for potential owners of Premier League football clubs to be properly vetted. Wright said anyone looking to take over a Premier League club had to face two tests, one from the Department for Trade and Industry and another from the Premier League. He said his department held consultations with the Premier League in June to determine whether the tests were stringent enough. The consultations came at around the time former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra took over Manchester City. Premier League spokesman Dan Johnson said that unless Usmanov increased his stake, he would not face any official scrutiny.
“Until Mr. Usmanov reaches 30 percent or becomes a director or becomes the owner of the club, not until that point would he be submitted to the fit and proper persons test,” Johnson said. Anyone who acquires 29.9 percent stake in a Premier League football club is automatically required to lodge a takeover bid.
Many Arsenal fans expressed indignation at Usmanov’s investment and worried about the source of the money coming into the club.
“This is a company that wants to buy up as many Arsenal shares as possible and take over the club,” a blogger on Arseblog.com said. “Usmanov is an oligarch. Do I need to tell you how they made their money?”

TITLE: Arrival of 3G Technology Hampered by Bureaucracy
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Don’t hold your breath in the hope that you will be able to join videoconferences or quickly browse the Internet with your cell phone any time soon.
Despite promises that the bells and whistles of third-generation technology will be available next year, the three leading mobile phone providers are mired in a web of technical and bureaucratic problems that threaten to delay their plans by at least a year. And even then, 3G networks may not be available in Moscow and other cities.
Chief among the problems are the need to clear radio frequencies for mobile phone use and a slow-moving government, which has yet to authorize 3G equipment for use in Russia.
But analysts said the big three operators — MegaFon, Mobile TeleSystems and VimpelCom — really had no excuse to miss a final deadline of 2009, which they committed to when they won state tenders for three 3G licenses in April.
“The bureaucracy is powerful, but nothing is impossible to overcome as long as you know how to go about it,” said Nadezhda Golubeva, a telecommunications analyst with Aton Capital. “The main operators certainly know the rules of the game.”
Russia is joining the 3G game later than much of the Western world. Japan was the first country to offer 3G services in 2001 and was followed by many European countries and the United States. A handful of developed countries, including Canada, still lack 3G networks.
In Russia, the first step toward setting up a 3G network is to claim radio frequencies won with the licenses in April. To do this, each mobile phone operator must clear a frequency — an expensive and labor-intensive process that involves converting it from government to civilian use.
“Frequencies clearance is the major challenge,” MTS spokeswoman Irina Osadchaya said. 
Most frequencies remained in military hands after Soviet times, while about 5 percent are in civilian use, according to figures from the IT and Communications Ministry, which wants to increase the share in civilian use to 12 percent in time for the 3G rollout.
Clearing a frequency requires that the old and new owners work hand in hand to remove old equipment used on the frequency, install new equipment and fine-tune it. The new owner also needs to receive approval from a myriad of state-controlled organizations. 
Only after the clearance process is completed can the state-run Main Radio Frequency Center officially sign off on a frequency for civilian use.
VimpelCom and MTS put the cost of a nationwide clearance of a single frequency at anywhere from several tens of millions of dollars to $200 million. The government seems to have anticipated this cost and has made concessions to offset the expenses, including its decision to issue licenses for a token fee of 2.6 million rubles ($100,000).
From start to finish, the whole process of clearing a frequency can take two to three years, said Alexander Krupnov, president of the Russian 3G Association. He said this was how long it took mobile phone providers to clear frequencies for second-generation technology.
A VimpelCom spokeswoman acknowledged that frequency clearance should not be an excuse for delaying 3G technology but said the time and expense of clearing frequencies in Moscow could delay implementation there. MegaFon concurred, saying it was considering building its first 3G networks in other large cities with populations of 1 million or more people. 
“Nationwide licenses are useless in places like Moscow unless further agreements are reached with the institutions currently using the frequencies,” MegaFon spokeswoman Marina Belasheva said. “We have received frequencies, but they are of no use.”
MegaFon announced last week that it would invest $1 billion in 3G technology over the next three years and build 2,000 base stations around the country. 
MTS also plans to spend $1 billion over three years as it looks to set up networks in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk in 2008 and in 43 other cities by 2009. VimpelCom has earmarked $350 million to deploy 3G networks in 39 regions by the end of 2008. 
For those investment plans to go forward, the IT and Communications Ministry needs to certify 3G equipment. By law, each operator must conduct an in-house tender to select an equipment supplier. Both MTS and VimpelCom hoped to conduct these tenders before year-end, but they cannot until the ministry certifies equipment.
“No company can start building 3G networks until the IT and Communications Ministry issues certification on the equipment, hopefully by September,” said VimpelCom’s spokeswoman, Yelena Prokhorova.
Certification, however, could come even later than that, said Osadchaya, the MTS spokeswoman. She said she understood that regulators were still engaged in the cumbersome process of developing technical norms for 3G equipment. 
IT and Communications Ministry officials were unavailable for immediate comment.

TITLE: New Nokia Services And Gadgets Aim At Apple
AUTHOR: By Matti Huuhtanen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HELSINKI, Finland — Nokia Corp. unveiled new services and cell phones Wednesday that customers can use to download music and play games, a bid by the world’s largest mobile phone maker to challenge Apple Inc.’s higher-end iPhone, as well as iTunes and the iPod.
The move by Nokia, whose basic handsets give it a strong position in emerging markets, is the latest recognition that high-end markets require handsets with photo, music and video capabilities and quick access to the Internet.
One of Nokia’s new phones can hold up to 6,000 songs. Other new gadgets include headphones, docking stations and speakers.
Nokia said it will focus its new Web services in a site known as “Ovi” — Finnish for “door” — that will include an online music store “with millions of tracks from major labels.”
With the new services, consumers will be able to transfer music from PCs to compatible Nokia devices and play and download N-Gage games on “tens of millions” of existing Nokia devices, the Finnish company said.
The announcement in London sent Nokia’s U.S. shares up $2.17, or 7.2 percent, to $32.18, setting a new 52-week high.
“The industry is converging towards Internet-driven experiences, and Ovi represents Nokia’s vision in combining the Internet and mobility,” CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in London.
Nokia’s new top-range models, some including 5-megapixel cameras, Carl Zeiss optics, and memory of up to 8 gigabytes, range from $300 to $750.
Nokia bought Loudeye Corp., a leading provider of digital media distribution services, for $60 million last year to expand its digital music offerings. Now it has completed deals with the four major music labels — Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group Inc., EMI Group PLC and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG. The “Nokia Music Store” will open this autumn in Europe and later in Asia.
Apple’s iTunes store is currently the leading online music retailer, and its iPod is the most popular digital media player. The company in June entered Nokia’s territory in releasing the iPhone, which combines a cell phone, media player and wireless Internet device.
Nokia’s announcement emphasized the new items’ sleek design and slim size — one phone is less than 10 millimeters thick — another apparent attempt to counterbalance Apple and its renown for design.
Last week, Nokia and Microsoft Corp. also announced that access to some of the software maker’s most popular Web services, like Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger, will come built into some Nokia phone models.
Nokia, based in Espoo near the Finnish capital, Helsinki, has sales offices in 130 countries and employs 110,000 people worldwide.

TITLE: Rumors abound of ‘Google Phone’ Launch
AUTHOR: By Laurence Benhamou
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Specialized blogs were all abuzz last week with rumors that Internet giant Google will soon launch the “Google Phone” or “GPhone,” a cheap mobile phone equipped with a Google operating system.
High-tech product specialist Engadget said a Google announcement would come this week, adding that a Google operating system would be tailor-made for the new cell phone.
According to another blog, CrunchGear, “Google is currently assessing over twenty [of Taiwan’s] HTC models” and plans to launch its cell phone between January and March of 2008.
Photographs of Google’s touch-screen handset are already on the Internet, and according to Rizzn.com, it will cost a mere $100 dollars.
CrunchGear said the HTC/Google phone would have Google Talk enabled, allowing users to make free Internet phone calls.
The blog said the Google phone will not only be able to surf the net but also will include “a special version of Google Maps, compatible with built-in GPS, and compatibility with Gmail,” Google’s email service.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has already shown its prototype to US companies AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, making it seem clear the Google Phone’s launch will definitely take place in the United States.
Google has refused to make any comment on the rumors.
The persistent rumors about a GPhone reflect gadget fans’ enormous interest for the iPhone Apple launched in late June, which has since generated a lot of buzz on the internet.

TITLE: Looking Further Back in History
AUTHOR: By Jay Winik
TEXT: With Russia just having trumpeted its claim to a piece of the Arctic the size of Western Europe, the military has now announced ambitious plans to establish a permanent presence in the Mediterranean for the first time since the end of the Cold War. The guiding hand behind this resurgence is undeniably the country’s enigmatic president, Vladimir Putin. 
On the surface, enigmatic seems to be the word. Putin dons well-tailored suits even as he clamps down on domestic opposition and homemade democracy. He flashes a warm smile in the councils of international summitry even as he smashes dissent in Chechnya. He has charmed U.S. President George W. Bush even as he stymies U.S. policy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. The conventional wisdom is that Putin’s background in the KGB is what ultimately drives his more notorious actions, leading foreign policy commentators to raise the specter of a renewed Cold War. 
But if the West is truly going to come to grips with Putin and a resurrected Russian state, it would do well to see him not as something relatively new, but as something old, drawing on historical roots stretching back to the 18th century and Catherine the Great. Indeed, it is far more likely that Putin and his allies are following not the ghosts of Stalin and Khrushchev, but spiritual masters such as Empress Catherine in seeking to reestablish Russia as a great nation on the world stage. 
Like Putin, Catherine II was a curiosity in her day, alternately bewitching and confusing her critics and supporters. From early on, she was the liberal idol of the great Enlightenment philosophes of Europe. She corresponded with the eminent Voltaire, drew upon Montesquieu in governing Russia (nearly 20 years before the founders of the United States did), published Helvetius when he was being burned in effigy by Paris’s public hangman, and subscribed to Diderot’s famed Encyclopedie when it was banned in France. “What a time we live in,” Voltaire enthused, “France persecutes the intellectuals while the Scythians protect them!” 
Catherine even took the remarkable step of not only corresponding with Thomas Jefferson, but also helping midwife U.S. independence through her League of Armed Neutrality, which diplomatically isolated Britain during the American Revolution. King George III first approached Catherine, not the Hessians, to request her hardened Cossacks to fight George Washington and the up-start colonials; she turned him down. American-Russian ties thus go way back. 
Yet, with eerie echoes for today’s world, the once-heralded liberal empress became, within a few years, a reactionary. Though John Adams, the second president of the United States, thought Russia would be a natural ally, Catherine did not even deign to meet with the envoy of the fledgling country, Francis Dana, who lamented that he knew “less of the empresses comings and goings” than did her groomsman. And when the French Revolution broke out, Catherine turned her back on decades of the Enlightenment and unleashed modern authoritarianism. 
She ruthlessly repressed intellectuals in Russia and, short of committing her armies, did everything she could to destroy the “democratic” Jacobin menace emanating from France. “What do cobblers know about ruling?” she barked, having decided that representative government was ill suited to such a large nation as Russia. Then, in still one more about-face, she openly derided George Washington and condemned the American Revolution she had once professed to admire. 
The current carnage in Iraq, along with Russia’s latest overtures to Syria and its rising belligerence toward Georgia, bring to mind how deftly Catherine took advantage of the French-led chaos that swept Europe in 1795. She acted to wipe the ancient kingdom of Poland off the map and carve up its lands. (Ironically, the Polish insurrection against her was bravely spearheaded by Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of the Revolutionary War in the United States.) 
Another hallmark of Catherine’s Russia with striking portents for today was domestic opinion on the West. To be sure, she took great strides to Europeanize the Russian colossus: She built the Hermitage, amassed a world-class art collection, improved schools and hospitals, and sent French-speaking Russians abroad in droves. But Catherine did little to change the attitude of the average Russian toward what was often disdainfully referred to as “the peninsula of Europe.” 
Putin, despite smiling Group of Eight photo ops, is in much the same mold. He likens U.S. policies to those of the Third Reich and darkly refers to the foreign enemies who seek to undermine Russia. Even many younger Russians, who analysts once predicted would be the United States’ greatest friends in the post-Cold War era, openly profess their profound hostility to the country. Catherine was charming, brilliant, vital and complex. She frequently dominated the global arena over three decades. “If she were corresponding with God,” Prussia’s Frederick the Great once said, “she would claim at least equal rank.” And with haunting lessons for the 21st century, 
Catherine was a master of presenting two faces to the world — one to enlightened intellectuals everywhere, and one to her own people. Whatever her flirtations with Washington, Franklin, Voltaire, Montesquieu, the United States or constitutionalism, in the end she cherished the glory of imperial Russia more. 
At the age of 67, Catherine was determined that her legacy would live on. She handpicked her successor — her grandson Alexander — only to be foiled by her own unexpected death. Within 4 1/2 short years, however, Alexander came to power in a coup, sanctioning the murder of his father and eventually becoming the arbiter of Europe, defeating no less than Napoleon. Similarly, Putin appears to have his own dynastic designs, albeit wrapped in a thinly democratic guise. He is expected to handpick his presidential successor for 2008, while hinting that he might run again in 2012. 
So what should we conclude? It would be a great mistake to see Russia’s actions as inevitably heralding a new Cold War. But it would be an equal mistake to ignore the fact that Putin has learned well how to play Catherine’s impostor game. Just as Catherine became a master of playing the budding democrat abroad while being a despot at home and of professing pacifism while beating the drum of bellicosity across the globe, so too has Putin. He should be viewed accordingly. 

Jay Winik’s new book, “The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800,” will be published next month. This comment appeared in The Washington Post.

TITLE: Now We Can Ignore the Elections in Peace
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: As politicians return from their summer recess, they are preparing for the latest battle — the campaign season for State Duma elections. According to changes in election laws, all of the Duma seats will be allocated according to a proportional representation system in the December elections. Instead of choosing individual candidates, voters will be able to choose only from a list of parties. The contest is conducted like a television game show: Those parties that do not get 7 percent of the vote are doomed to political extinction.
United Russia is acting as both player and referee by setting or changing the rules as it chooses. Liberals are outraged by this flagrant violation of democratic principles, while the majority of the people are openly indifferent — and rightfully so.
After all, what difference does it make for us if the rules of the political game are fair or unfair when the game itself bears no relationship to our lives and when we find the whole spectacle deeply offensive? In the end, the people are the main prize for the candidates. The election winners get to order us around, to steal from us and to deceive us.
The people are not so much indifferent to democracy as they are to a system that they cannot influence in any way. It is perfectly understandable why so many Russians have so little desire to follow the election campaign on television. They know instinctively that the politicians are fundamentally unable to speak the truth.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the new electoral law was the decision to eliminate the “against all” option on the ballot. In reality, this was nothing but a farce. The concept of “against all” was developed to create the impression that voters had a legitimate way of expressing their protest at the ballot box. We should thank United Russia deputies and the Central Elections Commission for removing this option from the ballot. Now we can stay at home and ignore the elections in peace.
In addition, politicians did the right thing when they removed the election rule that set a minimum threshold for voter turnout. The authorities understood that it is simply unrealistic to expect ordinary mortals to participate in the election process. By removing the burden of voter turnout, our leaders have shown how humanitarian they are by not demanding anything from the people.
Cancellation of the minimum turnout means that the 2007 elections will be, technically speaking, more honest than the last one. Back then, most ballot box stuffing occurred at the local level, where it was necessary to collect the minimum percentage of votes. If the threshold was not met, the elections would have been declared invalid according to the law, forcing us to go through this election mess all over again. 
With the new rule in force, life has become much easier for both ordinary citizens and officials because, under the proportional electoral system, low voter turnout won’t affect the outcome.
It would be more honest to simply cancel elections altogether and let politicians fight it out among themselves to determine who gets Duma seats. 
Even better would be to have them draw lots, or deputies could even try to win seats by playing poker or throwing dice. Any of these methods would be more fair and democratic than the present one. 
In addition, watching such a high-stakes contest would be more interesting and entertaining. At least we could limit ourselves to being observers rather than participants in the political process. After all, when you go to the horse races, no one requires you to run after the horses.

Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.

TITLE: The Written Rules Have Little Bearing on Reality
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Officials from the Natural Resources Ministry, including the deputy head of the federal environmental watchdog, Oleg Mitvol, are in the United States meeting with investors. The aim of the visit is to explain the rules of the game in the energy sector to U.S. investors.
On paper, the rules of the game have been made clear. This summer, the State Duma finally passed laws governing foreign investment in strategic sectors. But even Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev admits that these remain pretty vague.
“There are still definitions like ‘licenses are reviewed in the instance of existing violations,’ where these instances can be determined by any bureaucrat. ... Business isn’t protected,” Trutnev told Kommersant last week.
Market regulators apply the law differently for various companies. Market players and analysts in the sector already depend more on their sense of the signals being sent by the Kremlin and government than on the rules. Analysts trying to evaluate risk or predict the prospects of a certain company face a major problem — the rules are not just informal, they are also ephemeral.
Given the speed with which the signals in the industry change, it is practically impossible to evaluate the likely outcomes of different events. The role of formal methodology in market analysis continues to shrink, while the level of uncertainty continues to rise. In each particular case, it is necessary to account for a multitude of factors, and analysis is increasingly based on intuition.
It is occasionally possible to isolate a temporary tendency, but to use it to predict outcomes is dangerous, as the general line could change. The rules of the game in the oil and gas sector are corrected every few months. Most analysts were able to predict the outcome of the conflict over the Kovykta field based on past practice. But events in the Russneft case have been much more difficult to foresee. The state and state-controlled companies preferred to hold shares for ransom until the last minute (like Gazprom is doing with independent gas producers). The arrest warrant issued for the head of Russneft, which echoed the Yukos affair, demonstrates that there are no real trends in the oil and gas sector — just the positions and interests of the different players.
There are, of course, some general rules that can be discerned by analyzing regulatory practices and the interests of companies close to the state. But it is better not to listen too closely to officials’ speeches to get a general idea of the informal rules in play. Instead, what is required is an exceptional feel for the country. This comes easier for Russians, which is why foreigners have a hard time here.

This appeared as an editorial in Vedomosti.

TITLE: Sarkozy Helps the Socialists
AUTHOR:  By Zaki Laidi
TEXT: Three months after its third consecutive defeat and the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French left is in disarray. The new president is highly popular and hyperactive. The socialist leadership, meanwhile, is divided, depressed and deprived of any vision or perspective. 
Segolene Royal, who has tried to convert her electoral defeat into a bid on the Socialist party, underestimated the stiff resistance to her leadership. She is inclined to pursue the strategy that led her to be chosen as the Socialist presidential candidate: promoting herself to the public while circumventing the party apparatus. But she cannot ignore the rough law of politics: To win elections, the support of a strong party is indispensable. For this reason, she will probably try to play it both ways — inside and outside the party. 
The crisis of leadership is aggravated by two factors. Contrary to common belief, divisions within the Socialist party are blurred. It is not a case of conservatives on one side and modernists on the other. All socialists claim to be “reformists.” But this reform agenda is empty, ambiguous or limited to slogans. It is, for example, striking to hear modernists talking about a social-democratic project in a party that has no historical credentials in social democracy and at a time when social democracy itself is in crisis because of globalization. 
Moreover, alliances within the Socialist party are rarely the product of ideological coalitions. This has two important consequences. It is unlikely that the party can develop a clear ideology because there is no balance of power in favor of reform. This lack of ideology will actually prevent the party from imploding. But there is an additional complication that was largely unexpected. Most of the Socialist leaders secretly hoped that Sarkozy would act in a brutal and Thatcherite way, enabling them clearly to oppose him. But things did not turn out that way. Sarkozy took the Socialists by surprise, opening up his government to leaders from the left who had lost faith in their party. More importantly, he has followed a reformist agenda that cannot be labeled as neo-liberal. 
Sarkozy’s agenda combines four elements: a strong law and order bent aimed at preventing the revival of the right-wing National Front; a cautious deregulation of the labor market; a transfer of resources to the wealthiest through a new fiscal policy; and an appeal to traditional national values. 
The law and order agenda is popular with the rank and file left, and a growing number of left-wing leaders share Sarkozy’s desire to fight urban unrest. The deregulation of the labor market provides more political opportunities for the left in a country where attempts to reduce the number of civil servants are observed with suspicion. But everybody knows that the status quo is unsustainable. 
If Sarkozy succeeds in deregulating the labor market without strong opposition, the left will not repeal the new law if it comes back to power. Sarkozy is, above all, a dealmaker concerned with results. The manner in which the reform of universities has been conducted illustrates his method: strong on principles but pragmatic on implementation. His capacity to compromise is unlimited as long as he looks like the winner. 
It would be a mistake to draw hasty conclusions about the future of the left. The French left is not in the same situation as the British Labour Party at the end of the 1970s. There is still a strong left-wing electorate. The crisis of the left is more ideological than sociological. But the combination of strong support at the local level and weak leadership at the national one may have mixed implications. Why change if the left is capable of winning more cities? Why change if local leaders are indifferent to ideological issues? 
Since its conception in 1905, the Socialist party has cultivated what is called “municipal socialism.” Things have changed. The aspiration to national power is now part of the Socialist agenda. But in the present situation, the chances of an ideological big bang are limited. 
The Socialist party is not weak enough to revise in depth its attitudes towards the market, globalization and individualism. But it is not strong enough to represent a credible alternative to Sarkozy. 
In any case, it would be unlikely to reverse his reforms if and when it came to power. In this way, if Sarkozy succeeds in modernizing France, he may help the Socialist party to modernize itself. 
The question is how long it will take. 

Laidi is a professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. This comment appeared in the Financial Times.

TITLE: Suez, Gaz de France Seek Deal on Merger
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — Executives at Suez and Gaz de France are holding weekend talks to try to seek a deal on a 90 billion euro ($123 billion) merger, with both utilities expected to hold board meetings Sunday.
Trade unions, who are opposed to the deal, say they have had indications that the final details are being discussed — the FO union has said state-controlled GDF’s board was due to meet in the evening and that Suez’s board would also meet Sunday.
GDF and Suez declined to comment, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office has also declined to comment on the merger talks.
The unions said details seeping out over the weekend suggested, however, that the endgame was in sight for the deal, which was brokered by the previous conservative government in early 2006 to fend off a feared takeover bid for Suez by Italy’s Enel.
A FO union official said Saturday that the plan was for the merged group to focus on the energy businesses, which analysts have said was one way to solve a financial impasse that has cropped up since the merger plans were unveiled.
Suez’s market capitalization has increased faster than that of GDF since then, preventing it from being the merger of equals, as was initially envisioned. Analysts have said that for the deal to remain a merger of equals, Suez must shed assets and distribute the receipts of such sales to its shareholders through a special dividend.
And Suez has, sources close to the situation say, bowed to pressure from Sarkozy to split its business and shed part of its historic water assets to salvage the deal.

TITLE: Poles Protest EU Shipyard Decision
AUTHOR: By Marcin Grajewski
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS — Polish workers protested outside the European Union’s headquarters Friday over the bloc’s demands that the struggling Gdansk shipyard, birthplace of the anti-communist Solidarity movement, slash its output.
The European Commission has said Gdansk must cut capacity to avoid having to repay hefty state subsidies, which could trigger the yard’s bankruptcy.
“We defended our shipyard successfully during communist times, but now we feel the danger may be coming from Brussels,” protest leader Karol Guzikiewicz said at a rally of some 100 workers outside the EU executive’s main building.
The collapse of the yard would be political dynamite in Poland, which is poised for an early parliamentary election in October or November.
The protesters, carrying red and white Solidarity flags and singing anti-communist songs from the 1980s, met EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who is studying Gdansk’s restructuring plan.
Under EU rules, governments can give financial help to ailing companies only if the cash is accompanied by plans that would make the firms viable in the long term.
The aid paid to three Polish shipyards, including Gdansk, since Poland entered the EU in 2004 totals 1.3 billion euros ($1.8 billion).
“The Commission recognizes the crucial part in European history that Gdansk played and its part in the struggle for freedom and a reunited Europe,” said Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd, but the Commission had to follow the law.
The rally was held on the 27th anniversary of the signing of “August agreements” between workers and Poland’s communist government, which opened the door for the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union.
Unionists said the Commission’s demand to shut two of the yard’s three slipways would make it next to impossible to privatize the company and save its 3,000 jobs.
Ukrainian metals holding company Donbass Industrial Union and an Italian shipping firm have been selected as the final bidders to acquire 75 percent of the yard for some 100 million euros.

TITLE: Former French Minister Favored to Get IMF Job
AUTHOR: By Glenn Somerville
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Former French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the front-runner to take over the top job at the International Monetary Fund as a deadline passed on Friday for nominating successors to Rodrigo Rato.
Strauss-Kahn and former Czech central banker Josef Tosovsky — who is backed by Russia but not by the Czech Republic — were the only two nominees as successors to Rato as managing director of the fund.
Strauss-Kahn has the backing of the European Union to head the IMF, which gives his candidacy considerable clout on the IMF board. Russia said Strauss-Kahn lacked the technical expertise to head the IMF and that it considered Tosovsky a stronger candidate.
A decision will be made by the IMF’s board in the coming weeks on who wins the influential post to head the Washington-based global financial institution.
In a statement issued Friday evening, the IMF said its executive board would assess the two nominees’ professional record and qualifications, interview them in Washington, “and thereafter meet to discuss the strengths of the candidates and make a selection.”
The IMF job became vacant in July after the sudden resignation of Rato, who was in the midst of reforming the fund. The overhaul aims to strengthen the way the IMF monitors the world economy and revamp its voting structures to better reflect the rise of new economic powers like China.
Strauss-Kahn has campaigned vigorously for the position, traveling the world to lobby financial leaders. Tosovsky’s name was put forward by Russia in late August.
Several developing countries, including Russia, have been arguing that a decades-old convention of having the United States select the World Bank chief and Europe choose the head of the IMF was outdated and should be dropped in recognition of the growing might of emerging economies.
Neither candidate appears to have stirred rousing support.
The Czech Republic said it favored Strauss-Kahn over Tosovsky, while the United States has kept its distance from the maneuvering to pick Rato’s successor.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in July that he considered Strauss-Kahn a good candidate to head the institute, but stopped short of fully backing him for the job.

TITLE: China Looking for Bilingual Bankers
AUTHOR: By Eleanor Wason
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Chinese demand has already fueled booms in markets from copper to shipping, but the rise of the world’s fastest growing economy is also driving up prices for another hot commodity: bilingual bankers.
Banks are struggling to find enough candidates with fluent Mandarin and English to accommodate their expansion plans in China, which is poised to leapfrog Hong Kong as Asia’s biggest center for initial public offerings.
Securing banking talent in China has been a problem for years, but the matter is more pressing than ever with the country starting to spend its $1.33 trillion of foreign currency reserves on overseas deals.
Hedge funds and private equity firms, which are starting to source deals in China, are also poaching bankers from Wall Street, making the hunt for talent even tougher.
After China’s decades of isolation from global trade, English is not widely spoken, and few non-Chinese master the notoriously difficult language.
“There are people who understand the product and people who understand the people, but a dearth of those who understand both,” said Adrian Ezra, chief executive of international financial recruitment firm Execuzen.
“Demand outstrips supply 10-to-1,” he said. “If you are a senior or even a junior Chinese specialist, you can practically write your own ticket.”
An expected wave of foreign currency-funded overseas takeovers and a proposed end to a ban on foreign acquisitions of Chinese brokerages have helped spark hiring sprees by banks such as Citigroup.
One Chinese investment banking chairman said his European firm had more than tripled local hires, to about 20 a year.
Other emerging markets are also presenting troubles for banks in search of deal makers, but China poses a unique challenge.
“It is easier to move Russians back to Russia or Indians back to India. The Middle Easterners are happy to move to Dubai. But you cannot find the Chinese,” Ezra said.
Many Chinese immigrants are Cantonese speakers and unfamiliar with China’s official language of Mandarin. Outside of Shanghai and Beijing, English speakers are scarce, which boutique bank First Line Capital found when it opened earlier this month in the city of Chongqing.
“The language issue is a very sore point,” First Line founder Simon Erblich said. “Just ordering room service here is a problem.”
Another challenge in wooing employees to mainland China is lifestyle, as many are deterred by pollution, cultural divides, high taxes and strict control over politics and media.
“Even for Hong Kong Chinese, there are differences,” said one bilingual employee at a top bank in Beijing. “Mainland China is a much more traditional society.”

TITLE: Google Begins Direct Hosting of AP Stories
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN FRANCISCO — Internet search leader Google has begun hosting material produced by The Associated Press and three other news services on its own web site instead of only sending readers to other destinations.
The change, which started Friday, affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, Agence France Presse, Britain’s The Press Association and The Canadian Press. It could diminish Internet traffic to other media sites where those stories and photos are also found — a development that could reduce the online advertising revenue of newspapers and broadcasters.
Google negotiated licensing deals with the AP and the French news agency during the past two years, after the services raised concerns about whether the search engine had been infringing on their copyrights. The company also reached licensing agreements with The Press Association and The Canadian Press during the same period.
Financial terms of those deals have not been disclosed.
The new approach does not change the look of Google News or affect the way the section treats material produced by other media.
Although Google already had bought the right to display content produced by all four news services, the search engine’s news section had continued to link to other web sites to read the stories and look at the photographs, which helped drive more online traffic to newspapers and broadcasters.

TITLE: Former Bangladesh PM Arrested for Graft
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DHAKA — Bangladesh arrested and refused bail for former leader Begum Khaleda Zia on Monday, witnesses and officials said.
Her younger son Arafat Rahman was also detained at the same time. A Dhaka magistrate’s court remanded him to police custody for a week for interrogation.
Security forces arrested Khaleda, the country’s most recent prime minister, at her home. Her lawyers prayed for bail, which the same court rejected. She was then moved to a special jail in the capital, court officials said.
Hundreds of army-led security forces had surrounded Khaleda’s home in the city’s army barracks since Sunday midnight and she was detained at about 7:30 a.m. local time.
Khaleda was later produced in court under heavy police protection. From there she was moved in a building turned into a special jail, near the parliament building and beside another special jail where another former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, is now housed.
The arrest of Khaleda and Arafat came after police said they recorded a corruption case against the ex-prime minister, her son and 11 others late on Sunday.
The Anti-Corruption Commission accused Khaleda of illegally influencing the selection of an operator for two state-run container depots at the country’s main Chittagong port in 2003, during her second term in power.
Arafat had allegedly influenced his mother to select the operator of his choice, police said.
It was the first case filed against Khaleda Zia by the Anti-Corruption Commission, which has already brought multiple charges of extortion and corruption against Hasina.
Khaleda’s rival has been in jail since she was detained in July for alleged extortion. Hasina’s trial has not started. Hundreds of Khaleda’s supporters thronged the court building, making it difficult for police to lead her inside, witnesses said.
“Madam, we are with you,” chanted her supporters, as Khaleda, wearing an off-white silk sari, waved and smiled at them.
“She was cool and showed no sign of anxiety,” one witness said. “She looked brave and composed as ever.”
Khaleda’s lawyer Masud Ahmed Talukdar said “the charges were not clear. It said Khaleda influenced the selection of a firm with the motive to earn illegal money.”
The U.S. embassy in Dhaka said it was aware of Khaleda’s arrest and that “all individuals should be treated fairly and receive the full range of their legal and constitutional rights.”
Khaleda’s elder son and political heir Tareque Rahman was detained in March by security forces as part of an anti-corruption drive launched by the army-backed interim government, which took charge in January.
More than 170 other senior political figures have also been detained.
Bangladesh has been under a state of emergency since January, which banned political activity and protests by political parties or any other groups, and also cancelled an election planned for Jan. 22.  Khaleda stepped down in October at the end of her five-year term.
The interim government headed by former central bank chief Fakhruddin Ahmed has promised to hold a free and fair election before the end of next year.
The powerful army also seems determined to crush the two parties headed by Khaleda and Hasina. Prior to January, both parties caused widespread unrest, including costly nationwide strikes condemned by businesses, as well as violent protests.
The two women have been criticized by many of their party leaders as authoritarian and corrupt.

TITLE: Chelsea Struggle as Arsenal Storms Ahead
AUTHOR: By Tim Collings
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Chelsea missed a chance to return to the top of the Premier League on Sunday when they crashed to their first defeat of the season, going down 2-0 at Aston Villa.
Missing England midfielder Frank Lampard, who suffered a thigh strain in training on Friday, Chelsea struggled for any attacking rhythm and were beaten by second half goals from debutant central defender Zat Knight and striker Gabriel Agbonlahor.
The result left Chelsea fourth, level on 10 points with the leading trio Liverpool, Arsenal and Everton, and one point ahead of fifth-placed Manchester City who lost 1-0 at Blackburn Rovers after a Benni McCarthy strike.
Arsenal had earlier beaten Portsmouth 3-1 at the Emirates Stadium despite being reduced to 10 men after a 49th minute red card for Swiss defender Philippe Senderos.
Chelsea gave debuts to both of their recently recruited Brazilian defenders, right-back Juliano Belletti and centre-back Alex, and dominated the game for long periods.
But they were unable to turn possession into shots and fell behind when Knight, a boyhood Villa fan signed from Fulham, headed in from an inswinging corner by Gareth Barry after 47 minutes.
Chelsea threw everything into attack for the remainder of the game including using captain England centre-back John Terry as an auxiliary striker without reward.
Villa scored their second in the 88th minute when Ashley Young, called up by England on Friday for the first time, ran past Belletti on the wing and from his driven cross Agbonlahor shot crisply beyond keeper Petr Cech.
It was Chelsea’s first defeat in 19 league outings and extended their bad run at bogey ground Villa Park to nine matches without a win.
The Birmingham stadium also remains the only one in the Premier League where Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has not tasted victory.
Mourinho said: “It was a good game between two good teams, but the result was one that Chelsea did not deserve. We deserved to score a goal and to score a point. Their second goal was out of context because we were chasing and it came in the last minute.”
Arsenal were two goals ahead at the interval thanks to an eighth minute penalty from Togo striker Emmanuel Adebayor and a 35th minute close-range finish by Spanish midfielder Cesc Fabregas. Senderos was sent off for a clumsy tackle on former Arsenal forward Nwankwo Kanu, but the hosts refused to buckle.
Tomas Rosicky, their fluent Czech Republic midfielder, added a third from close range after 59 minutes following a quickly-taken free-kick by Fabregas.
Portsmouth replied when Kanu managed luckily to flick the ball into the net as he tried to control it just 18 seconds later.
Pompey were without 32-year-old central defender Sol Campbell, due to an injury that his manager Harry Redknapp expects will force him, like Lampard, to pull out of the England squad for next weekend’s Euro 2008 qualifier against Israel at Wembley.

TITLE: Thousands Remain Missing 
In Balkans
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: BELGRADE, Serbia — At least 17,000 people are still missing from the wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday.
More than 13,400 of those missing were from Bosnia’s war, some 2,300 from Croatia’s conflict and 2,047 from strife in Kosovo, the committee said in a statement. 
The figures were released ahead of the International Day of the Disappeared to be marked on Thursday.
“For years now, ever since the conflict in the former Yugoslavia broke out, the I.C.R.C. has strived to support the plea of the families of missing persons, hoping to bring about more answers on the fate of their beloved,” said Paul Henri Arni, the head of the Red Cross in Belgrade.
Some estimates say 200,000 people were killed and 2.2 million displaced in Bosnia’s 1992-95 conflict, but an independent study issued in June put the number of dead at fewer than 100,000. 
More than 20,000 are believed to have been killed in Croatia’s 1991-95 war, and up to 10,000 in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.

TITLE: U.S. Open Going Well For Sisters
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Venus and Serena Williams served their way into the U.S. Open quarterfinals with impressive straight-sets victories Sunday, setting up a possible clash between the American sisters in the final four.
Venus never lost her serve during a 6-4 6-2 drubbing of Ana Ivanovic, while Serena stopped France’s Marion Bartoli 6-3 6-4 by blasting 10 aces and landing 73 percent of her first serves.
A Venus-Serena match-up would be their fourth at Flushing Meadows and the first since meeting in the 2005 fourth round.
“That would be awesome because it would mean that there is a Williams in the final and it would mean that Americans have a chance to win,” said Venus, who won the 2005 encounter.
Standing in the way of Serena’s possible clash with Venus is top seed and world number one Justine Henin, who demolished 15th seed Dinara Safina 6-0 6-2 in just 59 minutes.
“We both have a lot of character and a lot of personality,” Henin said of her quarterfinal opponent.
“We both have been very strong mentally on the court the last few years.
“There’s a lot of respect professionally between the two of us, that’s for sure.
On the men’s side, second seed Rafael Nadal said he continued to suffer from nagging injuries to both knees but his ailments hardly apparent during a 7-6 6-2 6-1 victory over Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
Nadal made only 14 unforced errors and never lost his serve against the 74th-ranked Tsonga.
“It was important for me to win in straight sets,” the second-seeded Spaniard said. “For my knees it’s better because I can be a little bit more relaxed for the next match.”
In the fourth round, Nadal will face compatriot David Ferrer, who needed just under four hours to defeat Argentine David Nalbandian 6-3 3-6 4-6 7-6 7-5.
Third seeded Novak Djokovic of Serbia recovered from his four-hour, 44-minute victory over Radek Stepanek on Friday to ease past Argentine Juan Martin Del Potro 6-1 6-3 6-4.
“I was serving really well and he broke me only one time,” said Djokovic, who hit 74 percent of his first serves. “I’m really happy the way I played.”
Other third-round winners included Stanislas Wawrinka, Juan Ignacio Chela, Carlos Moya and Juan Monaco.
Eighth seed Tommy Robredo of Spain was eliminated, falling 6-1 6-3 6-2 to 88th-ranked, 19-year-old Ernests Gulbis of Latvia.
Venus Williams has not lost a set during her four matches and in the quarter-finals will face 2006 semi-finalist Jelena Jankovic, a 6-4 4-6 6-1 winner over 19th seed Sybille Bammer of Austria.
Third seed Jankovic was broken in the first game of the third set but swept the next six to set up a clash with Williams, who has lost her last three meetings with the Serb.
Ivanovic, the French Open finalist, was unable to keep up with the punishing serve or angled groundstrokes by Venus.
She said the 12th seeded American might be ready to claim her first Open crown since winning the second of two straight titles in 2001.

TITLE: Zenit Tops League as Rain Dampens Win Over Kuban
AUTHOR: By Edgar J. Morse
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Konstantin Zyryanov scored 12 minutes from time to send Zenit St. Petersburg back to the top of the Russian premier league on Sunday at Petrovsky Stadium in a 1-0 victory over Kuban Krasnodar.
In a match as dire as the weather, Zenit looked nervous in front of vociferous support and struggled to get a passing game together, often resorting to long balls and hopeful crosses to break the deadlock.
The first chance of the game fell to Zenit, with a Zyryanov shot from long range and the ball kept low, skidding off the wet surface before striking the post and going wide.
Aside from forcing a few corners, Zenit offered little more in the first half, and it was Kuban which came closest to opening the scoring.
Emmanuel Okoduva, who had a lively game, picked up the ball on the left hand side, made a determined run into the area and from an acute angle fired a powerful shot that Kamil Kontofalsky could only parry. 
With the goal at his mercy, Ricardo headed the rebound high over the bar.
The second half saw an improved performance from the home team, whose passing improved despite the wet and windy conditions. Andrei Asharvin put the ball into the back of the net, but it was rightly disallowed for handball as Zenit pushed forward looking for the opener.
Dominguez, who seemed to have spent most of the match dreaming about the sun-kissed beaches he left behind in Portugal, finally picked up the ball on the left right wing, and slipped an intelligent pass into the penalty area to Kim Dongjin. 
The Korean squared it to Zyryanov, who struck a powerful first time shot into the net to send the packed stadium into raptures.
Zenit manager Dick Advocaat said he was pleased with the performance in difficult weather  conditions.
“If you win, then you are always happy,” the Dutch manager told www.fc-zenit.ru. “But today we are very happy, because I think we played a very good game. We controlled the game from the beginning till the end.”
In other weekend matches, champions CSKA Moscow struck a last-gasp equaliser to salvage a 1-1 draw against city rivals Spartak in on Sunday. 
Brazilian midfielder Mozart converted a 30th-minute penalty to put Spartak ahead, but Poland under-21 striker David Janczyk scored in added time to prolong CSKA’s 13-game unbeaten streak against their archrivals dating back to March 2001. 
 FC Moscow stayed in third, four points behind, after beating Spartak Nalchik 1-0.
(SPT, Reuters)

TITLE: N. Korea to Halt Nuclear Program
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: GENEVA — The top American negotiator with North Korea said yesterday that the country had agreed to disable its main nuclear fuel production plant by the end of the year and to account to international monitors for all of its nuclear programs, including what American intelligence agencies say they believe was a second, secret program purchased from Pakistan.
At the end of a two-day meeting in Geneva — exactly the kind of one-on-one session that the Bush administration had refused to hold in recent years — Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said the two sides had agreed on what would be a speedy next step, following action by North Korea this summer to turn off its main nuclear reactor.
“One thing that we agreed on is that the D.P.R.K. will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007,” Hill told reporters in Geneva, according to The Associated Press. He was using the initials for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s formal name.
But in a separate news conference, his counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, who heads the North Korean negotiating team, made no mention of an end-of-the-year deadline. He spoke instead of an accord to disable North Korea’s equipment and provide an accounting of its facilities, fuel and weapons in return for what he called “political and economic compensation.”
If the North Koreans meet the schedule and disable their equipment, it would be a major victory for the Bush administration, at a time when it is eager to claim progress on some diplomatic front to offset its problems in Iraq. 
Whether to offer the North rewards, including oil and, eventually, removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and diplomatic recognition, has been the subject of a six-year struggle within the Bush administration.
But most of the hawks who have opposed such offers are now gone, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has given Hill far more latitude to strike a deal, and to meet the North Koreans outside of “six party talks” — the discussions that have also included Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. Those talks are expected to resume in mid-September, and the weekend meeting was cast as a prelude to any agreement reached there.
The hawks are still unhappy, and have suggested that Hill is giving away too much.

TITLE: Russian Women Dominate 2007 World Athletics Championships
AUTHOR: By Gregory Sandstrom
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Four Russian women have brought home gold medals from the World Athletics Championships in Osaka, Japan in running and jumping events, leading Russia to an overall third-place finish.
The World Athletics Championships began in 1983 in Helsinki, Finland, when East Germany won the medal count. Since 1991 the United States has dominated, while Russia has finished runner-up three times since 2001. 
In Osaka, Russia finished third behind the U.S. and Kenya, which won most of the long distance running events, including a medal sweep in the men’s 3000-meter steeplechase.
Russian women maintained their international supremacy in the Championships, amassing 14 medals compared to 2 from their Russian male counterparts. 
Russian women swept the long jump competition, while gold medalist Tatiana Lebedeva also won a silver medal in the triple jump competition. 
Favorite Yelena Isinbayeva won the gold medal in the women’s pole vault for the second consecutive time, with expert commentators considering her victory something of a foregone conclusion. 
Isinbayeva broke the world pole vault record for the first time in July 2003 and since then has broken it another 12 times, one more than the previous number of world marks set by Australia’s Emma George. 
Countrywoman Svetlana Feofanova, also a two-time world record holder, finished third in this year’s event. 
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Isinbayeva was quoted as saying, while still hoping to continue her streak to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and beyond.
Russian women hold an amazing 7 world records in indoor track and field competition out of a total of 15 events and 6 outdoor world records, with three also still held by Soviet female athletes, out of 26 events. 
Russian women are also superior in track events such as the 3000-meter steeplechase and the 20-kilometer walk, where they won both gold and silver medals at this year’s championship. 
In contrast, Russian men hold no outdoor world records. Soviet-era legend Sergei Bubka, who holds the pole vault record, now represents Ukraine, while one Soviet men’s record still stands in the hammer throw.
The third-placed Kenyans, in contrast, did not win a single jumping or throwing event. They excelled on the track in long-distance running events, including a convincing win-from-the-front victory in the 800-meters by Janeth Jepkosgei.

TITLE: Beijing Police Asked to Mind Their Manners
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — China has launched a campaign to improve police etiquette in Beijing and other Olympic co-host cities, including bans on smoking, eating and chatting for on-duty officers, state media reported on Monday.
“Police inspectors, both uniformed and plainclothes, will monitor mostly community, traffic and patrol police, to see how they behave when people ask them for help,” the China Daily quoted, Wu Heping, a police ministry spokesman, as saying.
“If a member of the public sees a police officer smoking, eating or chatting on duty — all of which are regarded as harmful to the image of the police — they can report them by dialing 110,” the paper quoted Jia Chunming, a Beijing police supervision official, as saying.
The campaign had been launched across the six Olympic co-host cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Shenyang, Tianjin and Qinhuangdao and would be rolled out to major tourist centers at the start of 2008, the paper said.
It follows a directive in June banning police from wearing scarves, jewellery, beards and “strangely dyed hair.”
Beijing, keen to ensure nothing mars the city’s image ahead of the Olympic Games, has launched a number of etiquette drives in recent months in a bid to improve the manners and hygiene of public servants, taxi drivers and common citizens.

TITLE: Lebanese Army Claim Victory In Battle for Palestinian Camp
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Lebanese Army wrested a Palestinian refugee camp from the control of Islamic militants on Sunday, ending three months of fierce fighting that took more than 300 lives and transfixed Lebanon.
The surprise end to the camp standoff came when about 70 militants tried to escape at dawn Sunday. As they neared army positions, soldiers fired on them, killing at least 31, including the group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and capturing 32, the army said. Five soldiers were killed in the gunfire. 
The camp, Nahr al Bared, had been home to 30,000 people, most of whom fled when the conflict started at the end of May. On Sunday, the state-run National News Agency reported that soldiers patrolled the empty camp, much of which had been leveled by army bombs, as helicopters searched for any remaining militants. 
It was unclear why the group, Fatah al Islam, made up of radical Sunnis inspired by Al Qaeda, chose Sunday to attempt its breakout. But the army had tightened its grip on the camp recently and ratcheted up its bombings over the past week, after family members of the fighters were permitted to leave. The remaining fighters were thought to be running out of ammunition and food.
The militants’ failed last stand has burnished the image of the army, which is viewed by Lebanese across the political spectrum as the only institution in the country that represents the state, not individual factions. 
Despite the prolonged fighting and deaths on both sides, the army has won widespread praise and support for its restraint in a nation that has seen its share of violent clashes.
The army’s commander in chief, General Michel Suleiman, has emerged as a national hero and potential force ahead of presidential elections in three weeks. The country remains deeply divided between a pro-Western government and the Hezbollah-led opposition, supported by Iran and Syria, and analysts said General Suleiman could emerge as a compromise presidential candidate.
“This victory reflects positively on the army and its commander in chief,” said Talal Atrissi, a political sociology professor at the Lebanese University. “His chances to become a compromise candidate have now increased.”
Banners and posters saluting the army have decorated Lebanese streets for the past several months. On Facebook, the online social network, Lebanese have created groups of army supporters. Banks have designed new credit cards with camouflage colors. 
As news from the camp spread Sunday, Lebanese from different political backgrounds, including those allied to Hezbollah, took to the streets across the country in celebration. Television programs showed residents in northern cities near the camp waving Lebanese flags and throwing rice at soldiers who were flashing victory signs as their convoys arrived.  At least 120 militants and 42 civilians have been killed in the conflict, as well as 157 soldiers, including the five on Sunday.

TITLE: British Army Leaves Basra, Initiates Iraq Withdrawal
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: BAGHDAD — The British Army began withdrawing from its last base in Basra’s city center early Monday, a move that will leave Iraq’s second-largest city without foreign forces for the first time since the American-led invasion in 2003. 
Basra residents reported overnight that they saw British military trucks accompanied by armored vehicles and helicopters leaving the base, Basra Palace, beside the Shatt al Arab waterway, heading for their airport headquarters miles outside the city, the oil-industry hub of southern Iraq.
While the British exit from Basra had been widely anticipated, the British government has given no timetable for the eventual withdrawal of British troops from Iraq.
British officials would not publicly confirm the withdrawal of the 500 or so remaining troops in the palace, apparently fearing that the disclosure would compromise their security. However, the Ministry of Defense said through a spokesman in London: “There is an operation under way. It is ongoing now and will continue to be ongoing for hours, possibly days.” 
The move is expected to be accompanied by a reduction in the size of the British force in southern Iraq to 5,000 troops from 5,500.
A Ministry of Defense statement said, “U.K. forces will now operate from their base at Basra Air Station, and will retain security responsibility for Basra until we hand over to provincial Iraqi control, which we anticipate in the autumn, conditions on the ground allowing.”
The statement said the remaining British troops would continue to train the Iraqi Security Forces, while “retaining the capability to intervene in support of the I.S.F. should the security situation demand it.” 
The downsizing became clear in recent days from palace workers and local residents. Basra Saad al-Amery, a laundry worker at the palace for three years, said Sunday that he was sent home 10 days earlier, told that his job was finished. 
“Six months ago we noticed that the British troops and the other contracting companies there in the palace started to move their equipment and vehicles outside the palace,” he said. “Most of this was happening during the night after we went home.” 
Residents living near Basra Palace have reported nighttime movements of men and matériel over the past few months, and in recent days the Iraqi flag has been seen flying over the palace gates for the first time, in preparation for the building’s transfer to Iraqi government control. 
Hours before the British move, General Mohan al-Fereiji, the commander of Iraqi forces in Basra, told journalists that his forces were already deployed in the palace compound.
The British face widespread criticism that they have abandoned Basra to the Mahdi Army militia led by Moktada al-Sadr and other Shiite religious militant groups that oppose the presence of foreign forces in Iraq. The militia is widely acknowledged to have infiltrated the security forces and provincial ministries.
British and Iraqi officials have been eager to avoid the looting that took place after the British evacuated other bases in the city. 
British commanders have openly expressed their concern that their withdrawal could create propaganda value for hostile forces such as the Mahdi Army, which have attacked the palace with thousands of rockets and mortar shells in recent months. The British may have benefited from the timing of last week’s announcement by Sadr that the Mahdi Army would suspend operations for six months, after it fought with government forces in Karbala.
Nonetheless, some Iraqi officials have been openly critical of the British decision to evacuate Basra, contending that it leaves the city vulnerable to lawlessness and political violence. On Sunday night, Hakim al-Mayahi, the provincial council member in charge of the security portfolio in Basra, said: “There have been many promises made by the British forces regarding the security problems, but they failed to fulfil most of these. That is in addition to the lack of support from the central government in Baghdad.
“We have a huge defect in the equipment and the arming of our security forces. The tribes and the locals have better weapons than our security forces, who weren’t provided with more than the usual Kalashnikovs and R.P.G.’s while the tribes even have mortars and heavy machine guns.”
British commanders have countered that their continued presence draws attacks and that the main problem in Basra is not an insurgency but criminal gangs. 
“General Mohan’s strategy is that we come out of the city because it allows him to deal with the Iraqis himself without the presence of the multinational forces, which are clearly a magnet for indirect fire at the moment,” Brigadier James Bashall, commander of the First Mechanized Brigade, said in July. “If we are out, then it makes it easier for the Iraqis to deal with Basra themselves.”
Around the palace, some residents spoke bitterly of the British presence drawing errant Mahdi Army mortar fire onto their homes. Many have abandoned shattered houses.

TITLE: Hurricane-Battered Jamaica Concludes Violent Election
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaicans were due to head to the polls on Monday in what is expected to be a close election as their Caribbean island heals from a brush with a monster hurricane, warily eyes another and frets over recent political violence.
With voting delayed a week by Hurricane Dean’s passage 15 days ago, Jamaica was under a tropical storm alert for election day as Category 5 Felix, carrying 265 kilometers-per-hour winds, churned several hundred kilometers to the southeast.
Attention on the island of 2.8 million people was less on the weather than political violence after seven people were killed by gunmen on Saturday, a grim reminder of Jamaica’s history of bloodshed around elections.
National television broadcast pleas late on Sunday from Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller and other officials concerned about a spate of killings in a nation with one of the world’s highest murder rates.
“Please obey the law to the letter. Do not allow yourself to be provoked into anger,” Simpson Miller said. “To anyone who might have violent intentions, I say think again. ... I encourage you to put down your weapons of war. Discover the joy and peace of having clean hands, a clean heart and a clear conscience.”
Simpson Miller’s People’s National Party sought a record fifth consecutive five-year term but the latest polls showed the opposition Jamaica Labour Party surging.
A poll published in the Jamaica Observer newspaper on Sunday had the JLP ahead by 9 percentage points, while an analysis by the Sunday Gleaner had the JLP winning at least 32 of the 60 parliamentary seats at stake.
About 1.3 million Jamaicans are eligible to vote. 
Both parties have new leaders since the last election in 2002. Simpson Miller replaced longtime Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, while veteran politician Bruce Golding took over the JLP when Edward Seaga, a former prime minister, stepped down as party leader after three decades.
Golding has played on Jamaica’s high unemployment rate of 9 percent, slow economic growth of between 2 and 2.5 percent over the past five years, and a murder rate averaging 1,200 per year, to forge gains in the polls.
Police blamed Saturday’s killings on Jamaica’s highly partisan politics, which gave birth decades ago to “garrison” communities, a unique system of power and intimidation.
The garrisons were created in the 1970s when the two major parties armed local political bosses, who through threats, intimidation and patronage delivered 100 percent of a neighborhood’s vote to the sponsoring party.
Dissenters were driven from their homes and supporters moved in, creating vote-rich party strongholds.
Parts of the verdant, mountainous island remained without electricity after Dean ravaged the island on August 19, killing five people.

TITLE: Senator Quits Over Toilet Sex Charge
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BOISE, Idaho — Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, caught in a sex scandal that quickly lost him the support of his party after his arrest in a men’s toilet, has said he will resign from the U.S. Senate.
Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct last month after he was arrested in an undercover investigation of lewd behaviour in an airport men’s room.
“To Idahoans I represent, to my staff, to my Senate colleagues, but most importantly to my wife and family, I apologize for what I have caused. I am deeply sorry,” Craig, 62, said at a news conference.
The three-term senator from the solidly Republican and sparsely populated state said he would step down on Sept. 30. Craig’s departure capped a week of turmoil for Republicans, already reeling from ethics problems, with the disclosure of his arrest.
Craig, who was elected to the Senate in 1990, is ending his career after the revelations on Monday of his guilty plea. He was arrested June 11 in the men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, where police were targeting public sex.
According to a police report, Craig entered a toilet stall next to an undercover policeman and tapped his foot and waved his hand in gestures that the officer said signaled “a desire to engage in sexual conduct.”
He was in the airport on the way to Washington that day.
Craig later said he regretted pleading guilty to the misdemeanor charge and claimed he did nothing wrong.
“I am not gay, I never have been gay," he said on Tuesday, with his wife at his side. They have three children.
Craig had found himself denying allegations that he was homosexual from early on in his Washington career, which began in the House of Representatives in 1981.
The conservative senator opposed gay rights and voted in favor of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. “I have little control over what people choose to believe, but clearing my name is important to me and my family,” he said.

TITLE: A Book Fair
TEXT: From Wednesday to Sept. 10, the All-Russia Exhibition Center, formerly known as VDNKh and one of the last islands of genuine Soviet archictecture in the capital, will host the 20th Moscow International Book Fair.
Though still not as significant as fairs in Frankfurt, London or Bologna, the Moscow event is steadily gaining momentum and has transformed from a meeting of local publishers and distributors into an international affair with a rich cultural program. This year, the fair will be coupled with a festival called Chitai-Gorod, roughly translated as Reading City, and various presentations, recitals and performances will take place all over Moscow. 
The club B2 will host the presentation of a new edition of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” a book by prominent music critic Artemy Troitsky. Ulitsa O.G.I., a haunt of young intellectuals, will be the venue for artist Leonid Tishkov’s master class titled, “How to Become an Artistic Genius Without Any Talent Whatsoever.” The ArteFAQ club, co-owned by Alexander Gavrilov, the chief editor of Knizhnoye Obozreniye (Book Review) newspaper and a well-known figure on the Russian book scene, will open its doors for a series of book-related events, from a master class on success with television presenter Svetlana Konegen to a cooking show with chef Ilya Lazerson.
There will also be a news conference with Polish author Janusz Leon Wisniewski, whose novel “Loneliness on the Net” was extremely popular with Internet users in Russia.
Since this year was declared the year of the Russian language, the fair will include a special program devoted to speaking and writing good Russian. The program includes numerous events for children, displays of textbooks and shows hosted by television and radio presenters. 
One of the curious effects of this surge in linguistic patriotism is a government-sponsored campaign to protect one of the letters of the Russian alphabet. The letter “½,” or yo, is often replaced by the regular “e” and generally neglected, to the point that it’s hard to say whether the Russian alphabet has 32 letters or 33. 
The rather ridiculous campaign is aimed at rescuing “½” from oblivion and reinstating it as a fully functional letter. Viktor Chumakov, a member of the committee organizing the year of the Russian language and an editor of an educational magazine, went as far as proclaiming the “½” movement “an issue of human rights.”
Human rights or not, the fair is sure to be a packed, lively event where readers, writers, publishers and booksellers will have many chances to talk about books. It only remains to hope that the pavilions have better air-conditioning and catering facilities than last year.

By Victor Sonkin

TITLE: New Biography Takes Hard Line on Lenin
AUTHOR: By Lars T. Lih
TEXT: Without a hint of moral scruple or sense of national loyalty, Lenin desperately hoped for Russia’s defeat in the First World War.” It’s the “without a hint” that is the giveaway in this introductory statement: This is going to be one of those books about Lenin. The kind where analysis is restricted to ensuring that nearly every sentence about Lenin contains a derogatory word or turn of phrase. The kind where Lenin never just walks from one room to another — rather, his mad lust for power drives him to walk from one room to another. Accordingly, Robert Gellately, the author of “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler” and a professor of history at Florida State University, does not write that Lenin was a dedicated revolutionary, but rather talks about “Lenin’s self-image as a fighter for the cause.” If Lenin holds an opinion that you or I might agree with, then it gets tainted in one way or another: “Lenin and Stalin, schooled in Russian terrorism, saw revolution as justified insurgence against tyranny.” In something of a masterpiece of this style of writing, Gellately manages to make Lenin sound more morally culpable in the matter of White Army pogroms against the Jews than General Denikin, the head of the White Army.
Gellately’s thesis regarding Lenin is that the first Soviet leader was a central cause of “the age of social catastrophe” of the first half of the 20th century because he was a “truly vile” man intent on inflicting violence, and Stalin was his “keenest disciple.” And for those who might doubt that Stalin’s actions were the perfect embodiment of Lenin’s most cherished ideals, Gellately points out, truly enough, that Stalin justified all his actions by references to Lenin. 
But is it fair to judge Gellately’s new book on the basis of his portrait of Lenin? After all, the Lenin period takes up only about a fifth of a narrative that extends to the end of World War II. Furthermore, when Gellately arrives at a period he really knows something about (he is a specialist on Hitler’s Germany), he gets off his soapbox and becomes more of a historian (although even here we run across such oddities as the assertion that during the interwar years Stalin and Hitler “invariably dressed in full military regalia”). Nevertheless, the worth of this book stands or falls on its treatment of Lenin. Gellately himself tells us that his real contribution in this book is the integration of Lenin into a broad-scale political history of Germany and Russia in the 20th century. And Gellately is right about one thing: Academic historians seem unwilling or unable to do this.
Unfortunately, after informing us of Lenin’s centrality, Gellately does not follow up with an adequate account of Lenin’s views, including those on topics that Gellately tells us are the most crucial: democracy and terror. Take Lenin’s case for a “Bolshevik coup” in the fall of 1917. Gellately writes that Lenin knew that “the majority in the country might not be behind the Bolsheviks, but for Lenin that was no reason to wait.” Yet one of Lenin’s main arguments was that the masses did support the Bolshevik program. 
He showered more than usually vituperative abuse on anyone who was skeptical about this support. He repeated his claim over and over again, in public pamphlets and in private debates with his Bolshevik cronies. Among other places, he repeats it on the very page from which Gellately took some of his own quotes about Lenin’s attitude at this time.
Lenin’s own writings, at the very least, raise some difficulties, not only for Gellately’s description of this one crucial episode, but also for his central contrast between Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union. According to Gellately, Germany had a “dictatorship by consent,” while the Soviets cared not a whit for mass support, never modified their policies in response to popular pressure, and did not even try to win the “hearts and minds” of the Soviet population. Yet there is extensive evidence that Lenin held other views, evidence that Gellately himself would seem to argue must be factored into the picture: “It would be foolish to ignore any of [Lenin’s and Stalin’s] works if we want to understand and explain how their brutal regimes operated.” 
The real reason for Gellately’s superficial approach becomes clear in the epilogue: “I submit that we have to avoid slipping into the role of apologist for Soviet leaders, including, and in some respects above all, Lenin.” This indeed is Gellately’s overriding aim — that his book not be an apology for Lenin — regardless of whether this aim interferes with the historian’s traditional purpose: explaining the outlook of a historical figure, and putting him or her into the context of the times. Even a hostile account of Lenin’s actual views would move in the direction of an apology, since Lenin’s choices would become more understandable. The ultimate effect of this anti-apologist stance is to put Lenin in a historical vacuum and keep him there. 
Paradoxically, Gellately is not so worried about not apologizing for Hitler and Stalin, so the later part of the book reverses the relative proportion of rant vs. analysis. Gellately gives a straightforward account of what Hitler and Stalin said in this or that speech, and carefully states the evidence for his own stand on controversial issues such as Hitler’s personal responsibility for the Holocaust. This is clearly Gellately’s area of strength. Alas, the reverse is true in the case of Lenin.
Gellately pictures himself as an iconoclast, bravely taking on the prevailing myth of the Good Lenin: “A good friend at my American publishers said the very thought of putting Lenin next to Stalin and Hitler in the book’s title would be enough to make her Russian grandmother turn in her grave.” In reality, his portrait of Lenin is easily recognizable from the works of Dmitri Volkogonov, Robert Service and Richard Pipes. What they see, Gellately also sees (along with their errors, such as Service’s over-inflation of the role of “Russian terrorism”), and concerning matters that they don’t cover — and this includes much of what is worth knowing about Lenin — Gellately knows little and does not wish to find out more. These three authors define the prevailing view of Lenin, and their slap-dash portrait of Lenin seems to be good enough for post-Soviet historians, at least in the West.
If all you ask of a book is that it be “not an apology” for Lenin, then “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler” will do. If you want a genuine attempt to integrate Lenin into the larger political narrative of the 20th century, you will have to wait.

Lars T. Lih is the author of “Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Historical Context.”