SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1317 (83), Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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TITLE: Visa Rules Tightened Up For Foreigners
AUTHOR: By Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government is tightening the screws on foreigners who want to work here full time without a work visa — and itinerant English teachers look likely to be the first to feel the squeeze.
Multiple-entry business visas, which used to let foreigners stay in Russia for up to one year, will now only allow stays of up to 90 days at a time, according to a decree signed by Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov on Oct. 4.
Under the new rules, such visas will still last one year. But they will only let people stay in Russia for up to 180 days of that year, and for no longer than 90 days at a time. Moreover, if a foreigner stays in Russia for 90 days straight, he or she is then required to leave and not come back until another 90 days have passed.
Zubkov’s decree also says foreigners might have to obtain the visas in their native countries — which implies that U.S. and British expatriates could no longer take the bus to Helsinki for a visa run. But representatives of visa agencies and foreign business lobbies were unsure how that rule would be implemented, and some said it might not apply to Westerners.
What is clear, however, is that expats can no longer stay in Russia endlessly by obtaining multiple-entry business visas and renewing them each year, said Alexei Filippenkov, director of the Visa Delight agency.
“Now, any foreigner who wants to come live here has to either go through the immigration process, and eventually obtain a residence permit, or else find an employer who will prepare a work visa for them,” Filippenkov said.
Foreigners with work visas are not affected by the change.
It is unclear whether the new rules will affect foreigners with multiple-entry business visas issued before Zubkov’s decree. But Filippenkov said it was unlikely.
Spokespeople for the Foreign Ministry and the Federal Migration Service declined to comment by telephone Friday, saying that all questions had to be submitted in writing. E-mails sent to the agencies were not answered as of Sunday.
The new rules could complicate life for expat English teachers, many of whom have multiple-entry business visas.
“If people have to come for 90 days and then leave, this will be very disruptive for the teaching process,” said Helen Panovich, academic director of ITC, a company that hires English-language native speakers to give lessons to Russian businessmen.
Amy Cartwright, a spokeswoman for the Association of European Businesses, said most of AEB’s member companies would not be affected because their foreign employees had work visas.
But she singled out expat English teachers as a potential trouble spot. “It’s very worrying because it means that if you’re a teacher, for example, and if you’re on a business visa, you can’t stay here,” Cartwright said.
AEB has met with representatives of the Federal Migration Service to find out how the rules will be implemented, and one of the open questions is whether expats will have to return to their home country to obtain a business visa, she said.
“We don’t have an answer yet, but we have asked them,” Cartwright said.
Representatives of visa agencies had different takes on the provision in Zubkov’s decree about returning to one’s home country for a visa.
Timur Beslangurov, managing director of Vista Foreign Business Support, said foreigners would be able to obtain visas in the Russian embassy of any country as long as they could present a residence permit for that country, or at least some document proving that they had the right to live there for 90 days.
Filippenkov, of Visa Delight, said the provision about returning to one’s home country did not apply to Westerners and was instead directed at countries like China, Turkey and India.
Russian embassies are notoriously inconsistent in their approach to issuing visas. In the past, it has often taken several months to see how rule changes are implemented.
Zubkov’s decree puts Russia on the same footing as many Western countries, which also draw a distinction between visas designed for short visits and visas that grant one the right to work.
U.S. citizens who visit Britain, for example, are allowed to stay for up to six months, but they get a stamp in their passport stating they are prohibited from working there.
“The government is making things work the same way as they do in America and Europe,” Filippenkov said. Russian citizens face the exact same 90- and 180-day restrictions in Germany, he added.
Still, such comparisons have not reassured expats accustomed to the ease of obtaining multiple-entry business visas and daunted by the obstacles of getting Russian work permits.
“What will they think of next?” asked one visitor at RedTape.ru. “Shooting all foreigners? Might be quicker to get rid of us that way!”

TITLE: Putin Sends Mixed Message in Turf War
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu and Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin waded into a turf war among the security agencies over the weekend, creating a new state committee to fight illegal drugs and naming Viktor Cherkesov as its chief.
The move, announced on the Kremlin’s web site Saturday, came a day after Putin publicly scolded Cherkesov on the pages of Kommersant, leading commentators to speculate that the president was trying to play a balancing act amid the infighting.
The battle between the Federal Drug Control Service, which Cherkesov heads, and the Federal Security Service and Prosecutor General’s Office broke into the open earlier this month when Cherkesov wrote a scalding letter to Kommersant that accused the other two agencies of picking the fight, which he said could threaten national security. Cherkesov, a long-time ally of Putin, spoke up after FSB agents detained several of his officers.
Putin criticized Cherkesov for airing dirty laundry.
“It is wrong to bring these kinds of problems to the media,” Putin told Kommersant. “When someone behaves that way and ... claims that a war among security agencies [is going on], he should, first of all, be spotless.”
Putin denied that there was any infighting going on among the secret services, and he said he had not read Cherkesov’s letter.
Details about the new state drug control committee, created by a Putin decree, were scarce Sunday. The decree said it would coordinate the work of regional committees, which would be led by governors and meet at least once every two months. Cherkesov’s appointment as its chief is a cunning move that shows Putin is not taking sides in the dispute, criticizing Cherkesov one day and naming him to a state post the next, said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank.
“Nobody knows who is winning,” Pribylovsky said.
The committee’s power is unclear, and the Kremlin did not say whether it would report directly to Putin, as does the Federal Drug Control Service, or the prime minister.
“I have no information on that,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Sunday.
“Nobody understands where the committee will be,” said Andrei Soldatov, an analyst with the Agentura.ru investigative Internet portal.
Cherkesov’s appointment means both he and FSB director Nikolai Patrushev now head a state committee. Patrushev heads the National Anti-Terrorism Committee.
Cherkesov’s letter pushed into the open what analysts described as a long-running struggle between Cherkesov and Igor Sechin, Putin’s powerful deputy chief of staff, and other members of Putin’s inner circle. The letter, published Oct. 9, followed the arrests of Alexander Bulbov and two other drug enforcement officers Oct. 1 at Domodedovo Airport. Bulbov was accused of ordering illegal wiretaps and accepting bribes from private firms in exchange for official protection.
Putin said in the Kommersant interview that law enforcement bodies should understand that their activities are being supervised.
“It would have been worse if law enforcement bodies had the illusion that nobody supervised their work. I understand that law enforcement agencies dislike it when measures to keep order affect them,” he said.
“The court should be the only judge in this situation,” he added.
Bulbov was involved in a corruption investigation into Tri Kita, a Moscow furniture store accused of evading millions of dollars in import duties.
Media reports have linked senior FSB officials to the business and speculated that the FSB struck back at Cherkesov’s agency by arresting Bulbov and the other officials. Commentators have described the infighting as a battle for control over money flows and markets.
In his remarks, Putin appeared to be aware of accusations of wrongdoing against FSB officials in the furniture case. “We are talking about violations in customs, suspicions that a part of the law enforcement system protects the activities of [customs] inspectors,” he said.
“In place of those people who defend the honor of the uniform, I would not accuse everyone in response. Especially through the media.”
Putin paid a visit to the FSB headquarters Oct. 8, a week after Bulbov’s detention, in what some interpreted as a show of support for the agency. But analysts said Putin had not taken sides.
“Putin is famous for saying something and meaning exactly the opposite,” Soldatov said.
“He was really annoyed that an agent went public in this way. [There is] a rule in the security services that says that dirty laundry should be washed at home,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who tracks Kremlin politics and the security services.
The FSB and the Federal Drug Control Service refused to comment Friday.
“I’m not allowed to comment on what the president says,” a Federal Drug Control Service spokesman said.
A spokesman for the Investigative Committee, which is investigating Bulbov, said he could not comment.

TITLE: Anti-Hate March Planned Amid Public Apathy
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Liberal politicians and human rights groups are preparing to take to the streets on Sunday to protest against hatred, discrimination and what they call plummeting levels of tolerance in Russian society.
The Fourth March Against Hatred, which is due to start at 1 p.m. on Sunday at Sportivnaya metro station, is dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Girenko, a prominent expert on ethnic and racial issues who was gunned down at the entrance of his apartment in June 2004. 
Organized by local branches of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces as well as human rights groups, including Memorial, Soldiers’ Mothers and Citizens’ Watch, the event aims to unite and consolidate local citizens. 
“When I first proposed holding this rally three years ago, I was thinking about ‘the first anti-fascist march’ as a name for it,” recalls Yabloko politician Yury Nesterov. “But we soon came to realize that we do not want the very word ‘fascism’ to be present in the title and, most importantly, that our mission is to resist hatred as such, hatred as a driving force behind decision-making.”
“Political decisions fueled by hatred are not only destructive; they launch a chain reaction that is extremely difficult to end,” he added.
City officials have distanced themselves from the event. But the march’s organizers stress that they are appealing to citizens, rather than the authorities, although the activists have sent invitations to City Hall, the police and the city prosecutor’s office.
“Not a single city official has turned up to our demonstrations or meetings yet, and their continued absence is compelling enough evidence of the indifferent attitude they have comfortably adopted,” said Alexander Vinnikov, one of the leaders of the For Russia Without Racism movement. “Russia’s ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, has been the only state official to encourage our movement and what we do.”
Russian human rights advocates say they are alarmed at skyrocketing levels of violence against non-Slavic people.
According to Galina Kozhevnikova, deputy head of the Sova center (a Moscow-based group that monitors racism), since January, 48 non-ethnic Russians have been killed in apparent hate crimes. “Moscow and St. Petersburg account for the highest numbers of attacks,” Kozhevnikova said. “In total, 436 people have suffered in ethnically motivated crimes this year.”
The expert criticized the Russian government for using a law against extremism to stifle political opposition, while failing to suppress the spread of nationalism.
“Violence against non-Russians is on the rise, and there is no sign of improvement,” Kozhevnikova said. “Skinheads and ultra-radical groups appear to be gaining new confidence and act with growing brutality.”
Valentina Uzunova, one of Russia’s leading experts on ethnically motivated crimes, said the country’s bookstores are flooded with extremist and racist literature. 
“Even St. Petersburg’s most respected bookshops are abundant with this trash,” the expert said. “I have contacted a number of local stores, but their managers refused to understand what I am talking about. Commercial interests have apparently prevailed over their morals and sense of responsibility.”
Uzunova, who teaches at the St. Petersburg State University, said she feels the influence of nationalist literature in student papers, a sign that she finds extremely dangerous.
“Young people find it more difficult to filter nationalist and chauvinist ideas,” she said. “At the very least, if we cannot limit the circulation of books like Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ we must oblige the publishers to include expert commentary in such editions.”
The rally’s organizers feel that activists alone are not going to make the difference. Public support for the rallies has been modest, with the protests drawing around 1,000 participants at the most.
“More and more Russian citizens feel alienated from one another. Not only are their social values and political beliefs different, but many people focus with hatred on the differences between them — be it a different skin color, political persuasion or social status — and are unwilling to open the door to dialogue and reconciliation,” Vinnikov said.
The march concludes with a protest meeting at 2 p.m. on Andrei Sakharov Ploshchad.

TITLE: Former President Gorbachev To Head New Political Group
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has been elected head of a new political movement founded, he said, to fight corruption and help bring democratic principles to Russia.
The movement, called the Union of Social Democrats, is the second political grouping that Gorbachev has headed in the past three years.
Gorbachev told about 200 delegates attending the founding meeting Saturday that the new movement would seek to rid the country of “extreme political forces” and help promote liberal values.
The movement will also support President Vladimir Putin’s reforms but does not intend to participate in State Duma elections in December. “We are fighting for power, but only for power over people’s minds,” Gorbachev told the delegates, the BBC reported.
In 2001, Gorbachev helped found the Social Democratic Party of Russia, but resigned three years later in a disagreement with the leadership about working more closely with United Russia. The Social Democratic Party was later one of several ordered closed by the Supreme Court under new registration rules.
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: Zyuganov Slams United Russia
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — United Russia wants to turn the State Duma elections into a political coup to prolong President Vladimir Putin’s rule, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said.
He warned that any attempt by Putin to hang on to power when he steps down as president in May could result in turmoil.
In an article published Friday on the party’s web site, Kprf.ru, Zyuganov attacked a statement by United Russia that described December’s elections as a “national referendum in support of Vladimir Putin.”
“The Dec. 2 vote is a vote for Putin,” United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov said in the statement published by Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper on Wednesday. “Vladimir Putin will remain the national leader whatever post he holds.”
Putin, who is coming to the end of the second of two consecutive presidential terms allowed by the Constitution, has refused to reveal his plans.
But he has said he intends to remain in politics to make sure his successor sticks to his policies.
Earlier this month he agreed to head United Russia’s party list, positioning himself as an informal leader of the party, but also hinting he could become prime minister.
“The election is not a referendum,” Zyuganov said in an attack on Gryzlov, who suggested that Putin could continue ruling Russia from a parliamentary power base. “Such an interpretation violates the Constitution.”

TITLE: Election Commission Sets Agenda for Vote
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As campaigning for the Dec. 2 elections to the Duma enter a costly media phase early next month, St. Petersburg Election Commission figures indicate the city’s branch of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) has already spent about half of its registered campaign budget of 15 million rubles ($604,000).
According to the May 2005 election laws, regional parties with candidates on the federal list, have the right to spend up to 30 million rubles ($1.2 million), including personal contributions not exceeding 1.5 million rubles ($60,400) and not more than 15 million rubles from a single corporate contributor for the election campaign. 
According to the figures, the nationalist minority LDPR was richer by five million rubles than the majority party, United Russia. They were the only parties to have their campaign budgets registered by Friday, about two weeks ahead of the media campaign scheduled to start Nov. 3. 
United Russia has spent only 367,696 rubles ($15,000) for campaign activities in what observers say is merely symbolic spending for a party backed by political heavyweights waging a covert campaign from powerful executive offices.
“It is very important for the public to note the differences when such leaders speak as candidates or as a part of their political or executive offices,” commission’s head, Alexander Gnyotov said Thursday in a remark meant to defend President Vladimir Putin and Governor Valentina Matviyenko, one of several governors standing as United Russia candidates. He was responding to a question from a journalist concerned about public officials taking advantage of their posts to wage campaigns for the party they are standing for as candidates.
Matviyenko heads the St. Petersburg list of candidates for United Russia, while Putin leads the party’s federal list. In his radio and television question-and-answer session the same day, Putin said he had decided to back United Russia because he was “for stable government and a prosperous nation… thanks to United Russia, the country has maintained stability, strengthened its economy and raised its living standards.”
In related comments, Gnyotov was dismissive about disputed fair use of the media in the past month of the campaign. He said, “several media disputes have emerged even before the official media campaign is yet to start, but the time is not yet ripe to reveal the details.”   
Meanwhile, other parties that have submitted their campaign spending budget by Thursday, pending scrutiny for immediate registration, included Russian Patriots, Just Russia, Rodina, Party of Pensioners and Party of Life. Others including the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces were yet to submit their budgets, but are expected to meet the two-week deadline prior to the opening of the media campaign.
The commission also closed its books for media organizations licensed to run both non-profit and commercial campaign adverts with the list of 136 media outlets involving 94 newspapers, five periodicals, 35 radio and television stations and for the first time, two cyber networks: Fontanka.ru and the Baltic Information Agency.
Although Gnyotov fell short of stating criteria by which media outlets were registered, Kommersant,  Novaya Gazeta and Delovoy Peterburg weeklies were missing in a list that includes neighborhood newsletters and nationalist publications such as Novy Peterburg. 
Also licensed to prepare, design, print and publish campaign materials are 148 non-media organizations and individuals, which were due to meet with the commission Tuesday to work out an action plan.
A voting system for soldiers, Russian visitors to the city, sailors and sea passengers, out of town city residents, sanatorium and hospital staff on round-the-clock shifts, citizes on business trips and the homeless was approved. They will be issued special cards enabling them to vote at a nearby polling station on election day. 
Polling stations at Vitebsky, Ladozhsky and Moskovsky train stations will be allocated for the city’s homeless people and visitors.

TITLE: A Foreigner’s Nightmare in Dubrovka Siege
AUTHOR: By Svetlana Osadchuk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Svetlana Gubareva woke up in the intensive care ward of a Moscow hospital, one of the first things she heard was President Vladimir Putin offering condolences to the families of the 129 hostages who died in the Dubrovka theater.
Gubareva wondered what had happened to her fiance, a U.S. citizen, and 13-year-old daughter, who, like herself, was from Kazakhstan. But Putin did not utter a word about the foreign victims of the 56-hour stand-off, which began five years ago this Tuesday when 42 Chechen rebels stormed the theater in southeastern Moscow during a performance of the “Nord Ost” musical.
The omission would have been insignificant if it were not for the fact that it encapsulates the way that authorities have blithely ignored the foreigners taken hostage in the attack, refusing to assist them in any way or even offer them the small compensation handed out to Russian citizens, Gubareva and others said.
The government says 75 foreigners were among the 800 hostages. Nine foreigners died in the attack, including Gubareva’s daughter, Sasha Letyago, and her fiance, Sandy Booker, of Oklahoma City.
No government representative broke the news to Gubareva. While in the hospital, she found out from media reports that they had died. Still later, she learned from media reports and people who had helped identify her daughter’s body that the girl had been crushed to death under a pile of unconscious bodies as she was sent by bus to the hospital.
Gubareva said she struggled alone after losing the two. No assistance came from Russian authorities, her hometown of Karaganda or the Kazakh steel mill where she worked. Hundreds of sympathetic letters, however, poured into her mailbox from the United States, offering much-needed support, she said.
“They were my psychotherapists because I did not have any professionals nearby and did not know how to go on,” she said in a telephone interview from Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
The only financial assistance came from a Pennsylvania-based foundation set up by U.S. citizen Andrew Mogilyansky to help terrorism victims.
Gubareva said her life was filled with joy in the months before Dubrovka. She met Booker, a 49-year-old electrical engineer, through a friend, and after many e-mails and telephone calls made plans to fly with her daughter to Oklahoma City to live there permanently as a family.
An interview at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow went well, and she was told she and her daughter would get visas. To celebrate, Gubareva, her daughter and Booker went to watch “Nord Ost” on the night of Oct. 23, a Wednesday.
The second act of the musical had just begun with “The Dance of the Pilots” when a masked man charged onto the stage, shooting an automatic rifle in the air.
“I thought at first that it was a bad joke, but Sandy immediately understood what was going on,” Gubareva said.
She saw a group of men with assault rifles drive the actors off the stage and force musicians from the orchestra pit and ushers into the audience. Booker cautioned the two to keep their heads down if shooting broke out. He prayed a lot, but at times he looked as if he had accepted the possibility that he would not make it out of the theater alive, Gubareva said.
Rebel leader Movsar Barayev told the hostages from the start that the attack was part of the battle over Chechnya and that the rebels had no grudge against foreigners. He promised to release anyone who showed a foreign passport.
Government negotiators, however, were reluctant to accept the offer to release the foreigners, saying they wanted women and children to be freed first. “Furthermore, we insist that everybody be released, without any distinction between foreigners and Russians,” FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said Oct. 25, the third day of the crisis, RIA-Novosti reported.
Gubareva, her daughter and Booker had no passports to show anyway. Booker had left his passport back at the hotel, while Gubareva’s and her daughter’s passports were at the U.S. Embassy awaiting visas.
Booker, however, had his Oklahoma driver’s license, and he handed it over to Barayev, Gubareva said. Barayev apparently had never seen one before and he examined it carefully. He did not let Booker or anyone else out that first night.
“We won’t let you go today, only tomorrow. I do not want your own people to shoot you and say later that we killed you. That’s what happened at Budyonnovsk,” he said, according to Gubareva.
In June 1995, Chechen rebels seized a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, taking more than 1,500 people hostage. More than 100 civilians died in the standoff.
On the last night of the siege, Oct. 25, Barayev ordered the rebels to separate the Russian and foreign hostages into two groups. A total of 75 were counted as foreigners, and since Gubareva’s documents were at the U.S. Embassy, she and her daughter were initially identified as Americans.
“They gave Sandy a phone so that he could call the American Embassy and get them to send a representative from the embassy the next day,” Gubareva said.
An agreement was finally made with the U.S. and Kazakh embassies for their release at 8 a.m. on Oct. 26, she said.
Gubareva recalled Barayev announcing to the hostages that negotiations would finally begin at 10 or 11 a.m. on Oct. 26.
“He said that everyone could relax until then, because there would be no assault until negotiations began,” she said.
The hostages settled down to sleep, Gubareva said. The last time she saw her daughter and Booker was at 3:20 a.m.
“They were asleep in each other’s arms,” she said.
Gubareva also fell asleep, only to wake up in the intensive care ward at Hospital No. 7. All the hostages and rebels fell unconscious at around 5:30 a.m. when special forces pumped a mysterious gas into the theater and then stormed it. The gas knocked out the attackers and the hostages without a shot being fired or a bomb detonating.

A U.S. Embassy representative officially notified Gubareva about Booker’s death two days later, on Oct. 28. When she went to the morgue to identify him the next day, doctors told her that he had died after not being treated for complications from the gas.
Gubareva — and many other former hostages and their relatives — firmly believe that many lives could have been saved if the rescue effort had been better prepared.

TITLE: Spy Agency Told to Help Companies
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Intelligence Service must work harder to protect the interests of Russian companies abroad, President Vladimir Putin said Friday, introducing former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov as head of the spy agency.
“Fradkov’s appointment as the director of the SVR underscores the important place foreign intelligence plays in the system of Russia’s state institutions,” Putin said in televised remarks as he presented Fradkov to his staff.
Analysts say the appointment proves that Fradkov, who had been prime minister since 2004, has a background in intelligence. Putin did not confirm this Friday. 
“I think the man who headed the government for more than three years does not need any extra recommendation,” he said. “Because of his previous jobs, Fradkov knows how intelligence works, knows in person its leading figures.”
Putin said he wanted the SVR to help fight terrorism, but also expected Fradkov to build up efforts in economic espionage. The agency “must be able to swiftly and adequately evaluate changes in the international economic situation, understand their consequences for the domestic economy and, of course, it’s necessary to more actively protect the economic interest of our companies abroad,” Putin said.
Russia, whose economic growth has made it increasingly active in world markets, complains that its companies are discriminated against in Europe and the United States when they try to make acquisitions in politically sensitive sectors. Russia, in turn, has also blocked foreigners from investing in areas it deems strategic.

(AP, Reuters, SPT)

TITLE: Nationwide Call Centers Set Up to Field Voter Complaints
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Voters will be able to report campaign violations and voting irregularities in upcoming State Duma and presidential elections to call centers nationwide, Public Chamber members said Friday.
Voter hotlines will open in all 86 regions as of Nov. 1 in a program that lawyer and Public Chamber member Anatoly Kucherena helped create.
Opposition politicians and federal election officials were highly skeptical, however, as to how effective such popular election monitoring could be in ensuring a fair vote in the Dec. 2 Duma elections and March presidential vote.
After receiving a report of a violation, a call center, via a state-connected organization called the Free Elections Foundation, is to relay the incident to the Central Elections Commission.
“The Central Elections Commission must react to a voter’s complaint in one hour,” Kucherena said at a news conference Friday.
But Kucherena noted that “a reaction” from the commission means only informing a voter how and when his complaint can be resolved.
Commission member Yevgeny Kolyushin said one hour would be a “tough” deadline to meet.
“Of course, it won’t be possible to react in one hour on many violations,” Kolyushin said.
He also doubted the effectiveness of the hotlines, saying election officials sometimes react immediately and “sometimes procrastinate.”
Communist Duma Deputy Viktor Ilyukhin questioned whether, from a logistical standpoint, call centers could even be set up in all 86 regions, as well as their objective assessment of violations.
“Officials at local elections commissions are ... controlled by United Russia, and they won’t react to violations,” Ilyukhin said.
The Free Elections Foundation opened a national hotline in January, and hotlines in each of the seven federal districts have been operating as of Sept. 17, the organization said. So far, they have registered around 2,000 appeals, Public Chamber member Andrei Przhezdomsky, the organization’s chief, told the news conference.

TITLE: Student Charged Over Video
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors have charged a student with inciting ethnic hatred after he posted an execution video on the Internet.
The three-minute video, which appeared in August on several ultranationalist web sites, shows two men kneeling in the woods in front of a Nazi flag with their arms and legs bound and identified by a subtitle as “colonists from Tajikistan and Dagestan.” One of the men is shown being beheaded, and the other is shot in the head.
The video ends with two men in black masks and camouflage clothing giving Nazi salutes.
Police in Maikop, the capital of the southern republic of Adygeya, detained a student on Aug. 15. The suspect, identified by Kommersant on Saturday as Viktor Milkov, 24, admitted to posting the video but maintained that he received it as an e-mail attachment from a stranger. Investigators have established that the e-mail came from a different region of the country.
Milkov, a self-described nationalist, was charged with inciting ethnic hatred, said Vasily Semyonov, the head of the Investigative Committee in the regional prosecutor’s office.
If convicted, Milkov could face up to four years in prison. A court has ordered him to remain in Maikop.
It was unclear whether authorities had made any progress in determining who made the video and, if it was authentic, who carried out the killings.
(SPT, AP)

TITLE: Glitch Sends Soyuz Spacecraft Off Course
AUTHOR: By Sergei Ponomarev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ARKALYK, Kazakhstan — Malaysia’s first space traveler and two cosmonauts survived a rough descent Sunday after a technical glitch sent their Soyuz spacecraft on a steeper-than-normal path during their return to Earth, officials said.
The spacecraft landed safely and all three were feeling fine, officials said.
The landing capsule carrying Fyodor Yurchikhin, Oleg Kotov and Malaysia’s Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, landed short of the designated landing site, Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said. The crew was unharmed, he said.
The spacecraft deviated from the intended path because of a computer glitch that sent the spacecraft on a steeper-than-usual descent trajectory, the so-called ballistic descent, Lyndin said.
“That meant that the crew were subjected to higher than normal gravity load on their descent,” Lyndin said.
Russian search and rescue teams quickly located the craft, which landed about 340 kilometers west of the designated landing site, near Arkalyk in northcentral Kazakhstan, NASA reported on its web site. It said all three crew members were feeling fine.
Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said space officials and experts “experienced a few tense moments” but added that the crew members were in good condition.
“All crew members have been recovered and they are feeling quite well,” Perminov said at a news conference at Mission Control.
Alexei Krasnov, head of the Federal Space Agency’s manned space programs, said an official commission would investigate the glitch.
“It’s difficult to immediately name a specific reason behind the problem. We need to do an in-depth analysis,” he said. A similar problem occurred in May 2003 when the crew — cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin and U.S. astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit — also experienced a steep, off-course landing. It then took salvage crews several hours to locate the spacecraft because of communications problems.
Yurchikhin and Kotov were returning after a six-month stint at the space station. Sheikh Muszaphar had been at the orbital outpost since Oct. 12.
During about 10 days in space, Sheikh Muszaphar, a 35-year-old physician fulfilling his own dream of space travel and that of his country, performed experiments involving diseases and the effects of microgravity and space radiation on cells and genes.
The $25 million agreement for a Malaysian astronaut to fly to space was negotiated in 2003 along with a $900 million deal for Malaysia to buy 18 Russian fighter jets. Back aboard the station, the remaining crew — U.S. astronauts Peggy Whitson and Clayton Anderson, and cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko — monitored the progress of the Soyuz on its return journey. Whitson, the station’s first female commander, arrived along with Sheikh Muszaphar and Malenchenko on another Soyuz that lifted off from a Russian-leased launch facility in Kazakhstan Oct. 10. She and Malenchenko are to spend six months in orbit, while Anderson — aboard since June — is to be replaced in the coming weeks by U.S. astronaut Daniel Tani, who is to arrive on the U.S. shuttle Discovery.

TITLE: Riot in Juvenile Jail Blamed On Protest Over Transfer
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — An uprising at a prison for minors that left three people dead last week was sparked by a group of inmates protesting the transfer of a fellow prisoner, Federal Prison Service chief Yury Kalinin said.
Protesting the transfer of the prisoner to a pretrial detention center Tuesday — and emboldened by false rumors that the guards had blank shells in their guns — the group of inmates began tearing down a perimeter fence at the Kirovgrad prison in the Sverdlovsk region, Kalinin told reporters Friday in Yekaterinburg.
After guards opened fire on the group, the prisoners ran back into the compound, realizing that the ammunition was live. Back inside, they proceeded to set fire to the compound’s buildings, Kalinin said, Interfax reported.
Two of those killed in the ensuing chaos were teenage prisoners who were shot trying to escape, while the third was prison guard Anatoly Zavyalov, Kalinin said.
Fifteen others were hospitalized with injuries, he said.
OMON riot police stormed the compound and stifled the unrest. Several prisoners attempted to escape during the chaos but were quickly tracked down, officials said.
Meanwhile, federal human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin visited the prison Thursday to interview witnesses.
“The main reason [for the uprising], in my view, is that these prisons for minors are turning into real prisons, where the most important thing is punishment,” Lukin said, Regnum.ru reported. “We have seen such symptoms before,” he added.

TITLE: Hermitage in London Closes
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum is closing its branch in London because of funding problems and rising exhibition costs.
The five Hermitage Rooms opened in November 2000 in the 18th-century Somerset House next to the Thames, sharing space with the Courtauld Institute of Art. 
The space was sponsored by a $7 million gift from the Hermitage Development Trust, headed by British financier Jacob Rothschild and his friend, former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
“Rising exhibition costs, at a time when funding is increasingly hard to obtain, have led the Courtauld and the Hermitage to shift the focus of their alliance from exhibitions to scholarship,” the Hermitage said in an e-mailed statement Friday.
The Hermitage has a branch in Amsterdam and in March it signed an agreement to open a branch in Ferrara, Italy.
It also runs an exhibition space in Las Vegas with the Guggenheim.

TITLE: Ukraine Set for Gas Hikes and Inflation
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — Ukraine is bracing for a larger-than-expected increase in the price of natural gas charged by Russia, which is likely to fuel inflation and curb economic growth, Ukrainian Economy Minister Anatoly Kinakh said Friday.
Russia may increase the price of natural gas next year by 15 percent, Kinakh said in an interview in Washington.
That’s more than Ukraine’s initial estimate of a 10 percent increase to $143 per 1,000 cubic meters.
Higher gas prices will make it harder for Ukraine to hold its inflation rate to the 6.8 percent government forecast for next year, he said. Ukrainian industries, including chemicals, need time to adjust to increases in gas prices, which remain far below European levels of $270 per 1,000 cubic meters, he said.
“At a gas price of $180 per 1,000 cubic meters, our chemicals-making industry, one of the major exporters, would become loss-making,” he said. “We need time to modernize our economy, to implement new technologies and cut energy consumption.”
Gazprom cut supplies to Ukraine in January 2006 in a dispute over prices that interrupted shipments to Europe. Russia later doubled what it charged Ukraine for gas, and it raised the price by another 37 percent in 2007.
The European Union depends on Russia for about a quarter of its oil and gas imports. The incident cast doubt over Russia’s reliability as a supplier of energy.
“There is a very serious political component here,” Kinakh said of Russia’s gas-pricing policies.
“It’s very important for us not only to agree on the price for next year but also to have a medium-term strategy,” he said. “It won’t be possible to keep the price” below the average European level “longer than two or three more years.”
“We managed to withstand these prices because of high prices for our major exports, such as metals and chemicals,” Kinakh said. Metals and chemicals, such as fertilizers, make up 52 percent of Ukraine’s exports, he said.
Ukraine’s economy will probably grow about 7 percent this year, compared with the government’s initial forecast of 6.5 percent and the central bank’s estimate of 7.5 percent, Kinakh said. Next year, growth may slow to less than 6.5 percent, he said.
“Ukraine’s consumer prices may rise as much as 13 percent by some estimates, but the government must make every effort to restrict it to 11 percent” this year, Kinakh said. It initially planned to cut inflation to 7.5 percent in 2007.
Ukraine will attract at least $5 billion in foreign direct investment this year, Kinakh said. “This is still not much, given Ukraine’s economic potential.”
Foreign direct investment rose 50 percent in the first half of the year from the same period a year earlier, to $2.55 billion, he said.

TITLE: Ruble Appreciation Unlikely
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Central Bank considers ruble appreciation “not effective” in terms of fighting inflation and is unlikely to use the measure for the rest of 2007, First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said Friday.
The ruble exchange rate was the Central Bank’s only weapon against inflation while investment flows and oil revenues generated excess liquidity. The global credit crunch that began in August has made liquidity much tighter and this may give the bank more leverage over inflation via the money markets.
“The appreciation of the ruble would not be an effective measure to curb inflation. We confirm our position that we are unlikely to use this measure in 2007,” Ulyukayev told a conference.
“The environment we have had since midsummer and will have until the end of the year is such that it would not be correct to use the exchange rate mechanism to curb inflation,” Ulyukayev said.

TITLE: Hi-Tech Enterprises To Get Financing
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: By November 2007, the Regional Venture Fund for Investment into Small High-Tech Enterprises will have finished raising capital and will start accepting applications from innovative companies, the Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade (CEDIPT) said Friday in a statement.
“This venture fund will provide financing for the development of 40 to 50 start-ups operating in the high-tech industry,” said Dmitry Bykov, deputy chairman of CEDIPT.
The main goal of this new fund is to contribute to the development of small innovative enterprises. It is a closed unit venture fund, whose total assets are expected to account for $16 million.
According to the approved scheme of the fund, the federal budget will supply $4 million, while another $4 million will come from the St. Petersburg budget. The remaining funds will be attracted from private investors.
VTB Asset Management, which won the tender and became the fund’s managing company, expects to raise the remaining funds from private investors by the end of October.
“Next year we expect to double the fund’s assets. Financing will come from the same sources and in the same proportions — $4 million from the federal budget, $4 million from the regional budget and $8 million from private investors,” Bykov said.
Bykov suggested that in the near future, the fund’s assets will increase to over $40 million.
Innovative companies are already applying to the fund and its managing company, despite the fact that it has not yet started operating officially, Bykov said.
A lack of financing for research is one of the main difficulties faced by small innovative enterprises, and local officials expect that by stimulating the development of such enterprises, they will increase the proportion of the high-tech industry in the gross regional product.
Lack of financing was also obvious during the 3rd Russian Venture Forum held earlier this month in St. Petersburg.
Experts estimated that companies participating in the forum sought an approximate total of $170 million. A total of 134 companies applied to participate in the forum, but experts were positive about the ability to attract investment of only 59 enterprises.
32 percent of the forum’s participants were seeking financing of $1 million to $3 million, while around 21 percent were looking for $300,000 to $1 million, and another 21 percent estimated their need for financing at $3 million to $10 million.
Investment of below $300,000 was requested by 18 percent of companies, while eight percent demanded a major investment of over $10 million.
Most of the participants specialize in the production of industrial equipment, software and information technologies, electronics, biotechnologies, consumer goods, medicine and telecom.
In addition to the venture fund, local authorities have created a business incubator, subsidizing rent rates for small innovative companies and proving consulting and outsourcing services for them free of charge. In the near future, City Hall expects 10 to 12 business incubators to operate in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>New Districts Planned</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — 1.1 billion rubles ($44.3 million) from the St. Petersburg budget will be spent in 2007-2009 on preparing two land plots in the south-west of the city for new residential construction, RBC reported Monday.
City Hall’s Committee for Construction will run an open tender to choose a contractor for the project. The winning company will get a license to explore the sites, create engineering infrastructure and plan the new city districts, which will be created on the two land plots of 47 hectares and 32 hectares respectively.

<b>Local Housing Boom</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) – From January through September this year about 460,000 square meters of new housing stock was constructed in the Leningrad Oblast, which is a 50 percent increase compared to the same period last year, RBC reported Monday.
According to a plan approved by the regional government, a total of 750,000 square meters of new housing should be completed this year in the Leningrad Oblast.

<b>GM Plant To Start Up  </b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — American automotive giant General Motors will officially open its plant in St. Petersburg and start mass production on November 3, 2008, Interfax reported Saturday.
By January next year equipment will be installed, and by September the plant will start producing the first small series of Chevrolet Captiva. Total investment into the plant is estimated at over $300 million. The plant will produce 70,000 cars a year.
Toyota Plant Prepared</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — On December 21, Toyota will inaugurate its plant in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Saturday.
The company has finished recruiting personnel for the new plant, where equipment is currently being installed. By December 11, Toyota Motor Company expects to obtain all the permits and approvals from supervising officials.

<b>Alcohol Sales Up 51%</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian Alcohol company, the maker of Green Mark vodka, said sales rose 51 percent in 2007’s first nine months as the country’s expanding economy fueled demand for more expensive brands.
Revenue was 13 billion rubles ($523 million) through September, the Moscow-based company said Friday in an e-mailed statement, without giving a year-earlier figure. Green Mark and lower-priced vodka Zhuravli, or “Cranes” in English, were among the best-selling brands, according to Russian Alcohol.
The distiller’s local market share had climbed to 10 percent in September from 6.8 percent at the beginning of the year, according to the statement, which cited the Federal Statistics Service.

<b>Globus Seeking Buyer</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Globus Gourmet, an upscale Russian supermarket chain, is seeking a buyer for about $100 million, Vedomosti reported, citing an unidentified investment banker.
Globus hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. to find a purchaser for either the entire company or a controlling stake, the newspaper said, citing the banker. The price equals forecast revenue for this year, according to Vedomosti.
Moscow-based Globus, which has six stores in the Russian capital and two in St. Petersburg, is 56 percent-owned by Lev Khasis, chief executive officer of grocer X5 Retail Group NV, the paper said. Russian banker Evgeny Bernshtam owns the rest, it said. 

<b>Russia To Pay Off Loan</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will use $343.25 million from its oil-revenue fund to pay off the remaining principle of a loan from the U.S. Agriculture Ministry ahead of schedule, the Interfax news agency reported.
An agreement on the loan was made on Dec. 23, 1998, four months after Russia defaulted on $40 billion in ruble-denominated foreign debt, Interfax said. The agency reported that by repaying the loan early, Russia will save $46.7 million on interest payments between 2008 and 2020.

<b>Brewery Bid Thwarted?</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Scottish & Newcastle Plc plans to thwart a hostile takeover bid by Carlsberg and Heineken by selling its stake in Baltic Beverages Holding, the Sunday Times reported.
     Selling Hartwall Oy, the Finnish holding company that owns Scottish & Newcastle’s 50 percent in BBH, would help derail the 7.5 billion pound ($15.4 billion) bid, the newspaper said.
The disposal would avoid reaching an accord with Carlsberg, which owns the other half of BBH and is seeking full control of the subsidiary, the Sunday Times reported. The holding in BBH, Russia’s largest brewer, is key to Scottish & Newcastle’s survival, the newspaper cited unidentified analysts as saying.
Scottish Danish brewer Carlsberg and Amsterdam-based Heineken aim to split the U.K. brewer between them, the Sunday Times said.

<b>HQ Coming to Town</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Rustam Tariko’s Russky Standart Bank will move its headquarters from Moscow to St. Petersburg, following a number of state-run companies, Vedomosti reported.
St. Petersburg offers good communication links to Europe and is less crowded than Moscow, the newspaper said, citing company spokesman Preston Mendenhall. The bank’s board on Oct. 19 decided to put the question to shareholders, Vedomosti reported.
Russky Standart will become the second large private company after Transaero Airlines to move to St. Petersburg, Vedomosti said. The bank follows state companies VTB Bank, Rostelecom and Rosneft unit RN-Trade, which have all moved to President Vladimir Putin’s hometown in the past two years, the newspaper said.

<b>Coal Output To Soar</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia, the world’s third-biggest coal exporter, plans to spend 853 billion rubles ($34.4 billion) expanding output in its biggest coal-producing area by about 50 percent by 2025.
Kuzbass’s production will rise to 270 million metric tons by 2025 after 24 underground mines and 10 open-cast mines are built, said Valentin Mazikin, vice governor of the Kemerovo region which is home to the coal field. About 80 percent of Russia’s coal exports come from Kuzbass, he said Monday.
Record coal prices have spurred companies to dig new mines. They have been hampered by rising costs for equipment and miners and bottlenecks on train lines and ports such as Newcastle, Australia, the world’s biggest coal-export harbor.
Kuzbass has about 700 billion tons of coal reserves, enough to last 600 years, Mazikin said. Output from Kuzbass last year was 174.3 million tons, of which 117.8 million tons was steam coal used in power plants.

<b>Gref Slams Low Output</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Russian economy’s “number one problem” is low productivity, said former Economy Minister German Gref, Expert magazine reported.
Industry is not focused on boosting productivity because it is benefiting from lower natural gas and electricity costs, Gref said in an interview published in the Moscow-based magazine Monday.
These “potential competitive advantages” will disappear in the next four years, prompting Russian companies to boost productivity, Gref told Expert magazine.
Monopolies in the power and rail shipment industries are becoming more open to competition and increasing their competitiveness, he said, according to Expert. Changes to Gazprom, a natural gas exporter that Gref called a “political monopoly,” have not advanced as quickly, Expert quoted Gref as saying.

<b>Aeroflot Profits Increase</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Aeroflot, eastern Europe’s largest airline, said first-half profit climbed 19 percent as revenue increased.
Net income under international accounting standards climbed to $160.8 million, the carrier said in a statement handed out before a news conference in Moscow on Monday. Sales advanced 28 percent from a year earlier to $1.68 billion.

TITLE: City Hall To Freeze Dairy Product Prices
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: City Hall plans to freeze prices for milk containing 2.5 percent fat, kefir and sour cream containing 15 percent fat, Fontanka.ru news portal announced.
The city is currently developing an agreement with producers of dairy products. The agreement on freezing prices is to be signed Wednesday and will remain in place until Dec. 31.
Research by large food retail chains showed that Petersburgers with low incomes most often buy 2.5 percent-fat milk, kefir, and 15 percent-fat sour cream.  Therefore it was decided that these items would be defined as basic dairy goods, and that prices on them will not be increased, at least in the immediate future.
St. Petersburg’s agreement will come as part of a federal government plan to freeze prices for basic food products.  The government says that food producers are doing so without pressure from the government, according to Dni.ru news portal. 
The list of socially vital products includes milk, kefir, sour cream, white and black bread, eggs, vegetable oil, sugar and cheese.
Retail chains will promise to fix the maximum profit margin on these products at 10 percent.
Large food companies deny that there is any pressure on them from state bodies, however, experts say major producers will suffer finanicial losses of tens of millions of dollars. 
Anton Saraikin, spokesman for Wimm Bill Dann milk processing company, said Wimm Bill Dann, Unimilk and some other major milk processing companies came up with the initiative to freeze prices on ‘basic dairy products’ themselves.
“We realize that taking such a step will cause some financial loss to the company, but we also understand our social responsibility at the moment,” Saraikin said to The St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
Saraikin said the company will try to partially compensate the losses by examining its expenses, and also by raising prices on their other more expensive dairy products.
He said the freezing of prices is a temporary measure, and in the long term the state will need to take measures to improve the situation.
“For instance, the state will need to allocate more money for the modernization of the cattle sector,” Saraikin said.
To compensate the voluntary measure undertaken by dairy producers, the St. Petersburg administration is ready to lower the customs duty on milk imported from abroad and to decrease the percentage rate on loans for milk processing companies.
Last week, experts said the city and state authorities’ call for dairy producers to freeze milk prices would not succeed.  They said that in any event, they would need to decide on special ‘basic’ kinds of milk and to sign a ‘milk’ agreement similar to the one signed on bread prices in June.
Vladimir Labinov, executive director of Russian Milk Enterprises Union, said only Russian milk producers could stabilize milk prices now.
“The less we depend on import, the more chances we have of solving the problem,” Labinov said, according to Fontanka.ru. 
Meanwhile, representatives of the Unimilk, Petmol and Wimm-Bill-Dann milk processing companies said that in the Northwest, the speculation of second-party retailers does not influence the growth of prices, because the companies prefer to work directly with milk producers.
Therefore, in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, prices on milk increased by only 18 percent over the summer, whereas in the southern regions they almost doubled.

TITLE: Russia Keen To Build Nuclear Plant
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MINSK — Belarus said Friday that it would hold a tender next year for the construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant, which could cost up to $3.5 billion, and Russia signaled its interest.
Belarus has virtually no energy resources and has quarreled with Moscow over the prices it pays for Russian gas, on which it relies heavily. President Alexander Lukashenko has long talked of diversifying energy sources, and on Thursday he pointed to Japan as an ideal partner for the nuclear project.
“The government at the moment is doing preliminary work. We have offers from Western partners and we have an offer from Russia,” Belarussian Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky said after meeting his Russian counterpart, Viktor Zubkov, in Minsk on Friday. 
Earlier, Zubkov said Russia was “capable of offering the most pragmatic and safest way” of building a nuclear power plant.
Russia’s ambassador to Belarus has said Russia could provide a loan to cover the entire cost of the project.
Zubkov also said it would make sense to revisit a proposal to build a second gas export pipeline to Europe through Belarus.
“It is probably expedient once again to revert to the question of constructing a second link, but to do that we will need to tally all resources,” Zubkov said. 
Sidorsky said he estimated that building the link could cost $2 billion to $3 billion.
Gazprom has, however, abandoned the so-called Yamal-2 link across Belarus due to low demand in Poland. It is now focusing on a project to build the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

TITLE: Talks Falter as Exxon Blocks Kazakhstan’s Kashagan Stake
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Talks between Kazakhstan and oil companies developing the giant Kashagan field have stalled as U.S. Exxon Mobil is blocking the expansion of the state’s share in the project, Interfax said Saturday.
The agency quoted unidentified sources as saying all other foreign members of the Kashagan group had agreed on a preliminary deal, under which state energy firm KazMunaiGaz would raise its stake in the project from its current 8.33 percent.
The proposed compromise, under which all group members would proportionally reduce their stakes, could settle a dispute over cost overruns and delays at Kashagan.
Interfax said KazMunaiGaz’s stake could double if Exxon were to give the final nod. Exxon has 18.52 percent of Kashagan, alongside project leader Eni as well as Shell and Total. Smaller stakes belong to ConocoPhilips, with 9.26 percent, and Japan’s Inpex, with 8.33 percent.
Many partners, including Total, have called for a swift resolution, saying a deal should be reached by the end of the year. Eni has said the group is discussing the idea of increasing Kazakhstan’s project role but has given few details. 
Analysts have compared the development to similar moves by Russia, which last year ousted Shell from the leading role in Sakhalin-2.
Kazakhstan has threatened to strip Eni of its leading role in Kashagan, the biggest oil find in three decades, as it negotiates a new budget, which may exceed $100 billion.

TITLE: Dutch Will Invest In Irkutsk
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: AMSTERDAM — A Dutch investment group has agreed to invest more than $100 million in the Irkutsk region to exploit coal and potassium salt as well as to convert coal to liquid fuel.
The group plans to invest $50 million in the first 18 months for geological research and project development, with the investment rising to over $100 million for exploitation, processing and setting up a sales network. The aim is also to bring leading-edge coal-to-liquid technology to Russia.
Dutch entrepreneur Roel Pieper, who manages investment company ETIRC, said Friday that the group hoped to avoid problems such as those faced by Shell with its Sakhalin-2 project.
“By being a public-private partnership we start out differently,” Pieper said. 
“We have set aside money for the environment ... as part of the business model. We have government officials in the board right from the beginning.”
Pieper said the Irkutsk project also involved Russian Railways, which will extend tracks to serve the project.

TITLE: Chess Grandmaster Uses Skills in Russian Business
AUTHOR: By Alissa de Carbonnel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Going out on a limb means a very different thing to French chess grandmaster Joel Lautier.
Lautier, 34, quit 22 years on the professional chess circuit and his Paris home in November to suit up as an analyst with Russian consultancy Strategy Partners. In six months, he has gone from analyst to an associate’s role as director of international development. 
“Chess and business are similar in that you are confronted with a problem that does not have a unique solution,” he said in a recent interview. 
“In chess, you’re used to looking carefully over every position to keep all your options open,” said Lautier, who is one of only three players in the world to have beaten every world champion dating back to 1975 during the course of his career.
“Business analysis is also like mapping a tree of possibilities,” he said. “One error can be fatal to hours of work because everything is a logical chain — every step must have its foundation,” he said.
Strategy Partners, an offshoot from the first Innovation Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, has worked on more than 50 projects in the regions since its 1994 start alongside the multinationals, competing in the sector by positioning itself as a local expert.
As with any advisory, Strategy Partners sells the brainpower of its consultants. And the chess graphics featured on the firm’s web site following their recent rebranding is telltale of Lautier’s quick accession to the team.
Without hesitation, Alexander Idrisov, the firm’s founding partner, assessed his new hire: “Joel has a brilliant mind, never forgets anything. He is smart in a very creative way.”
“We talked for an hour when he first walked into my office [last year] before I found out he is not Russian,” Idrisov said.
Lautier’s seamless Russian stems from his long association with the country’s premier chess champions. He worked as a trainer for chess champion Vladimir Kramnik leading up to his world championship victory over Garry Kasparov in 2000.
Lautier was three when he began playing, and though his father, his first trainer, was the more passionate player, he learned the initial moves from his Japanese mother. 
At eight, he won the 1981 national competition for his age level, which “was the first real revelation” of his potential as a chess professional. 
But Lautier said he understood the true meaning of professionalism when he came to the Soviet Union to train for three-week periods in camps outside Moscow in the late 1980s, as chess was among the prestigious sports rigorously promoted in that era.
Russian grandmasters resemble one another in their play and their systematic, almost scientific approach, Lautier said. By contrast, Westerners are more temerarious in their strategy, leaning on psychological play because they depended on winning top prizes in Western tournaments to make a living. The two did not meet often as Soviet players traveled rarely, and the level of Soviet players was much higher.
When possible, Lautier avoids speaking in the first person and instead opts for more general terms to describe his experiences. He is modest about his success, insisting that chess is not a particularly mathematical or inaccessible game.
He preferred novels to other assignments, as he pursued his education in parallel with six hours of daily training with coaches, chess books and computer modules — a regiment he maintained throughout high school — before turning to chess full time.
The vibrancy and pace of business in Russia attracted Lautier, who felt he had reached some kind of ceiling temporarily in his chess game. 
Though chess acumen carries a certain intellectual capital, not every player can make the transition to business. Lautier admits that it was not easy to adapt to a business environment after living “a bit like an artist,” responsible only to himself. 
“Some things are transposable, but you have to find a way to make them applicable,” he said. 
Idrisov said Lautier had crucial qualities that he did not expect from a chess player. “He is very open for a chess player and able to read people.”
Having forgone college for chess, Lautier is entirely self-taught. He enjoys promoting chess in business and had previously organized major chess events, including a world championship final, delivered company conferences and created his own sports consulting company in early 2005.
In 2003, with Kramnik he co-founded and was president of the Association of Chess Professionals, which he developed into an international body with more than 400 grandmasters, organizing an annual world tour of more than 60 tournaments.
Lautier’s advice to western companies is: Take more risks in the Russian market. Latecomers are losing out to their Russian counterparts who spend less time questioning what they stand to lose. 
“Because if it is not you, it will be your competitors.”

TITLE: Stock Market Blighted by Oil Tax Burden
AUTHOR: By Amie Ferris-Rotman
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Tax risks and fear of political uncertainty are acting as a drag on the country’s oil- and gas-dominated stock market, which was a star performer in 2006 but has underachieved this year. 
Although the RTS index has rallied to all-time highs, its 12 percent gain in the year to date falls short of other emerging markets and pales by comparison with last year’s 70 percent rise. 
“Russian oil companies are not benefiting from high oil prices. [They] do not do as well as international oil companies due to this heavy tax burden,” said analyst Igor Kurinny at ING in London. 
The country’s mineral extraction tax, which came into force in 2007 and takes into account factors such as oil-field depletion and water content in reservoirs, is weighing heavily on Russian oil’s profitability. 
It has also made developing new fields expensive. 
“Our costs are constantly increasing,” Leonid Fedun, LUKoil vice president, told a newspaper recently. “Now we have to develop new regions from zero and the costs today are not even comparable with before.” 
This tax, combined with a hefty export duty — which rose again this month by over $3, to $34.29 per barrel — means the state’s marginal tax take is almost 90 cents on the dollar. 
Oil industry bosses have lobbied for a lighter burden, so far in vain. The Industry and Energy Ministry declined to comment on oil taxation for this article. 
Oil and gas stocks, as measured by the RTS sector index, are down by 5 percent this year, even after a 17 percent run-up since mid-August. 
While energy companies comprise only 10 of the 50 companies in the RTS benchmark, they have a combined weighting of over 50 percent. Russian stocks have an estimated 2007 price-to-earnings ratio of around 10. 
“Given the big share oil and gas companies take of the index ... they are an anchor which limits the performance and growth of the RTS,” said Konstantin Reznikov at Dresdner Kleinwort. 
Only one oil stock, Tatneft, the largest producer in oil-rich Tatarstan, is up this year, with a 15 percent gain. 
State-controlled Gazprom and LUKoil — both with a maximum 15 percent RTS index weighting — are down 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively, in the year to date. 
But if sky-high world oil prices take a fall, the country’s high taxes would soften the impact on stocks. 
“If international oil prices decline, the international companies will be hit hardest as Russians will be protected by the buffer the taxes represent,” Reznikov said. 
Analysts believe state-controlled companies such as Rosneft could receive tax cuts in early 2008, while private companies such as LUKoil may miss out, except perhaps on new offshore projects. 
The country’s gas sector has escaped high taxation so far and has instead been charged with a small flat rate. Proposals to raise this fivefold and mimic oil’s mineral extraction tax have failed to gain traction over recent months. 
Further state consolidation in the energy sector also remains a large question. 
Shares of closely held oil firm Surgutneftegaz have been volatile on market speculation that the Kremlin — which controls over one-third of the oil industry — is considering creating a new state oil major by wrapping assets of Rosneft with Surgut and other firms.

TITLE: Timan Oil To Retain Its License
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Timan Oil and Gas, a British-registered company working in northern Siberia, won a rare court victory on Friday that will allow the small oil and gas firm to retain its main license.
Moscow’s Arbitration Court ruled in favor of the firm, which had sought to expand its main exploration and production license at the Nizhnye-Chutinskoye field in Timan Pechora, the company said in a statement. The court heard the case on October 5, it said.
The Natural Resource Ministry’s subsoil agency had asked its Komi Republic branch to revoke the company’s license in February, but was overruled by the court, which could not be reached for comment.
Shares in the firm, listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market index, soared 17 percent on Friday.
Timan Oil and Gas never received official notification from the Komi subsoil agency, the statement added. The company has also been targeted for investigation by the ministry’s environmental agency, which in summer began to crack down on smaller foreign energy firms.
Investigations by the Natural Resources Ministry’s agencies often work most to wreak havoc on company’s share prices.
“We are pleased to resolve this matter successfully and look forward to continuing exploration and production activity as previously planned,” Timan founder and CEO Alexander Kapalin said in a statement.

TITLE: Wheat Export Tax Planned
AUTHOR: By Aleksandras Budrys
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government plans to slap a prohibitive tariff on wheat exports in a move analysts say could cause an abrupt rise in world prices.
A source in the Economic Development and Trade Ministry said Friday that the ministry was considering recommending a tariff of 30 percent, or no less than 70 euros ($100) per ton of wheat.
There is currently no tariff on wheat exports but a tariff of 10 percent, or no lower than 22 euros per ton, is due to be imposed from mid-November.
The hike would be designed to keep grain at home while the government sells intervention stocks to combat record high grain prices that have threatened to push inflation above last year’s level of 9 percent. The ministry declined to comment on the report, but analysts said they expected the move to go ahead.
“The setting of a prohibitive tariff is very likely,” said Andrei Sizov, chief executive of agricultural analyst group SovEcon. “Otherwise government grain sales to the market would appear to be stimulating exports.” 
Sizov said that such a sharp increase in the tariff could have a dramatic impact on the world wheat market, pushing prices up. “A closure of Russian exports even for one month will keep 1.2 million to 2 million tons of wheat out of the world market,” he said. “If this happens in November or December, when new crop wheat from Argentina and Australia has not yet reached the market, we can predict an explosive rise of world wheat prices.”
The 10 percent tariff will be effective until April 30. The government has also set for the same period a tariff of 30 percent, but no less than 70 euros per ton, on barley. Analysts have said the barley tariff will effectively keep the cereal inside the country, but the wheat tariff at this level is too low to stop exports.
The Russian Grain Union said Friday that it would oppose setting the new tariff, because it could hurt domestic grain growers. “The 10 percent tariff takes into account the difference between world and domestic prices, so it will only stop the domestic price rise. The 30 percent tariff will stop exports,” union head Arkady Zlochevsky said.

TITLE: U.S. Meat Products To Face Ban
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CHICAGO — Russia plans to ban products from dozens of U.S. meat plants and cold-storage facilities, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman said Friday.
Shares of leading U.S. meat companies, including Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, fell back on the news.
Russia said last week that it would not import product from some U.S. chicken and pork plants following inspections of those facilities this summer.
Analysts expect the bans to be temporary. The USDA has the authority to approve the facilities once Russia’s concerns are addressed, it said.
“It is not a big deal unless it gets bigger,” economist Paul Aho said of Russia’s ban on the chicken plants. Chicken companies could continue to ship poultry from other plants that are approved for Russia, which is the largest overseas buyer of U.S. chicken, he said.
Russia has also halted imports of pork from seven U.S. plants and one storage facility.

TITLE: Kudrin Stands Firm on Oil Wealth Spending
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — As global oil prices reached the dizzy heights of $90 per barrel, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Friday that Russia would not accept restrictions from some Group of Seven countries on how it invested its oil wealth abroad. 
“Sovereign wealth funds should be subject to the general rules of the free movement of capital,” Kudrin said at a meeting with G7 finance ministers in Washington. “We do not want there to be any such restrictions.”
Concerns have been raised in Europe and the United States that sovereign wealth funds, investment vehicles used by governments to invest their windfall funds into foreign equities, have at times been driven by political, not commercial, motives. Western governments have also been suspicious of Russia’s motives in investing in their countries’ strategic sectors, such as energy and aerospace. 
From next year, Russia plans to use around $20 billion from its $140 billion stabilization fund in the National Welfare Fund to invest in foreign stocks. 
Russian officials have insisted that the welfare fund will be used to make portfolio, not strategic, investments. 
In a joint statement after their talks, G7 ministers and central bankers voiced their concerns about how transparently sovereign funds are structured and managed. 
But the G7 officials also stressed that sovereign wealth funds were “increasingly important participants in the international financial system and ... our economies can benefit from openness to [sovereign fund] investment flows.”
While opposing any formal restrictions on sovereign funds, Kudrin told G7 ministers that Russia might be willing to make some concessions. 
“Working out reasonable recommendations that are not as binding as a code of conduct is in principle possible — but only if it suits countries like us that have funds to invest,” he said.
Britain’s finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, argued against limiting the activity of sovereign funds, saying it would “send the wrong signals across the world.” He said, however, that the funds had to “operate on a commercial basis and no other basis.” 
“The U.S. will benefit from inward investment. We cannot get into a position where [the U.S. is] using this as an excuse for protectionism,” Darling told reporters Friday.
“We welcome inward investment from sovereign wealth funds, but it has to be a two-way street,” he said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at a European Union summit in Portugal on Friday, appeared to take a tougher line on sovereign funds. “We’ve decided not to let ourselves be sold down the river by speculative funds, by unscrupulous attitudes that do not meet the transparency criteria one is entitled to expect in a civilized world,” Sarkozy said. “It’s unacceptable and we have decided not to accept it.”
Kudrin, the longest-serving finance minister in the Group of Eight, said ahead of the talks Thursday that he intended to participate in discussions on an equal footing with his G7 counterparts. 
Buoyed by high oil prices that have soared on geopolitical instability and insatiable demand, particularly from China, Russia has adopted an increasingly assertive stance on the world stage. 
Kudrin predicted that the latest surge in oil prices, which has been driven by worries over Turkey’s threat to invade northern Iraq and a falling dollar, would be temporary. 
“Oil is significantly overpriced,” Kudrin told reporters Saturday in Washington. “Based on our studies, a more realistic price is closer to $50 per barrel. Taking into account inflation, oil will ... be at about $60 a barrel in 10 years.”
Kudrin also predicted that the dollar would continue to fall and expressed the hope that it would happen gradually.
While soaring oil prices have acted as a boon to Russia’s economy, enabling it to accumulate substantial foreign currency reserves, energy revenues have been one of the major contributors to the country’s spiraling inflation. 
“Inflation has accelerated to a high tempo, and it is difficult to reduce it quickly,” Kudrin said. 
On Thursday, Kudrin conceded that inflation would hit double digits by the end of this year, and President Vladimir Putin told callers in a phone-in show that the government would miss its 8 percent target. 
The Kremlin’s response to rising inflation has been to seek agreements with retailers to fix prices on basic food products, while also cutting import tariffs on dairy and milk products. But analysts have dubbed these steps as quick-fix measures that would only bring short-term relief. 
Internationally, Putin is eager to show Russia as a “very strong economic force,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, an analyst who tracks Kremlin politics. “Russia believes it is on an equal footing with G7 nations because of its financial might. But they do not understand the political essence of this equality.”

TITLE: Indian Measures May Benefit Russia
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Emerging-market investors got a sharp sense of deja vu last week as India’s financial regulators took measures to restrict foreign investment, prompting speculation that markets in Moscow could make up lost ground as investors take another look at the Russian story. 
The Indian stock exchange plummeted — dropping 9 percent in a matter of minutes Wednesday, to recover later — after the country’s Securities and Exchange Board proposed to stop issuing derivative notes. These notes enable offshore investors, particularly hedge funds, to invest in Indian equities without buying in directly and they also do not have to register with the board. 
The announcement sent the closed-end India Fund tumbling down 8.5 percent Wednesday while the Morgan Stanley India Investment Fund was down 6.5 percent.
Some analysts said India’s protectionist move could be the much-anticipated trigger that will bring momentum back to the Russian markets. 
Over the past year, Russia’s markets have significantly underperformed those in the other BRIC economies, and analysts say the country stands to gain from the India’s turmoil if investors decide to look elsewhere. 
“India’s move to restrict the inflow of foreign investment may finally provide the much-needed trigger, letting Russia benefit from India-destined cash,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib. 
“This year, investors have been ignoring Russia and the fund flow has been a modest $10 million or $20 million a week, whereas China, India and Brazil have been taking in billions of dollars.” 
Over the last four weeks, India has seen an inflow of $700 million, while Brazil has enjoyed inflows of $3.3 billion. 
Compare that to Russia, which has seen portfolio investment reach just $200 million during the same period, according to data from the Emerging Portfolio Fund Research.
“When the Indian financial market nose-dived Wednesday, the only conclusion was that investors could take their money out of India and put it into Russia,” said Erik DePoy, a strategist at Alfa Bank. 
Georgy Ivanin, chief strategist at the Antanta Investment Fund, pointed out that the structures of Russia and India’s financial markets are very similar, meaning that in the case of investor restrictions in India, Russia “is probably the next port of call.”
But some analysts were more cautious about the prospects that funds would switch their focus more to Russia. 
While foreign money may face restrictions in India, it is not a given that Russia will be the market to benefit. 
Vladimir Kuznetsov, director of equity investment at Finam brokerage, said Russia needed an overhaul of its business climate and investment regulations if it is to lure investors away from the other BRIC markets. 
“Every investor has his own vision of the country in which it has to invest and to many, Russia is considered a high political risk area,” Kuznetsov said. 
“That is why the Russian government created a special agency to work on the country’s image abroad. The need for positive information about the Russian economy and stock market is very acute.”
Investors say much of the money flowing into India has been so-called “hot money” from hedge funds. 
Much of it is speculative, and India’s market regulators have taken the view that this money is a contributing factor to the country’s overheating economy. 
Eric Kraus, managing director of the Nikitsky Fund, said that Russia was suffering from much the same problem as India, in that both countries are experiencing excessive capital inflow. 
The majority of companies in both India and Russia have a single reference shareholder and the free float is inadequate, he said.
The last thing Russia needs, Kraus said, is speculative foreign investment. 
High energy prices over the last two to three years have brought windfalls to the country, creating a huge buffer of domestic capital, Kraus said. 
“Russia has to avoid the inflow of hot money — this is a problem for India right now and could be a problem for Russia. The country needs long-term capital commitments,” Kraus said.
Russia’s two indexes — which have enjoyed a remarkable recovery in recent weeks — dipped toward the end of last week on the back of concerns about rising inflation and the government’s statements that it would intervene to cap consumer prices. 
The benchmark RTS index fell 0.95 percent to finish the week at 2142.42 points, while MICEX dropped 1.84 percent to 1801.42 points. 

Staff Writer Catrina Stewart contributed to this report.

TITLE: TNK-BP To Repair Ryazan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Oil firm TNK-BP on Friday confirmed problems at its largest refinery in Ryazan after traders said Moscow and regions in the Central Federal District are facing a big gasoline shortage.
TNK-BP, in which oil major BP holds 50 percent, said it had on Thursday halted several units for repairs until Nov. 13, cutting output of high-octane gasoline.
“We have been suspecting problems at Ryazan because we could not get a products off them for some time. The situation is serious because diesel and A-92 [gasoline] stocks in the region are dry,” said an oil trader who works with Ryazan.
He said the situation was aggravated by maintenance and repairs at a number of other Russian plants, including TNK-BP’s Saratov refinery.
TNK-BP controls two plants, the 315,000 bpd Ryazan and the 130,000 bpd Saratov. It also shares control together with Gazprom Neft of the 240,000 bpd Yaroslavl refinery.
“Due to a recent serious failure in power supplies to Ryazan refinery, the packing and catalyst in one of the reactors in the VGO hydrotreater unit has been destabilized and the unit now needs to be shut down and reset,” the company said.

TITLE: Khristenko  Faults EU
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS — European Union plans to prevent investment in its energy sector by companies from countries that do not open up their own power markets could dent bilateral ties, Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said Friday.
“Will EU efforts to limit ‘objectionable’ investment have an effect on Russia-EU industrial and energy cooperation? It is difficult to predict,” Khristenko wrote in a letter published in the Financial Times.
“Russia stretches across more than one geographical region, and we can diversify our industrial and energy cooperation by turning to Asian and Pacific countries,” he wrote. “But I am convinced the EU has been and will remain our key player.”
The European Commission proposed last month to break up big utilities that control power supply, generation and transmission, but added a clause to prevent foreign firms from buying pipelines and grids.
The draft legislation would bar foreign companies from controlling EU networks unless they play by the same rules as EU firms and their home country has an agreement with Brussels.
In his letter to the newspaper, Khristenko said there should be a balance between investment opportunities and state security concerns, and he questioned the logic of the EU’s plan.
“I am not sure what Brussels is trying to prevent by restricting foreign access to the EU energy market,” he said. “It would be strange to fear money or to rank it depending on the country of its origin.”

TITLE: A Modern-Day Don Quixote
AUTHOR: By Andreas Umland
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s decision to head the federal list of United Russia in the State Duma elections may one day be seen as the worst bungle in his biography as a statesman.
The foreseeable result of the outgoing president’s unexpected foray into parliamentary affairs will be a crushing victory for United Russia in the December election. The party of bureaucrats — an organization that did not even exist five years ago — will probably receive more than 50 percent of the vote.
Since many of the remaining votes will be spent on parties that have little chance of overcoming the new 7 percent barrier, the next Duma will presumably become entirely dominated by United Russia. So much that even ordinary Russians brainwashed by years of television idolatry of Putin and his policies may begin wondering why the country requires the institution of a parliament at all.
A major rationale of Putin’s centralization policies over the last years was that Russia needs guidance from above in its transition to a full democracy. Many Russians and even some Western observers are convinced that Putin is playing a positive role in Russian history. After the painful years of chaos under Boris Yeltsin, the argument goes, Putin has finally put the creation of a new state under governmental control. Putin had to insert an authoritarian interregnum into the country’s transition, providing stability, direction and confidence that society was craving by the end of the stormy 1990s.
Provisional electoral authoritarianism, as it has been argued, is a necessary steppingstone to a thorough modernization of Russia. As society itself was unable to create a functioning multiparty system from below, it could not help but install an enlightened transitional dictator to lay the foundations of an operational democracy from above.
With Putin’s direct participation in the Kremlin-manipulated party process and the country’s resulting return to an almost single-party system, this story, however, will lose its credibility. The following formation of a new government as well as the presidential election next year will be reduced to manifestly formal procedures. That is because Putin is not entering party politics, but a political theater of sorts set up by his own assistants.
This “sovereign democracy” is an imitation rather than the Russian embodiment of democratic principles, such as political pluralism, division of power, checks and balances, an independent mass media and a strong civil society. A modern-day Don Quixote, Putin will be competing against artificial rivals and virtual opponents. He might also face some real enemies in political and civil society. These, however, have been suffering from years of more or less sophisticated intermingling by the Kremlin’s “political technologists” as well as some crude harassment by agencies such as the police, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the secret services.
Thus, Putin will not only be entering a playing field where he is the only serious player. He will become part of a skewed game where his own assistants make the rules. Thus, he will not win but triumph. His few real and virtual competitors will not lose but be humiliated.
In view of this new turn of events, many Russian intellectuals will start asking themselves where the country will end up after the Putin era. With his new political system increasingly resembling the Soviet model, more and more educated Russians may start doubting whether Putin is leading the country in the right direction. As Russians’ familiarity with politics outside the country is growing by the year, the Kremlin’s overt domination of the entire political playground will look increasingly archaic.
Whereas until now, the Russian political processes resembled — at least on the surface — those of the “civilized world,” the future polity will start to look obviously different not only from the Western political systems, but also from the polities of countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine. It will increasingly resemble a number of states that have an ambivalent reputation among the enlightened parts of the Russian elite, such as Belarus, Kazakhstan and China.
With the re-emergence of a de facto one-party state, more Russians will begin to understand that the country is no longer following the path of the rest of Europe. Rather, it will be obviously moving in the opposite direction as it manifestly rejects some elementary principles of the “civilized world.” To be sure, a considerable part of the elite — the increasingly vociferous proponents of a “Russian special path” — shall be delighted by their motherland’s return to a monistic model of society. But others, especially the younger members of the elite, will realize that they are living in a country that increasingly isolates itself from the rest of the advanced countries with a Christian heritage. With its dubious mechanisms of transferring political power from one leader to the next, Russia has an uncertain future.
The medium-term consequences of Putin’s surprising rush into — and death blow against — party politics will therefore be new divisions in the elite resembling the ones in the late 1980s. Nationalist hardliners will defend “the Putin system” as perhaps not entirely democratic, but peculiarly Russian and thus appropriate for their motherland.
A new generation of cosmopolitan bureaucrats and journalists will not accept the remaining elements of the country’s facade democracy as being sufficient, and they will voice their concern about the ability of the recentralized state and closed political society to react adequately to domestic and foreign challenges.
As Moscow’s leaders will start quarreling again about whether their country should be a part of Europe or not, a new Time of Troubles may be lying ahead.

Andreas Umland, a former visiting fellow at Stanford, Harvard and Oxford, is editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society.”

TITLE: Royal Honor For KGB Hero
AUTHOR: By Ian Mitchell
TEXT: It was once Colonel Oleg Gordievsky of the KGB. Today it is Sir Oleg Gordievsky KGB after the queen honored the former Soviet intelligence officer by appointing him Knight Governor of the Most Distinguished Order of the Bath. Others who have been invested into this ancient order have included Sir Bob Geldof.
“I’m delighted to be able to put the letters KGB after my name,” said Sir Oleg, speaking from his top secret MI5 safe house at 25 Rosewood Villas, Cheltenham. “Even since I was a boy growing up in a crumbling pannelny dom in Nizhny Strashnov, I dreamed of such an honor. To be a knight of chivalry became the goal of my life.
“I read stories about Rapunzel letting down her silky hair from the turrets of her castle or about the heroic exploits of secret orders like the Knights of the Vine, who operated entirely at night in expensive restaurants, where they rescued priceless bottles of wine from confinement in cold, damp, badly lit cellars. Of course, that was all just childish fantasy. But in real life, to be in the KGB became my only professional ambition — a kind of complex.”
Sir Oleg entered the KGB as a talented young college graduate in the early 1970s. Despite rapid promotion, he became disillusioned with life on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad when he realized that it was never going to provide him with boxes at Ascot racecourse, Centre Court seats at Wimbledon or completely free access to the British secret service, even though the latter was explicitly mentioned in his compensation package.
So in 1985, he moved to Britain. Twenty years later, he had all three. Now he is a British KGB as well, the icing on Sir Oleg’s life cake. He is the only retired colonel in Cheltenham to have both KGBs.
“I’m over the moon,” said this now fully anglicized Russian, grinning impishly over a cup of Tetley’s Oop North tea (with milk and four sugars). “It’s almost like hearing that England has won an international soccer match.”
The rarely awarded KGB is used to honor exceptional individuals who have rendered important nonmilitary service to the queen in Britain or another member of the Commonwealth.

Ian Mitchell is a freelance journalist.

TITLE: Reading the Tea Leaves of Football
TEXT: If football has any role in Russian politics — and recent history suggests that it does — then Russia’s 2-1 victory over England on Wednesday night provided perhaps the clearest signal yet that Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov is a serious contender to succeed President Vladimir Putin.
It was, after all, just four years ago — as State Duma elections were heating up — that United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov was shown on state television extolling the national football team’s stomping of Switzerland as a victory for a “united Russia.” It was a particularly unashamed piece of bandwagon campaigning.
United Russia went on to stomp its competition in comparably convincing fashion, capturing a two-thirds majority in the State Duma and turning the chamber effectively into a rubber stamp for Kremlin initiatives.
But United Russia, with Putin heading up its federal ticket in the Duma elections on Dec. 2, doesn’t need football this time around. With a captain like Putin, every United Russia member could be cryogenically frozen today and defrosted Dec. 3 having captured 70 percent of the vote.
So who will benefit from Wednesday’s victory, one of the most important wins for Russian football in recent history? It’s no mystery to anybody who watched state-run Channel One television after the game.
Zubkov, a political unknown until last month, was shown getting the home side geared up for the game with a motivational talk highly reminiscent of Soviet times, when Communist bosses met athletes ahead of important games.
“We won the Great Patriotic War and were first to fly to space and, therefore, you must win today too. You must do everything you can,” Zubkov said, cutting the air with his right hand.
It was, notably, Zubkov who received airtime, not the two men heretofore widely seen as the leading contenders to succeed Putin — First Deputy Prime Ministers Dmitry Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov — who sat next to the prime minister in the same VIP box at Luzhniki stadium.
With Putin’s coyness about who will be his preferred successor, perhaps Kremlin watchers nowadays will have to watch football reports the way Kremlinologists watched Soviet parades for clues about who’s in and out of favor.
Zubkov’s announcement last month that he would consider running for president sounded like a lark at first. But since then he has been all over the news, chiding underperforming ministers and buying medicine for pensioners. And now this speech to the national team.
It seems someone close to the top is seriously considering the possibility of a Zubkov presidency — one that could end prematurely, under some pretext, with a return by Putin to the post.
But maybe Zubkov would stick around long enough to give a pep talk to Russian Olympians next summer.

TITLE: Tbilisi Streets Going Through Changes
AUTHOR: By Matthew Collin
TEXT: I was standing on a pile of rubble halfway down Pushkin Ulitsa, looking for somewhere to buy some credit for my cell phone and feeling somewhat confused. I’d been away from Tbilisi for a couple of weeks, and in that time my neighborhood had been transformed. A whirlwind of change has been whipping through the Georgian capital, and it had just hit my home territory.
The pile of rubble was all that was left of my nearest newspaper kiosk. It had been pulled down and the genial elderly couple who worked there were gone. The nearby kiosk had been demolished too. On the corner, the scruffy woman who used to hawk beer and cigarettes from a grimy shopping cart late into the night was no longer there either.
My local square is known for its flower market, where romantics can buy extravagant bouquets for their sweethearts at any hour. The flower sellers were still trading, but the fruit and vegetable vendors who used to cluster around them had vanished.
In the square stands an aging Soviet block which once housed a warren of rundown stalls: cobblers, seamstresses, key cutters and the like. They had disappeared too, and the building had been gutted. Only one hole-in-the-wall cigarette vendor remained, and her mood became more dour and depressed as the days passed until, eventually, she was also gone.
This is all happening in the name of progress. The idea is to smarten up the city center, make it more like a European capital, taking Tbilisi out of post-Soviet chaos and into a brighter, more prosperous future. The authorities are constructing elegant new squares and laying down attractive flower beds. The signs outside some of the many building sites give an indication of what’s on its way: Hilton, Hyatt, Kempinski, Inter-Continental, Radisson. Within a year or so, Tbilisi will have new five-star hotels catering to the business elite.
But what has happened to those people who used to scratch out a living selling potatoes or mending shoes? How will they survive? And what is their role in Tbilisi’s shiny European future? Critics say that the authorities are building a “society without people,” and that anyone who doesn’t fit into the grand modernization project — the impoverished, elderly and powerless — is being banished. They claim this will be a duller place without its anarchic jumble of sidewalk entrepreneurs.
Of course, there are winners and losers in any society charting its course through the turbulence of economic transition. The challenge for the authorities, in Georgia as elsewhere, is to ensure those who are dispossessed by the pitiless forces of the market do not fall into destitution and discontent.

Matthew Collin is a journalist in Tbilisi.

TITLE: Raw Dobkin, Crass Cheney
AUTHOR: By Mark H. Teeter
TEXT: In a telling demonstration of how today’s interactive technology really does make the world a global village, an obscure Ukrainian politician has emerged this month as an international entertainment phenomenon. Or the global village idiot. Or both. Somewhere Marshall McLuhan is surely laughing when he isn’t gnashing his teeth.
Mikhail Dobkin is the mayor of Kharkiv, not much of a launching pad for universal celebrity. Yet on YouTube — an internationally popular website for sharing videos — a short feature starring Dobkin has now been enjoyed by well over half a million viewers worldwide. The five-minute clip, entirely in Russian, consists of nothing more than Dobkin sitting behind a desk rehearsing a campaign spot for local television. Yet it has become the sixth most popular video for the entire YouTube nation over the past month, outdrawing such mega-hits as former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s “Help Improve the World” and “Iran So Far,” the Saturday Night Live send-up of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yep, Mayor Dobkin is a major hit.
The secret behind his overnight success is alarmingly simple: In the video, Dobkin curses a blue streak, like a sailor, a trooper or the original tinker who uttered that damn. The mayor and the campaign ad’s director snipe at each other like a foul-mouthed Laurel and Hardy for nearly the whole five minutes as candidate Dobkin stumbles through a hackneyed campaign speech promising better roads and city services “for all Kharkivites.”
In rough, denatured approximation — which is all you can do to convey cursing in another language — the dialogue runs in part: “Why the [expletive] can’t you just read what’s written there, Misha, you [expletive]?” “Because you wrote such a retarded, [expletive] text, that’s why!” “Stop smacking your [expletive] lips, just read it the way it is!” “Could you quit your [expletive] shouting already?” “C’mon, [expletive] it, two more takes on this [expletive] and we’re done, OK?”
While 2007 is indeed the Year of the Russian Language, this episode clearly won’t make the highlight reel at Pushkin House. But not everything here is Dobkin-depressive. Within its enormous volume of viewers, the video has attracted considerable positive commentary from Russian speakers and others (thanks to a loosely English-subtitled version). Along with apocalyptic laments about a nation whose ruling elite swear like stevedores, one finds heartfelt thumbs-ups such as “Terrific! Hilarious!” “ Kharkiv, thanks for raising our spirits here in Irkutsk!” “Better these regular muzhiki than a bunch of [expletive] heads we don’t know!” and “Lucky Kharkivites, what a great mayor!”
Upbeat remarks like these likely point to a higher (OK, lower) truth lurking somewhere beyond the classic public relations maxim, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Despite the vileness of his language, campaigner Dobkin comes across not only as crude, but also genuine in his own way, which is how all politicians want to be perceived, of course. And how constituents everywhere want to perceive them. As one English-language viewer revealingly commented, “I wish our politicians [could] be this open.”
They sometimes are, of course, but we seldom catch them at it — and there’s usually not a lot to enjoy when we do. President Vladimir Putin has crudely threatened to dismember Chechen rebels and circumcise a French reporter. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush wedged a cowboy-booted foot into his yap by calling a respected journalist a “major-league [expletive].”
Yet the anti-Nobel Prize for civic erudition surely goes to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. Confounded by inquiries into his honesty and integrity in the very Senate over which he presides, Cheney beheld his primary questioner, a distinguished gentleman from Vermont, and imperiously intoned, “Go [expletive] yourself.”
Dobkin may be a scalawag or a scoundrel; he is certainly a boor who casually uses obscenities. But consider Cheney. Never casual, he not only uses obscenities, he is one — a furtive, base and unapologetic manipulator whose speech and behavior are “offensive to accepted standards of decency” in a democracy. Idiot-shmidiot — give me Dobkin any time.
In January 2009, the world Cheney has been obscenely despoiling will finally get to tell him where to go. Meanwhile, in his “secure location,” safe from scrutiny by you, me, Congress and YouTube, Cheney should prepare himself for this event by carefully rolling up this column for filing purposes. He clearly knows exactly where to stick it.

Mark H. Teeter teaches English and Russian-American relations in Moscow.

TITLE: S. Africa On Top Of World
AUTHOR: By Rex Gowar
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — The Springboks basked in World Cup glory on Sunday with coach Jake White hoping South Africa will build on his team’s achievement.
“This is a massive opportunity for the future,” White told a news conference the day after South Africa beat 2003 champions England 15-6 in the final at the Stade de France to win the William Webb Ellis trophy for the second time.
“The next challenge is to win back-to-back titles like England and Australia tried,” he said at the team’s Paris hotel.
White named the talented younger players in the team like Francois Steyn, Bryan Habana, Danie Rossouw, JP Pietersen and the unfortunate Pierre Spies, who had to remain at home due to illness, as the future of the Springboks.
Captain John Smit said, however, that the older players bound for European clubs like himself and lock Victor Matfield would also be available if their country wanted to pick them.
South Africa, like the other big southern hemisphere rugby nations, do not normally call up their exiles to the national team.
“We must keep the group together. Against Wales we can celebrate what’s been achieved,” Smit said referring to a test match in Cardiff on Nov. 24 followed by a game against the Barbarians at Twickenham on Dec. 1.
White, whose contract ends on Dec. 31, would not talk about his own future either with South Africa or an opening abroad but he did not rule out staying on if asked, whereas prior to the tournament it had looked like his days as national coach were coming to a close.
There has been talk of South Africa wanting the Springboks to adhere to quotas of black players in any given squad, while White has always prioritized merit in his selections.

TITLE: Chinese Communist Party Names New Leaders
AUTHOR: By Chris Buckley
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — China’s ruling Communist Party unveiled a new leadership line-up on Monday, including two men positioned to eventually succeed President Hu Jintao and government head Premier Wen Jiabao.
Xi Jinping, who has been chief of Shanghai, and Li Keqiang, who has headed the northeast province of Liaoning, were lifted into the new nine-member Politburo Standing Committee — the innermost ring of power in this top-down state.
While Xi, 54, and Li, 52, have not been openly designated to replace Hu and Wen five years hence, their age and status leave no doubt they are favored to reach the apex of power with Xi the frontrunner for now to take Hu’s top job.
They will inherit a nation of about 1.4 billion people, including restive peasants and a maturing middle class, an increasingly open and market-driven economy likely be the world’s third largest and a one-party state that claims loyalty to Marx while it embraces capitalism.
“Comrades Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are two quite young comrades,” was all carefully spoken Hu said of them when presenting them before hundreds of reporters and flashing cameras.
Their rise marked Hu’s growing grip on power as he shed the residual influence of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. But the next five years will test Hu’s power to secure an untroubled succession in an era when no leader commands absolute loyalty.
“Hu’s power has emerged greatly consolidated,” said Li Datong, a former editor at a Party paper. “He has his own line-up now; Jiang’s out of the picture.”
The nine men in dark suits emerged after a tightly controlled vote by the 204-member Party Central Committee, installed at the end of the Party’s five-yearly Congress on Sunday.
Xi filed into the chamber at the Great Hall of the People directly ahead of Li, but there was no definitive sign of which man was favored for which top job.
“Xi came out ranked first, so that suggests that he has a bigger chance of becoming Party general secretary, but there are a lot of factors that can change in five years,” said Zhang Zuhua, a former official. Hu was widely believed to favor Li, who worked under him in the Communist Youth League, and Xi’s rise might reflect officials’ reluctance to allow the Party boss to hand-pick his successor.
But both men would be acceptable to Hu, said the ex-editor Li, and state media have stressed that Hu expects the new leadership to work together and avoid damaging rivalry.
“To fulfil the Party’s mission in power it must have a staunchly unified collective leadership,” says an editorial to appear in the People’s Daily that Xinhua news agency released late on Monday. It urges the country to unite around Hu.
Hu stays as Party boss, as well as President and head of the Central Military Commission, for five more years, while Wen will continue managing the government and its ministries.
The Standing Committee retained parliament chief Wu Bangguo and two leaders installed under the previous Party chief, Jiang Zemin — Li Changchun, who has been propaganda boss, and Jia Qinglin, head of the advisory council attached to the parliament.
The line-up also includes He Guoqiang, set to take control of Party organization and fighting corruption, and Zhou Yongkang, whose background in policing puts him in line to replace Luo Gan, the previous domestic security boss.
The three members of the outgoing Standing Committee who stepped down included Vice-President Zeng Qinghong, a powerful figure installed by Jiang. Both He Guoqiang and Zhou have past work ties to Zeng, who appears to have promoted their rise.
The death of Vice-Premier Huang Ju in June left a fourth vacancy.
Analysts said the mixture of recruits — some personally close to Hu, others not — reflected his bid to balance regions and interests and also limits his power to dictate outcomes.
Li Keqiang worked under Hu in the 1980s, before postings in Henan, a poor and unruly rural province in central China, and Liaoning, a rustbelt province striving to attract investment and emerge as a modern manufacturing base.
Before taking over as party boss of Shanghai earlier this year, Xi Jinping steered two of the country’s fastest-growing provinces, Fujian and Zhejiang — attractive credentials in a government where economic modernization dominates priorities.
“We must certainly grasp development as the top task of this Party in governing and reviving the country,” Hu said.

TITLE: Poland Votes for Pro-European Platform
AUTHOR: By Chris Borowski
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WARSAW — Poland’s center-right election victors said Monday they would seek a broad alliance in parliament to push through economic reforms and redirect Poland into the EU mainstream.
The Civic Platform defeated the conservative Law and Justice party of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Sunday’s election after a record number of Poles turned up at the ballot box to reject social conservatism and isolationism.
Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk is expected to be prime minister of the new government, with the centrist Peasant’s Party his expected coalition partner.
“We will have to form the broadest possible formula for cooperating with all who wanted to remove Law and Justice from power,” Bronislaw Komorowski, the Platform’s number two leader, told Polish TOK FM radio.
According to preliminary results from the electoral commission, the Platform won 41.6 percent of the vote, giving them 208 seats in the lower house — short of an outright majority of 231 seats. Final results were due to be released on Tuesday.
With 91 percent of the vote counted, the Peasants’ Party had won 8.8 percent, or 35 seats, giving the likely government 243 seats in the 460-seat lower house, the Sejm.
Kaczynski, whose party got over 30 percent of the vote, conceded defeat.
His twin brother Lech, the president, does not face an election until 2010 but opposition parties together looked set to get enough seats in parliament to trump his veto power.
It is up to the president to nominate the next prime minister once the new parliament meets for the first time on Nov.  5.
The Platform’s victory will be greeted with relief in EU capitals where the Kaczynskis have earned a reputation of troublemakers with their nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2005.
“Poland’s credibility will be rebuilt,” said Zbigniew Lewicki, a foreign policy expert at the University of Warsaw. “We have a chance of becoming a normal European country.”
Despite a booming economy, the Kaczynskis had ruled during constant infighting, particularly over the campaign against post-communist graft that has been their central policy.
The opposition had accused them of abusing secret services and undermining good democratic practice with attacks on independent judiciary and tight control of state media.
Following its victory, Platform leaders said they would try to put Poland’s all-but-abandoned drive to adopt the euro back on track, with 2012-13 seen as the earliest entry date.
It promised to seek lower taxes, cut red tape and speed up privatization to help slash the budget deficit and debt — key euro zone criteria seen as the main obstacles to euro zone membership.
It also plans to bring home some 900 troops from the U.S.-led force in Iraq and may bargain hard with Washington over U.S. plans to set up a missile defense site in Poland, opposed by Russia.

TITLE: England Mired In Misery
AUTHOR: By Martyn Herman
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — English sports fans were reaching for the anti-depressants on Sunday after another gut-wrenching day in front of the television.
Less than 24 hours after the rugby team’s World Cup dream was slowly strangled by South Africa, they watched in disbelief as a Finnish spanner was thrown into the cogs of Lewis Hamilton’s Formula One world title aspirations.
All that with a large cloud perched above the national soccer team after a mystifying 2-1 defeat in Russia that means they are unlikely to be present at next year’s European Championships in Austria and Switzerland.
A nation that prides itself on sporting glory does not seem to be getting much of it these days.
Thursday’s newspapers slammed coach Steve McClaren’s football team while the endless phone-in shows that now breed unstoppably on the airwaves were full of disgruntled followers of the national sport.
Players paid millions who never produce when it matters was a harsh, but common thread of the commentary by those who were angered.
The rugby team, by contrast, got praised to the heavens.
After all, they were written off as a shambles earlier in the six-week marathon in France, having been obliterated 36-0 by the Springboks in the pool stages.
The fact they then got their faces out of the dust to beat Australia and France and reach their second successive final was labeled a minor sporting miracle.
Sunday’s newspapers were full of sympathy.
“Heartbreak” said most headlines, England’s brave warriors finally meeting their match. There was even a highly contentious disallowed try to lean on in defeat as rugby fans wiped away the tears.
Beer sales went through the roof at the weekend as armchair fans loaded up the fridge for a weekend of high drama and celebration.
All that was left on Sunday evening was a mild hangover and the background hiss of a nation’s hopes deflating once again. Even the fresh-faced Hamilton could not save the day.
After ditching his car in Chinese gravel two weeks ago he still held all the aces going into the final race in Sao Paulo.
He simply needed to win or come second to guarantee the title, although anything in the top five would probably have been enough.
Instead, he was overtaken by two rivals at the start, then suffered some kind of computer glitch only F1 enthusiasts can explain and ended up seventh, handing the title to race winner Kimi Raikkonen.

TITLE: David Slays Goliath as Nalbandian Beats Federer in Spain
AUTHOR: By Simon Baskett
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MADRID — Unseeded Argentine David Nalbandian claimed a shock victory over world number one Roger Federer when he came from a set down to clinch his first Masters Series title with a 1-6 6-3 6-3 win in Madrid on Sunday.
Nalbandian, who beat world numbers two and three, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, on his way to the final, became only the second player since Boris Becker in 1994 to beat the top three at the same event.
The Argentine, who has slipped from a top 10 slot to 25th in the rankings this season, looked out of it when Federer raced away through the first set.
But he became the first man to crack the Federer serve this week when he broke in the second set and kept his nerve to level the match before taking advantage of some uncharacteristic errors by the Swiss to claim a famous victory.
It was Federer’s first defeat since he lost to Djokovic in the final of the Montreal Masters in August and only his seventh loss of the year.
Federer had beaten Nalbandian in eight of their last nine meetings including a 6-4 6-0 win in the semi-final here last year, but the Argentine was the last man to beat the Swiss indoors when he won the Masters Cup in Shanghai in November 2005.
“I was very focused, knowing I’d have to play incredibly to win and everything went right for me,” said Nalbandian. “It was a big boost for me to beat so many good players here this week.”
Federer admitted he had been able to hold the Argentine in the final two sets.
“I guess when you beat Nadal and Djokovic back-to-back you come into the final feeling better than ever,” said Federer. 
“It was a pity I couldn’t stop him today.
“He played well and came back strong and he was the better player all in all.”
The world number one appeared to be on course for another win after making his customary polished start on the ultra-fast court at the Madrid Arena.
He broke the Nalbandian serve in the fourth game after putting the Argentine under pressure with a superb backhand pass and again in the sixth with a fierce forehand drive as he wrapped up the first set in half an hour.
But just as the Swiss looked as though he might run away with it, Nalbandian fought his way back into the match by breaking Federer’s serve in the second game of the second set.
The match was interrupted briefly when the watering system for the courtside flowers sprang a leak, but Nalbandian maintained his concentration and withstood some heavy pressure on his serve to take the set 6-3.
Federer looked uneasy at the start of the decider and gifted Nalbandian another break in the third game after two uncharacteristically loose shots that drifted beyond the baseline.
The world number 25 kept Federer on the ropes with some excellent serving and deep returns and broke again in the ninth to claim the sixth ATP title of his career and make up for the disappointment when he lost to Marat Safin in the 2004 final.

TITLE: Kyrgyzstan Approves Improved Constitution
AUTHOR: By Olga Dzyubenko
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BISHKEK — Kyrgyz leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev dissolved parliament on Monday to tighten his grip on the chamber after a constitutional referendum extended his authority in the impoverished Central Asian state.
Kyrgyz voters approved a set of amendments on Sunday giving Bakiyev leeway in picking key cabinet officials and paving the way for his political party to gain a footing in parliament.
Kyrgyzstan has been volatile since 2005 when protesters ousted veteran leader Askar Akayev and brought Bakiyev to power. Since then, Bakiyev’s unresolved stand-off with a chamber packed with Akayev-era deputies has fuelled instability.
Bakiyev said that a new constitution, coupled with a new parliament, would help bring more stability.
“A ... contradiction has emerged, a crisis between the two branches of power,” Bakiyev said in a nationwide address. “In this situation ... I had to decide to dissolve [parliament], and this is what I’ve done.
“I am convinced it will be a different, an absolutely democratic and clean election. ... With the current assembly’s departure we are turning a whole page in our history.”
Bakiyev, himself elected in a 2005 vote judged free and fair by Western monitors, said he would set a date for the snap election after the new constitution formally comes into force.

TITLE: Right-Wing Triumphs In Switzerland Elections
AUTHOR: By Alexander G. Higgins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GENEVA, Switzerland — The nationalist Swiss People’s Party received the highest vote ever recorded for an individual political party in Switzerland after a bitter campaign blaming foreigners for much of the country’s crime, according to official results released Monday.
But although many saw the campaign as tainted by racism or xenophobia, the Swiss also elected their first black parliament member Sunday.
The Federal Statistics Office put the People’s Party at 29 percent after the national parliamentary elections. That topped the 1919 performance of 28 percent achieved by the pro-business Radical Democrats when Swiss elections were reorganized immediately after World War I.
The Social Democrats were the big losers, dropping to 19.5 percent from 23.3 percent.
The People’s Party added seven seats to bring to 62 its total in the 200-seat National Council, the lower house of parliament, also edging out the Radical Democrats’ 1919 record of 60.
People’s Party president Ueli Maurer and other party leaders pledged to continue working among the four major parties in the long-standing Swiss system of consensus politics that covers the wide range from Social Democrats on the left to People’s Party on the right. All four parties share in the governing Cabinet, without a prime minister and with the president only a figurehead.
The People’s Party claims foreigners are responsible for much of the crime in the country. In the campaign, the People’s Party called for a law to throw out entire immigrant families if a child violates Swiss laws — the most recent variation of the party’s anti-foreigner theme.
Party posters featuring white sheep kicking out a black sheep sparked outrage that was blamed in part for a riot two weeks before the election.
Despite the tension, Ricardo Lumengo of the Social Democrats, an Angolan who arrived in Switzerland as an asylum seeker the 1980s and subsequently became a legal expert, became the first black parliament member elected by the Swiss.
Switzerland’s population of 7.5 million includes about 1.6 million foreigners, including many workers from southern Europe and refugees from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Applicants for Swiss citizenship typically must wait years and clear administrative hurdles before they are granted Swiss passports.
The Social Democrats have 43 seats, a drop of nine. The Green Party added six to its 2003 performance, bringing its total to the party’s best showing of 20 seats, reflecting concerns for the environment on the left.
“I’m very happy with the result,” said Ruth Genner, president of the Greens. But she noted that the party appeared to be just short of its goal of 10 percent. If it had reached that figure, it had said it would ask to join the four major parties in the Cabinet.
The two center-right parties, the Radical Democrats and the Christian Democrats, each had about 15 percent of the vote — about the same as in 2003 — but the Radical Democrats will lose five seats for a total of 31. The Christian Democrats will gain three seats for the same total.

TITLE: Beckham’s Star Fails To Shine at LA Galaxy
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: BRIDGEVIEW, Illinois — David Beckham’s first season with the Galaxy has come to an end.
His Major League Soccer stat line for the season reads: five games played, two games started, 252 minutes played, no goals, two assists, eight shots and zero shots on goal.
Not exactly what the Galaxy was hoping for when it dished out a five-year contract worth $32.5 million.
The Galaxy made things interesting down the stretch, in the season and in Sunday’s game, but the Chicago Fire (10-10-10) brought L.A.’s chaotic season to a conclusion with a 1-0 loss in front of a sellout crowd of 21,374 at Toyota Park Stadium. Chicago, which only needed a tie Sunday to reach the playoffs, will play D.C. United in the first round. The Galaxy missed the postseason for the second year in a row.
Goalkeeper Joe Cannon kept the Galaxy (9-14-7) in it with one incredible stop after another, but in the 93rd minute John Thorrington lobbed the game-winner over Cannon’s head. Thorrington’s shot on goal was the 10th Cannon faced amid Chicago’s 22 shots overall.
The Galaxy experienced some highs this season — Beckham’s signing in January, his arrival in July and the five-game winning streak near the end — but it was mostly lows, and Sunday was no exception. After the game Beckham acknowledged that his arrival was a distraction to his Galaxy teammates.
“To go through what the players went through when I arrived, and before I arrived, was difficult to adjust,” the 32-year-old said. “But they showed character in the last six, seven games. No one expected us to be in this position today like we were, so it shows that we have character.”
Beckham won’t have much of an off-season — or time to fully heal from his injuries. 
The Galaxy will play exhibition games in Australia on Nov. 27 and in New Zealand on Dec. 1.
“I’ll be keeping on training and keeping fit,” said Beckham, who near the end of the game grabbed his right leg, after grabbing his left ankle on several occasions in a practice Wednesday. “I might take maybe three weeks, four weeks doing nothing. Apart from that I’ll be working all the way through.”
Players are expecting next year to be easier, but, then again, most of them conceded that nothing could have been harder than this year. In the post game news conference, Cannon said he “could probably talk all afternoon about our season since” Beckham arrived. 
“At first there was a sense of relief, you know. The moment’s come, [and] we don’t have to deal with being asked, ‘What do you guys think is going to happen?’” Cannon said. “But, we kind of got into it, and it was surreal.”
The attention — from fans, media and opposing teams alike — became too much.
Coach Frank Yallop said the year was a difficult one for everybody involved with the Galaxy.
“It’s not easy. You’re under the microscope the whole time since we signed David, I’m not saying it’s David’s fault or anything, but you are under the microscope as a team,” he said. “I think we struggled with it to start, but I think in the end we did get rid of the pressure, and we just played.”
Yallop was asked whether he would like to return to coach the club next season and didn’t give a definitive answer. He said he needed to take some time to think it over.
“I’ll let you know,” he added, “but I have a job to do so until...”
Landon Donovan, arguably the team’s best player behind Beckham, said he wants Yallop to return.
“This would not have happened, this run, without Frank,” he said. “Any other coach, I think, we would have cashed it in a long time ago. I think Frank was more himself [the last month of the season]. He was more free to do what he wanted to do, and at parts in the beginning of the season that wasn’t the case.”
Beckham also said he would like Yallop to return, but added that he wasn’t going to go out of his way to push for any changes.

TITLE: Fans Remember Fatal Soccer Match
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Zhdannikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Hundreds of Russian and Dutch fans gathered on Saturday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Luzhniki stadium disaster.
Officials from the Soviet Union failed for years to disclose the tragedy that occurred at a UEFA Cup match between Spartak Moscow and Dutch club HFC Haarlem on Oct. 20, 1982.
When they did, the authorities gave an official death toll of 66, although the number who died in a crush at one exit could have been as high as 340.
“Today things seem pretty clear to me. We know why it happened. What I don’t understand is why no one in Russia bothers to apologize 25 years after the tragedy,” said Nina Novostruyeva.
Novostruyeva’s 15-year-old son Mikhail died in the crush, and on Saturday she and the families of other victims laid flowers at a monument near Luzhniki.
“I said goodbye to my perfectly healthy son and got a coffin days later. He could have been alive now if only they had opened all the exits,” Novostruyeva said.
Spartak fan Vladimir Shorinov, who was at the UEFA Cup match, said it was a cold, snowy day. The stadium was half empty and only one part of it was open to spectators.
The Moscow side was leading 1-0 and some spectators headed for an exit before the final whistle, the only one of four open.
But leaving fans rushed back up the icy stairs when Spartak scored a late goal, crushing people in the process.
“The last thing they saw in their lives was football,” said one Russian commentator at a benefit game Saturday between veterans of Spartak and Haarlem, many of whom played on that day in 1982.
Russia’s Dutch coach, Guus Hiddink, and countryman Dick Advocaat, who coaches Premier League club Zenit St. Petersburg, helped organize the game.
In 1982, Dutch fans were sitting in a separate section of the ground and used a different exit.
“We were told there was an accident several days later but it was months before we realized people were killed,” said Haarlem president Dick Hulsebosch.
“[The disaster] has never been explained to us.”
The relatives claim that if officials confirmed the true scale of the disaster it would dwarf other football tragedies, including at Hillsborough and Heysel.
Ninety-six people were crushed at the Hillsborough ground in Sheffield, England, in 1989, while 39 people died at the Heysel stadium in Brussels in 1985.
About 300 fans were killed and more than 500 injured during stadium riots in the Peruvian capital of Lima in 1964, the world’s worst football disaster.
“I can’t say I’m blaming football,” Novostruyeva said.”I’m blaming the system and the way it was all organized.”

TITLE: JK Rowling: Dumbledore is Gay
AUTHOR: By Hillel Italie
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — With author J.K. Rowling’s revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.
The British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader’s question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight.
‘“You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,’” Dumbledore says in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in Rowling’s record-breaking fantasy series.
The news brought gasps, then applause at Carnegie Hall, the last stop on Rowling’s brief U.S. tour, and set off thousands of e-mails on Potter fan web sites around the world. Some were dismayed, others indifferent, but most were supportive.
“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the fan site www.the-leaky-cauldron.org, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”
“‘DUMBLEDORE IS GAY’ is quite a headline to stumble upon on a Friday evening, and it’s certainly not what I expected,” added Potter fan Patrick Ross, of Rutherford, New Jersey. “[But] a gay character in the most popular series in the world is a big step for Jo Rowling and for gay rights.”
Dumbledore may now be the world’s most famous gay children’s character, but he’s hardly the first. “And Tango Makes Three,” a story by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell that features two male penguins raising a baby penguin, topped the American Library Association’s latest list of books attracting the most complaints from parents and educators.
In 2005, PBS decided not to distribute an episode of “Postcards From Buster” that had been criticized by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings for including lesbian characters. The Potter books themselves have long been threatened with removal from school and library shelves, with some Christians alleging that the series promotes witchcraft.
In Rowling’s fantasy series, Gellert Grindelwald was a dark wizard of great power who terrorized people much in the same way Harry’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort, was to do a generation later. Readers hear of him in the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in a reference to how Dumbledore defeated him. In “Deathly Hallows,” readers learn they once had been best friends.
“Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life,’“ Rowling writes. “However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?”
As a young man, Dumbledore, brilliant and powerful, had been forced to return home to look after his mentally ill younger sister and younger brother. It was a task he admits to Harry that he resented, because it derailed the bright future he had been looking forward to.
Then Grindelwald, described by Rowling as “golden-haired, merry-faced,” arrived after having been expelled from his own school. Grindelwald’s aunt, Bathilda Bagshot, says of their meeting: “The boys took to each other at once.”
Potter readers had speculated about Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past.
“Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said Friday of Dumbledore’s feelings about Grindelwald, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down.”
Dumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy.”

TITLE: Raikkonen Snatches Victory From Hamilton and Alonso
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAO PAULO, Brazil — Kimi Raikkonen is known as “The Iceman,” and he more than kept his cool Sunday, winning the Brazilian Grand Prix and capturing the Formula One title in the tightest race for the championship in 21 years.
Raikkonen won his first F1 crown by taking advantage of Lewis Hamilton’s mistake on the first lap and a subsequent gearbox problem with his McLaren, combined with Fernando Alonso’s disappointing run.
The Ferrari driver took the lead with 21 laps to go, rallying from third in the drivers’ standings to win the closest title race since 1986. Teammate Felipe Massa was second Sunday.
“We had very good speed in both cars,” Raikkonen said. “Were just taking it easy, saving the tires and the cars. We could have gone much faster if we wanted to. It was perfect teamwork from the team and it paid off very well.”
Hamilton, trying to become the first rookie to win the title and F1’s youngest champion, went off the track on the first lap and went on to finish seventh. Alonso finished third.
“I went into the race and said to myself, ‘Whatever happens today, it’s been a phenomenal year,’” Hamilton said. “Who would’ve thought I would be leading the world championship during the last races? It’s a great feeling being in that position. The team did a phenomenal job all year.”
Alonso would have had to finish second and Hamilton fifth to keep Raikkonen from winning the drivers’ championship after his victory.
There were some doubts after the race whether Raikkonen would keep the title, however, as Formula One’s governing body — FIA — opened up an investigation into possible fuel irregularities.
FIA called a meeting involving representatives from BMW-Sauber and Williams, whose drivers finished fourth, fifth, sixth and 10th, and if at least two of them were punished, Hamilton could have moved up to fifth and taken the title.
Nearly six hours after the race, FIA said there wasn’t enough evidence to penalize the drivers or the teams.
Raikkonen erased a seven-point gap behind Hamilton coming into the race to finish with 110 points, one more than Hamilton and Alonso.
“This is a great feeling,” Raikkonen said. “We had some hard times, some reliability problems and lost some points. A lot of people didn’t believe in us, but we showed that they were wrong and we were able to come back. It was a great season.”
The Finn was reserved in his celebrations on the podium, waving his cap to the crowd before briefly throwing his arms in the air.
He finished the race on the 2.6-mile Interlagos track in 1 hour, 28 minutes, 15.270 seconds — 1.493 seconds ahead of Massa and 57.019 ahead of Alonso.
Raikkonen — second in the drivers’ championship in 2003 and ‘05 — became only the third Finn to win the F1 title, and the first since two-time winner Mika Hakkinen in 1998 and ‘99. The first Finnish champion was Keke Rosberg in 1982.
It was a hectic start for the Brazilian GP.
Hamilton, who started in the front row beside pole-sitter Massa, was passed by Raikkonen and Alonso on the first turn. Hamilton then made a mistake trying to recover the position from Alonso three turns later.
“I locked up behind Fernando to avoid hitting him and I went a bit wide,” Hamilton said.
“When I saw Hamilton going off, I knew that maybe we had some chances,” Raikkonen said. “I wasn’t 100 percent sure, I was really just waiting. It took a long time to hear that we had finally won it.”
The Englishman moved back to sixth place after six laps, but his car slowed dramatically with a gearbox problem two laps later and he seemed on the verge of retiring from the race. His car suddenly picked up pace again, but he had already dropped to 18th.
“Lewis has enjoyed phenomenal reliability from his car this year,” McLaren team chief Ron Dennis told British television. “It was just a default in the gearbox which selected neutral for a period of time, but then sorted itself out.”
Hamilton’s car was without problems for the rest of the race as he moved past the slower cars with ease. By lap 18 of 71, Hamilton was 11th, but he couldn’t manage to move up past seventh.
He had needed a top-two finish to guarantee the title Sunday without depending on other drivers.
“It has been an incredible season,” Hamilton said. “Under extremely difficult conditions, I beat the two-time world champion, which was my objective from the very beginning.”
Massa and Raikkonen stayed 1-2 from the start. Raikkonen took the lead after a final pit stop, coming ahead of Massa as the Brazilian apparently slowed his pace.
“Felipe worked hard ... he’s been a big help,” Raikkonen said.
Massa, who had won four times in the previous five races he started from the pole, had an emotional victory in Interlagos last year as he became the first Brazilian to win at home since the late Ayrton Senna in 1993.
Alonso was trying to become only the third driver to win three consecutive titles in the history of F1, along with Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher.
“I knew it was going to be a difficult situation for me,” Alonso said. “It was impossible to keep the pace from Ferrari. I was just waiting for something.”

TITLE: U.S. Airport Embraces Name That City Leaders Think SUX
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SIOUX CITY, Iowa — City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport’s unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport’s new marketing campaign.
The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport’s new slogan, “FLY SUX.” It also forms the address of the airport’s redesigned Web site — http://www.flysux.com.
Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.
Airport board member Dave Bernstein proposed embracing the identifier.
“Let’s make the best of it,” Bernstein said. “I think we have the opportunity to turn it into a positive.”
He noted that many airports, including some of the busiest, have forgettable three-letter codes.
“I’ve got buddies that I went to college with in different cities that can’t even remember their own birthdays, but they all know the Sioux City designator — SUX,” he said.
Mayor Craig Berenstein, who in 2002 described SUX as an “embarrassment” to the city, said he views the new slogan as a “cute little way” to make light of the situation.

TITLE: Zenit Goes Joint Top
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Zenit St. Petersburg came from behind to crush Khimki 4-1 at Petrovsky Stadium on Sunday to keep on track for their first Russian league title in nearly a quarter of a century.
Khimki captain Andrei Tikhonov put the visitors ahead with a 20th-minute penalty, but Zenit hit back with two goals by Pavel Pogrebnyak and fellow Russian international Konstantin Zyryanov before the interval.
Belgium defender Nicolas Lombaerts and Turkey striker Fatih Tekke added two more in the second half for the St. Petersburg side, which joined premier league leader Spartak Moscow at the top of the table with 52 points from 27 matches.
Spartak beat city rivals FK Moscow 3-1 in a heated derby on Saturday to put the pressure on Zenit, which won its first and only league title in the old Soviet Union in 1984.
FK Moscow stayed third, six points behind the leading duo with three games remaining.

TITLE: ‘Son of India’ Wins U.S. Poll
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HOUSTON — Republican Representative Bobby Jindal was elected governor of Louisiana on Saturday to become the first Indian-American to lead a U.S. state.
With most of the precincts counted, Jindal, 36, had 54 percent of the vote to win without a runoff in Louisian’s electoral system, where candidates of all parties run in a single primary.
His nearest competitor received just 18 percent of the vote.
The Oxford-educated Jindal will replace Governor Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat who did not run again after she was widely criticized for bungling following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

TITLE: Celebrity Homes Under Threat From Forest Fires
AUTHOR: By Mary Milliken
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — A dozen wildfires stoked by gusting winds burned out of control in southern California on Sunday, killing one person in San Diego and forcing thousands to evacuate homes from the celebrity enclave of Malibu down to the Mexican border.
Weather forecasts indicated that firefighters and residents faced two more days of high winds, hot temperatures and low humidity in the drought-stricken region.
The Malibu fire burned 2,200 acres from dawn to dusk and destroyed at least 10 buildings, including a landmark castle-like house and a Presbyterian church, officials said. No injuries were reported.
To the south in rural San Diego County, officials said one person died and 17 others were injured, including four firefighters, in a fire that scorched 5,700 hectares and shrouded the skies over San Diego harbor to the west.
Another fire in San Diego forced the evacuation of all 36,000 residents of the town of Ramona.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for seven counties stretching from Santa Barbara in the north to the Mexican border.
Malibu saw some respite in the afternoon, but authorities warned the fierce Santa Ana winds that roar through California’s canyons remained erratic and could double in speed overnight.
“Have a plan and be prepared,” Malibu Mayor Pamela Conley Ulich said at a news conference. “The winds, although they are dying down, could kick up again this evening.”
Malibu, a town of about 13,000 residents, is about 25 miles
west of Hollywood and home to legions of entertainers who flock there for the privacy of the beachfront homes or expansive canyon ranches complete with riding stables.
Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman said the fire was expected “to last a couple of days and literally thousands of homes are going to be threatened.”
Residents said the predawn fire took them by surprise and gave them little time to pack belongings and get out.
“We were in the house and the fire was burning all around us,” said Malibu philanthropist Lilly Lawrence, whose Castle Kashan was engulfed by the flames after she and a house guest escaped.
“The loss is way up in the double-digit millions,” Lawrence said in an interview, noting the home contained family heirlooms, paintings and Elvis Presley memorabilia bought from his Graceland estate.
Freeman said 700 firefighters were battling the Malibu fire and 300 more were expected to arrive overnight.
There was no confirmed cause for the fire, which authorities have named the Canyon Fire, but Freeman said there was speculation that downed power lines might have sparked it as wind gusted around 100 kilometers-per-hour.
The Santa Monica mountains above Malibu are tinder dry as Southern California comes out of one of its driest years on record with rainfall around one-fifth of average.
Some 200 homes were under mandatory evacuation in Malibu, while horse owners in some areas were ordered to evacuate their animals. The main coastal highway through the area was shut from both the north and the south.
Thousands of students at Pepperdine University, near the commercial center of Malibu, returned to their dorms in the evening after spending the day in safe areas on a campus that was built with the high wildfire risk in mind.
Wildfires are so common in Malibu that actress and resident Shirley MacLaine once joked the postal zip code should be changed to “911” — the phone number for emergencies.
Authorities told people to avoid Malibu beaches. But surfers were seen in the water taking advantage of the waves powered by high winds.

TITLE: Mozambique Leader Given $5 Million For Achievement
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Mozambique’s former President Joaquim Chissano won the first Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African leadership on Monday.
The $5-million prize — the world’s largest individual award — was presented by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a ceremony in London’s city hall.
Chissano, a former revolutionary who fought against Portuguese colonialism, ruled the southern African country from 1986 until 2005, winning praise for his sound economic policies in a country that was once one of the poorest in the world.
Chissano, who celebrated his 58th birthday on Monday, was not in London to receive the award.
Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born telecommunications entrepreneur, set up the award as a way of encouraging good governance in a continent blighted by corruption and a frequently loose adherence to democratic principles.
Annan, who stepped down as U.N. secretary-general at the end of 2006, told Reuters earlier this year he expected the prize to make African leaders more aware of their records on human rights and democracy.
Winners will receive $5 million over 10 years and then $200,000 a year for life, with another $200,000 annually for “good causes” they espouse.
In contrast, the Nobel Peace Prize, which Annan won jointly with the United Nations in 2001, pays $1.5 million.

TITLE: Official Killed in Monkey Attack
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI — Wild monkeys attacked a senior government official who then fell from a balcony at his home and died Sunday, media reported.
New Delhi Deputy Mayor S.S. Bajwa was rushed to a hospital after the attack by a gang of Rhesus macaques, but succumbed to head injuries sustained in his fall, the Press Trust of India news agency and The Times of India reported.
Many government buildings, temples and residential neighborhoods in New Delhi are overrun by Rhesus macaques, which scare passers-by and occasionally bite or snatch food from unsuspecting visitors.
Last year, the Delhi High Court reprimanded city authorities for failing to stop the animals from terrifying residents and asked them to find a permanent solution to the monkey menace.