SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1318 (84), Friday, October 26, 2007
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TITLE: Scant Progress At NATO Talks
AUTHOR: By Paul Ames
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NOORDWIJK, Netherlands — NATO appeared to make little progress Thursday in narrowing differences with Russia over U.S. plans to install missile defenses in eastern Europe despite an American offer to delay activating the bases until it has proof of a threat from Iran.
Russian media quoted Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov as saying there was no change in Moscow’s position after his talks with NATO counterparts.
“Everything we’ve been offered does not suit us,” ITAR-Tass quoted him as saying. “We stick to our position, although it seemed to me Americans have begun to understand our concerns better.”
The meeting comes days after Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Washington may delay activating the proposed missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic until it has “definitive proof” of a missile threat from Iran.
Gates outlined that proposal at the NATO talks which Serdyukov later joined. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said there were improved atmospherics, but no breakthrough at the talks with the Russian.
The announcement was widely seen as an attempt to mollify Russian opposition to the U.S. plan. Moscow says Iran is decades away from developing missile technology that could threaten Europe or North America, and claims the U.S. bases will undermine Russia’s own missile deterrent force.
French Defense Minister Herve Morin said European allies generally agreed with the Americans that there is a ballistic threat, “but not necessarily on the imminence of the threat.
In recent weeks Washington has made a number of proposals to clam Russian concerns, including the possible delay in activating the sites, an offer to share information from missile tracking radar units and allowing Russian observers at U.S. facilities.
Since then the Russians have given mixed signals. President Vladimir Putin last week said he detected “a certain transformation” in the U.S. view that allowed for continued dialogue. However, the next day, Russia’s military chief of staff, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, restated Moscow’s objections and said there was “nothing new” in the U.S. proposals.
The U.S. plan would install a radar base in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland. It is part of a wider missile shield involving defenses in California and Alaska which the United States says are to defend against any long-range missile attack from countries such as North Korea or Iran.
Piqued by the U.S. plans, Russia has frozen cooperation with NATO on a separate project to develop defenses against short-range battlefield missiles. Putin has also threatened to pull out of a Cold War-era treaty controlling conventional forces in Europe. Russia and NATO nations are also divided over Kosovo. Moscow opposes a Western backed plan to grant the province internationally supervised independence from Serbia. While talks continue, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority is promising to follow through on a threat to declare independence unilaterally in December if their is no settlement.
NATO ministers Wednesday agreed to maintain the alliance’s 16,000 peacekeepers in the territory and ready for any new outbreak of violence.
“We’ll keep up that level,” NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters. “There is, of course, not a single argument to bring down the force levels. We have to see to it that KFOR is ready for all eventualities, that KFOR is able to protect majority and minority alike.”
Kosovo has been administered by the United Nations and patrolled by NATO troops since the 1999 allied air campaign which ended a Serbian crackdown on pro-independence forces.
Before the talks with Serdyukov, NATO ministers agreed on the need to scale down a new elite force less than a year after it was declared ready to serve as the spearhead of the allies’ military modernization drive.
Allied commanders have been forced to rethink the NATO Response Force because the deployment of thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa has left the 26 nations with to few combat forces to maintain the 25,000-strong unit.
NATO spokesman James Appathurai declined to say how small the new “core” force would be.

TITLE: Maniac Guilty In 48 Deaths
AUTHOR: By Svetlana Osadchuk and Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow jury found Alexander Pichushkin, the so-called Bittsevsky Maniac, guilty of 48 murders Wednesday in the trial of the country’s most-prolific known serial killer in more than a decade.
Prosecutors also made the stunning admission that authorities missed a chance to stop Pichushkin’s rampage in 2002, when a police officer ignored the story of a woman who survived one of his attacks. That officer is now under investigation.
Pichushkin, 33, listened carefully from his defendant’s cage at the Moscow City Court and occasionally grinned as the jury’s foreman read the verdict in a courtroom packed with journalists and relatives of the victims.
“Thank God,” an elderly woman whispered as the verdict was read.
The jury deliberated for less than three hours before reaching its unanimous decision. It also found Pichushkin guilty on three counts of attempted murder and recommended no leniency in his sentencing. Russia currently has a moratorium on the death penalty, meaning he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Pichushkin to life in prison with mandatory psychiatric treatment and requested that he spend his first 15 years in a regular prison, where he may be kept with other inmates.
Defense lawyer Pavel Ivannikov asked for leniency for his client and said Pichushkin should be kept isolated from other prisoners, noting that he had no criminal record prior to the killings.
Pichushkin could be sentenced as early as Thursday, when he will be allowed a final statement.
Pichushkin earned his nickname by committing most of the murders in the sprawling Bittsevsky Park in southwest Moscow from 2001 to 2006. Over the course of the five-week trial, he boasted that he committed 63 murders in an attempt to kill one person for each square on a chessboard, but prosecutors only found evidence for 48 killings.
Prosecutor Yury Syomin told reporters Wednesday that investigators would look into the remaining murders that Pichushkin had described.
Investigators say Pichushkin sought to outdo Andrei Chikatilo, the notorious serial killer who was convicted in 1992 of murdering 52 women and children, dismembering them and eating some of their remains.
Pichushkin’s killing spree began when he was 18 with the murder of a classmate, Mikhail Odeichuk, in 1992. In court, Pichushkin confessed that he lured Odeichuk into a secluded part of the forest, strangled him with a rope and tossed his body into a sewer. Odeichuk’s relatives did not learn how he had died for another 14 years.
“A first killing is like your first love,” he said in court. “You never forget it.”
Earlier reports said Pichushkin pushed Odeichuk out the window of an apartment building.
In 2001, Pichushkin started killing again after a break of nearly a decade. He usually met lonely men near Kakhovskaya metro station, offered them a shot of vodka or beer to commemorate the death of his dog, and invited them for a walk into the wooded park to visit the dog’s grave.
“I liked to talk to these people for an hour or two because it was interesting to talk to those destined to die,” he said during the trial.
The walk usually ended when Pichushkin bludgeoned his victim to death with a hammer. Other times he simply tossed his victim into a sewer after getting them drunk.
Pichushkin often kept the cap from the bottle of Coca-Cola or Sprite he had shared with the victim as a souvenir. He also recorded each killing on the square of a chessboard, which police found in his apartment after his arrest in June 2006.
Tragically, police missed a chance to stop Pichushkin at the height of his rampage, prosecutor Maria Semenenko said Wednesday.
In February 2002, he threw a young woman, Maria Viricheva, into a sewer and left her for dead. Viricheva managed to escape and tell a police officer, whom Semenenko only identified by his last name, Kalashnikov.
Kalashnikov forced Viricheva to retract her story, Semenenko said.
Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Kalashnikov, she said.
Pichushkin’s trial featured the testimony of dozens of relatives of his victims, some of whom verbally clashed with him in court. One of them was Svetlana Shamayeva, the sister of Yegor Kudryavtsev, an old childhood playmate of Pichushkin’s who was killed on Aug. 30, 2003.
“Just tell me, why did you choose Yegor, what evil did he do to you?” Shamayeva asked Pichushkin, fighting back tears.
“Nothing,” the killer replied calmly. “He just was my friend, and that was the reason.”
Many of Pichushkin’s victims were people he knew. Two of them, Larisa Kulygina and Marina Moskalyova, were his co-workers at a Grossmart supermarket on Ulitsa Khersonskaya.
Moskalyova, 36, was Pichushkin’s last victim. Her body was discovered in the park on June 14, 2006.
Prosecutors said it was two small pieces of paper that led investigators to Pichushkin. A metro ticket found in Moskalyova’s coat pocket helped investigators establish the date and time she rode the train, and video surveillance footage showed Pichushkin walking with her, they said.
The second piece of paper was a note Moskalyova had left for her teenage son that he showed police the day her body was found, prosecutors said. Moskalyova wrote on the piece of paper that she had gone for a walk with Pichushkin and jotted down his cell phone number.
Pichushkin, who was arrested two days after Moskalyova’s body was found, also kept a list of names of potential victims, all drawn from his friends and acquaintances, prosecutors said.
“Were you intending to kill everyone you knew?” Semenenko asked Pichushkin in court after he confessed to Kulygina’s and Moskalyova’s killings.
After a pause, Pichushkin replied that when he failed to arrange a meeting with a friend, he went “hunting” on the street. He could rove around for hours, searching for people who seemed idle and open to talking. With one of his victims, 56-year-old philologist Stepan Vasilchenko, he discussed books and literature.
“I could be the most friendly and interested listener for my victim,” he said. “I could talk to anybody about anything.”

TITLE: Lyuba the Mammoth Packs Her Trunk for Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A 37,000 year-old baby mammoth named Lyuba, the finest example of a fully preserved mammoth ever discovered, will be brought to St. Petersburg in December where further research will be carried out on the specimen after it was found in western Siberia in May this year.
“Here, scientists will be doing the morphologic and anatomic research into Lyuba,” Andrei Bublichenko, senior scientist of St. Petersburg’s Zoology Museum, said.
Morphologic research is an examination of the mammoth’s tissue structure, and the anatomical research will look at Lyuba’s skeleton, Bublichenko said.
Bublichenko said Lyuba is coming to St. Petersburg because the city is Russia’s center of mammoth research. Initial research of the mammoth was performed in the Siberian city of Salekhard, where scientists recently determined the age of the specimen.
Lyuba will be kept in the museum’s refrigerator at a temperature of -18 deg C.
It has not yet been decided if Lyuba will go on show at the museum since her visit is for research purposes, Bublichenko said. The chances of a public appearance are low, he said.
St. Petersburg’s Zoology Museum already has two baby mammoths, Dima and Masha. They are a bit older than Lyuba — Dima is 40,000 years old and Masha is 39,000 years old.
After St. Petersburg, Lyuba will travel to Japan for further biochemical and genetic examination. When all the research is complete, Lyuba is to be returned to Salekhard where she will stay.
Lyuba, who was only about four months old when she died, emerged from the melting permafrost in western Siberia in May. 
With her trunk still intact, eyes in place and small tufts of fur still on her skin, Lyuba is considered the finest preserved specimen of a mammoth, experts say. She is 130 centimeters long, 90 centimeters high and weighs only 50 kilograms.
When the animal died, her body was immediately buried in a watery area or a bog. There was no decay and she remained frozen for several thousand years. Lyuba likely reappeared to the world after the river bank collapsed at the end of last year, experts say. 
Lyuba was found on May 15 by Yury Khudi, a nomadic reindeer tribesman near the Yuribei River in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous region. Khudi, a Nenets, thought it was a sick reindeer at first and went to investigate. When he saw that it was a mammoth, he went to the nearest village to report his find. 
She was named Lyuba by scientists in honor of Khudi’s wife. Mammoth finds are often named after the person who finds them. 
To keep her from deteriorating, Lyuba has been stored at -10 deg C in an industrial freezer in the Yamal-Nenets republic’s regional museum in Salekhard, the regional capital. 
Mammoths, believed to be close relatives of the modern day elephant, roamed the earth from almost 5 million years B.C. to just a few thousand years B.C. when they disappeared. 
Although mammoths once inhabited almost the entire world, Russia has always had a strong association with the beast. Mammoths are considered special animals by northern tribes.

TITLE: Russia Positive About Poland
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A senior Kremlin aide welcomed the upcoming Polish government reshuffle Wednesday and said the change might finally allow Moscow to reach a new EU partnership agreement.
“We couldn’t talk with Poland’s previous government,” Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the Kremlin’s adviser on EU relations, said at a news conference.
Tough-talking Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Wednesday that his government would resign Nov. 5, after his party lost weekend elections.

TITLE: Rogozin Tipped as New Representative to NATO
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel and Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Nationalist politician Dmitry Rogozin is being tipped as Russia’s new permanent representative to NATO, an appointment that could bode ill for the country’s already troubled relations with NATO.
Rogozin refused to say whether he was in line to replace Konstantin Totsky at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Rogozin, speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio late Wednesday, said he would only comment after the Kremlin made an official announcement.
An assistant to Rogozin, Sergei Butin, said by telephone that Rogozin had not been informed about any Kremlin decision.
Two presidential spokesmen and a senior Kremlin aide said they knew nothing about the appointment.
A NATO spokesman, reached at an alliance defense ministers meeting in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, also said he had not heard about the appointment.
But a NATO source said upon condition of anonymity that rumors had been circulating that Totsky was about to be replaced.
Reuters reported Wednesday night that President Vladimir Putin had signed a decree appointing Rogozin to the position a day earlier.
Gazeta.ru said Putin had a draft decree on his desk but had not signed it yet.
A new envoy to NATO would also have to be confirmed by the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee.
Rogozin, 43, was elected to the State Duma in 2003 as leader of Rodina, a party created just two months before elections to steal votes from the Communists. Party founders have said Rodina is a Kremlin project. Rogozin had a falling out with the Kremlin after attending anti-Kremlin rallies with opposition figures and has accused the Kremlin of forcing him out of Rodina. In May, he co-founded the Great Russia party, which has been denied registration twice, making it unlikely that it would be able to participate in the Dec. 2 Duma elections. The party has called the decision a “direct order from the Kremlin.”
Sending Rogozin to NATO would be tantamount to Moscow “teasing” the Western alliance, said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Information.
“He wouldn’t be an easy negotiator because everyone knows Rogozin’s previous statements about the alliance,” Mukhin said.
Rogozin has called for Russia to rearm itself to counter a threat from NATO, whose expansion, he has said, has placed a foreign army at Russia’s borders. He said in 2004 that NATO was a U.S.-dominated body that carried out “the rather aggressive interests of the United States.”
Ivan Safranchuk, the head of the World Security Institute’s Moscow office, said Rogozin’s appointment would signal that the Kremlin was not interested in improving ties with NATO.
It would mean that relations are guided by the principle “we cannot achieve anything good anyway,” he said.
“Russia is not laying great hopes on relations with this organization,” he added.
Before being elected to the Duma, Rogozin served as Putin’s representative in negotiations with the European Union over the status of the Kaliningrad exclave after EU expansion.

TITLE: 2 Arrested for Train Bombing
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two insurgents were arrested Wednesday in Ingushetia on suspicion of bombing a passenger train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg in August, the Interior Ministry said.
If the suspects prove to be both insurgents and train bombers, it would mean militants have again begun venturing out of the North Caucasus after a lull of more than two years.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said the suspects had been transferred to Moscow for questioning.
“There is circumstantial evidence that is very compelling. ... The information is very interesting,” Nurgaliyev said, Interfax reported.
Itar-Tass, citing an unidentified Ingush law enforcement official, identified the suspects as Markham Khidriyev, 30, and his brother, Maksharip, 29. FSB agents and local policemen arrested the two in the village of Ekazhevo, the official said, adding that they were also suspected of carrying out a series of robberies in central Russia.
Phone calls to the spokesman for the investigators in the Prosecutor General’s Office who are handling the bombing went unanswered Wednesday afternoon.
The Aug. 13 explosion derailed the train as it passed through the Novgorod region, injuring 60 people. Investigators had pursued different leads, including the possibility that the bomb might have been detonated by nationalists. Two St. Petersburg anarchists and a Chechen native had been detained in the case. The three were later freed for lack of evidence, but the Chechen was charged with robbery in a separate case.
Ingushetia has seen more rebel attacks this year than any other region of the North Caucasus, signaling that the insurgency remains strong in the republic. In comparison, federal and local law enforcement officials have kept rebels on the run in Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria.

TITLE: Putin Boosts United Russia Rating
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Support for United Russia has increased sharply since President Vladimir Putin decided to head its list of candidates for State Duma elections in December.
But the popularity of A Just Russia, a second pro-Kremlin party, has plummeted, casting doubt on its chances of getting into the next Duma, according to a monthly survey released by the independent Levada Center on Wednesday.
United Russia is now backed by 68 percent of voters, up from 55 percent in September, after Putin agreed to head its party list at the beginning of the month. 
A Just Russia, however, has seen its popularity dive from 7 percent to 4 percent, while support for the Liberal Democratic Party slumped to 6 percent from 11 percent. A party needs 7 percent of the vote to win Duma seats.
Levada interviewed 1,600 Russians for both polls, which had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

TITLE: Furnishings Retailer Expands Across Russia
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Laventa, a St. Petersburg-based company that operates home furnishings supermarkets under the SantaHouse brand, plans to become a nation-wide retailer over the next few years.
Laventa opened its first regional supermarkets in Rostov-na-Donu and Ufa in October this year. By the end of 2007, ten new supermarkets will open in St. Petersburg, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Samara, Lipetsk and Moscow. In the long term the company expects to operate 150 supermarkets across Russia.
“We want our customers to feel comfortable and come to our supermarkets as often as possible. In Ufa and Rostov-na-Donu, as well as in other cities, we will realize the same marketing concept that proved successful in St. Petersburg,” said Yelena Tsareva, director for marketing at Laventa.
The company focuses on middle class customers. SantaHouse has special offers for newly-weds and for those who are setting up home for the first time, as well as discount cards for regular clients. The company also has special offers for corporate customers such as hotels, restaurants and salons.
Laventa opened its first supermarket in St. Petersburg in December 2005. Currently, Laventa operates five supermarkets in the city. The company spent about 80 million rubles ($3.2 million) on each of the new stores that opened this month, and expects that about 900,000 customers will visit each of the new stores by the end of 2007.
 “We have ambitious plans. By the end of 2007 we will open new supermarkets in Samara, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Lipetsk and Moscow. In 2008, according to our plan, we will arrive in the Urals and Siberia,” said Tigran Gukasyan, Laventa’s general director.
In the regions, Laventa is looking for shopping areas of over 2,000 square meters. In Rostov-na-Donu, Laventa opened its largest supermarket, which occupies 4,000 square meters.
“Interior stores are an interesting and promising market niche. At the moment there are very few large companies in this market. Regional expansion could be an attempt to become the first company to occupy this market,” said Mikhail Podushko, director for strategic development at WorkLine Research.
Podushko said the growing popularity of home furnishings and interior materials is due to the population’s growing prosperity.
“Many retail chains include home furnishings in their range of goods. Such products are distributed in supermarkets like Lenta and OKey, and in stores that specialize in construction materials such as Obi and Castorama. A wide range of home furnishings can be found in Maxidom,” Podushko said.
Very few retailers specialize in home furnishings, Podushko said, citing Mesto as one example.
According to WorkLine Research, up to 90 percent of customers are familiar with the Maxidom and Lenta brands, while four times fewer customers know SantaHouse.

TITLE: Government Reconsiders Wheat Export Tax
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government has shelved indefinitely plans to set a prohibitive 30 percent tariff on wheat exports designed to keep the cereal at home during the forthcoming sale of government grain stocks, market sources said Wednesday.
The proposal may be revisited depending on market reaction to a lesser tariff, due to be introduced Nov. 12.
“We still have to see the market reaction to the new tariff and the intervention sales,” one of two market sources said.
Government officials had examined a proposal to set a tariff of 30 percent of the customs value but no less than $99.50 on wheat, the sources said. One source said there had also been a proposal to set a 50 percent tariff.
Economic Development and Trade Minister Elvira Nabiullina said the higher export tariff was not immediately necessary and that her ministry would watch the market before taking further action, Interfax reported.
Russia will introduce an export tariff on wheat of 10 percent or no less than $32 per ton, from Nov. 12. It will also introduce a barley export tariff of 30 percent but no less than $100 from the same date.
It will start selling grain from its 1.5 million tons of stocks to flour millers at tenders scheduled for Oct. 29 and 31.
Prices in major European Union wheat markets fell Wednesday after Russia denied its plans for the grain export tax hike, traders said.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Gas Prices Set to Go Up</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom raised its forecast for Europe’s natural gas price next year to $275 per 1,000 cubic meters from $265 this year, Vedomosti reported, citing unidentified company officials.
The forecast is less than Russia’s Economy Ministry and most analysts expected, the newspaper reported Thursday. State-run Gazprom’s original forecast for this year was revised down from $293.80 per 1,000 cubic meters.

<b>Russian Rail Overhaul</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian Railways will award contracts worth as much as $400 billion to metals, construction and timber companies through 2030.
Forty percent of the orders by value will go to train makers, Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Yakunin said on Thursday. Russian Railways will need ventures with foreign companies for some of those contracts because the domestic industry isn’t big enough, he said.

TITLE: Fast-Growing Bank Comes to St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: By the end of this year ICICI Bank Eurasia, a subsidiary of an Indian financial institution, expects to increase its assets up to $1 billion. The bank will focus on improving quality and speed of service while expanding into Russia’s regions, the bank’s managers said Wednesday at the opening of a branch in St. Petersburg.
In May 2005, ICICI Bank Limited acquired the Russian company Investment and Credit Bank and renamed it ICICI Bank Eurasia. In February 2006 the bank opened its first branch in Moscow.
“In the 18 months we have been operating, we have built a bank from scratch. We have increased our own capital up to 1.7 billion rubles ($68 million) and assets up to 16.7 billion rubles. That’s a dramatic growth. We are proud of the achieved results,” said Vladislav Voitsekhovich, deputy chairman of the board of ICICI Bank Eurasia.
In Russia, ICICI Bank focuses on retail services, but also serves corporate clients and runs treasury operations.
In St. Petersburg, ICICI Bank Eurasia will offer the same retail services as in Moscow. In 18 months, the bank will introduce a wide range of mortgages and issue Visa Classic and Visa Gold credit cards.
The bank will also offer a number of innovative products, such as the opportunity to transfer the balance from any card issued by other banks to a Visa Gold credit card issued by ICICI Bank Eurasia whilst saving the interest.
Among ICICI Bank’s advantages, Vinod Easwaran, head of the bank’s retail department, indicated speed and quality of servicing as well as a “doorstep banking” concept.
Currently, ICICI Bank Eurasia operates two branches in Moscow and a client center in Obninsk. In the near future, the bank could expand into the Volga area, the Urals and South federal district.
“We will only enter districts where we can guarantee control over the quality of services. We do not plan to operate all across Russia,” Voitsekhovich said.
By January 2007, ICICI Bank Eurasia reported assets of $230 million. By September the assets had increased to $661 million, and by the end of this year Voitsekhovich expects the assets to reach $1 billion and to double every year.
“The rate of growth in the Russian banking industry is higher than in most developed countries,” said Denis Mukhin, analyst for banks and currency markets at Brokercreditservice investment company.
“Many large foreign financial institutions have opened subsidiaries in Russia, either by creating them from scratch or by acquiring Russian companies. Now Russian banks price themselves very highly. You will be pushed to find a cheap bank, even in the regions,” Mukhin said.
According to Mukhin, retail banking in Russia accounted for only 7.7 percent of last year’s GDP, and he forecasted 10.3 percent for this year. In Europe the figure is 15 percent to 50 percent.
“Retail is the least developed banking segment in Russia. There is room for development. The rate of growth is high and will continue to be so in the future,” he said.
The Russian banking industry’s total assets accounted for 52.4 percent of last year’s GDP. The forecast for this year is 64 percent, while in Europe this figure stands at 60 percent to 150 percent depending on the country.

TITLE: Golden Arches Plan Faster Expansion
AUTHOR: By Maria Ermakova
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — McDonald’s Corp., the world’s largest restaurant company, plans to open 30 locations in Russia this year and accelerate the pace of expansion in the next two years, taking advantage of rising sales in the region.
“Russia will be one of the key countries where McDonald’s will see growth,” Ian Borden, chief financial officer for Russia and eastern Europe, said Tuesday in an interview in Moscow.
“It’s a big country, the income levels of people are growing very quickly and the market is not developed yet.”
McDonald’s is capitalizing on rising consumer spending in Russia, where a ninth year of economic growth is fueling wages and competition is less than in western Europe. The country’s dining-out market expanded by as much as 20 percent annually in the past two years and growth “won’t be less than that” in the coming years, Borden said.
Russia and China are the fastest-growing regions by sales for the Oak Brook, Illinois-based company, according to Borden.
The two countries have “very large populations, growing economies, and our presence in these regions is not that strong yet,” he added.
The chain rose 95 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $56.97 at 4:25 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have gained 29 percent this year.
McDonald’s, which added 346 restaurants in the year through Sept. 30, expects to increase the pace of expansion. The chain planned to add a net 450 locations this year, according to a regulatory filing in May. The company is also increasing the number of restaurants run by independent entrepreneurs. 
McDonald’s will continue to run all of its Russian outlets “in the short term” and will consider franchise openings “in the longer term,” Borden said Tuesday.

TITLE: Glencore Joins the Fray For Struggling Russneft’s Assets
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The fight for embattled oil producer Russneft intensified Wednesday as Swiss-based commodities trader Glencore announced that it had entered the race for some of the firm’s assets.
Russneft has been operating without a president and formal owner since founder Mikhail Gutseriyev fled the country in August to avoid what he called politically motivated charges of tax evasion.
Basic Element, the holding company of metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, has applied for anti-monopoly approval to buy Russneft, but sources close to the deal say the oligarch has already shelled out $6 billion for the firm.
Glencore, which works closely with Deripaska’s metals interests, may have been brought in to strengthen his bid for Russneft as rival Kremlin insiders hope to get their hands on the country’s seventh-largest oil firm, analysts said.
Glencore, which helped fund Russneft’s rapid expansion over the last five years, could also be seeking to recoup part of the $2.8 billion it is owed by the embattled firm.
Glencore applied Sept. 11 to buy minority stakes in three Russneft subsidiaries, said Irina Romanenkova, a spokeswoman for the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service. A decision on Glencore’s and Basic Element’s bids will be made after Nov. 30, she said.
The service was expected to rule on Basic Element’s bid by Oct. 4, 30 days after the holding applied for approval. A two-month extension was granted “due to the need for additional consideration of the transactions and the receipt of additional information,” the service said in a statement earlier this month.
Glencore spokeswoman Lotti Grenacher confirmed the trader’s bid but added that the firm had no interest in buying the entire company. “Neither Glencore, nor any of its subsidiaries has made any application to the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to purchase any shares in Russneft,” Grenacher said in e-mailed remarks.
Speculation has persisted that Rosneft, chaired by President Vladimir Putin’s powerful deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin, is hoping to buy the firm.
Rosneft spokesman Nikolai Manvelov denied that his firm had any interest in Russneft on Wednesday, saying, “We’re not planning on buying it.”
The battle for assets has intensified as Putin nears the end of his term, with rival clans hoping to secure their interests before he steps down after March’s presidential election.
Privately held Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader, has a strong foothold in the Russian metals and oil trade but does not release details on its commercial transactions. Its worldwide turnover in 2006 totaled $116.5 billion, with assets worth $47.1 billion.
“If Glencore is successful in getting the assets, we can only take it to mean they have a close relationship with the Kremlin and are trusted to hold those assets,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib said.
Glencore has applied to buy stakes in Russneft subsidiaries Uralskaya Neft, Udmurtskaya Natsionalnaya Kompania and Agan Neftegazgeologia, said Romanenkova.
Several sources close to the deal say Deripaska has already paid Gutseriyev $3 billion, with an additional $3 billion guarantee, to scoop up the firm.

TITLE: Seizing an Opportunity on Kosovo
AUTHOR: By Janusz Bugajski and Edward P. Joseph
TEXT: They tried to put a good face on it, but the truth is that President Vladimir Putin publicly humiliated U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates during their recent meeting in Moscow. Before even hearing their latest pitch on missile defense, Putin heaped scorn, even raising serious new objections. 
Whatever one thinks of missile defense, the dressing down of Rice and Gates marks a new low in U.S.-Russian relations. Appeals to shared values and interests are falling on deaf ears. It is now unmistakably clear that getting Moscow’s attention on the Iranian threat and a host of other issues will require action, not talk. 
Fortunately, Putin has created an ideal opportunity for Washington to score a victory and reorient Moscow toward cooperation. The opportunity is Kosovo. 
Putin has seized the dispute over Kosovo’s final status as one more means of reasserting the country’s global authority. But he has overplayed his hand, snubbing not only the United States, but the United Nations as well, whose secretary-general has endorsed a compromise plan for supervised independence of the former Serbian province, along with near-autonomy for Kosovo’s Serbian minority. So far, Putin has exploited perennial European divisions over the Balkans that put strong U.S. allies such as Britain and France against those European capitals who are either sympathetic to the Serb position or worried about a messy situation that would ensue without a UN blessing for independence. 
But these concerns pale next to the threat that the Russian challenge poses not only for Kosovo, but for the overall Western strategy to calm the still-troublesome region. Beyond asserting Russia’s voice on behalf of its client, Putin is also intent on transforming Serbia into a bulwark against European Union and NATO enlargement. Indeed, the obedient Serbian prime minister now advocates a “third way” between West and East and scorns the need for Belgrade to join NATO, raising the prospect of a fundamental reorientation away from integration with Europe and the United States. 
Belgrade’s position has severe consequences for Europe, whose grand strategy is for all the former Yugoslav states to narrow their differences through accession to the EU and NATO. But thus far not one former Yugoslav state that suffered major conflict has entered either organization. And the most fractious of all, Bosnia, has had serious setbacks over the past year, with its Serbian and Muslim leaders engaging in incendiary rhetoric not seen since the end of the war — in part because of the Kosovo issue. 
Three key errors by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush have permitted Kosovo to fester to Russia’s advantage. First, Washington failed to see how Russian objectives were evolving under Putin. Like many allies in Europe, Washington believed that Moscow would bark its objections over plans to grant Kosovo independence, but incorrectly assumed that the Kremlin, as in years past, would eventually fall into line with a few face-saving concessions. 
Second, the White House repeated the core mistake of the early 1990s, when the Yugoslav crisis threatened to tear apart trans-Atlantic relations. It allowed disputes in Europe to postpone concerted action. 
Instead of seizing on a broad consensus among the major powers that the status quo in Kosovo had to change, and moving swiftly toward supervised independence on the basis of the UN plan, the White House has permitted persistent delays, which have actually deepened Europe’s divisions. Each postponement signaled to Belgrade and to Moscow that the West lacked resolve, and this has enhanced Russia’s assertiveness. As a result, the inevitable reckoning over Kosovo has become even more complex and conflictive. 
Third, the Bush administration continues to participate in fruitless diplomacy. As is clear to all informed observers, there is zero possibility of a negotiated solution between Kosovo’s independence-demanding Albanians, who comprise over 90 percent of the population, and Serbia, which continues to claim the territory over which it lost control eight years ago after NATO’s intervention. Another “deadline” looms, but it is likely that Russia will demand another extension for more “negotiations.” 
After the recent humiliation in Moscow, it is crucial for Washington to take the lead on Kosovo, galvanized by the understanding that what happens in the Balkans matters not only for the people of that region, but also for the West’s relationship with Russia. There are allies in Europe who grasp that the last chance to deal with Kosovo is rapidly approaching. And many allies also realize that Europe’s energy dependence on Russia makes it more important to show mettle and unity on threats to core European security interests. With U.S. leadership, the EU can be mobilized into concerted action as witnessed during the NATO interventions that ended the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. At the same time, Washington must work closely with allies to develop plans for the enhanced EU and NATO missions in the new state. 
Dealing conclusively with Kosovo is no longer simply about successful U.S.-European involvement in the Balkans. It is now about the U.S. relationship with Russia and whether Moscow acquires veto rights over European and U.S. security. Putin has created an opportunity to show the world that shared values still prevail across the Atlantic and across Europe. It’s time to seize it. 

Janusz Bugajski is director of the New European Democracies Project at CSIS in Washington and Edward Joseph is visiting scholar and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This comment appeared in The Washington Post.

TITLE: No Need to Pad the Vote
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: A prominent opposition spokesman recently wrote an excellent article proving that the results of the December State Duma elections would be falsified and that the exact number of votes each party will receive had been predetermined. The article also included a list of the parties and the predicted percentage results for each. Out of an old habit dating back to my school days, I decided to tally up the figures. The total was 112 percent.
The problem is not that the author of the article, who is an economist, had trouble with basic math; he simply received too much information. Before writing the article, he must have got his information from members of the Duma and was able to determine the conditions of the agreements between the candidates and the Kremlin.
Such an agreement was probably struck, and a promise to manipulate the election results might have been made, but the real question is whether that promise will be fulfilled. I believe that officials will not tamper with the votes — not because they are so honest at heart, but because they probably won’t have the opportunity or even the need to do so.
According to an electronic vote-monitoring system called Fairgame, the elections results in 2003 were tweaked to benefit United Russia. If this is true, then the scheme employed by United Russia to pad its percentages was nothing short of genius. This is the way the scheme worked: If a tiny party garnered, say, 0.9 percent of the vote, it was officially granted 0.5 percent. The difference, a negligible and virtually unnoticeable number, was added to United Russia’s tally. Since there were a lot of these small parties, United Russia was able to scrap together up to 7 percent more votes. This strengthened the party’s position, but it did not radically change the overall picture.
This arrangement may explain why, after many viable parties were barred from the 2007 elections for not meeting the strict threshold of 50,000 members, a few marginal groups were nevertheless allowed to run, despite claiming memberships in the hundreds at best.
But the political landscape has changed so much since 2003 that such manipulations are no longer necessary. With President Vladimir Putin’s decision to head United Russia’s federal ticket, the results of the upcoming elections are now a foregone conclusion. Moreover, many voters who are dissatisfied with the current leadership will not participate in the elections because they understand that they are meaningless. Thus, padding United Russia’s figures doesn’t make a lot of sense, as the party will do well in the elections anyway. What’s more, since the new law does not require that a minimum number of votes be cast, there is also no need to overstate the voter turnout.
At issue is not how well the party of power will fare, but if any other party will manage to clear the 7 percent hurdle needed to win Duma seats. For Russia to preserve even a semblance of democracy, it is important to have some opposition parties in the Duma. Happily, there is a solution: The conservative electorate supporting the Communist Party promises to turn out in adequate numbers to ensure that its candidates win their coveted Duma seats.
As for the others parties, their leaders dream of earning at least 3 percent of the vote in order to return the campaign money they’ve already spent. Election officials are undoubtedly reassuring them and promising to help, but in the end they won’t lift a finger. No bureaucrat will come to their aid by falsifying the results because it is difficult to properly disguise. It is much easier to count the votes in an honest fashion.
In the end, since Russia now has a de facto one-party system, it is not necessary at all to falsify election results.

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

TITLE: The return of the king
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The opera deals with Russia’s first attempt to elect a tsar — let’s put aside speculation about how contrived that election might have been — and it enjoys its Russian premiere in the heat of the current parliamentary election campaign. 
“Boris Goudenow,” the first-ever opera written by a European composer on a Russian theme, is a timely arrival to the Russian opera scene.
Johann Mattheson’s 1710 opera Boris Goudenow — produced by the Early Music Festival and directed by Berlin choreographer Klaus Abromeit — premieres Friday at the Mikhailovsky (Mussorgsky) Opera and Ballet Theater. The production will join the company’s repertoire for at least a season and Vladimir Kekhman, the new general director of the Mikhailovsky, has acquired the rights to ensure that it will be staged for St. Petersburg audiences on a regular basis.
Boris Godunov, regent of Russia from 1584 to 1598 and then the first tsar from 1598 to 1605, is one of Russia’s cultural icons. In Mattheson’s opera, the character of Boris, compared to the tsar that appears in Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” and is featured in Pushkin’s drama, comes out as a drastically different character. Presenting an unknown baroque version of “Boris Goudenow” in contemporary Russia proved a serious challenge. 
“The opera was written in 1710 in response to Peter the Great’s victory over Sweden at Poltava, and was clearly an attempt to answer the question ‘what is this new strong emerging Russia?’” Marc de Mauny, the producer of the new production, said. “It made an attempt to decipher the enigma that Peter the Great presented.”
Almost three hundred years on, the issue is resonant as ever. Western Europe is still struggling to crack the Russian enigma and guess the intentions of Russia’s current ruler, President Vladimir Putin. Political experts have been wrong-footed at each turn as the Duma elections give way to presidential elections in March. Not a single Kremlinologist mentioned the name of Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov in forecasts before he was appointed. Putin’s move showed that powerplays in Russia are rarely transparent.
“There are many questions arising now about the nature of power in Russia and the transition of power, and Mattheson’s opera essentially touches on the very same topic: the transition of power from Fyodor Ivanovich to Boris Godunov, who initially pretends that he does not want the throne but then moves on to accept the offer,” de Mauny said. “Whether this scenario will be reflected in current affairs and whether Mr. Putin will suddenly decide to accept another four years in the presidency is anybody’s guess — it does not look at all likely — but it is an extremely topical issue.”
Mattheson’s take on the story of the doomed Russian tsar was never performed during the composer’s lifetime [1681-1764] for reasons that remain obscure.
Mattheson was the director of the Hamburg Opera House when he composed “Boris Goudenow.” He also served as a secretary to the British ambassador, and gained political experience.
“No-one knows why the opera was not staged then; it could be that the message which he was conveying and the way he was portraying Russia was no longer politically correct or simply no longer relevant,” de Mauny said. “There was a fire at the theater shortly before he wrote the piece, so the reasons could have been financial. But in any case, in 1711, Mattheson was transferred from the theater to the cathedral and was no longer in a position to influence the situation.”
Until very recently the score was thought to have been lost to posterity. But, after having not been performed for nearly 200 years, the story behind its rediscovery is itself suitably dramatic.
“The document was at first gathering dust in a library in Hamburg, then it was taken to Dresden during World War II, and then it was brought to post-war Leningrad by the Soviet army in a haul of war trophies,” De Mauny said. “After the distribution of trophies across the U.S.S.R., the manuscript ended up in Yerevan, Armenia, and only found its way back to Hamburg in 1999 when there was a commission set up for the restitution of the library.”
De Mauny, the founder of St. Petersburg’s Early Music Festival, which stages performances of baroque and other early music on original instruments, first heard about the opera from colleagues at the Boston Early Music Festival, which produced the world premiere of Mattheson’s work in 2005.
St. Petersburg’s early music musicians — who acted as consultants and took part in the staging — had thought of bringing the production on a tour to Russia but owing to bureaucratic hurdles and funding problems, in the end it was easier to stage a new production.
The new production, which was funded by the Moscow-based Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, enjoyed its European premiere on Aug. 30 in Hamburg’s San Pauli Theater. 
Seeking to create an authentic staging, the producers chose Abromeit to direct. They felt that the artist, with a wealth of experience in baroque ballets under his belt, would be best equipped to create a staging as close as possible to the way in which Mattheson himself would have staged it in Hamburg in 1710.
“There are principles of baroque theater and baroque dance in particular, which is an important part of baroque opera that Klaus spent his life working on,” de Mauny said. “We were convinced by his vision of the opera and his ability to translate it while using absolutely authentic elements of baroque theater into a language that is attractive and makes sense to the audiences today, and I believe this is what he has achieved.”
The Hamburg premiere won rave reviews.
“Abromeit’s key achievement was in making this synthetic authentic staging a wholesome production,” reads a review in nationwide business daily Vedomosti. “Over two months of rehearsals, all the details of the theatrical mechanics — incorporating the singers, the orchestra and the corps de ballet — became such a tight fit and the rapport between them grew so stunning that it began to feel as if the entire production team acted with the same pair of arms, legs and ears.”

www.earlymusic.ru, www.mikhailovsky.ru

TITLE: Word’s
         Worth
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: If you are having a shmooze over some nosh, but maybe you do not like schmaltz, whether you know it or not, you are speaking Yiddish.
Though the language has made inroads into English, it has all but died out in daily use in its homelands of Eastern Europe.
This includes Lithuania, which was once home to more than 200,000 Jews. But now schools and universities are trying to spread Yiddish again.
“Yiddish is a key to the rich culture of East European Jews, the heritage of European culture,” said Roza Bieliauskiene, a teacher at Lithuania’s only Jewish school, named Sholom Alecheim after the famed Yiddish writer whose stories inspired the “Fiddler on the Roof” musical. “I feel a very rich person by knowing this language.”
The school has 260 students. Children take only one hour of Yiddish a week, starting at age 15, in a small step toward reviving the language.
Yiddish writers also include Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1978. It was once spoken by about 13 million Jews in Eastern Europe from all walks of life, but the combined effects of the Holocaust and Soviet repression caused a drastic fall.
At the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, founded in 2001 and the only one of its kind in Eastern Europe, Professor Dovid Katz is keeping the flame alive with more than talk of matzo balls, gefilte fish and schmaltz (which is Yiddish for chicken fat). “Our institute is committed to real Yiddish, rather than the touch and the feel and the sound and the cooking,” he said.
The language is a mishmash — itself a Yiddish word — of German, Aramaic, Hebrew and Slav, but written in Hebrew characters. The word Yiddish means Jewish.
Estimates of how many people speak Yiddish worldwide today vary widely, ranging from 2 million to 4 million. It is mainly the language of everyday use among Orthodox Jews. Otherwise, it is primarily spoken by older people.
Its rich history in Lithuania came from the fact that Vilnius, or Vilna in Yiddish, was a strong regional Jewish center. Jews from Lithuania had their own name, Litvaks. Vilnius — once known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania” — used to be home to the Yiddish Institute of Learning, which had the largest collection of Yiddish books in the world but moved to New York in 1940.
Much of the heritage was lost when Nazi forces marched into Lithuania and the other Baltic states during World War II, killing much of the Jewish population.
Today, only 4,000 to 5,000 Jews remain in Lithuania, and Yiddish was dealt further blows in the former Soviet Union because of pressure to speak Russian. Even the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 did not help, because Israel adopted Hebrew as its official language.

Chernov’s Choice returns next week.

TITLE: Clowning around
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Fourteen teenagers from St. Petersburg and Hamburg will team up with thespians from the local Comic-Trust theater troupe to take part in a piece of bold historical kitsch on Nov. 3 at the Teatr Na Mokhovoi.  
“Antony and Cleopatra,” the company’s unorthodox take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, blends together genres and styles of visual theater to create a spicy visual cocktail.
The production is an adaptation of an existing street show which was first performed by Comic-Trust in  France in 2003 and has been performed in Germany and Portugal since. The stage becomes a Coliseum-style arena, where the actors are surrounded by the audience who themselves stand a fair chance of being recruited and directly involved in the onstage battle. 
“Female audience members run the risk of getting converted into courtesans!” warns the show’s director Vadim Fisson. “Those who fancy storming towers would enjoy it. Our show is optimistic and patriotic.”
The show had its Russian premiere in 2004. The plan to get the teenagers involved is part of a cultural program marking the 50th anniversary of St. Petersburg and Hamburg becoming twin cities in 1957. In September, “Antony and Cleopatra,” with the supporting student cast, was performed at Hamburg’s Ernst-Deutsch theater.
The Comic-Trust version of Cleopatra is a pear-shaped woman possessing tremendous personal power and a voracious sexual appetite, performed by the troupe’s only female actress, Natalya Fisson. 
Although Vadim is officially the director, both the scripts and the stagings are written by all the members of Comic-Trust, which includes husband-and-wife Vadim and Natalya Fisson, and actors Nikolai Kychyov and Igor  Sladkevich. “We have never had an argument about ‘who plays what’,” Natalya said. 
Director Vadim, confined to a wheelchair after the amputation of both legs through illness, will make a stage appearance as nothing less than Mars, the God of War, with a friendly nod to the Terminator. Comic-Trust has been branded extreme cabaret, black clownage, absurdist comedy and flowing parody. The company is very much a stylistic polygon, each side connected with a different form of visual comedy. 
“They inspire everything they touch, reviving the myth of the mysterious Russian soul,” reads a review in Marie Claire magazine.
“With grotesque make-up the trio are so expressive — a gamut of emotions and motives are ably conveyed — it is as if they have faces of putty,” wrote Sarah Willcocks in a review for the U.K. theater newspaper The Stage.
“Antony and Cleopatra” is one of Shakespeare’s best known later tragedies, with the Cleopatra role, one of the greatest roles in drama, popular with actresses all over the world. The play focuses on real events from Roman history, and portrays the love story of its title characters against the geopolitical backdrop of the ancient world.
Shakespeare’s tragedy was inspired by “Lives,” a study by the ancient Roman historian Plutarch. The plot and historical details of the love affair between the Roman general Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra were drawn from Plutarch’s book. The play alludes to numerous battles between Caesar and Antony’s armies and navies and features rapid dynamic scene-changes between Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria and Antony’s home in Rome. 
Most Comic-Trust productions — “Second Hand,” “Naphtalene,” “White Side Story,” and “Antony and Cleopatra”  — have various gags for the different countries in which they are performed. 
“It never happens that the audience just stares at us, perplexed and petrified, with perhaps the exception of a couple of corporate shows in Russia,” Vadim said. In general, he describes the Russian audience as more thoughtful than those in other countries, explaining that it seems to take some time for viewers to adjust to what they see on stage, but once they have, it takes as long for them to come down from the joy of the performance. 
Some Shakespearian verse, in Russian translation, will be spoken, but not much. The prologue presents genuine Shakespeare but a knowledgeable spectator will spot it is the introduction to a different drama. To be on the safeside, Fisson suggests you have a quick glance at “Henry VIII” before the performance.

www.comic-trust.com

TITLE: Poetry in motion
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In an exciting development for ballet in St. Petersburg, the Leonid Yakobson Theater of Choreographic Miniatures, a chamber ballet company formed in 1969, has for the first time performed an original full-scale ballet which premiered earlier this month at the Alexandrinsky Theater.
Yakobson, a legendary name in the St. Peterburg ballet world, was an outstanding   choreographer and a follower of Mikhail Fokin and the traditions of the Ballets Russes. The master died in 1975, but his work has been continued by others. Since 2001, the theater has been run by Yury Petukhov, choreographer and former principal dancer with the Mikhailovsky (Mussorgsky) Opera and Ballet Theater. 
As the name indicates, Yakobson’s company has been known for short balletic works, or  “miniatures.” So Petukhov’s decision to stage a full-scale ballet was a major event for Petersburg balletomanes, who filled the Alexandrinsky Theater on Oct. 11 for the premiere of “Sergei Yesenin,” an ambitious work based on events in the life of the eponymous poet.
“It is hard to produce new full-scale ballets. Only two theaters in the city dare to do it: Boris Eifman’s ballet theater and now us,” Petukhov said, explaining the idea behind his approach. 
“I have been dreaming about creating a ballet based on Sergei Yesenin’s life for a long time. Firstly, I love his poetry. Secondly, his life was so intense. His biography is dazzling and cannot pass unnoticed by theater people. Our new ballet is a modern spectacle, in which we attempted to modernize dance. What makes it unique is our return to a combined theater, because we attempted to bring together drama and ballet.”
Yesenin was born in 1895 in the Ryazan region and traveled to Moscow aged 17 to begin work as a proofreader. He married his first wife a year later and soon had a son (who was murdered during Stalin’s Terror in 1937). 
After a stint at university in 1915, Yesenin came to St. Petersburg and fell in with a group of “Silver Age” poets including Alexander Blok, Nikolai Kluyev and Andrei Bely. Soon after his first book was published in 1916, Yesenin became famous and popular, and at this time had an affair with Kluyev. 
The withdrawal of Russia from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ended Yesenin’s brief military service. That year Yesenin married the famous actress Zinaida Raikh, who was later to marry theater pioneer Vsevolod Meyerhold, and had two children. 
After founding his own publishing house in 1921, Yesenin became besotted with Paris-based U.S. dancer Isadora Duncan. 
They married in 1922, but the explosive union burned itself out the following year and Yesenin returned to Moscow to marry, apparently without having divorced Duncan, actress Augusta Miklashevskaya. That same year, poet Nadezhda Volpin gave birth to Yesenin’s son, who later became a Soviet political dissident. 
In 1925, Yesenin married a daughter of Leo Tolstoy, but, his life increasingly undermined by alcoholism, he suffered a mental breakdown. While he was staying at St. Petersburg’s Angleterre Hotel he wrote his last poem in his own blood and was found hanging from heating pipes. He was 30 years old.
A memorial plaque on the hotel on the corner of Voznesensky Prospekt and Maly Morskaya Ulitsa remembering Yesenin is honored to this day with fresh flowers left by devotees of his poetry.
The new ballet based on Yesenin’s life is a controversial blend of theatrical dramatization and dance linked by poems and music. The director gives two Yesenins. One role is danced by a dancer and the other is an actor reciting verse. Sometimes they occupy the stage simultaneously, sometimes one watches the other from the side.
“In the 1930s, Yesenin’s art was so widely known that even officials running the concentration camps nicknamed arrested and incarcerated poets as ‘Yesenins,’ Petukhov said. “The idea of having two parallel actions comes from that fact.”
The ballet does not disclose the enigma of the poet’s death — whether his death was a suicide or a homicide. The choreographer has chosen a more philosophical approach where poets don’t die, they simply depart. Instead of death, the choreographer has preferred to show Yesenin’s life and his relations with women. His character is a romantic, a hooligan and a hard working poet. 
At the conclusion of the piece, Yesenin-the-actor dies violently, enclosed in a cage, as Yesenin-the-poet, the dancer symbolically disappears. But before he goes he recites Yesenin’s last poem, “Farewell, my friend, farewell.” 
Petukhov’s show is intended for an audience familiar with the poet’s art and life and incorporates a set of allegoric figures from Yesenin’s poems, such as the Red Stallion and the Black Man, who acquire a life of their own and enter the action. 
The most significant is the Black Man, who accompanies Yesenin for most of his time on stage. Instead of a love triangle, that familiar formula of ballets, we have three women, each of whom play an important part in the poet’s life. Their presence on stage is one of the most successful elements in this work. 
Duncan, who strongly influenced Yesenin’s fate, is shown performing the Internationale. Waving a red banner to the applause of Red Army officers, Yesenin mounts the stage and everything else disappears. A passionate and well choreographed adagio follows. 
However, Petukhin did not want to turn the ballet into a story about the poet’s stormy relationship with his three lovers. He has created generalized images and has added a fourth female personage, a Woman in White, who embodies other women, the soul, and the motherland.
Besides Petukhov, the troupe’s creative team includes the St. Petersburg composer Vladimir Artemiyev, stage designer Semyon Pastukh and costume designer Galina Soloviyeva.
Artemiyev has arranged a musical score drawing mainly on the work of Rachmaninov, and the finale of Shostakovich’s 11th symphony, as well as the foxtrot from the latter’s Jazz Suite. 
The score also includes some original music by the composer, who added a few numbers and adagios to fill the need for what Petukhov described as “more aggressive music.”
Pastukh’s design was inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s colors: black, red and white. Set decorations include a forest of birch trees — a symbol of Russia and evocative of Yesenin’s love for village life and the reminiscences of his childhood.    
The costumes display dramatic colors and interesting designs, especially the uniforms of the Red Army soldiers, whose march is one of the best scenes in the production. 
Also worthy of mention are the outfits of the foxtrot soloists in the scenes relating to Yesenin’s travels abroad with Duncan.

The role of Yesenin is convincingly performed by a new star, Vladimir Dorokhin, who during the past six months has performed leading roles in “Swan Lake” and “Romeo and Juliet” at the theater.

TITLE: The mass murderer as a young man
AUTHOR: By William Grimes
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: For decades historians accepted the portrait of Stalin painted by his rivals. He was, in the words of one political adversary, Nikolai Sukhanov, “a gray blur,” a mediocre party hack who managed, through stealth and intrigue, to wrest the levers of power from the brilliant revolutionaries surrounding him. History, in this case, was written by the losers, notably Leon Trotsky, who never could accept that he had been bested by a pockmarked thug from Georgia with shaky intellectual credentials.
In “Young Stalin,” Simon Sebag Montefiore’s meticulously researched, authoritative biography of Stalin’s early years, the blur comes into sharp focus. Building on the revisionist studies of Robert Service and Richard Overy, Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin’s childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution. No one, henceforth, need ever wonder how it was that Stalin found his way into Lenin’s inner circle, or took his place in the ruling troika that assumed power after the storming of the Winter Palace.
Just as he did in “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” his lurid, grisly chronicle of Stalin in power, Montefiore has found his devil in the details, working his way with a fine-toothed comb through previously unread archival material in Russia and in Georgia, where he uncovered a memoir written by Stalin’s mother. Throughout, he connects dots and fills in the blanks, uncovering facts that Stalin, once he assumed power, took great pains to conceal.
No detail is too minute. We learn that Stalin, while living in exile in Vologda in 1911, visited the library 17 times in less than two months. No source, it seems, lies beyond the author’s reach. Montefiore located a 109-year-old cousin of Stalin’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze. Her memory still sharp, Montefiore’s eyewitness corroborated the assertion, made by other family members, that Svanidze died in 1907 of typhus, not tuberculosis, as historians mistakenly believed. A small point, but the accretion of direct testimony adds color to the traditional monotone picture of Stalin, bringing him to life on the page.
Stalin was,  Montefiore writes, “that rare combination: both ‘intellectual’ and killer.” The roots of violence ran deep in his family life and in Gori, his hometown, where street brawling was the principal sport. Soso, as Stalin, born Josef Djugashvili, was called, suffered savage beatings from both his alcoholic father and his doting mother, who alternated smothering affection with harsh corporal punishment. When Stalin, later in life, asked his mother why she had beaten him so much, she replied, “It didn’t do you any harm.” A brilliant but rebellious student at the religious schools he attended, and a published poet of great promise, Soso took up radical politics while still in his teens, his approach already shaped by the tactics of the seminary’s administration — “surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings,” as he later described them. Taking the name Koba, that of a fictional Caucasian bandit-hero (Stalin, or “man of steel,” would come much later), he embarked on a career as an underground political agitator, his life punctuated by multiple arrests and years spent in internal exile.
Gaunt and darkly handsome despite the facial scars left by smallpox, and blessed with a beautiful singing voice, Koba enchanted women throughout his young manhood and left several illegitimate children as proof. He had a mesmerizing effect on men as well.
“His style, manners were totally Georgian, yet there was something utterly original, something hard to fathom, both leonine and feline about him,” a Georgian Menshevik wrote of this fascinating political opponent.
Montefiore sheds new light on Stalin’s wild years as a kind of revolutionary gang leader in the Caucasus, putting him at the center of robberies, kidnappings, arson attacks, extortion schemes and executions of suspected traitors. He makes a very strong case that Stalin burned down the Rothschilds’ refinery warehouse in the oil boom town Batumi in January 1902 and thereafter used this act as leverage in extorting protection money from other oil barons. In addition to agitating among workers and fomenting strikes and riots, Stalin specialized in daring, extremely violent bank heists, whose considerable proceeds helped Lenin finance the Bolshevik Party.
Stalin thrived on violence, subterfuge and dark conspiracy. He fully subscribed to the Leninist ideal of the Marxist revolutionary as a man outside normal society and moral law, a pitiless instrument of the working class. The “black work” that Stalin made his metier became standard operating procedure for the Soviet government. Stalin, like his fellow Bolsheviks, never left the shadow world of spies, double agents and criminal conspiracy.
Montefiore dismisses, perhaps for good, the theory that Stalin was an agent for the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. He spent far too much time in prison or exile, for one thing. On the occasions when he met with agents, Montefiore points out, Stalin was receiving rather than giving intelligence.
Stalin won Lenin’s wholehearted approval from the moment they met in 1905. In Lenin’s terms he was, quite clearly, one of the highly desirable “men of action,” rather than one of the “tea-drinkers.”
With time their relationship only deepened. Much to Lenin’s surprise, Stalin submitted a brilliant position paper on party policy toward nationalities within the Russian empire. The killer really was an intellectual.

TITLE: Bearing witness
AUTHOR: By Mike Collett-White
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: After countless biographies of Stalin, a new book gives voice to the millions of ordinary Russians who suffered the dictator’s reign of terror in silence.
“The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” by award-winning historian Orlando Figes, is based on hundreds of interviews with survivors of the era of Josef Stalin, and their stories still have the power to shock.
A slain boy becomes the hero of a propaganda cult, lionized in the press for denouncing his father to the police, neighbors betray neighbors, bravery is punished, cowardice is rewarded and innocents are executed.
The human suffering during Stalin’s rule is nothing new. The strength of “Whisperers” is in personal testimony, the stories behind staggering statistics of arrests, imprisonment and death.
Figes, a respected authority on Russia, said the book was unique in exploring the emotional impact of Stalin’s leadership.
Ten years ago people were still unwilling to talk about it. In another 10 years, many people who lived through the age of betrayal, paranoia and fear will be dead.
“There has never been a book like it and there will never be another one like it,” Figes said in an interview.
“We grasped the opportunity of a narrow window of time to gather testimony in written and oral form about how people really lived, how families functioned under stress and how people lived with moral compromise.”
Figes spent more than four years working with teams from the Memorial Society, established in the Soviet Union to commemorate victims of repression, who interviewed families across the country and corroborated their accounts with documentation.
The title “Whisperers” conjures the state of suspicion cultivated by Stalin, and the book helps explain how the dictator came to wield the power that he did.
Parents were wary of voicing opinions for fear their children would repeat them, deliberately or not, to teachers at school. One wrong turn could lead to arrest, torture or worse, meaning Soviets were reduced to whispers in their own homes.
Because children of “enemies of the people” were often deemed guilty by association, they resented their parents. Wives came to believe the trumped up charges against husbands, while arrests and imprisonment tore families apart, often permanently.
One central personality, Antonina Golovina, reinvented her upbringing to hide her “kulak” [rich peasant] roots which had landed her in exile as a young girl.
She did not tell her daughter about her past until some 60 years later, and concealed the truth from two husbands.
In 1987, she was visited by an elderly aunt of her first husband, Georgy Znamensky, who let slip that he was the son of a tsarist who fought the Bolsheviks in the civil war. Like Golovina, he concealed his origins from his partner for decades.
Figes said writing “Whisperers” had made him less judgmental about people prepared to work within Stalin’s system, recognizing that the alternative was almost unthinkable.
“For people who suffered from repression, like the kulaks, the only way to overcome repression was to join the system,” he said.
“Where else was there but the system? So they internalized the values of the system, and practiced its ideology.”
And among grim tales of death by firing squad or from hunger in a gulag are stories of human strength and bravery.
“You come out thinking that this shows the resilience of families as much as their destruction.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The other week, TNT showed the first episode in a new series of its sketch comedy “Our Russia.” This time around, it has a few new characters and has killed the sushi waitress from Ivanovo. But the most intriguing detail is that it is now being directed by Pyotr Buslov – the maker of the two “Boomer” gangster movies, where bad guys with soul cruise through mournful Russian countryside with Sergei Shnurov rasping at top volume.
It’s a strange pairing, since “Our Russia” is a cheap and cheerful “Little Britain” rip-off where the sets look as if they were built by the show’s pair of incompetent gastarbaitery, Ravshan and Dzhashmud. And the only mournful Russian countryside is a stretch of highway patrolled by a downtrodden traffic policeman and his higher-earning competitor – a leggy prostitute in leopard-skin.
Still, I thought I could see a bit of Buslov in the recurring sketch about a dictatorial football coach, where he managed to get some dramatic angles into the recurring scene of the coach beating up his players. Shot from below, it was practically “Raging Bull” in a pink tracksuit. And the director made the show look sharper in general by zooming in on the characters, so you don’t see so much of the plywood sets.
In addition to hiring a big-name director, the show’s makers got a celebrity cameo into the first episode, with It Girl Ksenia Sobchak playing a spoilt It Girl who has hired some elitniye builders from the United Arab Emirates to remodel her apartment. Naturally, the builders are none other than Ravshan and Dzhashmud wearing dish-towels on their heads. The scriptwriters wisely don’t require Sobchak to be funny; she just has to be an imperious diva who wants ivory tiles in her bathroom. 
One character missing from the first episode, and hopefully all the other ones, was the sushi waitress from Ivanovo who comes on to all her male customers because the textile manufacturing city has so few men. Which was just ridiculous – I mean, the idea of Ivanovo having a sushi bar. Luckily, she has been replaced by a cast of new characters, including a teacher who extorts money from her students (sadly, not such a ludicrous concept in Russia) and a couple of down-and-outs from the ritzy Rublyovka district outside Moscow. 
The teacher at a school in Voronezh is called Snezhana and with her frilly blouse and pinned-up hair looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she asks little Kolya to stay behind after class and says she saw him smoking. She’s about to write to his father, unless ... “I’ve never had a Samsung air conditioner,” she says, hinting that his father is the local distributor. “Tell your father that teacher is about to have a housewarming, and she’s accepting gifts.” Finally, she reaches into her drawer and tosses Kolya a small inducement: a pack of cigarettes. 
The introduction to the Rublyovka sketch characterized it as the kind of neighborhood where people write SMS messages to President Vladimir Putin – saying “Where R U?” In keeping with this, the local garbage dump has a roof supported by Grecian columns, and the two bums who live out of it, Boroda and Sifon, are dressed in cast-offs from Gucci.
It’s a great idea, even if “The Beverly Hillbillies” got there first. In the first episode, the incredibly picky bums pulled out finds such as a Louis Vuitton bag, tickets for a package holiday in Egypt – “No, I’ve already been there three times,” one grumbles – and a huge jar of red caviar. “Red caviar is living your life in vain,” one bum says, smashing it in disgust. “I’m not going to eat that.”

TITLE: Soupe du jour!
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Le Borshch // 11 Nab. Reki Fontanka // Open 12 p.m. through 1 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with wine: 2,400 rubles ($97.10)

While its kitschy nouveau-russki name cannot help but raise some doubts or a snicker or two, the small new restaurant on the Fontanka, Le Borshch, has succeeded in creating a genuine marriage of French and Russian cuisine. 
At its heart, the menu is unmistakably Russian. Central ingredients include root vegetables, mushrooms, tvorog (cottage cheese), dill, forest berries, veal, pork, caviar and freshwater fish.
But when it comes to the preparation, combination and presentation of these staples, French culinary convention takes the reigns and defies the stereotype that Russian cooking must be rich and hearty.
Instead of serving a traditional Russian beet salad, which typically consists of thickly grated beets and lots of mayonnaise or sour cream, Le Borshch offers a beet carpaccio salad (250 rubles, $10.20).
Round, tissue-paper thin beet slices lay delicately on the bottom of a large white plate: a true trompe l’oeil for those familiar with venison carpaccio. In the middle of the plate, a small frisee salad drizzled with honey-lemon dressing was held in place by a pyramid of warm, lightly breaded goat cheese. 
The prominent dill and parsley garnish, however, served as a reminder that this is still a Russian salad. 
“Anyone can see that everything here is Russian at heart,” said a Russian diner. “But something new and surprising has been added to each dish, something that a Russian would never think of mixing in.”
Take for example the prunes and porcini mushrooms in the borshch (190 rubles, $7.70). While these mushrooms may be widely used in other Russian dishes, they are never found in borshch, and prunes are only used on very rare occasions.
Buckwheat is a traditional Russian grain, but it does not go into shchi, a sour-cabbage soup. Le Borshch’s version of shchi (190 rubles, $7.70), however, welcomes this combination. 
Le Borshch also offers many different kinds of pelmeni, meat-stuffed dumplings, as hot starters or light entrees. 
But instead of finding the usual pork and beef pelmeni, you have the choice of pelmeni stuffed with: veal and pumpkin (240 rubles, $9.70); shrimp with lobster sauce (300 rubles, $12.10); and cottage cheese and herbs (240 rubles, $9.70).
I sampled the latter of the three and found the dumpling dough to be significantly lighter and thinner than any I had ever tried. The cottage cheese filling didn’t sit heavy in the stomach and went very well with the zucchini sauce accompanying the pelmeni.
Meat and seafood entrees cost between 240 rubles and 790 rubles ($9.70-$32.00). Highlights include venison medallions with cowberry sauce (790 rubles) and golubtsi, a rice, vegetable and ground beef pilaf wrapped in cabbage leaves, to which the chefs at Le Borsch add diced tiger shrimp (300 rubles, $12.10). 
The veal served on the bone with fresh marinated vegetables (620 rubles, $25.10) was an excellent choice. Instead of the usual fillet, the veal was served on the bone, making the meat tender and succulent.
The idea of a Franco-Russian synthesis is also impressed on the restaurant’s white and grey-themed interior.
An eclectic collection of hundreds of imitation cream-colored porcelain dishes known as creamware, line the glass shelves of the restaurant’s tall wooden armoires. 
During the day, Le Borshch offers a 260 ruble ($10.50) business lunch deal, which includes an appetizer, entrée and a drink. And on Mondays and Wednesdays, for every two glasses of wine you order, the third is on the house.

TITLE: Trick or treat?
AUTHOR: By Matt Zoller Seitz
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: John Carpenter’s original 1978 “Halloween” was a slumber-party spook tale about a mask-clad bogeyman hacking his way through a sleepy Illinois suburb. Rob Zombie’s remake wants to be all that and a case study as well, devoting its first act to the childhood of the future serial killer Michael Myers, a chubby, sweet-faced, socially awkward boy whose mental illness is transformed into murderous rage by school bullies and a home life of Dickensian squalor.
Unfortunately, the spook tale and the case study are incompatible storytelling modes.  Zombie’s movie, which he wrote and directed, wants us to care about Myers — who busts out of a mental institution 17 years after murdering most of his family and goes home to reconnect with the baby sister he spared — even while it depicts him as a mute, literally faceless grim reaper. The two impulses cancel each other out.
That’s too bad, because the case study part of the film re-establishes Zombie’s status as modern American horror’s most eccentric and surprising filmmaker.
Like Zombie’s first two features, “House of 1,000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” this “Halloween” is unusually at ease among white, working-class characters who drawl, curse and like their fun loud. Between the movie’s classic rock soundtrack, the screenplay’s lively characterizations and Phil Parmet’s chaotic camerawork, Zombie often seems less an heir to Carpenter and other 1970s horror filmmakers than a sociologist who happens to make horror movies: the John Cassavetes of splatter.
Zombie lavishes attention on the killer’s sad origins to the point where his film suggests a boy’s answer to Brian De Palma’s “Carrie.” Young Michael (Daeg Faerch) is cursed with a frazzled mother, Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s wife), who has a newborn daughter and a job as an exotic dancer; a sexually active older sister (Hanna Hall); and a loutish stepfather (overacted by William Forsythe) who taunts the boy.
Michael wears masks all the time and acts out his buried anger by killing animals, warning signs that his family ignores at their peril.
The boy’s equivalent of Carrie’s prom detonation is his Halloween night rampage. It begins with a touching montage that cuts between Michael brooding alone in his neighborhood and his mother sliding around a strip-club pole to the tune of “Love Hurts,” and climaxes with a killing spree that alludes to suppressed Oedipal and incestuous desires.
Alas, once Michael is locked away in a mental institution under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), the movie starts to spin its wheels. When Zombie reintroduces Michael as a long-haired giant (Tyler Mane) pining for a reunion with his now-teenage sister, a spunky baby sitter named Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), the film’s energy and originality dissipate.
Michael’s escape from the asylum and his knife-wielding, door-smashing progress through his old neighborhood are competently handled but tedious. Parmet’s lighting and compositions link the adult Michael to Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, but the film’s obligation to serve up the expected body count prevents Zombie from laying the groundwork for the explosion of tragic feeling that the movie’s finale deserves.
The new “Halloween” has sympathy for the Devil, but not enough.

TITLE: Coach Says ‘Ill Fate’ Dogs CSKA Moscow
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Walter Samuel scored a late goal to lead Inter Milan to a 2-1 away win over CSKA Moscow in the Champions League on Tuesday.
The winner came in the 80th minute, when CSKA goalie Veniamin Mandrykin failed to hold Samuel’s close range header.
“Ill fate follows us in the Champions League... We have conceded such an easy goal, but we lost to a stronger team today,” CSKA coach Valery Gazzayev said, in acknowledgement of the many second-half chances Inter created but did not convert.
Inter now has six points after three games in Group G, while CSKA has one and will travel to Inter on Nov. 7.
CSKA controlled the game in the first half at Lokomotiv stadium, while the visitors looked for their chances on the flanks. Figo, who followed Raul Gonzalez, Roberto Carlos, David Beckham, Paolo Maldini and Oliver Kahn as the sixth player to make 100 Champions League appearances, made several dangerous crosses into the box early in the game but his teammates were unable to capitalize. Inter was forced to reshuffle its midfield after just 16 minutes when France international Patrick Viera made way for Dejan Stankovic after not fully recovering from a hamstring strain.
Brazilian striker Jo put CSKA ahead in the 32nd minute. He connected with Daniel Corvalho’s pass, benefited from a lucky bounce to move past Ivan Cordoba and lofted the ball over Inter goalie Julio Casar. The hosts had two more clear chances to extend their lead before Gazzayev was forced to substitute two key players before halftime.
Brazilian playmaker Dudu injured his right Achilles and was replaced by Eduardo in the 42nd. Two minutes later, Figo collided with defender Alexey Berezutsky, cutting his right leg with his spike. 
CSKA was also without injured striker Vagner Love. Inter took control in the second half, and Hernan Crespo equalized in the 52nd minute following.
Retreating from an offside position, Crespo was fortuitously played onside by CSKA midfielder Milos Krasis’ headed deflection of Esteban Cambiasso’s header. Crespo calmly slotted the ball past Mandrykin from a one-on-one position. Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Julio Cruz, who came in for Crespo in the 62nd, both came close before Mandrykin’s blunder handed Inter the win. Samuel’s header off a Luis Figo free kick bounced awkwardly in front of the goalie, who should nonetheless have been able to keep it out.

TITLE: Californian Fires May Be Close to Turning Point
AUTHOR: By Elliot Spagat
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN DIEGO — Flames drew perilously close toward thousands of homes in Southern California’s firestorm Thursday, despite a break in the harsh winds and a massive aerial assault that raised evacuees’ hopes of going home for good.
The hot, dry Santa Ana winds that have whipped the blazes into a destructive, indiscriminate fury since the weekend were expected to all but disappear Thursday.
“That will certainly aid in firefighting efforts,” National Weather Service meteorologist Jamie Meier said.
The record high temperatures of recent days began succumbing to cooling sea breezes, and two fires that burned 21 homes in northern Los Angeles County were fully contained.
Even with the slackening winds, the county remains a tinderbox. Firefighters cut fire lines around the major blazes in San Diego County, but none of the four fires was more than 40 percent contained. More than 8,500 homes were still threatened.
Towns scattered throughout the county remained on the edge of disaster, including the apple-picking region around Julian, where dozens of homes burned in 2003.
To the northeast, in the San Bernardino County mountain resort of Lake Arrowhead, fire officials said 6,000 homes remained in the path of two wildfires that had destroyed more than 300 homes.
Both fires remained out of control, but were being bombarded by aerial tankers and helicopters that dumped more than 30 loads of water.
President Bush, who has declared a major disaster in a seven-county region, was scheduled to arrive in California Thursday and to take an aerial tour of the burn areas, accompanied by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“It’s a sad situation out there in Southern California,” Bush said outside the White House before leaving for California. “I fully understand that the people have got a lot of anguish in their hearts. They just need to know a lot of folks care about them.”
Losses total at least $1 billion in San Diego County alone, and include a third of the state’s avocado crop. The losses are half as high as those in Southern California’s 2003 fires, but are certain to rise.
The more hopeful news on the fire lines came a day after residents in some hard-hit San Diego County neighborhoods were allowed back to their streets, many lined with the wreckage of melted cars.
In upscale Rancho Bernardo, house after house had been reduced to a smoldering heap. Cheryl Monticello, 38 and eight months pregnant, knew what she would find when she came back Wednesday because a city official warned her the house was lost. But she had to see it for herself.
“You really need to see it to know for sure,” Monticello said.
Only the white brick chimney and her daughter’s backyard slide had survived the inferno that bore down on her neighborhood Monday morning.
Running Springs resident Ricky Garcia returned to his house in the San Bernardino Mountains on Wednesday, panicked that his street had been wiped out and his cats, Jeff and Viper, were lost.
But his house, a new home built on a cleared lot, was unscathed, unlike those of his neighbors. Hiding underneath a porch and mewing loudly was Jeff, his long, black hair gray with ash. Viper, however, was nowhere in sight.
“I’m excited to see my cat and my house, but absolutely devastated for my neighbors,” he said, after loading Jeff into a carrier and preparing to evacuate again. “I’ve been through fires before, but this one hit a lot closer to home.”
As nature’s blitzkrieg starts to recede, many of the other refugees will be allowed back to their neighborhoods. More than 500,000 people were evacuated in San Diego County alone, part of the largest mass evacuation in California history.
So far, at least 15 fires have destroyed about 1,500 homes since they began late Saturday.

TITLE: Champ Liverpool Remains Winless
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Liverpool extended its winless streak in this season’s Champions League, losing at Besiktas 2-1 Wednesday and hurting its chances of advancing.
The five-time champions are last in Group A with one point from three games.
“It is the worst possible result,” said Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard, who helped the team win the title in 2005 and reach the final last season. “We had a mountain to climb but we have got an even bigger one to climb now.”
Defending champion AC Milan had a comfortable 4-1 win over Shakhtar Donetsk. Alberto Gilardino and Clarence Seedorf scored two goals each.
Robinho scored two goals in Real Madrid’s 4-2 win over 10-man Olympiakos, and Rosenborg upset Valencia 2-0. Also, it was: Chelsea 2, Schalke 0; Werder Bremen 2, Lazio 1; Benfica 1, Celtic 0; and Marseille 1, FC Porto 1.
Besiktas took the lead on a Liverpool defensive error. Jamie Carragher blocked an attempt from Bobo, and the ball went to Serdar Ozkan, whose shot went in off the leg of Liverpool defender Sami Hyypia in the 13th minute for an own-goal.
The Turkish team doubled its lead in the 81st when Bobo met Ibrahim Uzulmez’s through ball outside the box, drove in and beat Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina.
Gerrard scored in the 85th on a diving header.
Marseille leads the group with seven points, followed by Porto with five and Besiktas with three.
Lucho Gonzalez converted a late penalty kick to earn Porto the draw after goalkeeper Steve Mandanda fouled Lisandro Lopez inside the area. Mamadou Niang put Marseille ahead in the 69th minute, deflecting in a cross from Djibril Cisse.
Milan went to the top of Group D to get its Champions League defense back on track after an early loss.
Gilardino headed in goals in the sixth and 14th minutes off corners, and Seedorf volleyed in his goals in the 62nd and 69th. Cristiano Lucarelli pulled one back for Shakhtar in the 51st.
Benfica beat Celtic 1-0 off a goal from Oscar Cardozo in the 87th minute in the other Group D game.
Milan has six points, leading Shakhtar on goal difference. Benfica and Celtic have three points each.
Real Madrid striker Raul Gonzalez scored his 58th goal in the Champions League in the second minute.

TITLE: Iraqi Delegation To Visit Turkey
AUTHOR: By Volkan Sarisakal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CIZRE, Turkey — Turkey is running out of patience and will not tolerate the use of Iraqi soil for the purpose of launching terrorist activities, the Turkish president said Thursday ahead of a visit from a high-level Iraqi delegation.
The Turkish military, meanwhile, said troops had killed 30 Kurdish rebels who were preparing to attack a military unit near the border with Iraq. The report increased the number of rebels killed since Sunday to at least 64, according to military figures.
Turkey has threatened to stage an incursion into northern Iraq if Iraqi Kurds and U.S.-led coalition forces do not crack down on Kurdish rebels.
“We are totally determined to take all the necessary steps to end this threat,” President Abdullah Gul said in a speech opening the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization foreign ministers’ meeting in Ankara.
The high-level Iraqi delegation was expected to visit Ankara on Thursday after Turkey’s top leadership recommended the government take economic measures to force Iraqi cooperation against Kurdish rebels and Turkey considered a possible military cross-border offensive.
On Wednesday, Turkish warplanes reportedly pounded rebel positions along the border. An AP Television News cameraman standing at the Habur border crossing on Thursday saw a pair of warplanes flying from northern Iraq back into Turkey. It was not clear whether the planes were on a reconnaissance mission.
Several F-16 warplanes were seen taking off from an air base in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir earlier Thursday, local reporters said.
A Kurdish rebel ambush near the border killed 12 soldiers on Sunday. Eight soldiers have been missing since then; the rebels say they are holding them and have distributed photographs and video footage.
The Iraqi delegation visiting Thursday will be headed by the Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi and will include Minister of State for National Security Sherwan al-Waili, said Yassin Majid, an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“It will discuss all issues between the two countries. The political choice will be the first solution to solve the crisis. The Iraqi government insists on dialogue and cooperation to solve the crisis,” Majid said.
Iraq already has promised to shut down offices used by rebel bases. But Turkey wants Iraq and U.S. forces to destroy rebel bases and extradite the rebel leadership to Turkey.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said Turkey is “expecting them to come with concrete proposals and otherwise the visit will have no meaning.”
Turkey has launched a diplomatic campaign to ease concerns of Western allies that a Turkish offensive could destabilize northern Iraq, which escaped much of violence that gripped Iraq, and is also weighing economic sanctions as an option to win the backing of local Iraqi Kurds.
Turkey’s military and civilian leaders on Wednesday recommended the government “to first take necessary economic measures against those groups directly or indirectly supporting the separatist terrorist organization in the region.”
The self-ruling Kurdish administration in Iraq’s north relies heavily on Turkish investment, mainly for construction works, including the building of roads, hospitals and infrastructure.
Ankara is also selling electricity to northern Iraq, and most food sold in markets come from Turkey. The Turkish Trade Minister said earlier Wednesday that economic sanctions could be taken.
Turkey’s military and civilian leaders face growing demands at home to stage the offensive in northern Iraq, where the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, rest, train and get supplies in relative safety before returning to Turkey to conduct attacks.
Troops on Thursday were seen using mine detectors against roadside rebel bombs as they patrolled near the town of Yuksekova in Hakkari province, bordering Iraq and Iran, the television crew reported.
Troops have killed 231 Kurdish rebels in several clashes since Jan. 1, the state-run Anatolia news agency, citing military sources, reported Thursday. It did not say how many soldiers were killed in the clashes in the same period but around 30 soldiers were ambushed and killed this month alone.
Turkish security forces also have seized more than 110,000 pounds of dynamite and plastic explosives from suspected rebels across the country in the same period, Anatolia reported. Kurdish militants have carried out numerous bombings in Turkey.
Turkey seems willing to refrain from a major cross-border action until at least early next month, when it is scheduled to host foreign ministers for a meeting about Iraq.

TITLE: Lebanese Troops Open Fire on Israeli Warplanes
AUTHOR: By Sam Ghattas
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanese troops opened fire Thursday on Israeli warplanes flying low over southern Lebanon, but no hits were reported, Lebanese officials said.
Israeli warplanes frequently fly over Lebanese airspace in what Israel says are reconnaissance missions, but this was the first time the Lebanese army has fired on the aircraft since an Aug. 14, 2006, cease-fire ended a monthlong war between Israeli and Hezbollah guerrillas.
Lebanese soldiers opened up with machine guns and light anti-aircraft weapons mounted on armored vehicles at two planes that flew by just east of Marjayoun town near the border at midmorning, a Lebanese security official said.
A total of 150 rounds were fired, he added.
A senior military officer also said that the army had “confronted” the Israeli airforce planes, but he gave no specific details.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity in the absence of a formal announcement from the military command.
The Israeli military does not comment on air operations, but there were no reports from Jerusalem of any planes being hit.

TITLE: Inspectors Say Beijing Is Safe But Air Still a Worry
AUTHOR: By Nick Mulvenney
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — Chief Olympic inspector Hein Verbruggen foresees no “risks or dangers” in the preparations for next year’s Beijing Games, although the problem of air pollution was being closely monitored.
Speaking on Thursday at the end of a three-day visit by the IOC’s inspection team, Verbruggen said he was confident the Games would be of the highest standard even if there was still much detailed work to be done over the remaining 288 days.
“There is nothing, and I repeat nothing, that is any risk or danger for the organisation of next year’s Games,” the Dutchman, who is chairman of the International Olympic Committee [IOC]’s coordination commission, told a news conference.
“We look towards a lot of green lights as far as the preparations of these Games for next year are concerned ... our friends here [in Beijing] are doing a perfect job to make these Games a great Games.”
A report by the United Nations Environmental Programme released on Thursday said Beijing was on course to hold a Green Olympics but air quality remained a problem.
Verbruggen said it was a concern and the IOC and Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games [BOCOG] were monitoring the situation “from day to day.”
“Let there be no misunderstanding,” he said. “This is a health issue, it would be almost insulting that we would not take this seriously, we remain confident that this will be addressed sufficiently.”
BOCOG executive vice president Jiang Xiaoyu said Beijing would continue its multi-billion dollar project to clean up the city’s smog but had also planned some contingency measures for Games’ time.
These could include taking 1.3 million cars off the city’s roads, as happened during a test project in August.

TITLE: Tour de France Route Revealed
AUTHOR: By Julien Pretot
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — Tour de France organizers have designed a balanced route for the 95th edition of the world’s premier stage race next year with a brutal climb up L’Alpe d’Huez in the final week set to potentially decide the eventual outcome.
Starting in Brest on July 5, the 2008 Tour will run over 3,554km from the Brittany city to Paris with four hilly stages and five mountain stages, including three in the Alps.
“We wanted to put rhythm into the first week,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme told reporters on Thursday.
“We wanted to offer different scenarios. There will be possibilities to attack in every stage,” he added.
Organizers also hope the race’s scenario will differ from this year’s, when the Tour was hit by doping scandals.
“We are fed up with the (doping) affairs. Let’s go back to sport,” Amaury Sport Organization (ASO) president Patrice Clerc said.
In July, then leader Michael Rasmussen and Kazakh Alexander Vinokourov were both kicked out of the race amid doping scandals.
Competition director Jean-Francois Pescheux said there would be no time bonuses throughout.
“The first week will not necessarily be the exclusive property of the sprinters,” he said.
“The end of the first stage, for example, is a two-kilometer slope. So a great finisher can win but also a sprinter or a rider who broke away earlier in the stage.”
 “We want the Tour to rediscover its romanticism. It means the plot will not be obvious,” Prudhomme added.
One year after the roaring success of the opening stage in London, the Tour returns to its roots with three days in Brittany, a region that gave birth to five-times winner Bernard Hinault, three-times champion Louison Bobet and two-times winner Lucien Petit-Breton.
For the first time since 1966, the race will not start with an individual time trial with the effort against the clock taking place in Cholet in the fourth stage.
Hilly stages will take the peloton straight to the Pyrenees with a finish at Hautacam.

TITLE: United States To Slap New Range of Sanctions on Iran
AUTHOR: By Matthew Lee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is imposing sweeping new sanctions against Iran’s defense ministry, its Revolutionary Guard Corps and a number of banks to punish them for purported support for terrorist organizations in Iraq and the Middle East, missile sales and nuclear activities, U.S. officials said Thursday.
The measures, to be announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, will cover some of the Iranian government’s largest military and financial institutions, which Washington blames for supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Shia insurgent groups in Iraq, along with the Hamas and Hezbollah organizations, they said.
Iran’s defense ministry and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are to be designated proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile technology while several banks will be hit with sanctions for “proiliferation financing,” the officials told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity before the formal announcement.
The Quds force and banks will be identified as “specially designated global terrorist” groups for their activities and financing of militant groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East, the officials said.
In all, more than 20 Iranian entities, including individuals and companies owned or controlled by the Revolutionary Guards will be covered by the sanctions, they said.
The sanctions will be the toughest the United States has levied against Tehran since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy there.
Rice told a House committee Wednesday that the administration shares Congress’ goal of making sanctions tougher on Iran. She also declared that activities in Iraq by the Quds Force “are inconsistent with the Iranian government’s obligations and stated commitment to support the Iraqi government.”