SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1336 (102), Friday, December 28, 2007
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TITLE: Pakistan’s  Bhutto Assassinated
AUTHOR: By Sadaqat Jan and Zarar Khan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said.
Bhutto’s supporters erupted in anger and grief after her death, attacking police and burning tires and election campaign posters in several cities. At the hospital where she died, some smashed glass and wailed, chanting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf.
The death of the 54-year-old charismatic former prime minister threw the campaign for the Jan. 8 parliamentary elections into chaos and created fears of mass protests and violence across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.
Musharraf convened an emergency meeting with his senior staff where they were expected to discuss whether to postpone the election, an official at the Interior Ministry said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.
The attacker struck just minutes after Bhutto addressed thousands of supporters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, 8 miles south of Islamabad. She was shot in the neck and chest by the attacker, who then blew himself up, said Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s security adviser.
Sardar Qamar Hayyat, a leader from Bhutto’s party, said he was standing about 10 yard away from Bhutto’s vehicle.
“She was inside the vehicle and was coming out from the gate after addressing the rally when some of the youths started chanting slogans in her favor,” he said. “Then I saw a thin, young man jumping to her vehicle from the back and opening fire. Moments later, I saw her speeding vehicle going away.”
At least 20 others were killed in the attack.
Bhutto was rushed to the hospital and taken into emergency surgery. She died about an hour after the attack.
“At 6:16 p.m., she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital.
“The surgeons confirmed that she has been martyred,” Bhutto’s lawyer Babar Awan said.
Bhutto’s supporters at the hospital exploded in anger, smashing the glass door at the main entrance of the emergency unit. Others burst into tears. One man with a flag of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party tied around his head was beating his chest.
“I saw her with my own eyes sitting in a vehicle after addressing the rally. Then, I heard an explosion,” Tahir Mahmood, 55, said sobbing. “I am in shock. I cannot believe that she is dead,” he said.
Many chanted slogans against Musharraf, accusing him of complicity in her killing. No one claimed responsibility for the killing.
“We repeatedly informed the government to provide her proper security and appropriate equipment ... but they paid no heed to our requests,” Malik said.
As news of her death spread, angry supporters took to the streets in the northwestern city of Peshawar as well other areas, chanting slogans against Musharraf. In Rawalpindi, the site of the attack, Bhutto’s supporters burned election posters from the ruling party and attacked police, who fled the scene.
In Karachi, shop owners quickly closed their businesses as supporters from Bhutto’s party burned tires on the roads.
Nawaz Sharif, another former premier and opposition leader, arrived at the hospital and sat silently next to Bhutto’s body.
“Benazir Bhutto was also my sister, and I will be with you to take the revenge for her death,” he said. “Don’t feel alone. I am with you. We will take the revenge on the rulers.”
Speaking to the BBC, Sharif also questioned whether to hold the elections.
“I think perhaps none of us is inclined to think of the elections,” he said. “We would have to sit down and take a very serious look at the current situation together with the People’s Party and see what we have to do in the coming days.”
Hours earlier, four people were killed at a rally for Sharif when his supporters clashed with backers of Musharraf near Rawalpindi.
Bhutto’s death will leave a void at the top of her party, the largest political group in the country, as it heads into the parliamentary elections. It also fueled fears that the crucial vote could descend into violence.
Pakistan is considered a vital U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida and other Islamic extremists including the Taliban. Osama bin Laden and his inner circle are believed to be hiding in lawless northwest Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan.
In Washington, the State Department condemned the attack.

TITLE: Nemtsov Pulls Out of Presidential Race
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov announced Wednesday that he would not run for president and called on other opposition candidates to follow suit or risk legitimizing a “farcical” election.
Nemtsov, one of six candidates approved by the Central Elections Commission to run in the March 2 ballot, said he was quitting the race in part because of the opposition’s failure to field a single candidate.
“I had always hoped there would be a single candidate from a united democratic opposition, and this had not happened,” Nemtsov said by telephone.
Nemtsov’s departure leaves former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, head of the Russian People’s Democratic Union, as the only remaining candidate in the race from the liberal opposition.
Nemtsov said his decision was also based on the Kremlin’s use of so-called administrative resources in backing its handpicked candidate, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Medvedev, who has the support President Vladimir Putin, is running as the candidate from pro-Kremlin party United Russia.
Opinion polls show Medvedev running away with the race before it has even started. Seventy-nine percent of Russians would vote for Medvedev if the election were held next Sunday, according to the most recent poll conducted by the independent Levada Center. The poll, conducted Dec. 21 to 25, questioned 1,600 voters across the country and had a margin of error of less than 3 percent.
Along with Nemtsov, Kasyanov and Medvedev, approved to run in the election are Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Democratic Party leader Andrei Bogdanov.
Nemtsov called on Zyuganov and Kasyanov to quit the race if the Kremlin abuses its power to ensure Medvedev’s victory or if candidates are denied equal access to national television.
Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin who was once seen as Yeltsin’s political heir, also called on Zyuganov and Kasyanov to demand that Medvedev participate in televised debates with other candidates.
Putin did not participate in debates in the 2004 presidential election, and no United Russia candidates took part in televised debates ahead of the Dec. 2 State Duma elections, in which it grabbed 315 out of 450 Duma seats.
Because Union of Right Forces, or SPS, failed to win any seats in the Duma, Nemtsov would have been required to collect at least 2 million signatures by Jan. 16 to get on the ballot.
Kasyanov, whose supporters have begun collecting signatures, said Wednesday that he would not quit his presidential bid.
“I don’t plan to and am not considering the possibility,” Kasyanov said, Interfax reported.
Kasyanov said, however, that if the Kremlin turns the election into a “farce,” he would not participate.
Zyuganov said Wednesday that his party could pull him from the race if authorities use “dirty” campaign tactics. Nemtsov’s announcement came just six days after he submitted his registration papers to the Central Elections Commission and just nine days after SPS enthusiastically nominated him.
Asked what happened thereafter to prompt him to quit, Nemtsov abruptly said, “Nothing has changed.”
SPS leader Nikita Belykh declined to comment Wednesday when reached by telephone. He wrote on his LiveJournal blog, however, that he supported Nemtsov’s decision.
Political analysts Boris Makarenko and Alexei Mukhin said Nemtsov flinched because he understood that he would not be able to collect 2 million signatures.
The Central Elections Commission said it had not received an official request to remove Nemtsov from the list of candidates as of Wednesday afternoon.

TITLE: Local Hero Saves Lives, Wins Praise for Bravery
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Once in order to save a man’s life St. Petersburg rescue worker Vadim Nenonen, who was named Russia’s Best Rescue Worker of 2007, had to take off almost all his clothes.
“A man had fallen under ice and he’d been in the water for about 10 minutes. The man was so cold that he could have died from hypothermia so the only way to warm him up was to do so with my own body,” Nenonen, 44, said.
“You know, warming someone up with one’s own body is the best way to save someone’s life in such cases,” Nenonen said.
He said that after warming up the man in this manner in a nearby village house, he became completely frozen himself. But the man survived and was later hospitalized. It is only one example of the sort of unusual cases that rescue workers deal with as they carry out a job that requires various skills and personal qualities, Nenonen said.
Nenonen, who works at the North-West Search and Rescue Division (NWSRD) of the Ministry of Emergency Situations (Emercom), began working for Emercom in 1991. Since then he has participated in more than 350 rescue operations in which he and his colleagues have helped about 1,900 people. 
Nenonen said he has personally rescued about 20 people but added that it is always hard to say how many lives a rescue worker saves.
“Rescue operations are always teamwork, and most of them would not be possible if there wasn’t a group working together,” Nenonen said.
Nenonen said he decided to become a rescue worker because he had good training as a diver when he served in the navy.
“Everything came together with that job.  It was very interesting for me since it combined all kinds of different activities,” he said.
Nenonen received the title of Russia’s Best Emercom Rescue Worker of the Year for a series of courageous acts carried out during more than 13 years as a rescue worker.  
These include emergency operations at Uliltsa Dvinskaya in 2002 when an entire nine-story residential building collapsed, killing four people; at Sennaya Ploschad in 1999 when the canopy above the entrance of a metro station collapsed, killing several people; and at a factory explosion in 2001, among other cases.
In 1998 Nenonen and his team saved about 1,000 fishermen in 24 hours. Two large groups of ice fishermen got trapped on blocks of ice that broke away on open water at Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. Nenonen’s team came to the rescue.
In fact, saving Russian ice fishermen has become almost routine for local rescue workers. Fishermen go ice-fishing even when the ice gets too thin and dangerous to walk on. They then often get in trouble and need rescuing with the help of helicopters.
Nenonen also remembers the case of a teenage boy who got lost in caves at Sablino outside St. Petersburg. The boy had been exploring the caves with a friend who managed to find his way out. However, perhaps out of fear, the friend kept silent for a week about the first boy still being trapped in the caves.
“When we found the boy, he lay on his side and was obviously in psychological shock and had slow reactions to the things happening around him. However he had survived by licking water off the walls of the cave,” Nenonen said.
Nenonen also warned that people should never try to get out of a stuck elevator themselves. He said he had witnessed several cases when people, mainly teenagers, had tried to do so and then been killed when the elevator suddenly moved.
Nenonen said he is never frightened when he carries out rescues. 
“First of all, a rescue worker should never have hysterics; he should know how to control his emotions well. Secondly, if one does his work professionally and keeps the situation under control there’s no big risk,” he said.
Nenonen said the hardest thing is to deal with death.
“It’s always hard when you find a dead person, be it a lost mushroom picker or a drown man,” he said.
But when attempts to save a human life are successful it gives Nenonen lots of “positive energy,” he said.
Nenonen said people willing to become rescue workers have to pass tough tests on their psychological characteristics and motivation.
“Ideally, a rescue worker should be a person who is ready to do anything in order to save a human life. In a way, one should be an altruist by nature,” Nenonen said.
Nenonen, who is a first class diver, said rescue workers need to have at least several specialties in order to be effective in different life saving operations. In addition to his diving skills, Nenonen is an industrial climber and a navigator.
“In fact, almost any rescue worker should know how to work with mechanical and hydraulic instruments, be a scaffold worker, an electrician, and to manage other technical professions,” he said.
Another must for emergency staff is good physical fitness. For that reason rescue workers need to do at least two hours of physical training a day, Nenonen said.
At the same time, all rescue workers go through medical training and they are able to do CPR, stop bleeding, or even handle the delivery of a baby.
“We also get some psychological training, and can basically work as crisis psychologists,” Nenonen said.
Beslan Gogokhiya, head of the NWSRD, said they nominated Nenonen for Best Rescue Worker of the Year for his “high level of professionalism.”
“He is a very qualified rescue worker on land, on water and under water. There are few such high quality divers,” Gogokhiya said. He said Nenonen is also a “very reliable and honest man.”
“As we say in Russia, he is someone I would go on reconnaissance with,” Gogokhiya said.
Gogokhiya said Nenonen showed his professionalism as a diver and head of a divers’ group when the NWSRD were looking for the body of a drowned man in Lake Ladoga.
“He performed that work in very hard conditions — a strong wind, strong tides, cold temperatures. It was a big responsibility and the mission was successful,” he said.
Viktor Osipov, Nenonen’s colleague at the NWSRD, said Nenonen is one of the most experienced rescue workers on their team.
“Vadim is one of those people, who will always help and support in any situation,” Osipov said. “As a professional diver Vadim has always been an example for me to follow.”

TITLE: Kobzon Replaced in Duma
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A renowned singer and an acclaimed film director protested the election of a lawyer as chairman of the State Duma’s Culture Committee at a session where old faces were re-elected to most senior positions, including Speaker Boris Gryzlov.
United Russia easily pushed through its members as the heads of 26 of the Duma’s 32 committees at an opening session Monday. The other three factions won the remaining chairmanships, in contrast to the previous Duma where United Russia kept all the posts.
In a rare show of disunity, United Russia deputies Iosif Kobzon, the singer, and Stanislav Govorukhin, the film director, challenged the selection of lawyer Grigory Ivliyev to the Culture Committee.
“I think it’s offending and undermines the authority of United Russia,” Govorukhin said. “We wanted to create a healthy party, but what we have is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
Deputies laughed but confirmed Ivliyev to replace Kobzon on the committee.
Ivliyev, a first-time deputy, was chief legal adviser in the previous Duma.
Govorukhin declined to be named deputy chairman and, with Kobzon, signed up for the Information Policy Committee.

TITLE: Residents’ Rights Case To Come to City Court
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The local branch of the international environmental pressure group Bellona has thrown its weight behind a legal appeal against City Hall, arguing that city officials have made illegal changes to St. Petersburg’s development plan. The changes, claim Bellona, give a tacit blessing to rampant illegal construction practices that violate residents’ rights. 
The first hearing in the case was due to be held on Thursday in the Primorsky District Court. However the hearing was moved to Jan. 18 because the defendants did not show up.
The environmental group is supporting a legal appeal that had been prepared by a group of residents in the Dolgoye Lake municipality. The residents felt City Hall had violated their citizens’ rights by failing to organize public hearings ahead of a massive construction project in the neighborhood and restricted their access to information.
Bellona lawyer Olga Krivonos said the authorities have organized only one public hearing on the changes to the city development plan, which envisages large-scale construction in green areas, including parks and gardens, instead of the eight that would be required by law.
“There are over 400,000 residents in the Primorsky District, and the law obliges the city administration to organize at least one public hearing in each municipality,” Krivonos said. “Changes to the general plan are crucial to so many locals. If they had learned about what is coming to them — destruction of parks and gardens, construction of highways and trade centers just meters from their homes — they would have been extremely concerned.”
Bellona activists said that if the court rules in favor of the appeal, the decision would set an important legal precedent that can be used for filing similar cases in the future.
St. Petersburg citizens have been very active in the past year setting up protest groups against the practice of in-fill construction which means building in green zones, often tightly between existing buildings. Another common problem for St. Petersburg residents is when the City Hall sells plots of land with existing apartment buildings to a new investor — with an eye of demolishing the old building and constructing an entirely new property on the spot — and offers inadequate replacement housing or forces them to pay market prices for alternative accommodation.
Yelena Malysheva of the Okhtinskaya Duga movement, an umbrella group uniting a host of residents’ organizations, said residents’ rights are frequently violated in St. Petersburg when deep-pocketed investors have an interest in a particular plot of land, regardless of which area it is located. 
“In-fill construction continues in many areas despite concerns,” Malysheva said. “If a wealthy investor points to a plot of land, the authorities happily wipe out all residential buildings that get in the way of the plum project. The whole process is lawless. The residents are offered laughable compensation or a new home miles away from the city, not anywhere near where they originally lived. We are facing an invasion of barbaric construction.”

TITLE: Medvedev’s Future in the Stars
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — It doesn’t take an astrologer to see that Dmitry Medvedev will become Russia’s next president. But that’s not stopping astrologers from predicting it anyway.
Russian astrologers looking toward 2008 are forecasting a future that could have been scripted by spin doctors from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party that nominated Medvedev, a current first deputy prime minister.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they agree completely on what the future holds for Russia, which is, if you hadn’t guessed already, a typical Cancer.
Medvedev, meanwhile, is a Virgo. He is a flexible politician, said Yevgeny Volokontsev, a teacher at the Higher School of Astrology in Moscow who said Medvedev would be a successful president. President Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor is always learning and makes only sensible decisions, Volokontsev said.
“Maybe he will be even better than Putin,” Volokontsev said. “He is a very clever person, flexible and always developing.”
Having chosen a new president, Russia “will go quiet for four years,” astrologer Pavel Globa wrote last week in the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.
“But it will not be Brezhnev stagnation, but rather a time of growing strength, so as to successfully cope with the upcoming world economic crisis, which will reach its peak in 2012, first in the United States and then in Europe,” Globa said.
Anyone who still has savings in dollars should buy the mighty ruble now, assuming Globa’s predictions come true and the dollar drops to 15 rubles by the end of 2008. The euro, Globa predicts, will not be far behind.
Leaders and politicians have been looking to the stars since antiquity for some clue as to what the future will bring. Roman emperors saw political threats in the skies and used any astrological omen as an excuse to kill their rivals. Elizabeth I reportedly had her coronation date in 1558 selected by her astrological adviser.
Boris Yeltsin, Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand and Ronald Reagan are among last century’s world leaders who sought astrological advice before making decisions, according to “The Fated Sky; Astrology in History” by Benson Bobrick, published in 2006.
But detailed predictions for Russia in 2008 are difficult to find.
The government can handle a big shake-up after the election, Mikhail Levin, head of the Moscow Academy of Astrology, said in an e-mail interview, citing the path of Uranus.
Levin has had mixed success predicting developments in domestic politics. On the one hand, it appears his prediction that the next president would be “a person who is named by Putin” is working out quite well. He did, however, also predict that United Russia would have a slightly weaker position in the new Duma.
Led by Putin, the party captured 64.3 percent of the vote in the Dec. 2 elections and increased its number of Duma seats from 302 to 315.
Levin, who heads up the oldest astrology school in Moscow, created his astrological chart for Russia beginning July 6, 862, the date he says Russia was born in Novgorod following the ascendancy of Rurik.
Russia, therefore, is a Cancer, though Levin does not indicate what time the nation was born.
The activities of Pluto indicate the battle for control over the country is intensifying, as is the power struggle between siloviki factions, Levin said. Pluto’s relationship with the sun also shows that Putin’s relations with the siloviki are “less than ideal,” he said.
Levin warned of a record number of disasters in 2008 but added that “the country will survive it quite calmly.”

TITLE: Putin’s Pooch Gets Sat Nav
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has launched three satellites to complement its space navigation system, for which President Vladimir Putin said he had a specific plan: to keep tabs on his black lab, Connie.
The satellites were sent into orbit Tuesday on a Proton-M rocket that blasted off successfully from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, said Russian Federal Space Agency spokesman Alexander Vorobyov.
They are to join Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System, or Glonass — the equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System, or GPS.
Putin on Monday listened to First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov as he briefed the Cabinet on the development of Glonass.
Putin then asked, “When will I be able to buy the necessary equipment for my dog Connie?”
Ivanov responded that collars for dogs with satellite-guided positioning equipment would be available soon.

TITLE: Trutnev Sets New Rules
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Soldatkin and Amie Ferris-Rotman
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said his ministry would propose easing access to state auctions of large oil, gas and metal deposits by foreign companies but would tighten control over large-equity deals.
Analysts said the measure, if approved, would bring clarity to rules by which the Kremlin treats foreign investors. Investors have repeatedly called on Moscow to introduce a legal framework to policies often driven by resource nationalism.
“If before, foreigners were not allowed to participate in strategic field auctions, now the mechanism of access has substantially eased,” Trutnev, who has previously advocated caps on foreign majors, told reporters Monday.
Foreign firms “will now have a chance to access strategic fields by applying for permission from a government commission,” said Trutnev, who added that his ministry was working on changes to the existing legislation.
He gave no further details, but he said the ministry was also reviewing proposals on legal changes that would tighten equity deals involving firms that already control large deposits or fields of so-called strategic importance.
Under the proposals, the government should simply be notified about any equity deal involving a foreign-led firm buying a stake of less than 10 percent in a Russian firm with a strategic deposit.
The government should clear any deal involving more than 10 percent of a project, Trutnev said. No such clearance is required at the moment, as the ministry has yet to submit, and the parliament to approve, a law defining a strategic deposit.
Trutnev’s ministry has been working on a new text of the subsoil law for several years but has recently decided to amend existing legislation to speed up work.
Ministries and security services have repeatedly clashed on the subject with proposals including total bans on deals with strategic deposits, including those already in private hands.
Ronald Smith, chief strategist at Alfa Bank, said the new proposal seemed to be a softening of tone for him, as proposals could have been much tougher.
“The government was always talking about control, control, control. They always wanted a Russian company in control. For the big assets they had problems with foreigners. ... At worst this is neutral,” he said.
Trutnev has previously said any field containing 70 million tons of oil, 50 billion cubic meters of gas, 50 tons of gold or 500,000 tons of copper should qualify as strategic. On Monday, he said those criteria would not change.
Earlier, the ministry identified strategic fields in several sectors, including 31 gas fields, that can be given only to Russian majority-owned companies.

TITLE: Gazprom’s Tomskneft Deal Gets Approval
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom’s oil arm, Gazprom Neft, has received approval from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to buy half of Tomskneft, a Rosneft unit that once belonged to bankrupt oil firm Yukos, as the gas giant seeks to expand oil output.
Gazprom Neft will pay 90.5 billion rubles ($3.66 billion) for half of Tomskneft, Kommersant reported, citing an unidentified person close to Gazprom’s oil arm.
The two state-controlled companies reached an agreement on the sale of the stake, Natalya Vyalkina, a spokeswoman for Gazprom Neft, said by telephone Wednesday. She declined to name the price or a time frame.
Gazprom, which failed in an attempt to acquire Rosneft in 2005, has been expanding its oil business since the purchase of Sibneft from billionaire Roman Abramovich and his partners after they unraveled a merger with Yukos. The unit was renamed Gazprom Neft the same year.
President Vladimir Putin’s administration has used former Yukos assets to build up Rosneft and Gazprom’s dominance of the oil industry. Rosneft bought Tomskneft and Yukos’ other east Siberian oil assets at a $6.8 billion bankruptcy auction in May to become the country’s largest crude producer and refiner after leading the bankruptcy case against Yukos last year.
Rosneft said in July that it sold half of Tomskneft to the new Development Bank, formerly called Vneshekonombank, for $3.4 billion.
The bank denied taking ownership of the stake.
Rosneft said the sale occurred June 25, the same day it bought Yukos’ trading house, Moscow headquarters and other property for the same amount.
Gazprom Neft last week applied to the anti-monopoly service for permission to buy the stake in Tomskneft, Kommersant reported Monday.
The Tomskneft deal ends a guessing game over the real owners of the 240,000-barrels-per-day oil producer. Rosneft had said it sold half of Tomskneft in July after buying the unit at a state bankruptcy auction in May.
Tomskneft would become the first Yukos asset that Rosneft has agreed to share. The sale comes shortly after Putin blessed Gazprom chairman Dmitry Medvedev’s candidacy to succeed him in the March presidential election.
But the Development Bank said it was not involved in the deal, prompting analysts to speculate that it was a warehousing transaction.
Rosneft produces around 2.3 million bpd, and the sale would reduce its output by about 5 percent.
The addition of 120,000 bpd would increase Gazprom’s oil production by 14 percent, bringing it very close to the landmark figure of 1 million bpd.
Rosneft has to redeem $17 billion of short-term debt over the next year and has just decided to postpone a eurobond issue until next year due to volatile global markets.
(Bloomberg, Reuters)

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Gridlock Eases</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russian truck lines at the border with Latvia eased Tuesday after record delays as drivers tried to leave the European Union before the start of the Christmas holiday.
The number of trucks waiting at the Burachki crossing on the road to Moscow shrank 33 percent to 800 as of 1 p.m., the St. Petersburg-based Northwestern Customs Agency said. At the Ubylinka crossing for St. Petersburg, the backlog fell 44 percent to 530 trucks. (Bloomberg)

<b>$2.5Bln for Port</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — St. Petersburg ports spent a record $2.5 billion on upgrades and expansion this year as exports and imports advanced, Vedomosti reported Monday, citing analysts and companies.
The largest project is the construction of the Baltic Container Terminal at Ust-Luga, the first phase of which is scheduled to be completed next year, the newspaper said. 

<b>Sberbank Sale</b>
ASTANA, Kazakhstan (Reuters) — Sberbank plans to list existing shares in London rather than raise fresh equity, its new head, German Gref, said Wednesday.
“It won’t be a supplementary issue — it will be existing shares,” Gref told reporters in the Kazakh capital, Astana.
Gref said a timetable for the London listing would be set in the new year. 

<b>Rosneft, LUKoil</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Natural Resources Ministry found violations of license agreements at fields operated by units of LUKoil and Rosneft, the ministry said Wednesday.
LUKoil’s Ritek unit is working in the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district without proper documentation and is behind its production timetable, and Udmurtneft, a company owned by Rosneft and Sinopec, is not producing enough oil or drilling the number of wells stipulated in the license, the ministry said. 

<b>New Norilsk Bid</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — United Company RusAl plans to bid for a 2 percent stake in Norilsk Nickel to boost its holding in the world’s largest nickel and palladium producer to 27 percent, the company said Tuesday.
RusAl sent a purchase request to KM Invest, which is selling part of the stake jointly held by billionaires Mikhail Prokhorov and Vladimir Potanin, RusAl said. 

<b>Gazprom Ups Stake</b>
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Gazprom has bought 46.6 percent of a supplementary share offering by wholesale generator OGK-6, securing a 17 percent stake, OGK-6 said Tuesday.
Gazprom paid 20.999 billion rubles ($849 million) for 5.53 billion shares, priced at 3.8 rubles each. 

<b>Gazprom Reserves </b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom will replace oil and gas reserves this year, deputy chief executive Alexander Ananenkov said, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Gazprom will add 610 million tons of oil equivalent this year, about the same amount it did last year, Ananenkov said, Interfax reported. 

<b>Oil-Export Tax Up 18%</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will increase its tax on oil exports Feb. 1 by at least 18 percent to a record on rising world fuel prices in November and December, said Alexander Sakovich, deputy head of the Finance Ministry’s customs department.
The tax will top $325 per ton and is likely to exceed $330, Sakovich said. 
The current duty is $275.40 per ton, or $37.57 per barrel. 
Sberbank Lending</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Sberbank lent companies and individuals a combined total of 338.6 billion rubles ($13.7 billion) last month, a national record, as a global credit squeeze made it harder for businesses to borrow abroad.
Sberbank boosted outstanding loans by 9.5 percent to 3.91 trillion rubles ($158 billion) in November under outgoing chief executive Andrei Kazmin

TITLE: Toyota Plans To Sell 9.85 Million Vehicles
AUTHOR: By Yuri Kageyama
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NAGOYA, Japan — Toyota plans to sell 9.85 million vehicles worldwide in 2008, the company said Tuesday, setting an ambitious target despite worries about a slowing U.S. car market, as it tries to become the world’s top automaker.
Toyota also said it plans to produce 9.95 million vehicles worldwide next year, up 5 percent from this year — the same as the projected annual percentage jump for Toyota’s global sales.
Its recent growth has put Toyota Motor Corp. on track to beat U.S.-based General Motors to become the world’s largest automaker by sales. GM has said it estimates this year’s sales to total 9.3 million vehicles, against Toyota’s estimate of 9.36 million sales.
Toyota’s growth been based in large part on the popularity of models such as the Camry sedan, Corolla subcompact and the Prius gas-electric hybrid.
Soaring gas prices have dramatically boosted the appeal of smaller fuel-efficient models that are Toyota’s main strength.
General Motors has been fiercely fighting back, boosting its overseas business and could still keep the top industry spot, which it has held for 76 years.
GM has not given a forecast for the number of vehicles it expects to produce or sell in 2008. The Detroit automaker has the industry record for annual global vehicle sales, with the 9.55 million vehicles sold by GM in 1978.
Toyota executives acknowledged Tuesday worries about the U.S. market, which has been hit by the subprime mortgage crisis and soaring oil prices. But they nonetheless projected increasing U.S. sales by 1 percent to 2.64 million vehicles.
They were also bullish about prospects for emerging markets such as China, Russia and South America, while being conservative expectations for Europe, at a 2 percent increase to 1.27 million vehicles, and seeing sales in Japan remain flat at 1.6 million next year.
But Koji Endo, auto analyst with Credit Suisse in Tokyo, said next year will likely prove a challenge even for Toyota, as U.S. economic woes weigh on sales and profits.
But he said the overall optimism for sales growth was “reasonable,” given Toyota’s recent performance.
“These are targets Toyota is giving, not forecasts, and so they are reasonable,” he said.
After the first nine months of this year, Toyota was — at 7.05 million vehicles sold worldwide — trailing GM’s sales of 7.06 million vehicles for the same period. The final tally for this year’s numbers won’t be out until January next year.
GM’s spokesman in Tokyo, Michihiro Yamamori, declined to comment, citing company policy to refrain from commenting on its rivals’ targets.
Toyota also said it was preparing to start mass producing lithium-ion batteries for low-emission vehicles.
Lithium-ion batteries, already widely used in laptops and other gadgets, are smaller yet more powerful than the nickel-metal hydride batteries used in gas-electric hybrids like the Prius now.
Lithium-ion batteries will not be used in the Prius, on sale for a decade and the most popular hybrid on the market, according to Toyota.

TITLE: Stocks Fall on Bhutto Death, Weak Data
AUTHOR: By Tim Paradis
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Stocks fell in Thursday after the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and after the Commerce Department reported a weak increase in durable goods orders.
Bhutto’s assassination raised the possibility of increasing political unrest abroad, always an unsettling prospect for investors. 
Oil, gold and bond prices rose following the news.
Meanwhile, the government said orders for durable goods — big-ticket items from commercial jetliners to home appliances — rose by just 0.1 percent last month. Economists had been looking for a rise of 2.2 percent. Still, November saw the first rise in durable-goods orders in the last four months.
The notion that the economy is slowing was also unnerving for the market.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department said the number of workers seeking unemployment benefits showed a surprise increase last week. Applications filed for unemployment insurance rose by a seasonally adjusted 1,000 to 349,000. Economists had expecting the figure would fall to around 340,000 for last week.
In a bright spot, the Conference Board said its Consumer Confidence Index advanced to 88.6 in December from a revised 87.8 in November. It was the first increase since July and Wall Street had expected a slight drop.
Wall Street follows the employment and consumer confidence figures because consumer spending represents about two-thirds of economic activity in the U.S.
In midmorning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 66.49, or 0.49 percent, to 13,485.20.
Broader stock indicators also fell. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 7.74, or 0.52 percent, to 1,489.92, and Nasdaq composite index fell 13.24, or 0.49 percent, to 2,711.17.
Bond prices rose as investors worried about political instability sought the safety of U.S.-backed investments. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 4.21 percent from 4.29 percent late Wednesday. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices rose.
Light, sweet crude rose 38 cents to $96.35 per barrel in pre-opening trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Stocks have managed to increase for the past four trading days, posting a modest increase Wednesday as investors tried to reconcile their expectations with somewhat disappointing results from retailers.
The battered financial sector again commanded some of Wall Street’s attention following predictions by Goldman Sachs that the flood of writedowns at banks will continue.
Goldman predicted Citigroup Inc. may be forced to write off 70 percent more than the $8 billion to $11 billion Citi forecast in early November. Citi could also cut its dividend by 40 percent and may need to raise $5 billion to $10 billion more cash, Goldman estimates.
Citi, one of the 30 stocks that makes up the Dow Jones industrials, fell 74 cents, or 2.4 percent, to $29.71.
Meanwhile, Goldman also raised concerns about Merrill Lynch & Co., which fell 78 cents to $53.76 and JPMorgan Chase & Co. fell 48 cents to $44.46.
In other corporate news, Sallie Mae fell $1.35, or 6.1 percent, to $20.78 after saying it would sell $2.5 billion in stock and use a bulk of the proceeds to settle contracts requiring the company to buy back stock at prices above current levels. The student lender, officially known as SLM Corp., shares fell sharply last week amid concerns about the company’s plans following a the collapse of a $25 billion buyout deal.
Declining issues outnumbered advancers by about 2 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 140.6 million shares.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 6.40, or 0.80 percent, to 790.63.
Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 0.57 percent. In afternoon trading, Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.12 percent, Germany’s DAX index gained 0.49 percent, and France’s CAC-40 added 0.17 percent.

TITLE: U.S. Home Prices Post Record Annual Fall
AUTHOR: By Richard Leong
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Prices of existing U.S. single-family homes recorded their biggest annual drop in October, suggesting the housing slump is far from over, a national home price gauge released on Wednesday showed.
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller year-over-year index of 10 metropolitan areas fell to 209.68 in October, down 6.7 percent from a year earlier. The decline surpassed the 6.3 percent drop in April 1991.
“No matter how you look at these data, it is obvious that the current state of the single-family housing market remains grim,” said Robert Shiller, chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC, in a statement.
The firms’ newer, composite home price index on 20 metropolitan areas declined to 192.89 in October, down 6.1 percent from a year ago.
On a month-over-month basis, both indexes lost 1.4 percent in October compared with September.
The bleak housing data spurred more selling in stocks, which were already under downward pressure on worries over weak Christmas tallies among retailers. 
Bond prices were also stuck in the red, as the data failed to stoke hopes of more interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.
Eleven of the 20 metropolitan areas recorded their largest monthly decline on record in October, led by San Diego, where home prices fell 2.6 percent, according to S&P/Case-Shiller.
On an annual basis, single-family home prices in Miami recorded the biggest decline, down 12.4 percent in October, followed by Tampa with an 11.8 percent fall.
Charlotte, Portland and Seattle were the only cities still experiencing annual home appreciation in October, as tracked by the S&P/Case-Shiller indexes.
At least one economist predicted that home depreciation will continue well into 2008 in order to attract enough buyers to clear the huge backlog in inventories.
“It’s painful medication but it’s the one that works,” said Gregory Miller, chief economist at SunTrust Banks Inc. in Atlanta.
“More likely, we’ll be well into 2009 before we start describing this housing cycle as ‘in recovery,”’ Miller added.

TITLE: A New Year of More Confrontation
AUTHOR: By Janusz Bugajski
TEXT: A new critical year in East-West relations is fast approaching. It promises to be a year of decision and confrontation. 2008 will present an important challenge for European Union unity, trans-Atlantic cohesion and the determination of the West to stand up to an increasingly assertive and expansive Russia.
The world is waiting for final decisions on the status of Kosovo. Without Russia’s involvement during the past year, Kosovo would already be a state, since Serbia by itself could not have resisted Western objectives to legitimize Kosovo’s de facto independence. Moscow’s calculation to use the disputed territory as a pawn in its “great game” against U.S. interests has made the process of statehood more tense and unpredictable.
Washington continues to demonstrate resolve over Kosovo’s final status despite the difficulties in forging an EU consensus and the hesitation evident among some European states in bypassing the UN Security Council, whose decisions are blocked by the Kremlin. The process of independence will most probably be completed by the time of the NATO summit in Bucharest in April. But the recognition of Kosovo’s statehood will generate fresh regional and international tensions that need to be competently handled by the trans-Atlantic powers.
The stabilization of the Western Balkans is manageable if NATO, the EU, and the United States work in tandem to prevent Belgrade and Moscow from exploiting latent tensions and militant expectations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro. Although Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica may act irrationally in response to Kosovo’s independence, Belgrade no longer has the capabilities to export war to neighboring states. A display of diplomatic and military force may be necessary by NATO and the EU to convince local actors that the West is serious.
Containing Russian reactions outside of the Balkans, however, may prove more problematic. Some analysts say the Kremlin has drawn a red line across Kosovo’s independence. If the West recognizes the new state, the Kremlin may pursue its “national interests” more vigorously in several neighboring regions and intensify its anti-U.S. alliances. Washington and Brussels need to be prepared for all eventualities.
Moscow has already signaled that it will fortify its economic and political ties with Iran. In addition, it will seek a closer relationship with China to counter “U.S. expansionism,” and it will develop the Collective Security Treaty Organization into a competitor with NATO in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Moreover, Russia will increase pressure on all former Soviet colonies that seek inclusion in Western institutions.
Georgia has become the most vulnerable outpost of Western interests in the Caucasus, a region that Russia is determined to dominate both for reasons of geostrategy and energy politics. Moscow’s military commanders are prepared to assist the Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatist movements and confront the Georgian military if Tbilisi attempts to regain the two enclaves. Indeed, the Kremlin may seek to draw Georgia into a military confrontation to justify an already planned intervention.
The Russian authorities may also seek to apply pressure on Moldova by raising the specter of recognizing the breakaway Transdnestr region once Kosovo becomes independent. They are certain to fortify their military presence in Belarus and Kaliningrad, and they will lean heavily on the new Ukrainian government led by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to undermine the process of democratic reform and Western integration. In recent days, President Vladimir Putin has warned against Western influences in Ukraine and again raised the prospect of instability and disintegration.
The presidential election in March will not change official policy. Putin’s selected successor,  Dmitry Medvedev will remain beholden to the KGB clique that controls the Kremlin. Moscow’s policy will remain assertive and aggressive toward the West.
The list of conflict points between Russia and the West expands almost every week. It now includes such contentious questions as the missile defense shield, the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, ballistic missile accords, the role of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO enlargement, energy security and even the ownership rights to the Arctic. Tensions also persist over Kremlin pressures on the three Baltic states and its escalating confrontation with London. It is not surprising that the EU and Russia have been unable to arrange a new partnership agreement.
The Putin leadership has deliberately created a sense of danger through its anti-Western rhetoric. It claims that the United States and its closest NATO allies, such as Britain and Poland, are seeking to encircle Russia and prevent the country from regaining its rightful position as a major global player. The expansion of Western alliances and the promotion of liberal democracies are depicted as direct threats to Russia’s interests.
In these testing circumstances, the U.S. presidential election in November will be a good time to decide which direction the United States is heading. 
Among the priority items for the United States will be dealing with an expansionist Kremlin that is once again seeking to divide the Western alliance and diminish U.S. influence. The decision on Kosovo’s statehood will be an early indication of whether Washington is determined to stand by its principles and is capable of ensuring trans-Atlantic cohesion — even at the cost of exacerbating the inevitable confrontation with Russia.

Janusz Bugajski is director of the New European Democracies project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

TITLE: A True Citizen Is More Than a Good Shopper
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Moscow has turned into one huge marketplace in the run-up to the New Year’s holiday. Judging from the traffic jams in the city, and especially those near supermarkets, the scale of this year’s shopping bonanza will set a new record. Many supermarkets long ago switched to 24-hour service. Moscow now has more giant around-the-clock stores than any other city in the world, but even at night you can still encounter lines. The crowds of shoppers snatch up furniture, cars, home electronics and the latest cell phone models as fast as the Soviets used to grab potatoes from store shelves. In addition, Moscow’s young women feverishly buy up fashionable clothing that costs twice what it does in Europe. It is hard to believe that Russia is a poor country.
The country’s consumer market is on the verge of becoming Europe’s largest. Russians’ real income has grown 12 percent to 15 percent annually, outstripping labor productivity by a factor of two. And if you take into consideration the robust shadow economy, actual incomes are probably growing even faster.
A consumer boom has seized the country, and conspicuous consumption is a major component of this tremendous growth in spending. There is a rational economic reason for this profligacy: As before, Russians have no place to put their money except in consumer goods and entertainment. Real estate prices, especially in the big cities, have soared to such dizzying heights that the overwhelming majority of buyers don’t have a hope in the world of ever purchasing a new apartment. Only 400,000 Russians have chosen to invest in the stock market, including in relatively accessible mutual funds. Overseas travel is becoming increasingly fraught with complex visa requirements, and members of the middle class, who are busy at work all day, don’t have the time to deal with the hassle. They prefer purchasing ready-made tours in the same way that they might buy something at a supermarket. The result is that the demand for trips to visa-free countries is growing at an astronomical rate.
In general, Russians do not tend to look very far into the future. Most people are content with their standard of living, but at the same time, they can’t seem to satisfy their endless desire for more and more consumer comforts.
Now imagine that a pollster approaches one of these beaming consumers wheeling his overflowing shopping cart toward the register and asks how he feels about human rights and freedoms. Does he need freedom of speech, for example? How do you think our happy shopper would respond? According to a recent poll by the Levada Center, it turns out that the average Russian doesn’t have much need for traditional human rights and freedoms. Only 21 percent of the respondents considered freedom of speech important, 13 percent valued the right to receive information, 11 percent value religious freedom and a mere 10 percent want the right to vote for representative government.
In all likelihood, the democracy that is “suitable for Russia” is associated with President Vladimir Putin’s style of leadership, with its strong central authority and clearly ordered society.
It seems to me that the most pressing questions for the near future are the following: Will Russia’s pervasive consumer-based mentality have an influence on the people’s understanding of democracy? Will a supermarket shopper choosing between brands learn to estimate the worth of human rights and freedoms? Will demanding his rights as a consumer lead him to demand his civil rights in a courtroom? Will Russians defend their consumer rights if authorities begin encroaching upon them after an economic downturn?
An active consumer does not automatically turn into a politically aware and responsible citizen. This is sad news because, without building a foundation of citizen rights and responsibilities, I don’t see any prospects for building a healthy civil society.

Georgy Bovt is a political analyst and hosts a radio program on City-FM in Moscow.

TITLE: Simply the best
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The final full year of President Vladimir Putin’s presidency will be remembered in his hometown of St. Petersburg as the year when UK Flavours, a pro-tolerance musical event held in July on the sun-drenched beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress, brought a bit of cross-cultural harmony between Russia and the west. The event’s organizers, the British Council, are now threatened with closure amid a diplomatic spat between Russia and the U.K., and a much anticipated sequel event in summer 2008 is under threat (see Best in popular Music, page ii).
Other highlights included concert appearances by The Rolling Stones and Elton John on Palace Square. The director of the State Hermitage Museum located on the square, Mikhail Piotrovsky, often says such events are harmful to the precious artworks in the museum but the concerts went ahead. More recently he complained about the giant ice rink that now occupies the square, although the public seems to be enjoying the chance to skate in the shadow of some of St. Petersburg’s historic buildings.
The preservation of the city skyline is, however, another matter. The plan to build a massive skyscraper for energy giant Gazprom within sight of the historic center animated many residents to march in protest. Promising more public consultation, Governor Valentina Matviyenko nevertheless put her weight behind the project and construction is set to begin in mid-2008.
Work on the Mariinsky Theater’s new building, meanwhile, is going slowly but the musicians, singers and dancers of the theater continue to bring new productions to its historic stage. Vasily Barkhatov, a blond wunderkind from Moscow, nailed his reputation as an innovative new director with his production of Leos Janacek’s “Jenufa” which premiered at the Mariinsky in April (see Best classical music, page iii). 
After a speedy refit and costly renovation, the Mikhailovsky (Mussorgsky) Theater reopened to offer the Mariinsky some healthy competition in opera and ballet. A highlight of its new season was the Russian premiere of Johan Mattheson’s 1710 opera “Boris Goudenow.”
Ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev was the subject of the year’s best biography, while the post-Soviet modern art scene flexed its muscles in 2007.

TITLE: Best popular music
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: <b>LISTENING TO THE WIND OF CHANGE:</b> The spirit of absurdity in Russia’s recent history was epitomized in one show last week. 
German hard rockers The Scorpions, whose most famous songs include its perestroika anthem “Wind of Change,” performed for the elite of Russia’s security services, including President Vladimir Putin, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, in the Kremlin on Dec 20.
The FSB considers its history to have begun with establishment of the Cheka politcal police by the Bolsheviks in 1917. As the agency developed it changed its name to the NKVD, then the MGB and finally the KGB. Throughout this history, the security services have been responsible for the revolutionary terror, Stalin-era mass repressions and the struggle with dissent in the later Soviet period. 
The Scorpions, whose famous song (mentioning “the freedom bell”) was met with applause in the packed Kremlin Palace, later said they had no idea what the show was really all about.
“We were told this would be a very special Christmas occasion,” Scorpions vocalist Klaus Meine said to The Moscow Times the following day.
 “Our Moscow promoter asked us if we could perform for a special concert with nationwide television coverage, and we said yes.” 
When asked whether The Scorpions would have performed if they had known the concert was for the security services, Meine’s reply was: “This is a moot point because we did not know.”
Earlier in the year, one of the Russian rock musicians who performed on Red Square to the audiences composed of Nashi, Molodaya Gvardiya and other Kremlin-backed youth organizations on Russia Day on June 12, reacted in a way similar to Meine.
Vladimir Shakhrin of Russian band Chaif said the show’s promoter misinformed him by saying there would be “ordinary people” as well as Putin supporters.
“But it turned out that some 8,000 organized, politically active citizens were brought there, and nobody else was let in,” said Shakhrin to Izvestiya newspaper. “We went to play and felt that it was like Kim Il-sung’s birthday party.”
Singers from Chaif and fellow rockers Alisa who took part in the concert were reported to have not sung along to the Russian national anthem and to have quit the stage before it finished.
Conformist rock musicians were challenged in 2007 by Mikhail Borzykin of Televizor, one of the most outspoken bands during perestroika in the 1980s, who wrote a song called “We’re on the Different Sides of Barricades.” 
Borzykin, who was a frequent sight at opposition rallies this year, has written new political songs, something he has not done since the late 1980s, and plans to release them as a single for free download on the web.
Russia today is experiencing a return to the atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, according to Borzykin.
“It’s absolute deja vu, the situation is very similar for me,” he said.
“The slogans are the same - it’s again rabid anti-Americanism, it’s exactly like a Brezhnev-era high school, the tenth form. I remember it very well, how they sent us to meetings against the Chinese threat, against the American threat. Looking for an enemy is a symptom. Only instead of the Communist ideology they’ve added Orthodox Christianity. It contradicts any common sense and only proves how obsolete the methods are.”
State-honored musician Boris Grebenshchikov, fromtman of the Akvarium, reasserted his support for Putin in interviews in 2007, while his irreverent song from the early 1980s, now seems prophetic.
“Just wait a little, and the dream will come true, / Our people will occupy high places, / Fearing to lose our arms or legs, / We’ll have to listen nothing but rock,” he sang in a song called “A Berry in the Field Forever.”
Here you are. First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who has been promoted, in a recent Russian tradition, to the post of President-in-waiting, turns out to be a rock fan and a collector of authentic vinyls, according to interviews, but the subject of his affection is British hard rock, something that was all the rage when he was a student at High School 305 in Kupchino, in the south of the city, in the 1970s.
“Today I can boast, for instance, of a complete collection of Deep Purple,” he was quoted by Itogi magazine as saying earlier this month. 
“If you set a goal, you can find everything.”
<b>FAMOUS VISITORS:</b> Arguably the most refreshing event of 2007 was U.K. Flavours, an outdoor pro-tolerance concert promoted by The British Council, the cultural relations organization now under attack from the Russian government, on July 21.
Coming soon after the biggest recent explosion of hostilities between the two countries, the event was well-organized and very positive, as fans relaxed and danced on the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Fun-Da-Mental accused the British government of wanting “to arrest us,” Lily Allen jokingly tried to make out Putin in the audience, the former Specials frontman Terry Hall was genuinely surprised about “how friendly the people are” after performing with Dub Pistols. Mad Professor, Misty in Roots and Tigerstyle also took part.
A follow-up event, due next summer, is now under question, as the Russian government has ordered the British Council to close its offices in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg by Jan. 1. 
However, in a statement released in London on Dec. 12, the British Council, which stresses that its activities are “fully compliant both with Russian and international law, under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963),” replied, “We have no plans to shut down in Moscow or St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg.”
Menwhile, the Rolling Stones finally made it to the city after last year’s cancellation, performing at the Palace Square with a support from Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel on July 28. Elton John performed at the same location on July 6.
Sonic Youth, which came to the Soviet Union in 1989 when few people knew them here and inspired many of those who came to the show, returned to the city this year. Fans at the original show included then jobless Akvarium cellist Seva Gakkel who launched TaMtAm, Russia’s first alternative rock club, a couple years later. TaMtAm supported innovative music and fought Russian rock cliches, and many acclaimed local acts, from Markscheider Kunst to Tequilajazzz, got their start there. This time around Sonic Youth was supported by Tequilajazzz, which performed its first show at TaMtAm in 1993.
New York Dolls, reformed with two original members, vocalist David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, performed in the city for the first time on Dec. 6. 
“You can be in a band where one makes all the decisions and chooses the music and kind of tells the band what to play; and then there’s this band where everybody essentially just plays what they want to play,” said Johansen in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times.
“It’s kind of a different kind of soup, because everybody knows what they’re supposed to do, and we get a lot of joy out of playing with each other. It’s not like a job. It’s more like play.”
Other concert appearances in St. Petersburg were made by Sean Lennon, Muse, Bryan Ferry, Art Brut, AIR, NoMeanNo, Aerosmith, David Clayton-Thomas, Lisa Germano, Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, The Tiger Lillies and Agnostic Front, among others. 
Acts that went to Moscow, but did not make it to St. Petersburg, included Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, Maximo Park, Starsailor, Ian Brown of Stone Roses, former Suede vocalist Brett Anderson, Gogol Bordello, Stuart A. Staples of Tindersticks and Happy Mondays.
Fake concerts continued in the departing year when a French band posing as The Gipsy Kings came to tour Russia in February. 
“The Gipsy Kings are on a U.S. tour right now and will come back home on Feb. 26. They have no plans to tour in St. Petersburg on Feb. 28,” wrote the Gipsy Kings’ manager Pascal Imbert in an email to The St. Petersburg Times.
“The person you mention, Manolo, has never been a member of the Kings, but he has tried many times to use the name Gipsy Kings as he cannot sell tickets on his own name.
“We have sued him successfully in the U.S., that is why he is now changing territory. Please warn your public that this is a fake band and has nothing to do with the original.”
<b>IN CLUBS:</b> Revolution, a redneck disco in the shadowy Apraksin Dvor market, launched an evening concert program, with Leonid Fomin, a musician with local goth-rock band Para Bellum, on Jan. 26. With dark rock dominating the program, some other genres were let in as well.
One of the best things the club hosted was perhaps a solo show by Ukraine-born, U.S.-based singer/songwriter Alina Simone. Simone performed a set based on her debut album “Placenessness” and the upcoming follow-up, “Everyone Is Crying Out to Me: Beware,” a collection of her versions of songs written by the late Siberian folk-punk legend Yanka, due in March 2008.
On the club scene, The Place, an interesting new club emerged amid Tarkovskian industrial slums in the city’s south-west. With art director Claire Yalakas, formerly of Red Club, the venue, officially launched with a show by the British cabaret-folk-punk band Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra on March 31, is oriented toward better and more innovative acts, this past year’s program included U.S. singer/songwriter Lisa Germano, who gained recognition in the late 1980s as the violinist for John Mellencamp.
The Place’s concerts also included Sabot, an avant-rock instrumental duo that has moved from San Francisco to Tabor, the Czech Republic returned for the first time since its pioneering Russian tours in 1991 and 1992 to perform on Sept. 17. 
This year also saw the openings of Belgrad, the concert-friendly extension of the indie bar Fidel, in June, and Soho, an upscale club with live music, on Sept. 5.
<b>BAD NEWS:</b> The nasty things that happened in the city during the past 12 months included an attempted bomb attack during a Spitfire-headlined concert called Music of the Streets at Roks club on Oct. 13. A bag with an explosive device containing 200 grams of TNT and an amount of screw-bolts was discovered on stage during a performance by Swedish punk band Blisterhead. Several Nazi-style attacks outside the venue were reported as well.
The concert, which drew an estimated 400 fans, was stopped by the police as headlining local ska-band Spitfire was performing. 
“They checked the bomb and said that it didn’t explode because it was clumsily made,” said Spitfire drummer Denis Kuptsov. “They stopped our performance after the eighth song and told everybody to leave.” Later in the month, three young men who belong to nationalists groups according to the police, were arrested. Not much information has been released since then.
Earlier, in August, a court has finally sentenced some of the attackers who stabbed and killed punk musician and anti-fascist activist Timur Kacharava in November 2005. Four out of seven men charged with the murder were sentenced to between two and 12 years in prison. Nazi-style attacks and murders have continued, however.
<b>LOSSES:</b> Ilya Kormiltsev, poet, translator, the head of the radical publisher Ultra Kultura and a former songwriter for the Soviet rock band Nautilus Pompilius, died in London at the age of 47 on February 4. 
Alexander “Ricochet” Aksyonov, best known as the vocalist with the 1980s punk band Obyekt Nasmeshek, died on March 22. He was 42.
Accordion player Sergei Shchurakov, who played with the later-day Akvarium and then with his own band Vermicelli Orchestra, died at the age of 47 on August 7.
The 33-year-old Vladimir Khanutin, who became known as a drummer with Chizh & Co., and played with various bands, including underground spoof rock band Selyodka, died in mid-August.
Former Kolibri singer Natalya Pivovarova, who performed with her own band SOUS and was involved in various drama projects, was killed in a car crash near Koktebel, Ukraine, on September 24. She was 44.

TITLE: Best classical music
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: French director Alain Maratrat’s adrenaline-driven production of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera of Carlo Gozzi’s “The Love For Three Oranges” that saw its premiere on March 14 at the Mariinsky Theater became 2007’s first remarkable event.
The show was the Mariinsky’s third take on the opera after productions in 1926 and 1991. The opera originally saw the stage in Chicago in 1921, and immediately became a favorite on the international opera scene. It enjoyed its first staging at the Mariinsky five years later. Prokofiev welcomed the Russian premiere — staged by director Sergei Radlov — by saying that the show was by far the most successful production of the opera he had ever seen. 
Alain Maratrat, who thrives on lively extravaganzas, was a predictably good choice to direct the new production. He boldly responded to the challenges set by both Gozzi and Prokofiev. The performance spills generously off the stage, and the show’s unruliness flows into the far corners of the auditorium. In the best traditions of courtyard theater, spectators in the higher balconies leaned over the banisters and stood up from their seats to catch a fuller view of the constantly fleeting show, as if admiring vagrant performers in a street show through the windows and doorways of their courtyard. Every row and every circle was filled with cheer.
Leos Janacek’s dark expressionist drama arrived in St. Petersburg on April 4 with the premiere of “Jenufa,” the composer’s best-known opera, at the Mariinsky Theater.
The work of Janacek has been notably absent from the Mariinsky repertoire for many decades.
The 23-year-old Moscow director, Vasily Barkhatov, has created a spectacular show where a visually unchanging landscape is contrasted with razor-sharp, noir-tinged dramatic acting. 
Based on “Jeji Pastorkyna” (Her Stepdaughter), a story by Gabriela Preissova, a contemporary of Janacek, “Jenufa” is a domestic drama about a Moravian family. The Mariinsky’s staging is set in what resembles a settlement or an unfinished construction site. 
The unrelenting chain of miseries suffered by these doomed people is certain to resonate greatly with a Russian audience. 
“Three quarters of Russia lives like this anyway — and it certainly did a hundred years ago,” joked the show’s set designer Zinovy Margolin in an interview before the premiere.
True to its intentions, the production team placed the story in a forgotten, humble village, totally lacking character and devoid of a sole distinctive feature. The Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev was flawless. The musicians produced an outstanding sound and balance both during subtle ensembles and ecstatic climaxes, treating Janacek’s expressionist score with rare lucidity, raising the composer’s drama to the height of tragedy.
The distinguished American baritone Thomas Hampson made his Russian debut on May 29 at the Mariinsky Theater’s new state-of-the-art concert hall with a program of Liszt, Mahler and American songs. 
Meanwhile, the renowned Italian tenor Roberto Alagna was in town for only one concert on Nov. 1 at the Mikhailovsky (Mussorgsky) Theater. His visit was organized by the internationally established Musical Olympus Foundation that has already brought to Russia the likes of cellist Yo Yo Ma.
“Boris Goudenow,” the first-ever opera written by a European composer on a Russian theme, enjoyed a timely arrival on the Russian opera scene this fall when it premiered on Oct. 26 at the Mikhailovsky (Mussorgsky) Opera and Ballet Theater.
Johann Mattheson’s opera was produced by the Early Music Festival and directed by Berlin choreographer Klaus Abromeit. 
“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.”
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. 
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.”
The production joined 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.
In the last week of December the Mariinsky Theater became the first foreign company to perform on the freshly inaugurated stage of the new home for the National Grand Theater of China. From last Tuesday and until Jan. 6, the Russian company is showing some of its hits productions, including “Swan Lake” and “Prince Igor.”

TITLE: Best classical music: Moscow
AUTHOR: By Lada Bakal
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — This year saw many memorable concerts in Moscow, but the two concerts given in February by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, left the competition trailing in their wake. Listening to an orchestra of this class, you are powerless to resist the power of music that is irreproachable in every respect: the soloists and the separate orchestra sections and the performance as a whole. Fragments of operas by Richard Wagner became a seamless whole: The Funeral March from the “Gotterdammerung” smoothly flowed into the overture to “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.” The string section was so perfect that you could hear each instrument — such a performance lifts any music to the highest level. Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 was the culmination of the orchestra’s Moscow tour. Leading the orchestra, Barenboim showed that a conductor really can be the creator of music, and that even such a first-class orchestra as the Vienna Philharmonic can be simply a tool in his hands.

PERFORMER OF THE YEAR: Kurt Weill has written melodies that are familiar to everyone — for example, “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song” — but at the same time he is respected by classical musicians. 
The world’s most renowned interpreter of Weill, German singer Ute Lemper, gave a concert at the “Vladimir Spivakov Invites...” festival in October for one simple reason: The organizer, conductor and violinist Vladimir Spivakov, had never managed to attend one of her concerts. He invited her to the Moscow International House of Music to sing the song cycle “The Seven Deadly Sins,” songs from “The Threepenny Opera” and other Weill musicals, and the hits of Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf. Lemper transfixed the audience to such an extent that it followed her every move, even when she fell silent. Now Spivakov has attended a Lemper concert, and thanks to him, so have several hundred Muscovites.

ANNIVERSARY OF THE YEAR: The 125th anniversary of the birth of Igor Stravinsky in June was celebrated in Moscow far more modestly than last year’s centenary of Dmitry Shostakovich. The only musician who paid serious attention to the anniversary was Valery Gergiev who devoted several concerts to the composer at the Easter Festival. 
The composer often complained that the success of his early ballets, such as “Petrushka,” “The Rite of Spring” and “Les Noces,” made it difficult for the public to appreciate his later works, and it’s rare to hear any of the music he wrote after 1946. In a December concert at the Conservatory, Gennady Rozhdestvensky finally gave the audience the chance to hear several late works by the composer: his 1955 “Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis” for choir and orchestra, and his cantata “A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer” from 1961, which had never before been performed in Moscow.

LOSS OF THE YEAR: Cellist, conductor, pianist, teacher, human rights crusader and citizen of the world: All of those labels are insufficient to explain the nature and genius of Rostropovich, who died in April. Rostropovich lived as if everything in the world concerned him. As a cellist, he provoked a real revolution and brought the art of the cello to a new level. That didn’t satisfy him — so he started conducting. 
The most perfect work of Rostropovich, however, was not his concerts and recordings, but his life itself. He often talked about death, anticipating his meetings with Shostakovich and other greats.

TITLE: Best books
AUTHOR: By Rebecca Reich
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Given Russia’s penchant for self-reinvention, national memory has tended to be selective at best. During the Soviet period, the achievements of the tsarist era were swept under the rug only to be recollected after communism’s collapse; more recently, nostalgia for Soviet times has come back into vogue. The death of Stalin, and later the lifting of censorship, led to the airing of many hushed tragedies, but others remain to be acknowledged. Memory plays a vital role in Russian society not least through the ongoing commemoration of World War II, which continues to muster support for the state. Yet the subordination of individual memories to an overarching story often leads to further forgetting, particularly with the passage of time.
To be sure, developments since Sept. 11, 2001, are proof enough that the politicization of memory is not unique to Russia. But for a country still sorting out its post-communist identity, the questions of what Russia chooses to remember, and how it remembers it, are urgent and revealing. Those questions came to the fore in this year’s crop of Russia-related books, as the following selection of the best fiction and nonfiction shows.
FICTION: In 2002, British author Martin Amis published a book of essays arguing that the evils of the Soviet system had been too quickly dismissed or forgotten. His latest novel, “House of Meetings” (Knopf), dramatizes the problem through the unsavory recollections of an 84-year-old Russian emigre who has returned by river cruise to the Siberian prison camp where he and his brother were incarcerated. Our reviewer, Michael Scammell, wrote that the narrator’s confessions of rape and murder, and his tendency to blame “history” for his crimes, may not offer much in the way of sympathetic characterization, but they do correct “the last vestiges of censorship” by a polite society that airbrushed the brutality of the gulag experience.
MEMOIR: Stalin’s collectivization of the peasants into state-run farms devastated the Soviet Union in the 1930s. But for the nomads of Kazakhstan, used to migrating with their animals between mountains and steppe, the imposition of an agricultural way of life left especially deep wounds. Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s “The Silent Steppe” (Rookery) probes the scars to the point of “an exorcism, through storytelling, of personal demons,” as our reviewer, Robert Rosenberg, noted. From the arrest and deportation of Shayakhmetov’s father to the famine that decimated the Kazakh population, to the author’s indoctrination as a Soviet soldier on the front lines of Stalingrad, Shayakhmetov’s past — and his decision to record it — is “its own private hell.”
BIOGRAPHY: Researched and written over the course of more than a decade, Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev” (Pantheon) is “so unusual in its depth of both reporting and integrity that a reader arriving at the last page is left dumbstruck,” as our reviewer, Mindy Aloff, observed. For many of Rudolf Nureyev’s friends and fans, the dancer’s volatile behavior and artistic decline marred their memories of him at the height of his powers. Yet Kavanagh’s vivid, even-handed reassessment of Nureyev as both dancer and man allows her subject to emerge “from chapters of degradation with his dignity intact — a figure ... whose godlike energy, intermittent capacity for human feeling and permanent legacy for the world of dance it is finally possible to understand.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: If visitors to Moscow tend to associate the ornate classicism of Stalinist architecture with Soviet power, that is because the state meant them to. Less imposing but far more radical are the spare buildings erected in the modernist style during the brief burst of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. Today these avant-garde structures stand forgotten, many unnoticed or fated for demolition. The magnificent array of photographs in “The Lost Vanguard” (Monacelli) — water towers, theaters, bus stops, factories — represent Richard Pare’s decade-long effort to both document this period in Soviet culture and record the buildings’ state of neglect. Reviewer Nicole Rudick wrote that Pare “becomes both poet and mourner, at once celebrating a building’s ‘radical purity’ and grieving for its ill fortune.”
HISTORY: Among the most challenging tasks for historians of the Stalin era is to reconstruct Soviet citizens’ private lives — the thoughts, secrets and hopes that they preferred not to write down, or at least not to mention too loudly. Orlando Figes takes on this state of mind in “The Whisperers” (Metropolitan), an ambitious study of the psyche of ordinary Soviets under Stalin’s rule. Immensely readable yet poignant and terrifying, Figes’s book sets individual stories within their historical context to show how people carved out private lives in a society that viewed public and private as one. Our reviewer, Ronald Grigor Suny, praised the book as an “extraordinary work of synthesis and insight” that gives a strong sense of the mix of enthusiasm and fear that accompanied the Soviet mission to create a new world.

TITLE: Best art
AUTHOR: By Brian Droitcour
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 15th anniversaries that several public and private art institutions celebrated this year were reminders that Russia’s post-Soviet art world is still in its adolescence. So were the concomitant symptoms: growth spurts in Moscow’s cultural infrastructure, a confrontation with authority figures, and encounters with socialites and oligarchs that helped the local art scene feel more confident about its burgeoning sexiness.
The number of exhibition spaces in Moscow mushroomed this year, starting with the opening of the Yekaterina Cultural Foundation’s mini-museum for displaying its own collection on Lubyanka and ending with the sleek gmg, a gallery selling Western contemporary art just off fashionable Bolshaya Nikitskaya Ulitsa. In between, a host of new galleries opened at the up-and-coming Vinzavod arts complex, showcasing everything from Kazimir Malevich’s drawings to photography from glossy magazines.
Even as the market and infrastructure expanded and the variety and prices of art available increased, artists and dealers cast a wary eye toward the state, wondering what direction its involvement would take next. Until recently, the government appeared to adopt a laissez-faire stance toward the arts, and early this year there were even signs of self-serving patronage: A preface to the catalogue of the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art signed by Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s top ideologist, called the event “an important part of the cultural policy of a democratic Russia.”
But in October, Culture and Press Minister Alexander Sokolov made it his personal mission to withhold certain pieces from an exhibition of Russian political art in Paris, including a photograph by the Blue Noses of two kissing policemen. The curator, Andrei Yerofeyev, was subject to interrogations and searches of his office. Yerofeyev is the founder and head of the Tretyakov’s contemporary art department. He was already suspended from putting on further exhibitions after curating the controversial “Forbidden Art” at the Sakharov Museum in March. That show prompted protests from the Russian Orthodox Church over its use of religious imagery.
Meanwhile, Vasily Tsereteli, the youthful director of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, rose to new prominence organizing big projects for the Moscow and Venice biennales titled “I Believe” and “Click. I Hope,” which restricted art to the safely uncritical territory of dreams and feelings — a course that, in retrospect, looks politically shrewd. I hope Russia’s art community can continue to mature unhindered, but I predict it will face more hurdles in 2008.
AGENT PROVOCATEUR: Only the biggest prudes and hypocrites can claim to be shocked by the Blue Noses’ kissing cops. Unexpectedly, the most memorably jarring artwork of 2007 was an alternative fashion show on the party schedule of the Art Moscow fair in May. It was staged in a hangar at the Arma factory complex by Alexander Petlyura, a collector of vintage clothing. After a prelude of men in jumpsuits and lederhosen, a series of young women paraded down the runway in Soviet house dresses and shriveled fright masks. An announcer dubbed them Miss 1917, Miss Hiroshima, Miss Afghanistan, and so on in chronological order.
The last model was introduced as Miss Eternal Spring — a wizened 97-year-old who hobbled down the catwalk before delivering a somewhat senile speech wishing the audience health and happiness. Many in the audience were reduced to tears — some of pity or anger over the perceived exploitative nature of the finale, others overwhelmed by its massive emotional force. Either way, Petlyura found a strange and audacious way to hit an audience with the whole weight and length of the worst century ever. You had to be there.
BEST 15TH BIRTHDAY: Aidan Gallery celebrated its milestone with a group exhibition at Vinzavod where each artist was represented by two works — one recent piece and one from the early 1990s. It was interesting to note the change in trends from messy expressionist painting then to the current proliferation of video art. There were also plenty of curiosities and discoveries — for instance, the childhood drawings of the young Ukrainian sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova, which showed her early attraction to bold and colorful geometric patterns.
MIND GAMES: Yury Avvakumov became a leader among his architect colleagues in the 1980s by curating exhibitions of their conceptual works for display abroad. In June he was honored with the Soratnik prize, the laureates of which are voted on by a jury of 101 artists. Avvakumov also received international recognition this year, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation commissioned him to design a pavilion for a planned museum complex in Abu Dhabi. And the highlight of the year’s exhibitions was “Games,” Avvakumov’s solo show at the Stella Art Foundation, with sculptures that drew on cards, chess and dominoes to expose the ludic roots of the urges to build and destroy.
RENEGADE MUSEUM: Collector and LiveJournal celebrity Igor Markin flouted art world conventions with his new museum Art4.ru. There are no labels, no wall texts and no narrative structure to the exposition. But Markin does encourage engagement by handing out “for” and “against” stickers that visitors can fix to the wall next to their most and least favorite works, and he held a public vote in a competition for a monument to Boris Yeltsin. Art4.ru also opens up fresh, if naive, views of art history by championing rogue talents such as Dmitry Lion and Leonid Purygin. As Moscow’s art world strains to look more grown-up, it’s probably a good thing that someone is still throwing spitballs.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: When the cream of the Russian pop scene gets together for a camp television show with plenty of in-jokes and tangled relationships between the stars, it has to be worth a look. But somehow “Two Stars” — now hosted by pop diva Alla Pugachyova and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” presenter Maxim Galkin — isn’t nearly as fun as it should be. In fact, you can almost smell the mothballs.__The show, which began a new series on Sunday, was originally hosted by comic Alexander Tsekalo and his ex-wife, Lolita Milyavskaya, who exchanged scripted banter about the pitfalls of marriage. Now it’s Alla exchanging scripted banter with Maximochka — often rumored by the tabloids to be her lover — about how jealous she is when he stands next to pretty young singers. She also talks of her love for her former son-in-law, pop singer Vladimir Presnyakov, who performs on the show, and for the aging songwriters who sit on the jury.
The tabloids say Galkin is staying at Pugachyova’s apartment while he builds himself a castle in the Moscow region (that part seems to be true — I’ve seen photographs of the turrets). They are said to haunt the casinos together and the tabloids imply there is more to it than that. However, Pugachyova is a master at keeping herself in the headlines, and Galkin is an attractive man nearly 30 years her junior, so I would take all this with a coronary-inducing pinch of salt.
The show involves pop stars singing duets with famous people. Last time, politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky was the standout act — even if his voice sounded like a rusty hinge. Replacing him as the comedy politician is Mikhail Shvydkoi, the rotund head of the Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency. The ho-hum list of celebrities also includes bouffant-haired Channel One host Andrei Malakhov and various actors who have been on reality shows. 
The pop stars are a better bunch — it was good to get a closer look at Masha Rasputina, a blonde singer who has used cosmetic surgery to give herself a close resemblance to Miss Piggy. She and Malakhov dueted on a song called “Tea Rose,” clad in a blinding array of gold lame. Then there was lissom pop singer Alsu and flamboyant gay star Boris Moiseyev. The show bans lip-synching, so it was a chance to find out whether such singers as Alsu and Moiseyev can actually hit the notes. The answer was: yes, though she missed some, and no. 
With her smoky voice and penchant for personal remarks, Pugachyova has the charisma to carry the show, but she mainly just sat and read the script. And while Galkin came out with some funny comments, he seemed about as emotionally engaged as he does when contestants get stuck on the 1,000 ruble question on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” 
The judging is done by the following people: Channel One host Garik Martirosyan; songwriter Ilya Reznik, who wrote lyrics for Pugachyova; Polish actress Barbara Brylska who acted in the 1975 comedy film “Irony of Fate”; and composer Vladimir Matetsky, who wrote songs for Pugachyova’s contemporary, Sofia Rotaru. In other words, apart from Martirosyan, it’s a lineup that would have been innovative around 1976. Brylska might seem a strange choice, but Channel One is now promoting its sequel to “Irony of Fate.”
The best moment was when Brylska gave 5/10 to Pugachyova’s ex-son-in-law, Presnyakov, for a plaintive ballad. “You didn’t sing, you screamed,” she said. Pugachyova was quick to retaliate, quoting poet Nikolai Nekrasov, no less. “In Poland they don’t know that in Russia ‘this moan is called a song,’” she said, shooting her a death stare. It can only get worse.

TITLE: A smokeless New Year
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova and Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It’s probably the world’s most popular New Year’s resolution. Among those promises we make to ourselves on Jan. 1, when we turn over new leaves and hope for the best in the coming year, the decision to quit smoking is for many the most important — and agonizing — of them all. 
But St. Petersburg is a long way from being a friendly place for non-smokers. Although public transport and the majority of offices have long been smoke-free, nicotine-soaked fumes continue to float through restaurants, cafés and bars. 
This is revolting for non-smokers visiting from Europe and the U.S. where smoking inside public areas is frequently outlawed. (It is also, however, a relief for harried smokers from the same strange clean climes.) 
Following requests from readers who have already realized that dining out for them might be “a big challenge while staying in Russia,” because they are “allergic to cigarette smoke,” The St. Petersburg Times has compiled a list of places where you can not only eat, drink and be merry but also breath without fear of becoming a passive smoker.
It is also a service we offer to all of those who resolve to stub out their last cigarette as the last minutes of 2007 pass into history.
The rules of finding a successful smoke-free eating experience are simple but effective. 
Don’t waste your time on bars. Look for places with outdoor terraces where blankets are usually provided on request, or those with an open kitchen. Bakeries with in-house cafes are also a good option as making bread and smoking are not compatible.
The free English-speaking telephone enquiry service Restaranny Raiting (Tel: 325 6500) says that smoke-free zones or non-smoking rooms are located at the popular eateries Karavan, Tres Amigos, Bagrationi, Grad Petrov, Kavkaz, Kitaisky Dvor, La Presse, Magrib and Morkovka, but we recommend the following.
Stroganoff Steak House, 4 Konnogvardeisky Boulevard. Tel: 314 5514. Open daily noon to midnight. 
A new and vast steak house that has eight huge rooms including one that is smoke-free. It placed in between rooms for smokers, but if the air-conditioner continues working as well as it did at the time of our visit, it should not be a problem. The menu isn’t large. For the most part it’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. If you come here for a steak, try a Rib Eye, a New York, or a Fillet Mignon (890 rubles, $36). Made from fresh ground beef with porcini and served with tomato, onion, pickled cucumber and fries, the 1/2 pound Stroganoff Burger is priced at 380 rubles ($15.50) and Sibirskaya Korona beer here is 70 rubles ($2.80) for a half liter. Needless to say, it’s not much good for non-smoking vegetarians.
Terassa (former La Terazza). 3 Kazanskaya Ulitsa (6th Floor of Vanity Opera boutique). Tel: 337 6837. Open daily, noon through 2 a.m.
After undergoing a refit, this 400-square meter space in a high-fashion boutique offers the combination of aesthetic and gastronomic delights. As views of the most famous street in Russia, Nevsky Prospekt, and an astonishing close-up of the golden dome of St. Kazan Cathedral  satisfy the eye, so does the open kitchen where you can see the chefs at work. Good air-conditioning and a non-smoking area make the place a good option. The menu features American, French, Italian and Asian cuisines, an extensive list of freshly squeezed juices, and Russian classics including Borsch (200 rubles $8), and Oliviye salad (250 rubles, $10). 
Ro Café, 39 Moskovsky Prospekt. Tel: 575 0002. Open daily 9 a.m. through 11 p.m. 
The brave managers of this place chose “Thank You for Not Smoking” as their motto and say they don’t have plans to abandon it. Ro boasts a large choice of tea (80 -110 rubles, $3-$4.30) and coffee (60-900 rubles, $2.30-$35). The desserts, especially those made in-house, are not to be missed. Limited number of salads, sandwiches, pasta and omelets are also featured in the menu for prices of between 90-120 rubles ($3.50-$4.70).
Bushe, 7 Malaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 315 5371. Open daily 9 a.m. through 10 p.m. 
Some romantics arrange dates here, driven by the chocolaty décor and delicious smell of just-out-of-the-oven bread and pastry; others say that because you have to pick up your order at the bar, the bakery is best only for take-out orders. Entirely smoke-free. Have a cup of latte (65 rubles, $2.60) with a 39-ruble ($1.60) apple or cherry strudel before setting off to explore the Hermitage just a stone’s throw away.
Mozart Café, 23 Kronverksky Prospekt. Tel: 232 9493. Open daily 9 a.m. through 11 p.m.
The tiny and quiet Mozart café, as the name suggest, offers Austrian cuisine and is a good place to try Viennese-style apple strudel. Although modestly calling itself a café, this longstanding smoke-free oasis has it all — soups, roast beaf, pork chops — you name it. Relished with a blintze (a type of pancake) and boiled chicken, Frittaten soup (110 rubles, $4.50) with home-style noodles fried in breadcrumbs (300 rubles,  $12), it’s a good option for those with an appetite.

TITLE: Oscar Peterson (1925-2007)
AUTHOR: By Richard Severo
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most popular jazz artists in history, died on Sunday night at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82.
The cause was kidney failure, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.  Peterson had performed publicly for a time even after a stroke he suffered in 1993 compromised movement in his left hand.
Peterson was one of the greatest virtuosos in jazz, with a piano technique that was always meticulous and ornate and sometimes overwhelming. But rather than expand the boundaries of jazz, he used his gifts in the service of moderation and reliability, gratifying his devoted audiences whether he was playing in a trio or solo or accompanying some of the most famous names of jazz. His technical accomplishments were always evident, almost transparently so. Even at his peak, there was very little tension in his playing.
One of the most prolific major stars in jazz history, he amassed an enormous discography. From the 1950s until his death, he released sometimes four or five albums a year, toured Europe and Japan frequently and became a big draw at jazz festivals.
Norman Granz, his influential manager and producer, helped  Peterson realize that success, setting loose a flow of records on his own Verve and Pablo labels and establishing  Peterson as a favorite in his touring Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Peterson won eight Grammy awards, as well as almost every possible honor in the jazz world. He played alongside giants like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Nat King Cole, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald.
Duke Ellington referred to him as “maharajah of the keyboard.” Basie said, “Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I’ve ever heard.” The pianist and conductor André Previn called Peterson “the best” among jazz pianists.
In a review of a performance in 1987, Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, said, “Peterson’s rock-solid sense of swing, grounded in Count Basie, is balanced by a delicacy of tone and fleetness of touch that make his extended runs seem to almost disappear into the sky.” He added, “His amazing speed was matched by an equally amazing sense of thematic invention.”
But many critics found Peterson more derivative than original, especially early in his career. Some even suggested that his fantastic technique lacked coherence and was almost too much for some listeners to compute.
Billy Taylor, a fellow pianist and a jazz historian, said he thought that while Peterson was a “remarkable musician,” his “phenomenal facility sometimes gets in the way of people’s listening.”
Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 1966 that Peterson’s playing “continues to be a pudding made of the leavings of Art Tatum, Nat Cole and Teddy Wilson.”
The critical ambivalence was typified in 1973 in a review of a Peterson performance by John S. Wilson of The Times. Wilson wrote: “For the last 20 years, Oscar Peterson has been one of the most dazzling exponents of the flying fingers school of piano playing. His performances have tended to be beautifully executed displays of technique but woefully weak on emotional projection.”
The complaints evoked those heard in the 1940s about the great concert violinist Jascha Heifetz, who was occasionally accused of being so technically brilliant that one could not find his or the composer’s heart and soul in the music he played.
The jazz critic Gene Lees defended Peterson as “a summational artist.”
“So was Mozart. So was Bach,” Lees wrote in his biography of Peterson, “The Will to Swing” (1990). “Bach and Mozart were both dealing with known vocabularies and an accepted body of aesthetic principles.” He noted that just as Bach used material that he first heard in Vivaldi, “Oscar uses a curious spinning figure that he got from Dizzy Gillespie.”
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born in the poor St. Antoine district of Montreal on Aug. 15, 1925, one of five children of Daniel Peterson, a West Indian immigrant, and the former Olivia John, whom Daniel had met in Montreal. Daniel Peterson, who worked as a sleeping-car porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway, had taught himself how to play the organ before he landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917.  Peterson’s mother, who also had roots in the Caribbean, encouraged Oscar to study music.
As a boy, Oscar began to learn the trumpet as well as the piano. At 7, he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for 13 months. Fearing the strain the trumpet might put on his son’s lungs, Daniel Peterson persuaded him to concentrate on piano. He studied first with Lou Hooper, then with Paul (Alexander) de Marky, a Hungarian who had also given lessons to Oscar’s older sister, Daisy.
By his own account, Oscar believed he had become quite accomplished by age 14. Then he heard a recording by Art Tatum.
“I gave up the piano for two solid months,” Peterson later recalled, and had “crying fits at night” because he thought nobody else could ever be as good as Tatum.
The same year, however, he won an amateur competition sponsored by the CBC, prompting him to drop out of Montreal High School so he could spend all his time playing the piano.
By 1942, Oscar Peterson was known in Canada as the “Brown Bomber of Boogie-Woogie,” an allusion to the nickname of the boxer Joe Louis and also to Peterson’s physical stature - 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds.
Peterson became the only black member of the Johnny Holmes Orchestra, which toured Canada and the United States. In parts of the United States, he discovered that he, like other blacks, would not be served in the same hotels and restaurants as the white musicians. Many times they would bring food out to him as he sat in the band’s bus, he recalled.
For a time, Peterson was so identified with popular dance boogie-woogie that he was denied wider recognition as a serious jazz musician. In 1947, Granz, the jazz impresario, was on his way to Montreal’s airport in a taxi when he heard a live broadcast of Peterson playing at a local lounge. He ordered the driver to turn the taxi around and take him to the lounge. There he persuaded Peterson to move away from boogie-woogie.
Peterson eventually became a mainstay of the Jazz at the Philharmonic series, which Granz created in the 1940s. In 1949 Peterson made his debut at Carnegie Hall, becoming a sensation. A year later he won the Down Beat magazine readers’ poll for best jazz pianist for the first time. He would go on to win it more than a dozen times, the last in 1972.
Over the years his albums sold well, and he recorded with Billie Holiday, Fred Astaire, Benny Carter, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Buddy DeFranco and many others. He also occasionally sang.
Among his more notable long-playing recordings were the so-called Song Books of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen and Jimmy McHugh.
His format of choice was the trio. Perhaps his most famous threesome, that lasted from 1953 to 1958, was with the guitarist Herb Ellis and the bassist Ray Brown.
Though best known as an interpreter of other people’s work, Peterson cultivated a second identity as a composer. In 1964 he recorded “The Canadiana Suite,” an extended work written for his home country; he later wrote “African Suite” and “A Royal Wedding Suite,” for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
Granz’s Verve and Pablo labels released most of Peterson’s work, but he also recorded for the MPS and Telarc labels, among others.
Peterson was frequently invited to perform for heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II and President Richard M. Nixon. In 2005 he became the first living person other than a reigning monarch to obtain a commemorative stamp in Canada, where streets, squares, concert halls and schools are named after him.
Peterson’s autobiography, “A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson,” was published in 2002 by Continuum.
According to the CBC, Peterson was married four times. He had a daughter, Celine, with his fourth wife, Kelly. He also had six children from his first and third marriages: Lyn, Sharon, Gay, Oscar Jr., Norman and Joel.

Peterson continued playing after his stroke in 1993 because, as he told The Chicago Tribune, “I think I have a closeness with the instrument that I’ve treasured over the years.”

TITLE: Notable departures in 2007...
TEXT: <b>Magnus Magnusson</b>, Icelandic writer and broadcaster who found fame in the U.K. Died Jan. 7, aged 77. 
<b>Anna Nicole Smith</b>, U.S. former glamour model and tabloid celebrity. Died March 8, aged 39. 
<b>Kurt Vonnegut</b>, U.S. author best known for World War II/sci-fi fable Slaughterhouse Five. Died April 11, aged 84.
<b>Boris Yeltsin</b>, first president of the Russian Federation. Died April 23, aged 76. 
<b>Mstislav Rostropovich</b>, Russian cello maestro and human rights campaigner. Died April 27, aged 81. 
<b>Isabella Blow</b>, British fashion stylist who ‘discovered’ McQueen and Treacy. Died May 7, aged 48. 
<b>George Melly</b>, quirky British jazz musician and art collector. Died July 5, aged 79. 
<b>Ingmar Bergman</b>, legendery Swedish film director who defined European art-house cinema. Died July 30, aged 89.
<b>Michelangelo Antonioni</b>, master Italian film director who inspired generations. Died July 30, aged 94.
<b>Tony Wilson</b>, British journalist, broadcaster and godfather of Brit Pop and the Manchester sound. Died Aug. 10, aged 57. 
<b>Luciano Pavarotti</b>, superstar Italian opera singer who achieved world-wide fame. Died Sept. 6, aged 71.
<b>Anita Roddick</b>, British founder of the Body Shop chain of “ethical” beauty products. Died Sept. 10, aged 64.
<b>Marcel Marceau</b>, veteran French mime artist who single-handedly revived the art in Europe. Died Sept. 22, aged 84. 
<b>Igor Moiseyev</b>, Russian choreographer and dance pioneer. Died Nov. 2, aged 101.
<b>Norman Mailer</b>, U.S. author of “The Naked and the Dead” who railed against the establishment. Died Nov. 10, aged 84.
<b>Ian Smith</b>, Rhodesian prime minister from 1964 to 1979 who clashed with Britain over independence. Died Nov. 20, aged 88.
<b>Natalia Durova</b>, Russian animal trainer and writer. Died Nov. 27, aged 73
<b>Evel Knievel</b>, U.S. motorcycle stunt rider who cheated death in the 1970s. Died Nov. 30, aged 69.
<b>Karlheinz Stockhausen</b>, German avant-garde composer famous for atonal music. Died Dec. 6, aged 79.
<b>Ike Turner</b>, U.S. rock and soul musician and former husband of Tina Turner. Died Dec. 12, aged 76.

TITLE: Man U Riding High After Christmas Day
AUTHOR: By Martyn Herman
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United went top of the Premier League after a 4-0 romp at Sunderland on Wednesday with Arsenal and Chelsea dropping points.
Arsenal, who began the day in first place, were held 0-0 in a late kickoff at Portsmouth while third-placed Chelsea were involved in an astonishing 4-4 battle with Aston Villa.
Champions United were a class above hapless Sunderland, two goals from Louis Saha and one each by Wayne Rooney and the league’s leading scorer Cristiano Ronaldo allowing them to go above Arsenal with 45 points at the season’s halfway stage.
The holiday fireworks were at Stamford Bridge where Gareth Barry’s last-gasp penalty gave 10-man Villa a deserved share of the spoils against a Chelsea side which had Ricardo Carvalho and Ashley Cole sent off.
Chelsea have 38 points, two more than Liverpool who went fourth after a late goal from captain Steven Gerrard earned a 2-1 victory at bottom club Derby County.
Everton stayed in touch with the top four by beating Bolton Wanderers 2-0 at Goodison Park.
Chelsea, already without John Terry, Florent Malouda, Claude Makelele and Didier Drogba, face an injury crisis after midfielder Frank Lampard joined the casualty list when he limped off with a thigh problem.
Defenders Ricardo Carvalho and Ashley Cole also face suspension after being sent off after a double from Andriy Shevchenko and a goal from Alex had turned around a 2-0 deficit to put them 3-2 up.
In an action-packed final 20 minutes Martin Laursen made it 3-3, substitute Michael Ballack appeared to have sealed it for Chelsea with a sublime free kick before Cole was red-carded for handball and Barry drove in Villa’s equaliser.
Villa had taken a deserved 2-0 lead with two goals from Shaun Maloney, the second a bad mistake by goalkeeper Petr Cech.
Chelsea got a lifeline on the stroke of halftime when Zat Knight bundled Ballack over in the area and was shown a red card before Shevchenko fired home the spot kick.
The Ukrainian made it 2-2 with a spectacular finish and Alex put Chelsea in control before the late twists and turns.
Villa manager Martin O’Neill was frustrated. “We were playing great and deserved to be 2-0 up,” he told the BBC. “Their penalty was really dubious, it’s a major point in the game... we went from being 2-0 up and suddenly it’s 2-1 and we’re down to 10 men.”
Chelsea said it would appeal against Cole’s sending off — he appeared to head the ball down on to his arm — but Carvalho had no complaints.
“It was never my intention to hurt Gabriel Agbonlahor with the tackle. I was going for the ball and I don’t want people to think that I tried to hurt another player,” the Portuguese defender said in a club statement.
United manager Alex Ferguson rested a few of his first teamers against Sunderland but United were still too good and Rooney opened the scoring after 20 minutes.
Saha’s volley and a Ronaldo free kick made it 3-0 before halftime and Saha completed the rout with a late spot kick.
At the bottom Birmingham City gave themselves some breathing space with 3-0 victory over fellow strugglers Middlesbrough and Wigan Athletic moved out of the drop zone with a 1-0 defeat of inconsistent Newcastle United.
Wigan move above Fulham who were thrashed 5-1 at Tottenham Hotspur, for whom Robbie Keane and Tom Huddlestone both scored twice. West Ham United drew 1-1 with Reading.

TITLE: Georgia’s Imedi TV Suspended
AUTHOR: By Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia’s top television station suspended its broadcasts Wednesday, saying it was protesting the pressure authorities have exerted because of the station’s links to a billionaire presidential contender challenging the government.
“Each of us and members of our families have been subjected to official pressure and blackmail,” Georgy Targamadze, the director of Imedi TV’s political programs, said on behalf of the station’s staff. “There are no security guarantees for our workers.”
The dispute centers on Badri Patarkatsishvili, the founder of Imedi, who is considered Georgia’s richest man. He is challenging Mikhail Saakashvili in the Jan. 5 presidential election, and accuses authorities of plotting to assassinate him.
Georgian authorities shrug off the allegations. They, in turn, accuse the billionaire of plotting to topple the government and trying to bribe Erekle Kodua, a senior police official, with $100 million if police agreed to help with the overthrow
Suspension of Imedi’s broadcasts deals a heavy blow to opposition candidates, which have used the station as a platform for their campaigns.

TITLE: Zoo Faces Queries After Tiger Kills Man
AUTHOR: By May Wong
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN JOSE, California — Marilza Sousa had Christmas dinner waiting on the table, but her 17-year-old son never showed up.
She worried when he didn’t return home that night, but didn’t hear the devastating news until the next morning: Carlos Sousa Jr. was killed by a Siberian tiger that escaped from its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo.
Sousa and her husband, Carlos, choked back tears Wednesday night as they described their shock over their son’s death. “I wish I was sleeping and this was just a bad dream, but it’s not,” Marilza Sousa said.
They said they learned of their son’s death from the coroner’s office, and neither police nor zoo officials had contacted them.
“They didn’t call, like we lost a dog or a cat,” Marilza Sousa said. “But we do have questions. How did this happen?”
On Thursday, investigators were still trying to figure that out.
They cordoned off the zoo’s big cat exhibit Wednesday as they tried to determine whether the tiger escaped from its high-walled pen on its own or got help from someone, inadvertent or otherwise.
The zoo was to remain closed Thursday as police continue probing how the animal was able to leave an enclosure surrounded by an 18-foot wall and a 20-foot moat. Police shot the 300-pound animal to death after it killed Sousa and severely mauled two brothers who also were visiting the zoo.
Police Chief Heather Fong said the department opened a criminal investigation to “determine if there was human involvement in the tiger getting out or if the tiger was able to get out on its own.”
One zoo official insisted the tiger did not get out through an open door and must have climbed or leaped out. But Jack Hanna, former director of the Columbus Zoo, said such a leap would be an unbelievable feat and “virtually impossible.”
“There’s something going on here. It just doesn’t feel right to me,” he said. “It just doesn’t add up to me.”
Instead, he speculated that visitors could have been fooling around and might have taunted the animal and perhaps even helped it get out by, say, putting a board in the moat.
Ron Magill, a spokesman at the Miami Metro Zoo, said it was unlikely a zoo tiger could make such a leap, even with a running start.
“Captive tigers aren’t nearly in the kind of shape that wild tigers have to be in to survive,” he said. He said taunting can definitely make an animal more aggressive, but “whether it makes it more likely to get out of an exhibit is purely speculative.”
The police chief would not comment on whether the animal was taunted.
The same tiger, a 4-year-old female named Tatiana, ripped the flesh off a zookeeper’s arm just before Christmas a year ago while the woman was feeding the animal through the bars. A state investigation faulted the zoo, which installed better equipment at the Lion House, where the big cats are kept.
Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo said Wednesday he gave no thought to destroying Tatiana after the 2006 incident, because “the tiger was acting as a normal tiger does.” As for whether Tatiana showed any warning signs before Tuesday’s attack, Mollinedo said: “She seemed to be very well-adjusted into that exhibit.”
It was unclear how long the tiger had been loose before it was killed. The three visitors were attacked around closing time Tuesday on the 125-acre zoo grounds. Four officers hunted down and shot the animal after police got a 911 call from a zoo employee.
The zoo has a response team that can shoot animals. But zoo officials and police described the initial moments after the escape as chaotic.
The first attack happened right outside the tiger’s enclosure — Sousa died at the scene. Another was about 300 yards away, in front of the zoo cafe. The police chief said the animal was mauling one of the survivors, and when officers yelled at it to stop, it turned toward them and they opened fire.
Only then did they see the third victim, police said.
The two injured men, 19- and 23-year-old brothers from San Jose, were in stable condition Wednesday at San Francisco General Hospital. They suffered deep bites and claw wounds on their heads, necks, arms and hands, said Dr. Rochelle Dicker, a surgeon. She said they were expected to recover fully.
Sousa’s parents said they didn’t know why their son went to the zoo Tuesday, but it should have been a fun Christmas Day activity.
“It’s not a safe place for kids,” Marilza Sousa said. “People go there to have a good time, not to get killed.”

TITLE: BMX Champion Aims For Olympic Gold Glory
AUTHOR: By Tim Reynolds
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: American cycling star Donny Robinson has heard it for years.
It seems like such simple physics. At 5-foot-5, isn’t he too short to be an elite BMX racer? Doesn’t his 150-pound body simply lack the strength and power to compete against men several inches taller, 50 or 60 pounds heavier and who have far more muscle packed onto their frames?
Somehow, the answer is no.
“People have no clue what can be accomplished,” Robinson said, “when you want something bad enough.”
So next August in Beijing, Robinson wants to stand tall — atop the medal podium with Olympic gold around his neck.
The 24-year-old rider from Napa, California, is one of the best BMX racers in the world and part of a powerful American team that plans to dominate when the niche sport hits the Olympic stage for the first time this summer. The U.S. squad is ranked No. 1 by the International Cycling Union, and the diminutive Robinson is a big reason why.
He’s currently No. 2 in the worldwide BMX rankings — only behind fellow American Mike Day — and won a test event at the newly built Beijing Olympic track a few months back, giving him plenty of confidence heading into the biggest year of his career.
If he gets one of USA Cycling’s Olympic spots, he’ll be a gold medal favorite.
“When I first got to that track in Beijing, the place was completely empty and my jaw was hanging for a good half an hour,” Robinson said. “It really hit me that this is the place. This is the place where all my dreams can come true.”
One of his dreams already is: BMX is going mainstream.
He was 6 when he started racing, and even into his late teens, the Olympics wasn’t something BMX racers like Robinson thought about. Their sport — pedaling single-gear bikes on 350-meter dirt tracks with steep start ramps, challenging jumps and banked curves — was thought by many to be a long shot for the Olympic program.
But in 2003, the International Olympic Committee took notice of BMX’s surging popularity, particularly among young athletes, and added it to the Beijing lineup.
Right then and there, Robinson’s priorities immediately changed.
He abandoned the cliche, one-race-at-a-time approach that worked for years. From now until August, it’s all about the Olympics.
“Having the world finally see our abilities and realize that we’ve spent our whole life to be at this point, it’s just an amazing feeling,” Robinson said.
He makes BMX sound easy.
It’s nothing close to easy anymore.
Gone are the days where the sport’s “tricks” include relatively simple things like wheelies, kickouts and bunnyhops. No, it takes a special sort of athlete to survive in the sport now. Races are grueling and can tend to mimic roller derby on dirt.
And the tracks — including the massive, steep one in Beijing — test everyone’s limits.
“I had a rider who was ranked in the top 10 in the world,” said Pat McDonough, USA Cycling’s director of athletics. “We went to the Olympic track in Beijing, with its huge start ramp. She got up there and retired. She got up there and froze for 45 minutes. She told me that if this is where the sport is going, she’s done. It’s almost at the point where you’ve got to be completely nuts ... freakin’ crazy to do this now.”
Robinson doesn’t describe himself as nuts or crazy.
But he races that way. He has to, or else winning wouldn’t be an option.
Once riders leave the starting gate, the next few seconds on a BMX track are, at best, controlled chaos. They’re often side-by-side, inches apart, pedaling furiously. They usually go over jumps en masse; if one racer lands awkwardly and bobbles, then the riders trailing at that point typically crash as well.
So there’s tons of luck involved just to navigate the course while remaining upright.
“It’s like anything else,” Robinson said. “The more you work, the more successful you’ll be.”
His record — with a couple dozen race wins as a pro, a few titles and the current No. 2 points ranking — has proved that.
It also proves that his size won’t deter him from his plans to climb that Olympic mountain in Beijing, either.
“These guys are bigger. So why don’t they beat me every single time? It’s always in my mind,” Robinson said. “So I train harder, I work harder and it’s all mental. If you let it get to you, then you’ve already lost the race. And I won’t let that happen.”

TITLE: Blake Is Back For Islanders
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Jason Blake epitomized hard work during his five-plus years with the New York Islanders.
Blake returned to Long Island for the first time Wednesday night after leaving as a free agent in the summer. The Islanders spoiled his return with a 4-3 overtime victory over Toronto.
He was given a brief video tribute just before the opening faceoff and was greeted with mostly cheers from the fans who appreciated his efforts. The gritty forward left as a free agent in the summer after scoring a career-best 40 goals.
The video board thanked him for his hustle, and the Islanders beat him with a dose of it in the nick of time.
“Obviously coming back, it was good,” Blake said. “You wanted to win the hockey game and get it done.”
The Islanders won the game, but lost starting goalie Rick DiPietro to a knee injury. He won’t make the trip to Ottawa for Thursday night’s game against the Senators.
“He felt good enough in warmup and wanted to give it a try,” Islanders coach Ted Nolan said. “He’ll take an MRI and see what the damage is. We give him full marks for giving it a try.”
In other NHL games Wednesday night, it was: Ottawa 5, Buffalo 3, the New York Rangers 4, Carolina 2; Washington 3, Tampa Bay 2; Columbus 2, Atlanta 0; Chicago 5, Nashville 2; Detroit 5, St. Louis 0; Dallas 8, Minnesota 3; and San Jose 3, Los Angeles 2.
Mike Comrie scored with 9.6 seconds showing on the overtime clock on a rush after backup goalie Wade Dubielewicz stoned the Maple Leafs at the other end. Blake had a chance, but Richard Park knocked the puck away.
“We only got so many seconds left in overtime, I was trying to make a play,” Blake said. “Parkie made a great play by poke-checking it.”
Comrie, who also scored in New York’s three-goal first period, got to a rebound of Park’s shot and put it past backup Andrew Raycroft shortly after a Maple Leafs power play expired.
Raycroft hadn’t played since Nov. 24 when he was pulled in the first period of a loss to Phoenix.
“I was hoping to at least get to a shootout,” he said. “All I’ve done the last month and a half is shootouts. I wanted to see if some of that work was going to pay off.”
Andy Hilbert and Bill Guerin also scored in an unusually productive first period for the Islanders to stake DiPietro to a lead. But a knee injury sustained in pregame warmups forced him out early.

TITLE: Paris Hilton’s Grandfather Gives Away Her Fortune
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Hotel heiress Paris Hilton’s potential inheritance dramatically diminished after her grandfather Barron Hilton announced plans on Wednesday to donate 97 percent of his $2.3 billion fortune to charity.
That wealth includes $1.2 billion Barron Hilton stands to earn from both the recent sale of Hilton Hotels Corp. — started by his father Conrad in 1919 when he bought a small hotel in Cisco, Texas — and pending sale of the world’s biggest casino company, Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.
That money will be placed in a charitable trust that will eventually benefit the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, raising its total value to about $4.5 billion, the foundation said in a statement.
Barron Hilton, chairman of the foundation, intends “to contribute 97 percent of his entire net worth, estimated today at $2.3 billion, including the created trusts, at whatever value it is at the time of his passing,” the foundation said.
Paris Hilton was not immediately available for comment on her grandfather’s plans for his fortune.
Jerry Oppenheimer, who profiled the Hilton family in his 2006 book “House of Hilton,” has said Barron Hilton is embarrassed by the behavior of his socialite granddaughter Paris and believes it has sullied the family name.
Barron Hilton, who is 80, has not commented on Oppenheimer’s remarks.
The foundation supports projects that provide clean water in Africa, education for blind children, and housing for the mentally ill. Its aims, based on Conrad Hilton’s will, are “to relieve the suffering, the distressed and the destitute.”
“Speaking for the family as well as the foundation, we are all exceedingly proud and grateful for this extraordinary commitment,” said Steven Hilton, one of Barron’s sons and president and chief executive of the foundation.
Conrad Hilton established the foundation in 1944 and when he died in 1979 left virtually all of his fortune — including, according to media reports at the time, a 27 percent controlling stake in Hilton Hotels — to the charity.
But Barron Hilton challenged the will and after a nearly decade-long legal struggle reached an out-of-court settlement to split ownership of the shares with the foundation in 1988, The New York Times reported.
The hotel group was sold for $20 billion in October to private equity firm Blackstone Group, while the acquisition of Harrah’s — of which Barron Hilton was a board member until 2006 — is due to be completed by Apollo Management and TPG Capital in early 2008.
Paris, a symbol of celebrity privilege in America, gained notoriety in 2003 when a home video of her having sex was posted on the Internet.

TITLE: Presidential Hopefuls Hunt For Votes in Iowa
AUTHOR: By David Espo
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa — The most wide-open presidential race in a half century pushed unpredictably into a decisive new phase Wednesday, the rhetoric a bit more pointed and the appeals a tad more urgent in the final run-up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
“This is crunch time,” said former Democratic Senator John Edwards, and he spoke for all.
In a race without front-runners, a brief Christmas lull yielded quickly in both early-voting states to a new round of subtle digs, outright criticism, fresh TV ads and stepped-up efforts by independent organizations.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, surprise leader in the Republican pre-caucus polls, bagged an Iowa pheasant with a .12-gauge shotgun and said caucus-goers on Jan. 3 should take notice.
“Maybe it will show that I certainly understand the culture of being outdoors,” he said. It was a not-so-subtle jab at his leading rival in the state, Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor once proclaimed himself a lifelong hunter, but later conceded he had shot only “small varmints” and did not have a gun or a hunting license.
Romney’s political quarry for the day was Arizona Senator John McCain, seemingly staging a comeback in New Hampshire. Romney accused his rival of flip-flops on immigration and tax cuts.
“The point is that under his bill, that he fought for, everybody who came here illegally could stay forever. And does he still believe that or does he not believe that?” Romney said on a radio program from New Hampshire.
“And likewise on taxation. He said, well now he’s for making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Well, does he admit he was wrong in voting against them before?
McCain responded quickly.
“I know something about tailspins, and it’s pretty clear Mitt Romney is in one,” said the former front-runner. “It’s disappointing that he would launch desperate, flailing and false attacks in an attempt to maintain relevance.”
In the short term, the Republican race has become a pair of separate but connected two-man campaigns in early states. In Iowa, Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, is counting on the support of evangelical Christians to deliver a victory over Romney, who has spent millions in the state.
McCain is not mounting a significant effort in Iowa, but his hopes in New Hampshire — where he won the primary eight years ago — depend heavily on the outcome. A Huckabee victory, McCain’s aides say, would put their man in much better position to defeat Romney in the first primary five days later.
By contrast, the Democratic race over the next eight days shapes up as a three-way fight for Iowa among Senator Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Edwards, the party’s 2004 vice presidential nominee. It’s unlikely that Edwards, in particular, could sustain a loss in the first contest, particularly since he’s been campaigning there virtually since the last election.
Obama was first among the leading contenders into the state after the holiday, renewing a campaign-long attempt to cast himself as an agent of change while trying to pre-empt Edwards’ attacks on special interests in Washington.
Without naming Clinton, he said, “We’re told that the lobbyists and the special interests, it’s inevitable that they run things, and so the best you can do is to find somebody who knows how to work the system in Washington. ...
“That’s essentially the argument that’s being made in these last seven days. Don’t try something different because that’s going to be too risky. You don’t know what you might get.”
Later in the day, Obama blamed negative advertising and mail sent by unnamed opponents for planting “seeds of doubt” about him.
“That’s how Washington typically reacts to change,” he said.
The former first lady campaigned with her husband by her side, opening a final-week sprint with remarks designed to blunt Obama and Edwards.
“Some believe you can get change by demanding it, and some believe you can get change by hoping for it,” she said in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. “I believe you can get change by working really, really hard for it.”
“And I think it takes strength and experience to be able to make change in our political system,” she said. “We don’t have any time to waste.”