SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1358 (22), Friday, March 21, 2008
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TITLE: City To Get Olympic Torch Relay
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg will be the only city in Russia and one of only three European cities to host the Olympic torch relay ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August.
The torch will be carried through the city on April 5. London and Paris are the other European cities through which the Olympic torch will be carried.
“It’s a great honor for St. Petersburg to host such a serious world sports event,” said Vyacheslav Chazov, head of the St. Petersburg Sports and Physical Culture Committee.
“I think St. Petersburg has received the honor because it is known not only as the country’s cultural capital, but also as the home of a whole set of magnificent sporting achievements,” Chazov said.
Chazov said at least 81 Olympic champions live in St. Petersburg, and 44 of the city’s sportsmen will take part in the Olympics this year.
The Olympic torch relay in St. Petersburg will cover 20 kilometers, beginning at Ploshchad Pobedy and passing famous sights including the Mariinsky Theater, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Bronze Horseman and the Peter and Paul Fortress. It will end its journey on Palace Square next to the State Hermitage Museum.
Among the 80 participants of the relay will be many Russian Olympic champions, including ice-skater Yevgeny Plyushchenko and speed skater Svetlana Zhurova, who will complete the 3 1/2-hour relay. Shot-putter Galina Zybina, 77, who won three medals in the Helsinki (1952), Melbourne (1956) and Tokyo (1964) Olympic games will begin the relay.
The honor of carrying the Olympic torch will also go to Russian actors, including the 73-year old actress Alisa Freindlikh. The other torch-bearers will be representatives of public organizations and sponsors.
In comments to the media about a possible boycott of the Beijing Games over a recent crackdown in Tibet, Chazov said “sports and politics should not be confused.”
“We should not mix sports and politics for politics’ sake,” Chazov said. “Sportsmen all over the world train for the Olympics with all their strength, and some have an opportunity to take part in it only once in their lives. Therefore they should not suffer because of political moments,” he said.
Chazov said it was sad that the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980 and Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 suffered because of politics. The U.S. boycotted the former as a response to the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, while the Soviets struck back by boycotting the U.S.-held games four years later.
This year’s Olympic torch relay is to take place in 19 cities on all five continents from April 1 through May 3. On May 4 the torch arrives in China.
Beijing Olympic officials said Wednesday that the Olympic torch relay would take place as planned, starting next week in Greece, despite the threat of continued unrest in Tibet and possibly other parts of China, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Jiang Xiaoyu, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee, said the Tibet leg, which includes an ascent up Mount Everest, would proceed as planned and be a “great feat of Olympic history,” the newspaper reported.
At the same time, Jiang implied authorities could change the route or cancel certain legs of the relay, hinting at the vast logistical and political nightmares that could plague Beijing as protesters threaten to target the four-month long event, dubbed the “Journey of Harmony.”
The torch relay is slated to pass through 21 cities in mainland China during more than 30 days, including some 12 days traversing areas currently experiencing ethnic unrest such as Tibet, Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang.
A second torch will be lit and taken up Everest following the flame’s arrival in China, The Wall Street Journal reported.
On Tuesday, representatives of the European Union and Foreign Affairs Ministry of France first spoke about the possibility of a “partial boycott” of the Beijing Olympics by authorities of European Union — for example, by refusing to be present at the Olympics Opening ceremony, Kommersant daily reported.
Representatives of the EU are considering the action as a response to the crackdown by Chinese authorities against Tibetan independence protesters. Some estimates say dozens of people have been killed in the crackdown.
At the same time, the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, said early this week he would leave his position as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile if disturbances in Tibet did not stop. The Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India, has rejected the charge by Chinese authorities that he had anything to do with the disorder in Tibet.
TITLE: Suspected TNK-BP Spy Held
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian security services have detained an employee of BP’s Russian joint venture and a second person with links to the British government’s cultural arm on charges of industrial espionage, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday.
The agencies quoted the Federal Security Service (FSB) as saying the two people detained were brothers with the family name Zaslavsky. It said they both held Russian and U.S. passports.
“According to FSB information, the people mentioned were illegally collecting classified commercial information for a number of foreign oil and gas companies to gain advantages over Russian competitors,” Interfax quoted an FSB statement as saying.
TNK-BP declined to comment. The British Council said it was not yet aware of the development.
A spokesman for the British embassy in Moscow said: “We are aware of the events. We are monitoring the situation closely and we are in touch with BP.”
The statement follows raids by security officers and police of headquarters of BP and TNK-BP, BP’s joint oil venture with local oligarchs and one of Russia’s biggest foreign-backed companies.
Officers swarmed over BP’s new office on Novy Arbat around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, hours after a similar raid against TNK-BP headquarters on Arbat in connection with a back tax claim. There was confusion as to who had ordered the raids.
The aggressive move against TNK-BP, 50-50 owned by British oil major BP and three Russian oligarchs, came as the firm continues to wrangle with Gazprom over its future.
“Representatives of law enforcement have visited our offices as part of an investigation,” BP spokesman Vladimir Buyanov said by telephone late Wednesday. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities.”
Earlier Wednesday, three unmarked minivans, two topped with blue lights, parked along the pedestrian street in front of TNK-BP headquarters. The raid began at noon, employees said, and was still underway as of 6 p.m. One van remained at 8 p.m.
“We are not talking about a search; we are talking about the collection of documents,” said Irina Dudukina, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee. She referred further questions to the ministry’s economic crimes unit.
Two TNK-BP officials were brought in for questioning on Wednesday, said Andrei Filipchuk, a spokesman for the economic-crimes unit.
“We ... invited two managers from TNK-BP’s head office to provide explanations regarding certain questions,” he said, declining to identify the officials.
Dudukina said the officers were looking for documents related to an ongoing tax investigation into Sidanco, a mid-sized oil firm that BP originally bought into in 1997, before folding that stake into TNK-BP when the company was formed in early 2003, Interfax reported.
TNK-BP remains an anomaly in an energy sector that has witnessed creeping state control. The firm has come under increasing pressure in recent months, losing its flagship Kovykta gas project to Gazprom last June following pressure from environmental regulators.
Finalization of the deal, in which TNK-BP pledged to sell its 63 percent stake in Kovykta license holder Rusia Petroleum to Gazprom for between $700 million and $900 million, has been postponed several times.
This has prompted market speculation that Gazprom may be hoping to fold Kovykta into a larger deal that would see it buy out the firm’s Russian shareholders — Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova, Lev Blavatnik’s Access Industries and Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group.
A clause forbidding the trio from selling their stakes expired late last year.
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said the Kovykta deal had yet to be sealed “because we haven’t agreed on everything yet.” He declined to comment further.
President-elect Dmitry Medvedev is chairman of Gazprom’s board. The raids at the offices of the British oil major could further strain already poor relations between Moscow and London.
TNK-BP employees flooded from the building starting around 4 p.m., some saying they were unable to work as computer servers had been shut down.
“They shut the doors around lunchtime for about 15 or 20 minutes, so no one could leave,” said one TNK-BP employee, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak with the press.
TNK-BP spokeswoman Marina Dracheva declined to comment on the investigation, saying only, “We will be ready to cooperate with the authorities, as we always do.”
Several employees said they did not know who was carrying out the raid, and that no announcement had been made. The officers wore no uniforms, they said.
Around 5 p.m., two men exited TNK-BP headquarters and spoke to a man sitting inside one of the unmarked vans.
When asked if they were from the Interior Ministry, one of them, dressed in a dark blue tracksuit, said, “No. We just came to look at Arbat,” one of Moscow’s most famous streets.
The men then retreated to a gray Lada parked at the end of Arbat on Gogolevsky Bulvar, where they picked up McDonalds bags, before heading back inside TNK-BP headquarters.
It remained unclear who exactly carried out the search of the BP and TNK-BP offices. Dudukina said the Central Federal District’s Investigative Committee had carried out the raid. Yet a spokesman for that committee told Interfax that “there is no investigation connected to these companies,” referring to TNK-BP and Sidanco.
The committee had not opened a criminal case related to either firm, the spokesman added.
Filipchuk, of the economic crimes unit, stressed that there was no criminal case and said his department had not carried out the raid.
“None of our staff was there [today],” he said, referring to TNK-BP headquarters.
TITLE: Two Generations of Activists United in Protest
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A new generation of activists joined veteran protesters this week near the Angleterre Hotel on St. Isaac’s Square to mark the 21st anniversary of mass protests held to save the original historical building, one of the most important such demonstrations of people power in the waning days of the Soviet Union.
News of the building’s impending destruction drew up to 22,000 protesters, who kept up the defense of the building around the clock for three days until they were dispersed by the Soviet riot police and the army, just a few minutes before the facade was pulled down on March 18, 1987.
“This day is very important for us, because the Angleterre’s demolition united very many people, very many Petersburgers at that time,” said Yulia Minutina, the coordinator of Living City (Zhivoi Gorod), a pressure group that today struggles to protect the city’s endangered buildings.
Living City shares the same goal as the Salvation Group (Gruppa Spaseniya), the organization that led the 1987 protests against the destruction of the hotel, which is remembered as the place where the revered poet Sergei Yesenin died in mysterious circumstances in 1925.
Most Living City activists did not take part in the 1987 protests because they were too young or had not yet been born.
“We were kids at that time, but now it’s the next generation,” said Minutina.
“We do have people who were at the Angleterre at that time in the organization, but there are few of them, mostly we are all younger. One of our members is the daughter of a Salvation Group activist in Living City, so we have literally inherited its cause.”
The demolition of the Angleterre and the preceding protests represent a symbol for veterans and newer activists for the cause of preserving the city’s historical buildings, which they say is relevant as never before.
“On one hand, this date is a symbol of the disasters, the losses that the city suffered and is yet to suffer, but on the other hand, the Angleterre is a symbol of people’s unity, their ability to forget their own business for the sake of common values,” said Minutina.
“The people from the Salvation Group mark this day every year. They come to the Angleterre at around 2 p.m., when the people were dispersed and the demolition started. Living City has existed for 18 months now, and of course, we join and support this tradition and are planning to keep observing this date. It’s very meaningful for us as well.”
The Angleterre was later rebuilt and now operates as a luxury hotel managed by the Rocco Forte group.
As the first open, mass protest in St. Petersburg under the Soviets, the rally to save the Angleterre’s original building opened the way for other street protests demanding social and political freedoms, and symbolizes the beginning of real changes in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
“People were defending historical architecture, but they had a feeling that they were defending their own freedom. It was one of the first acts of civil disobedience,” said Minutina.
“The people took to the streets not only for the sake of the Angleterre — they felt they were defending themselves, defending their freedom, defending their country, their city, and making the point that it is their country, their country, thus breaking the Soviet stereotype.”
Although many more historical buildings in the center have been destroyed during the last few years, street protests now usually draw dozens, rather than the thousands who were present during the three days of the defense of the Angleterre.
“The situation is different. It was something shocking then. If you could break through and get on the television or in the papers, it was half way done,” said Minutina.
“Now it’s easier, but the attitude is calmer; well, it was shown, printed and so what. Nobody cares.”
However, a March for the Preservation of St. Petersburg, organized by the Yabloko democratic party, Living City and a number of other organizations, drew an estimated 3,000 protesters in September, a substantial number compared to other protests.
“We believe that as time goes by, such actions will get bigger,” said Minutina. “The thing is that people don’t realize yet that what is happening is not one-shot, pinpoint destruction, it’s a general tendency.
“And the more people realize it, the more will join our ranks — not only because everybody wants to preserve our cultural heritage, I don’t have illusions about that, but also because they will understand that his or her own house could be threatened. And people can do a lot when fighting for their own homes.”
TITLE: Minibuses Inspected After Accident Rate Hike
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A recent increase in the number of accidents involving the city’s marshrutki minibuses has prompted police, prosecutors and the city administration to step up safety inspections.
On Tuesday, an inspection of 18 marshrutki in northern St. Petersburg registered 14 violations of traffic rules, and three of the minibuses were taken off the route in question, Fontanka.ru reported.
The inspection showed that the vehicles were breaking technical safety standards.
However, experts say that the most frequent violation of traffic rules performed by drivers of marshrutki is making an illegal turn from the wrong lane, cutting across other vehicles and putting the safety of passengers at risk, according to Fontanka.ru.
Another common violation is that minibuses pick up and drop off passengers in illegal zones.
The city’s marshrutki also cause problems at bus stops near metro stations, which become crowded because they are often the final stop on the route. As a result, bus passengers have to step into the street in order to catch the bus they need.
Since the beginning of this year, six major traffic accidents involving marshrutki have been recorded, in which four people were killed and 30 injured.
During the first few days of this week in three separate incidents, marshrutki collided with trucks.
The latest accident took place on Tuesday when a marshrutka minibus collided with a truck while making a left turn toward the suburb of Pushkin on the Pulkovskoye Highway. Ten people were seriously injured in the accident and taken to hospital. The driver of the marshrutka did not yield to the truck, Gazeta.spb said.
TITLE: Other Russia Calls for a Second Parliament
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Opposition coalition The Other Russia on Wednesday proposed creating an alternative parliament that would unite opposition groups across the political spectrum.
The alternative parliament, tentatively titled the National Assembly, would consist of 500 to 600 members, including activists from liberal opposition parties and groups, such as Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and Mikhail Kasyanov’s Russian People’s Democratic Union, opposition leader Garry Kasparov told a news conference.
“In a situation where acting political institutions in the country have been practically eliminated, a platform is needed where our country’s agenda can be discussed,” Kasparov said.
The group’s inaugural session could be held before the summer and would focus on finding solutions to pressing national problems, including corruption, social inequality and the results of privatizations in the 1990s, Kasparov said.
Opposition groups will hold a conference April 5 to 6 in St. Petersburg to hammer out the details on the composition of the assembly and its activities, Kasparov said.
Union of Right Forces head Nikita Belykh said his involvement in the alternative parliament would depend on the results of the St. Petersburg conference, in which he will participate.
Spokespeople for Kasyanov and Yabloko head Grigory Yavlinsky could not confirm whether the two would participate in the St. Petersburg conference or the alternative parliament. Sergei Udaltsov, head of the leftist opposition group Red Youth Vanguard, said his supporters would participate in the National Assembly if they could agree with other opposition groups on how the assembly’s members will be elected.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov curtly declined to comment on the creation of an alternative parliament.
TITLE: City Ombudsman Gives Report on Human Rights
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Most violations of people’s rights in St. Petersburg are connected to housing, according to an annual report released by city ombudsman Igor Mikhailov. These findings are countered by local human rights advocates who are working on an alternative document.
Mikhailov presented the report at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly on Wednesday. The city parliament — heavily dominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party — elected the politician, a prominent member of the party, to the job in July 2007.
“Approximately half of the appeals are justified,” Mikhailov said. “Most of the complaints concern residential housing. The rest deal with the negligence of the authorities in various situations and their inefficiency regarding pensions, welfare, migration control and access to medicines.”
Since he started his job in July last year, Mikhailov has received 7,000 complaints.
Mikhailov’s statistics are not objective or representative, local pressure groups argue, saying they don’t trust him.
Because Mikhailov has the reputation of being a ruling party stooge, often those who see themselves as victims of the regime — for instance, the participants of Dissenters’ Marches beaten by the police — flock to the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council, an umbrella group aimed at voluntarily carrying out the ombudsman’s duties, and ignore the ombudsman.
The council was in fact born out of pressure groups’ disappointment at Mikhailov landing the ombudsman’s job. Its member organizations include, among others, the human rights groups Citizens’ Watch, Memorial, Soldiers’ Mothers, For Russia Without Racism and the League of Voters, the environmental organization Bellona and the non-governmental Museum of Galina Starovoitova foundation.
“When it comes to cases with any political flavor or involving the interests of a government clan, people do not have any trust in Mikhailov, and come to us instead,” said Ella Polyakova, a member of the Human Rights Council and head of the pressure group Soldiers’ Mothers.
“In such cases it is the state that violates people’s rights and therefore nobody would rely on someone who puts his party interests above everything else, like Mikhailov does. He would be incapable of challenging the government or any other powerful state institution.”
The council is preparing an alternative report on rights abuses. The document will be released in coming weeks, Polyakova said.
The report will contribute to creating a fuller picture of human rights abuses in the city by highlighting the cases that human rights groups deal with, such as dozens of complaints by local citizens beaten by the police during opposition rallies or a wave of appeals coming from human rights groups in Northwestern Russia that have come under heavy pressure from the authorities and encountered difficulties with re-registration under a new law on non-governmental organizations.
The council has gone as far as to suggest a boycott of the ombudsman.
Mikhailov’s figures also appear to conflict with the results of the annual report released this year by Russian national ombudsman Vladimir Lukin.
Speaking at the Federation Council on Wednesday, Lukin said every second complaint sent to him is connected with human rights abuses happening in Russia’s courts, or with law enforcement agencies. In 2007, Lukin received more than 48,000 complaints.
“People’s rights are violated during investigations, inquests and judicial procedures of all kinds; rights get abused when judges deliver their verdicts, and then the violations continue in prisons,” Lukin said. “The level of violence in Russia’s penitentiary system frequently borders on torture. Resolving this problem must be made a top priority.”
Mikhailov said some of his immediate steps will include an appeal to Governor Valentina Matviyenko to revise the procedure for providing housing to families with more than three children.
TITLE: Russia Restores Flights to Georgia
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow agreed Tuesday to restore air travel between Russia and Georgia, more than 17 months after imposing a sweeping transport blockade amid tensions between the ex-Soviet neighbors.
Russia’s Transport Ministry said in a statement that it would restore the air link starting March 25, after Georgia agreed to pay a debt for navigation services provided to its planes over Russia.
There was no immediate comment from Georgian officials.
Russia suspended the air link with Georgia in October 2006, severed postal connections, and launched a massive crackdown on Georgian migrants after Georgia briefly detained four Russian military officers it accused of spying.
While Moscow cited financial reasons for the blockade, Russia’s relations with its small southern neighbor have been mired in political tensions since U.S.-backed President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in late 2003, vowing to integrate Georgia closely with the West.
Georgia and Russia have long been at odds over the status of two pro-Russian breakaway regions in Georgia, and Saakashvili’s repeatedly stated determination to bring Georgia into NATO and the European Union has irked Moscow.
But the two neighbors have recently made efforts to ease tensions. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin met with Saakashvili on the sidelines of a summit of leaders of ex-Soviet nations in Moscow last month, and both governments have moderated their statements.
On Tuesday, Russia’s Deputy Transport Minister Boris Krol sent a letter to Georgia’s economics minister saying that Russia has agreed to resume regular flights, the Transport Ministry said.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that the decision to restore the air link came after Georgia had paid Russia’s air navigation service $2 million and agreed to pay further $1.7 million through October to fully settle its debt.
It hailed the resumption of air travel as an “important step toward restoring traditional good-neighborly ties” between the two nations.
TITLE: U.S. Delivers Proposals on Missile Defense
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia received the United States’ compromise proposals on missile defense in written form Wednesday, and officials were studying them, Foreign Ministry officials said, Interfax reported.
Russian officials were expecting the United States to provide the written proposals Tuesday, after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates discussed them with their Russian counterparts in Moscow.
The delay did not appear likely to affect Russia’s response to the proposals, which are aimed at easing Russia’s strongly voiced concern about U.S. plans for facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Soviet satellites that are now in NATO.
The meeting brought no breakthrough on the contentious issue. Gates had indicated that Russia would receive the proposals in writing late Tuesday.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Wednesday morning that the United States had yet to provide the documents. But Interfax later quoted Kamynin and another official as saying Russia received the proposals Wednesday and was studying them.
The Foreign Ministry and the U.S. Embassy declined immediate comment.
At Tuesday’s talks, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed that Moscow still opposed the U.S. plans to place interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic, saying they would create “risks” for Russia and that the best solution would be to scrap the idea.
The United States says the facilities would provide protection against a potential threat from Iran. Russian officials have said they believe that the real intent is to weaken Russia’s nuclear deterrent.
Lavrov and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov indicated that they wanted to have the proposals in writing. Last year, Lavrov accused the United States of backtracking on missile defense, claiming that written proposals fell short of what Rice and Gates laid out orally in an October meeting.
Moscow has repeatedly expressed concerns that the planned facilities could be expanded and reconfigured to target missile launches from Russia. The proposals formulated by Rice and Gates reportedly include a clause obligating the United States not to place interceptors in their silos until an Iranian ballistic missile threat becomes real. They also stipulate the construction of the radar in such a way that it would be incapable of monitoring launches from Russia, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
(AP, SPT)
TITLE: Pepsi Buys 75% of Russian Juice Firm
AUTHOR: By Maria Kiselyova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — PepsiCo and its largest bottler agreed to buy a majority stake in Russia’s leading juice producer in another step by the world’s No. 2 soft drinks maker to increase its presence in healthier food and beverages.
PepsiCo and the Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG) said in a statement on Thursday they have agreed to buy 75.53 percent of the juice business of Lebedyansky, which also makes baby food and mineral water, for $1.4 billion.
“From the PepsiCo standpoint, this investment represents one of the most exciting steps our company has ever taken internationally,” Zein Abdalla, President of PepsiCo Europe, told a news conference.
“With the Russian juice market forecast to grow to become one of the top five in the world sometime in the next decade, we believe the growth potential of this sector is significant.”
PepsiCo currently controls about 2 percent of the Russian juice market through the Tropicana brand, but does not have its own juice-producing facilities in Russia. Its rival CocaCola Co. controls over a fifth of the Russian juice sector after a $530 million purchase of producer Multon in 2005.
Lebedyansky has 30 percent of the Russian juice market and its juice sales last year stood at around $800 million.
PepsiCo and PBG said Lebedyansky is currently the world’s sixth-largest juice producer.
PepsiCo and PBG will buy shares held by Lebedyansky’s four individual shareholders, and that stake will be split, with PepsiCo getting 75 percent and PBG 25 percent.
The deal, the largest ever in the Russian food market, will however only take place if Lebedyansky’s shareholders approve the separation and the spin-off of the firm’s juice business.
“We now need to see the mineral water and baby food spin-off, to get regulatory approval... we expect the deal to close in the third quarter,” Abdalla told Reuters.
Upon completion of the transaction, PepsiCo and PBG will make a mandatory offer to purchase the shares held by all remaining shareholders in Lebedyansky, which could bring their holding in the Russian firm to 100 percent.
TITLE: Fazer to Build New Bakery in Lenoblast
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Fazer Group has signed an agreement to buy a land plot in the Leningrad Oblast on which it will build a new bakery to strengthen its position on the Russian market, the Finnish company said Tuesday in a statement, adding that construction will begin on the eastern part of this land plot in the near future.
The new bakery will produce fresh and frozen bread as well as other baked produce, and total investment is estimated at more than 100 million euros ($157.4 million.)
“The greenfield bakery in St. Petersburg supports Fazer’s growth strategy and strengthens our position as one of the leading bakery companies in Russia,” said Karsten Slotte, president of Fazer Group.
The 20-hectare land plot is located in the Vsevolozhsky district of the Leningrad Oblast, along the eastern side of the St. Petersburg ring road.
“The new bakery will enable us to introduce new types of products and increase deliveries to other areas in Russia,” said Harri-Pekka Kaukonen, chief operations manager of Fazer in Russia.
“Our estimate is that the new bakery will offer job opportunities for several hundred new employees,” Kaukonen said.
Fazer Group operates in eight countries. The group’s turnover for 2007 was about 1.2 billion euros ($1.89 billion), of which turnover in Russia accounted for 170 million euros ($268 million). The division employs 3,700 people.
During the last three years, Fazer’s bakery operations in Russia have grown at an average annual rate of 40 percent. Currently, 14 percent of the group’s turnover comes from Russia.
Fazer started operating on the food catering and services market in Russia in 2006, and has invested 130 million euros ($204.78 million) in its operations in Russia during the last ten years.
Its operations in the sector at first focused on providing catering services to international and Scandinavian companies operating in the city.
In September 2007, Fazer opened its first restaurant in St. Petersburg.
Earlier this month, Kraft Foods opened its new coffee plant in the Leningrad Oblast with total investment into the project reported at $100 million.
Other foreign investors have also been active in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast over the past year.
More than 120 production facilities were launched in St. Petersburg last year, including a Toyota Motor Manufacturing car plant, Kreps construction materials plant, and new plants for British American Tobacco, Baltimor-Neva, Pervomaiskaya Zarya, Knauf and Aquafor.
According to City Hall’s Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade (CEDIPT), last year foreign investment in St. Petersburg accounted for $6.3 billion — a 19.6 percent increase on 2006 figures.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Vegetable Profits Slump
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Sunway-Group LLC, a Leningrad Oblast-based fruit and vegetable retailer, saw its net profit decrease by 16 times last year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The company reported net profit of 2.686 million rubles ($114,000) for 2007 as opposed to 41.852 million rubles ($1.8 million) in 2006. Profit decreased as a result of growing operational expenses and tax payments.
Zoo Tender to Open
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Next month the St. Petersburg authorities will announce a tender for the planning and construction of the new city zoo, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The zoo will occupy 172 hectares in the Primorsky district, between Yuntolovsky resort and the western high-speed link-road. A 75-meter sanitary zone around the zoo is planned, as well as shopping, pedestrian and parking areas. The project will be financed by the city budget.
Rezidor to Renovate
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Rezidor Hotel Group will invest $40 million into the reconstruction of two hotels in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Rezidor will reconstruct the buildings of Park Inn Pulkovskaya and Park Inn Pribaltiiskaya. The work will be completed by May 2009.
Liviz Declared Bankrupt
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The local alcohol producer Liviz has filed for bankruptcy at the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Earlier this month the court appointed a temporary manager to supervise the troubled enterprise. Interfax cited a source in the alcohol market as saying that recently a new company, Liviz LLC, was registered and will continue to produce alcohol under the same brand at new production facilities, despite the bankruptcy proceedings.
PM Buys Turbine Stake
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Power Machines industrial enterprise is acquiring a 50.32 percent stake in Kaluga Turbine Plant for $53.8 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement.
The company is buying the shares from Highstat Ltd. In the future, Power Machines could increase its stake in the plant to 100 percent.
Nuclear Plants Planned
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Toshiba Corp. and Russian state-owned nuclear energy company Atomenergoprom plan to design and build nuclear power plants together and develop the production of atomic-reactor fuel.
The companies signed an agreement Thursday and will begin to evaluate potential areas of cooperation, Moscow-based Atomenergoprom said in an e-mailed statement.
China Pipeline Rejected
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom Neft failed to secure pipeline space to export crude to China through the end of the year, the company said Wednesday.
The Industry and Energy Ministry did not explain why Gazprom Neft’s application was rejected, said Natalya Vyalkina, a spokeswoman for the oil producer. The company, which had sought to export 1.1 million tons of crude to China, will challenge the decision, she said.
TITLE: Nevzlin On Trial For Murder In Absentia
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart and Matt Siegel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — The murder trial in absentia of former Yukos executive Leonid Nevzlin began in Moscow on Wednesday, prompting complaints by defense lawyers that they were given inadequate time to prepare their case.
Nevzlin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s former lieutenant at Yukos who fled to Israel in 2003, faces 11 charges, including murder and attempted murder, following a four-year investigation led by the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Nevzlin, who currently resides in Israel, has denied all the charges, claiming they are politically motivated.
Prosecutor Alexander Kublyakov outlined the charges against Nevzlin in the opening hearing at the Moscow City Court on Wednesday.
But Nevzlin’s lawyer Dmitry Kharitonov told the court that his team could not respond to the charges, as it had not been given enough time to study the allegations against his client, a court spokeswoman said.
“The defense was given 7 1/2 days to read 19,500 pages,” Eric Wolf, an Israel-based spokesman for Nevzlin, said by telephone. “The prosecution has done everything that it could to prevent Nevzlin’s lawyers from participating in this trial.”
The court on Wednesday refused an earlier request by the defense for a two-month postponement to give it more time to prepare.
Nevzlin is charged with ordering the killing of several business executives and officials from 1998 to 2004, and his trial is closely linked to that of Alexei Pichugin, the oil firm’s former security chief, who was jailed for life last August on charges of involvement in the same murders.
According to the charges, Nevzlin is accused of being behind the killing of Valentina Korneyeva, a Moscow businesswoman, and Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk.
In December, the prosecutor’s office said it was also investigating a possible connection of Yukos executives, including Nevzlin, to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security service agent who was killed by radiation poisoning in London. Weeks before his death, Litvinenko had met with Nevzlin in Israel.
Britain has accused former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi of murdering Litvinenko and called for his extradition, a demand that prompted a chill in the countries’ diplomatic relations.
Yukos, formerly the country’s biggest oil company, was forced into bankruptcy in 2006 by a slew of what many viewed as politically motivated multibillion-dollar back tax charges.
Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, another former Yukos shareholder, are currently serving jail sentences of eight years on tax and fraud charges.
Wolf said Wednesday that Nevzlin would not receive a fair trial in Russia. “This is a show trial. It is an abuse of the legal system,” he said. “I think [the Russian authorities] will rush the trial, and convict him quickly. That’s what they do. Not a single person in the Yukos case has been acquitted.”
Dozens of the company’s managers fled abroad amid the fallout of the affair. Britain has rejected Russian requests to extradite several Yukos executives, including Alexander Temerko, a former senior vice president.
TITLE: Farming Bank Will Get $3Bln
AUTHOR: By Maria Kolesnikova
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia, the world’s third-biggest wheat exporter, agreed to give the country’s farming bank 70 billion rubles ($3 billion) to help boost grain output after borrowing costs doubled.
Russian Agricultural Bank will get 20 billion rubles ($848 million) to help farmers finance spring sowing and another 50 billion rubles for longer-term loans, Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev said in Moscow on Wednesday after meeting with disgruntled growers. “It’s almost a done deal.”
Surging demand for farm financing has left the bank, the country’s sixth-largest by assets, with “no extra money,” Chairman Yuri Trushin said during the meeting. “The bank is in a very difficult situation.”
Rosselkhozbank, as the bank is known in Russian, boosted lending 45 percent to a record 246 billion rubles last year and now lends farmers about 3 billion rubles a week. It borrowed $6 billion from foreign banks in 2007, Gordeyev said.
The global credit squeeze “is becoming more difficult and it got worse in March,” Trushin said. “Our borrowing costs have doubled” and are now 11 percent to 12 percent a year, he said, without elaborating.
TITLE: Kudrin Says Inflation’s Fate In Hands of Central Bank
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday that he saw the Central Bank’s deposits, bank reserve requirements and market operations, but not the ruble as key anti-inflation levers in 2008.
Russia missed its 2007 inflation target by a wide margin, reversing a lower inflation trend seen in previous years. With annual inflation running at over 13 percent, Russia also looks set to miss the 2008 official target of 8.5 percent.
The government has introduced a package of anti-inflation measures, which include price controls, anti-monopoly regulation and export duties, but Kudrin said the package would have little impact on the price growth.
“I believe the fate of inflation is now in the hands of the Central Bank,” Kudrin told reporters in the State Duma.
The Central Bank raised all of its interest rates and mandatory reserve requirements last month, seeking to curb inflationary pressures. Deposit rates provide a floor for the money market rates and are currently set at 3 percent.
The Central Bank has said the ruble exchange rate is no longer an effective tool for lowering inflation.
Kudrin said the new Budget Code provided a legislative framework for a better control over budget spending, another factor behind growing consumer prices.
A possible cap on the retail markup for some foods is “impractical” and could lead to shortages, Kudrin said.
He called the proposal “impractical” and “unacceptable,” Interfax said.
(Reuters, Bloomberg)
TITLE: Pension Fund Accused of Theft
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s Interior Ministry said it uncovered “large-scale embezzlement” by State Pension Fund employees.
Fund managers used government money to purchase apartments from the city of Moscow in 2004 and 2005, the ministry said in a statement on its web site Wednesday.
The unidentified workers signed nine contracts to purchase property worth more than 43.5 million rubles ($1.85 million) for themselves, according to the statement.
“This situation is unrelated to the current management of the Pension Fund,” the state-run fund said in a statement Wednesday.
The person, who was managing director of the Fund during the period investigated by the Interior Ministry, left the organization in December, 2004, according to the statement.
The fund made payments totaling 1.5 trillion rubles ($60 billion) to more than 38 million Russians in 2006, according to the Federal Statistics Service’s latest available figures. Payments equal 5.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the statistics office said.
The fight against corruption, which President Vladimir Putin has called one of the greatest threats to Russia’s security, must remain a priority, President-Elect Dmitry Medvedev said on Feb. 15. Medvedev will replace Putin in May when he is sworn in.
TITLE: The Return of Soviet Dissidents
AUTHOR: By Leon Aron
TEXT: Earlier this month, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a panel discussion with leading members of the opposition in Russia — Boris Nemtsov; Vladimir Ryzhkov; Oleg Buklemishev, the deputy manager of Mikhail Kasyanov’s presidential campaign; and Vladimir Kara-Murza, the manager of Vladimir Bukovsky’s presidential bid.
This event was unusual for the AEI, and we decided to hold it because it is becoming increasingly difficult to hear their voices. They are banished from state-controlled television and have been pushed out of national and local politics. In addition, their rallies and demonstrations are routinely prohibited, and when they do protest on the street, they are attacked by riot police and Nashi thugs, who are paid from government funds.
Their colleagues are harassed in their homes and on the streets. They are detained on bogus criminal charges, sometimes beaten unconscious and in a few cases thrown into psychiatric wards. Owners of halls and conference centers are afraid of giving them space for meetings and debates, and many advertising agencies refuse to produce their campaign materials. The police break into their headquarters and take away their computers, leaflets and posters, and the Kremlin-friendly courts never rule in their favor.
In short, Nemtsov, Ryzhkov, Kasyanov and Bukovsky are becoming more like dissidents in the Soviet sense than a normal opposition force that you would find in Western democracies.
This transformation is bound to have profound implications for Russia and the world. Governments without opposition are doomed to falter. The blunders of a nuclear superpower drunk on oil and gas revenue are bound to be enormous.
Competitors are “partners” in the political process, even when they actively criticize the government. Without an opposition, the center of political gravity is raised all the way to the top, making the vehicle of national politics unstable — one without shock absorbers or brakes. Free of the need to explain themselves, the ruling elite begin to believe in their own infallibility.
We have already seen the first signs of the country’s institutional debility when the government monetized social benefits to pensioners a few years ago. The law, which affected tens of millions of people and cost trillions of rubles, was adopted by the rubber-stamping State Duma after only a few hours of debate. Monetization of benefits is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Without a genuine debate and participation from the opposition, the government is unable to develop solutions to the huge problems in education, healthcare, pensions and corruption.
Moreover, without opposition as a check and balance, the government is given a virtual carte blanche. Take, for example, the borrowing spree of state or state-sponsored companies — in particular, Gazprom and Rosneft, which together owe $85 billion and clearly hope for the state to bail them out. This also applies to Moscow’s huge exports of modern weaponry to China, a serious geopolitical rival that will be armed to the teeth with Russian weapons and know-how, and to Moscow’s support of uranium-enriching Iran. Could these policies have been adopted so easily if the opposition had an opportunity to engage the government in a true debate — in the parliament, on television or in the newspapers — exposing millions of Russians to the perils of these flawed policies?
Of course, the Putin’s crackdown on the opposition is still a far cry from the repression under the Soviet Union. The four members of the opposition who spoke at the AEI on March 10 and thousands of their colleagues are still far better off now than Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Ginzburg or even Bukovsky were in the 1970s. The Union of Right Forces and Yabloko parties, although marginalized, are still legal. Moreover, the Internet is far more efficient than samizdat, although it now essentially plays the same role in the country’s political discourse. And a handful of small-circulation newspapers and magazines that are not afraid to publish articles critical of the Kremlin can still find publishers and distributors. But we don’t know how long this will last.
In the meantime, the West should continue to help sustain Russia’s new dissidents by giving them a platform and an opportunity to engage in a free debate. Far from “undermining” Russia, this solidarity can best ensure that Russia’s democratic evolution will be nonviolent — similar to the period from 1989 to 1991. Let’s hope it is not too late for this.
Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989-2006.”
TITLE: Fairy Tales of Glorious Batttles in Chechnya
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Here is the latest scandal to hit Chechnya: A Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist, while on a visit to Grozny for a football game, took a drive down the street that was renamed just last month for the 84th Paratroopers Squadron. He discovered that a memorial plaque was missing from one of the buildings on the street. The local authorities removed the plaque — ostensibly for repairs. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov had even promised to deploy a security detail armed with machine guns next to the plaque.
According to Moscow’s version of events, the commandos of the 84th Paratroopers engaged “in a battle with terrorists in the Argun Gorge from Feb. 29 to March 3, 2000. They cut off all escape routes and killed at least 700 of them.”
I am quoting an Interfax report about President Vladimir Putin awarding 21 paratroopers the Hero of Russia award, while another 63 received the Order of Courage.
When I was in Grozny last week, I visited this street. I even bet my Chechen companions that we would not find any street signs bearing the name of the 84th Paratroopers. I lost that bet because the street signs were still in place, but the memorial plaque was gone, of course. We found only a blank spot with nail holes in the place where the plaque should have been mounted. I knew that a scandal would erupt over this, but I chose not to draw attention to the missing plaque.
It was sordid to force on Chechnya and on Kadyrov the idea of placing a plaque to honor the 84th Paratroopers Squadron. Rather than strengthening the bonds between Chechnya and Russia, it placed the Chechen authorities in a trap. If Kadyrov allowed the plaque to be installed, it would have been tantamount to letting Russia spit in his face without being able to wipe the saliva off. But if Kadyrov took the plaque down, people would say, “Aha! You are on the side of the insurgents!”
What is most important is that the 84th Paratroopers’ supposedly heroic feat of defeating 2,000 insurgents under the command of Khattab, the infamous Chechen rebel leader who was killed in 2002, never took place.
We first heard about this legend on March 4 from a Pskov newspaper. The correspondent who wrote the story apparently did not know that Chechen insurgents do not roam the countryside in groups of 2,000. In guerrilla warfare, groups of insurgents rarely exceed 100 people; otherwise they would draw too much attention to themselves. Even groups of as few as 10 to 15 are common — that is enough to stage a sudden ambush and then withdraw in a flash.
The problem is that, once the myth of a 2,000-member band of insurgents disappears, the other fables vanish as well, including the one that the commandos wiped out 700 insurgents. In reality, quite the opposite happened. Khattab and a small group of insurgents snuck up on an unprotected company and killed all of the soldiers.
Instead of awarding the Russian officers in charge with new honors, they should have been tried for criminal negligence.
The plaque honoring the 84th Squadron had been mounted on the side of an extremely plain-looking one-story building, which is now home to a little store. In 1996, interestingly enough, this building served as a concentration camp of sorts to detain and “filter out” terrorists.
I don’t know how necessary it is for Chechnya to be a part of Russia, and I don’t know if it ultimately will remain so. But if it does, it will be due to a lot of money being spent in the region and an intelligent political strategy from Moscow.
It will definitely not be accomplished by strong-arming the Chechens into mounting a plaque to honor a nonexistent military feat in a city where federal troops once indiscriminately gunned down Chechens.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Snapshots of a fallen friend
AUTHOR: By Todd Pitman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Todd Pitman, the West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press, was riding behind Dmitry Chebotayev’s vehicle when the Russian photographer was killed last year. He describes how the experience changed his life.
In my nightmares, the helicopters still come out of a dark sky, two black spots barely visible against the backdrop of night.
Their swirling blades grow louder until they finally touch down on earth and fall silent. They look like giant steel bugs from another planet, bulbous robots with eyes of glass coming to take away their prey: seven human beings who woke one day in Iraq not knowing they would be dead by noon.
Six American soldiers. One Russian photographer.
“Ever been a pall bearer before?” a soldier asks in the darkness.
“No,” I say. “What do I need to do?”
“Just carry him.”
There are no lights on this U.S. base because of the threat of attack. And so it is dark, and quiet: a heavy, physical quiet with a body and a shape, one that bears down on my shoulders and makes it hard to breathe.
The soldiers are carrying stretchers to the aircraft. I help carry the last — on it is a large black pouch containing the body of my friend.
It is much heavier than I thought.
We push the stretcher through the open door of a Black Hawk, and I lean forward to rest my palm on the bag one last time. I close my eyes, picturing my friend’s eyes closed inside. A soldier reads the 23rd Psalm.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ...”
I step back, sobbing, and the helicopter blades start up again, slowly at first, spinning faster, growing louder, irreversible clocks forcing this moment to evaporate.
As they lift off I remain behind, sitting alone on a pile of sandbags, watching them vanish into the fluorescent, speckled backdrop of eternity overhead.
n
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, 3,987 U.S. soldiers and at least 128 journalists have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led war began. But to me, they were all just numbers until last year.
I first met Dmitry Chebotayev in April 2007. Just 29, he was on an assignment for the Russian edition of Newsweek and several photo agencies.
At the U.S. military press center in Baghdad, I saw him poring over an online magazine spread of soldiers patrolling a grassy palm grove outside Baqouba. I was going there, and said he should, too.
As a teenager, I had gazed for hours at history books filled with similar images from Vietnam. I had always wondered what it was like.
Dmitry, I think, was afflicted by a similar curiosity — a profound hunger for experience. The lure of a war is illogical, impossible to explain. When you feel it, going is rarely a choice.
A week later, Dmitry joined me in Baqouba. We quickly became friends.
Like him, I had a woman in my life for more than six years whom I loved but had not married. Like him, I was using the lens of journalism to explore the world.
We shared meals, drank coffee late into the night and slept on cots in a tent full of soldiers. Especially, though, we searched for stories, and in Baqouba that meant searching for the war.
One of those days, May 6, 2007, began like many others.
We got up before dawn. We moved out with a platoon of four 31,750-kilogram armored vehicles known as Strykers. And we spent the morning at a police station mostly bored — until Army helicopters spotted a group of men apparently planting a bomb on a street corner.
We rushed to the Strykers and drove deeper into the city.
We paused on a broad dirt road that Americans called “Trash Alley.”
Everything was fine until one of the Strykers began turning left — and somebody, somewhere, set off a massive bomb buried in the sewage system underground.
n
In my nightmares, I can still see the burgeoning, hellish ball of smoke filling the color TV monitor inside our vehicle.
The back hatch opens, and I am trailing soldiers through a tunnel of blurred vision and dust as yellow and red smoke grenades cast bizarre shadows.
I see a dead Iraqi man lying beside his mangled bicycle, crumpled against a wall from the pressure of the blast.
I see the Stryker’s wreckage belching jet-black smoke as sparks rain down from the sky. Flaming hunks of debris are scattered among body parts and charred ammunition. A surreal mist is blanketing the ground.
The blackened, flesh-strewn hulk of twisted steel is barely recognizable, upside-down. A severed leg is dangling off the back.
Soldiers rush forward with stretchers, looking for survivors. Only the driver is alive, pinned inside a front compartment, his hand crushed.
I can hear things sizzling, and I feel something is about to explode.
Then, we are ambushed again.
Insurgents fire and bullets ping off the Stryker’s carcass. Soldiers crouching inside it and on surrounding rooftops fire back.
When the gunshots ease, I survey the scene nervously.
I circle around one body in particular: a man in a maroon shirt, lying face up. Carefully, deliberately, I take photo after photo, capturing it at different angles. The Stryker is just behind, shadowed by a large golden-domed mosque across the street. I think this is an Iraqi civilian in a dishdasha gown, perhaps one of the attackers.
I am expecting Dmitry to come running with his camera, but he does not appear. I think soldiers are keeping him back — photographing U.S. casualties is often taboo.
Inside an abandoned house where we seek shelter, I ask where he is.
“Out front,” a soldier says. “You OK?”
I am relieved, thankful.
I know we will share these stories later: a dangerous time, a brush with death, but we escaped unharmed.
Desperate to talk to Dmitry, I wander outside again. I still can’t find him, and ask somebody else where he is. Inside the house, a dozen red-eyed, mourning soldiers are sitting against the walls, staring angrily toward the harsh light outside. Until this moment, I am an observer. When a soldier answers, I become one of them. I am numb.
Dmitry is outside on the ground near the door — the one wearing the maroon shirt. His blue flak jacket, helmet and sunglasses are gone. His smashed camera is on the ground beside him. His face is covered in dust. When I gain the strength to go out and look, he is gone. Soldiers have carried him away.
Now I want to ask him: Can you forgive me taking your picture?
And I ask myself: Why was I taking his picture, any of these pictures, at all?
n
For a journalist, the world unfolds as an infinite stream of events. Your job is to witness them, capture them, explain them.
But they build up inside you.
I traveled to Iraq half a dozen times for The Associated Press over the years. I saw families crouching in their homes while Americans fought on their rooftops. I heard the screams of a dying Iraqi soldier as we crawled on a roof under a boiling midday sun. I watched helicopter gunships fire rockets across a twilit sky at insurgents holed up in palm groves below.
Unlike everybody else, I was always able to hop on a plane and leave it all behind, returning to a world where you did not cringe, where you could walk — not run — down the street, without worrying about trip wires or bombs or snipers.
I was always able to leave it all behind — until Dmitry was killed.
That day, I crossed through a kind of looking glass, and saw the war in Iraq from another side.
To the daily churn of news, it was just one more tragic story.
To me, it was far more profound. It reverberated through lives thousands of kilometers away, changing them forever.
I think about all the stories we have written — all the headlines and statistics that comprise the daily death tolls.
I do not look at them so casually anymore.
n
At the end of May, I traveled to Moscow for Dmitry’s funeral and met his parents, sister and girlfriend.
They didn’t really know what had happened, and telling them, between shots of ice-cold vodka, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. (Dmitry, it turned out, had never told his parents he was going to Iraq. They thought he was in Jordan, shooting pictures of refugees).
His death forced me to slow down my fast-paced life. In less than a year, I had traveled to Iraq twice, with 20 countries and a coup in Thailand in between.
My fiancee and I took a long vacation visiting family and friends, swimming with giant turtles in a sapphire-blue Hawaiian bay. We got married. And now she is pregnant with our baby boy.
I could not be happier — except when I think about what happened.
I have not returned to Iraq, but I’ve been back many times in my mind.
Often, I see Dmitry smiling.
Often, I see him dead.
In my dreams, I lean down and hold what is left of him. I do not care about the blood.
I press my forehead to his — as I did not have the chance to do — then tell him I am sorry and say goodbye. It is important for me to recognize him, to treat him as a human being — not the object of a camera lens.
I take no pictures, and I am finally at ease. But this is not a peaceful place.
Nearly a year later, I still wonder what we could have done differently. I feel stupid for seeking the war out. And I’m haunted by the words — “Be careful what you wish for” — that one soldier said to us the day before Dmitry died, as we resolved to go out with the Strykers again.
Now I am left with questions, memories and hundreds of digital photographs that I can no longer look at, that I cannot show anyone and cannot throw away.
I wish for the impossible: that I could open these two-dimensional worlds up, walk through them to that time, change that sequence of events.
But I know it cannot happen — except in my dreams. So I try to make the memories last, filtering through them carefully, over and over. And I often come to these:
In the last hours of Dmitry’s life, we spent the morning bored, joking, hoping something might happen. We wondered if our helmets would protect us, and I knocked my fist lightly on his. “You’ll be fine,” I said.
Then Dmitry led the way to a sandbagged rooftop machine-gun post, where we peeked out into the palm-fringed city as the odd gunshot rang out.
I took his picture three times. Not long afterward, he took mine as I stood beside the back ramp of his Stryker, and we prepared to head out.
“C’mon,” I said, begging him to take a few more. “Nobody ever takes my picture here.”
“Don’t worry, man,” he replied in his heavy Russian accent, narrowing his eyes with a smile. “I’ll take some great ones of you later.”
n
In the dream, I want to open the black bag and see his face.
The soldiers at the morgue refuse and tell me it’s too late.
“Open it!” I protest. I scream.
They say no.
Finally, they relent.
My hand zips the bag open, downward, revealing a pale discolored face, covered in dust.
I am relieved. It is not my friend.
It is not anyone I know.
TITLE: Chernov’s
choice
TEXT: Free Maxim Reznik, a rally against imprisonment of the leader of the local branch of Yabloko democratic party, will feature Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov and satirist Viktor Shenderovich, rather than musical performances, as was previously announced in leaflets distributed earlier this week.
“We assumed that people would come to listen to people speaking about the situation rather than to listen to the music, although there will be bands performing at the end of the meeting,” said Olga Kurnosova, the local coordinator for the oppositional United Civil Front, on Thursday.
One of the leaders of the local liberal opposition, Reznik is now in custody charged with assaulting three policemen. He could face up to five years in prison in what he calls a fabricated case.
A meeting demanding Reznik’s immediate release will be held on Pionerskaya Ploshchad, near the Young Spectator’s Theater (TYuZ), on 2 p.m. Sunday.
Artist Vladimir Shinkaryov, the founder of once-underground art group Mitki, announced on Thursday that he is quitting the group.
The move follows a controversy in which Dmitry Shagin, who has appointed himself the art group’s leading figure, wound up on Dmitry Medvedev’s local election committee and urged the public to take part in the March 2 presidential elections during a concert celebrating the Art Center Pushkinskaya 10’s recent 19th anniversary.
“Of course, he’s gone into politics, because it’s the way to get money without even painting pictures. He’s the best friend of [Governor Valentina] Matviyenko.”
The friendship paid off when Shagin was granted two large studios by the governor. Matviyenko was the main guest at the launch party, while Shagin has painted at least one portrait of her.
“Everybody who saw the beginning of the Mitki movement [in the 1980s] was wondering how I managed to tolerate it for so long,” said Shinkaryov by phone on Thursday.
“An art group can’t exist for that many years. It’s not as if it’s a sports team that is forced to keep together for profit. But [Mitki] only brings profit to Dmitry Shagin. When [Alexander] Florensky left, he lost what remained of his taste.”
Shinkaryov said that the art group’s last proper exhibition was one dedicated to Mitki’s 15th anniversary 10 years ago. The Mitki art group started as a fictional youth movement that Shinkaryov described in his samizdat book “Mitki.” The group’s trademarks were sailor’s shirts and a penchant for cheap strong wine.
“Perhaps it’s an aberration of conscience, but he started thinking that it was him who invented Mitki, and tells this to journalists, shamelessly,” said Shinkaryov.
“What is Mitki? It’s Dmitry Shagin and a sailor’s shirt. But Mitki was once a subtle and interesting thing.”
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Eyes wide open
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Amid a wave of hate crimes that has tarnished Russia’s cultural capital, a youth organization has taken up the challenge to retrieve St. Petersburg’s reputation by organizing a movie festival on tolerance in the week following the UN’s World Day Against Racism.
The St. Petersburg Social Democratic Youth Organization (SDYO) has taken over the task of organizing the third annual five-day “Open Your Eyes” International Film Festival against Racism and Xenophobia, to be held at Dom Kino, from the St Petersburg-based Russian-German Exchange (RGE), which was the organizer last year.
Tickets to see the film program are free and public discussions with experts will be held after each show in Dom Kino’s conference hall, according to SDYO’s co-leader Marie-Angel Toure.
“We thought it would be wise to help RGE by taking over the task at a time when they are preparing for bigger international festivals that need serious commitment, more resources and organizational skills... [but] we are still working in collaboration with them,” said Toure.
RGE will organize the four-month young filmmakers and environmental activists Moving Baltic Sea Festival on a ship set to sail from Germany, via Poland, Kaliningrad, Latvia and Estonia to St. Petersburg in June, according to Ludmila Lisichkina, RGE’s Public Relations Manager and the program coordinator.
The “Open Your Eyes” festival, which is also a part the European Action Week Against Racism, starts on Wednesday with a screening of British director Shane Meadows’ “This is England” (2006). Set in 1983, the film tells the story of an orphaned 12-year-old boy who discovers a new world of parties, fashion and sex by joining a skinhead gang.
Under the gang-leadership of Combo, the group carries out a series of racial assaults on the local ethnic minority members a few days prior to the boy’s rite of passage into the gang, marked with rituals symbolizing a farewell bid to innocence and purity of childhood.
The program also includes a screening on Thursday of Andrei Panin’s and Tamara Vladimirtseva’s “Gagarin’s Grandson” Russia (2007), which depicts the fate of Gena, an African-Russian boy who is rejected by the community to which he belongs because of his dark skin.
Fyodor, Gena’s white half-brother is shocked to discover that his brother in the orphanage is black. On taking Gena home, Fyodor encounters hostile receptions from both the general public and his close acquaintances who are not prepared to accept the “alien.”
Josef Fares’ “Zozo” (2005), showing on Friday, is a Swedish production depicting an Arabic boy moving from Lebanon to Sweden to escape the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980s.
A Golden Lion award nominee, Winfrid Bonengel’s “Nazi,” (2002), playing on March 29, is a thrilling drama of horror based on the memoir of a German neo-Nazi ringleader.
The film reflects the emergence of neo-fascism, the state of racial prejudice and violence in the early 1990s not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The festival ends Sunday, March 30 with a display of Gavin Hood’s “Tsotsi” (2005), which probes the legacy of Apartheid. Tsotsi kills a woman to steal her car, only to find a toddler in the back seat. Regretting his life of crimes, he sets out to raise the child, but finds himself facing social barriers in the new South Africa.
The UN’s Security Council declared the International World Day Against Racism and Xenophobia to comemorate March 21, 1960, the day of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa when police shot at a crowd of black protesters, killing around 70 people. The event became synonymous with racist brutality.
www.domkino.spb.ru, www.openeyes.spb.ru
TITLE: A flock of swans
AUTHOR: By Kevin Ng
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This year’s Mariinsky Theater Ballet Festival, running through Sunday, has proved very meager indeed compared with the rich and diverse fare offered by the seven previous festivals.
Six of the ten performances are “Swan Lake.”
This would be understandable for an overseas tour due to limited rehearsal time. But surely in its home theater, the Mariinsky Ballet should be more than capable of presenting a different program almost every night, as in previous years.
This safe and predictable programming is justifiable if the Mariinsky can still dance this Petipa 1895 classic “Swan Lake” with all its legendary greatness. But can it?
After the first two performances last weekend, the answer is yes and no. Yes, the Mariinsky’s corps de ballet is still the greatest in the world and surpasses any other ballet company’s in terms of upper-body uniformity. But it must be mentioned that the Mariinsky corps was greater still a decade or two ago, and the present one cannot yet attain that peak. And yes, the Mariinsky’s character dancers are still unsurpassed in the national dances of Act III. But then again, there was even more grandeur and stylishness in these national dances in the past.
The choreographic text of this 1950 Konstantin Sergeyev production is not as authentic as the London Royal Ballet’s current 1986 production by Anthony Dowell.
Still, any production of “Swan Lake” needs to be illuminated by a true classical ballerina, such as the Mariinsky star Diana Vishneva, much acclaimed in New York lately, who danced the opening “Swan Lake.” Vishneva, a supremely musical dancer, danced the white swan duet immaculately as if in one long phrase. Vishneva’s pure and pellucid dancing achieved a rare state of sanctity, as if bestowing a spiritual blessing. Her sublime performance in this “white” act was a revelation. Her black swan was also gloriously danced. Igor Kolb strongly partnered Vishneva and gave a performance full of dramatic depth and virtuosic power.
The second-cast Swan Queen the following night wasn’t in the same class. Gillian Murphy, a principal of the American Ballet Theater, was more conventional and not as distinguished as Vishneva, though her black swan was technically formidable. She was fortunate to have a prince as noble as Andrian Fadeyev. Fadeyev, a fine classical dancer, danced with much romantic passion. Ilya Kuznetsov was powerful as the evil Rothbart, one of his best roles. And Vasily Shcherbakov impressed in the Act 1 trio.
This year’s Mariinsky Ballet Festival however opened on March 13 with a downer: a premiere of an insubstantial two-act ballet by Kirill Simonov, who had choreographed the Mariinsky’s 2001 Shemyakin production of “The Nutcracker.” It lasts only slightly over an hour excluding the long interval. Compared to last year’s festival, which opened with Sergei Vikharev’s masterly reconstruction of Petipa’s gem “Le Reveil de Flore,” and the 2006 festival which opened with Pierre Lacotte’s reconstruction of “Ondine,” this two-act Simonov ballet,”Glass Heart,” is nowhere as significant. The Mariinsky would have done better to stage instead Balanchine’s Stravinsky masterpiece “Agon,” which has been planned since last year but has unfortunately been delayed again.
“Glass Heart” consists of five scenes, and is set to music by Alexander von Zemlinsky, a contemporary of the famous Viennese composer Gustav Mahler. It is based on the real life of Zemlinsky who is in love with Mahler’s wife Alma. This central love triangle is depicted in a series of duets and trios. A contrast to this threesome is a secondary couple — the gardener and his wife — which represents pure love. The most dramatically successful scene in Act I is the third, with Alexander shooting Alma by mistake instead of Gustav. The first scene in Act II consists of some rather pleasant pure-dance divertissements for an ensemble. The short final scene depicts, none too effectively, Alexander’s obsession with a puppet of Alma after his descent into madness.
Simonov’s choreography employs a lot of undulating upper-body movements, punctuated by plenty of circling and rotation of the arms, which curiously remind one of the style of the American modern-dance choreographer Trisha Brown. However, Simonov’s vocabulary is very narrow and becomes repetitive after a while. The major weakness is that there is not enough differentiation between the main characters, who often execute similar interchangeable steps. The best part of this uneven ballet is the impassioned duets between Zemlinsky and Alma.
The leading dancers were outstanding. Islom Baimuradov danced authoritatively and was entirely compelling as Gustav Mahler. Yekaterina Kondaurova was most glamorous and alluring as his wife Alma. Maxim Zyuzin danced powerfully as Alexander, revealing a dramatic intensity not seen before in his dancing. Svetlana Ivanova was delightful in her solo.
The Mariinsky Theater Ballet Festival runs through Sunday. www.mariinsky. ru
TITLE: A Cold War tale
AUTHOR: By William J. Broad
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Atop the globe, the icy surface of the Arctic Ocean has remained relatively peaceful. But its depths have boiled with intrigue, no more so than in the cold war.
Although the superpowers planned to turn those depths into an inferno of exploding torpedoes and rising missiles, the brotherhood of submariners — the silent service, both Russian and American — has worked hard over the decades to keep the particulars of those plans hush-hush.
Now, a few secrets are spilling through a crack in the wall of silence, revealing some of the science and spying that went into the doomsday preparations.
A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine, the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The United States did so as part of a clandestine effort to prepare for Arctic submarine operations and to win any military showdown with the Soviet Union.
In great secrecy, moving as quietly as possible below treacherous ice, the Queenfish, under the command of Captain Alfred S. McLaren, mapped thousands of miles of previously uncharted seabed in search of safe submarine routes. It often had to maneuver between shallow bottoms and ice keels extending down from the surface more than 100 feet, threatening the sub and the crew of 117 men with ruin.
Another danger was that the sub might simply be frozen in place with no way out and no way to call for help as food and other supplies dwindled.
The Queenfish at one point became stuck in a dead end. The rescue took an hour and tense backtracking out of what had threatened to become an icy tomb.
“I still dream about it every other week,” Dr. McLaren, 75, the book’s author, recalled in an interview. “It was hairy.” The University of Alabama Press is publishing his recollections of the secret voyage.
Sylvia A. Earle, an oceanographer and the former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said such feats in perilous waters made Dr. McLaren a genuine hero. “The sub could have disappeared, and nobody would have known anything about it,” she said. “But they came through. That’s exploration at its most exquisite.”
After Dr. McLaren’s mission, the Arctic became a theater of military operations in which the Soviets tried to hide their missile-carrying subs under the fringes of the ice pack while American attack subs tried relentlessly to track them. The goal was to destroy the Soviet subs if the cold war turned hot, doing so quickly enough to keep them from launching their missiles and nuclear warheads at the United States.
Norman Polmar, an author and analyst on Navy operations, called the polar environment “very very difficult” for subs. He said ice dangling from the surface in endless shapes and sizes made the sub’s main eyes — sonar beams that bounce sound off the bottom and surrounding objects — work poorly.
Mr. Polmar added that the submarine community nonetheless considered the Arctic “a big deal,” because it had a near monopoly on operations there.
Dr. McLaren commanded one of the Navy’s most advanced warships, a jet-black monster the length of a football field.
It was the first of a large class of submarines specially designed for year-round operations in polar regions. As such, it boasted an array of special acoustic gear meant to help it visualize the complex world beneath the pack ice.
For instance, the sub had a special sensor to detect icebergs jutting downward with threatening spikes. From bow to stern, it had a total of seven acoustic sensors pointing upward to help the crew judge the thickness of ice overhead.
As Dr. McLaren recounts in “Unknown Waters,” the Queenfish, in preparation for its Arctic voyage, was stripped of all identifying marks and picked up a full load of torpedoes.
It arrived at the North Pole on Aug. 5, 1970, rising through open water. On the ice, an impromptu Santa Claus in a red suit frolicked with crew members.
The submarine then sailed for the Siberian continental shelf, where it began its mission of secret reconnaissance.
Moscow claimed seas extending 230 miles from its shores, including most of the shelf, whose waters averaged a few hundred feet deep. But Washington recognized just a 12-mile territorial limit, and Dr. McLaren was instructed to play by those rules.
As the book recounts, the sub repeatedly ventured within periscope range of Soviet land. In the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, its crew examined the October Revolution and Bolshevik islands.
The Queenfish also spotted a convoy. “I was able to see and identify all six ships as Soviet,” Dr. McLaren writes. “They consisted of an icebreaker leading a tanker and four cargo ships on an easterly course that slowly weaved back and forth through the chaotic ice pack.”
The main mission was to map the seabed and collect oceanographic data in anticipation of the Arctic’s becoming a major theater of military operations. The sub did so by finding and following depth contours, for instance, by locating the areas of the Arctic Basin where the seabed was 600 feet below the surface. A result was a navigation chart that bore the kind of squiggly lines found on topographic maps.
The goal of mapping the bottom contour also sent the Queenfish into the dead end. The crew was watching a favorite Western movie, “Shane,” when a messenger touched Dr. McLaren on the shoulder and whispered that the sub had ground to a standstill.
“Heart in my mouth, I ran up to the after-port side of the control room,” he writes. “Saturating the iceberg detector scope was bright sea-ice-return in all directions.”
Dr. McLaren ordered all crew movement to cease as he and other watch standers worked the propeller, rudder and stern planes to move the Queenfish slowly backward. Finally, he writes, the boat entered deeper water, and the crew “gave out a huge collective sigh of relief.”
The two-month voyage ended in Nome, Alaska, where the sub and crew encountered a chilly reception. The mayor and other people on the town dock had mistaken the sinister-looking sub without markings as Soviet.
In 1972, Dr. McLaren won the Distinguished Service Medal, the military’s highest peacetime award.
Historians say cold war maneuvering in the Arctic picked up after his mission, with the two sides deploying more submarines beneath the ice. The United States built a total of 36 sister subs to the Queenfish, known as the Sturgeon class.
Little is known publicly of the polar exploits. But every so often the icy world erupted in a foretaste of war. In 1984, an American satellite observed a Soviet sub breaking through the ice of the Siberian sea to test fire missiles.
Military and legal experts said Dr. McLaren’s book, while providing a glimpse into a hidden world of cold war planning, might also make political waves today.
That is because of the sub’s repeated penetrations of what Moscow considered its territorial waters, defying boundaries that Washington refused to recognize.
The disclosure of that boldness could bolster the case in international forums for American navigational rights, legal experts said in interviews.
Bernard H. Oxman, a specialist in maritime law at the University of Miami School of Law, called the 1970 voyage “an indication of state practice and a refusal to acquiesce in Russian claims over navigation.” Although Moscow has in recent years relaxed such claims, he added, the legal precedent remains.
So too, Dr. McLaren sees his spy mission as a milestone for freedom of navigation, whether in Russian waters or elsewhere in the contested wilds atop the globe.
Today the issue is hot, because melting polar ice is opening up new shipping lanes and exposing potentially vast deposits of natural resources, including oil. A modern gold rush is getting under way.
“It’s important to maintain freedom of the seas,” Dr. McLaren said in an interview. “That’s something our country has fought for literally from its inception.”
Global warming and the shrinking polar ice pack are creating new opportunities and responsibilities, he said, adding, “We’ve got to stand our ground.”
TITLE: Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction prophet, dies aged 90
AUTHOR: By Gerald Jonas
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.
Rohan de Silva, an aide, confirmed the death and said Clarke had been experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome for the last two decades.
The author of almost 100 books, Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project. His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.
Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.
Clarke’s influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Clarke’s writings with giving him courage to pursue his “Star Trek” project in the face of indifference, even ridicule, from television executives.
In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Clarke continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific sage and the pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th century. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning network of communications satellites. “No one can predict the future,” he always maintained. But as a science fiction writer he couldn’t resist drawing up timelines for what he called “possible futures.” Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology — from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that “clean, safe power” from “cold fusion” would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.
Popularizer of Science
Clarke was well aware of the importance of his role as science spokesman to the general population: “Most technological achievements were preceded by people writing and imagining them,” he noted. “I’m sure we would not have had men on the Moon,” he added, if it had not been for H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. “I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.”
Arthur Charles Clarke was born on Dec. 16, 1917, in the seaside town of Minehead, Somerset, England. His father was a farmer; his mother a post office telegrapher. The eldest of four children, he was educated as a scholarship student at a secondary school in the nearby town of Taunton. He remembered a number of incidents in early childhood that awakened his scientific imagination: exploratory rambles along the Somerset shoreline, with its “wonderland of rock pools”; a card from a pack of cigarettes that his father showed him, with a picture of a dinosaur; the gift of a Meccano set, a British construction toy similar to American Erector Sets.
He also spent time, he said, “mapping the moon” through a telescope he constructed himself out of “a cardboard tube and a couple of lenses.” But the formative event of his childhood was his discovery, at age 13 — the year his father died — of a copy of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, then the leading American science fiction magazine. He found its mix of boyish adventure and far-out (sometimes bogus) science intoxicating.
While still in school, he joined the newly formed British Interplanetary Society, a small band of sci-fi enthusiasts who held the controversial view that space travel was not only possible but could be achieved in the not-so-distant future. In 1937, a year after he moved to London to take a civil service job, he began writing his first science fiction novel, a story of the far, far future that was later published as “Against the Fall of Night” (1953).
Clarke spent World War II as an officer in the Royal Air Force. In 1943 he was assigned to work with a team of American scientist-engineers who had developed the first radar-controlled system for landing airplanes in bad weather. That experience led to Clarke’s only non-science fiction novel, “Glide Path” (1963). More important, it led in 1945 to a technical paper, published in the British journal Wireless World, establishing the feasibility of artificial satellites as relay stations for Earth-based communications.
The meat of the paper was a series of diagrams and equations showing that “space stations” parked in a circular orbit roughly 22,240 miles above the equator would exactly match the Earth’s rotation period of 24 hours. In such an orbit, a satellite would remain above the same spot on the ground, providing a “stationary” target for transmitted signals, which could then be retransmitted to wide swaths of territory below. This so-called geostationary orbit has been officially designated the Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union.
Decades later, Clarke called his Wireless World paper “the most important thing I ever wrote.” In a wry piece entitled, “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time,” he claimed that a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a patent. The lawyer, he said, thought the notion of relaying signals from space was too far-fetched to be taken seriously.
But Clarke also acknowledged that nothing in his paper — from the notion of artificial satellites to the mathematics of the geostationary orbit — was new. His chief contribution was to clarify and publicize an idea whose time had almost come: it was a feat of consciousness-raising of the kind he would continue to excel at throughout his career.
A Fiction Career Is Born
The year 1945 also saw the start of Clarke’s career as a fiction writer. He sold a short story called “Rescue Party” to the same magazine — now re-titled Astounding Science Fiction — that had captured his imagination 15 years earlier.
For the next two years Clarke attended King’s College, London, on the British equivalent of a G.I. Bill scholarship, graduating in 1948 with first-class honors in physics and mathematics. But he continued to write and sell stories, and after a stint as assistant editor at the scientific journal Physics Abstracts, he decided he could support himself as a free-lance writer. Success came quickly. His primer on space flight, “The Exploration of Space,” became an American Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
Over the next two decades he wrote a series of nonfiction bestsellers as well as his best-known novels, including “Childhood’s End” (1953) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). For a scientifically trained writer whose optimism about technology seemed boundless, Clarke delighted in confronting his characters with obstacles they could not overcome without help from forces beyond their comprehension.
In “Childhood’s End,” a race of aliens who happen to look like devils imposes peace on an Earth torn by Cold War tensions. But the aliens’ real mission is to prepare humanity for the next stage of evolution. In an ending that is both heartbreakingly poignant and literally earth-shattering, Clarke suggests that mankind can escape its suicidal tendencies only by ceasing to be human.
“There was nothing left of Earth,” he wrote. “It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun.”
The Cold War also forms the backdrop for “2001.” Its genesis was a short story called “The Sentinel,” first published in a science fiction magazine in 1951. It tells of an alien artifact found on the Moon, a little crystalline pyramid that explorers from Earth destroy while trying to open. One explorer realizes that the artifact was a kind of fail-safe beacon; in silencing it, human beings have signaled their existence to its far-off creators.
Enter Stanley Kubrick
In the spring of 1964, Stanley Kubrick, fresh from his triumph with “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” met Clarke in New York, and the two agreed to make the “proverbial really good science fiction movie” based on “The Sentinel.” This led to a four-year collaboration; Clarke wrote the novel and Kubrick produced and directed the film; they are jointly credited with the screenplay.
Many reviewers were puzzled by the film, especially the final scene in which an astronaut who has been transformed by aliens returns to orbit the Earth as a “Star-Child.” In the book he demonstrates his new-found powers by detonating from space the entire arsenal of Soviet and United States nuclear weapons. Like much of the plot, this denouement is not clear in the film, from which Kubrick cut most of the expository material.
As a fiction writer, Clarke was often criticized for failing to create fully realized characters. HAL, the mutinous computer in “2001,” is probably his most “human” creation: a self-satisfied know-it-all with a touching but misguided faith in his own infallibility.
If Clarke’s heroes are less than memorable, it’s also true that there are no out-and-out villains in his work; his characters are generally too busy struggling to make sense of an implacable universe to engage in petty schemes of dominance or revenge.
Clarke’s own relationship with machines was somewhat ambivalent. Although he held a driver’s license as a young man, he never drove a car. Yet he stayed in touch with the rest of the world from his home in Sri Lanka through an ever-expanding collection of up-to-date computers and communications accessories. And until his health declined, he was an expert scuba diver in the waters around Sri Lanka.
He first became interested in diving in the early 1950s, when he realized that he could find underwater, he said, something very close to the weightlessness of outer space. He settled permanently in Colombo, the capital of what was then Ceylon, in 1956. With a partner, he established a guided diving service for tourists and wrote vividly about his diving experiences in a number of books, beginning with “The Coast of Coral” (1956).
Of his scores of books, some like “Childhood’s End,” have been in print continuously. His works have been translated into some 40 languages, and worldwide sales have been estimated at more than $25 million.
In 1962 he suffered a severe attack of polio. His apparently complete recovery was marked by a return to top form at his favorite sport, table tennis. But in 1984 he developed post-polio syndrome, a progressive condition characterized by muscle weakness and extreme fatigue. He spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair.
Clarke’s Three Laws
Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction and society that were published in his “Profiles of the Future” (1962):
* “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
* “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
* “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Along with Verne and Wells, Clarke said his greatest influences as a writer were Lord Dunsany, a British fantasist noted for his lyrical, if sometimes overblown, prose; Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher who wrote vast speculative narratives that projected human evolution to the farthest reaches of space and time; and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
While sharing his passions for space and the sea with a worldwide readership, Clarke kept his emotional life private. He was briefly married in 1953 to an American diving enthusiast named Marilyn Mayfield; they separated after a few months and were divorced in 1964, having had no children.
One of his closest relationships was with Leslie Ekanayake, a fellow diver in Sri Lanka, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1977. Clarke shared his home in Colombo with his friend’s brother, Hector, his partner in the diving business; Hector’s wife, Valerie; and their three daughters. Clarke reveled in his fame. One whole room in his house — which he referred to as the Ego Chamber — was filled with photos and other memorabilia of his career, including pictures of him with Yury Gagarin, the first man in space, and Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.
Clarke’s reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than a few accurate predictions. His visions helped bring about the future he longed to see. His contributions to the space program were lauded by Charles Kohlhase, who planned NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and who said of Clarke, “When you dream what is possible, and add a knowledge of physics, you make it happen.”
At the time of his death he was working on another novel, “The Last Theorem,” Agence France-Presse reported. “ The Last Theorem’ has taken a lot longer than I expected,” the agency quoted him as saying.
TITLE: Ripley director dies
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Anthony Minghella, a screenwriter, opera director and the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “The English Patient,” died of a hemorrhage Tuesday at age 54. Minghella’s death came five days before the British TV premiere of his final film, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”
Spokesman Jonathan Rutter said Minghella died early Tuesday at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. Rutter said Minghella underwent surgery last week for a growth in his neck. He said the operation “seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage.”
Britain’s arts community reacted with shock to the loss of one of its best-known and best-liked figures. Tributes poured in from people as diverse as movie star Jude Law, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the president of Botswana.
Law, who appeared in three of Minghella’s films, said he was “deeply shocked and saddened.”
“He was a sweet, warm, bright and funny man who was interested in everything from football to opera, films, music, literature, people and most of all his family whom he adored and to whom I send my thoughts and love,” said Law, who appeared in Minghella’s films “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Cold Mountain” and “Breaking and Entering.” “I shall miss him hugely.”
Blair, who became friends with Minghella after the filmmaker directed a Labour Party election commercial in 2005, said Minghella was “a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with.”
“Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber,” Blair said.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Minghella was “one of Britain’s greatest creative talents, one of our finest screenwriters and directors, a great champion of the British film industry and an expert on literature and opera.”
Minghella was in Botswana recently filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which the BBC plans to broadcast Sunday. A spokesman for Botswana’s President Festus Mogae said Minghella’s death was a “shock and an utter loss.”
The project was the latest of Minghella’s literary adaptations, which also included the Italy-set thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the U.S. Civil War saga “Cold Mountain” and the World War II-era story “The English Patient,” which came out in 1996 and earned the Academy Award for best picture, with Minghella winning an Oscar for best director.
But Minghella, who began his career as a writer, confessed he was not sure of his place as a director.
“I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write,” he said recently. “It is a naked thing to admit, but I feel very strongly that I want people to appreciate that I am not just a flash in the pan.”
Minghella also turned his talents to opera. In 2005, he directed a highly successful staging of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” at the English National Opera in London — choreographed by Minghella’s wife, Carolyn Choa.
The following year, he staged it as the season opener of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Minghella was working with composer Osvaldo Golijov on a new opera titled “Daedalus,” for which he was to write the libretto and direct. It was to have premiered in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season.
Met general manager Peter Gelb remembered how the chorus invented its own award to present to Minghella during “Madama Butterfly.”
“He was a brilliant renaissance man. This wasn’t just a gifted filmmaker,” Gelb said. “He was a musician, played the piano, was a playwright. It’s a tremendous loss. It’s very sad for me and the Met. He was deeply loved by everybody he came into contact with at the Met, from the performers to the stage crew. They respected him and his clarity of thinking and his kindness.”
Born in 1954, Minghella grew up on the Isle of Wight, a holiday island off England’s southern coast where his Italian parents ran an ice cream factory, and studied at the University of Hull in northern England.
Minghella came to moviemaking from a playwrighting career on the London “fringe” and, in 1986, on the West End with the play, “Made in Bangkok,” a hard-hitting look at the sexual mores of a British tour group in Thailand.
He also wrote for radio and television, penning episodes of the BBC kids’ drama “Grange Hill” and the popular detective series “Inspector Morse.”
Film was a natural progression.
“I was never happy writing plays just set in rooms,” Minghella told The Associated Press in a 1996 interview. “I wanted the plays to move and for time to shift — a more liquid way of storytelling.”
He made his film directing debut in 1990 with “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a comedy about love and grief starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.
His biggest hit was “The English Patient,” a romantic epic set against the backdrop of World War II that won nine Oscars and became such a part of pop culture, it inspired an entire “Seinfeld” episode.
The success of the film, which also starred Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, was evidence of Minghella’s strengths. It was adapted from a poetic, multi-stranded novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje that many considered unfilmable. In Minghella’s hands it was lush, evocative and epic.
Minghella typically wrote and directed his films — to acclaim, in the cases of “The English Patient” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” less successfully with “Breaking and Entering,” an underpowered 2006 drama set in London’s gritty King’s Cross district.
The 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” starring Matt Damon as a murderous social climber, was based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith and earned five Oscar nominations, including best screenplay for Minghella.
His 2003 “Cold Mountain,” based on Charles Frazier’s novel of the U.S. Civil War, brought a best supporting actress Oscar for Renee Zellweger.
“The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” was based on the first in a series of novels about the adventures of Botswanan private eye Precious Ramotswe. HBO recently commissioned a 13-part TV series.
Minghella is survived by his wife, his actor-son Max Minghella and his daughter Hannah, who recently was named president of production at Sony Pictures Animation.
TITLE: Simple but effective
AUTHOR: By Serge Polotovsky
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Simplebar // 1 Degtyarnaya Ulitsa // Tel. 941 1744 // Open daily from 1p.m. to 1a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with wine 6,510 rubles ($268)
SimpleBar has the subtitle “Aram and Olga’s Enoteca.” Aram is the owner of this restaurant as well as half a dozen other well-known places from Probka to Ryba, while Olga supervises this particular bar. What’s more important than this superfluous fact or the red A and O letters attached to some dishes on the menu to mark their personal favorites, is that SimpleBar is more of a drinking than an eating place and is that with a twist. The twist here is the intricate hermetic corks that can keep the wine intact for weeks on end once the bottle is opened. Hence the chance to sample outrageously expensive wines by the glass (150 ml) or even a sixth of it (25 ml.).
The system allows customers to try the most expensive wine in the bar — Calvario Alliende, at a hefty 7,500 rubles a bottle ($305) or 1,500 rubles a glass ($60). This treat can be complemented with the cheapest wine on offer: Merlot Punta Nogal at 276 rubles a glass ($11). The upscale wine proved better than the downscale one, but not five times better, although in the confusing world of wine, curves tend to defy not only simple or geometric progressions but plain common sense too. All medium-priced wines, from Pinotage Spice Route (342 rubles a glass, $14) to Sedara Donnafugata (396 rubles a glass, $16) are a decent catch.
The food in the SimpleBar is not just an accompaniment but a serious Italian-style enterprise.
While the more intricate dishes are being thoughtfully cooked by the chef Gabriele Savini you can feast on ciabatta (111 rubles, $4.50) — hot from the oven, and a selection of cheeses — from chavroux to more exotic Spanish items served in 40 gram portions. Otherwise, go for such petty carnivore delights as lardo di colonatta (99 rubles, $4) — the closest Italians have come to imitating Ukranian salo or lard — or bresaola (80 rubles, $3.20), each serving enough to satiate until the dinner courses arrive.
Salad Nicoise (329 rubles, $13) comes as a regular package of, well, salad, tuna, anchovies, quail eggs and the rest, the only caprice of the chef being the introduction of brown kidney beans. The baked bell-peppers (329 rubles, $13) made the plate reminiscent of a pop-art painting, or a fauvist canvas. Perfect rectangles of red and orange glitter in oil screaming to be devoured in one bite. The peppers, served well below the room temperature, exude freshness despite being marinated and cooked.
Tuscany-style Picci (360 rubles, $15) is a standard thick macaroni affair with tomato ragout. But the octopus in tomatoes (790 rubles, $32) is overrated: the sea-monster must be the more costly partner in this alliance, but it is the tomato sauce that in the end of the day saves it.
The lamb chops (670 rubles, $27) are spiced up with drops of pesto. They go together well with spinach al burro (160 rubles, $6.50), in which the amount of butter doesn’t distract from the veg going full monty.
The pear pie (150 rubles, $6) is a sweet tooth’s delight, and the canolli with ricotta in orange sauce (190 ruble, $8) will surely provoke a hypoglycemic fit. If the Godfather catchphrase “Drop the gun, take the canolli” makes you smile, then take the canolli and forget about the gun altogether — this desert is a killer on its own.
The service is friendly and gets even friendlier once you’ve established a rapport with Aram and Olga, which is quite a simple task in SimpleBar.
Serge Polotovsky is the Editor-in-chief of Kommersant Weekend: St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Bridesmaid revisited
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
TEXT: At the beginning of “27 Dresses,” Jane (Katherine Heigl), a serial bridesmaid with an almost pathological devotion to other people’s nuptials, spends a long night shuttling between two weddings. One is in Midtown Manhattan, the other in Brooklyn; one has an upper-crusty, white-bread look, while the other appears to be a Jewish-Hindu intermarriage. But as the director, Anne Fletcher, methodically cuts back and forth between them, she makes the reasonably insightful, moderately funny point that modern American weddings, however they may strain for individuality and specialness, are all pretty much alike.
The problem is that much the same could be said about modern American romantic comedies. There is a touch of idiosyncrasy here and there — in this one the heroine’s dad is a widower who owns a hardware store! — but most of the elements might as well have been pulled off the registry list at a high-end chain store.
The template is something like this: A career woman who lives in a bright and perky city (though usually not the one in which it was filmed; most of this Manhattan is actually Providence, R.I.) takes a bit under two hours to make it to the altar with (or at least be stopped at the airport by) the Right Guy, who had seemed at first to be the Wrong Guy. Earlier, the Wrong Guy had seemed to be the Right Guy.
For ease of reference let’s call the one the heroine ends up with the Right Wrong Guy and the one she rejects the Wrong Right Guy. In the case of “27 Dresses” the Right Wrong Guy is James Marsden, who recently played the Wrong Right Guy in “Enchanted,” while the Wrong Right Guy is Edward Burns, who gets to be the Right Wrong Guy mostly in movies he writes and directs himself.
The best thing about “27 Dresses,” which was written by Aline Brosh McKenna (whose script adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” was far more witty and interesting), is that the Guys are not really the point. Or rather, if getting the Right one is the point of the story (see above), the spark of comedy is carried by the women in the picture.
Too bad it’s such a dim spark. Heigl, the blossoming babymama in “Knocked Up,” has an impressive gift for mugging. Her eyebrows shoot up and scrunch downward with amazing precision, and her mouth contorts itself amusingly when she says things like “gewurztraminer,” “hot hate sex” and “I’m Jesus.”
Which may make the movie sound more interesting than it is. To allay that impression, let me just note that the big comic-romantic set piece comes when Jane and the Right Wrong Guy get drunk at a suburban roadhouse and sing “Benny and the Jets” while dancing on the bar. At least it wasn’t “Y.M.C.A.” or “I Got You (I Feel Good),” but still.
Back at the office Jane has the requisite slutty/flaky best friend, who at least is played by the irrepressible Judy Greer (“13 Going on 30”). Jane’s sister, Tess — her rival, as it happens, for the love of the Wrong Right Guy — is Malin Akerman, who was the only remotely funny thing about “The Heartbreak Kid,” in which she played the Wrong Right Girl.
Why Fletcher and McKenna couldn’t have supplied these three funny, charming women with a funny, charming movie is something of a puzzle. Or maybe it isn’t, since their task seems to have been to produce a movie that wouldn’t make all the other movies exactly like it too envious.
Heigl certainly works hard to convince the audience of the existence of a universe in which she could be the dowdier, shyer member of a pair of sisters. The costume designer, Catherine Marie Thomas, worked at least as hard to find a dress (out of the 27 in the title) that might make Heigl look less than gorgeous. A futile effort, like most of the rest of the movie, or the attempt to find anything else to say about it.
TITLE: Dozens Arrested in Tibet, Dalai Lama Blamed
AUTHOR: By Chris Buckley
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — Tibet authorities said on Thursday they had arrested dozens of people involved in a wave of anti-Chinese violence that has swept the mountain region and prompted Beijing to pour in troops to crush further unrest.
China’s response to last week’s violence — which it says was orchestrated by the exiled Dalai Lama — has sparked international criticism and has clouded preparations for the Beijing Olympics which the hosts hope will be the country’s “coming-out party” as a world power.
The prosecutor’s office in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, said 24 people faced charges of “endangering national security as well as beating, smashing, looting, arson and other grave crimes” in last Friday’s riots, the Tibet Daily reported.
They were the first arrests since rioting erupted across the remote region. Some outside groups say hundreds of Tibetans may have already been detained, and the China News Service reported Lhasa has broadcast wanted pictures of more suspects.
“The facts of the crimes are clear and the evidence is solid, and they should be severely punished,” a Lhasa deputy chief prosecutor, Xie Yanjun, said.
He echoed the Chinese government’s accusation that it was exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, and his “Dalai clique” who had engineered the violence.
It is a sentiment that resonates with ordinary Chinese.
“I don’t think they would do this without any manipulation by the Dalai Lama or some other organization ... I don’t think Tibetan people want independence. Any normal Tibetans would be happy to live under China’s rule,” said Zhang Ming, 25, a Beijing office worker.
China’s unyielding response to the unrest has brought demands for a boycott of the opening ceremony for the August 8-24 Games from pro-Tibetan independence groups and some politicians.
The Olympic torch relay across 19 countries that starts next week, and which will also pass through Tibet, is also likely to be dogged by protests.
U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in talks in Beijing she had raised the “concern we ... continue to have about the lack of access to the region for journalists, for international observers, and how critical it is for purposes of transparency and getting information about what’s going on, for that kind of access to be provided.”
China has poured troops into Tibet and neighboring provinces that are home to large ethnic Tibetan groups. But it has barred foreigners from the mountain region.
Beijing residents said they were unable to buy tickets for the 48-hour train journey to Lhasa and several Beijing-based travel agents told Reuters they had for the time being stopped organizing tours there.
In Kangding, a heavily Tibetan town in western Sichuan province, next to Tibet, roads were crowded with troops who blocked most travel. Notices on walls warned locals not to protest and to stay away from the “Dalai clique”.
“Resolutely protect the unity of the motherland, protect unity among ethnic groups,” declared one red banner.
The Chinese government has resisted some international calls for dialogue over the unrest and expressed serious concern that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown plans to meet to Dalai Lama during a visit to Britain in May.
“If those acts can be tolerated, is there any law in the world? Is there any justice in the world?” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference when asked to respond to Pope Benedict’s call for dialogue to end the violence.
The Dalai Lama, speaking in his exile home in the Indian town of Dharamsala, said he was ready to travel to Beijing to meet Chinese leaders, calling on Tibetans to end the violence.
Beijing has long said it would meet him only if forsakes claims to Tibet’s independence. The 72-year-old monk says he just wants greater autonomy for his homeland.
China has struggled to convince the international community that the Nobel Peace Prize winner orchestrated the violence and that its own policies are free from blame.
One striking thing is “the lack of understanding in Beijing about how popular the Dalai Lama is in the West ... attacking the Dalai Lama personally is a losing proposition,” said Minxin Pei, director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
China says that 13 innocent civilians died in the Lhasa violence, and at least three rioters. Exiled Tibetan groups have said as many as 100 Tibetans died.
TITLE: Sharapova Wins 18th Straight Victory in California
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: INDIAN WELLS, California — Rafael Nadal came back to win the final five games and beat Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Wednesday in an intense, crowd-pleasing rematch of their Australian Open semifinal.
Nadal, the defending Indian Wells champion, avenged his lopsided loss in Melbourne with a scrappy 6-7 (4), 7-6 (3) 7-5 victory in the fourth round of the Pacific Life Open.
No. 1 Roger Federer , bidding for his fourth Indian Wells title in five years, cruised to a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Ivan Ljubicic to also move into the quarterfinals.
Maria Sharapova ran her 2008 record to 18-0 and gained the women’s semifinals with a 7-6(2), 6-1 victory over defending champion Daniela Hantuchova . Sharapova won the tournament in 2006, and Hantuchova has taken the title twice, the first time in 2002.
James Blake and Mardy Fish , the two U.S. players remaining in the men’s competition, each won to advance to the quarterfinals. Blake took a 6-4, 6-2 victory over Richard Gasquet , and Fish beat two-time Indian Wells champion Lleyton Hewitt 7-5, 3-6, 7-6(4).
After Tsonga, a hard-hitting Frenchman, went up 5-2 in the third set, Nadal held serve the rest of the way and broke Tsonga’s serve in the ninth and 11th games to take a 6-5 lead.
With the crowd beginning to cheer even as he set up for the shot, the Spaniard capped the match by slamming an overhead past Tsonga.
The 22-year-old Tsonga, who has vaulted from 212 in the rankings in 2006 to No. 17, upset No. 2 Nadal 6-2, 6-3, 6-2 in the Australian Open semis before losing to Novak Djokovic in the final.
Nadal insisted he wasn’t out for revenge, but acknowledged that the match was significant in another way.
“He is going to be one of the rivals for this year, will try to be in the top positions, so I try to win. These matches are very important always,” the 21-year-old Spaniard said. He believes Tsonga has the potential to move into the top three or four spots, saying, “He has an unbelievable forehand.”
Tsonga considered the match important for another reason.
“I would like to show everybody my run in the Australian Open was not luck,” he said. “I want to prove to everybody I can play at this level, so I’m disappointed about this.”
Tsonga played brilliantly at times in the rematch, but mistakes cost him at other times. After ending a long rally when both hit several outstanding shots, Tsonga ended it with a drop shot that Nadal somehow managed to hit back, then a bang-bang volley that left Nadal lying on the ground at the end of the point. That brought Tsonga back from a 15-40 deficit to deuce in the 11th game, but he quickly followed that with a double-fault, then hit a forehand long to lose the game.
Driving powerful forehands down the lines, Tsonga had 47 winners overall— but made 56 unforced errors. The far more consistent Nadal finished with 27 winners and 27 unforced errors. Tsonga, who had 18 aces when he stunned Nadal in Australia, had 11 against him at Indian Wells, but also double-faulted seven times.
The match lasted 3 hours, 3 minutes, and the crowd seemed rapt, reacting loudly to practically every point. Some fans yelled “Go, Ali!” a Tsonga nickname alluding to his resemblance to boxing great Muhammad Ali, and others screaming, “You can do it, Rafa!”
In other matches, Djokovic advanced with a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Guillermo Canas ;Tommy Haas edged Andy Murray 2-6, 7-5, 6-3; and David Nalbandian beat Juan Carlos Ferrero 6-2, 6-2.
In a women’s quarterfinal, Svetlana Kuznetsova beat Agnieszka Radwanska 6-2, 6-4.
TITLE: Beckham Recalled, Could Play 100th England Match
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — David Beckham could win his 100th international cap against France next Wednesday after he was recalled to the England squad on Thursday.
Coach Fabio Capello named the 32-year-old midfielder, who plays for LA Galaxy, in a 30-man squad for the friendly at the Stade de France. The squad will be cut to 23 on Saturday.
Beckham, who made his international debut in September 1996 and won his 99th cap against Croatia in November when England were eliminated from this year’s European championship, was left out of Capello’s squad for last month’s friendly against Switzerland.
But the former Manchester United and Real Madrid player was watched by Capello’s assistant Franco Baldini in a friendly for LA Galaxy in Dallas at the weekend and clearly did enough to convince the Italians that he was fit. Arsenal forward Theo Walcott, who turned 19 last Sunday, has been called up for the first time since he was included in the 2006 World Cup squad.
Walcott, who won his only cap as a substitute against Hungary in May 2006, did not play in Germany and subsequently dropped out of the senior international squad.
“I celebrated my 19th birthday on Sunday,” he told the Arsenal web site. “So the call-up is a great birthday present for me. I’m looking forward to meeting up with all of the lads after the weekend’s game.”
Middlesbrough defender David Wheater and Portsmouth’s prolific striker Jermain Defoe are also in Capello’s provisional squad.
A year ago Wheater was on loan at League Two (fourth division) Darlington and he started the season as Middlesbrough’s fifth or sixth choice centre-back.
Capello has selected Portsmouth’s David James, Aston Villa’s Scott Carson and Wigan Athletic’s Chris Kirkland as his three goalkeepers.
TITLE: Fatal Floods Ravage U.S. Midwest
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CINCINNATI — Storms that dumped as much of a foot of rain on the Midwest took aim at the Ohio Valley and Northeast on Thursday, leaving behind submerged roads, swamped homes and more than a dozen deaths.
Flooding was reported Wednesday in parts of Arkansas, southern Illinois, southern Indiana and southwestern Ohio, and schools were closed in western Kentucky because of flooded roads.
The rain stopped falling late Wednesday as the storms moved east, targeting the Ohio Valley and spreading snow over northern New England. A parallel band of heavy rain stretched from Alabama and Georgia to the Mid-Atlantic.
Days of rain turned the Midwest into a soggy mess, flooding roads, stranding motorists and displacing residents - with a cleanup bill likely to run in the millions.
President Bush declared a major disaster in Missouri on Wednesday night and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts in areas affected by flooding. Seventy counties and the city of St. Louis also are eligible for federal funding for emergency protective measures.
Much of Ohio was under a flood warning Thursday, with some areas cautioned to watch for flash floods. Most of southwest Ohio had received more than 4 inches of rain, and officials in Butler County declared a state of emergency because of the rising waters.
Flooding along the Scioto River in Pickaway, Ross and Pike counties was expected to be the worst since January 2005. The river near Circleville was expected to remain over the 14-foot flood stage through Sunday, and Pickaway County authorities asked the Red Cross to prepare shelters for possible flood victims.
In Findlay in northwest Ohio, authorities closed off streets Wednesday after the Blanchard River had once again gone over the 11-foot flood level - the 10th time it has done so in the last 15 months. The National Weather Service predicted the river would crest Thursday afternoon at 12.3 feet.
“It is going to take some time to dry out with this type of rain put down on saturated ground,” said Beverly Poole, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Ky. “It’s going to take a few days for the rivers and the creeks to recover.”
The Ohio River at Cincinnati was expected to rise about 2 feet above flood stage by Friday. In nearby Whitewater Township, rescue workers with boats helped 16 people to safety and urged 40 to 45 more families to leave their homes.
Judy Booth, who’s lived in a low-lying area of the township for 11 years, said Wednesday was the first time she’s had to flee from flooding.
“You don’t have no choice, you’ve got to go,” said Booth, who was helped by fire-rescue squads who brought an inflatable boat to her water-surrounded home.
Retired truck driver George Slayton, 65, said he just wasn’t sure how much water from the Black River flowed into his home in Piedmont, Mo. He only had time to grab some medication and a change of clothes.
“I believe in God and everything, but he does things sometimes that make you wonder,” said Slayton, who found shelter at a church and slept on a padded pew.
Crews rescued a man clinging to a tree in the Ohio River after his truck was swept away at a boat ramp near Evansville, Ind. He showed signs of hypothermia and could not speak clearly.
“It’s hard for anybody to say how long he could have survived there,” Knight Township Fire Chief Chris Wathen said. “But I do think it was fair to say he was within minutes of losing his life.”
At least 13 deaths have been linked to the weather over the past few days, and three people were missing.
Five deaths were blamed to the flooding in Missouri, five people were killed in a highway wreck in heavy rain in Kentucky and a 65-year-old Ohio woman appeared to have drowned while checking on a sump pump in her home. In southern Illinois, two bodies were found hours after floodwaters swept a pickup truck off a rural road.
Searches were under way in Texas for a teenager washed down a drainage pipe, and two people were missing in Arkansas after their vehicles were swept away by rushing water.
In the northern Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville, water as high as 4 feet stood outside some businesses, and police contacted owners and warned them not to open for the day.
“The biggest problem has been people driving into floodwater,” said Frank Young, emergency management director in Warren County, Ohio. “There are a lot of stupid people. When that sign says, ‘Road closed, high water,’ that’s what it means.”
The town of Fenton, Mo., put out a call asking volunteers to help put down sandbags against the floodwaters Thursday. Gov. Matt Blunt said state workers was checking on nursing homes and hospitals, mobilizing rescues, opening shelters, closing highways and working to ensure safe drinking water.
TITLE: Missing Madeleine’s Parents Receive Apologies, $1.1Mln
AUTHOR: By Peter Griffiths
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Two British tabloid newspapers made unprecedented front page apologies on Wednesday to the parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann for suggesting they might have killed their daughter and covered up her death.
The Daily Express and Daily Star admitted the allegations against Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter went missing on holiday in Portugal last May, were “baseless” and agreed in court to pay 550,000 pounds ($1.1 million) in libel damages.
Madeleine’s disappearance prompted intense international media coverage.
“We accept that a number of articles in the newspaper have suggested that the couple caused the death of their missing daughter Madeleine and then covered it up,” the Daily Express said.
“We acknowledge that there is no evidence whatsoever to support this theory and that Kate and Gerry are completely innocent of any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance.”
At a High Court hearing London, the McCanns’ lawyer Adam Tudor said it was “difficult to conceive a more serious allegation than to be falsely accused of being responsible for the death of one’s daughter.”
He told the court that the articles included a variety of false claims, including that the McCanns killed their daughter, sold her to pay off debts or were involved in “wife-swapping”.
A lawyer for the newspapers told the court: “Express Newspapers regrets publishing these extremely serious, yet baseless, allegations.” The Sunday Express and the Daily Star Sunday are also expected to apologize in issues this weekend.
The McCanns hired the London media law firm Carter-Ruck earlier this month to sue for libel. The McCanns said the damages awarded would be donated to the fund set up to find their daughter. Their spokesman said the family had not yet decided whether to take action against other newspapers.
Madeleine McCann disappeared shortly before her fourth birthday while on a family holiday in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz, prompting a huge police investigation.
The McCanns believe she was abducted from their holiday apartment while they were dining with friends nearby.
They hired private investigators to help find their daughter after Portuguese police named them as suspects in September. The investigation dominated the media for months.
Roy Greenslade, professor of journalism at City University London, said the apology was unprecedented and that it was significant the newspapers had settled out of court.
“It shows just how culpable they were that they didn’t even try to fight the action in court,” he told BBC radio.
Despite a string of reported possible sightings from Morocco to Spain to Malta, Madeleine is still missing.
TITLE: Beijing Gets Toilet Upgrade For Games
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — Beijing organisers are refitting the toilets at three main Olympic venues after complaints from foreign athletes about having to squat, an official said on Wednesday.
Most toilets in China are still of the squat rather than sit-down variety, as spectators and competitors at recent test events in otherwise state of the art venues like the “Water Cube” aquatics center discovered.
“In my personal point of view, there are cultural differences between Chinese and Western people. Chinese are more used to squat toilets,” said Yao Hui, a senior official responsible for the management of Olympic venues.
“Toilet alteration projects at the Bird’s Nest (National Stadium), the Water Cube and National Indoor Stadium are ongoing and if technical conditions permit, all the toilets in these stadiums will be changed.” A similar project will be expanded to more of the 31 venues in the city, he added.
“We will change the toilets in as many as we can, especially those for the key clients, athletes, Olympic family members and the media.”
Beijing has 5,200 public toilets, the Beijing Evening Post reported earlier this month, more than any city in the world.
Yao said he believed that eventually, the majority of Chinese would use the sit-down variety of toilet, as people do in large parts of the developed world.
“The Olympics is an opportunity to speed up the transition,” he said. The Beijing Olympics run from Aug. 8 to 24.
TITLE: Chinese Shooters Promised Victory Bonuses
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — The largest producer of China’s favorite tipple has promised the country’s shooting team a 10 million yuan ($1.42 million) bonus if they bag five gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, state media reported on Thursday.
The Wuliangye Group, which distils the fiery alcoholic drink baijiu, has also offered a 1.5 million yuan ($212,600) prize if a Chinese shooter nabs the first gold medal awarded at the August 8-24 Games, said a Xinhua report.
According to a draft Games schedule, the women’s 10m air rifle is likely to be the first event in which medals will be decided on the morning of August 9, making defending champion Du Li the favorite for the reward.
“I think the gold medal and honor are more important,” Du told Xinhua.
But Gao Zhidan, director of China’s shooting and archery administration, warned that the big rewards might have a negative impact on shooters.
“In shooting, a sport in which the psychological factors play an important, even vital role, we should reduce their pressure as much as possible, and let them train calmly,” he said.
China’s first Olympic gold medal came at the 1984 Los Angeles Games when Xu Haifeng won the 50m pistol and in 2004 in Athens China won four golds in the sport.
Chinese gold medalists in all disciplines will be handsomely rewarded for their efforts.
The Chinese General Administration of Sports paid each Olympic champion 200,000 yuan ($28,350) in Athens and that is likely to be higher for Beijing. They can also count on additional bonuses from provinces and cities.
Hong Kong’s Fok Ying-Tung Foundation has also rewarded every Chinese gold medalist with 1 kg of gold and $80,000 since 1984.