SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1362 (26), Friday, April 4, 2008
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TITLE: Armed Raid Kicks Off Probe Into  Eldorado
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Interior Ministry officers, armed with assault rifles, raided the Moscow head office of leading electronics retailer Eldorado on Wednesday morning after a criminal investigation was opened into alleged nonpayment of about $300 million in taxes. 
Investigators from the Interior Ministry’s Central Federal District branch searched the company’s headquarters after about 20 heavily armed officers, including rapid reaction troops, had cleared Eldorado employees out of the building. 
A criminal case for tax evasion totaling 7 billion rubles ($300 million) was opened “several days ago” by the investigative arm of the Interior Ministry’s Central Federal District branch, said Anzhela Kastuyeva, spokeswoman for the branch. 
Kastuyeva said she had no information on whether anyone had been detained or arrested in connection with the case. 
A spokeswoman for the in Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee said a criminal investigation had been opened against Eldorado’s general director. Igor Demchenko, who replaced Alexander Shifrin as the company’s general director earlier this year. 
Eldorado spokesman Ilya Novokhatsky said the company’s top management was refusing to comment on the matter Wednesday. 
Reports surfaced at the beginning of March that Eldorado, which reported revenues of about $6 billion last year, could be facing mammoth back tax claims of up to 15 billion rubles. 
Eldorado’s major shareholder, Igor Yakovlev, put the tax claims at 8 billion rubles and conceded that the firm could be forced to sell off some of its assets to cover them, Kommersant reported March 5. 
The tax claims concerned the year 2004-2005 and are being investigated by a Moscow branch of the Federal Tax Service, Kommersant reported. 
The ratcheting up of the case against Eldorado comes after federal tax authorities pledged last month to target the country’s booming retail sector. The service could not be reached for comment Wednesday. 
The Interior Ministry’s Kastuyeva could not say why her department was now handling the case. 
The same Interior Ministry branch was involved in the joint arrest of Vladimir Nekrasov, head of cosmetics retailer Arbat Prestige, and reputed Mafia kingpin Semyon Mogilevich in late January on charges of tax evasion. Both men are still in custody. 
Investigators inside Eldorado’s offices Wednesday refused to comment on what was happening, and armed officers present could not say how long the searches were expected to take. 
“Who the hell knows?” said one special forces officer as he stood on the front steps of the Eldorado offices, cradling a submachine gun and smoking. 
Another officer, also gripping an automatic weapon, muttered a terse “no comment” in English before blocking the main entrance. 
At one point, officers could be seen carrying a large sledgehammer and crowbar into the building. 
The officers had arrived at the retailer’s headquarters on Polkovaya Ulitsa in north Moscow without warning at about 10.30 a.m. in two gray-blue Ford Transit vans and moved right past building security. 
By late afternoon the Interior Ministry troops seemed to have left, leaving only investigators in suits congregating in the company’s reception area. 
Eldorado employees leaving the offices at around 11.30 a.m. said they were in the dark over the reason for the searches and that they had been told to go home for the day. 
“It’s pretty easy to guess that this has something to do with the tax claims,” said a member of Eldorado’s middle management, refusing to give his name. 
“I will be back at work tomorrow though, I hope,” he said. 
Buses were quickly brought in to ferry the Eldorado employees to the nearest metro stations. No one could say who had organized the buses. 
“We are all going for a trip out of town,” said one male employee brusquely. “Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, and today we’ve decided to take a trip to the countryside to enjoy the sunshine.” 
Other Eldorado employees seemed to treat the searches and armed troops with a sense of levity. 
“I wish you could come everyday so that we got more holidays,” said one young female employee to a uniformed officer as he sat slumped on a sofa in the reception with his balaclava rolled up above his ears.

TITLE: NATO Nixes Georgia, Ukraine Membership
AUTHOR: By Paul Ames
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BUCHAREST, Romania — NATO decided Thursday not to put Georgia and Ukraine on track to join the alliance after vehement Russian opposition, but the alliance pledged that the strategically important Black Sea nations will become members one day.
Senior American officials also said that NATO leaders agreed to fully endorse U.S. missile defense plans for Europe and urge Russia to drop its objections to the system.
French and German concern over Russia’s reaction dashed the two former Soviet republics’ hopes of being granted a “membership action plan” that would bring them into the alliance within the next five to 10 years.
But alliance Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said NATO welcomes the countries’ aspirations to join. “We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO,” he said.
Greek opposition also meant that Macedonia was excluded, though NATO did agree to invite the Balkan nations of Albania and Croatia. NATO foreign ministers will review Ukraine and Georgia’s applications again in December, de Hoop Scheffer said.
Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were concerned about provoking Moscow, which has warned of a new East-West crisis if NATO takes in the two republics. Both are on Russia’s southwestern border, across key east-west oil and gas routes.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko insisted that “Ukraine will be in NATO” one day.
Pro-Western governments in both republics had earlier warned that a failure to launch the membership process in Bucharest would be a bitter blow and a boost for pro-Russian forces in their countries.
“A ‘no’ for Georgia will show those people in the Kremlin who think that by a policy of blackmail, by arrogance and aggression” they can influence NATO’s decisions, Georgia’s Foreign Minister David Bakradze said. 
“A ‘no’ will be seen by those people as a victory.”
The NATO summit also gave a broad endorsement to U.S. plans to base elements of its missile defenses in Europe, despite Russia’s objections.
De Hoop Scheffer said a summit communique would recognize the protection the system will give to Europe from long-range ballistic missile threats, particularly from the Middle East. Russia fiercely opposes the plan.
The allies will also move ahead with a complementary system of short-range missile defenses to cover parts of Turkey, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria that would fall outside the U.S. shield.

TITLE: City Conference Seeks to Unify Divided Opposition
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Members of the left and right wing political opposition will be looking for common ground during a conference in St. Petersburg on Saturday aimed at forming a unified strategy to win more support from the public. 
The event, titled “New Agenda For Liberal Forces,” has among its scheduled participants Garry Kasparov, head of the United Civil Front; Nikita Belykh and Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces; Maxim Reznik, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko; former Soviet dissident and human rights advocate Vladimir Bukovsky; Konstantin Merzlikin of the People’s Democratic Union and other politicians. A second conference will take place in Moscow on Sunday.
The agenda for Russia’s democratic forces is to move on from the era of small and weak liberal parties to a broad coalition of opposition forces, said dissident politician Vladimir Bukovsky, now a resident of London, speaking to reporters Thursday at the local headquarters of the democratic party Yabloko.
The idea of an umbrella group has been circulating since 2004 when the liberal parties failed to win seats in the State Duma. Democrats have said that unfair political competition, a climate of fear and intimidation created by the state with the use of police violence against civil protests and political persecution of activists who challenge the government, and widespread media censorship are obstacles preventing the creation of a unified opposition.
The delegates have said they have no plans to create a new political party or any other formal alliance that would entail official registration with the authorities, despite claiming to have 10 to 15 million potential supporters.
“The political party format has outlived its usefulness,” Bukovsky said. “Liberals made a major strategic mistake in the 1990s when they preferred a variety of small different parties to a powerful coalition. The democrats overestimated the scale of people’s appetite for liberal values; besides, they were under the illusion that the fledgling democracy in Russia was irreversible, and they are paying the price.”
Bukovsky’s role at the conference is expected to be that of a knowledgeable and trusted mediator. 
“I never belonged to any political party; neither do I hold a grudge against anyone at the conference, while some delegates have a history of tension and sensitive situations, so I feel well-equipped for the task and comfortable with it,” Bukovsky said.  
Critics say one of the key mistakes of the liberal opposition parties, as well as of the Other Russia coalition more recently, has been the radical nature of their criticism of the Russian president, who is said to have an approval rating nearing 70 percent. Delegates to the conference say they are going to tackle the issue by considering a different approach.
“We have no intention of seeking confrontation with the authorities and center our activities exclusively on criticizing their policies,” reads an official statement distributed among conference participants. “In this respect, we are open to both the formal political process and a dialogue with the government with an eye to discuss practical ways of making Russia a real democracy.”
The conference is expected to build a bridge between the left and right wing opposition. The Other Russia coalition, formed in 2006, pursues the same goals but the alliance suffered when Mikhail Kasyanov’s People’s Democratic Union left the coalition on the grounds that it was seeking a more moderate and balanced approach for its campaigning.
Eduard Limonov, the leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party and one of the leaders of the Other Russia, said hopes are high that this weekend’s conference will be a breakthrough. Limonov and some of his fellow activists are joining the discussions in Moscow on Sunday.
“This event is an honest attempt to consolidate; none of us are going for it half-heartedly,” Limonov said, adding that members of the Communist Party of Russia would be most welcome to take part in the debates.
“The Communist Party is not the enemy; the people behind the current repressive regime are the enemies,” Limonov told Interfax on Tuesday. 
“The problem with the Communist Party is that it agonizes and is incapable of showing resistance. The first step for the Communists, if they want to survive in politics, is to end their collaborationist policies and stop flirting with the authorities.”

TITLE: Duma Approves Limits on Foreign Investment
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s lower house of parliament on Wednesday backed restrictions limiting foreign investment in key sectors such as oil and gas, aerospace and mass media.
The legislation, which also would increase the powers of Russian security services in business transactions, has raised concern among foreign investors.
The State Duma passed the bill in its final reading 384-55. It now goes to the upper house, the Federation Council, where passage is likely, and to the president for his signature.
The legislation stipulates that private foreign companies would need authorization to buy more than 50 percent of a Russian company in one of 42 “strategic” sectors. A commission made up of Russian economic and security officials would review such deals.
Foreign state-controlled companies would need permission to acquire a stake of more than 25 percent in a Russian company within the list of major industrial sectors. Those include either controlled by the Russian state or tied to state interests — aviation, mining, fishing, media, arms production and other defense-related industries.
Also included are fixed-line telephone operators, which affects Svyazinvest, the massive telecom holding company. 
The company’s privatization has been held up for years over security concerns connected to its work with Russia’s military and security services.

TITLE: Hermitage Capital Chief Browder Charged by Police
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian police have charged the head of Hermitage Capital Management investment fund Bill Browder with tax evasion in absentia, Kommersant business daily reported on Thursday quoting sources. 
Browder, a British citizen, has been a major investor in Russia since the 1990s. He has been barred from Russia since Nov. 2005 for unspecified reasons though Browder himself said the Russian government had cited “national security” concerns for the ban. 
Browder has a reputation as a champion of minority shareholders’ rights, and advocates greater transparency and better corporate governance at Russian companies. 
Hermitage, a $4 billion fund, continues to focus on Russia but Browder has recently raised a new $625 million fund to invest elsewhere. Kommersant reported that the Interior Ministry launched its investigation in 2007 into Browder’s tax record and has also targeted Russian companies linked to Hermitage which paid out profits to offshore entities based in Cyprus. 
Police told Kommersant it will ask a court for an arrest warrant for Browder and Ivan Cherkasov, head of Hermitage’s local office, who left Russia in 2007. 
The investigation is focusing on share deals by Cyprus-based company Kameya. Hermitage is not a shareholder in Kameya but has advised the firm. 
Investigators told Kommersant that Kameya was buying shares in Russian energy firms including gas export monopoly Gazprom when trade in their Russian shares was restricted. 
Firms could profit from huge price differences between Gazprom’s London and Moscow shares. Non-resident investors widely used such schemes until trading in Gazprom shares was liberalized in December 2005.

TITLE: Fear and Resolve in RusAl Pit Strike
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova and Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Among the 96 miners spending their eighth straight day underground at the Little Red Riding Hood mine, the mood is grimly defiant, local union officials said Wednesday. 
The miners, and many of their colleagues shut out of the same mine complex by owner United Company RusAl since last week, are calling for higher salaries and better working hours. 
Yet they have one overriding fear: that the company will quit the struggling bauxite mines, on which more than 5,000 miners depend for their livelihoods in Severouralsk, a town 450 kilometers north of Yekaterinburg, for good. 
“We are RusAl’s hostages,” said Igor Taroyev, a blaster who has worked at the pit for 19 years. “There is no [other] place to work around here. If RusAl leaves, Severouralsk will die.” 
A spokeswoman for RusAl on Wednesday said the company had offered to hold talks with the union and hotly disputed claims that it might quit the mines. The company confirmed that it would seek to have the strike declared illegal at a court hearing Thursday. 
“Two years ago, we started the construction of a new mine, and it will be completed by 2010,” RusAl spokeswoman Vera Kurochkina said by telephone. “But the resources of the existing [Little Red Riding Hood] mine are estimated [to last] until 2031, so there shouldn’t be any concern that there is no work at this mine.” 
The spark for the strike, said Alexei Berdnikov, a driller at the mine who heads the local branch of the Russian Independent Miners’ Union, was a confrontation over wages.

TITLE: Ex-Kremlin Reporter Gets Asylum
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Britain has granted political asylum to a journalist who fled Russia saying her life was in danger because of her criticism of the Kremlin, she told Reuters.
The Home Office declined to confirm if Yelena Tregubova had been granted asylum, saying the government did not comment on individual cases.
Tregubova said by telephone from London that she had received a letter from the Home Office informing her that her application for political asylum had been approved.
Tregubova reported on the Kremlin for the leading Russian newspaper Kommersant.
She published a book called “Tales of a Kremlin Digger” which disclosed details of private conversations with senior politicians, including a dinner with Vladimir Putin before he became Russian president.

TITLE: Aide to Starovoitova Fears Trail Gone Cold
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The aide to slain State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova fears investigators have given up trying to establish who ordered the shooting as the Federal Security Service confirmed Wednesday that the investigation into the case has been suspended. 
“There are no investigative activities in the case at the moment. However, if the necessity for such activity appears, if information on the missing suspects appears, then we’ll resume work,” an FSB representative said, Interfax reported.
Ruslan Linkov,  Starovoitova’s former assistant who was injured during the 1998 killing, said on Tuesday that the investigation into Starovoitova’s case was temporarily stopped on March 20 due to the end of the investigation’s time limit, Interfax reported.
Linkov called the move “outrageous.” He said his Democratic Russia organization was intending to contest the decision in court.
“The person who ordered the crime has not yet been ascertained, despite the fact that the name of one former LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) Duma deputy was mentioned in court. That person acted as a mediator in the crime.  However, he has not yet been detained and they haven’t even questioned him,” Linkov said.
Linkov said he regretted that the investigative group that was in charge of Starovoitova’s case was wound up a few years ago, and that the FSB was following the case only “optionally.”
Starovoitova, joint leader of Democratic Russia party, was shot dead in the entrance hall of her apartment building on Nov. 20, 1998. Linkov, who was with Starovoitova, was injured in the attack.
Alexander Gutsan, deputy head of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office, said that the halt in the investigation did not mean that the case was closed.
“The essential volume of investigative actions has been completed but work on the criminal case has not stopped,” Gutsan told reporters in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.
Gutsan said the main target of the investigation was to establish “who ordered the murder.”
In June 2005, following an investigation and trial that lasted for nearly seven years, Starovoitova’s killers, Valery Akishin and Yury Kolchin — the hitman and a technical organizer — were convicted and sentenced to 23 1/2 and 20 years in prison respectively. The investigation has since continued but no major breakthrough has been reached.
During the investigation, Linkov has repeatedly suggested that former LDPR Deputy Vyacheslav Shevchenko and his counterpart Mikhail Glushchenko were linked to the assassination but the  prosecution has not proved any such connection.
Shevchenko’s body was found wrapped in a plastic bag in a villa in Cyprus in March 2004. The whereabouts of Glushchenko are unknown.

TITLE: MBA Forum Heads For St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The global career and education network Quacquarelli Symonds and GreenTown Consulting Group will hold an MBA Forum in St. Petersburg next week. This is the first time that the event is being held in the city, providing an opportunity for MBA candidates to meet the admissions officers of international business schools.
“On Tuesday, 8 April, admissions directors from INSEAD (France), Duke Fuqua (U.S.), IE Business School & ESADE (Spain), Cass & Manchester Business School (U.K.), Vlerick (Belgium) and RSM (Netherlands), will be presenting their full-time and executive MBA programs to St. Petersburg professionals,” said Zoya Zaitseva, senior operations manager at QS World MBA Tour.
During the forum, a select group of potential MBA students will get the opportunity to have pre-admissions interviews with the admissions officers of the world’s most prominent business schools. Applicants will be able to talk to representatives of the schools at their respective stands, participate in the presentations and network after the event.
The forum will begin with a panel discussion on MBA admissions tips, during which MBA recruiters and alumni will discuss and compare full-time and executive MBA programs.
The forum will be followed by a seminar on preparing to pass the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) — the standardized test for measuring students’ aptitude for courses.  Several presentations will be made, including those by IE Business School, Manchester, ESADE, RSM, Cass, INSEAD, Duke Fuqua, Vlerick and Copenhagen Business School.
Besides face-to-face meetings and networking sessions, sample MBA master-classes will be held.
“For us, QS GreenTown is a totally new type of exhibition. We hope to conduct a series of interviews with potential MBA students. We also expect that the informal atmosphere will help candidates to get information about the school and its programs, and formulate their goals and expectations. During formal testing or in a motivational essay, this can be difficult,” said Anastasia Korshunova, development director at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School’s St. Petersburg Campus.
This opportunity of having face-to-face meetings is one of the advantages of exhibitions rather than advertising, Korshunova said. Schools can find out which factors are important for potential students, she added.
At the forum next week, the school will be represented by Korshunova and Peter Rafferty, partner and director of International Business at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School and International full-time MBA director.
“As well as the exhibition, the forum will include business school seminars and presentations. 30-minute master-classes should demonstrate the quality of teaching and lecture format, and give potential students an idea of the school’s atmosphere,” Korshunova said.
The number of seats at the presentations during the forum will be limited and distributed on a first-come-first-served basis. Potential students can register at the TopMBA web site.

TITLE: MTS Makes SMARTS Offer
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s largest mobile operator, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), has offered $1 billion for 97 percent of regional operator SMARTS, Vedomosti business daily reported on Thursday, quoting sources.  SMARTS, which operates in the Volga region in central Russia, is the country’s seventh-largest cellphone operator by subscriber numbers with 4.03 million clients as of Feb. 29. 
Among others, SMARTS has a presence in the Penza region, the only territory in Russia which is not covered by the MTS network. According to AC&M, there are 1.43 million mobile phone users in Penza, where SMARTS has a 30-percent market share. 
“We see the potential deal as positive for MTS, as the company could substantially enhance its subscriber base in the Volga Region and get rid of a strong player in a quite competitive market at a reasonable EV/subscriber multiple,” said Alexander Kazbegi, analyst at Renaissance Capital. 
MTS, controlled by services conglomerate Sistema, has around 88 million subscribers in Russia and former Soviet states. Its revenues exceeded $8 billion in 2007 compared with $6.4 billion in 2006, according to its preliminary estimates. 
“We have repeatedly said that we are studying all assets in Russia but no decision has been taken as yet,” MTS spokeswoman Yelena Kokhanovskaya said.

TITLE: TNK-BP Optimistic on Kovykta Deal
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Zhdannikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian oil firm TNK-BP, half-owned by BP, said on Thursday it considered recent raids by security services officers and the arrest of an employee as one-off incidents, not a broad attack on the firm. 
The firm’s chief executive Robert Dudley also said he expected to close a long-awaited deal with Russian state gas giant Gazprom around the huge Kovykta deal at the end of April, saying he was not aware of any bigger deal involving the buyout of TNK-BP itself. 
“We are back to business. The [security] officials came to us and said they came to look at commercial documents taken from a state hydrocarbon company. They were very professional. They did the right thing,” he said. 
TNK-BP, co-owned by BP and a group of Russian billionaires, is subject to long-running speculation that the Kremlin wants the Russian owners to sell it to a state firm to further tighten the state grip on the energy sector. 
Many analysts interpreted the raids by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet KGB, and the subsequent arrest of an employee of TNK-BP on suspicion of industrial espionage, as a sign the Kremlin is stepping up pressure on TNK-BP and its owners.  
Gazprom is seen as the most likely buyer of the Russian billionaires’ stake in TNK-BP, although they have repeatedly denied they plan to sell out. TNK-BP is the largest single British investment in Russia. 
Dudley said he has not heard from either BP nor the Russian shareholders about plans to sell their stakes. “Commitment to invest continues at the same levels from both BP and TNK-BP,” he said, adding that the Kovykta deal was nearing. 
TNK-BP, Gazprom and BP are involved in protracted talks over the creation of a global joint venture on the basis of the Kovykta gas field, which belongs to TNK-BP but which Gazprom agreed to buy last summer after months of state pressure on TNK-BP.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Power Plants Planned</b>
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Sevzapenergomontage and ITM Group have founded a joint venture for the construction of power plants in St. Petersburg and the Northwest region, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The new enterprise will start construction of a 450-megawatt power plant for TGK-1 this year at a cost of $500 million, and work should be completed by 2010.

<b>New Car Plant for City</b>
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Czech company Cadence Innovation and Japanese firm Sumitomo will construct a new car component plant in St. Petersburg for $60 million, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The two companies have registered a joint venture for the project, named Plastimat.ru. The plant will be based in the Shushary industrial area.

<b>LSR Buys Urals Plant</b>
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — LSR Group has acquired a plant for the production of reinforced concrete in Yekaterinburg, Interfax reported Wednesday.
LSR Group acquired an 87 percent stake in the plant from Nova-group for 57 million euros ($88.6 million).

TITLE: Alitalia Talks Fail, Bankruptcy Likely
AUTHOR: By Marco Bertacche and Andrew Davis
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MILAN — Alitalia SpA, which loses more than $1.6 million a day, moved closer to bankruptcy after Air France-KLM Group broke off takeover talks on Wednesday, scuttling a 15-month effort by Italy to find a buyer for the airline.
Air France ended negotiations three hours before a midnight deadline, rejecting counter-proposals by Alitalia’s unions as incompatible with its offer, Italian Finance Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa said Wednesday. Alitalia might need to apply for protection from creditors if the bid failed. The government will seek to check the talks are “definitively” over, it said Thursday.
“Unions put the agreement in jeopardy,” said Patrizio Pazzaglia, who helps manage the equivalent of $400 million at Bank Insinger de Beaufort NV in Rome. “The company still has some cash and can sell some real estate assets, but it’s left alone to its financial crisis.”
Alitalia said Jan. 30 it needed to raise 750 million euros by mid-year to stay in business. The Rome-based company’s fate is complicated by Italian elections April 13-14 to replace the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who had backed the Air France offer. The carrier also lacks a top executive after Chairman Maurizio Prato quit yesterday after the talks collapsed.
“The scenario we see opening up before us is bankruptcy,” said Carlo Luoni, a fund manager at 8A+ Sgr SpA in Varese, Italy, who manages $180 million. “The only positive is that with elections so close, things are likely to stall for a few days. This may give Air France time to think about it and come back.” 
Alitalia’s shares and convertible bonds were suspended in Milan pending a statement, the Italian exchange said Thursday on its web site. The stock is down 38 percent for the year, valuing the company at 693 million euros.
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who leads in opinion polls, has criticized the Air France bid and on Thursday renewed an appeal to the Italian business community to make a rival offer.
“We cannot give up our flagship carrier,” Berlusconi said in Rome during a campaign speech.
Minister Padoa-Schioppa told parliament Wednesday that a new offer was unlikely. Alitalia may be forced to use a special bankruptcy law adopted at the time of the 2003 collapse of dairy company Parmalat SpA, he said. The measure would protect Alitalia from creditors, while requiring “a more radical restructuring” than proposed by Air France, Padoa-Schioppa said.
European rules bar the Italian government from offering a bailout to Alitalia to stave off bankruptcy.
“It cannot receive any more state aid” European Commission transport spokesman Michele Cercone told reporters Thursday in Brussels. “This is crystal clear.”
In buying Alitalia, Air France-KLM would have won access to one of Europe’s biggest passenger markets, while inheriting an airline that hasn’t made money in almost a decade and has had nine government-appointed chief executives in the past 15 years.
German airline Deutsche Lufthansa AG may be considering an offer for Alitalia after pulling out of the bid process in December, Il Messaggero reported Thursday, without saying where it got the information.
Aeroflot may also be interested in participating in a new auction, news agency Radiocor said yesterday, citing a spokesman. The Russian carrier quit the bidding in November.

TITLE: Real Estate Growth Firm Despite Crisis
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although the credit crunch in the United States and Europe and ensuing fund market crisis has affected real estate prices all over the globe — last year real estate price growth in Western Europe was limited to 2-5 percent — a sharp increase in prices has been registered in developing countries, according to a survey issued Wednesday by Knight Frank consultancy.
The largest increase in elite real estate prices (33.7 percent) was reported in Bulgaria, while Singapore followed at 31.3 percent. Russia holds the third place with 30 percent growth, followed by Montenegro (26 percent), Poland (22.4 percent) and Hong Kong (22.3 percent).
“In developed countries, the typical price growth is 3-6 percent a year. In 2007, average real estate prices grew by 5.2 percent in Great Britain, by 4.8 percent in Spain and by 2.5 percent in France. These figures prove that the crisis has resulted in a correction in real estate prices on mature markets,” said Yekaterina Tein, managing partner of Knight Frank.
“Quite different trends were seen in Russia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Singapore, Hong Kong, Moscow and St. Petersburg are large developing cities that attract real estate buyers from many regions. They provide stability and offset the negative influences of mortgages and the financial crisis,” Tein said.
In 2006 real estate prices in Russia grew by 40 percent — unprecedented growth for any other country during that period. Moscow saw 92 percent price growth.
According to Knight Frank, prices for mass-market property slowed down last year and even decreased in some areas, while prices for elite premises in Moscow continued to grow.
More than 20 new elite projects were announced in Moscow last year, while in 2006 there were just seven. Tein concluded that this trend demonstrates the high confidence of investors in the further growth of real estate prices in Russia. Most of the new projects will be realized in 2008-2009.
In 2007, the price of elite property in Moscow grew by over 20 percent. Based on the price dynamics for January-March this year, Knight Frank forecasts that by the end of 2008, the price of elite property will increase by 15-20 percent.
Another expert forecasted that the negative effects of the crisis on the real estate market could intensify this year.
“The growth of real estate prices in Russia is based mainly on the growing demand for property, fuelled by soaring profits from oil and gas export,” said Maxim Mikhailov, executive director of Maris Properties in association with CB Richard Ellis.
“The bank crisis is putting pressure on prices to decrease, but with no effect so far. Speculative investors are quitting the market while institutional investors remain. So far prices in Russia have not decreased, but over the next few months the situation in the financial markets is likely to get worse and then the effect of the crisis on real estate will be more evident,” Mikhailov said.
As a result of the crisis, investors’ profits are decreasing, he indicated. Increasing interest rates are also a negative trend for the real estate market, but in Russia the share of bank financing in development projects is small.
“Banks usually finance large successful companies with large turnovers and liquid assets. Middle-sized and small companies have to use co-investors and give away a share of their profits,” Mikhailov said.
According to Knight Frank, despite the financial crisis, prices for elite property in the capitals of other developing countries are also growing at a high rate. Bulgaria is attractive to investors, especially as an EU member country. Montenegro is similarly attractive for its relatively low real estate prices and prospects of entering the EU.
However, in the Baltic States the crisis has already dampened real estate markets. The rate of price growth has decreased from 66.6 percent in 2006 to 7.1 percent last year in Riga,  from 23 percent to 0.9 percent in Vilnius, and from 23.8 percent to 14.5 percent in  Tallinn.

TITLE: Code Needs Revising
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: The labor movement has been making a lot of headlines lately. Workers at multinational companies were the first to strike for higher wages, but now the conflict has spread to Russian firms. In mid-March, workers at the KamAZ car plant — the former flagship of Soviet industry — walked out on their jobs, and by the end of the month, bauxite miners in the Urals were also striking.
In all of these conflicts, company management has justified their extremely aggressive behavior by blaming workers for Labor Code violations while at the same time denying striking workers the right to conduct negotiations through their elected union representatives. The reason is that management refuses to recognize the legitimacy of worker-formed unions. Instead, they only grant official status to the purely symbolic unions, which are leftovers from the Soviet era that operate under an umbrella organization called the Federation of Independent Labor Unions.
At most enterprises, the local branch of FILU functions like a department of social affairs run by the general director. Although FILU might serve some useful purpose, it is by no means a labor union. To fill the gap, a handful of a company’s workers often form fledgling unions of their own. Usually, the director calls the offending workers into his office one at a time to demand that they withdraw their membership in the new union. If they refuse, he transfers the activists to low-paying jobs or fires them. The official union supports the company’s management and owners. Management can usually find justification for these actions in the Labor Code.
Rather than giving management the upper hand, however, these strong-armed tactics against unions often lead to spontaneous strikes. One example of this occurred in late March at the Little Red Riding Hood mine, north of Yekaterinburg. The Independent Miners’ Union existed at this mine for many years. But the IMU can be considered a worker-formed labor union only in a limited sense. The organization has a history dating back to the widespread miners’ strikes of 1989. At that time, the mine’s management refused to recognize the new worker-formed IMU and preferred to conduct talks with the official FILU — tantamount to negotiating with itself. The result was that the number of unresolved issues continued to accumulate, culminating in spontaneous strikes that spread to neighboring mines. RusAl, the company’s owner, closed all five of its mines in the Sverdlovsk region as a preventative measure. Management claimed that the move would “protect the lives and health of the other workers who are not involved in the current situation.” But they never explained how the loss of jobs and income would protect those workers.
Only after the strikes had already started did the company’s administration suddenly take an interest in the IMU, but by then it was too late. The IMU could have called off the strikes only if it had been empowered to represent the miners earlier on.
From the beginning, the Labor Code was written in such a way as to make life easier for management. But business leaders are realizing that repressive measures do not work and that it would be more effective to negotiate with freely elected unions than to face the consequences of spontaneous and uncontrollable strikes. Even an organized strike would be easier to cope with than a spontaneous uprising. It is no longer a question of whether authorities will revise the Labor Code, but of when and how.
The Kremlin and State Duma will have to face the new reality of the workers’ movement, whether they like it or not.

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

TITLE: The Russophobia Card
AUTHOR: By Andrei Tsygankov
TEXT: The U.S. presidential candidates are increasingly playing the Russophobia card in their campaigns. In addressing Russia, Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton have resorted to insulting President Vladimir Putin as a KGB spy who has no soul. Russophobia is truly back into fashion, as Senator Joseph Biden admitted last week in a comment published in The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. politicians can hardly claim that they know a lot about Russia. Unable to even pronounce names of Russia’s leading politicians, many in the U.S. establishment are nevertheless convinced of Russia’s inherent propensity to violate its own citizens’ rights and bully other nations.
The attacks on Putin and President-elect Dmitry Medvedev are widely supported in mainstream U.S. media. This demagoguery also extends to scholarly publications, such as “The New Cold War” by Edward Lucas, who claims that “Russia’s vengeful, xenophobic and ruthless rulers have turned the sick man of Europe into a menacing bully.” Just published, the book is getting a lot of publicity and is treated as a serious treatise by influential organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations.
Despite the anti-Russia rhetoric, many U.S. politicians feel that Russia doesn’t matter in the global arena. Instead, they are preoccupied with other international issues, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But Russia should matter, particularly in a world of new security threats and growing energy competition. The attitude of ignorance and self-righteousness toward Russia tells us volumes about the U.S. unpreparedness for the central challenges of the 21st century.
Russophobia’s revival is indicative of the fear shared by some U.S. and European politicians that their grand plans to control the world’s most precious resources and geostrategic sites may not succeed if Russia’s economic and political recovery continues.
One Russophobic group, exemplified by McCain, includes military hawks or advocates of U.S. hegemony who fought the Cold War not to contain the Soviet enemy but to destroy it by all means available. The second group is made up of “liberal hawks” who have gotten comfortable with the weakened and submissive Russia of the 1990s. They have an agenda of promoting U.S.-style democracy and market economy. The fact that the Soviet threat no longer exists has only strengthened their sense of superiority.
Finally there are lobbyists representing East European nationalists who have worked in concert with ruling elites of East and Central European nations to oppose Russia’s state consolidation of power as well as promote NATO expansion, deployment of elements of a U.S. missile-defense system in Poland and Czech Republic, and energy pipelines circumventing Russia. These groups have diverse but compatible objectives of isolating Russia from European and U.S. institutions. Because of a lack of commitment to a strong relationship with Russia in the White House, a largely uninformed public and the absence of a Russian lobby within the United States, the influence that these groups exert on policymaking has been notable.
Russophobia is not in U.S. national interests and is not supported by the American public. Various polls demonstrate that Americans do not agree with the assessment that Russia is a threat to the United States’ values and interests. A recent BBC World Service poll revealed, for example, that 45 percent of Americans have a mainly positive attitude regarding Russia’s influence in the world, compared with 36 percent who have a mainly negative attitude.
Yet Russophobia-driven groups have generally succeeded in feeding the media an image of Russia as an increasingly dangerous regime. Thousands of reports in the mainstream U.S. media implicate the Kremlin and Putin personally in murdering opposition journalists and defected spies. Only a handful of reports in less prominent outlets question such interpretations.
Although it matters greatly which candidate will enter the White House in November, the more important issue is whether there will be a fundamental psychological adjustment in Washington away from Russophobia.
To be sure, the healing of the U.S. Russophobic mindframe is going to require a lot of time. Winston Churchill once commented that U.S. politicians “always do the right thing in the end. They just like to exhaust all the alternatives first.” If this indeed is the case, we will not see a framework for meaningful cooperation with Russia any time soon.

Andrei Tsygankov is associate professor of international relations at San Francisco State University.

TITLE: New Chance To Make The Roads Safer
TEXT: If any country has a record of poor road safety, it is certainly Russia. Perhaps this is what qualifies Russia to host a landmark conference on the issue next year.
The country’s top traffic police officer, Viktor Kiryanov, told the United Nations General Assembly this week that Russia wanted to host the world’s first ministerial-level conference on road safety. The UN gladly welcomed the proposal.
Russia has one of the worst road-fatality records in Europe. As many as 33,000 people died on Russian roads last year, according to the Interior Ministry.
In all fairness, road safety has improved after a law came into force on Jan. 1 that dramatically toughens penalties for serious violations of traffic rules. Road fatalities dropped 16 percent during the first two months of this year compared with the same period last year, according to information on the Interior Ministry’s web site. The overall number of traffic accidents also fell by 16 percent.
The number of traffic accidents and casualties, however, remains unacceptably high.
One issue is the fact that bigger fines give traffic police officers the opportunity to collect bigger bribes, motivating them to hide in the bushes to catch speedsters rather than keeping the roads safe with preventive measures.
A better motivated, less corrupt traffic police force is only part of the solution. The government needs to invest heavily to repair existing roads and to build better, safer roads. New roads will also help to ease traffic, reducing the amount of time that it takes paramedics to reach accidents. Their swift arrival is vital because statistics show that victims of traffic accidents have a 90 percent survival rate if help arrives within nine minutes of an accident.
Hopefully, Russia’s role in the international conference will put additional pressure on the government to improve Russia’s road safety record. More important, the conference would give Russia yet another opportunity to learn some of the best practices used by other countries. Kiryanov could then work out a comprehensive approach that addresses bad roads, careless drivers and pedestrians, insufficient emergency personnel and his own corrupt traffic police force.

This comment first appeared in The Moscow Times.

TITLE: Russian to his roots
AUTHOR: By Anthony Tommasini
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: “The older I become, the closer I feel to Russia,” the Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky said recently over tea at a Manhattan hotel. And he seemed surprised to hear himself say it.
“If you had talked to me 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said I do not really care about this,” Hvorostovsky, 45, said. “To become more internationalized was one of my biggest tasks.”
What that meant in particular was making his mark in Mozart opera and the Italian repertory, especially Verdi. And his burnished voice, uncanny breath control and Italianate feeling for lyrical lines, as well as his charisma and dashing physique, make it easy to understand why he has been approached by companies worldwide to perform core Verdi baritone roles that are perpetually hard to cast.
A defining moment for Hvorostovsky at the Metropolitan Opera was his elegantly impassioned Germont in “La Traviata,” which opened the season in 2003, with Renée Fleming singing her first Violetta at the house. In December Hvorostovsky’s Renato in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” was one of the few compelling portrayals in the Met’s tepid revival of this 1990 production. Hvorostovsky returns as Renato for three more performances, starting April 16.
But in the fall he celebrated his Russian heritage in an ambitious North American tour with the acclaimed Academy of Choral Art, Moscow, and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Constantine Orbelian. The program included Russian liturgical music, opera arias and folk songs. After intermission he crooned Soviet-era pop songs into a microphone.
“It was an enormous task, involving about 100 people,” Hvorostovsky said.
How authentically Russian the pop songs were was, of course, open to question. Reviewing a performance at Avery Fisher Hall in November, Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times that some of the pop songs sounded stateless, “their flaccidity offering a sort of Europop for grandmothers.” Still, in the arias and liturgical works Hvorostovsky sang with “the improbable smoothness and cultured delivery that still make listeners roll their eyes in wonder,” Holland wrote.
No one will question the authenticity of the Russian repertory that Hvorostovsky presented on Thursday night at Carnegie Hall with the pianist Ivari Ilja: a program of songs by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Nikolai Medtner, a contemporary of Rachmaninoff’s.
Hvorostovsky recently recorded two albums of Russian songs for the Delos label: a Tchaikovsky program and a selection of settings of Pushkin texts by various Russian composers. (Release dates have not been announced.) “I’ve been going back to my childhood,” he said, reconnecting to traditions “I used to love.”
Yet for such a thoughtful artist Hvorostovsky was surprisingly inarticulate about what defines the Russian musical heritage and singing style. What makes a Russian singer sound Russian?
“Do I know?” Hvorostovsky said. “Hmm.”
Because his connection to the culture is innate, he suggested, he may lack the perspective to explain it. When singing in Russian, he can, of course, “play with the words and the phrases,” he said. Then there is a pervasive brooding quality to Russian music, a “stubbornness and wildness,” he added, that also comes naturally to him, something he proved during his rebellious adolescence. Growing up in the gritty industrial city of Krasnoyarsk, the young Dmitri started drinking vodka at 14 and ran around with gangs of working-class boys, getting into fights and breaking his nose several times.
To Western vocal music enthusiasts the Russian traits of Hvorostovsky’s singing may be easier to describe. The language is rich with earthy colorings, robust vowels and consonants that “seem to go on forever,” in Holland’s words. When Hvorostovsky sings in his native tongue, the language comes across as conversational and mellifluous.
The dark, rueful Russianness of his singing infused his portrayal of the title role in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” last season at the Met. In the early scenes, when Onegin arrives at the country estate of the Larin family and meets the winsome young Tatyana, poignantly portrayed in this production by Fleming, Hvorostovsky blithely conveyed the diffidence and smugness of this rakish and entitled young landowner. 
Yet even in Onegin’s haughty phrases, Hvorostovsky’s voice had a melancholy and an aching sensuality that exposed an emotional subtext. It was not surprising when, in the final scene, with Onegin now desperately in love with the married Tatyana, the character’s suppressed longing burst through his volatile courtship of Fleming’s shocked and regretful character.
The Met’s high-definition broadcast of “Eugene Onegin” was the eighth top-grossing “movie” in Canada for the weekend it was screened in theaters there. A DVD is now available from Decca.
Hvorostovsky, for his part, cringes when he watches himself on film. “If something goes wrong from your point of view, it’s so painful to see,” he said. He is intensely self-critical. “I don’t like myself really,” he added.
From the story of his early life in Siberia, it is hard to imagine how he coped with the cultural isolation of Krasnoyarsk and the deprivation of the Soviet era. An only child, he mostly lived with his maternal grandmother and his volatile, alcoholic step-grandfather, a war hero. Though devoted to his parents — his father an engineer, his mother a gynecologist — he saw them mostly on weekends in their small cooperative apartment. He wanted to study music in Moscow, but his parents were determined to keep the family as together as possible. “They worried that I would live a dangerous life and lose my talent,” he said.
After victories in student competitions, he became a star at his hometown conservatory. “I was the most cherished and loved and admired boy,” he said. Even before graduating, he was awarded a position at the local opera theater, where he was nurtured by conductors and coaches. “I was given an apartment when I was a still a student,” he said, laughing impishly.
The only component of his vocal training that was lacking, he said, was an exploration of the classic bel canto approach to singing, which cultivates evenness throughout the voice, pliant legato phrasing and nimble agility. The bel canto heritage profoundly influenced Russian opera in the mid-to-late 19th century. Just listen to the arching melodic lines and flourishes of filigree in Glinka’s operas. But during the Stalin era, cultural overseers viewed bel canto as some elitist European influence that was corrupting the earthy tradition of Russian vocal music.
Hvorostovsky learned bel canto on his own, listening to recordings of great Italian singers from the early 20th century. His combination of impassioned Russian expressivity and elegant Italianate phrasing won over the judges of the Singer of the World Competition in Cardiff, Wales, in 1989. Hvorostovsky, chaperoned by a pair of K.G.B. agents, edged out the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel for first prize. The next day, he said, he traveled to London and signed a recording contract, and his international career took off.
Hvorostovsky endured rough patches in his artistic work and his personal life during the late 1990s because of excessive drinking and a continuing penchant for rebellion. “I enjoyed the opportunity to be famous, because of my stupidity and stubbornness,” he said. “It spoils you.”
He has been sober since 2001, he said, and he now finds strength from a rich family life with his second wife, Florence, and their two young children. He also has 12-year-old twins from his first marriage.
Still, Hvorostovsky feels the pressure of expectations. “Who cares what I did last week?” he said. “Yes, your name helps out and gets people’s attention. But I have to prove myself every time.”
One of the most alluring actors in opera, Hvorostovsky responds to challenging directors and is open to daring production concepts. But his adventurousness may be tested when he sings Onegin in October at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.
The production, by the Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, was introduced in the fall amid sensational controversy. Onegin and his earnest friend Lensky are depicted as lovers; the climactic duel scene opens with the impulsive friends in bed together. 
The well-known Polonaise at the ball is danced by a corps of bare-chested, implicitly gay cowboys. The show was called the “Brokeback Mountain Onegin” by bloggers and critics.
“I shall see for myself,” Hvorostovsky said. “These devoted friendships between Russian men at that time could be sexual.” Intimations of romantic feelings between Onegin and Lensky run through the source, Pushkin’s verse novel, he said: “It’s very tender, the way it’s written.”
On the Verdi front, he sang his latest role, the title part in “Simon Boccanegra,” to acclaim at the Houston Grand Opera and the Paris National Opera. And he is studying Iago in “Otello.” Audiences at Carnegie Hall last year had a hint of what a Hvorostovsky Iago might be like from his chilling and cagey performance of the “Credo” during a program he shared with the soprano Anna Netrebko and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
He is also looking closely at that touchstone Verdi role, Macbeth. “I want to do it,” he said, adding: “It’s just so dark and depressing. Even a Russian is afraid.”

TITLE: Words worth
TEXT: One thing I’ve missed in the post-Soviet period is the brilliant Russian political joke (àíåêäîò). Under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, jokes were invented and made the rounds but for some reason, the punch seemed to go out of them. Until about a year ago, that is. Operation Successor has tickled the funny bone of the Russian collective consciousness, and the political joke is on the comeback trail.

There are dozens of jokes about Putin and Medvedev alternating as president and prime minister until the end of time. For example, in 2023, Putin and Medvedev are suffering from hangovers one morning. Putin asks, À òû íå ïîìíèøü, êòî èç íàñ ñåãîäíÿ ïðåçèäåíò, à êòî ïðåìüåð-ìèíèñòð? (Do you remember who is president today and who is prime minister?) Medvedev replies: Äà êàêàÿ ðàçíèöà? Íó, ïóñòü  áóäó ïðåìüåð (What’s the difference? Well, let’s say I’m prime minister). Putin: Òîãäà òåáå çà ïèâîì áåæàòü (Then you do the beer run).

RuNet is filled with bear jokes and puns. Local wags are delighted that Medvedev will be inaugurated president in the spring — ìåäâåäü äî ìàÿ â áåðëîãå (the bear is in his den until May). In one joke, the Kremlin issued a list of forbidden things right after the elections, such as the candy Ìàøêà êîñîëàïûé (the pigeon-toed bear) and Winnie the Pooh, as íå ñîîòâåòñòâóþùèå ãåíåðàëüíîé ëèíèè ïàðòèè è ïîðî÷àùèå ÷åñòü ïðåçèäåíòà (not conforming to the party line and defaming the honor of the president). I liked a journalist’s pun about the elections: ïðîöåññ "ïîäìåäâåäèâàíèÿ"èòîãîâ âûáîðîâ (the process of Medvedizing the election results, based on word play with ïîäâåäåíèå èòîãîâ, or summing up the results).

Punsters are having fun with initials, pointing out that since Medvedev’s initials are ÄÀÌ, toasts çà äàì (to women) are now to the new president. There are other puns about ÄÀÌ and ÿ äàì (“I will give,” also used in the sexual sense of “I will put out.”) Another set of jokes points out that his combination of ôàìèëèÿ-èìÿ-îò÷åñòâî (surname/first name/patronymic name) is ÌÄÀ, which is the sound one mutters to something disconcerting (typographically rendered ì-äà). This is a bit like having a president whose initials are JEEZ.

And pundits are tripping over each other to come up with witty descriptions of the future power structure in the country: It is either òàíäåìîêðàòèÿ (tandemocracy) or äèìàêðàòèÿ (dimacracy). The head of state is called Ïóòâåäåâ or Ìåäâóòèí.

Even Medvedev’s height is fair game: Íîâûé ïðåçèäåíò — íàãëÿäíûé ðåçóëüòàò äåéñòâèÿ Ïëàíà Ïóòèíà â ñôåðå íàíîòåõíîëîãèé (The new president is a tangible result of realizing Putin’s Plan in the area of nanotechnology). I hope Mr. Medvedev has a good sense of humor. As one blogger writes, ×åì äàëüøå, òåì ñìåøíåå (It’s just going to get funnier).

<i>Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based interpreter and translator.</i>

TITLE: Bossa beats
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Take a punk/new wave anthem from the late 1970s or early 1980s and perform it as a soft bossa nova number with gorgeous female vocals on top, and, if it’s done well, the public is won over — even in the U.K., where French acts have not really ever had any notable success.
In February, Nouvelle Vague sold out its British tour in no time and added another London show at Forum on Dec. 4, 2008, “due to phenomenal demand.”
“Yeah, yeah, actually, to tell you the truth, it’s very incredible, all the shows we’re doing around the world now, probably 80 percent, sold out each time. I don’t know, it’s just that the people want to see us live — I don’t know why!,” said producer and musician Marc Collin in a recent interview speaking from his studio in Paris.
“But it’s also the same in Australia — we’ve just come back from Australia and New Zealand. It was the same there, its not only the U.K. There’s been interest from a lot of people, for four years now, to see us live.”
Nouvelle Vague fans include David Byrne, whose label Luaka Bop released “Bande a Part,” the band’s second, and most recent, album in the U.S.
“We saw him each time we played in New York. He’s a very nice guy,” said Collin, who formed Nouvelle Vague in 2003. “I think he liked the project, and also he’s a very big fan of Brazilian music. So maybe he liked the bossa nova rhythm that we have.”
Collin, 39, said he was a fan of post-1979 music, rather than punk. His passion for bossa nova came as he grew older.
“I’m not really into punk, I’m not into the Sex Pistols or bands like this, I’m really more into Joy Division, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, all those bands that are called now ‘postpunk,’” he said.
Turning Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” into a lounge crowd-pleaser is where Nouvelle Vague’s method is at its best. The meaning is completely twisted. 
The same is true for The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” and The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” that were featured on Nouvelle Vague’s eponymous debut album in 2004. But it was actually Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” that sent Nouvelle Vague into motion.
“The first idea was to do ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in a very different way, so maybe ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was the starting point for the project. That’s why also it opened the first album,” said Collin.
On its second album, “Bande a Part,” released in 2006, the band reworked such gems as Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love,” New Order’s “Blue Monday” and Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
In the studio, Nouvelle Vague is essentially Collin and musicians and singers that he finds appropriate for a specific track. Vocalists change constantly — contrary to the original idea.
“The original idea was to have only one Brazilian singer,” said Collin.
“But we found only one girl in Paris, and she didn’t even know how to speak English, so it was a bit of problem. We recorded two songs and just realized it was impossible to do the entire album.
“So after I just tried to call my friends in Paris, most of them are French girls, and so we recorded an album, really, just four of us. There wasn’t any label, anything. If I saw a girl for another project, I just asked, ‘Would you like to do this song?’ ‘Yeah, OK.’ It was very simple, very naive in a way.’
“And after, for the live version, we realized it was not possible to bring all the girls on stage, so we just chose two to represent all of them.”
Nouvelle Vague last performed in St. Petersburg in June, but in a distant summer cafe called Verandah More, where few fans managed to catch them.

Nouvelle Vague performs at A2 on Saturday. www.nouvellesvagues.com

TITLE: Leaving the stage?
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A cloud of uncertainty is lingering over the future of Makharbek Vaziev, the man who has led the ballet division of the world-renowned Mariinsky Theater for the past 12 years.
The first rumors about Vaziev’s future started in mid-March after several newspapers in Russia reported — without providing a source on the record — that Vaziev had intended to quit his job March 24, after the closing gala of the Eighth Mariinsky International Ballet Festival.
More than two weeks on, the ballet director has not yet made any official statements or comments on the matter. The company’s press office has said that Vaziev continues to fulfill his duties, while remaining tight-lipped about the ballet head’s rumored resignation and the reasons behind it.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Monday to mark the company’s current tour to New York’s City Center, the Mariinsky’s Artistic Director Valery Gergiev cautiously offered the first public comments on the matter. Gergiev confirmed that Vaziev is considering leaving the Mariinsky but made it clear that no final decisions have been taken.
The newspaper quoted Gergiev as saying that the ballet director “had told him that he would discuss retiring this summer.”
Gergiev was critical about Vaziev’s most recent choreographic choices. 
“We can’t afford doing things that are mediocre,” Gergiev told The New York Times, without making specific references.
In the interview, Gergiev also blamed the ballet troupe’s leader for failing to create a more welcoming climate for the next generation of dancers. In Gergiev’s view, newcomers need stronger support from the top soloists.
“Mr. Gergiev said another area of disagreement was Mr. Gergiev’s strong desire to enlist seasoned company principals like Igor Zelensky, Uliana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva and Yulia Makhalina to work with the youngest generation of [Mariinsky] dancers,” The New York Times wrote. 
“I’m not 100 percent sure that we have created the atmosphere and situation today where all these young people are immediately helped to the maximum,” the newspaper quoted Gergiev as saying.
An insider at the theater who asked not to be named said Vaziev had threatened to resign as a last resort since he had been struggling to promote the interests of ballet troupe.
“He has been trying without much success recently to win better conditions and more funding for the ballet troupe; opera and symphonic programs have always been a priority for Gergiev, and with the arrival of the new concert hall that emphasis has further increased,” the source said. “It is natural that Vaziev avoids confirming his intentions to step down; it means negotiations are still in progress, and there is hope of reaching an agreement.”
Vaziev, a former soloist with the Mariinsky Ballet, has led the ballet division since 1996, after the company discontinued its contract with Oleg Vinogradov for whom Vaziev had been working — upon his retirement from stage — as an assistant.
Speculation about Vaziev’s future with the Mariinsky has abounded in the Russian and international media since the end of the critically panned Mariinsky International Ballet Festival last month.
A list of possible successors to Vaziev has included the Mariinsky prima ballerina Lopatkina; Altynai Asylmuratova, artistic director of the Vaganova Ballet Academy; Zelensky, artistic director of the Novosibirsk Ballet Theater and a Mariinsky dancer since 1988, and Alexei Ratmansky who has just left his job as artistic director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater.
However, Russian ballet critics have pointed out, it is primarily Vaziev who is credited for inviting modern choreographers such as William Forsythe to work with Mariinsky dancers and motivating the troupe to mount brilliant performances of their works.

TITLE: Private hell
AUTHOR: By Sally Laird
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Written in 1946 but first published only 25 years later, “Unforgiving Years” is Victor Serge’s last novel. This is the first time it has appeared in English, and it has found an excellent translator in Richard Greeman, who captures the zest and poetry of Serge’s writing and provides an admirable introduction to Serge’s work.
Most readers will need that introduction, for Serge is hardly a household name. A Russian who wrote in French on Russian themes, he doesn’t belong to the literary canon in either country. Indeed, many Russians and Russian scholars will be unfamiliar with his work. (This year sees the first Russian translation of “Unforgiving Years,” as well.) But Serge also falls between political stools. A fierce critic of Stalinism yet an unrepentant revolutionary, he was mistrusted by both the left and the right, and in his final years wrote exclusively “for the desk drawer.”
Born to Russian anti-tsarist exiles in Brussels, Serge grew up in poverty and from his teenage years became involved in anarcho-socialist circles. By the time he reached revolutionary Russia in 1919, he had already served several years in French jails. His ardor undimmed, he joined the Bolsheviks and began working for the Comintern, with postings abroad in Vienna and Berlin. He soon began to have doubts about the Party’s authoritarian tendencies, and in 1925 he recklessly returned to Russia to join Trotsky’s fight against Stalin. Expelled from the Party and eventually deported to the Urals, he was allowed to leave the country only after international protests (he was lucky to escape alive). Serge wrote against the Stalinist regime from exile, but his warnings fell on deaf ears. In 1941, he joined the throng of Parisians who fled the occupied city on foot (an exodus vividly described by his French-Russian compatriot Irene Nemirovsky in her beautiful, and in many ways comparable, “Suite Francaise”), boarded the last refugee ship out of Vichy France, and eventually fetched up in Mexico City. It was here that he wrote his classic autobiography, “Memoirs of a Revolutionary,” and his last two novels, “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” and “Unforgiving Years.”
In “Unforgiving Years” Serge draws on this wealth of experience to provide a fractured panorama of the world before, during and after World War II. Divided into four “movements,” to use Greeman’s apt term, the novel takes us variously to Paris, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Leningrad, Berlin, New York and the Mexican countryside. The opening movement is set in a louche, decadent, film-noirish Paris shortly before the war; here, the central character is the Soviet secret agent D (alias Sacha or Battisti), who, disillusioned by the Party’s crimes, has decided to resign from “the Service” and is set to flee Paris with his partner, Noemi (or Nadine). They leave behind two colleagues from the Service: Alain, a French painter and would-be believer who is distressed at his older mentor’s “betrayal,” and Daria (or Dacha), D’s comrade from the days of the Civil War, who is determined to return to Russia and remains the “purest” believer of them all.
The second part finds Daria first in exile in Kazakhstan, then unexpectedly called up to work in Leningrad. It is (presumably) the bitter winter of 1941, when Leningrad under German siege is slowly starving and freezing to death. This chapter, written from Serge’s experience of besieged Petrograd in 1919, is the most powerful and tragic movement of the book and compares to Andrei Platonov’s “Foundation Pit” in its account of spiritual and bodily suffering — the “spiritual suction deep inside” of hunger, the “stabbing emptiness” of loneliness.
In the third part, Daria is working with the Berlin underground during the final days of the war; Alain, the painter, coincidentally meets her there. The events — the ferocious Allied bombings, the liberation — are seen, unusually, from the point of view of ordinary, “innocent” Berliners. Asked by an American journalist whether he feels guilty for the war, an elderly German professor gazes in bewilderment at the surrounding devastation, astonished at the imputation that he caused it all.
The final movement takes us to Mexico, where Daria is reunited with D and Noemi. D, transplanted to this “climate of cosmic vigor ... of destruction and fertilization,” has now become Don Bruno, a prosperous small farmer, while Noemi, unhinged by all she has undergone, floats gently on some other plane of existence. With Daria’s arrival, however, the past catches up with the pair — and the story returns full-circle to the forebodings of the opening chapter.
It is an extraordinary journey, but what makes the novel compelling is not so much its events as the vivid, painterly way in which Serge evokes each swiftly illuminated landscape or scene. 
Most of the real action takes place offstage — in the past, in imagination, or in another country. It is only in Berlin that we are placed, so to speak, directly under the bombs. Even death is circumvented, seen only in its effects. For all its apocalyptic vision and the cataclysmic events it describes, the novel is eerily quiet: focused on the interior lives of its characters rather than their doings. Of D we know only that he once did “a good deal of throat cutting” and “carried out his fair share of dirty work,” and the same is presumably true of his loyal, idealistic comrades. But for now what we witness are mainly their inner travails, their troubling questions: “Could we have got it horribly wrong on some hidden point?” “Did we bring about the opposite of what we wanted to do?” Daria, for all her intermittent submission to physical pleasure and the warmth of human contact, questions whether there is any life “beyond working for a great common destiny.” 
These are strange ciceroni for a journey back to that bleak, murderous time. But Serge is a writer with a keen eye and immense stylistic force, and I was glad to be introduced to him through this fine translation.

Sally Laird is a translator and author of “Voices of Russian Literature.”

TITLE: Afrika in New York
AUTHOR: By Katya Kazakina
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Polish artist Piotr Uklanski’s chalk-white, crowned eagle towers 13 feet high at Gagosian Gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Two blocks north, at I-20, Russian artist Afrika (aka Sergei Bugaev) has erected a large boatlike structure made of a crumbling wooden sleigh and washed-out communist banners.
Both artists comment on their homelands’ shifting cultural identities, alluding to history, communist propaganda, nationalistic ambitions and consumerism.
Uklansky’s  “Bialo-Czerwona’’ (White-Red) — a reference to Poland’s bicolored national flag — is an imposing exhibition of  painting, sculpture and photography. One 12-by-19-foot work looks like a massive Polish flag made of two enameled panels, one white and one red.
The labyrinthine layout of the exhibition underscores its theatricality, starting with the floor-to-ceiling red curtain emblazoned with the title of the show in large white letters. The artworks are concealed on the other side.
In the first room, the long-necked eagle, looking like a cross between a mythical phoenix and a chicken, recalls Poland’s heraldic past (the communist government de-crowned the bird) and its Soviet-era heroic sculpture — with a dose of irony.
Another room has been transformed into a colorful, cluttered city of Gothic spires. The cardboard-and-foil metropolis, which features tiny figures of saints and royals, shimmers like a pile of candies in shiny wrappers.
Afrika’s exhibition “Good Ballerina Is Always Right’’ at I-20 has none of the highly produced sleekness of Uklanski’s creations.
Instead, the artist, who was at the vanguard of the Russian music and art scene in the 1980s and 1990s and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1999, creates a low-key, low-tech show merging the symbols of Soviet lore with folk and outsider art.
The exhibition’s focal point is an incongruous vessel comprised of a cracked antique sleigh, a mast covered in rabbit fur and eight sails made of Soviet-era banners.
The sculpture first appeared in a group show, “Russia Miami 2007,’’ during the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair in December. Its latest incarnation features more sails, according to I-20 owner Paul Judelson.
The red velvet flags are embroidered with communist slogans and profiles of Lenin, absurdist phrases and childlike images.
The flags are based on Afrika’s 1995 project, “Krimania,’’ during which he spent a month at a psychiatric clinic on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea. Working with the clinic’s chronic patients, the artist explored aphasia, a brain disorder that results in a loss of speech comprehension.
Afrika’s communication with the patients focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union, Judelson said. The ubiquity and symbolism of the red flags made them a common topic of discussion and of numerous drawings they created. During a performance at the end of the project, Afrika decorated the flags with a variety of words and symbols based on the aphasic patients’ drawings.
Many of these images are incorporated into the banners at I-20. Also on view are photographs of the participating patients.

TITLE: The cost of loving
AUTHOR: By Svetlana Osadchuk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: STRUNINO, Vladimir Region — Valentina Pavlenko first met U.S. seaman Bill Rowgraft at a large dance party in Arkhangelsk.
Pavlenko, then 15, knew she would pay a heavy price for falling in love with the bright-eyed sailor depicted in a photo that she has kept for the past 65 years. Little did she know how much.
“I hid his picture behind the wallpaper when the NKVD came for me,” said Pavlenko, now 80.
Pavlenko is among thousands of girls from three northern ports who frequented Interclubs, clubs established by the Soviet government for foreign seamen during World War II. The clubs — located in Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) — offered movies, music and dancing to sailors working in Arctic convoys, which delivered vital supplies under the Lend Lease program from August 1941 to May 1945.
A total of 1,400 merchant ships — accompanied variously by destroyers, anti-submarine trawlers, minesweepers and cruisers — delivered the supplies from Britain and the United States to the Soviet Union. By 1943, the number of staff at the British military mission in Arkhangelsk alone totaled 80 people.
Local residents were not permitted to fraternize with the foreigners except within the confines of the Interclubs, recalled Lidia Chernyayeva, 88, from Severodvinsk.
Britain and the United States also frowned on such contacts, and the British mission staff was instructed to avoid contacts with Soviet citizens, said Yury Alexandrov, head of the Arctic Convoy veterans organization.
The Interclubs were always packed, however. Cheerful music and dancing filled the Arkhangelsk club, located in an old mansion along the banks of the Dvina River, Pavlenko said. “It was the most alluring place in the whole city,” she said.
It was on May 8, 1943, that the blue-eyed Bill Rowgraft first escorted her home and kissed her hand. From that evening, they met almost every day for the next four months. Then he boarded a ship and disappeared.
A similar fate awaited other girls. In 1946, when the British military mission pulled out of Arkhangelsk, Pavlenko witnessed a stampede on the pier. Girls wept as they saw their boyfriends sailing away.
Plainclothed men photographed the crowd, Pavlenko said. Soon many of the girls were arrested, accused of being enemies of the people.
A few girls were allowed to marry foreigners, mostly British mission staff, although they were never permitted to leave Russia, said Olga Golubtsova, a Severodvinsk journalist and author, who has written extensively about Interclub romances. Only one woman was granted a visa to join her husband, Golubtsova said. She waited five years for her paper.
Some relationships, however, survived a half-century of separation. British sailor Bill Greenhall married Alexandra Rasheva but had to leave with his ship. Rasheva was arrested in 1948 when she went to the British Embassy in Moscow to find out whether she could get a visa to be reunited with him, and she was sent to internal exile in Siberia. With the help of a British journalist and Pavlenko, Greenhall and Rasheva began corresponding shortly after the Soviet collapse. Greenhall wrote that he still loved her, and the two met in Britain in 1994, Pavlenko said. He asked her to stay, but after much thought she decided to return to Russia. Greenhall died the next year.
The NKVD arrested Pavlenko in 1946 when she was 18. After Bill Rowgraft, her first love, she had continued visiting the Interclub, dating both British and U.S. seamen. At the time of her arrest, she was corresponding with an American, Warren Bowsley, 25, who wanted to marry her. While she said she liked him, she did not love him like Rowgraft. Soon after Bowsley left, she found herself pregnant with his child. She named her daughter Bella, in honor of Bill.
After her arrest, Pavlenko said, NKVD officers subjected her to sleep-deprivation interrogation techniques. For three months, the officers kept asking what she had talked about during parties at the British military mission. “I talked about love and dancing,” she said in the recent interview. A military court later declared her an enemy of the people and sentenced her to six years in prison. Asked by the court if she had anything to say, she pleaded for the return of photos of Rowgraft, which had been confiscated from her apartment. The court said the photos had been thrown away.
Pavlenko was imprisoned in a labor camp in Salekhard, within the Arctic Circle. A good dancer, she became a member of the Salekhard labor camp’s music and dance theater. Upon her release in 1953, she returned to Arkhangelsk to fetch her daughter, Bella, and Rowgraft’s picture hidden behind the wallpaper. The people living in her apartment had found it and preserved it, Pavlenko said.
She later married a Muscovite, Yevgeny Pavlenko. Pavlenko now lives alone in the village of Strunino in the Vladimir region, exactly 101 kilometers east of Moscow. She settled here after her release in 1953, obeying a Soviet law that required former prisoners to live at least 101 kilometers away from major cities. Her husband has died, and her children have married and moved away. Age is catching up with her, and she can barely walk. But her memories remain strong. “Sometimes I dream that I am dancing with Bill at the Interclub,” she said.

TITLE: Punished
AUTHOR: By Svetlana Osadchuk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Hundreds of girls swooned over British and U.S. sailors at three entertainment lounges set up by Soviet authorities during World War II. Some also made money on the side, selling sexual favors.
But several women who frequented the Interclubs and the Federal Security Service flatly rejected the notion that the clubs served as brothels.
“Archives about the Interclubs contain no evidence that they served as official brothels,” said Natalya Ozhigina, a spokeswoman for the Arkhangelsk branch of the FSB.
The clubs — located in Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) — offered movies, music and dancing to sailors working in Arctic convoys, which delivered vital supplies from Britain and the United States to the Soviet Union under the Lend Lease program from August 1941 to May 1945.
Some of the sailors and girls had affairs, but only recently did speculation begin swirling that the clubs might have acted as brothels.
Fueling the rumors, U.S.-based author Leonid Perepletchik wrote a fictitious account of how Arkhangelsk’s Interclub operated as an NKVD-organized brothel for foreign sailors. The story, published in the Word literature magazine in 2006, told of specially trained girls who simultaneously worked as prostitutes and spies and, after the last sailors left, were put on a ship that was sunk at sea.
Several years earlier, St. Petersburg filmmaker Alexei Uchitel considered shooting a film about 300 women who worked as prostitutes at Murmansk’s Interclub and were subsequently drowned at sea. Uchitel told Izvestia in 2001 that he had “absolutely authentic” evidence to support his account.
However, Yury Aleksandrov, the head of Arctic Convoy, a veterans organization, dismissed the idea of the sunken ship, saying it was a maritime legend dating back at least 80 years. 
Two women who frequented the clubs — Lidia Chernyayeva from Molotovsk and Valentina Yevleva from Arkhangelsk — also said the clubs were not brothels.
One of the few Australians who took part in the Arctic convoys, Laurence Downey, said some young women working as hostesses at Molotovsk’s Interclub accepted fees to help sailors find women willing to sell sexual favors.
“These girls were not prostitutes in the strictest sense of the word. They were, probably, married women trying to earn a living for their hungry families,” he wrote in an unpublished biography available on the Internet.
Yevleva said prostitutes lived in her hometown of Arkhangelsk like in any other city but that they were not associated with the Interclub. From the age of 15 to 17, she dated U.S. and British sailors at the club — relationships that caused the NKVD to declare her an enemy of the people in 1946 and imprison her for six years in a labor camp.
“Nobody was punished for prostitution,” Yevleva said. “They punished us only for love.”

TITLE: Beacon of luxury
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Lumiere // Grand Palace Complex, 15 Italianskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 449 9482 // www.lumiere-spb.ru // Open Wednesday through Sunday 6 p.m. through 1 a.m. // Credit cards accepted // Dinner for two: approximately 6,000 rubles ($245)

There are Sunday afternoon painters and there are the Impressionists. There are métiers en scene and there are auteurs. What distinguishes the masters from the workhorses in the worlds of paint and celluloid? Their command of the luminescent quality of light.
Likewise, there are ordinary restaurants in St. Petersburg — and there is Lumiere. Light is the guiding principle at this highly exclusive, very expensive restaurant on the top floor of the Grand Palace shopping complex.
Taking full advantage of its place on high, Lumiere has a glass roof and walls, and a broad view of Ploshchad Isskuvtsk, the Russian Museum and the glistening domes of the Church on the Spilt Blood. Perfectly positioned to capture the spectrum of St. Petersburg’s sun-filled and ever-lengthening evenings, Lumiere’s location alone is dazzling. But subtle artistry lies behind every aspect of the restaurant that elevates it above its radiant location.
Consider such gossamer detailing as the potato crystalline basket that accompanies the lobster fondant, Kamchatka crab crumble, whipped cream and black caviar starter (700 rubles; $28) and the filigree coils of chocolate biscuit with a warm, dark, flourless chocolate cake, Szechuan pepper and blue cheese chocolate truffle, and vanilla ice cream dessert (350 rubles; $15). 
Or the froth on a “cappuccino” made of peas that accompanies the king crab cooked with brandy with macaroni gratin and lobster sauce main course (1,150 rubles; $47) and the melt-in-your-mouth tenderness of lamb that comes in a thick-cut rack, marinated with preserved lemon, capsicum and dried fruits in gravy main course (1,550 rubles: $63). 
Between courses, in conventional style, a small but sparkling sorbet is served unbidden to refresh and revitalize the tastebuds. 
Chef Patrick Maurin says his style is “French New Style” and the menu at Lumiere deftly mixes the softness of such base ingredients as scallops, tuna, fois gras and beef tartar with the sharpness of such accompaniments as chestnut, chutney, brie, basil, balsamic vinegar and truffle oil — often conjured into unforgettable combinations. 
Even the featherweight dance of waiters is so discreet that chairs slide, glasses refill, and napkins reappear, fresh as new, as if in an optical illusion.
Seating just 54, manager Herve Le Bail describes Lumiere as a “chamber” restaurant, and, despite its expansive panoramic views, the restaurant has an intimate, exclusive ambience. It is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and never open for lunch — except, rumor has it, for luminaries in industry, show business and government. Monsieur Le Bail also explains that smoking is quietly discouraged, although it is hard to imagine high-ranking guests not enjoying a fine cigar with a glass of vintage Armagnac as the pianist plays after a languid three course dinner at Lumiere.
The lichen-green velvet upholstery of the chairs and banquettes at first appears dull. And the dark woods of the lobby can make it seem gloomy and intimidating. But soon the counterpoint effect of these touches becomes clear as they enhance and illuminate Lumiere’s glittering charms. Not least among these is an incredible ceiling feature made of tens of thousands of crystal beads supplied by luxury Swiss chandelier maker Swarovski. Overpowering at first, suggesting a glut of Moscow-style bling, the ceiling’s beauty reveals itself as an evening at Lumiere unfolds, as slowly as flavors evolve on the palate and colors develop in a St. Petersburg sunset.

TITLE: Zombies that just won’t quit
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: In “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead,” the loosest, goosiest chapter in the filmmaker’s continuing zombieland epic, we meet the enemy and he is us, with video cameras. Set in Romero’s usual Pennsylvania stomping and chomping grounds (a.k.a. Canada), the story pivots on a clutch of University of Pittsburgh students who, in the process of fleeing legions of the undead — despite their obvious handicap, zombies always find fresh meat — have taken up cameras, thus becoming the producers of their own snuff biopic.
If this sounds a little like “Cloverfield” it is, superficially, though “Diary” is a lot cheaper-looking, generally smarter-sounding and a whole lot funnier. Its lead characters — played by Michelle Morgan, Josh Close and seven other serviceable actors I’ve never heard of — run and strategize, point and shoot, and not just cameras. They flee from doom, not toward it. They’re real and prickly and all too human, and their mistakes feel true to life rather than a consequence of bad writing. One guy even plugs his camera into the wall when the juice runs low. They’re trying to make it out of zombieland alive, not knowing, as we do — take another look at the movie’s title — that the guy running this show thinks they are already dead.
Yeah, the kids are not all right, says Romero, and here’s the lowdown on the meltdown. It’s those blasted cameras, those infernal machines, the blinking screens and humming monitors that we run 24/7 and are now running us, shutting us off from the real world (whatever that is). To be honest, I kind of agree, but agreeing philosophically with a movie doesn’t make it any good, particularly when that movie insists — as this one does — on hammering home the obvious point again and again. There’s some striking filmmaking in “Diary of the Dead,” but there’s also a lot of less-than-elegant speechifying. Having already scared the stuffing out of us with his past films, Uncle George has decided it’s time for a good talk.
Some of that talk does tickle the funny bone, as when a couple of the characters — film students shooting a girl-meets-mummy cheapie — engage in some metacriticism and argue whether the dead are supposed to move fast or slow. Romero, who inaugurated the era of the modern zombie with his 1968 masterpiece “Night of the Living Dead,” maintains that the undead should shuffle through this mortal coil, not race, as they do in some recent flicks. His purism has its point. Zippy zombies are frightening less because they’re dead (and hungry), but because their speed — particularly when combined with fast editing and agitated camera moves — affects you on a visceral level. The filmmaking gets into your body; Romero also wants to get into your head.
But the body has its needs, and one of the problems with “Diary of the Dead” is that it doesn’t get into your body; it doesn’t shake you up, jolt you, make you shiver and squeak. It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary. Paradoxically, the movie’s self-reflexive conceit — that you’re watching what the characters are supposedly shooting — works against its fear factor. Because most of the characters wielding the cameras happen to be film students, the images are somewhat finessed (and edited). But because most of the images are also meant to resemble nonprofessional visuals — there’s some surveillance material too — they’re not just drab, they’re also stale.
What looked fresh in 1998 in Thomas Vinterberg’s “Celebration,” which was shot with a hand-held digital video camera and has the feel of a home movie, now looks tired, wrung out. The reason has nothing to do with video or hand-held cinematography, but with the idiom of amateurism, with a visual style that swaps artistry for a spurious authenticity. “Diary of the Dead” is supposed to look as if it had been shot by some freaked-out college kids who are as securely tethered to their video and cellphone cameras as a fetus is to its umbilical cord. And because their experience of the world is largely defined by mediated images, they turn their lives and deaths into a spectacle, just not a very exciting one.
There’s always been a political edge to Romero’s zombieland epic, which he began during the civil rights and Vietnam era and is now using to engage with the contemporary American scene. “Cloverfield” trades on the iconography of Sept. 11, turning familiar images of billowing smoke and swirling paper into virtuosic production design. By contrast, in “Diary of the Dead” Romero pokes and prods and awkwardly struggles with some aftershocks of that day, specifically, what happens when a culture — particularly one gripped by fear — is overrun with images, particularly atrocity images, that ostensibly numb and dumb down that culture by blurring the real and the unreal, true life and its canned image. Never mind that movies are part of the mix and that the movies lie too, sometimes beautifully.

TITLE: Plane Flies Blood To Betancourt
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — A French airplane landed in Colombia before dawn Thursday as part of a mission to help rebel hostage Ingrid Betancourt, who is believed to be gravely ill after more than six years in captivity, officials said.
Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate who also has French citizenship, may be within hours of death if she does not get a blood transfusion, according to her son.
An official in French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said an aircraft carrying French envoys had arrived in Colombia, without elaborating.
The plane arrived to Bogota at 1 a.m. local time, according to an official in Colombia’s civil aviation authority who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.
French officials have been tightlipped about the mission. France-Info radio said the aircraft carrying at least three envoys left Wednesday from a military airport outside Paris. Officials said a doctor was one of the envoys.
French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani declined to provide details about the mission at a regular news briefing Thursday, saying: “Discretion is required in this type of case.”
Betancourt is among hundreds of hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, but her release has become a cause celebre in France.
“The first objective of this mission is to succeed in getting close to Ingrid and care for her,” Betancourt’s ex-husband, Fabrice Delloye, said on France’s BFM-TV Thursday. “Then we hope the emissaries will be able to speak with the FARC and consider pulling Ingrid out of the jungle.”
Delloye said Betancourt is believed to be in the region around the southern Colombian city of San Jose de Guaviare or possibly in an adjacent area. Six other hostages were freed from the region earlier this year.
“A humanitarian mission of three facilitator countries, Spain, France and Switzerland, has started, in liaison with concerned authorities,” Sarkozy’s office said in a brief statement Wednesday.
Betancourt was kidnapped by the FARC in 2002 while campaigning in rural Colombia. The guerrillas have said they want to exchange Betancourt, as well as dozens of other hostages, for hundreds of rebels being held in government prisons. But years have passed with the rebels and Colombia’s government failing to agree to a swap.
The guerrilla group has been quiet about a possible prisoner swap since March 1, when Colombian troops killed their chief spokesman and 24 others in a bombing raid in neighboring Ecuador.
On Tuesday, Sarkozy appealed directly to the leader of FARC for Betancourt’s freedom.

TITLE: Arsenal, Liverpool Lock Horns in QF Battle
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: LONDON — Liverpool may have emerged from Arsenal with a 1-1 draw from Wednesday’s Champions League quarter-final first leg but their coach Rafa Benitez rejects the notion they are favourites to advance to the semi-finals.
Benitez was delighted by his team’s outstanding defending at the Emirates Stadium but insisted after the match the tie was far from over.
Although they now have the advantage of playing the second leg in front of their own fans at Anfield, Benitez said: “I do not think we are the favourites. Not against a team like Arsenal.
“They are a fantastic team who have the ability to hit us on the break — they are a superb counter-attacking team. But we will be playing at Anfield in front of our own fans and that will make a big difference.”
Arsenal also play Liverpool again on Saturday at the Emirates Stadium in the Premier League but Benitez says that game will have little bearing on what happens next Tuesday at Anfield.
“It will make no difference at all to what happens next Tuesday,” he said.
Liverpool, last season’s beaten finalists, were under pressure for much of the match on Wednesday but, apart from one serious lapse when Emmanuel Adebayor was left unmarked to head Arsenal in front after 23 minutes, they were disciplined and resolute in defence.
Despite having much of the possession Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said his side were restricted to just four or five scoring chances.
But he also knows that Arsenal have the potential to score in any match and can be even more dangerous away from home. “It will be a big test now for us in the second leg, but we have the desire to do it,” he said.
Arsenal proved in the last round that failing to win at home is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen.
After being held 0-0 by AC Milan at the Emirates in the first leg of the Round of 16 on Feb. 20, they won 2-0 at the San Siro two weeks later to depose the champions and go through.
Liverpool’s goal came just three minutes after Arsenal’s opener when Steven Gerrard surged his way past three defenders on the left and crossed for Dirk Kuyt to equalize.
Wenger praised Gerrard’s contribution but was not so complimentary about Dutch referee Pieter Vink, who he said should have awarded his side a penalty in the second half after Kuyt hauled down Alexander Hleb.
“It happened five yards in front of the referee,” said Wenger, “It was a 100 percent penalty.”
Arsenal’s main injury worry for next week concerns Robin van Persie, who was taken off at halftime with a muscular problem. 
Although Liverpool now have a good chance of reaching the last four, the tie is still on a knife-edge, Arsenal confident they can also qualify and face either Chelsea or Fenerbahce in the semi-finals.

TITLE: Mugabe Readies for Presidential Run-Off
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HARARE, Zimbabwe — State media gave Zimbabweans a hint of how President Robert Mugabe’s embattled party might wage its campaign for a presidential runoff, with stories Thursday portraying the opposition as divided and controlled by former colonial ruler Britain.
Mugabe’s Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga said the 84-year-old leader was ready for a runoff. The opposition claims it won the presidential race outright, and official results show it won the most parliament seats.
“President Mugabe is going to fight. He is not going anywhere. He has not lost,” Matonga told the British Broadcasting Corp. “We are going to go hard and fight and get the majority required.”
Mugabe has ruled since his guerrilla army helped force an end to white minority rule in Rhodesia and bring about an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. On Thursday, he was shown on state television meeting African Union election observers, his first public appearance since the elections.
While the election commission has issued results for the parliamentary races held alongside the presidential race, it has yet to release any presidential count.
Independent observers say their own projection based on results posted at a representative sample of polling stations showed opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the most votes, but not enough to avoid a runoff, which would have to be held within 21 days of the first round.
A commission member indicated presidential results would be announced Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The commission said it was still receiving ballot boxes from the provinces, raising questions about where those votes had been since Saturday’s elections, amid charges there was a plot to rig the results. Western election observers have accused Mugabe of stealing previous elections.
On Wednesday, official election returns showed Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party had lost its parliamentary majority. The state-owned Herald newspaper, which reflects government and ruling party thinking, said Thursday the parliamentary race was a “photo finish” and stressed the split in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Tsvangirai loyalists won seats, as did members of a breakaway MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara.
Mugabe has overseen the destruction of a thriving economy. The unraveling began when he ordered the often-violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms, ostensibly to return them to the landless black majority. Instead, Mugabe replaced a white elite with a black one, giving the farms to relatives, friends and cronies who allowed cultivated fields to be taken over by weeds.
Today, a third of the population depends on imported food handouts. Another third has fled the country and 80 percent is jobless. Inflation is the highest in the world at more than 100,000 percent and people suffer crippling shortages of food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 35 years.
Still, about half of Zimbabweans who voted in weekend elections chose the ruling ZANU-PF party.
On Thursday, The Herald charged that Tsvangirai would hand back farmland to the whites. Tsvangirai has not said that, promising instead an equitable distribution of land to people who know how to farm.
The Herald said white farmers had returned from Zambia and Mozambique and were threatening to evict blacks. It quoted the war veterans association that spearheaded violent land grabs as saying, “We will be left with no option except to take up arms and defend our pieces of land.”
Mugabe blames former colonizer Britain and other Western nations for the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy. Targeted Western sanctions, though, only involve visa bans and frozen bank accounts for Mugabe and about 100 of his allies.
Mugabe calls opposition leaders stooges and puppets of Britain. The Herald said “the British government and Prime Minister Gordon Brown have now come out in the open as the real power behind MDC-Tsvangirai.”
Religious leaders and diplomats were involved in a flurry of initiatives Thursday to try to persuade Mugabe to step down. Diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue said Western leaders were contacting southern African leaders. Amani Countess of the Washington-based TransAfrica Forum said religious leaders also were asking counterparts in the region to pressure presidents to approach Mugabe.

TITLE: F1 Shamed By ‘Nazi’ Orgy Claim
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MANAMA — Leading Formula One car manufacturers put pressure on Max Mosley to resign as president of the sport’s governing body on Thursday after a sex scandal involving the Briton.
Mosley, who has said he will stay at the helm of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), showed no sign of changing his mind, however.
Mercedes, BMW, Honda and Toyota all issued statements critical of Mosley’s position after Britain’s News of the World Sunday tabloid detailed how he had paid for sex with prostitutes in what was depicted as a Nazi-style orgy.
“Toyota Motorsport does not approve of any behaviour which could be seen to damage Formula One’s image, in particular any behaviour which could be understood to be racist or anti-Semitic,” the Japanese carmaker said.
“Senior figures within any sport or business, including motorsport, must adhere to high standards of behaviour.
“When all the facts are known, it will be for the FIA to decide whether Mr. Mosley has met the moral obligations which come with the position of FIA President.”
Mosley, who has blamed a ‘covert’ operation against him and is taking legal action against the newspaper, apologised to all national FIA clubs and bodies in a letter on Tuesday but said he would not stand down.
He also denied any “Nazi connotation to the matter,” as reported by the newspaper.
German manufacturers BMW and Mercedes, who partner McLaren, issued a joint statement before Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix making clear that the scandal was not simply a personal matter.
“The content of the publications is disgraceful,” they declared. “As a company, we strongly distance ourselves from it.
“This incident concerns Max Mosley both personally and as president of the FIA, the global umbrella organisation for motoring clubs,” they added.
“Its consequences therefore extend far beyond the motor sport industry. We await a response from the relevant FIA bodies.”
Mosley, in a statement to Reuters, issued a sharp reply.
“Given the history of BMW and Mercedes Benz, particularly before and during the Second World War, I fully understand why they would wish to strongly distance themselves from what they rightly describe as the disgraceful content of these publications,” he said.
“Unfortunately, they did not contact me before putting out their statement to ask whether the content was in fact true.
“No doubt the FIA will respond to them in due course as I am about to respond to the newspaper in question.”
Honda said senior figures in sport and business had to maintain the highest standards of conduct.
“The Honda Racing F1 Team is extremely disappointed by recent events surrounding Mr Mosley and we are concerned that the reputation of Formula One and all its participants is being damaged,” their statement said.

TITLE: Athletes Urged to Focus on Sport in Beijing
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: The International Olympic Committee urged athletes on Thursday to focus on sporting competitions during the Beijing games in August and not be distracted by political issues such as protests over Tibet.
The Chinese government hasn’t asked the IOC “to muzzle’’ any athlete, Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the IOC’s coordination commission for the games, told reporters.
China is facing increasing international pressure over its role in Sudan and its handling of the biggest protests in 20 years in Tibet. The Chinese government’s handling of the protests has prompted calls to boycott the opening ceremony.
“Athletes must respect the Olympic charter,’’ Verbruggen said in Beijing. “During the games, the venues are places for sporting competitions, not for grandstanding or making political gestures. Outside the venues they have freedom to say whatever they want.’’
The Chinese government accuses supporters of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, of trying to undermine the Olympics, which take place Aug. 8-24.
Chinese authorities said supporters of the Dalai Lama killed about 20 people last month in rioting that began in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, and spread to Tibetan-populated areas of Western China. Tibet’s government-in-exile accused Chinese security forces of killing 140 protesters.
The IOC won’t interfere with the politics of any host country, Verbruggen said.
Movie director Steven Spielberg in February rejected an invitation to work on the opening and closing ceremonies, saying China wasn’t doing enough to end violence in Sudan’s Darfur region.
The Beijing games organizers assured the IOC that athletes and reporters will enjoy free access to the Internet and that Web sites won’t be blocked, Wang Wei, executive vice president of the local organizing committee, said today.
The IOC and the Beijing government will work to provide “very sophisticated’’ forecasts of the weather and air quality during the games, Verbruggen said. Pollution in Beijing may pose health concerns for athletes taking part in events lasting longer than an hour, he said.
The IOC and the Chinese weather authorities will be working to get the weather and air quality forecast “days before’’ any endurance events and decide in advance on any postponement, Gilbert Felli, IOC executive director for the Olympics, told reporters in Beijing today.
The city’s pollution has raised concern among athletes and the IOC, which said it may reschedule endurance events affected by smog. World record holder Haile Gebrselassie last month said he is pulling out of the marathon because of health concerns.
The Chinese capital city has spent 120 billion yuan ($17 billion) on more than 200 projects to improve air quality.
The IOC will also be pushing the Chinese government “to do a little bit more’’ in tackling intellectual property rights infringements, following complaints from some sponsors, Verbruggen said, without elaborating.

TITLE: Europe Won’t Ban Anti-Teen ‘Mosquitos’
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — The British inventor of a controversial device which disperses young people by emitting a high-pitched noise which only they can hear called Wednesday for legislation to regulate its use.
Self-confessed “mad inventor” Howard Stapleton developed the Mosquito after his 15-year-old daughter was harassed by youths hanging around a local shop.
The device emits an irritating high-pitched pulse that most people aged under 20 can hear but almost nobody over 30 can.
Stapleton said he has sold around 4,000 Mosquitos in Europe and North America.
However, the device has provoked protests from some civil liberties campaigners, while some 7,000 people signed an Internet petition to ban it in Europe.
Earlier Wednesday, the European Commission said it would not ban the Mosquito, despite the complaints.
“I would like the assistance of central governments to cover fair usage,” Stapleton said. “I never intended it to make kid-free zones but to combat anti-social behaviour.”

TITLE: Diplomatic Tensions Rise on Korean Peninsula
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SEOUL — North Korea said on Thursday it was ready to give up dialogue and attack the South, ignoring a call from its wealthy neighbour’s new president to calm down and get back to serious talks.
In the past week, the North has warned it could reduce its neighbour to ashes and hurled insults at President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February with a pledge to end the free flow of aid unless Pyongyang’s communist leaders behaved.
And late on Thursday, it accused the South of raising tensions by sending three warships into its waters. South Korea’s Defence Ministry denied the charge.
Earlier, Pyongyang sent a two-sentence letter from its military to the South warning of a strike, which was followed by a separate report in its KCNA news agency that the peninsula was on the brink of war.
“South Korea’s military should clearly be aware that the position of our revolutionary military is to counter any attempt to carry out a pre-emptive attack with an advance pre-emptive attack,” KCNA said.
“(The South) can never be cleared of the responsibility for suspended dialogue and contact between North and South and for the implementation of a travel ban,” it added.
North Korea’s military has threatened pre-emptive attacks for years in response to annual, joint U.S.-South Korean military drills it said were pushing the peninsula into war.
Its actions over the past week, including a missile launch and expelling South Korean officials from a joint factory park north of the heavily armed border, are the most aggressive against the South in a decade.
But there is no sign so far that the North has gone any further than furious rhetoric in what many analysts see as an attempt to pressure South Korea and its U.S. ally into making concessions to appease it.
A South Korean working at the Kaesong industrial park said by telephone: “There has been no change in operations here.”
Lee has said he will end the free flow of aid North Korea has become used to over the past decade unless it mends its ways and, in particular, makes progress on nuclear disarmament.
“We propose that the two sides engage in sincere dialogue, and in order to do so, we believe the North has to move away from its previous ways and actions,” the presidential office quoted Lee as telling military chiefs.
South Korean government officials saw the latest statement as a repetition of threats North Korea made a few days ago, adding there was no scheduled dialogue between the two to be suspended.
KCNA said three South Korean warships entered North Korean territorial waters on Thursday morning in “a brigandish act to defend the illegal ‘northern limit line’”.
The nautical border known as the “Northern Limit Line” was set unilaterally by U.N.-led forces at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War and has been recognised since by the South’s military as the de facto border.
North Korea declared the line in the Yellow Sea invalid in 1999. Dozens of sailors from both Koreas were killed in clashes across the line in 1999 and 2002.
The flare-up between the two nations technically still at war, has had little impact in the South. Its financial markets, long used to fiery exchanges from across the Cold War’s last frontier, have mostly ignored the latest hostility.
The North also threatened to step away from its obligations in a deal with regional powers, including the United States, aimed at ending its atomic arms ambitions.

TITLE: Youzhny Beats His Head Raw
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KEY BISCAYNE, Florida — A tennis tantrum by Russian Mikhail Youzhny left him bloodied but made him a YouTube celebrity.
When Youzhny hit a backhand into the net during his  match Monday at the Sony Ericsson Open, he angrily whacked himself in the head three times with his racket strings. The forehand to the forehead sent a stream of blood running down his nose nearly to his mouth.
By Wednesday afternoon, the video of the tantrum had drawn more than a half million hits on YouTube.
“I saw that,” said James Blake, who lost in the quarterfinals Wednesday. “That was pretty funny — not for Mikhail, I’m sure.