SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1365 (29), Tuesday, April 15, 2008
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TITLE: Election Numbers Questioned
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — There are numerous curiosities to be found in the official returns of the March 2 presidential election.
At a polling station in the Dagestani town of Kizilyurt, for example, more than 700 voters cast their ballots, but not a single one voted for President-elect Dmitry Medvedev, who captured more than 90 percent of the vote in the republic and more than 70 percent nationwide.
While one could imagine a neighborhood where antipathy toward Medvedev runs aberrantly deep, one blogger has crunched official election results and found strikingly anomalous voter behavior across the country.
Analyzing official returns on the Central Elections Commitee web site, blogger Sergei Shpilkin has concluded that a disproportionate number of polling stations nationwide reported round numbers — that is, numbers ending in zero and five — both for voter turnout and for Medvedev’s percentage of the vote.
The statistical anomalies offer mathematical evidence of election fraud in Medvedev’s victory, math-savvy bloggers, election analysts and economists said.
“This is an unnatural distribution, and it points to blatant manipulation of numbers,” said Andrei Buzin, who heads the Interregional Association of Voters and has a doctoral degree in math and physics.
In most elections, one would expect turnout and returns to follow a normal, or Gaussian, distribution — meaning that a chart of the number of polling stations reporting a certain turnout or percentage of votes for a candidate would be shaped like a bell curve, with the top of the bell representing the average, median, and most popular value.
But according to Shpilkin’s analysis, which he published on his LiveJournal blog, podmoskovnik.livejournal.com, the distribution both for turnout and Medvedev’s percentage looks normal only until it hits 60 percent.
After that, it looks like sharks’ teeth. The spikes on multiples of five indicate a much greater number of polling stations reporting a specific turnout than a normal distribution would predict.
A suspicious voter might say polling officials stuffed ballot boxes to achieve a nice, clean percentages like 65, 70, 75, 80 and so on.
The analysis and results mirror Shpilkin’s study of the Dec. 2 State Duma elections, in which he found a similar predominance of round numbers both for voter turnout and for the percentage of the vote captured by pro-Kremlin party United Russia.
Local election officials were clearly thinking in round numbers while rigging turnout and Medvedev’s percent of the vote, said economist Mikhail Delyagin, head of the Institute of Globalization Problems.
While the spikes on round numbers certainly reveal manipulations, they also demonstrate “an administrative demand” for a specific turnout to be reported to superiors, Shpilkin said in e-mailed comments.
Furthermore, according to Shpilkin’s analysis, the higher the turnout, the higher Medvedev’s percentage of the returns — a correlation not seen in the returns of the other three candidates: Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky; Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov; and Andrei Bogdanov, who heads the tiny Democratic Party of Russia.
Buzin said this correlation clearly indicated ballot stuffing on a massive scale, though Shpilkin and Delyagin said it was feasible that where turnout was higher — whether due to voter enthusiasm, coercion or herd mentality — voters may have been more inclined to vote for Medvedev.
A written request to the Central Elections Commission for comment on the anomalies was not answered in time for publication. In February the commission would not comment on similar anomalies in the Duma elections.
Arkady Lyubarev, a researcher with Independent Institute of Elections, said he had tried on numerous occasions to discuss statistical anomalies in election results with commission officials but was repeatedly snubbed.
“They are not mathematicians, they are legal experts,” Lyubarev said. “And from a legal perspective, you cannot use these anomalies to officially challenge the results of an election.”
Given the similar anomalies in both the Duma and presidential elections, officials have either not learned how to manipulate returns to make them more plausible, do not care about public opinion, or both, said Sergei Shulgin, an analyst with the Institute of Open Economics who studies elections.
“The repetition of the anomalous spikes after they were reported in the media and widely discussed in the Russian blogosphere [after the Duma elections] confirms that there is no feedback between election officials and the public,” Shulgin said.
Shulgin, who has crunched numbers for national elections dating back to the mid-1990s, said statistical distribution for voter turnout in Russian elections was becoming increasingly aberrant.
With each national election, the downward slope for turnout in what should be a bell curve rises higher and higher, Shulgin said. In Medvedev’s victory, it became more or less a straight line peppered with spikes on round numbers.
This trend, Shulgin said, indicates that in areas where turnout is traditionally strong — such as rural areas and ethnic republics — more and more voters are showing up at polling stations with each new election.
This does not necessarily indicate ballot stuffing, Shulgin said. Intense efforts by officials to lure or coerce voters to polling stations could be an important factor as well, he said.
“In this presidential election, it looks like there was an order to get every voter out, and it worked,” Shulgin said.
Meanwhile, what happened at Polling Station No. 682 in the Dagestani town of Kizilyurt remains unclear.
According to the Central Elections Commission web site, of the 766 ballots cast at the polling station, not one went to Medvedev. What’s more, Bogdanov received 95 percent of the votes.
The numbers stand in stark contrast to those for all of Dagestan, where Bogdanov got 0.15 percent of the vote and Medvedev 91.92 percent. Nationwide, Bogdanov received 1.3 percent compared with 70.28 percent for Medvedev.
Buzin suggested that Dagestani election officials may have accidentally swapped Medvedev’s and Bogdanov’s figures as they filed their reports.
A spokesman for Dagestan’s elections commission was incredulous when told of the results at the Kizilyurt polling station, despite the fact they are posted on the Central Elections Commission’s web site.
“It is a provocation,” he said without elaborating.

TITLE: United Russia Party Seeks Putin as Chairman
AUTHOR: By Guy Faulconbridge
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s biggest party created a new role of chairman on Monday and said it would ask President Vladimir Putin to take the job, a possible final clue to the riddle of who will really run Russia after he steps down.
Putin has said he will serve as prime minister once his protege, Dmitry Medvedev, is sworn in as president on May 7. But for many investors the critical questions of how much power Putin will wield and for how long remain unanswered.
The United Russia party had said it would invite Putin to be leader, but on Monday at its conference, it said it was creating the new post of party chairman and would offer it to Putin. The chairman’s job would free Putin from day-to-day management duties.
If Putin does accept the invitation to be chairman it would significantly entrench his power and indicate, some analysts say, that he is planning to use that position to preserve his long-term influence.
There is a precedent for leadership of a party, rather than any state position, providing the lever of power in Russia. For much of the 20th century, the leader of the Soviet Communist party held sway over state institutions.
Turning down the job could suggest that Putin, after a trial period to make sure 42-year-old Medvedev settles into the Kremlin job, is planning to take a back seat.
The Kremlin has given no indications about whether Putin will take a role in the party’s leadership. Putin is expected to attend the second day of the conference on Tuesday.
“We are now talking about a concrete post which we intend to offer to Vladimir Putin, the post of chairman of the party,” United Russia chief Boris Gryzlov told reporters on the first day of the party conference on Monday.
Delegates voted unanimously to create the post of chairman, which Gryzlov said would make Putin the leader of the party.
Lawmakers said the party chairmanship would be a non-executive role that would give Putin overall strategic control of the party.
Putin used a United Russia conference last year to announce he could serve as premier once his presidency, limited by the constitution to two consecutive terms, came to an end.
Putin, 55, is the country’s most popular politician after presiding over Russia’s longest economic boom for a generation and cementing Kremlin control after the chaos of the 1990s. 
The president’s critics, a minority in Russia, accuse him of crushing democracy.
Investors want to know what Putin’s final role will be after he steps down because they see political stability as key to Russia’s booming $1.3 trillion economy.
Kremlin-watchers believe the riddle of what Putin will do next is still not fully solved because the post of prime minister is an awkward one for someone so powerful.
The prime minister is junior to the president. Accordingly, the presidentcan be sacked at the president’s whim and often carries the can for policy failures. 
Putin filled the post with a series of low-level technocrats all seen as expendable.
Some analysts see a leadership role in United Russia as a way for Putin to preserve long-term influence by molding the party, closely tied to the Kremlin since its creation, into a powerful political force in its own right.
The president can sack the prime minister but he has to seek the approval of parliament — controlled by United Russia — to appoint a new premier. The party has the two thirds majority in parliament required to amend the constitution.
Putin helped found the party, which was designed in the last days of former President Boris Yeltsin’s rule to ensure the Kremlin’s control of parliament.

TITLE: President Calls for Boost to Russia’s Space Program
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin ordered his government Friday to speed up construction of a new cosmodrome and development of a booster rocket in a bid to revive the nation’s space glory.
Russia’s space agency chief, meanwhile, said the country may stop selling seats on its spacecraft to “tourists” starting in 2010 because of the planned expansion of the international space station’s crew from the current three to six or even nine in 2010.
The development came a day before the 47th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s becoming the first man in space. The Soviets also launched the first satellite — Sputnik — and the first woman in space, and carried out the first spacewalk.
But Russia’s space industries fell on hard times after the 1991 Soviet collapse when once-generous state funding dried up. They have survived mostly thanks to launches of foreign commercial satellites and revenue from so-called “space tourists” — wealthy private citizens who have bought trips to the International Space Station.
Russia’s oil-driven economic boom has led to increases in government spending on the nation’s space program in recent years, reducing the space agency’s dependence on revenue generated by commercial flights.
Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said the space station’s expansion will mean that Russia will have fewer extra seats available for tourists on its Soyuz spacecraft, which are used to ferry crews to the station and back to Earth. Since 2000, five wealthy private citizens have bought trips to the station.
“We will continue flying tourists to the international space station in accordance with the existing programs, but we may have problems with it starting from 2010 because of planned increase of the ISS’ crew,” Perminov said, according to Russian news reports.
Russia has launched all its manned missions — many involving U.S. and other foreign crew members — from the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome, which it leases from neighboring Kazakhstan. Putin ordered officials Friday to speed up construction of the Far Eastern Vostochny launch facility to make it capable of handling manned space launches.
He said the government would increase the space program’s budget to make that possible.
“We must ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to space, that is a capability to make all kind of space launches — satellites, manned spacecraft and interplanetary probes — from our own territory,” Putin said during a meeting of the presidential Security Council, which discussed the nation’s space strategy.
Putin said that money for the initial phase of construction on Vostochny, or Eastern, cosmodrome in the Amur region which borders China, would be allocated this year.
Perminov said after the meeting that the Vostochny launch pad will be built by 2015 and begin handling all manned space launches in 2020.
Putin on Friday also ordered space officials to speed up the development of the new heavylift Angara booster rocket and modernize and expand the nation’s satellite fleet.

TITLE: Top Commander Threatens to Arm Borders
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia will take military and other steps along its borders if ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia join NATO, news agencies quoted the armed forces’ chief of staff as saying on Friday.
“Russia will take steps aimed at ensuring its interests along its borders,” the agencies quoted General Yury Baluyevsky as saying. “These will not only be military steps, but also steps of a different nature,” he said, without giving details.
Russia is opposed to NATO plans to grant membership to ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia, saying such a move would pose a direct threat to its security and endanger the fragile balance of forces in Europe.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this week that Moscow would do everything it could to prevent the two countries, run by pro-Western governments, from becoming NATO members.
President Vladimir Putin has said that if NATO military installations ever appeared in Ukraine, Moscow would have to target its missiles at the country.
At a summit in Bucharest this month, NATO members turned down requests from Georgia and Ukraine to be granted a Membership Action Plan.
But under pressure from Washington, one of the strongest advocates of enlargement in the alliance, NATO gave a commitment that the two countries would be allowed to join eventually.

TITLE: Ministry Protests Over Bout
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry said Friday that it had summoned Thailand’s ambassador to discuss what it called violations of the rights of Viktor Bout, an alleged Russian arms dealer in prison in Thailand.
“The ambassador of the Kingdom of Thailand ... was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry and handed a note in connection with violations of the rights of Russian citizen V.A. Bout, who is under arrest in Thailand at the request of the United States,” the ministry said in a statement.
The statement did not specify in what way Bout’s rights had been violated.
Earlier this week, Bout sent an open letter from a Thai prison, appealing to the Russian government for help in securing his release and saying charges against him were fabricated by the United States government.
“As was stated to [Thai Ambassador] S. Dhirakaosal, Russia’s Foreign Ministry believes Thailand’s law enforcement bodies will investigate this case objectively and impartially,” the ministry statement said.
Bout, a Russian national born in then-Soviet Tajikistan, has been called the “Merchant of Death” by some media.
Bout was arrested in Thailand last month as part of a U.S. sting operation hours after arriving from Moscow. 
He was immediately charged with trying to buy weapons for Colombian rebels.
Bout has repeatedly denied the allegations.
According to the United Nations and the U.S. Treasury Department, Bout ran a network of air cargo companies and sold or brokered arms that have helped fuel wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan.
The United States, which has given billions of dollars in military aid to Colombia to fight Marxist rebels and drug cartels, has said it will seek Bout’s extradition.

TITLE: In Absentia Case Brought Against Lawyer Kuznetsov
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Lawyer Boris Kuznetsov, who was granted political asylum in the United States earlier this year, has been formally charged in absentia with divulging state secrets, his lawyer said Friday.
Kuznetsov, 64, fled the country in July, shortly after authorities began investigating him for purportedly disclosing state secrets by filing a complaint to the Constitutional Court that the Federal Security Service had illegally wiretapped the telephone of his client, former Senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan.
The Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee formally charged Kuznetsov on Thursday, said Viktor Parshutkin, one of Kuznetsov’s lawyers.
It was unclear whether Russia would seek Kuznetsov’s extradition, as it has with other high-profile suspects living abroad, such as businessman Boris Berezovsky and Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev, both of whom have been granted political asylum in Britain.
A spokeswoman for the Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee said Friday that no one would be available to comment until Monday.
The crime Kuznetsov is accused of is punishable by up to four years in prison.
Kuznetsov has defended high-profile clients against government charges and claims that the case against him is a politically motivated attack orchestrated by the Federal Security Service.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services granted Kuznetsov political asylum in February.
Kuznetsov insisted that the bugging of Chakhmakhchyan’s phone was a violation of the former senator’s human rights and therefore could not be considered a state secret.

TITLE: Supreme Court Judge Shot Dead in Ingushetia
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a senior judge in Ingushetia, a restive province in the North Caucasus.
Khasan Yandiyev, deputy chairman of Ingushetia’s Supreme Court, was driving his Mercedes through the town of Karabulak when the assailants fired automatic weapons at his vehicle, a law enforcement official told RIA-Novosti.
The gunmen fled immediately and Yandiyev died on the scene from multiple gunshot wounds, the law enforcement source told the news agency.
Yandiyev has presided over a number of high-profile trials of local rebels and officials charged with corruption, and investigators believe that he was murdered because of his work, the source said.
Ingushetia is one of the country’s poorest and most violence-torn provinces. It has been rocked by a number of high-profile crimes, including a 2004 raid by local rebels and a series of killings of ethnic Russians. The local insurgency network has remained strong despite the efforts by law enforcement agencies to dismantle it.
Also on Sunday, police in the neighboring region of Dagestan killed a local rebel leader.
Ismail Yangizbiyev was trapped by local law enforcement agents overnight in a forest in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district, RIA-Novosti reported.

TITLE: OMON Turn Out for Non-Event
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A non-political rally was stopped from taking place by the city administration on Friday, and a large contingent of police was sent to the rally’s planned location in the center — only to find that the demonstrators did not show up. 
The rally’s organizers claim the administration violated the law by banning the rally and are considering suing it. Originally, between 200 and 300 people were expected to take part.
Called the March Against Social Indifference, the rally’s original aim was to call on people to care more about each other and was caused by several recent accidents in which people died in public places while passersby did nothing to help them. 
In their blogs on Livejournal.com, the organizers described two such incidents. 
High school director Nikolai Belousov died of a cardiac arrest after he had spent a night lying in the street before anybody called an ambulance, the organizers said, while student Viktoria Sokolova was reported to have fainted in the metro and fell onto the rails between the carriages. Metro security footage shows two other women looking at what was happening and then leaving without making any attempt to stop the train, a few moments before it moves and kills the woman.
The march’s route was planned by organizer Maxim Ushakov to symbolically follow the planned trip of Sokolova, who died at Nevsky Prospekt metro station while heading to Gorkovskaya.
“We wanted to draw attention to the problem of indifference and to find some solution for it,” said Sergei Voronchikhin, another organizer, by phone on Monday.
“We couldn’t find any other way of drawing attention to this problem. The rally was directly connected to those two incidents, but if you read the news, you’ll find there are thousands of such occurrences across Russia, not only in St. Petersburg. But these two incidents in St. Petersburg are simply outrageous.”
Forty-five minutes before the rally’s announced starting time, five police vehicles were deployed at the rally’s planned starting point at the intersection of Nevsky Prospekt and Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa, while an armored OMON special forces truck was hidden in Cheboksarsky Pereulok, close to the site, and another police vehicle was located at the end of the street.
The organizers applied to Leonid Bogdanov, the head of City Hall’s Security and Justice Committee on April 1, in the time frame defined by the law (“not more than 15 and not less than 10 days”), but in his reply, which the organizers distributed among journalists and put on the web, Bogdanov said that the application had failed to meet the deadline, and therefore the organizers had “no right” to hold the rally.
The rally’s organizers at first considered going ahead with the march, since they had met the legal deadline, but then canceled it on the eve of the event after a series of warning calls from the administration and the police.
“There was talk about still holding the event but then [Ushakov] received calls from both the Interior Ministry in St. Petersburg and the city administration during the whole week, threatening that if the action went ahead it would be dispersed, while the organizers would be charged with organizing forbidden marches and so on,” said Voronchikhin, who announced the cancellation in his blog on Thursday and telephoned potential participants whose numbers he knew personally.
“That’s why we decided not to hold the event — so it wouldn’t be turned into another ‘Dissenters’ March’ [to be suppressed by the police]. The police presence was immense.”
Voronchikhin attributed the ban to a “changed political situation in Russia.”
“As I was told by [opposition democratic party] Yabloko, [the administration] used to give permission for such actions even two or three days in advance,” he said.
“But now the political situation has changed and they ban simply everything. It seems like they ban any mass action that people organize themselves. Obviously, they are afraid of everything — which is shown by the pressure they put on youth subcultures such as punks in Moscow. [The youths] were under pressure for several months, culminating in mass police beatings there on Friday.
“The authorities are simply afraid of everything, no matter what people want, what they protest against or for.”
Although the march did not happen, three activists, including Voronchikhin, walked the proposed 2 1/5-kilometer route, crossing the River Neva, and lit candles by a monument in the Alexandrovsky Garden near Gorkovskaya metro station. No police were present at  the destination point.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Women’s 10k in St. Petersburg</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — As many as 12,000 local women have signed up to participate in a 10-kilometer run to be held on Sept. 6, Interfax reported.
The news service said that such women-only events are an “athletic tradition common throughout Europe,” and that it will be the first time a “Women’s 10km” has been held in Russia.
The race is set to start and finish on Palace Square.

<b>Theatrical Therapy</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A St. Petersburg theatrical troupe will perform especially for the children who survived the Beslan school siege in September 2004 in which more than 1,000 were taken hostage and more than 330 people were killed. 
Interfax reported that the Litsedei troupe’s performances, which will be held April 15 and 16 in Vladikavkaz near Beslan, are part of a charity project that aims to provide comfort and psychological assistance to the survivors of the Beslan tragedy.

<b>Patron of the Arts Day</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The third annual celebration of Patron of the Arts Day took place Sunday at the State Hermitage Museum. 
While this is generally an Italian tradition, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky told Interfax, “In Russia, there is no separate law for charity, so we must come together to say thank you. This gives us a European spirit and makes us worthy of the legacy that we have.” 
The museum received gifts dating from the 9th century and writing tablets from the 3rd century discovered in southern Russia.
Media Rebuttal Bill</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — The Prosecutor General’s Office has submitted a draft bill to the State Duma that would oblige media to publish all official rebuttals to news coverage and would also allow prosecutors and courts easily to block access to internet sites judged to be posting extremist content.
Prosecutors argued in an accompanying letter that the bill would help curb growing extremist crime, RIA-Novosti reported Friday.
The State Duma Security Committee that reviewed the bill Friday decided to conduct a parliament hearing into the legislative initiatives aimed at fight extremism.

<b>Bookkeeper Questioned</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Investigators briefly detained the accountant at a private security company owned by the wife of Alexander Bulbov, a top drug police official who is in custody on charges of abuse of office.
Yelena Mordashova, bookkeeper for the Nemizida company, was summoned to the Prosecutor General’s Office for questioning on Friday, RIA-Novosti reported.
Investigators questioned her on whether she had passed “protection” money from businessmen to Alexander, Bulbov, deputy head of the Federal Drug Police Service, Nikolai Orlov, deputy head of the Moscow police criminal investigations directorate, and several other law enforcement agents, RIA-Novosti reported.

<b>Exhibition Closed</b>
MOSCOW (AP) — The opening of an art exhibition in the Pskov was canceled Sunday by local authorities over alleged safety concerns, the show’s organizers said.
The art exhibition, entitled “Prison, Madness, Equality, Justice,” was due to display works painted by Natalia Chernova while she awaited trial for taking part in a protest at a Kremlin-controlled building in late 2004.
“Fifteen minutes before the start of the opening of the exhibition, the building’s administrators announced the site was in an unsafe condition,” Chernova told Ekho Moskvy radio.
Interior Ministry officials arrived shortly afterward and demanded the paintings be taken down, Chernova said.
In December 2004, Chernova was one of about 40 members of the now-banned National Bolshevik Party that occupied the presidential information administration building. Chernova was later sentenced to three years in jail.

TITLE: Radical Solutions Sought to Combat Child Sex Abuse
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russia’s Police Ministry has said that the number of child sex crimes it has recorded in recent years has risen by more than 25 times as state officials and experts call for stronger punishments for pedophilia, including life imprisonment, execution or the use of chemical castration. 
“The number of registered crimes of a sexual character concerning minors increased by 25.6 times,” Mikhail Artamoshkin, acting head of the Ministry’s Public Safety Department, said at a roundtable called Counteracting Violence Against Children in Moscow last week. 
Artamoshkin said that in 2003, police registered just 129 cases of this kind in Russia, but in 2007 it registered more than 3,000 cases, Interfax reported.
Oleg Filimonov, head of the law department at the Federal Penal Service, said the punishment for sex crimes against children should be toughened.
Filimonov said the maximum punishment for child sex crimes is five years imprisonment, and the convicted party can also be released early.
“Sex crimes against children should be qualified as severe crimes,” Filimonov said.
Vladimir Ovchinsky, adviser to the chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, said that people who were imprisoned for sex crimes against children should be permanently barred from working at both state and private facilities for children, Interfax reported.
Ovchinsky said that the Police Ministry has been fighting for a law to control released murderers, sex offenders and pedophiles for the past 15 years. However, the law has not been passed because a number of State Duma deputies say that it would violate human rights, Ovchinsky said.
Artamoshkin, however, said that the Police Ministry still intends to increase its vigilance concerning convicted sex offenders after they have been released from prison as a matter of policy, although the draft of the new law will be considered by the Duma in June.
If the law is passed, child sex offenders will be under permanent control, Artamoshkin said. 
Artamoshkin also suggested that Russia could pass laws similar to those in some Western countries that bar pedophiles from living near schools or other places where children can often be found. 
The system of background checks on people hired to work with children should also be strengthened, he said. Artamoshkin said that police should also have access to information about people who are registered as having a mental illness — at present, the police can only get such information by court order.
Artamoshkin said at least 70,500 children were victims of violence in 2007. He said that 6,000 crimes against children were committed by their parents.
According to him, in order to avoid violent abuse, children often run away from their families or the children’s homes where they live.
“In the last five years, the police have registered up to 55,000 missing children each year,” Artamoshkin said.
Meanwhile, the Public Chamber has discussed the idea of using chemical castration against pedophiles, Interfax said.
“We are planning to offer the State Duma a package of legislative initiatives which will probably include the use of chemical castration for people sentenced for sexual crimes against children,” said Anatoly Kucherena, head of the Chamber’s commission on Control of Police Activities and Reform of the Legal System.
The Public Chamber is an advisory body that can suggest amendments to draft laws but has no legislative power.
Kucherena said that as a lawyer he was against all physical punishment because of the possibility of miscarriages of justice, but “as a man, citizen, and father of a small child, I understand that radical measures should be used to fight scumbags who sexually violate and kill children.”
Kucherena said that chemical castration could be introduced legally if the convicted sex offender agreed to it. Such consent would be given in the presence of a lawyer and a prosecutor, allowing the procedure to be employed.
Chemical castration is the temporary suppression of the male sex drive using hormone medication and drugs such as depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, a common contraceptive. 
Zurab Kekelidze, deputy head of the Serbsky State Social and Forensic Psychiatry Center, said that in general he supported the idea of chemical castration but that the measure would not be effective in itself, Interfax reported.
Kekelidze said society should create conditions to “prevent such crimes” before they are committed.
“People who notice the first signs of inclination to kleptomania or pedophilia should realize that there is a need to go to a psychiatrist to prevent the development of the illness,” he said.
Henry Reznik, a well-known lawyer and member of the Public Chamber, said that the punishment for pedophilia should be toughened up and be equal to that meted out for rape. Reznik also said early release for such criminals should be stopped.
“In prisons and colonies there are no children, and naturally pedophiles behave well and meet all the norms. However, the specifics of their crimes show that these people present a danger to the public,” Reznik said.
Vladimir Gruzdev, first deputy head of the State Duma’s Legislative Committee, said chemical castration is used in Germany and other countries.
Sweden, Denmark, Canada and eight U.S. states offer chemical castration to repeat sex offenders on a voluntary basis, The Guardian newpaper wrote in 2007 when it was reported British officials were considering it. 
Gruzdev said St. Petersburg legislators have suggested toughening up the punishment for pedophilia from eight years imprisonment to life imprisonment in cases of severe consequences or death to a child.
Meanwhile, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church said castration would not be effective, and blamed the media for causing the growth of pedophilia by distributing “seductive” information.
“It’s impossible to ignore the seductive acts by the media, advertisements, and the dominance of erotic images everywhere, and at the same time fight the consequences of erotic and pornographic outrages,” said Mikhail Prokopenko, spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchy, Interfax said.
At the same time Prokopenko said that the church condemns all forms of castration. He said that church tradition says that physical injury “does not save a man of bad thoughts with an inclination to sin.”
Prokopenko said the idea of castration is also dangerous because a court could make a mistake that would lead to the suffering of an innocent person.
Prokopenko also said that today the problem of pedophilia “has the character of a fire.”
“Just 15 or 20 years ago, parents could let children play outside alone and not accompany them to school. Today, such a situation is impossible,” he said.
Vladimir Kolesnikov, deputy head of the State Duma’s Safety Committee, said he didn’t consider chemical castration effective.
“I think people who commit such crimes should face life imprisonment or even the death penalty,” Kolensnikov said.
In March, the St. Petersburg City court sentenced Ukrainian citizen Dmitro Voronenko to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of five children and young women. 
The court agreed with prosecutors who demanded Voronenko be executed, but the judge commuted the sentence to life imprisonment because Russia has a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
In August 2006 he raped a 17-year-old girl in the city’s Kirovsky district, and in December of the same year he raped and murdered an 11-year-old girl in the entrance hall of an apartment building on Prospekt Stachek.  
In January 2007 he raped and killed an 18-year-old girl at a construction site, and in March Voronenko raped and killed a 20-year-old girl. In May 2007 he raped and murdered a 12-year-old schoolgirl.

TITLE: Author Says Play Censored
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — A British-based playwright has accused Russian authorities of Soviet-style censorship after her play, about a real-life hostage siege in Moscow, was canceled on its opening night.
The play was based on events at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater six years ago, when Chechen terrorists stormed in as more than 700 people watched a musical. About 120 theater-goers died in a rescue operation that victims’ relatives say was botched.
Playwright Natalia Pelevine said that moments after the curtain came down on the play’s first performance in Russia, in Dagestan, local officials told the director the play’s first night would be its last.
Dagestan’s President, Mukhu Aliyev, was in the audience for the performance. He denied that he had ordered its cancellation or that his administration practised censorship.
“The banning of this play is either a provocation by someone or an ill-conceived decision by the republic [of Dagestan’s] minister of culture,” he said in comments on his web site.
But he added: “I did not like the production as a whole because, in my view, it romanticizes the image of the terrorists. It made them look heroic.”
He hinted Russia’s enemies could be using the play to destabilize the region, an allegation Pelevine described as “absolutely mind-boggling, laughable.”
The theater siege was one of the bloodiest attacks by Chechen rebels in a separatist war that lasted over a decade. The attackers stormed the theater during a packed performance with bombs strapped to their bodies.
After a standoff that lasted three days, special forces pumped a gas into the auditorium that rendered most people inside unconscious. They shot the terrorists.
Relatives of the theater-goers who died say many were killed by the gas, having suffocated or choked on their vomit while unconscious because they were not given proper medical care.
Authorities praised the operation as a success, but a police general has since said medical help was slow in reaching many of the victims.
The country’s cultural establishment has shied away from the sensitive subject matter. Pelevine said several theaters she approached turned it down before she received an invitation from a theater company in Dagestan to stage it there.
She said her aim was not to romanticize the terrorists, but to explore what compels people to commit violence.
A central character in her play, which is called “In your hands,” is a young Chechen woman who was one of the hostage-takers. She describes how she had wanted a normal life.
“All of that fell apart when the war [in Chechnya] happened, and her loved ones were being killed, and her desperation led her to become this monster,” said Pelevine.
“This is not trying to find an excuse for her on my part. By no means. This is just trying to have a dialogue about what it is that we are doing, politically, what our government is doing, what we are doing as a people,” she said.

TITLE: Lenta Court Ruling Clarifies Shareholders’ Rights
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A British Virgin Islands court has ruled that that Sergei Yushchenko was legitimately dismissed and Vladimir Senkin legitimately appointed general manager of Lenta LLC, the local retail enterprise whose shareholders August Meyer and Oleg Zherebtsov are currently involved in a lawsuit.
At the same time, the BVI court ruled that Oleg Zherebtsov should be prevented from acting on sole signatory rights and issuing in his sole capacity the power of attorney to any person on behalf of Lenta Ltd.
“The resolution adopted by the board on 16 January, 2008, that resulted in the appointment of Mr. Senkin as general manager of Lenta LLC was valid, as was the board resolution of the same date which canceled the employment of Mr. Yushchenko as general manager,” High Court Judge Indra Hariprashad-Charles said in a judgment issued on April 3.
Lenta Ltd., which is registered on the British Virgin Islands, owns 100 percent of Lenta LLC. Oleg Zherebtsov owns 35 percent of Lenta Ltd. through the company Rebelco, while August Meyer owns 36 percent through the company Svoboda.
On Jan. 15 this year, Meyer called an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting to reelect the board of directors of Lenta Ltd. On Jan. 16, Oleg Zherebtsov held a shareholders’ meeting that voted to dismiss Yushchenko and appointed Senkin as the general manager of Lenta LLC.
Zherebtsov appealed to the BVI court to determine whether the shareholders of Lenta Ltd. could legally dismiss members of the board. The judge ruled that the shareholders can indeed dismiss the board of directors, with the exception of the EBRD board member, with a simple majority vote. However, doing so by means of a written resolution requires a 75 percent majority.
The resolution of Jan. 15 was passed by a majority of 50.75 percent. Consequently, Hariprashad-Charles found the decision of Jan. 15 to remove Robert Voss from the board to be “invalid and ineffective.” She also stated that the appointment of Meyer, Kostygin and Yushchenko as directors was invalid and ineffective.
Among the current directors of Lenta Ltd., the judge named Oleg Zherebtsov, Vladimir Senkin, Mikhail Leshchenko, Loren Bough, Robert Voss, Greg Lykins and Sevki Acuner.
At the same time the judge ruled that granting sole signatory rights or any power of attorney to Zherebtsov requires the affirmative unanimous resolution of the board of Lenta.
“Mr. Zherebtsov cannot usurp the powers of the board, particularly at a time when these parties are embroiled in discordant litigation. He is under the fallacious belief that the Articles of Lenta were intended to guarantee that he retained control of the board of directors and the overall management of Lenta,” Hariprashad-Charles said.
Earlier Zherebtsov had explained the conflict by saying that August Meyer did not like his decision to independently develop a new retail chain called Norma.
“He demanded my resignation from the position of general director of Lenta LLC at the end of 2006. Then Meyer demanded my resignation from the position of chairman of Lenta Ltd. and the sale of my shares. On my refusal, he and his ally Sergei Yushchenko tried to sell the company to an outside investor,” Zherebtsov said.
Meyer remained positive on the latest court decision.
“The BVI judge ruled in our favor that Oleg Zherebtsov does not have, nor did he ever have sole signature rights to do as he pleased on behalf of Lenta Ltd. He has been restricted by the judge in her decision from acting on the sole signature rights he does not have and he is unable to issue any powers of attorney on behalf of Lenta Ltd.,” Meyer said.
“The old powers of attorney that he issued in January 2008 have been earlier revoked by the court. When he opened the court case in the Russian Arbitration Court in St. Petersburg, he circumvented the board of directors and did not get their 100 percent approval to open the case, and he also issued those powers of attorney to two other individuals without the Board’s 100 percent consent,” Meyer said.
Meyer stated that the next shareholders’ meeting of Lenta Ltd. would be held in St. Petersburg on April 23, at which the general director would be chosen.
Regardless of the conflict, Lenta continues to expand. Earlier this month the company announced that it plans to double the number of its stores in 2008-2009.
By the end of 2009 Lenta plans to operate 50 stores across Russia, investing about $25.6 million into each one. The company currently operates 26 stores.

TITLE: Pankin Announces Plan for Early Payback of $3Bln to World Bank
AUTHOR: By Halia Pavliva
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — Russia, the world’s biggest energy exporter, plans to repay early about $3 billion owed the World Bank as oil and gas revenue help ease the country’s debt burden, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said.
“There are plans over the early repayment and there are mutual agreements on that,” Pankin said at a press briefing in Washington at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. “We expect to repay about $3 billion in June and may repay more later in the year.”
Russia is using windfall revenue from energy exports to lessen a debt load amassed in the Soviet era and a period of economic malaise after the fall of communism. The International Monetary Fund predicts the Russian economy will grow 6.8 percent this year, faster than the 0.5 percent rate of expansion in the U.S. and 1.4 percent for the euro zone.
Russia’s total debt to the bank of about $4.5 billion includes $3 billion in “mono-currency loans that we will repay first,” Pankin said. “Estimation of multicurrency loans raises some questions and takes a long time, and lots of efforts. Still, we will keep calculating them and may repay some,” he said.
Urals crude, Russia’s major export blend of oil, has surged more than 10-fold since 1998 to $104.72 a barrel April 11. Russia’s sovereign oil funds held $163.4 billion on April 1.
Russia plans to reconsider initially planned agreements with the World Bank and switch to financing the projects designed by the bank with Russia’s domestic resources, Pankin said earlier.
Pankin also said Russia may set a deadline for accepting claims to exchange as much as $700 million in Eurobonds for former Soviet debt for mid-2008, enabling more creditor companies to take part.
“The idea is to get done with it,” Pankin said. “This work has been proceeding very slowly and it is not easy.”
The government has yet to approve a resolution allowing the ministry to swap the debt, Pankin said, adding that he expects the measure will be approved by the end of the month and a deadline set as soon as July.
The government initially wanted to exchange this portion of the debt by the end of 2005. The Finance Ministry said then that it had as much as $2.5 billion of former Soviet debt that it wanted to exchange for Eurobonds at a discount in order to cut its foreign debt and help spur economic growth.
In 2001 and 2002, Russia swapped about $1.3 billion in Eurobonds maturing between 2010 and 2030 for part of the debt. The debt was accumulated by Soviet foreign trade agencies that then defaulted as the communist regime collapsed.
Russia plans to begin talks with South Korea on repayment of Russia’s about $1.3 billion debt by June, Pankin said. Russia will also ask Libya to repay its debts when the Finance Ministry’s delegation visits Tripoli later this week.
Russia’s foreign currency and gold reserves, the world’s third largest, rose to a record $508 billion last week. The reserves have climbed from $17.8 billion on Jan. 1, 1998, when crude sank to less than $10 a barrel and the government was forced to default on $40 billion of domestic debt and devalue the ruble, sending the economy into recession.

TITLE: PWC Loses Appeal Against Tax Claim
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Moscow District Arbitration Court rejected a second appeal by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s Russian unit against a 380 million rubles ($16 million) back-tax claim, a spokeswoman for the auditor said.
Investigators say the auditor illegally reduced the amount of tax liability in 2002 by falsely declaring the hiring of non-Russians.
The amount includes $11 million in taxes that PWC allegedly failed to pay and $5.1 million in penalties and fines, according to the spokeswoman, who said PWC had paid all the required taxes.
The Higher Arbitration Court in Moscow ordered a retrial in the tax case on July 11, 2007. PWC lost a hearing and first appeal in a new trial prior to Monday’s decision. Under Russian law, the company can make its case again in the Higher Arbitration Court. 
In January, PWC lost a separate appeal against charges that it had prepared two diverging sets of audits for the bankrupt Yukos. The auditor was ordered to pay a 16.8 million-ruble fine in connection with the case, which PWC has said it plans to appeal.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Land for Sale at Auction</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg Property Fund plans to auction off a land plot on Sytninskaya Ulitsa in the Petrogradsky district in October or November this year, Interfax reported Friday.
The land plot, which has a total area of 5,900 square meters, will be used for the construction of a 600-room hotel.  The plot already contains premises covering an area of 4,700 meters and borders an empty residential building and state lyceum, which are due to be demolished in the near future.

<b>Monuments Transferred</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — This year, 448 monuments in St. Petersburg will be transferred from the Federal Property Fund to the St. Petersburg Property Fund, Interfax reported Saturday.
Six hundred monuments will remain under the supervision of the Federal Property Fund, and another 115 monuments are still under discussion. St. Petersburg’s historic center is listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

<b>Carousel Sales Increase</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Carousel, the Russian superstore chain being bought by X5 Retail Group NV, said first-quarter sales jumped 67 after shoppers spent more money per trip.
Sales climbed to $252.5 million, the St. Petersburg-based company said Monday in an e-mailed statement. The figures are preliminary and unaudited. The average purchase advanced more than 10 percent to $22.97, Carousel said. The company had 23 superstores at the end of the quarter.

<b>MTS Eyes Tajik Leader</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Mobile TeleSystems, Russia’s largest mobile-phone company, is in talks to buy a Tajik operator, Interfax reported Monday, citing three unidentified people in the telecommunications market.
Mobile TeleSystems is seeking a 60 percent stake in Babilon-Mobile, the largest mobile-phone company in Tajikistan, the Russian news agency said.

<b>RusAl Resolve Likely</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — A tussle over United Co. RusAl’s plan to buy a stake  in GMK Norilsk Nickel will be resolved next week, Rusal’s controlling shareholder Oleg Deripaska told the Sunday Times.
“Everything will be clear next week,” Deripaska told the London-based newspaper in an interview published on Sunday, without saying whether the acquisition will go ahead. Vladimir Potanin, who owns part of Norilsk, isn’t necessarily opposed to a deal with RusAl, the paper cited Deripaska as saying.

<b>Naftogaz to Diversify</b>
KIEV (Bloomberg) — Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-run energy company, will extract crude oil in Libya as part of its efforts to lessen its dependence on Russian fuel imports, President Viktor Yushchenko said.
Naftogaz will regain control of a Libyan field that it got in 2003 and then lost, Yushchenko said in an interview with Ukrainian television channel ICTV late Sunday. Libya may also build an oil refinery in Ukraine, Yushchenko said. He will discuss the construction with Muammar Qaddafi during the Libyan leader’s visit to Ukraine later this year.
Ukraine, a country of 46 million people that depends on Russia for almost all its energy needs, wants to diversify by producing oil and natural gas in the Black Sea and abroad, including such countries as Egypt.

<b>Severstal Set to Divide</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Severstal, Russia’s largest steelmaker, will be reorganized into three divisions to improve efficiency and may buy iron-ore assets in West Africa, Chief Executive Officer Alexei Mordashov said.
Anatoly Kruchinin, general director of Severstal’s Cherepovets plant north of Moscow, will lead the domestic steel unit, Mordashov told reporters at a presentation Monday in Moscow.
Gregory Mason, Severstal’s chief operating officer, will manage its foreign holdings and Roman Deniskin will head the company’s other natural-resource assets.
Severstal will look at steel acquisitions in the U.S. and Italy, countries in which it’s already present, Mason said. The U.S., where Severstal already owns three steel mills, still has assets that could be acquired at a “bargain” price, he said.

<b>Deripaska Given Nod</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Oleg Deripaska has won approval to buy 100 percent of Moscow-based insurer Ingosstrakh, Vedomosti said, citing Yulia Bondareva, an official with the Federal Antimonopoly Service.
Bekar-Servis, an entity affiliated with Deripaska’s Basic Element holding company, has won the right to acquire 84 percent of Ingosstrakh, the Moscow-based newspaper said.
Deripaska owns about 60 percent of Ingosstrakh via companies including Bekar-Servis, which holds a 16 percent stake.

<b>Trust in Dollar Falling</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian faith in the U.S. currency has slumped to an all-time low as the strengthening local economy increased confidence in the ruble, according to a poll by Moscow-based Public Opinion Foundation.
Sixty-one percent of Russians “trust” the ruble, up from 37 percent in 2002, while belief in the dollar declined to 3 percent from 35 percent of respondents, according to the survey. The euro was trusted by 27 percent of Russians compared with 11 percent six years ago, the poll showed.
The Russian currency has gained 27 percent against the dollar since December 2002, while the country’s now $1.4 trillion economy has been growing at an annual rate of about 7 percent since then, driven by its energy resources.
New Airport Scanners</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — General Electric Co.’s Homeland Protection unit has won an order to supply explosive-detection baggage scanners to Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport, Russia’s busiest.
GE will provide scanners using X-ray technology as well as medical-type devices that identify suspicious substances by their molecular structure, the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company said Monday in a Business Wire statement. Financial details of the contract weren’t disclosed.
The combined system will be the first of its kind, said GE, which competes with Britain’s Smiths Group Plc, the world’s biggest maker of airport-security scanners.

<b>Uralkali Planning Cuts</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Uralkali, the potash producer owned by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, plans to cut headcount by 30 percent by 2010.
Uralkali plans to reduce staff at its main production unit to 6,000, from 8,560 in 2007, the company said in a presentation on its web site Monday. Uralkali reduced staff 16 percent last year, the company said. Labor costs grew 30 percent in 2007.

<b>TMK Takes Out Loan</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — TMK, the world’s second-largest maker of pipes for the oil and gas industry, has borrowed 88.7 million euros ($140 million) from Societe Generale SA to finance upgrades at its Seversky Tube Works plant.

TITLE: X5 Sales Up 61 Percent
AUTHOR: By Maria Ermakova
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — X5 Retail Group, the country’s largest supermarket chain, rose the most in almost six months in London trading after reporting a 61 percent sales increase and saying Friday that it would buy the Karusel chain for less than analysts expected. 
X5 gained $1.39, or 4.9 percent, to $30.03, the steepest percentage climb since Oct. 15. That increased the market value of the retailer to $6.5 billion. 
First-quarter sales advanced to $1.78 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier after X5 added stores and Russians spent more on food, the company said in a statement. The retailer also said it would pay $920 million to $970 million to acquire the Karusel chain of 23 superstores, less than some estimates. 
“Sales are very positive,” said Julia Gordeyeva, an analyst at ING Bank in Moscow with a “buy” rating on X5. “Considering improvements they’ll be able to achieve in profitability and sales growth at Karusel stores, they are buying it cheap.” 
The final price that X5 pays will include $140 million of Karusel debt, bringing the total value of the transaction to as much as $1.1 billion, Gordeyeva said. Analysts had expected the cost to be $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion. 
X5, which has held an option to buy Karusel since at least 2006, said the final price would be determined by the valuation of existing stores and property under construction. 
As much as 25 percent of the consideration will be settled by issuing new shares, according to the company, which said it was still deciding how to fund the balance.

TITLE: Duma Ratifies Anti-Smoking Treaty
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — State Duma deputies floated radical plans on Friday to cut tobacco use after ratifying a United Nations anti-smoking convention. 
Potential measures include dramatically increasing the cost of cigarettes and banning their sale in roadside kiosks, Nikolai Gerasimenko, deputy head of the Duma’s Public Health Committee said Friday, Interfax reported. 
The comments come as the Duma finally passed a law on accepting the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. 
The treaty, which has now been ratified by 154 countries, requires participants to ban tobacco advertising within five years, increase the size of health warning labels on packages, protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke and possibly increase prices. 
The UN initiative is aimed primarily at developing countries, where smoking is more prevalent, and Russia has lagged behind countries including Rwanda, Afghanistan and Samoa in accepting the convention. 
The Duma has already taken steps toward bringing the country’s laws into line with the convention requirements, including passing in a first reading a bill to place major restrictions on tobacco advertisements. Lawmakers will then try to shift the sale of cigarettes from kiosks to supermarkets, Gerasimenko said. 
In recent years, the number of smokers in the country has skyrocketed. According to state statistics, 60 percent of men and 30 percent of women smoke regularly. Forty percent of people under 18 have used tobacco, he said. 
Health experts point to high rates of smoking as the overwhelming cause of lung cancer in Russia and one of the primary reasons for the country’s low life-expectancy level among men. 
Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of tobacco products and pumps out as many as 414 billion cigarettes each year, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said Thursday, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Space Tourism Likely to Decline As Crew Increases
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said Friday that the country might stop selling seats on its spacecraft to “tourists” starting in 2010 because of the planned expansion of the international space station’s crew. 
Perminov said the station’s permanent crew was expected to grow from the current three to six or even nine in 2010. That will mean that the country will have fewer extra seats available for tourists on its Soyuz spacecraft. 
Since 2000, five wealthy private citizens have bought trips to the international space station, riding there and back on Russian spacecraft. The trips have brought badly needed revenue to the country’s space program. 
“We will continue flying tourists to the international space station in accordance with the existing programs, but we may have problems with it starting from 2010 because of planned increase of the ISS’s crew to six to nine people,” Perminov said, Interfax reported. 
President Vladimir Putin on Friday pledged to further increase allocations to the space program and urged officials to speed up construction of a far eastern facility, the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region, to make it capable of handling manned space launches. 
Russia launches all its manned missions from the Soviet-built Baikonur Cosmodrome, which it leases from neighboring Kazakhstan for $115 million per year through 2050. 
He said the Vostochny Cosmodrome would be built by 2015 and begin handling all manned space launches in 2020.

TITLE: Serbia, Inter RAO Set to Sign Deal
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Inter RAO, Unified Energy System’s import and export arm, said Friday that it would sign a protocol Monday with Serbian state-controlled electricity monopoly EPS that could lead to a number of lucrative contracts, a move experts said had political overtones. 
Although the nonbinding document does not mention specific projects or figures, reports in the Serbian press have said Inter RAO may be enlisted to construct two 700-megawatt thermal plants in central Serbia to replace the region’s dilapidated facilities, as well as several hydropower stations on the Drina River. 
The talks come on the heels of Russia gaining control of Serbian oil and gas company NIS and the right to route the South Stream gas pipeline through the country. The deals, signed in January, were seen at the time as a reward for President Vladimir Putin’s strong support of Serbia in its efforts to prevent Kosovo’s independence. 
“We have been interested in the Serbian market for quite a long time,” Inter RAO spokesman Boris Zverev said Friday. “Expansion into foreign markets is a natural part of our company’s strategy.” 
EPS declined to comment on the negotiations Friday. 
The Serbian company’s management will give its Russian partners a list of the power stations it wants to modernize and new sites where it would like to build, Zverev said. 
“We will then choose the projects that are most economically profitable for us,” he added, declining to elaborate. 
Analysts, however, said the negotiations were not exclusively about potentially lucrative new projects. 
“It’s no secret that the economic interests of Inter RAO are linked to the political interests of the Kremlin,” said Alexander Kornilov, a utilities analyst at Alfa Bank. 
“Moscow’s support of Belgrade on the Kosovo issue may continue to help it win profitable energy contracts.” 
The Kremlin has staunchly opposed the breakaway Serbian province, which unilaterally declared independence Feb. 17. Six of 11 members on Inter RAO’s board are representatives of the state. 
UES holds a 60 percent stake in Inter RAO, while 40 percent belongs to the state nuclear corporation, Rosatom.

TITLE: Ukraine Poultry Producer Plans IPO
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: KIEV — Mironovskiy Hleboproduct SA, Ukraine’s biggest poultry producer, plans to hold an initial public offering in London to fund its expansion.
The company will sell global depositary receipts, Kiev-based Myronivsky said Monday in a statement. Morgan Stanley and UBS AG will be the joint global coordinators and bookrunners.
Ukraine, a country of 46 million people, has an economy that’s expanding for an eighth consecutive year. Retail sales jumped 28 percent in the first two months of the year as the government increased social spending.
Ukraine “is a market with massive potential,” Chief Executive Officer Yuriy Kosyuk said in the statement.

TITLE: Rosneft, LUKoil In Lead As RTS Hits 2,100 Mark
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The RTS, the country’s benchmark stock index, breached the 2,100 barrier for the first time this year, as oil and metal stocks pulled away from the field. 
“It does look much better than last month,” said James Fenkner, managing director at Red Star Asset Management. 
Oil stocks, led by Rosneft and LUKoil, had some of the biggest trading volumes, after Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said the government might reach an agreement in two to three months on cutting oil taxes to shore up flagging production. 
Metal stocks were buoyed by price gains across the board, while Norilsk Nickel basked in the news that its deal with United Company RusAl — a prelude to a full merger, which analysts have signaled will dilute minority shareholders’ stakes — may be on shaky ground. 
Elsewhere, though, things were looking pretty quiet. 
“Outside of those two sectors, there is really nothing going on,” Fenkner said. “Retail’s dead, telecoms is dead, utilities are dead and dying, banking is dead.” 
Some investors have been unloading state electricity giant Unified Energy System, which has said Jun. 6 will be its last day of trading, on fears of illiquidity before the shares’ suspension. At the time of delisting, minority shareholders will get shares in the spun-off companies. 
“There is a reshuffling away from electricity and consumer names to oil and gas,” said Denis Obukhov, a portfolio manager at Wermuth Asset Management. “The electricity sector’s still pretty attractive in our view ... but it is quite close to the deadline of [UES’s] existence, so everybody is quite cautious.” 
Oil prices rose back to previous highs, pushing past $110 per barrel on lower-than-expected inventories before dropping back slightly. Rosneft rose 4.1 percent on the week, a far cry from last month when it languished about 18 percent lower on MICEX. LUKoil  saw its stock rise 3.4 percent on the week, up 20 percent from its March low. 
Rising commodity prices also helped Gazprom, which rose 3.5 percent on the week. Alfa said the company could end 2008 as the second-highest global earner, just behind ExxonMobil, on predictions that net income could reach $41.5 billion. 
But the biggest movers were the coal companies. “Coal prices are just going crazy,” said Fenkner. 
Midweek, BHP Billiton said it expected prices of coking coal, a material used in the production of steel, to rise by as much as 240 percent this year. Analysts said prices had risen from around $90 per ton last year to $300 per ton. 
Yuzhkuzbassugol saw a one-day gain Thursday of 18.6 percent, while Raspadskaya, which said last week that its concentrate prices had doubled, rose 7.8 percent the same day. Mechel, a steelmaker with coking coal assets, rose 20 percent on the week on the RTS. 
The RTS closed down Friday by 1 percent, just keeping its head above the 2,100 parapet. It edged up on the week to 2,112.1 points, a 2.6 percent increase, while the MICEX, where most trading takes place, pared down its gains earlier in the week to creep up 0.9 percent to 1,649 points on the week. It closed down 2.11 percent Friday.

TITLE: Heineken Sees Weaker Growth
AUTHOR: By Maria Ermakova and Joram Kanner
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Heineken, the largest Dutch brewer, said Friday that growth in its Russian beer sales would weaken this year as the market’s expansion slows. 
“There won’t be double-digit growth this year,” Viktor Pyatko, vice president of Heineken’s local unit, told reporters after a news conference in Moscow. The company will aim to increase the amount of beer it sells in Russia “at least at the pace of the market or slightly better,” he said. 
Growth in the country’s beer market will decelerate to 3 to 5 percent in coming years from 2007’s 16 percent, Baltika Breweries, the largest local beer maker, has said. Foreign competitors, including InBev, the world’s biggest brewer by sales, have flocked to the country as it expands for a 10th straight year, fueling incomes and spending. 
Heineken’s Russian sales advanced 15 percent to 15 million hectoliters last year. Drinkers bought more beer as the warmest Moscow winter since records began in 1879 pulled demand away from vodka. 
The company will invest 112 million euros ($177 million) to 117 million euros in Russia this year, unchanged from 2007, Pyatko said. Around 60 million euros will go to quadruple capacity at a brewery in Nizhny Novgorod, and the company also will increase the capacity of its Yekaterinburg plant by about one-third and improve its brewery in Irkutsk. 
He also said the Amsterdam-based brewer was moving to revive sales of Bochkaryov beer, one of its main local brands, which were unchanged last year. 
Heineken will seek to improve profitability in Russia by cutting costs, including improving labor productivity, rather than raising prices, Pyatko added. 
Heineken controlled 13 percent of the country’s beer market in 2007, trailing Baltika’s 38 percent share and InBev’s 19 percent slice, according to research company Business Analytica.

TITLE: Retailers Choose Own Stores Over Acquisitions
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian retailers prefer to expand by opening their own stores, rather than acquiring competitors, because the scarcity of potential targets has made takeovers too expensive, PricewaterhouseCoopers said Friday. 
Companies that opt to expand without purchases made up 56 percent of respondents polled by the accounting firm. The study was based on 23 online interviews with Russian retail companies, New York-based PwC said in an e-mailed statement. 
X5 Retail Group, the country’s largest supermarket company, and main competitor Magnit are among retailers that are adding stores to gain market share. The country’s 10 main retailers control about 5 percent of the market, compared with 85 percent for the four British leaders, the survey shows. 
“The growing purchasing power of Russian consumers” will keep fueling retail-industry expansion in the country, according to PwC. 
The country’s $434 billion retail market will expand by 22 percent per year through 2010 as household incomes increase about 15 percent, UBS analysts have estimated. The country’s economy is swelling for a 10th straight year as surging energy prices boost revenue from exports of crude oil and natural gas. 
Bureaucracy, rising competition and a lack of infrastructure are the main barriers to expansion, according to the survey. Companies also are hampered by shortages of workers and space for stores and warehouses, it shows.

TITLE: Banker Says Russian Key to Success
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian language could  help Moscow compete with financial hubs to lure companies from around the former Soviet Union to list on its bourses, a Central Bank official said Friday. 
MICEX and the RTS should do more to attract companies such as Kazakhstan and Ukraine that now prefer to sell shares in Western Europe, said Sergei Shvetsov, the director of the bank’s financial markets department. 
“We should start exploiting our competitive advantage based on the Russian language,” he said. “They haven’t learned how to speak English yet, and they haven’t forgotten Russian. At best, they see Moscow as a second London.” 
Both President Vladimir Putin and his elected successor, Dmitry Medvedev, have said making the country a global financial center is a priority.

TITLE: Energy Producers Sign Deal
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: KIEV — Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-run energy company, said Friday that it signed a contract with Swiss-registered RosUkrEnergo on importing natural gas from Russia, despite efforts by the prime minister to eliminate energy middlemen. 
The agreement is for the supply of “around 50 billion of cubic meters of gas this year,” Oleksandr Shlapak, the deputy head of staff at President Viktor Yushchenko’s office, said at a news conference in Kiev. 
“They have signed a contract with RosUkrEnergo for 50 billion cubic meters at $179.50,” a Naftogaz spokesman said. 
The contract confirms the price per 1,000 cubic meters as agreed earlier — a rise from last year’s price of $130. It also gave Gazprom the right to supply 7 bcm through a subsidiary, as agreed earlier. 
RosUkrEnergo, half-owned by Gazprom, is the sole importer of gas to Ukraine under a 2006 agreement that resolved a dispute between the two countries over fuel prices. Gazprom, which supplies 70 percent of Ukraine’s gas, cut deliveries in January 2006 after Ukraine rejected its demand to quadruple the price. 
RosUkrEnergo mixes more expensive Russian gas and cheaper gas from Central Asian countries and resells it to Ukraine. 
Shlapak said Friday that RosUkrEnergo was “kept due to Russia’s request.”  

(Bloomberg, Reuters)

TITLE: Sotheby’s Expects Sale Of Russian Art to Be Success
AUTHOR: By Katya Kazakina
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — A Faberge icon in a silver frame studded with rubies, sapphires and emeralds and a gigantic tsarist-era porcelain centerpiece are among the Russian treasures headed for auction at Sotheby’s in New York this week.
The biggest seller of Russian art aims to raise more than $40 million during auctions spanning three centuries on April 15 and 16. Other highlights are a set of Ivan Aivazovsky’s paintings that hung in the White House during John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency and a photomontage of a staged riot by contemporary-art collective AES+F.
Spurred by Russia’s economic growth and a new class of ultra-rich art collectors, Sotheby’s annual Russian sales surged to $190.9 million in 2007 from $6.03 million in 2000. However, this week’s Russian sales come amid jitters about the art market’s ability to withstand losses in the financial sector.
“The economy is probably on everybody’s mind,” said Sonya Bekkerman, head of Sotheby’s Russian paintings department in New York. “But all indicators are pointing to strong sales.”
Sotheby’s Russian contemporary art sale in London last month tallied $8.2 million, up from $5.2 million in 2007.
Most of the buyers of Russian art —about 70 percent to 80 percent — are Russian, Bekkerman said.
“Luckily, they are not tied to the subprime mortgage crisis,” she said.
Russia’s wealth comes from natural resources, such as oil, gas and metals, whose prices continue to soar, said Moscow-based art dealer Vladimir Ovcharenko.
 “There’s a lot of money in the country and the interest in Russian contemporary art is growing,” Ovcharenko said. “This will lead to an increase in prices for Russian artists.”
Sotheby’s will offer 130 lots of postwar and contemporary Russian art on April 15. They include paintings by nonconformist artist Oscar Rabin, conceptualists such as Ilya Kabakov and the duo Komar and Melamid, and photorealist Semen Faibisovich.
“The sale is very well balanced between historic and contemporary, paintings and works on paper,” said Natalia Kolodzei, whose collection of Russian postwar and contemporary art is currently on view at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York.
AES+F’s “Last Riot, Panorama #4,” shows a group of children and teens in camouflage pants wielding guns and swords. The work, which was exhibited at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg last year, is estimated to bring in as much as $220,000.
Rabin’s 1959 “City With Moon (Socialist City)” depicts a hodgepodge of gloomy, crumbling houses - a representation that countered the officially sanctioned image of Soviet life. The painting is estimated to fetch as much as $160,000.
Among more affordable pieces is Tania Antoshina’s takeoff on Ingres’s 1862 painting “The Turkish Bath.” In a similarly titled 2007 color photograph, Antoshina replaced the original’s lounging females with nude men. The work’s high estimate is $7,000.
Fine art, offered in a separate section, also on April 15, features more 19th-century paintings than usual, Bekkerman said.

TITLE: Governor Protests Baikal Plant
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Irkutsk Governor Alexander Tishanin on Friday demanded the relocation of a pulp plant that is polluting Lake Baikal, which holds about one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. 
“Saving the lake is a task of global importance because high-quality drinking water is turning into a strategic resource,” Tishanin said in a statement posted on his administration’s web site. He suggested moving the plant elsewhere in the region at the government’s expense. 
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika last month ordered regional investigators in Irkutsk to determine whether Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mills, majority owned by billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element holding company, is operating illegally by dumping industrial waste into Baikal. 
The plant was built in the 1960s on the southern shore of Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest lake, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Environmentalists have been campaigning for its closure for the past 40 years. 
“This is a ray of hope,” said Jenny Sutton of the Irkutsk-based Baikal Wave environmental watchdog. “The main thing now is that these words become deeds,” she said. 
BasEl spokeswoman Oksana Gorlova said the mill had invested almost $13 million in technology to reduce the plant’s influence on the environment. 
“The company has always been environmentally responsible,” Gorlova said. “From September, there will be no more discharges into Baikal.” 
The mill, in which BasEl has a 51 percent stake, with the government holding the remaining 49 percent, has pledged to activate a closed, internal drainage system by Sept. 15, eliminating the flow of waste water into the lake. 
The government has offered to sell the mill to Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling for conversion into a water-bottling plant. The company said in February that it was considering the proposal.

TITLE: Banks to Bid for Funds
AUTHOR: By Halia Pavliva
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — The Russian government will allow banks to bid for as much as 600 billion rubles ($25.6 billion) in budget funds to shore up liquidity, said Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin.
“Theoretically, the volume that may be placed may be about 600 billion rubles,” Pankin said at a press briefing in Washington D.C. after the semi-annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The auctions to allow banks to temporarily hold spare budget funds will probably start this month, he said. The government initially expected to let the banks bid for between $10 billion and $15 billion, Pankin said on April 9. Russian lenders need additional funds as interbank lending rates rise worldwide, fueled by the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis.
“The scale of this crisis is still unknown,” Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said at a press briefing in Washington on Saturday. “Russia feels it already, for reasons including capital outflow and higher interest rates.”
Net capital outflow reached $22.8 billion in the first quarter, according to the central bank’s preliminary estimate. The nation had inflows of $20.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The first auction was planned to take place on April 17, though it may take longer to enroll the banks, Pankin said. The ministry and the central bank will jointly decide on the price limit for the deposits, he said.

TITLE: RusAl Workers Begin Hunger Strike
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Seventy-five workers at United Company RusAl’s North Ural Bauxite Mine in the Sverdlovsk region began a hunger strike Sunday, a union leader said. 
Alexander Anisimov, deputy head of the local Independent Miners’ Union, said by telephone late Sunday that the miners were staying in the administrative building of the Little Red Riding Hood mine, which is part of the larger RusAl complex. 
“We decided to take the step when RusAl said it was ready to increase our salaries 5 percent, or about 800 rubles [$34],” Anisimov said. 
The miners had previously asked for a 50 percent increase, saying their wages fell dramatically last year without any explanation from RusAl. 
“They again threatened us with fines and dismissals, even though they have signed a paper saying they wouldn’t,” Anisimov said. 
RusAl said it was ready to pay miners more if their productivity increased, because the company had no additional resources to increase wages with the present mine output, Anisimov said. 
“We don’t believe RusAl doesn’t have money to pay us,” he said. “Company chairman Oleg Deripaska is the richest man in the country, he has got billions.” 
A RusAl spokesman confirmed the strike, saying it was an attempt to disrupt negotiations between workers and the company. “We’re looking at this small group’s protest as an attempt to derail the negotiation process and stop work in the North Ural Bauxite Mine’s shafts,” he said, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Energy Behemoth Prepares to Auction Off OGK-1
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KASHIRA, Moscow Region — The jewel in the crown of the Unified Energy System network, OGK-1, will be auctioned off Thursday as part of the culmination of a decade-long sector reform that will see the electricity monopoly officially cease to exist on July 1. 
The opening of the strategic sector to foreign investors is unprecedented and is perhaps a sign of desperation. The country’s booming economy has fostered greater demand for electricity from a sector starved of government investment over the past two decades and in dire need of money for new power stations and the modernization of existing facilities. 
German, Italian and Finnish electricity firms have all stepped in to purchase significant assets, but the most active buyer has been state-controlled Gazprom, which has scooped up a controlling stake in the four largest generating assets to go on the block so far. 
The scope of Gazprom’s involvement has drawn criticism from foreign experts, but those foreign companies that have managed to get their hands on assets have sung the praises of the reform — and of its architect, UES chief Anatoly Chubais — and are expecting significant profits. 
Reaping a decent return on their investment, however, will only become a reality if the country’s electricity market is fully liberalized, something that is supposed to happen by 2011. The hope is that the state will stick to its promise to allow the liberalization to go ahead. But there are few guarantees from a government that has demonstrated its willingness to step in to regulate prices and has few qualms about state ownership of major assets. 
“The Russian power market is extremely attractive and we see a lot of opportunities for us here,” said Dominique Fache, Enel’s country manager for Russia and the CIS. 
Enel, Italy’s biggest electricity producer, became the first foreign company to purchase a significant chunk of UES, buying power generator OGK-5 at the beginning of the asset spinoff last June. 
“Now, for the continued success of the reform it is critical to invest in infrastructure, innovation and IT, and to ensure the stability and relevance of rules governing the energy market,” Fache said. 
Finland’s Fortum paid $2 billion for a controlling stake in TGK-10, a record for a regional generating unit, and secured a significant interest in TGK-1. The company’s vice president, Tapio Kuula, has expressed some concern about the safety of the company’s Russian investments, however. 
“After UES ceases to exist, it is crucial that political circles maintain adherence to the schedule for the development of the electricity market,” Kuula said. “Since the investment in the electricity-generation sector is long-term, we do need guarantees of returns on our investment.” 
Guarantees of such returns depend on market liberalization. 
Currently, just 20 percent of all electricity produced in the country is sold at deregulated prices. This figure, however, is slated to reach 100 percent by 2011. 
The markets do not seem to have much faith in the sector’s profitability. The RTS index of electricity stocks has lost 23.6 percent of its value 
Meanwhile, the Elektroenergia Index on the RTS has dropped 23.6 percent, and most companies in the sector have seen their share prices fall significantly in that period. 
Analysts said Gazprom’s activities in buying up electricity assets had played a role in spooking investors. 
“Shares in the companies formed out of UES have been falling as investors are confused and don’t understand why the Russian government has gotten actively involved in the market through Gazprom, even though it has accepted an obligation not to,” said Derek Weaving, head of utilities sector research at Renaissance Capital. 
New laws to govern the electricity sector adopted in 2003 said that, while the government would hold on to electricity distribution assets, it would no longer be a player in the markets for generation and sales. 
Gazprom’s plans for the four electricity-generating assets it has already bought clearly go against the spirit, if not the letter, of the 2003 law. The gas-producing giant plans to merge those assets with two producers snapped up by major coal producer SUEK later this year. Gazprom will hold a stake of 50 percent plus one share in the resulting entity. 
“The core of the reform is to create a competitive market, Weaving said, “and we face a big danger of not getting it.” 
Dmitry Bulgakov, a utilities analyst at Deutsche Bank, agrees. 
“The question is whether the government will at least keep its promise on the liberalization,” Bulgakov said. “The hopes for a free market are the only reason foreigners are buying into the sector now.” 
Bulgakov is doubtful that the government will be able to keep its hands off. 
“The liberalization will put upward pressure on prices,” Bulgakov said. “And the government can intervene vigorously at any point in the process in an attempt to battle soaring inflation numbers.” 
Federal Energy Agency head Dmitry Akhanov admits that the coherence and consistency of the government’s activities will be the main factor determining how successful the market liberalization will be. 
Chubais said there was an instrument to help make sure the state sticks to the plan, if not a particularly comforting one. 
“It is written down in the official documents — if the government swerves from the plan, force majeur is declared, the investors are freed from their investment obligations and from the development programs for the companies they have bought,” Chubais said on the sidelines of a Moscow conference for electricity market reform Wednesday. 
So far, the government seems to be the winner in the reform program, having managed to attract investment to the sector while retaining partial control and the right to step in to regulate in “extraordinary” circumstances. 
Nikolai Korobkov, the general director of the Energosetservis, the state-owned company that provides maintenance for electricity distribution grids, said his company had also suffered from the market privatization. 
“We have a number of obligations as a state-controlled entity, but at the same time we now have a whole bunch of competitors whose hands are untied, so they can be more flexible in terms of the prices they charge for their services, and so on,” Korobkov said. 
The numbers of those opposed to the reform are deep, including many industry veterans whose opposition springs from a deep understanding of the sector, a vested interested in maintaining the status quo or a combination of the two. 
Vladimir Sukhov, 71 and now retired, worked for 38 years — the final 11 as general director — at the thermal power station in Kashira, a town in the Moscow region. The station was the first built in the Soviet Union, opened under Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in 1922, as part of a massive program to bring electricity to the whole country. 
Today the Kashira station is part of OGK-1, an asset that UES hopes will turn out to be worth as much as $7 billion when it is sold this Thursday. 
“I don’t believe in the UES reform,” Sukhov said. “The government is consolidating aircraft and ship production but fragmenting one of the country’s most strategic industries — electricity production, which is of dramatically high importance in a country as big as Russia.” 
“Instead, we have handed control to unreliable private investors,” he added. 
He says the problem is that the government has not committed sufficient resources to building additional generating capacity to keep up with climbing demand. 
At the Kashira station, he said, the equipment is on average 30 years old and the average worker’s age is over 40, as low salaries and the lack of professional training have taken their toll. 
“The system deteriorated in the 1990s, as the idea appeared that working as an electrician or a plumber meant you were no one, Sukhov said. “It was simply not fashionable.” 
Industry analysts said the opportunity to address the problems earlier was missed. 
“We proposed the reform as early as 1994,” said Renaissance Capital’s Weaving, who was working for KPMG at the same time it was acting as a consultant for the government. “But no one was listening to us.” 
“In 2001, Chubais came up with a program that had the main principles we had suggested a decade earlier — creating a competitive generation market and preventing the creation of vertically integrated companies,” Weaving said. 
As it has turned out, the critics say, the wait has not made the sector any readier for the changes to come. They warn of the chaos likely in a country they say is too large for its electricity sector to be privatized, of the sector’s inability to attract investment on its own, of skyrocketing electricity prices and of the possibility that Gazprom could pressure the industry — the majority of which still burns gas to produce electricity — to operate on its terms. 
But there are still optimists, who say the situation was much worse not so long ago. 
“We used to be paid in women’s underwear, cognac or goods like woolen boots instead of money in the 1990s, as enterprises had no cash to pay for electricity, so they paid with what they produced,” said Korobkov, of Energosetservis. 
“We didn’t receive our salaries for months and didn’t know what would happen tomorrow,” he said. “Today we at least get real money. And that is actually all the Russian electricity sector needs.”
Anatoly Chubais, the overseer of Russia’s privatization process in the 1990s, took over as chief executive at the country’s electricity monopoly in 1998, when the company was in danger of bankruptcy.
The goal of the current  auction process is to raise as much as 1 trillion rubles ($42.6 billion). So far, through the sale of the state’s stakes in OGKs and TGKs and additional share emissions, UES has raised almost 797 billion rubles ($34 billion).
The plan also calls for the deregulation of electricity prices, with rates for industry allowed to float by 2011 and those for private consumers to be set by the market by 2014.

TITLE: It’s Not All About High Oil Prices
AUTHOR: By Yaroslav Lissovolik
TEXT: The key economic priority in Russia is to maintain the high economic growth rates that it has achieved over the past eight years, and recent growth performance has certainly been encouraging. There are reasons to believe that this growth will remain high despite further shocks from global financial turbulence. This is due to the shift in the country’s development from fragmentation to integration. The repatriation of capital and labor resources, the decrease in the size of the shadow economy and the country’s increased role in the global economy are prominent examples of the country’s integration, all of which played a major role in its post-1998 growth performance. This “integration theory” challenges the traditional view that high oil prices were the predominant reason for the country’s economic expansion.
In the early to mid-1990s, one of the explanations advanced for the precipitous decline in gross domestic product was “disorganization” — a concept pioneered by Olivier Blanchard, economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — characterized by a fragmentation of nonmarket production links between enterprises. This resulted in an economic system that was dubbed the “virtual economy” and characterized by supply disruption, nonpayments and barter.
After the 1998 crisis, disorganization increasingly gave way to economic integration characterized by the formation of market-based links between interdependent enterprises. Apart from the economic integration effect at the micro level of individual companies, we also observed this across the country’s regions after years of widespread regional protectionism and trade barriers. The creation of a unified economic space free of trade barriers was another key factor that fueled the country’s economic growth. Interregional trade as a share of total production in goods such as sugar and gasoline — which was previously subjected to regional protectionism — increased by three to four times from 1995 to 2006.
At the macro level, the integration process was driven by the incorporation of sizeable chunks of the shadow economy into the official sector and the return of flight capital and migrant workers. With respect to capital flows, the massive influx of foreign direct investment was to a major degree driven by the return of capital that left the country back in the 1990s. The share of FDI coming to Russia from places like Cyprus, the Virgin Islands, Luxembourg — believed to harbor the bulk of the country’s capital flight — has been as high as 40 percent.
Another trend, though less pronounced, is the return of “human capital” that had left the country in the 1990s. This process is particularly important for growth and productivity in the services sector, most notably in IT and financial services. Russia is the second-largest recipient of migrant workers in the world, most of whom are coming from the counties of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Indeed, if there is any progress in economic integration between Russia and the CIS, it is in the labor market.
The integration of parts of the “gray economy” into the official sector saw major advances in the past eight years, although there is still a lot more work that needs to be done in this area. The move in 2001 to lower the income tax to a 13 percent flat rate was one of the key factors in raising tax compliance and allowing for a growing share of financial transactions to be brought into the official sector. Overall, according to our estimates, the share of the shadow economy declined from close to 50 percent of GDP in the mid-1990s to roughly 25 percent of GDP now.
Finally, the country’s integration into the world economy has increased in the past four years, as evidenced by the significant rise in the ratio of FDI to GDP. There is significant potential to increase global economic integration, most notably with respect to the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Russia is the only major economy that is outside of this organization.
India and China also have a strong “integration potential.” This is based on the world’s largest diasporas that serve as a source of capital and human capital inflows. Indeed, nearly 50 percent of China’s FDI inflows are believed to come from Chinese companies located abroad. Furthermore, China’s economic growth in the past decade received a boost from the integration of Hong Kong and Macao.
Economic miracles, such as in China, Ireland and South Korea, are also frequently rooted in these countries’ past under-performance, which often leads to higher-than-expected economic growth. This process was also based in part on the shift from economic fragmentation to integration. The dynamism of these economic miracles is often linked to the release of the “unobserved reserve” — the reduction in the shadow economy or the inflow of capital and labor resources made accessible from abroad.
Integration played a significant role in Russia’s economic growth over the past eight years. In this context, the role that high oil prices played in the country’s expansion, although important, should not be exaggerated.
First, it is important to note that the country has largely avoided the resource curse that has historically affected economies heavily dependent on the export of natural resources. The creation of the stabilization fund has helped Russia avoid the resource curse by following a policy of fiscal discipline; the government did not give in to the temptation to spend money from the stabilization fund on populist social programs. This fiscal policy was made possible by social and political integration characterized by popular support for the government’s economic course.
Second, there are significant hidden reserves that could fuel continued growth due to the return of capital and labor from abroad, the decrease of the shadow economy and Russia’s increased role n the global economy.
Admittedly, this upside can be exploited to the fullest only if macroeconomic stability and structural policies lead to further economic integration.

Yaroslav Lissovolik is chief economist with Deutsche Bank in Russia.

TITLE: Those Ukrainian, Iranian NATO Blues
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie
TEXT: On the surface, it seems Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin each got what they wanted most at the NATO and Sochi summits. Bush is moving forward with the placement of anti-Iranian missiles in Poland, and Putin kept Ukraine out of NATO, at least for the time being.
It is certainly true that Iran may in time pose some danger to Israel, Europe and the United States. And perhaps it was an intentional provocation that Iran’s announcement about 6,000 new uranium-enriching centrifuges coincided with the Bucharest and Sochi summits. But it remains highly debatable whether a missile-defense system is the best response to that potential threat, and the reason for this is simple — most experts doubt it will work.
What is beyond doubt, however, is that the Poles are hitting up Washington for billions in military aid in exchange for allowing 10 missiles to be based on their territory. But Moscow’s demands for a permanent monitoring presence on Polish territory could be a deal-breaker. Moreover, Warsaw is aware that if the next U.S. president is a Democrat he or she will be very unlikely to sign onto this foolish, costly and unpopular project.
In other words, the U.S. missile-defense system, which might not work anyway, may never get built in the first place. That hardly sounds like a success.
But this Bush initiative did succeed in one respect. It infuriated the Russians. Of course, only the most paranoid and gullible could believe that these missiles would ever be targeted at Russia.
Though the Kremlin pumped up the volume, its outrage was in part sincere. The missile base was an insult added to the injury of NATO’s eastward expansion, which effectively cordoned Russia off from the Baltic to the Black seas. Moscow worries that all its gas shipments to Western Europe will soon have to pass through territory controlled by NATO, which many Russian politicians still consider a hostile alliance.
In fact, Bush’s anti-Iranian missile plan was a godsend for Putin. It gave him something to protest as long as he got what he really wanted — to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
“Do you understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state?” Putin told Bush in an outburst at a closed session of the NATO-Russian Council in Bucharest, Kommersant reported. Losing his temper, Putin revealed his real attitude toward Ukraine. According to this view, Ukraine is not a real state, nor is it a separate entity from Russia, with which it shares a common origin and historical ties. For Putin, Ukrainian statehood is nothing but the vanity of delusional nationalism. More to the point, a significant portion of Ukraine’s population is ethnic Russian, and a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory is subject to Russian claims. In 1954, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave Ukraine the Crimea, which was traditionally Russian, as a present, believing that the transfer didn’t make any real difference since it remained part of the Soviet Union.
Putin has threatened to encourage the secession of the Crimea and the Russian-speaking, pro-Moscow eastern part of Ukraine if Kiev decide to join NATO. He was quoted as saying Ukraine would cease to exist as a state (after having said it wasn’t a real state in the first place).
In other words, Putin is challenging NATO to a showdown: If you accept Ukraine into your ranks, we will foment civil war in one of your member states. Could NATO stand by and allow that?
This could lead to hostilities. The Kremlin has already threatened to target Ukraine with nuclear weapons, and now it might just be tempted to use them.
But hold on a minute. Thanks to Bush, there might be a missile-defense system in Poland that now could be used to shoot down Russian missiles — the first 10 anyway.
Richard Lourie is the author of A Hatred For Tulips and Sakharov: A Biography.

TITLE: Silencing Protest With 
Balloons and Concerts
AUTHOR: By Matthew Collin
TEXT: From my balcony in the center of Yerevan, the Armenian capital, I heard a sudden volley of bangs, as flashes of light illuminated the evening sky. A few weeks earlier, I’d been standing in the same place as the crackle of tracer bullet fire resounded in the night. Some people called this “Bloody Saturday,” as nine people were killed in pitched battles as riot police put down protests against Serzh Sargsyan’s disputed presidential election victory. But this time, the explosions were celebratory — a display of fireworks ending the day last week when Sargsyan was sworn in to office. This time, nobody died.
From morning, the city had been under lockdown. Baton-swinging cops formed a huge cordon around Yerevan’s Opera House, where the inauguration ceremony was to take place. After last month’s unrest, nobody was taking the risk of letting any member of the public anywhere near Sargsyan on his big day.
Inside the cordon, Yerevan was quiet and still. Armenians were only permitted to watch their new leader take power on screen. Even journalists, who were also told that they had to watch the event on television, were confined to a room deep within the Opera House. Desperate cameramen shot footage of journalists sipping their complementary coffee. Meanwhile, Sargsyan strode toward the podium to take his oath in the same Opera House, but he seemed eerily distant.
Ranks of soldiers goose-stepped past their new president as a military parade brought the inauguration ceremony to its conclusion. This was a show of strength on the 40th day after the deaths on March 1 — the day when, according to tradition, the souls of the departed should be commemorated. Beyond the cordon, on the street where the clashes took place, women cried bitter tears as they faced down a solid wall of riot shields and laid flowers in memory of those who died.
As they did so, they could hear echoes of pop music from nearby Republic Square, where a concert was staged alongside a hot-air balloon show. Children gazed. They were transfixed and oblivious to everything that was going on around them, as the huge balloons rose gracefully into the sky.
A few opposition protesters tried to disrupt the festivities by chanting slogans, but they were rapidly dispersed. An image captured by one photographer showed a man standing apart from the crowd, holding up a portrait of a youth who was killed on March 1, its gilded frame wrapped in black ribbon. Behind him stood a line of riot police, ensuring that his lonely statement went almost unnoticed by the evening revelers.

Matthew Collin is a journalist in Tbilisi.

TITLE: You Aren’t Where You Went
AUTHOR: By Mark H. Teeter
TEXT: If theIdes of March spelled trouble for Julius Caesar, mid-April makes millions of Americans wary — and without knives or men in togas. The gainfully employed must lock ‘n’ load their No. 2 pencils for the annual showdown with the Internal Revenue Service (guess who wins), while high school seniors face an even more fateful reckoning: by April 15, the annual college admissions sweepstakes is finally over, and students must decide where to start the rest of their lives in the fall.
“Getting in” is a key concept here. For Americans aged 14 to 17, acceptance by the college of their choice has become something like the quest for the Holy Grail — a long, arduous, quasi-mystical trek with enigmatic directions and no guarantee of success. Success? There’s no guarantee you’ll come out with all your teeth, judging by the media accounts of recent weeks. Terms like “frenzied,” “scary,” “crazed” and “brutal” make this year’s college admissions cycle sound less like an academic competition than a World Wrestling Federation event.
And indeed, successful questers are thin on the ground this April, as the nation’s elite schools have become even more so. Harvard, Yale and Columbia, for example, posted all-time low acceptance rates — 7.1, 8.3 and 8.7 percent, respectively — which meant, in effect, that each college found itself forced to reduce over 90 percent of a shining 2008 applicant pool to a flaming Gotterdammerung with acne. Oh, the humanity...
Let’s lighten up, folks. This ivy-strewn status race has clearly gone overboard. No one is more status conscious than Russians, yet you don’t see 17-year-olds putting each other in half nelsons at the gates of Moscow State University.
Granted, the college admission ritual is considerably different here. Russian high school seniors don’t apply to universities, for starters. They apply to individual departments, called faculties, acceptance to which may be vastly easier or more difficult within a single institution. Beyond that, applicant pools can be very different for paying customers (above or below board) and those seeking traditional merit-based admission. In any case, while entry to the most hallowed halls of Russian academia is highly prized, the race to get there does not bear apocalyptic overtones — at least not yet. Meanwhile, millions of young Americans perceive admission to a prestigious college as nothing less than the origin of their adult identity — “You are where you went” — or of a new identity for the family whose standard they bear. Or both.
Elite U.S. colleges can indeed help show that you and yours have “arrived.” The Kennedy saga — from undereducated immigrant Patrick to Harvard-educated J.F.K. in four generations — is one famous paradigm. On a grittier level, note the sequence of the nation’s most beloved crime families, the Corleones of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos” of cable television. Each clan gradually scales the educational heights, from minimal to middling to Ivy League, with Dartmouth (Michael Corleone’s alma mater) and Columbia (Meadow Soprano’s) serving as reputation launderers and dynasty legitimizers.
Sociologists call this “upward social mobility” in a “functional meritocracy,” and most people assume it’s a good thing — part of the American Dream. Well, yes and no, as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out. Fitzgerald gave us a lasting archetype of the upwardly mobile, self-invented American in James Gatz, an unprepossessing Midwesterner who remolds himself into wealthy, Oxford-educated Jay Gatsby in order to win the fair Daisy Buchanan away from her polo-playing, Yale-vetted husband.
Gatsby fails and “The Great Gatsby” ends tragically, yet the hero remains a sympathetic character to Americans. His ambition and drive embody “the pursuit of happiness” we hold so dear. But Gatsby is wrong. He mistakes attributes for essentials, and this wrongness remains insidious.
The green light on the Buchanans’ dock, which Gatsby watches devotedly, famously symbolizes the hero’s earnest and flawed hope for success with Daisy. After 14-year-old Chinese immigrant Jinzhao Wang read “Gatsby” this spring in her Boston high school, she quickly drew an analogy. “My green light,” she told a New York Times reporter, “is Harvard.” Her quest has begun.
Striving is good and achieving is even better, but they both need a focus that’s worthy of the effort. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MGU — these are means, not ends, to be looked through more than at. Listen up, kids: It’s less where you go than what you do. Relax and go do it.
Trust me on this. My family’s legit.

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

TITLE: Oil Enriching Nenets, Bankrupting Traditions
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: NARYAN-MAR, Nenets Autonomous District — When an airplane carrying LUKoil workers crashed in the far north of this Arctic region three years ago, killing 29 of 52 people on board, many blamed the weather.
When, one year later, in March 2006, a helicopter carrying victims’ relatives to a commemoration ceremony at the crash site also fell, killing another person, the indigenous people thought something else was at play. The land, they said, was cursed.
One of Russia’s newest oil-producing regions, the Nenets autonomous district is home to lucrative projects for LUKoil and Rosneft. 
It is also home to a population of 7,000 indigenous Nenets, whose livelihood and semi-nomadic way of life is being increasingly threatened by the region’s growing oil industry.
“They defied the energy of the land,” said Kolya, a Nenets shaman who, at 39, looks at least 20 years older, speaking of the crashes. 
Squatting in his tent (called a choom) 5 kilometers from Naryan-Mar in the snow-covered tundra one recent evening, he spoke slowly, slurring his words through wide gaps of missing teeth after one beer too many.
“The earth started to sink and all the souls started to rise,” he said.
NaryanMarNeftegaz, a 50-50 joint venture between LUKoil and ConocoPhillips, built an oil platform in the northern port of Varandei on the site of a native cemetery, local Nenets say.
As oil production spreads to the country’s farthest corners, local people and activists are warning that the country risks not only ecological catastrophe but also a serious threat to the native cultures that have inhabited these Arctic regions for centuries.
“There is so much work going on — roads, pipelines — and several oil companies working at once. It disrupts the path of the reindeer herders, and that’s quite painful,” said Nikolai Latyshev, a vice president at Yasavei, a local organization fighting for indigenous rights. “There’s enough land and reindeer for now, but what if that changes?”
Most Nenets who live here devote themselves to traditional occupations, like reindeer herding and fishing, existing barely at subsistence levels, as the district’s economy booms on the back of sky-high oil prices.
“To live poor with such rich neighbors isn’t normal,” said Mikhail Kanev, 52, a reindeer herder who shares a choom with his brother, his son and a friend. Nenets comprise about 17 percent of the district’s population.
Kanev makes about 3,000 rubles per month ($125), and even here, nearly 40 kilometers into the tundra, expenses run high. In winter, much of the tundra can only be traversed by snowmobile, and gasoline is expensive. There are warm clothes to buy and cell phone bills to pay.
“For two years, I haven’t really received my wage anyway because of my debts,” Kanev said, sitting at a table in the choom laden with reindeer meat, vodka and tea. 
“You work for money, but buy things from the shop on credit, and my wage goes directly to pay that off,” Kanev said.
Yet, according to official surveys, the Nenets autonomous district places among the country’s best regions in terms of living standards. 
The average wage here is 33,000 rubles ($1,400) per month, and the district’s administration is overflowing with oil revenues, which provide more than 90 percent of its budget.
Naryan-Mar, the regional capital, is dotted with modern buildings and construction sites. Prices for groceries rival those of Moscow, as transport costs add to the official 12 percent inflation rate. No roads or trains from the rest of the country reach the district, and everything must be flown in by plane.
Seeing how their Russian neighbors live, many indigenous Nenets youth find it difficult to keep to traditional ways, locals say. Worse, that way of life is being threatened by the very projects enriching the area.
Like hundreds of reindeer herders, Kanev and his colleagues migrate south every winter, ever closer to their base at Krasniye, a settlement outside the capital that is home to their cooperative settlement (which they still refer to using the Soviet-era term, kolkhoz).
In summer they return north, trying to dodge the pipelines that increasingly crisscross the district, as mainly LUKoil subsidiaries seek to develop the fields that were first discovered in Soviet times.
“They don’t clean up after themselves,” Kanev said of the oil companies. “Metal from the pipes lies around everywhere.”
Their route takes them past the vast Yuzhno-Khilchuyu oil field, the largest project in the Nenets autonomous district, which NaryanMarNefteGaz is planning to bring online this year.
Nenets lies in the oil and gas-rich Timan-Pechora basin and holds an estimated 3.6 billion tons of recoverable oil and gas reserves, with just 70 million tons pumped so far, according to figures provided by the regional administration.
The first oil began flowing in 1988, from the Kharyaga field, which is now run by a production-sharing agreement between LUKoil, France’s Total and the regional administration.
The companies promise to build sections of pipeline high above ground, so the reindeer can pass under without disrupting their normal route. 
But the firms often don’t follow through on their pledges, Kanev and his colleagues said.
“Then we have to just go around them,” he said.
“A number of areas are simply too crowded with installations and tracks that destroy the vegetation so that the area is deteriorated,” said Winfried Dallmann, a senior research fellow at Norway’s Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research.
Around 90 percent of the entire district is considered reindeer feeding-ground. But the herders are confined to using 70 percent of that area, Dallmann said.
“The rest is either taken from the people or they cannot use it because the reindeer can’t go there — they can’t cross some of the pipelines,” he said.
Andrei Zayarny, who heads LUKoil-Komi’s negotiations with indigenous peoples, said the firm was working with a Soviet-era mess, left over from when geologists made their first inroads into the district in the 1960s.
“When the Soviet Union fell apart, a lot of their work was thrown into the tundra,” he said, adding that the company earmarks 10 million to 15 million rubles ($430,000 to $640,000) per year to recultivate the tundra.
“We follow through on all ecological standards because we are a private company and have to answer to high standards,” Zayarny said.
The indigenous Nenets, organized through 19 cooperative settlements, conclude long-term contracts that run as long as 45 years, by which they lease land from the administration. That means the oil firms must win their approval to build pipelines and platforms on their land — it is their only leverage.
“We give them socio-economic support,” said Sergei Ruzhnikov, chief spokesman for NaryanMarNefteGaz, during an interview inside the regional administration offices. “We don’t have to do it, we do it because we want to.
“They get what they want from us and we get their agreement to do our work on their land,” he said.
Yet Latyshev, of Yasavei, said the natives were effectively coerced into agreeing. “It’s hard since there is barely any property ownership here,” he said. “When an oil company gets a license for a field, the government must give them land — oil must be produced. In this case, the reindeer herders are basically forced to agree,” he said.
Dallmann agreed. “They feel they are more or less powerless against the piece-by-piece loss of reindeer pastures and natural areas,” he said. “Of course people want to talk and have a dialogue, but nothing really happens and industrial development just goes its way.
“They are not necessarily against oil development in principle, but the way it is done — laws are not really upheld, there is no constructive dialogue,” he said.
Ruzhnikov declined to put a figure on the amount of support the firm gives to the local reindeer herders, saying the Nenets had asked for confidentiality to prevent “jealousy.”
“We understand that our work bothers them — pipeline construction, the sound of increased helicopter flights — so we finance a yearly economic program. We buy them groceries, build apartments, give them medicine and clothes — everything they need for a normal life,” he said.
Yet life in the tundra is far from normal.
Alcoholism and drug use is rampant, a fact local Russians blame on the harsh living conditions and the natives’ character. Activists say, however, that it is a result of the imposed hopelessness about their lot in life.
“It’s a syndrome among indigenous people who are deprived of their way of life and have difficulties to adopt to another one,” Dallmann said. “They have problems with their identity and some start to drink. That’s just a fact all over the Arctic, and it’s not their fault,” he said.

TITLE: Russia Advances After Injury Ends QFs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: The Czech Republic conceded its Davis Cup quarterfinal to Russia on Sunday after Tomas Berdych injured his ankle against Nikolai Davydenko.
World No. 9 Berdych fell when he lunged for a forehand baseline shot on a break point against Davydenko’s serve in the fourth game of the fifth set.
Elsewhere, Spain defeated Germany 3-0 on Saturday, while the United States and Argentina will take 2-1 leads into the reverse singles against France and Sweden respectively.
A doctor bandaged up Berdych’s ankle but eventually he limped off, handing Davydenko a 6-3, 2-6, 6-7, 6-3, 1-2 victory and dashing the Czechs’ hopes of an upset victory over Russia, which has not lost at home since 1995.
With the tie poised at 2-1 to Russia, Berdych had to defeat world No. 4 Davydenko, whom he had failed to beat in six previous meetings.
But on Sunday, in front of a partisan Moscow crowd, Berdych pushed Davydenko to his limits during a match in which the momentum seesawed.
Berdych injured his ankle just as Davydenko’s serve was looking increasingly vulnerable.
The teams had split Friday’s singles, with Marat Safin beating Berdych in five sets before Radek Stepanek’s three-set win over Igor Andreyev leveled the tie. Davydenko and Andreyev beat Stepanek and Pavel Vizner in Saturday’s doubles.
Russia captain Shamil Tarpishchev left Davydenko out of Friday’s singles after he arrived late in Moscow following his Miami triumph last weekend.
Russia will face Argentina or Sweden in the semifinals in September.
Fernando Verdasco and Feliciano Lopez displayed nerves of steel to win a marathon doubles match Saturday and propel Spain into the Davis Cup semifinals.
They battled for almost five hours before grinding out a 6-7, 7-6, 6-4, 2-6, 12-10 win over Philipp Kohlschreiber and Philipp Petzschner, giving Spain an unbeatable 3-0 lead over Germany in Bremen.
The two-time champion is now eager to meet holders the United States and avenge last year’s 4-1 quarterfinal defeat.
“We’d rather face the U.S. as we’d be at home,” Spain captain Emilio Sanchez said. “It would be great to have another go at them after losing over there last year.”
The Americans lead their tie against France 2-1 in Winston-Salem and, despite going down in the doubles, will be favorites to seal their passage into the last four.
Top-ranked Mike and Bob Bryan missed out on a chance to become the most successful American doubles pairing when they lost 6-7, 7-5, 6-3, 6-4 to Arnaud Clement and Michael Llodra.
They had shared a 14-1 win-loss Davis Cup record with John McEnroe and Peter Fleming but must now wait before securing a 15th win.
David Nalbandian and Guillermo Canas made the most of the raucous Buenos Aires atmosphere to beat Sweden’s Jonas Bjorkman and Robert Linstedt 7-5, 6-4, 6-4 in an ill-tempered match.
Visiting teams have often complained about the crowd’s overzealous behavior in Argentina and on Saturday it was the Swedes who found the Estadio Parque Roca an inhospitable place.
Tempers frayed in the second set when Sweden captain Mats Wilander, amid jeering and whistling, complained to the umpire that Nalbandian was using time-wasting tactics to disrupt his team’s rhythm.
“I think they got a bit unnerved,” Nalbandian said. “I wanted to make the public happy by winning, so we played every point as if it was the last.”

TITLE: Zimbabwe Election Crisis Enters Week 3
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HARARE, Zimbabwe — Authorities said Sunday they would recount the votes from nearly two dozen parliamentary races as Zimbabwe’s ruling party sought to overturn election results that cost it control of the legislature for the first time in the nation’s history.
As Zimbabwe’s election crisis headed into a third week — with the results of the presidential vote still not released — southern African leaders held an emergency summit and called for the swift verification of the results in the presence of all parties.
The summit declaration, following an all-night, marathon meeting in neighboring Zambia that ended Sunday morning, fell far short of opposition calls for neighboring leaders to pressure President Robert Mugabe to step down after 28 years in power.
It also did not fulfill the hopes of Western powers, the United Nations and regional rights groups for the summit — which Mugabe skipped — to at least demand an immediate announcement of results from the March 29 vote.
In a sign of growing impatience with Mugabe, however, South Africa’s powerful speaker of parliament broke ranks with President Thabo Mbeki’s policy of quiet diplomacy toward Zimbabwe and urged the international community to speak out.
National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete told the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Cape Town that they cannot “remain silent about the situation in Zimbabwe.”
She said the failure to publish the election results was an example of a “democratic process gone wrong.”
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who attended the summit, claims to have won the presidential election outright. Independent tallies showed Tsvangirai won the most votes, but not enough to avoid a runoff.
The election commission has released results for the nation’s 210 parliamentary races showing Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change winning 109 seats, giving it control of the parliament and humiliating Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, which won only 97 seats. Three seats will be decided in by-elections and the remaining seat was won by an independent.
In the days since those results were announced, however, the government has alleged that widespread electoral fraud biased the outcome against the ruling party and arrested 11 election officials.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said it would conduct a full recount on Saturday of the presidential and parliamentary ballots cast in 23 constituencies — all but one of them won by the opposition, the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper reported. Commission chairman George Chiweshe said candidates, party representatives and observers would be allowed to witness the process, the paper said.
If the vote is overturned in even some of those districts, the ruling party could take control of parliament again.
The MDC filed a petition Friday to block any attempt at a re-count and a hearing is set for Tuesday, opposition lawyer Alec Muchadehama said. He argued that ruling party representatives had signed off on the official tallies from those districts after the vote, but are now calling them fraudulent.
“Suddenly, two weeks later, the same person who said ‘this is the outcome’ and signed for it says they need a re-count,” Muchadehama said. He said that in the district the MDC is challenging, the party representative had refused to sign off on the result.
Government spokesman Bright Matonga said the reports of irregularities came from both sides, adding that he did not know if the re-count would further delay presidential results.
Zimbabwe’s High Court is expected to rule Monday on an opposition petition to force the immediate release of the presidential results. The court, stacked with judges loyal to Mugabe, has waited more than a week to rule on the urgent appeal.
The MDC charges that Mugabe is delaying the result while his party wages a campaign of violence against those who voted against him. International rights groups also have documented the attacks.
Government officials have repeatedly dismissed all charges of violence and intimidation.
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa — one of few African leaders to openly criticize Mugabe — called Saturday’s regional summit to try to resolve the standoff.
But the summit declaration recommended little action, saying the results should be verified quickly and in the presence of the candidates.

TITLE: Immelman Wins Major
AUTHOR: By Mark Lamport-Stokes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: AUGUSTA, Georgia — Trevor Immelman survived a double-bogey at the 16th hole to become the first South African to win the U.S. Masters in 30 years with a three-shot victory on Sunday.
Maintaining his composure in swirling winds at Augusta National, the dapper 28-year-old got up and down from a greenside bunker to par 17 before parring the last to seal his first major title.
Two ahead overnight, Immelman followed in the footsteps of his childhood hero Gary Player to secure the prized green jacket with a three-over-par 75, matching the highest closing score by a Masters winner set by Arnold Palmer in 1962.
He also became the fifth wire-to-wire champion at Augusta, and the first since American Raymond Floyd in 1976, with an eight-under total of 280.
World number one Tiger Woods, overwhelming favorite at the start of the week after winning nine times in his previous 11 tournaments worldwide, had to settle for second place after closing with a 72.
Six strokes off the pace going into the final round, Woods struggled to make headway in his bid for a 14th major title and the first hurdle of a unique calendar grand slam.
“It was a tough day out there and I was just trying to be tough,” a beaming Immelman said after being presented with his green jacket by last year’s champion, American Zach Johnson.
“That’s all I kept saying to myself, just hang in there and play one shot at a time. There’s a disaster around every corner, as I showed on 16. I just tried to hang in there and I’m proud of myself for doing that. I can’t believe I did it.”
Immelman said he had gained a major boost from Player after Saturday’s third round when the 72-year-old left him a telephone message saying he was confident the young South African would win.
“It meant an awful lot,” he added. “I played it to my whole family on speaker phone. Mr. Player has been at me the whole week, since Tuesday when we played together, telling me to believe in myself, telling me I’m good enough to do it.”
Woods offset three birdies with three bogeys to finish at five-under 283, dashing his bid for a sweep of this year’s four majors.
“I didn’t putt well all week,” the four-times Masters champion said. “You have bad weeks and you have good weeks, and certainly this week was not one of my best.”
Immelman, who four months ago had surgery to remove a non-cancerous tumor on his diaphragm, was caught by American playing partner Brandt Snedeker after two holes.
Both players bogeyed the par-four first after failing to reach the green in two before the mop-haired Snedeker rolled in a 40-footer to eagle the par-five second.
Immelman, aiming to become the first South African to win the Masters since Player in 1978, parred the hole after failing to get up and down from the right greenside bunker for birdie.
Although Immelman birdied the par-four fifth after hitting a superb approach to four feet, he squandered an opportunity to forge five ahead when he narrowly missed a three-foot birdie putt at the seventh.

TITLE: Porn Star Hopes to Heat Up Italian Politics After Election
AUTHOR: By Phil Stewart
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ROME — She had no desire to be just another smiling face in Italian politics. So when porn star Milly D’Abbraccio designed her campaign posters, it was obvious she was going to show off her bottom.
Targeting her male fan base, the veteran of Italy’s adult entertainment industry has plastered images of her derriere all around the Eternal City in a bid to win a seat in Rome’s city hall.
If elected, D’Abbraccio wants to create a red light area with strip clubs, erotic discos and sex shops called “Love City” just kilometers away from the Vatican.
“It would be something cute, clean — nothing to do with prostitution,” said the actress whose films include “The Kiss of the Cobra” and “Paolina Borghese, Imperial Nymphomaniac”.
D’Abbraccio, in her 40s, isn’t the first adult entertainer to dip her painted toenails into Italian politics. Ilona Staller, known as “Cicciolina”, sat in parliament in the 1980s and was famous for her impromptu stripteases.
“It was simpler then,” D’Abbraccio said. Public nudity isn’t the guaranteed attention-grabber it once was, she noted.
D’Abbraccio hopes to capitalize on increasing disenchantment with Italian politics. The recession-prone nation voted on Sunday and Monday in elections to pick a prime minister as well as lawmakers, mayors and city councilors.
“People don’t want to see these politicians’ faces anymore,” she told Reuters in an interview from her Rome apartment.
She said she was tapping into her popularity among pornography fans as “an act of generosity” to help Italy’s socialists, who are fielding her in the municipal race.
“I am the derriere of the Socialist party,” she concluded.
Silvio Berlusconi, who leads in opinion polls to become prime minister for a third time, drew scorn recently for saying his party boasted the prettiest women in politics. Critics called him a chauvinist.
D’Abbraccio also objected, but for another reason. “I think he is wrong, because he lost the prettiest one (me),” said D’Abbraccio, whose campaign and adult professional website is www.millydabbraccio.com.

TITLE: World Bank Seeks Deal On Rising Food Prices
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The World Bank plans to invest up to $3 billion over the next two to three years in stock and bond indices, to stabilize its income and safeguard against rising inflation and falling interest rates, bank officials said on Sunday.
Some World Bank member countries said it meant a move into riskier assets because, unlike the safer fixed income securities the bank normally invests in, there is no guarantee that stocks or bonds will appreciate.
Others said that by diversifying the income portfolio of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or IBRD, which lends to middle-income and credit-worthy poorer countries, the bank would get a better return on its capital for development projects.
In contrast, projects for poor countries are funded from the bank’s International Development Association, or IDA.
“At the request of shareholders, we created the Long-Term Income Portfolio to stabilize IBRD’s income and improve the return on capital over the long term for development purposes,” World Bank Chief Financial Officer Vincenzo La Via told Reuters.
In the current market some investments considered secure turned out to be riskier than anticipated as the U.S. subprime mortgage mess engulfed a surprisingly wide range of securities.
Board officials said a communique expected later on Sunday after meetings of the bank and International Monetary Fund’s Development Committee would refer to the need for “better deployment of the bank’s capital.”
The officials said the up to $3 billion set aside for the investment represented less than 10 percent of IBRD’s $36 billion capital, which includes paid-in capital from the bank’s member countries and accumulated reserves.
World Bank officials said the idea sprang from discussions among the bank’s member countries last year and was not a reaction to current turmoil in financial and credit markets.
Some officials argue that the IBRD’s investments in fixed income securities were vulnerable to lower interest rates and rising inflationary pressures. Officials said the investments will be managed by outside managers and will be composed of a 60/40 split between equities and bonds.

TITLE: United States Rejects Possible Boycott of Olympics
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — A boycott of Olympic ceremonies by world leaders over China‘s crackdown in Tibet would be an evasion of responsibility and less effective than quiet diplomacy, the U.S. national security adviser said on Sunday.
The remarks by White House adviser Stephen Hadley come as a challenge to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has said she will not attend the opening ceremony of this year’s Beijing Olympics, and to those calling for U.S. President George W. Bush and other leaders to do the same.
“I think unfortunately a lot of countries say ‘well, if we say we are not going to the opening ceremonies, we’ve checked the box on Tibet’ — that’s a cop out,” Hadley said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“If other countries are concerned about Tibet they ought to do what we are doing, through quiet diplomacy,” he said. “They would put pressure on Chinese authorities, quietly, to meet with representatives of the [exiled Tibetan spiritual leader] Dalai Lama and use this as an opportunity to help resolve this situation.”
Bush has said he plans to go to the Olympic Games in August, although the White House has not said whether he will attend the opening ceremonies. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain have said Bush should consider an opening-ceremony boycott.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has indicated he may not attend, and the European Parliament has passed a resolution calling for European Union leaders to consider boycotting the ceremony due to the crackdown in Tibet.
Dissatisfaction with the level of China’s pressure on Sudan to end violence in the Darfur region has also fueled calls to boycott the opening ceremony.
U.S. speedskating gold medalist Joey Cheek, who co-founded the Team Darfur international athlete’s coalition, said on Fox that the sort of quiet diplomacy favored by the Bush administration has not worked in Darfur.
“They’ve been using quiet diplomacy for the last two years, as tens of thousands of more people have been killed,” he said.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who led a 54-nation boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he did not endorse a boycott of this year’s games.
“That was a totally different experience in 1980, when the Soviet Union had brutally invaded and killed thousands and thousands of people,” Carter said.

TITLE: Power Deal Reached In Nairobi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NAIROBI, Kenya — President Mwai Kibaki named opposition leader Raila Odinga as prime minister Sunday, implementing a long-awaited power-sharing deal aimed at resolving a political crisis that left more than 1,000 people dead.
The deal marks the first time Kenya will have both a president and prime minister. But the working relationship between Kibaki and Odinga, which has been frosty in the past, will determine how long the coalition lasts.
The two men agreed in February to share power after a dispute over who won Kenya’s December presidential election triggered weeks of unrest that killed more than 1,000 people and uprooted 300,000 from their homes.
But negotiations over the Cabinet dragged on, and the public grew impatient. Scuffles broke out for three days last week between police and residents protesting the delay in Kenya’s largest slum, Kibera.
On Sunday, Kibaki announced the new Cabinet with the 40 ministries split equally between his Party of National Unity and its allied parties and Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement. Kibaki made the announcement a day after holding closed-door talks with Odinga.
The Cabinet includes two deputy prime ministers: Musalia Mudavadi, the second-in-command in Odinga’s party, and Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kibaki ally and son of Kenyan independence hero and first president, Jomo Kenyatta.
Kibaki and Odinga had come under growing pressure to implement the deal. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had said he was concerned by the slow pace of forming a new government under the deal he brokered, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also called them Monday.
The U.S. welcomed the implementation of the deal Sunday.
“We commend the president and prime minister-designate for once again making the courageous decisions necessary to move the nation forward,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
“We urge the president and prime minister-designate to maintain momentum by moving quickly to carry out institutional reforms,” he added. “We also urge them to personally lead efforts to promote reconciliation.”
The Kenyan leaders now must try to heal a divided nation, as well as restore one of Africa’s most promising economies. Kenya, one of the most tourist-friendly countries in Africa, has seen up to $1 billion in losses linked to the turmoil.
In many regions, the violence brought a bloody end to decades of coexistence among Kenya’s ethnic groups, transforming cities and towns where Kenyans had lived together — however uneasily at times — since independence from Britain in 1963.
Legally, the coalition will last until either the current parliament’s term ends in 2012 or a new constitution — to be negotiated in the next 12 months — is enacted.
But the focus will be on Kibaki’s and Odinga’s working relationship. Either side can end the new partnership at any time.
When Kibaki was hurriedly sworn in as president after the disputed December election, Odinga accused him of stealing the vote. Until they signed the peace deal in February, the opposition leader refused to recognize Kibaki as president. Kibaki, for his part, declined early in negotiations to share any power with Odinga, insisting he was legally elected.

TITLE: Tiger Loses Out on Slam
AUTHOR: By Jim Litke
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AUGUSTA, Georgia — The only way Tiger Woods gets a Grand Slam this year is by stopping off at Denny’s.
For the third year in a row, he knew how all those guys who chased him down the stretch of all those other majors felt: desperate leaving the first tee, frustrated when none of the gambles paid off, and, finally, beaten.
Woods walked off Augusta National on Sunday after an even-par 72 and went directly into the clubhouse, up a winding staircase and into the refuge of the champions’ locker room. A moment later, a Masters official scurried out carrying four freshly pressed green jackets on hangers, one of which was going to be draped across the shoulders of Trevor Immelman. Woods stayed there until after the South African’s par putt fell on No. 18, officially ending his own quest to sweep the season’s four majors, something Tiger said was “easily within reach” just two months ago.
When someone asked whether losing the first one would affect the rest of his season, Woods smiled more broadly than he had all day.
 “I got three more,” he said.
True enough. But there’s still a glaring hole in his resume. Despite cutting Immelman’s lead in half  — from six strokes to three  — Woods still could not win a big one coming from behind.
He put himself into a king-sized divot from the outset by failing to make putts and birdies at the par-5s, which used to be his bread and butter at the Masters. For the week, he was just 4-under on the par-5s and ranked 21st in putting. In that sense, the final round was a snapshot of why he leaves here empty-handed.
“You’ve just got to play them under par each day,” he said, but this is how he played them Sunday:
At No. 2, with the wind at his back, Woods tried to reach the green in two after laying up the three previous days. He came up a yard short. At No. 8, he put his second shot over a hill at the back of the green and couldn’t get up and down. At No. 13, he made a great recovery after a drive that skittered onto the pine straw on the right side of the fairway, then stuck a wedge from 97 yards to 4 feet—and missed. At No. 15, he hit his second long and well right of the green and failed to get up and down.
“We figured if we shot something in the 60s,” Woods said, “we’re going to be right there with a chance to win, so we tried to put a lot of pressure on Trevor up there.
“It turns out that would have been the case,” he added. “But I didn’t do my part.”
That seemed almost unthinkable at the start of the season, and perhaps even dating back to last August, when he took off on another of those sublime runs, arriving here having won eight of his last 10 starts. But this isn’t the same Augusta National that Woods scorched four times, shooting an average score of 14 1/2 under par.
Masters officials may not have “Tiger-proofed” their golf course by adding length and trees and expanding the bunkers, but they forced Woods to play the percentages like everybody else, and drew the rest of the field closer in the bargain. Immelman’s margin of victory was the same number of strokes by which he beat Woods on the par-5s.
In Tiger’s first year here as a professional, his raw power was not just intimidating; it translated into a huge advantage. He never needed more than a 4-iron for his second shot into No. 2 and hit wedges on his approaches into No. 15. The first three days here, he didn’t even try to hit No. 2 in two shots and used a fairway wood for his second to lay up short of the greenside bunkers.
Woods laid the blame for his failure to make more birdies on his putting.
“I’ve tried to release it, tried to get it going and tried to hook my putts, tried to do anything to get the thing rolling properly. I just didn’t quite have it this week.”
What Woods did have was the burden of outsized expectation, something that was evident as soon as he started overpowering all those regular-sized layouts on the PGA Tour and Europe. Some people actually thought he could win every time out, but that was no more realistic than winning the Grand Slam. In any shootout where birdies are the target, Woods is the last guy you would bet against. When par is at a premium, the way it is at the majors because of course setups, he’s still the favorite, but the odds shrink considerably.
“I’m a little hungry right now,” Woods said, and soon after, headed off toward the clubhouse in search of something to eat.
The clubhouse loomed large in the distance. There wasn’t a Denny’s anywhere in sight.

TITLE: Superfast Swimming Suit in Spotlight
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MANCHESTER, England — Speedo’s record-breaking suit passed another test at a meeting Saturday between the manufacturer and swimming’s world governing body.
“FINA confirmed that all the swimsuits approved so far are complying with the specifications,” a statement from the governing body said.
There have been 19 long-course world marks set since Speedo’s LZR Racer suit was introduced in February. Nine additional world marks have been established through three days at the short-course world championships. All but one of the records have come with swimmers wearing the LZR.
The meeting had originally been planned to review future approval of new suits, but it turned into a debate about the suit that has taken over the record books in the last two months.
“As far as we’re concerned, there is nothing wrong with our swimsuit, and it was agreed on at the meeting that it conforms with FINA’s rules,” Stephen Rubin, the chairman of Speedo holding company Pentland, told The Associated Press.
Critics of the LZR said it had illegal levels of buoyancy and called it “technological doping” because it combines a polyurethane layer with a layer of normal fabric.
“The discussion clarified that there was a broad understanding between the manufacturers and FINA that the rules were not meant and should not be interpreted as limiting the materials to (strictly) fabrics, but that other material could be used, as has already been the case for several years,” FINA said.
The argument of Arena Group CEO Cristiano Portas, the leading opponent of the LZR, centered on the word “fabric,” which he took as prohibiting polyurethane.
“I have to acknowledge that the other manufacturers had a broader understanding,” Portas said. “The most important thing was to clarify the rules. Now that we know fabric is the same thing as material, we will develop a new suit.”
Matt Zimmer, director of promotions for TYR, which also has a new suit that Arena has contended violated the rules, called the meeting “excellent.”
“(FINA) want to go forward, not backward,” he said. “And it would be counterintuitive for the manufacturers to go backward.”
Other manufacturers at the meeting, which was closed to the media, included Diana, Descente, Adidas, Nike and Mizuno.
Zimmer said that the most important thing remaining to be clarified is the buoyancy rule.
“A lot of people say our suit and Speedo’s are buoyant, but the fact is it’s not buoyant, it’s just really effective,” he said.
Zimmer said FINA has no test to determine buoyancy.
“It was agreed that the manufacturers will submit to FINA a common proposal for additional criteria and corresponding methods of testing which may be included in the process,” FINA’s statement said.

TITLE: President Bush Lays Out Red Carpet for Pontiff
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The leader of the world’s Roman Catholics has been to the White House only once in history. That changes this week, and President Bush is pulling out all the stops: driving out to a suburban military base to meet Pope Benedict XVI’s plane, bringing a giant audience to the South Lawn and hosting a fancy East Room dinner.
These are all firsts.
Bush has never before given a visiting leader the honor of picking him up at the airport. In fact, no president has done so at Andrews Air Force Base, the typical landing spot for modern leaders.
A crowd of up to 12,000 is due at the White House on Wednesday morning for the pope’s official, pomp-filled arrival ceremony. It will feature the U.S. and Holy See anthems, a 21-gun salute, and the U.S. Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. Both men will make remarks before their Oval Office meeting and a send-off for his popemobile down Pennsylvania Avenue.
The White House crowd will be the largest of Bush’s presidency. It even beats the audience last spring for Queen Elizabeth II, which numbered about 7,000.
The evening festivities will mark the first time the Bushes have put on a high-profile meal in honor of someone who isn’t even a guest. Wednesday is the pontiff’s 81st birthday, and the menu celebrates his German heritage with Bavarian-style food.
But Benedict’s prayer service that evening with U.S. bishops at a famed Washington basilica preclude him from coming to the dinner, according to the White House. Catholic leaders will be there instead.
The president explained the special treatment — particularly the airport greeting.
“One, he speaks for millions. Two, he doesn’t come as a politician; he comes as a man of faith,” Bush told the EWTN Global Catholic Network in an interview aired Friday. He added that he wanted to honor Benedict’s conviction that “there’s right and wrong in life, that moral relativism has a danger of undermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies.”
The Bush-Benedict get-together will be the 25th meeting between a pope and a sitting president.
The first did not come until shortly after the end of World War I, when Woodrow Wilson was received at the Vatican by Pope Benedict XV in 1919. The next wasn’t for 40 more years, when President Eisenhower saw Pope John XXIII in Rome. President Carter hosted the first White House visit by a pope, when John Paul II came on Oct. 6, 1979.
Since then, such audiences have become a must-do. Every president has met with the pope at least once, often more. This week makes Bush the record-holder, with a total of five meetings with two popes.
There are more than 64 million reasons for this. Catholics number nearly one-quarter of the U.S. population, making them a desirable constituency for politicians to court. Worldwide, there are now an estimated 1 billion Roman Catholics.
“The pope represents not just the Catholic church but the possibility of moral argument in world affairs and it is very important for American presidents to rub up against that from time to time,” said George Weigel, a Catholic theologian and biographer of Pope John Paul II.
The Vatican — seat of a government as well as a religious headquarters — has an interest, too.
“It wants to be a player in world affairs, and everyone understands that to do that you have to be in conversation with the United States,” said John Allen, the Vatican correspondent for the independent National Catholic Reporter.
On social issues such as abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research, Bush and Benedict have plenty of common ground.
But they disagree over the war in Iraq, just as Bush did with Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul.
When Benedict was a cardinal before the 2003 invasion, the now-pontiff categorically dismissed the idea that a preventive strike against Iraq could be justified under Catholic doctrine. In his Easter message last year, Benedict said “nothing positive comes from Iraq.”
Benedict told Bush at their first meeting last summer at the Vatican that he was concerned about “the worrisome situation in Iraq.” Bush characterized the pontiff’s concerns as mostly limited to the treatment of the Christian minority in Muslim-majority Iraq. The statement out of the Vatican suggested a broader discussion.
Weigel predicted talks this time would be focused almost entirely there.
Prominent Christians have been slain in Iraq in recent weeks and tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians are believed to have fled the country because of attacks and threats. “The Vatican is a very adult place,” he said. “The arguments of five years ago are over.”
The current pope’s approach may be softer than that of John Paul, who turned from Bush’s presentation to him of the Medal of Freedom in 2004 to read a statement about his “grave concern” over events in Iraq. But Benedict is no less committed to the church’s stand on issues such as abortion, stem cells and the death penalty, as well as war.
In fact, the death penalty is another area of long-held disagreement, with Bush a strong supporter. 
Benedict also speaks forcefully against punitive immigration laws and the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, and for environmental protection and social welfare — all in ways that often run counter to Bush administration policies.

TITLE: Carter Courts Controversy In Israel by Seeking Hamas Ties
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Israel’s secret service has declined to assist U.S. agents guarding former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit in which Israeli leaders have shunned him, U.S. sources close to the matter said on Monday.
Carter angered the Israeli government with plans to meet Hamas’s top leader, Khaled Meshaal, in Syria, and for describing Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories as “a system of apartheid” in a 2006 book.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who brokered Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab neighbor, Egypt, signed in 1979, met Israel’s largely ceremonial president, Shimon Peres, on Sunday but was shunned by the political leadership, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Israel has also rejected Carter’s request to meet jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi, who is seen as a possible successor to President Mahmoud Abbas, a spokesman for Carter said. Barghouthi was convicted in 2004 of murder by an Israeli court over the killing of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk in attacks by Palestinian militants.

TITLE: Man U Edges Closer to Title Win
AUTHOR: By Mitch Phillips
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United surged six points clear at the top of the Premier League with a 2-1 comeback victory over Arsenal at Old Trafford on Sunday that also snuffed out the London club’s slim title hopes.
Emmanuel Adebayor put Arsenal ahead early in the second half but a Cristiano Ronaldo penalty levelled and Owen Hargreaves won it with a 72nd-minute free kick.
The result leaves United on 80 points, six clear of Chelsea, who host Wigan Athletic on Monday, with Arsenal on 71. United, who have a far superior goal difference, still have to play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.
Earlier on Sunday, Liverpool tightened their grip on fourth place when superbly-taken goals from Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres and a late Andriy Voronin effort gave them a 3-1 Anfield win over Blackburn Rovers. They have 66 points to the 61 of Everton, who drew 1-1 at Birmingham City on Saturday.
Arsenal traveled back to the north-west knowing they needed a win to save their season having been knocked out of the Champions League at Anfield on Tuesday.
They made most of the running in an open first half but were let down by some unconvincing finishing, especially by Adebayor.
However, the Togo striker did find the target three minutes into the second half, in controversial circumstances. Robin van Persie crossed from the left and with United’s defenders leaving the ball for keeper Edwin Van der Sar, Adebayor nipped in between them to put the ball into the net with his arm.
Just as they had in their midweek classic at Anfield, Arsenal handed the initiative straight back through poor defending, this time William Gallas handling in the box to give away a needless penalty five minutes later.
Ronaldo, forced to take the spot kick twice after the referee blew for encroachment, duly dispatched it for his 38th goal of the season.
In between the goals Van der Sar had to make two sharp saves to prevent own goals as Rio Ferdinand and Wes Brown deflected crosses goalwards.
United though always looked dangerous and got the winner when Hargreaves took responsibility ahead of Ronaldo and planted a perfectly-executed 20-metre free kick over the wall and into the unprotected half of Jens Lehmann’s goal.
United held out without too many further scares to inflict a defeat that left Arsenal with a tally of eight points from their last eight league games having led the league by five points two months ago.
“The quality of that game today was outstanding,” United manager Alex Ferguson told Sky Sports News.

TITLE: Obama Condemned as ‘Elitist’
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: STEELTON, Pennsylvania — Accused of being elitist, a defiant Senator Barack Obama lashed out at rival Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying “Shame on her” and mocking her vocal support for gun rights as their political tempest threatened to consume the Democratic presidential race.
It was a startling twist Sunday to the three-day controversy that erupted after the publication of comments the Illinois senator made at a San Francisco fundraiser a week earlier. At that event, Obama said some working-class voters are bitter over their economic circumstances and “cling to guns and religion” as a result.
Campaigning Sunday in Pennsylvania, Clinton derided the comments as “elitist and divisive” and suggested they could doom Democrats’ chances for recapturing the White House in November if Obama were the nominee.
At a union hall outside Harrisburg, Obama said he’d expected blowback from GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain but said he’d been “a little disappointed” to be criticized by Clinton.
Laughing, the Illinois senator noted Clinton seemed much more interested in guns since he made his comments than she had been in the past. On Saturday, the former first lady reminisced about learning to shoot on summer vacations in Scranton, where her father grew up.
“She is running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment. She’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley,” Obama said.
Clinton has told campaign audiences that she supports the rights of hunters. She’s also said she once shot a duck in Arkansas, where she served as first lady.
Clinton, who is trailing Obama in the popular vote and pledged delegates, has pounded Obama since audio from his San Francisco appearance was posted on The Huffington Post web site. She hoped the comments might give her a new opening to court working-class Democrats less than 10 days before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, which she needs win to keep her campaign going.
At the San Francisco fundraiser, Obama tried to explain his troubles in winning over some blue-collar voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions: “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
In Scranton on Sunday, Clinton said Obama’s words would probably alienate voters in Pennsylvania and other states holding primaries in the coming weeks. Indiana and North Carolina vote on May 6.
“How does he see people here in this neighborhood, throughout Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, other places in our country?” she asked during an informal news conference. “I think that’s what people are looking for, some explanation, and he has simply not provided one.”
Fighting back, Obama said Clinton’s history proved she was not as sensitive to the concerns of blue-collar voters as she claimed. 
He noted that Clinton accepted campaign contributions from political action committees and drug and insurance industry lobbyists, which he does not.
“This is the same person who spent a decade with her husband campaigning for NAFTA, and now goes around saying she’s opposed to NAFTA,” Obama said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is widely unpopular among blue-collar voters.
Obama’s comments came up later Sunday in a forum on faith and values at Pennsylvania’s Messiah College.
“What I was saying is that when economic hardship hits in these communities, what people have is they’ve got family, they’ve got their faith, they’ve got the traditions that have been passed onto them from generation to generation,” Obama said at the forum, which was televised on CNN. “Those aren’t bad things. That’s what they have left.”
Obama planned to address the issue of which candidate was most in touch with working voters in a speech before the annual meeting of The Associated Press in Washington on Monday.
Clinton stuck with her criticism of Obama at the Sunday night forum but said she didn’t believe his words implied he lacked religious faith.
“Someone goes to a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco and makes comments that do seem elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing,” she said. “That has nothing to do with him being a good man or a man of faith.”

TITLE: Red Sox Fan Tries to Jinx Stadium
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — A construction worker’s bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.
After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.
The team said it learned that a Red Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the new Bronx stadium, which will open next year across the street from the current ballpark, from a report in the New York Post on Friday.
Yankees president Randy Levine said team officials at first considered leaving the shirt where it was.
“The first thought was, you know, it’s never a good thing to be buried in cement when you’re in New York,” Levine said. “But then we decided, why reward somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing?”
On Saturday, construction workers who remembered the employee, Gino Castignoli phoned in tips about the shirt’s location.
“We had anonymous people come tell us where it was, and we were able to find it,” said Frank Gramarossa, a project executive with Turner Construction, the general contractor on the site.
It took about five hours of drilling Saturday to locate the shirt under 2 feet of concrete, he said.
On Sunday, Levine and Yankees CEO Lonn Trost watched as Gramarossa and foreman Rich Corrado finished the job and pulled the shirt from the rubble.
In shreds from the jackhammers, the shirt still bore the letters “Red Sox” on the front. It was a David Ortiz jersey, No. 34.
Trost said the Yankees had discussed possible criminal charges against Castignoli with the district attorney’s office.
“We will take appropriate action since fortunately we do know the name of the individual,” he said.
A spokesman for Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson said Sunday he did not know whether any criminal charges might apply.
“It’s typical Yankees,” Castignoli told the Boston Herald on Monday. “It’s not like I snuck in there. It didn’t do any structural damage. I didn’t put anyone in harm’s way.”
Castignoli, 46, said he became a Red Sox fan during his childhood in 1975 when he idolized slugger Jim Rice.
As construction began for the new Yankee Stadium, Castignoli said his union got after him to work on the project. The Red Sox fan was reluctant.
“I would not go near Yankee Stadium, not for all the hot dogs in the world,” he told the Herald.
But he relented, and hatched the plan to plant the jersey. He said he worked just a single day at the stadium project.
“It was worth it,” he said.
Levine said the shirt would be cleaned up and sent to the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Along with that, New York will send a Yankees Universe T-shirt, which is sold to benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
“Hopefully the Jimmy Fund will auction it off and we’ll take the act that was a very, very bad act and turn it into something beautiful,” he said.

TITLE: Sports Watch
TEXT: <b>Rubin Stays on Top</b>
BELGRADE (Reuters) — Surprise leaders Rubin Kazan stretched their perfect start to five matches after a brace by Turkey striker Gokdeniz Karadeniz helped them to a 4-0 away rout of Khimkhi.
Dynamo Moscow stayed second, two points behind the leaders, after Bulgarian Tsvetan Genkov and strike partner Dani scored two goals apiece in a 4-3 home win over city rivals Spartak.
Champions Zenit St. Peterbsurg remained in the bottom half of the table following a 1-1 home draw with Krylya Sovietov Samara that left them nine points off the pace.

<b>Beijing Air Control</b>
BEIJING (AP) — The Beijing city government has announced a sweeping plan to stop construction and close heavy industry to improve air quality ahead of the Olympics.
The city’s environmental protection body said Monday that the plans include stopping all digging and concrete pouring on construction sites from mid-July 20. Nineteen heavy-polluting industries have been told to cut their emissions by 30 percent.
Pollution — in addition to the violence in Tibet and other human rights issues — has been a major concern for China in the lead up to the Olympics.

<b>Gleb’s Diving Success</b>
MOSCOW (AP) — World champion Gleb Galperin of Russia won two golds on the men’s 10-meter platform at a diving Grand Prix on Sunday.
Galperin finished the men’s 10-meter platform competition with 523.25 points for his first international victory since winning the world championships in Melbourne in 2007. China’s Li Junbai was 13.15 points behind for second. Russia’s Viktor Minibayev had 488.75 for third.

<b>Torch in Oman</b>
MUSCAT, Oman (AP) — The Olympic torch arrived Monday in Oman amid tight security and expectations of a smooth relay of the flame on the Middle Eastern leg of its round-the-world tour. 
Officials said the flame arrived at Oman International Airport from Tanzania and was received by Omani sports minister Ali bin Masoud al-Sunaidy.
Oman has strong economic ties with China, which is an importer of its oil.

TITLE: Lonely Planet Defends Claims That Travel Guide Authors Make It All Up
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SYDNEY, Australia — Lonely Planet said Monday it stands by the accuracy of its travel guides following news reports that one of its authors claimed he plagiarized and invented sections of the books.
Australia’s Herald Sun and Sunday Telegraph newspapers reported that author Thomas Kohnstamm claimed he made up parts of the books he wrote, lifted information from other publications and accepted gifts in contravention of Lonely Planet’s policies.
But Kohnstamm later told The Associated Press that his remarks to the Australian newspapers were “taken out of context.”
“I did not make up sections. I did not plagiarize,” said Kohnstamm, who lives in Seattle.
Lonely Planet is reviewing the books that Kohnstamm contributed to but has so far found nothing inaccurate, said publisher Piers Pickard. He said Lonely Planet’s reputation was built on the integrity of its books and any inaccuracies would be quickly fixed.
Kohnstamm told the AP that while he had accepted perks such as discounted hotel rooms and free meals, he “never traded positive editorial coverage for any sort of a freebie.”
The newspapers also reported that Kohnstamm said he did not visit one of the countries he wrote about.
“They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia,” Kohnstamm was quoted as saying.
“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating who was an intern in the Colombian consulate.”
Pickard called that claim “disingenuous” because he was hired to write about the country’s history, not to travel there to review accommodation and restaurants. That work was done by two other authors.
“Thomas’ claims are not an accurate reflection of how our authors work,” Pickard told the AP.
On Sunday night, Kohnstamm agreed. “It was expected I would never go to Colombia” for the purposes of the guide book, he said.
His point, he said, was that to adequately cover an entire country, “it is necessary to piece together second hand information about things you are not able to see yourself.”
He added that few travel writers are able to visit all of the places they are expected to write about.
“I found out very quickly I was not able to go to all the places I needed to go to; I was not able to make the money stretch out to the end,” he said. “I don’t know what percentage of writers go to every place, but I don’t think most people do.”
The writer is due to visit Australia soon to promote his new book “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?” about his experiences in the guidebook business. His web site says he holds a masters degree in Latin American studies and has written more than a dozen books.

TITLE: Former Soviet Dissident Bridges Past and Present
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Cambridge, U.K.,-based Vladimir Bukovsky is a living link between today’s Russian opposition and the Soviet dissidents of the past. 
Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in a Soviet prison as a political prisoner before he was released and exiled to the West as the result of a strange exchange with a Chilean communist leader in 1976, returned to Russia last year to run for Russian president — although his candicacy was rejected by the authorities. 
Earlier this month, Bukovsky was in St. Petersburg to attend a conference called A New Agenda for Democratic Movement that aimed to unite the democratic opposition. Addressing conference delegates, he said forming parties in the 1990s was a “mistake” and democrats should return to the “original idea of a mass resistance movement in Russia, a mass movement for establishing democracy in Russia.” 
He garnered applause when he said that he was categorically against any form of struggle that required registration with the authorities. 
“We can’t let the authorities decide who the lawful opposition is or isn’t, we should act without preliminary permission,” he said. “The Constitution gives us such a right, and the constitutional right of a citizen doesn’t need approval from some bureaucrat.”
Vladimir Bukovsky spoke to The St. Petersburg Times later the same day.

<b>What are your first impressions of the conference?</b>
You see, the conference is only one step in a very long process. The process of opposition consolidation started earlier. I caught some stage of it in October and November last year, kind of participated in it a little, spoke to many people, and, on the whole some common positions could be felt.
Now it’s the next stage, the next step when everybody has already talked about the possibility, the necessity, of such a consolidation in public. Unfortunately, you can’t force such processes quickly, because there’s a lot of inertia, a lot of disagreements have been accumulated. I mean if you try to hasten this process, you will cause antagonism. You have to do it slower than you’d like.
In reality, if you ask me when the opposition should have united, I would say, in 1996, which is 12 years ago. It didn’t work then.
So today’s conference can be only considered in this general context — as one more step in the direction of where all of us are trying to go.
It’s an important step, nevertheless. A series of conferences in the Russian Federation’s regions and republics are being planned; the general conference, the congress, is due after that, somewhere by the end of the year. These are important steps.
The content offered in the project is written and distributed by the organizing committee. It’s very general, because nobody wants to get into particulars now; particulars divide. General positions allow you to be more flexible and unite people. This process is rather akin to diplomacy, that’s why it’s a little longish, a little boring, but inevitable.

<b>Nevertheless, the Union of Right Forces (SPS) has immediately come up with the suggestion of uniting on the basis of its own structure.</b>
It was [SPS leader Nikita] Belykh who said this, but it won’t pass, and the most people won’t agree with it for very many reasons. He didn’t distinguish between the struggle against the regime and the struggle for power, and that immediately diminishes the base.
You see, one thing is that when we struggle against the regime, struggle for the institution of democracy and the institution of free elections, for police repressions to be stopped, then all of us can unite, all of us. Even if the Communists go with us to protest police repressions, I won’t drive them away. You see, it’s their own business — if they agree with it, they join us. This is a much broader platform, a broader base.
But if you say that we are struggling for power, we can’t struggle for power with the Communists. This means in theory that we’ll have to share power with them, but this is impossible, and there can’t be any common platform for us and them.
This is the point; this is where Belykh’s mistake is. He stressed the wrong thing – we are not struggling for power at the moment, we are struggling for democracy, to have a political field [to play on] so that we can deal with political issues. You can’t have this all anymore in Russia today. That’s why we feel there’s enough ground for very different forces to unite on. All these forces are interested in a certain form of pluralism, a certain kind of fair play, which would allow people to define what they prefer. That’s all. 
That’s why I think that Belykh said the wrong thing. And I simply noticed that his fellow party members, so to speak, didn’t support him. Neither [Boris] Nemtsov nor the other SPS members supported his point. That’s why I think it’s just Belykh’s point of view, I think he’ll correct it, we’ll explain to him that we limit ourselves in this case. A party can struggle for power only all by itself. It can’t form a broad coalition.

<b>Today’s conference is limited to democratic and liberal parties and groups, excluding left-wing movements and the banned National Bolshevik Party, which has actually taken a pro-democracy stance.</b>
Yes, but as I understand they will have a conference in a few days in Moscow. This will be the other part of the spectrum. The organizers decided that it would be easier to do this by blocs. We defined our bloc, they will define theirs, and we’ll see how many points we have in common. Where we can and where we can’t cooperate. But, I repeat, my point (and I think they will agree with it) is that until we struggle for principles or specific political prisoners, a union with anybody is possible.
And my experience in the West is like this. We’d sign petitions for prisoners in Iran, for prisoners in Cuba, you see. Sometimes it turned out that we signed them with some very left-wing organizations. We have only one principle: I don’t sign other people’s signatures, I sign the text. And if somebody else joins, it’s his free will, I can’t forbid him. That’s why it doesn’t confuse me, if [Communist party leader Gennady] Zyuganov will sign it with me — it’s his problem, not mine, isn’t it?

<b>You suggest using Soviet dissident methods — does this mean that the situation in Russia today is that much the same as it was in the Soviet Union?</b>
Well, let’s put it like this: the closer today’s situation approaches the Soviet situation, the more the experience of dissidents becomes relevant, you see. It’s in direct proportion. The more the authorities try to restore the Soviet system, the more reasons it gives [us] to resort to dissident methods. At the same time we understand perfectly that they can’t carry out a complete restoration. They can’t even restore 50 percent of Soviet power—it’s guaranteed. Therefore, only a part of the dissident experience will ever be needed. Moreover, the technical possibilities are absolutely different today. The technology that we once used is outdated, you don’t need that.
In the age of internet and mobile phones, why do you need a typewriter and samizdat [underground, self-produced printed matter]? You don’t need that.
We were inventing forms of struggle adequate to that time and technological level. That level is much higher today, it gives us more opportunities. Why should we return to the Stone Age?
So the dissident experience is adequate up to a point, depending on how far the restoration goes, how much the technology of the past is in demand and so on. These are the limits, the parameters.

<b>The country was closed but the interest was immense—for instance people borrowed forbidden books and read them overnight. Now it looks like there is not much interest.</b>
Well, that’s because it’s permitted. You see, book publishing is almost uncensored so far. You can publish any book in Russia today. The authorities don’t pay any attention to book publishing, fairly believing that only a small percentage of people in society read books today. A great number of people read books at one time, we remember, but it has decreased greatly now, that’s why the book-reading audience is the audience that understands everything anyway, and the authorities won’t change them. That’s why they stopped, quite rightly, paying any attention to that.
It’s OK, that’s why book publishing, the samizdat section of dissident activities is not needed today. So what, fine. But some things have remained.

<b>Do you mean organizational methods?</b>
Not only organizational, but strategic, as well. Say, cultural resistance was a large part of our movement. Just recall — the Taganka Theater, the Sovremennik Theater, [singers/songwriters Vladimir] Vysotsky, [Alexander] Galich, [Yuli] Kim and so on, it was a cultural form of resistance. A sort of cultural form of what we were doing politically. They were our allies; they were our partners, all of these people. And now it returns. Look at how many cultural figures joined our attempt at uniting the democratic forces.

<b>Not so many — more seem to have joined the Kremlin.</b>
Much more than you think. For instance, today I met at last [Oleg] Basilashvili, a remarkable actor. I was happy to meet him. [Rock musician Yury] Shevchuk went public himself recently, and did it in a very powerful way. 
He made, for instance, a very good documentary. It’s called “Freedom Russian Style” (Svoboda Po-Russki) [with director Andrei Smirnov]. I saw it on DVD. It was made for the 100th anniversary of Russian parliamentarism, in ten parts. It’s very witty. He found many things, some details; it’s a very good, comprehensive historical review. It means he’s a thinking man, who’s moved from the cultural establishment to the positions of the dissenters and will continue to do this. This is very symptomatic.
We don’t say now how many of these figures there are. But there’s more and more of them, you see, and this tendency won’t die, it will go on. We remember how it was from the Soviet times. Once this course is taken, culture starts to rapidly develop in this alternative direction. That’s all — the state doesn’t have real culture anymore: real culture is on our side.

<b>The Soviet authorities were under the pressure from the West, but now it seems that the West just doesn’t care.</b>
They didn’t care then as well, believe me. This is a later legend about how the West loved and supported us all. It didn’t begin like that. When we were starting out in the 1960s, the West didn’t pay any attention to us, absolutely. It just didn’t want to know. What are you talking about?
It took our trials; it took a huge amount of work to get Western civil society groups involved in the process of supporting rights activists in Russia. We did this work. It was as the result of our work that the West started to support us. It doesn’t emerge all by itself. We did it. We should do it now, that’s all.
Governments didn’t support us then until we checkmated them. We checkmated them by 1977 or 1978. And then even the U.S. President [Jimmy Carter] declared that human rights were the cornerstone of his foreign policy. You see, it wasn’t good will on his part — he was checkmated by society. He had no other way out, he couldn’t consolidate the country. It’s a very long, complex, painful game. In the end we will definitely be able to win the sympathies of society in the West for the social forces here.
There are such sympathies there even now. They are less organized, much less effective, than they were then, because nobody works at it. But they are definitely there. Say, Western society led and continues to lead a fairly pointed campaign against the war in Chechnya. 

<b>There’s a rather strong campaign in France.</b>
Yes, in France, but it also exists in Germany and in the U.K. where I live.
They are small so they can’t make the government change its attitude to this issue, but they will grow. One has to do it: it is enormous organizational work.
I remember I came to the West 32 years ago and I was amazed how many outstanding people supported us. I was astonished. You don’t know this when you’re in prison, you’re in isolation there. In my support committee alone there were such famous people as playwright Tom Stoppard, author Iris Murdoch, famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, actress Vanessa Redgrave — they all were on my committee, they organized around one specific case. And it was the same in every country. It was powerful.
Imagine when the Soviet embassy is picketed not by just some person with a small poster, but a person whose works are read, watched, performed, seen by millions of people. It makes news at once, you see. “Yehudi Menuhin came to the Soviet embassy with a poster,” it will be everywhere, in every paper, on television, that’s what it is. It’s a certain technique. And these people, honest as they were, were ready to do this and they did this.

<b>The slogan of the Soviet dissidents was “Observe Your Constitution” — that wouldn’t have have any effect on the authorities now, would it?</b>
But the slogan has remained. It’s sufficient, actually.

<b>But can’t they change the Constitution or make laws that would cancel its clauses?</b>
Let them change it: they changed the Constitution in our time as well. Incidentally, they adopted the infamous Article 6 of the Constitution [proclaiming the leading role of the Communist Party] as an answer to our activities. 
Speaking in court in 1966, I was holding Stalin’s Constitution and saying, “The CPSU, according to our basic law, is only one social organization among many and it’s totally unclear why it usurps power and why I can’t say anything against it. It doesn’t follow from the Constitution.” 
As an answer to our position, [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev’s leadership changed the Constitution and introduced Article 6, “No, the CPSU is not ‘one of many’ social organizations; it’s the main organization, the ruling organization.” They also reacted to this, you see.
But changing the Constitution is quite a hopeless task. OK, they’d changed the Constitution, and we started to appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the U.N. civil rights pacts.
And then we had the Helsinki Accords. 
That means we always found what to cite and what to use as a norm. Well, if not the Constitution, then the Helsinki agreements. We couldn’t be confused by this, it’s a technique.

<b>Will you keep coming back here?</b>
Sure, sure. At least I must come to this concluding congress, but perhaps even before this, depending on what is needed. If it happens that they want me to go to some regional congress, well, I’ll go there. It’s not limited by anything now, it’s only limited by a ticket — you buy a ticket and fly in.