SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1385 (49), Friday, June 27, 2008
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TITLE: Medvedev Receives Graft Plan
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin on Wednesday submitted a long-awaited plan to tackle corruption, a problem that President Dmitry Medvedev has declared a top priority. 
Naryshkin told Medvedev in televised comments that the draft strategy consisted of four stages, starting with new anti-corruption legislation being submitted to the State Duma by Nov. 1. 
Measures then would be adopted to improve state management, followed by measures to enhance the effectiveness of professional training for lawyers. In the final stage, measures would be taken to put the plan into effect, said Naryshkin, who heads the new Anti-Corruption Council, which Medvedev founded and chairs. 
Medvedev said he needed to “closely study” the plan. 
“We will meet again and discuss it, and then we will hold a meeting of the council to put the final touches on the document,” Medvedev said. 
The president is expected to present a final draft of the strategy during an address to the Federation Council next Wednesday, Reuters reported, citing an unidentified official. 
A Kremlin spokeswoman said no further details of the strategy were available. 
Medvedev has said that corruption is slowing economic growth and undermining the state, but analysts are skeptical that he will have much success in rooting out a problem so deeply entrenched in Russian society. 
Medvedev declared war on corruption immediately upon being elected, creating the Anti-Corruption Council and calling on it to draft legislation to address the problem, to protect businesses from corrupt bureaucrats and to guarantee judicial independence. 
In an interview with Reuters released Wednesday, Medvedev called corruption the country’s second-biggest problem, after poverty. 
“Corruption is a systemic challenge, as a threat to national security, as a problem which leads to a lack of faith among citizens in the ability of the government to bring order and to protect them,” Medvedev said. 
“We need to strengthen the judicial and legal systems, and this is something we have already begun,” he added. 
Meanwhile, the State Duma Commission to Fight Corruption has drafted a bill that would eliminate opportunities for officials to use their positions for personal profit and set strict standards for government employees. The bill requires state officials and their families to declare their property and forbids former officials from working for companies they had previously been responsible for regulating. 
Medvedev will present the bill to the entire Duma for a vote in the fall, and it is to be passed by year’s end. 
Other anti-corruption legislation is also in the works. The Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General’s Office has floated a bill that would eliminate a legal loophole that allows government officials to accept gifts worth less than 11,500 rubles ($490). 
Kirill Kabanov, the director of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, an advocacy group, said Medvedev’s plan to fight corruption was “generally fine” but that it was doomed to fail unless nongovernmental organizations and the media are allowed to operate as watchdogs over bureaucracy. 
“Medvedev is trying to introduce an administrative reform, and this is something we really need, but who is going to fight against corruption? The corrupt law enforcement bodies? The corrupt judges?” he asked. “How can the president fight a problem so engrained in everyday life without the help of a free press and a free civil society?” 
Kabanov said the first step in fighting corruption is making people understand how the problem affects their everyday lives. 
“People don’t understand that corruption is posing a danger to their lives. If someone gets killed on the street because of a drunk driver who paid a bribe to a street police officer or terrorists who get into a building after bribing the police, people don’t link these events to corruption,” he said. 
Kabanov said corruption could be rooted out from Russian society only when the society is willing to cooperate with the authorities in trying to solve the problem. 
According to a study carried out last year by Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, everyone in Russia pays bribes. The study ranked Russia on par with Gambia, Togo and Indonesia in terms of corruption, placing it 143rd out of 180 countries surveyed. 
According to Indem, a Moscow-based research center that tracks corruption, people living in Russia pay $319 billion a year in bribes. That amounts to about $2,250 for each of the country’s 142 million citizens.

TITLE: Summit Dreams For Oil Town
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KHANTY-MANSIISK — For the next few days, this small town deep in a Siberian forest will bask in the spotlight as European and Russian officials try to move their stalled partnership forward. 
Regional leaders hope the Russia-EU summit, which opened Thursday evening, will lead to more foreign investment. Beaming local residents, meanwhile, insist that the choice of their town, some 2,700 kilometers east of Moscow, to host the event is no surprise.
“Khanty-Mansiisk is the center of the universe today,” said Yeremei Aipin, deputy speaker of the regional parliament and a writer of Khanty origin.
Such a notion may be in part shaped by a local legend that a great flood covered the whole world, and life returned on Samarovskaya Mountain, a sacred site for the region’s two main indigenous groups, the Khanty and the Mansi, Aipin said.
But when Aipin and other officials speak of Khanty-Mansiisk’s significance, they also use hard facts.
The region accounts for about 40 percent of the country’s oil exports and pumps 7.5 percent of the world’s oil, while its taxes account for almost a quarter of federal budget revenues, according to officials’ estimates. 
“The world depends on us now,” Aipin said.
The choice of this boom town, located in forests and swamps at the confluence of the northern rivers Ob and Irtysh, is perhaps meant to showcase the country’s newfound wealth — and its increased bargaining power as the price of oil keeps climbing.
“This is the starting point of those power streams that flow to Europe so that the bulbs there can light up,” Governor Alexander Filipenko said Wednesday, touting his region’s oil and electricity industries to foreign and Russian reporters.
There is so much oil that the current extraction volume of 280 million ton a year will last for another 15 to 20 years, Filipenko said, dismissing suggestions that the oil will dry up. “You won’t see that. Our children and grandchildren will extract it too,” he said.
Khanty-Mansiisk stands in stark contrast to many gloomy towns across the country: Recently built low-rises line its small, tidy streets, and the local government is working with celebrity architects Norman Foster and Eric van Egeraat to build skyscrapers and expand the town further. But signs abound that Khanty-Mansiisk has been graced by energy wealth after years of despair and Soviet-era reliance on prison labor. Some of its old wooden barracks have been razed, others have been covered with metal sheeting ahead of the summit. A monument to victims of political repressions has been erected in a quiet corner where a wooden barrack once stood — a notable move for a country that does not like to dwell on its painful past.
Although Governor Filipenko insisted that a sharp drop in oil prices would not affect the regional economy, he said his administration was working to diversify away from hydrocarbons. The region wants non-oil sectors to account for half of the region’s economy in the next decade, he said, adding that his administration was focusing on research and development and education.
Officials said this was where the EU could step in to help. The summit is expected to address energy cooperation between Russia, which is not rushing to open up its energy sector but urgently needs expertise and technology, and the EU, which wants greater access to the country’s oil and gas. The EU wants to spell out conditions and terms of cooperation in the new partnership agreement, while Russia would prefer a framework document. “There is a number of technologies related to oil extraction that we lack,” Filipenko said.
He noted that there was a lot of room to expand cooperation between his region and Europe. Annual direct investment into the region stands at 10 million euros, accounting for 60 percent to 65 percent of investment needs.
Aipin, who heads a group representing indigenous peoples in the regional parliament, spoke in favor of offering more access to foreigners in exchange for modern technologies. But he insisted that the state should continue to closely watch the process. Aipin, a writer whose books have been translated into French, German, Finnish and English, dismissed the notion that the country was using its hydrocarbon resources as a political tool, instead calling it “an element of intellectual influence.”
His top concern, however, is that indigenous peoples will some day begin receiving a share of the profits from oil companies operating on their land. The companies currently support the 30,000 Khanty and Mansi people, but the support accounts for a “ridiculously small percent” of their profits, Aipin said. Big oil operators in the region include LUKoil, Surgut and Rosneft, whose local assets once belonged to Yukos.
Many people in the streets speak favorably of the administration led by Filipenko, who insisted Wednesday that he welcomed criticism and learned from it. 
A local newspaper, My City Without Censorship, won a freedom of speech award from the German-based ZEIT Foundation earlier this year together with Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta.
Among the preparations for the summit, the authorities have sprayed the forests with chemicals to kill mosquitoes — which are notorious here in summer — and other insects like ticks. The forests are sprayed every year from May to September, but they are getting special attention in the run-up to the summit. Officials admit, however, that even though they can guarantee high security for summit participants, they cannot protect them from mosquito bites.
“We are trying to spray, but you must understand that this is Siberia and these are swamps,” said Alexander Kolesnikov, deputy director of the hotel Yugorskaya Dolina, where European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and possibly President Dmitry Medvedev will stay.
Sitting on a riverbank and surrounded by a forest, the hotel will put up some 200 guests. Five cottages have been built in the forest for the leaders and their entourages. Located a 10-minute ride from the town, the hotel — whose main building is built in the shape of a chum, a teepee-like structure where Northern peoples live — has its own cabaret, archery range and pheasant hunting grounds. 
In early March, then-FSB director Nikolai Patrushev hosted a conference of 50 foreign intelligence agencies in Khanty-Mansiisk. It might have been then that the hotel passed muster. “They have done some probing, to put it mildly,” Kolesnikov said.
The summit itself will be held in a concert hall in the city center. A festival will follow on Saturday.

TITLE: Acting Conservatory Rector Ousted
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Violinist Sergei Stadler lasted less than a day as acting rector of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. 
Hours after Stadler was officially introduced to the conservatory’s academic council on Wedesday, the staff held an emergency meeting and unanimously voted against the appointment. The faculty argued that the new rector, who had earlier worked at the Conservatory’s Opera Theater, is unprofessional.
Stadler was intended to be a temporary replacement for the Conservatory’s previous rector, St. Petersburg composer Alexander Tchaikovsky, whose contract was terminated by the Culture Ministry earlier this month. Tchaikovsky was ousted after a ministerial inspection found financial irregularities and 15 million rubles ($638,000) unaccounted for.
However, the rectorship is an elected post with the next elections scheduled for October.
After Tchaikovsky’s dismissal, deputy Dmitry Chasovitin automatically became acting rector but the Culture Ministry decided to intervene and place Stadler in the job.
Stadler currently works as the principal conductor of the Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater and the Moscow-based New Philharmonic Orchestra.
“Stadler will lead the Conservatory’s team until the elections and help the institution to recover from mismanagement and the mistakes made by the previous administration,” said Andrei Busygin, deputy Culture Minister.
Some critics say the vote of no confidence shown by the Conservatory in Stadler was predictable and the rebellion could have been prevented. Wednesday’s protest suggests that during his short tenure at the Conservatory’s Opera Theater, Stadler made too many enemies.
“The mutual antipathy between Stadler and many professors of the Conservatory is ongoing, profound and irrepairable,” said Gyulara Sadykh-zade, a classical music reviewer and a board member of the St. Petersburg Union of composers. “Proposing Stadler as rector was shortsighted indeed because too many people find it impossible to deal with him.”
Sadykh-zade said many professors at the conservatory had been in the know about the Culture Ministry’s plan to back Stadler and tried hard to convince Moscow not to put the violinist forward, considering his unpopularity among the staff. Their efforts were fruitless.
Some of the professors were insulted by the Culture Ministry’s persistence over the issue.
“I think it is wrong of the Moscow officials to interfere with the Conservatory to such a great extent,” said singer Irina Bogachyova, who teaches at the Conservatory. “Since our abilities to teach and perform have never been questioned, we should feel free to elect whomever we find appropriate for the role of our rector. Imposing any proteges on us is unnecessary.” 
Speaking at a special session of the academic council on Wednesday, Stadler offered a reconciliatory tone, saying that he “would like to help the Conservatory to win a proper place in international musical culture; the place it deserves.”
“I have never served as a rector; I need time to familiarize myself with the situation,” Stadler said. “I have only been at this job for about five minutes.”
Stadler’s olive branch was immediately rebuffed.
“Do you not understand that you will not have the slightest chance during the elections?” Nikolai Martynov, an acting deputy rector of the conservatory, asked his newly appointed boss in a raised voice.
Several other members of the academic council nodded gloomily in agreement and made insulting comments in lowered voices, calling Stadler “childish” and “wet behind the ears.”
Later on Wednesday, an emergency meeting at the Conservatory issued a resolution that said the staff “firmly objects to Sergei Stadler’s appointment” and would be happy with Chasovitin fulfilling the rector’s duties until the October vote. The staff also sent a letter to Governor Valentina Matviyenko asking her to help resolve the conflict.
“Being fully aware of Sergei Stadler’s personality, competence and qualifications we do not trust him and cannot support him,” said Stanislav Gaudasinsky, the president of the Conservatory. 
Stadler had previously attempted to get a teaching position at the Conservatory but failed. In 1998-2001 the musician served as chief conductor of the Conservatory’s Opera Theater but had to leave after the theater was absorbed by the Conservatory and was no longer an independent company with its own repertoire. Critics said at the time that the main reason for the unification of the conservatory and the theater was the need to give the students sufficient time to rehearse. The theater that had kept a busy schedule was interfering with the studies, they said.
Gaudasinsky claimed Stadler was “fired for not showing up at work.”
The venerable musical institution has changed leaders four times over the past five years. The turbulence began when Vladislav Chernushenko who had been the Conservatory’s rector for almost twenty years lost his job amid accusations of negligence, mismanagement and even embezzlement. 
His successor, cellist Sergei Roldugin, an old friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, left after less than two years, when a financial inspection claimed some of his deputies were responsible for serious financial irregularities. Then followed Tchaikovsky, whose tenure was equally short-lived.
After the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Culture Ministry drastically cut the funding of all state-run artistic institutions, including the St. Petersburg Conservatory, leaving them to the vicissitudes of the market economy. 
Conservatory funds have been scarce since and managers cannot allocate the state funds flexibly. Spending the money intended for the purchase of, say, new instruments to repair the roof could be easily classified as mismanagement of funds.
Alexander Tchaikovsky was praised in the classical music industry for creating a coherent artistic policy for the Conservatory and attracting some of the biggest names in the field — including conductor Mariss Jansons and composer Rodion Schedrin — to its festivals, master-classes and other initiatives.

TITLE: Jailed U.S. Pastor Released
AUTHOR: By Paul Sonne
PUBLISHER: Associated Press Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — An American pastor walked free Tuesday after spending nearly five months in a Russian jail for bringing hunting-rifle ammunition into the country. The release of Phillip Miles, 58, came a day after the Moscow City Court reduced his three-year sentence for smuggling and ordered him set free.
Miles, a pastor at Christ Community Church in Conway, South Carolina, said he was well treated in custody.
“The Russian people are the most wonderful people in the world,” he said after walking out of Detention Center No. 5 on the grimy edge of Moscow, where he was met by a friend, a U.S. Embassy representative and his lawyer, who was bearing red roses.
The pastor said he hoped to continue his humanitarian work in Russia, which includes bringing recovered drug addicts from the United States to help recovering addicts in Russia. “The Lord willing, I’ll be back,” he said.
Miles was convicted in April after security officers at a Moscow airport found a box of .300-caliber cartridges in his luggage. He apologized repeatedly, saying the ammunition was for a Russian friend, also a pastor, who had recently bought a new Winchester hunting rifle, and that he did not know that bringing ammunition into the country was illegal.
“Who would risk prison for a $25 box of bullets that you can buy right here in Moscow?” Miles said Tuesday.
His lawyer, Vladimir Ryakhovsky, called it an honest mistake but said the English-language customs signs at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport were unclear and confusing.
Russian officers confiscated the ammunition when Miles arrived on Jan. 29 but allowed him to continue on to Perm, a city about 750 miles east of Moscow. He was arrested when he returned on Feb. 3.
Miles has traveled to Russia more than 10 times with Evangel Fellowship International, a charity organization founded by his father in 1983, which has given more than $11 million in aid, primarily to Russian hospitals.
He plans to leave Russia once he has obtained an exit visa, expected in the coming days.

TITLE: Ingushetia’s Forces Accused of Abuses
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirovalev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Security forces are responsible for widespread human rights abuses in Ingushetia, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Wednesday. 
The New York-based rights group says it has documented dozens of summary and arbitrary detentions, acts of torture, disappearances and extrajudicial executions committed by security forces combating insurgents in the republic. 
“The crimes in Ingushetia, although on a far smaller scale, evoke the thousands of enforced disappearances, killings and torture cases that plagued Chechnya for more than a decade,” said Rachel Denber, deputy director of the group’s Europe and Central Asia division. 
Security forces in Ingushetia have been fighting militants, who stage frequent attacks on police and local authorities in a bid to oust the government and promote Islamic rule in the Caucasus. 
But heavy-handed attempts to curb the insurgency have resulted in persecution of peaceful Muslims and government critics, the report said. Opposition groups are marginalized, independent media stifled and rallies are violently dispersed, it said. 
“In this situation, the popular support to insurgents is only rising,” said the group’s researcher Tatyana Lokshina. 
She said the youngest victim of extrajudicial killings was a 6-year-old boy who was killed in November by security forces during a raid on suspected Islamic militants. 
The Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry did not have any immediate comment, but Ingush officials harshly criticized the report. 
“This report is 90 percent biased,” said regional lawmaker Shamsudin Mogushkov.
Ingushetia’s human rights ombudsman, Karimsultan Kukurkhayev, said the report is designed to turn its readers into “zombies.” “There has not been a single abduction or case of torture this year,” he said. 
Human Rights Watch urged the government to change what it called “brutal” counterinsurgency policies and punish those responsible for violations in Ingushetia.
“If Russia does not want Ingushetia to become a full-blown human rights crisis like Chechnya, it must stop these violations,” Lokshina said. 
The group warned in the report that the “dirty war” tactics against insurgents would likely further destabilize Ingushetia and the volatile North Caucasus. 
Opposition activist Magomet Khasbiyev said the escalation of violence in Ingushetia is fueled by the Kremlin’s “shortsighted” policies, which target religious youths and lack flexibility in addressing social issues. 
“If things go on this way, Russia may soon lose the Caucasus,” Khasbiyev said.

TITLE: Duma Swaps Debt For Tracking Facility
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenko
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Wednesday ratified a deal with Tajikistan that envisions writing off its debt to Moscow in exchange for handing over a Soviet-built space-tracking facility. 
The Okno complex in Nurek is capable of automatically tracking objects that are 2,000 to 40,000 kilometers from Earth. The Russian Space Forces, which operate the site, say Okno offers a better range and precision than standard radar facilities. 
The facility, located 50 kilometers southeast of the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, involves telescopes housed in several large spheres. 
The Duma voted 320-12 with two abstentions to write off $242 million — the bulk of Tajikistan’s debt to Russia — in exchange for the Nurek facility. The ratification must be approved by the upper house of parliament and signed by President Dmitry Medvedev — a formality. 
The Tajik parliament has already ratified the agreement. 
Perched on top of mountains, 2,200 meters above sea level, Okno takes advantage of the area’s fine weather and high transparency of the atmosphere, conditions not found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.
The facility was designed to detect and track down satellites on high geostationary orbits, but it is also capable of monitoring even small fragments of space debris. It can spot an object 1 meter in diameter 40,000 kilometers away. 
Each of Okno’s powerful telescopes is covered by an 25-meter silver-colored dome covered with aluminum plates and special foam to reflect sunrays. 
Russian officials said the facility could be used in the future as part of an international system to protect the Earth from dangerous space objects.
The construction of the Nurek site started in 1979, but stopped after the 1991 Soviet collapse, when Tajikistan slid into a five-year civil war that left its economy in a shambles and its population in deep poverty. The construction resumed in the late 1990s and the facility became operational in 2004. 
About 25,000 Russian troops are deployed in Tajikistan to help protect its southern border with Afghanistan and help stem drug smuggling.

TITLE: Belarus Tightens Internet Control
AUTHOR: By Yuras Karmanau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK — Belarussian lawmakers have given final approval to a crackdown on Internet journalism, one of the last remaining independent sources of information in the country. 
The legislation also forbids all Belarussian media outlets from accepting foreign funding, a restriction that will affect about 30 publications. 
The bill, drafted by President Alexander Lukashenko’s office and approved Tuesday by lawmakers, “is among the harshest in Europe and throws Belarus back to the worst Soviet times,” said Oleg Gulak, leader of the Belarussian Helsinki Committee, a rights group.

TITLE: U.S. Moves to Ditch Agreement
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers have taken a first step toward rejecting a civil nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and Russia, but it was not clear whether opponents would be able to muster the votes to block it. 
A resolution opposing the deal was introduced Tuesday by the top Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee. 
This begins a lengthy legislative process. Opponents, who fear the deal would undermine efforts to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, would have to pass the resolution by two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate to block it. 
The Democratic sponsor of the resolution, Howard Berman, said he would not necessarily oppose the deal but needed to introduce the resolution to allow more time to consider the deal. 
“There are some good arguments for the agreement, and some good ones against it,” he said, adding that the administration needs to convince him that the deal will help international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear program. “I chose to introduce a resolution of disapproval today because I want the administration to understand that I will not support the agreement until that question, on the most critical foreign policy issue facing our nation today, is answered to my satisfaction.” 
Iran acknowledges that it is enriching uranium but insists it is for peaceful civilian usage. 
The administration of President George W. Bush views the agreement with Russia as a breakthrough in cooperation reached at a time of rising tensions between Washington and Moscow over issues including missile defense, NATO expansion and differences on Iran. Opponents believe that the deal will reward Russia at a time when they say Moscow is not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program. 
The resolution’s other sponsor, Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is seeking to block the deal. 
The agreement would give the United States access to state-of-the-art Russian nuclear technology.

TITLE: Gas Retailers Feel Sting of Rising Prices
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Gasoline prices in Russia continue to gallop skywards at a record rate, with St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast leading the way. According to Rosstat, the Russian Federal Statistics Service, in early June gasoline prices rose by 1.5 percent to gain almost two rubles (80 cents), giving rise to fears that they will reach 30 rubles ($1.27) per liter by the beginning of the fall.
Oleg Ashikhmin, president of the St. Petersburg oil club that includes 23 companies involved in the oil business, forecasts that prices will leap again. “The increase in wholesale supply prices has not yet been responded to by retailers, who have stuck to May prices so far but are about to change them. As for diesel oil, traders are already suffering considerable losses.” 
Retailers have been continuously raising prices for two months already, says Leonid Churilov, deputy director of St. Petersburg Oil Company. “But oil refineries and wholesale suppliers were the first to start,” he said.
According to the Kortes information center, between March 1 and May 6 the average cost of one ton of AI-95 has increased from 22,730 rubles ($960) to 25,670 ($1,087). Kirishi Refinery Plant, one of St. Petersburg’s biggest wholesale suppliers, now trades it at 27,300 rubles ($ 1,156) per ton.  Pavel Strokov, Kortes’ development director, says that the cost of oil on the Russian market depends not only on taxation, but mainly on international prices. “The internal oil market is tied to international prices, which explains why crude oil in Russia is also becoming more and more expensive.”
This affects 64 percent of the St. Petersburg retail gasoline market, which is held by small companies, while the rest is occupied by bigger oil companies. The leading gasoline retailers in St. Petersburg are PTK, with 69 stations and 28 percent of sales; Phaeton, with 36 stations and a 14 percent market share; Neste-St. Petersburg, which operates 25 stations and holds a 9 percent share; and LUKoil St. Petersburg Service, with an 11-percent stake in the market garnered by its 25 stations. Retailers are clearly worried by the 25 percent price hike that wholesale traders have set, but — unlike the latter — haven’t raised their prices correspondingly. Anton Ivanov, executive director of Phaeton, explains that one extra ruble (four cents) will scare dozens of customers away.  “Retailers at gasoline stations make enough profit when 10 percent is added to the wholesale price. If there is a hike on wholesale prices, we go into the red.”
Politics has its own role to play in the matter of gasoline price hikes in Russia. December 2007 saw parliamentary elections to the State Duma, followed by presidential elections in March 2008. During the politically sensitive pre-election and election period, the country’s major oil companies kept gasoline prices low in order to avoid irritating the Kremlin. Prices stopped rising at the end of last year and barely changed during the following four months, standing at 17.72 rubles (69 cents) per liter in mid-April.  But wholesale gasoline prices rose 15 to 20 percent in April, when domestic crude prices surged 25 percent.  “When the time-out was over, prices immediately rocketed. But it is not right for economics to depend on politics,” said Ashikhmin.
Experts say that gasoline prices in St. Petersburg previously rose at an annual rate of 4.33 percent from the beginning of 2003, accelerating to more than six percent in May this year, Rosstat reports. Now the average cost of gas at stations around the city is 25 rubles ($1.10) per liter, compared to $1.06 in the United States where the annual increase in retail prices in 2007 amounted to less than 30 percent, according to the American Automobile Association.

TITLE: State Role in Economy to Diminish
AUTHOR: By David Schlesinger and Janet McBride
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview that he wanted to reduce the state’s role in the economy and curb government spending to combat rising inflation. 
Medvedev rejected any idea of a state energy giant buying into TNK-BP and said Russia would not gamble its vast sovereign oil wealth on risky equity investments. 
In the wide-ranging interview at the Kremlin on Monday, Medvedev stressed the importance of international cooperation to solve global economic woes and repeated his proposal to make the ruble one of several regional reserve currencies, limiting the world’s exposure to the dollar. Analysts say that rising inflation, likely to hit 14 percent this year, is the country’s top economic problem. They believe that the economy is growing too quickly, or overheating. 
Noting that prices were rising more than twice as fast as an original government target of 5 percent to 6 percent a year, Medvedev said Russia did not have “supernatural overheating” but should act “toughly and clearly to limit these inflationary tendencies.” 
Asked what specific measures he would take, he mentioned the reduction of “excessive” government spending but said Russia “could not pursue interest rate policy in isolation” from international factors. 
Medvedev first suggested giving the ruble a role as a reserve currency in February, and he returned to the idea in the interview, saying it would help build a more robust global financial system. 
Medvedev defended former President Vladimir Putin for bringing certain industries under tighter state control. This, he said, was important to “guarantee the strategic interests of the economy in the years to come.” 
“But any additional strengthening of the role of the state, increasing its presence in the economy, is not foreseen,” Medvedev said. “On the contrary, we will take action to reduce the presence of the state in the economy.” 
The EU has raised concerns with Russia about the fate of TNK-BP, where BP’s half-share of the company is mired in a dispute with the Russian co-owners about strategy and ownership. 
Analysts have suggested that the Kremlin wants a stake for a state energy firm such as Gazprom or Rosneft in TNK-BP. But Medvedev, who previously headed Gazprom’s board, rejected this. “I didn’t lead such conversations even as chairman of the board of directors,” he said. “As far as I know, there are no proposals about the sale of the corresponding stakes to Gazprom or Rosneft, so there is nothing to talk about. If there are offers, they will be considered. But state companies have no objective right to acquire stakes from private companies.” 
Both the Russian shareholders and BP should settle their differences using the law and their own memoranda of understanding, he added. 
Russia has built up a $162 billion windfall from unexpectedly high oil revenues, and Medvedev said this money should be used first for domestic investment and to guarantee social programs.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Finns May Tax Truckers</b>
HELSINKI (Bloomberg) — The Finnish state may tax trucks carrying goods through the country to Russia to help papermakers pay new Russian wood tariffs, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Paavo Vaeyrynen said.
Finland could start charging truckers and subsidizing papermakers as soon as this fall, Vaeyrynen said Thursday at a press conference. One third of all Russian imports by value enter the country through Finland, according to Russian trade representatives in Helsinki.

<b>Ruble Band to Increase</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia may expand the ruble’s trading band by as much as 5 percent at each end to deter speculation and force the currency lower, said Konstantin Korishchenko, deputy chairman of the country’s central bank.
The ruble is kept within a trading band versus a basket of euros and dollars to protect Russian manufacturers and exporters. As part of a new policy announced in May, Bank Rossii widened the range by 0.5 percent on June 10, buying and selling the currency at different, unpublicized levels to make it a two-way bet for speculators.

<b>TNK-BP Profits Rise</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — TNK-BP Holding, BP Plc’s Russian venture, said profit rose 37 percent in 2007 to $5.7 billion after adjusting for the sale of its Udmurtneft unit.
The company didn’t give a comparable figure for 2006. Profit was calculated based on U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
Net revenue was 24.9 billion rubles and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, were $8.7 billion, the company said in an e-mailed statement Thursday.

<b>Gazprom to Buy Stake</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom, Russia’s natural-gas exporter, will exercise an option to buy a 20 percent stake in its crude oil unit, Gazprom Neft, from Italy’s Eni SpA.
The acquisition will cost about $4 billion, Andrei Kruglov, Gazprom’s chief financial officer, told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Moscow on Thursday.

<b>Shareholders Chosen</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — TNK-BP shareholders elected nine members to its board of directors at their annual meeting on Thursday, Interfax reported, citing a minority investor who attended the meeting.
Three members of the board, Alexander Gorshkov, Roman Bezrukov and Boris Kondrashov, unsuccessfully attempted to remove their names from the list of candidates for the board before the vote, the Russian news service reported.
Their resignation from the board may be discussed at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting, Interfax reported.

<b>BasEl Seeking Coal, Oil</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Basic Element, the investment holding company of Russia’s richest man Oleg Deripaska, plans to expand in the coal, oil and nuclear industries to “balance” its energy assets.
The holding, which controls the world’s biggest aluminum producer United Co. Rusal, may soon bid for coal deposits in Russia and is considering acquisitions in oil, BasEl CEO Gulzhan Moldazhanova said Thursday.

TITLE: Genghis Putin
AUTHOR: By Michael Auslin
TEXT: While Washington continues to fixate on Iraq, a resurgent Russia is steadily expanding its influence in Eurasia. If the next U.S. president ignores Moscow’s inroads, democratic development in Asia will come under threat, and the United States may soon be faced with a strategic challenge in one of the world’s most resource-rich regions. 
The Kremlin’s main target of late is Mongolia, one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies. Since first holding elections in 1990, Mongolia has developed a stable electoral system with more than 15 political parties and seen two peaceful handovers of power. Mongolians will vote on June 29 to elect a new parliament. Polls suggest the ruling ex-Communist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, which regained power in 2000, could lose power to the opposition Democratic Party. 
Regardless of the election outcome, Mongolia’s relationship with Moscow will take center stage. State-owned oil company Rosneft supplies more than 90 percent of Mongolia’s oil. Over the past three months, it has increased prices twice — by an average of 20 percent each time. This comes on top of surging prices that, since 2006, have pushed inflation in Mongolia to over 15 percent annually. Rosneft recently told Mongolian officials that it would lower oil prices if given the rights to run oil production in the country. Moscow also wants to build 100 gas stations throughout the country, which would solidify its overwhelming presence there and reduce consumers’ energy choices even further. 
Similar tactics are afoot in other sectors of Mongolia’s economy. Russian enterprises already own 49 percent of Mongolia’s national railway and its largest copper and gold mining companies. An industrial group founded by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants to consolidate the Russian-controlled shares of all three companies, effectively giving Putin’s cronies a near-stranglehold on key players in the Mongolian economy. Officially, Mongolian officials express confidence in the benefits of deeper economic relations with the Kremlin. Privately, they admit to feeling pressured into opening up their markets to Moscow and wish more Western companies would invest. 
Despite these misgivings, Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar visited Moscow last month and agreed to discuss further joint uranium production and nuclear cooperation. President Dmitry Medvedev stated that bilateral trade will soon exceed $1 billion, cementing Russia’s position as Mongolia’s largest trading partner after China. If these trends continue, Mongolia may become an economic satellite of Putin’s newly expansive Russia. 
The stakes are high for fledgling Asian states, especially democracies, which must balance satisfying Russian demands with proving to their own people that they can protect their independence. If Russia succeeds in blackmailing Mongolia into economic subservience, then it can try to extend this tactic to Central Asian nations. 
Imagine the precedent that would set. China could also decide that painstaking negotiations and diplomacy are a waste of time when it can bring its export and import power to bear. Democratic Japan and South Korea could feel greater pressure to join exclusive trading blocs led by authoritarian regimes. Finally, Mongolia and other states might be asked to make strategic concessions to Russian security forces to “protect” Moscow’s investments. In this way, Russia could gain new opportunities to expand its military footprint beyond its own borders. 
What can Washington do? First, it must encourage greater U.S. trade with Mongolia. Total trade stood at about $120 million in 2007. The United States should push beyond the 2004 Trade and Investment Framework Agreement and start negotiations for a full free trade agreement. In addition, the U.S. government-funded Millennium Challenge Corporation should increase its outlay for infrastructure projects in Mongolia far beyond the current total level of $285 million. Mongolians can also help themselves in this regard. Lingering governance problems partly account for slack Western investment. 
Second, the United States should marshal global opinion against the Kremlin’s strong-arm tactics and condemn exclusive economic arrangements. Developing states must be assured that no economic leverage will be used against them to secure unfair advantages. So far, the United States and other democracies in Asia have stood silently by as Russia has stepped up its bullying of Mongolia. 
Third, Washington can push forward with the Asia-Pacific Democracy Partnership project, proposed by President George W. Bush at the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, and unite Asia’s free nations to support democratic values and assist states building liberal systems. Mongolia should feel that the United States is committed to linking up democratic nations in the region and addressing common concerns, be they economic or strategic in nature. 
Finally, the United States and Mongolia can deepen their impressive security cooperation, which includes joint training and peacekeeping exercises. Even without a formal security relationship with the United States, Mongolia has built a training center for peacekeeping operations and dispatched nearly 200 troops to Iraq. For a young democracy, Mongolia has shown a welcome willingness to look beyond its borders and play a constructive role in the world. When Bush visited Mongolia in November 2005, he called Mongolia a “brother in the cause of freedom.” Now is the time for the United States to help protect that freedom from economic and political threats alike. 

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar in Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. This comment appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia.

TITLE: AAR Getting the Last Laugh
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Two weeks before our vigilant Federal Security Service agents arrested TNK-BP employee Ilya Zaslavsky and charged him with industrial espionage, one of the owners of Alfa Group complained to then-President Vladimir Putin that “the foreigners are getting in our way.” 
When I wrote this after Zaslavsky’s arrest, even some well-informed businessmen said, “This is impossible. After all, why would Alfa start a conflict with the British? If Alfa did this, it would be persecuted everywhere in every country except Russia.”
It is clear that Russian and British shareholders in TNK-BP are now embroiled in a bitter internal feud. As in any conflict like this, each side has its own version of what it considers to be the truth. 
It is certainly true that the Russian authorities have acted nastily toward the firm’s British partners. In corporate disputes in civilized countries, government authorities do not bring trumped-up charges of spying against foreign businessmen, nor do they try to intimidate the firm’s CEO by calling him into the Interior Ministry for five-hour interrogations.
But it is also true that TNK-BP’s Russian shareholders, known collectively as AAR, have good reason to be upset with the way the Russian-British business partnership has unfolded. AAR’s complaints are not limited to the ones they have voiced in the media — that they have been sidelined from participating fully in managing the company and that BP has prevented the joint venture from expanding its activities in international markets. 
In fact, both of these claims are rather doubtful. After all, BP already paid the AAR consortium $6 billion for the right to have management control of the company. It is a bit strange that AAR accepted this money and the corresponding terms, but is now crying foul. They should have protested earlier. 
As for the allegations that BP has undermined AAR’s expansion into global markets, the Russian shareholders have yet to put forward any specific examples of BP misconduct. The only instance of which I am aware concerned some kind of half-baked oil exploration and development license in Iraq. Alfa Group owners wanted to buy the license for TNK-BP, but the British shareholders opposed the deal. In the end, TNK-BP shelled out the funds to complete a due diligence study of the project, and AAR bought the license on their own. 
Russian shareholders have indicated that the main grievance is BP’s separate negotiations with Gazprom, which could include a deal to buy out the AAR stake in TNK-BP. Gazprom and BP say they are holding talks about the rights to develop the Kovykta gas field and not about TNK-BP’s future, but representatives from both companies have said TNK-BP has also been discussed. In principle, BP has no right to enter separate negotiations concerning a buyout or oil and gas deals without AAR’s participation, according to the terms of the BP-TNK joint-venture agreement.
When BP first entered Russia in the ‘90s, it used the powerful Alfa Group to gain a foothold in the country. Now the situation has changed, with state-owned oil companies calling the shots. Shortly after the joint venture’s moratorium on the sale of shares by either side expired on Jan. 1, BP started talks with Gazprom on a number of joint projects.
An AAR buyout with Gazprom’s participation would create a new, profitable configuration for BP in which the state would effectively force AAR’s private shareholders out of the oil and gas business using BP’s money. In return, BP would gain the right to represent Gazprom in foreign markets. Put more simply, Gazprom would replace Alfa as BP’s new partner.
BP would have beaten AAR to the punch if it had struck a deal with the state to use government resources to trade one Russian partner for another. But AAR shareholders are getting the last laugh by showing that they are more skillful than BP at the quintessential Russian game of “knock your partner’s teeth out with the government’s help.” 

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: On the bright side
AUTHOR: By Larissa Doktorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 400 works that make up the Yury Zlotnikov restropective at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum reflect the long and creative life of the Moscow painter. 
Although it took him decades to win acceptance into the Soviet-era Union of Artists, Zlotnikov is today one of the country’s best appreciated living artists. His work is owned by many Russian museums, including Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, as well as by European museums and private collectors. 
The possibility of organizing a Zlotnikov retrospective in St. Petersburg intensified after a successful 2004 exhibition at the Tretyakov. 
The new show is organized both chronologically and thematically. At the very start of the exhibition, there is a series of 15 self-portraits where the artist depicts himself as a young man with searing honesty. When they were created, the use of nudity and their painterly conception were deemed shocking by Soviet culture bosses. Zlotnikov’s use of dramatic color schemes, his tense profile and penetrating gaze are reminiscent of self-portraits by Chaim Soutine, the Russian-French painter. 
These and other portraits lead the visitor to much later works from the series “Signal System,” in which many clean white canvases covered with multicolored lines in rhythmic movements strive to depict eternity.  
Zlotnikov is known for his use bright colors, freshness and resolutely confident taste. His colors suggest the South of France and not a Northern Europe where in winter people don’t see the sun for weeks and weeks. This may be said of both Zlotnikov’s oils and of his many graphic works in watercolor and gouache.
The majority of the works on display are large — some several meters across — with the occasional triptych that covers a wall. The painter feels comfortable filling large spaces and expressing himself.
Moving between the topics and canvasses, it becomes apparent that the painter’s color scheme has not changed with time and with age, even if the themes have moved on substantially from the 1950s into the 1990s and the new century, and as he moved from representational art to abstraction. Zlotnikov’s optimism shines throughout. 
However, if you look hard, it is possible to find a couple of cracks in this optimistic worldview — for example a series of works in the manner of social realism. One hall is filled with large canvasses, in which the painter tries to come to terms with sad lives in Moscow in the 1950s and1960s. 
Although the colors may be bright, they don’t hide the melancholy. Two major works in this period are “The Canteen” and “The Steel Factory in Balakovo.” The first is painted in the style German 1920s Expressionism. The distorted faces with frozen sad eyes gazing at plates filled with food from behind the counter resemble the horror-filled works of German painters. The steel factory landscape lacks spontaneity and creates the impression of having been imposed and not a free creation. 
During the press conference that preceded the exhibition’s opening event last week, Zlotnikov said that has he always tried to remain upbeat and express positive feelings in his work in spite of the harsh realities of Soviet and Russian life. 
One way he kept his sanity and was able to continue working was to teach children; another was to befriend scientists and philosophers whose own approach to the universe lay well outside official doctrines. 
“Both helped me to forget about the gloomy life outside my studio,” Zlotnikov said. 
The painter said he became interested in blending science and art in his compositions. He began to visit laboratories and medical institutes and to study the rhythms of the internal organs and the heart. His “Signal System” series came out of this experience. The works resemble electrical diagrams rendered in different colors.
Regarding the synthesis of art and science, Zlotnikov said that “great Italians like Piero della Francesco and Leonardo [da Vinci], and Russians [Kazimir] Malevich and [Mikhail] Matyushin tried to achieve it. I can’t imagine art without blending it with science.” 
The titles of as works as “Metaphysical Space,” “Space of Construction” and  “Geiger Counter,” show the painter’s fascination with science. 
Moscow occupies a special place in Zlotnikov biography. The city inspires the artist and he returns to city scenes, to the crowds filling Moscow streets, to the cars and the stores, time and again in his work. 
One of the best is “The Shop Window,” showing an old fashioned car parked in front of a shop window displaying men’s hats. The painting “The Troubled City” betrays the painter’s mixed feelings toward big cities and large concentrations of people. The crowd looks like an army of ants. The moving figures seem unstoppable. The painter’s point of view is fixed somewhere above, in open cosmic space.
The series “Koktebel” gives us Zlotnikov’s Crimean works, which evoke [French-Russian painter Marc] Chagall and other French painters. The blues, yellows, sunny orange and green colors are completely removed from the gloom of his earlier, realistic canvasses. Here the painter’s soul sings.
More recent works show the painter’s abiding interest in abstraction, where he continues on the route discovered by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. 
This leads logically to the artist’s next trend, Neo-constructivism. 
The painter has traveled a long route, stopping along the way to explore diverse approaches. All of this gives richness to his art.

Yury Zlotnikov at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum. Closing date to be announced. 
www.rusmuseum.ru

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: The Sex Pistols, the reformed legendary punk band that came to the city recently, snubbed Russian authorities a little by announcing “God Save the Queen” as a “little song for your president” at a local stadium concert on Monday.
“God save the queen her fascist regime / It made you a moron a potential H bomb! / God save the queen she ain’t no human being,” goes the song, in case anyone had forgotten. Sadly, only an estimated 2,300 fans were present.
U.S. punk band <b>Lagwagon</b> found itself in a tricky situation when Orlandina, the club where its local concert was to take place, withdrew from the agreement two weeks before the date, according to Denis Kuptsov of local band Spitfire. Spitfire helped to organize bringing Lagwagon to the city.
“Santa Barbara’s pride and joy, Lagwagon have been belting ’em out since 1988,” the band’s official biography reads.
“Their catchy brand of punk is an infectious blend of pop and hardcore, [and] lyrically tackles an array of personal politics. This punky quintet has secured a massive following worldwide with their solid, tonal attack and hectic touring schedule. With over a million records sold (and all independently, pal!), it’s impossible to deny Lagwagon’s greatness.”
To the save the gig, it was moved to <b>Sochi</b>, a new indie bar in the center, where the band will perform on Wednesday.
Sochi was launched by <b>Datscha</b> owner Anna-Christin Albers last Friday. Formerly a joint called Soho, it looks like a great amount of work to deglamorize and humanize the place has been carried out.
According to its art director Denis Rubin, the place will be a cross between Datscha and the now-defunct Platforma and Gosti.
Sochi is located on the first floor of Tinkoff brewery and pub, and though it is not part of it,  shares some of Tinkoff’s facilities. 
Soho, the former club located there, started with live concerts by better-known Russian acts in September last year, and held an infamously indecent concert by Leningrad with tickets costing 5,000 rubles ($212). It slowly degraded into a DJ bar until it abruptly closed late last month.
Meanwhile, Datscha will close early next month because the owner of the building where it is located wants to kick out all the businesses there to develop the property.
July 6 will be Datscha’s last day, according to Albers.
“There will be all the DJs, everybody will come, and I think we’ll say goodbye to it in the proper way,” she said.
While most of the summer’s big concerts are already over, there remains <b>Blondie</b>, who will perform at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on July 8, <b>Metallica</b> (Peterburgsky Sports and Concert Complex, July 18), <b>Santana</b> (Ice Palace, July 20), <b>Gogol Bordello</b> (Lenexpo, July 23) and <b>Sigur Ros</b> (TyUZ, August 26).

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Local hero
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Andrei Arshavin, the St. Petersburg-born soccer player who has been the star of the Euro 2008 football tournament which concludes Sunday in Vienna, is rapidly becoming the darling of the Western media and one of the most famous Russians in the world.
A BBC correspondent has dubbed Arshavin the “Russian Ronaldinho” as fans and journalists around Europe seem to be throwing their support behind Russia.
“Before this tournament, Russia was my least favorite of the 16 teams,” columnist Simon Hattenstone wrote Wednesday in the British daily The Guardian. “I can’t stand Vladimir Putin, I thought England should have been there instead. ... And now? I am falling in love with them.” 
“Russia is really a beautiful team! Did you see the game against Holland?” read one message posted on the web site of Italian daily Gazzetta Dello Sport. “Now that Italy has gone home, I’m supporting them!” 
But it is one man who is really drawing plaudits from around the continent.
“A-R-S-H-A-V-I-N, your day of glory has arrived,” one fan wrote on the web site of French daily L’Equipe. 
An adviser to the president of Arshavin’s club team, Zenit St. Petersburg, said on Thursday that FC Barcelona had made a $24 million offer for the Russia playmaker, the Associated Press reported.
“FC Barcelona has made an official proposal to Zenit for the purchase of Arshavin,” Konstantin Sarsaniyam was quoted as saying by Sovietski Sport on Thursday. “But we will only talk about this once Andrei returns to Zenit.”
Arshavin’s agent had told a Spanish television station that a transfer fee of at least $39 million would be expected in any deal.
The news came with Barcelona vice president Ferran Soriano saying that the Catalan club has been following Arshavin’s progress for several months now. 
“We are interested in Arshavin,” Barcelona newspaper Mundo Deportivo quoted Soriano as saying on Thursday. “But our interest isn’t sudden since we have been following him with discretion for a few months now.”
Soriano said Barcelona first noticed the 27-year-old Zenit St. Petersburg player back in April when he played against German side Bayer Leverkusen in the UEFA Cup, a competition the Russian club eventually won.
“We were under the impression that he played in midfield. But now we have seen that in big games, with his national team at the Euro, that he plays on the flank,” Soriano said. “That’s dispelled any doubt and this is the profile of a player we would like.
“But it won’t be easy to sign him because all teams want him now.”
Arshavin has been one of the stars of Euro 2008 despite only playing two games because of suspension. His  skills have fueled speculation he will play in one of Europe’s biggest leagues next season.
“I have supported Barcelona all my life. Barcelona are my dream,” Arshavin said Wednesday. “I never thought I would have a genuine chance to play for the club. Let’s see how the situation unfolds.”
Russia’s players were not being distracted by speculation over which big clubs may snap them up after Euro 2008, coach Guus Hiddink said on the eve of their semi-final against Spain, Rueters reported.
Hiddink said Arshavin was coping with the attention well.
“Every tournament needs its attractive teams and when you are watching attractive teams that means that within them are outstanding players and he’s one of those players,” the Dutchman said.
“Young kids like to have a kind of role model ... he’s the kind of player who attracts attention. He can deal with it very well, he’s not getting out of control whatsoever.” 
Pravda.ru reported that after Russia’s success in the UEFA tournament this month, many parents have started to name their newborns in honor of Russian football stars. 
Two couples, whose baby boys were born on June 22, named their sons in honor of Hiddink, Pravda.ru reported, while Andrei, after Arshavin, became the most popular name for baby boys in St. Petersburg with twelve babies named after the baby-faced footballer in the city last week.
A baby camel born at a zoo in Nalchik, southern Russia, has also been named in honor of Arshavin too. The camel wasn’t named Andrei but Arsha, the footballer’s nickname.
But it’s not just babies getting the caught up in Arshavin mania.
“In two weeks, I’ve become a real fan of Russian football and Andrei Arshavin,” Perm resident Yulia Konoplyova, 21, told the tabloid Tvoi Den after getting a somewhat hazy portrait of the football star tattooed on her left breast.

Staff Reporter Max Delaney contributed to this report.
See page vii for more about Euro 2008.

TITLE: Power to the people
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko is personally responsible for the destruction of St. Petersburg’s historical center. That’s what preservationist Alexander Makarov said on television, famously suppressed and censored in president-turned-premier Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And the channel on which it was said belongs to ever-loyal Oleg Rudnov, who is reputed to be a good friend of Putin and had backed Putin-ally Matviyenko’s gubernatorial bid in 2003. Has something changed? Is a new period of glasnost (openness) dawning?
There were plenty of bold statements and criticism made during Channel 100 TV’s six-hour telethon, titled “The Fourth Century: The Fate of St. Petersburg” and devoted to the city’s  most pressing issues. The event on Wednesday gathered city officials, such as Vice Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov who is in charge of construction, along with authors, poets and other cultural figures as well as the city’s preservationists. Viewers who called the station overwhelmingly backed the city’s preservationist movement.
The live show, which started with a pre-recorded address by author Daniil Granin (who said that “the voice of protest should sound louder”), featured the famous list of 100 destroyed historic buildings compiled by pressure group Living City as an answer to Matviyenko’s annual address delivered to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly in April, where the governor criticized the “loud defenders of the historic center” and described the city’s defenders’ complaints about many architectural treasures having been lost in recent years as “lies.” “This is lies! I beg you — show me the first hundred!”  she said at the time.
The list, which was displayed onscreen several times during the program, features the historic buildings destroyed during the past five years of Matviyenko’s reign.
“I think it came to a critical point,” said Mikhail Novitsky, frontman of rock band SP Babai and the leader of Green Wave, an ecological group that struggles to protect the city’s parks, gardens and lakes, by phone on Thursday. He took part in the show, hosting a live link from Palace Square.
“It has accumulated, then it went to the streets, there were Dissenters’ Marches, there was resistance by residents. It even went beyond dialog: it reached a physical standoff between the two sides.
“And it coincided with the change of president [from Vladimir Putin to Dmitry Medvedev in May], and even if [Medvedev] rose to power in an illegitimate way, he still gives us some hope. His speeches are different from those of  the previous president, at least. There’s some hope for a ‘thaw.’ I think these two facts could coincide,” said Novitsky, who has taken part in many oppositional rallies, including the Dissenters’ Marches organized by pro-democracy coalition The Other Russia.
Several hours before taking part in the television show on Wednesday, Novitsky’s band SP Babai performed for defenders of Skver Podvodnikov (Submariners’ Garden) who are resisting infill construction that will destroy the garden by not allowing construction company trucks and workers onto the site.
“It looked to me like a court hearing, a hearing in a good, people’s court,” Novitsky said about the program.
“There is a problem, there is a crime, the crime is being analyzed, those guilty are being looked for, then they answer [for their crime]. I think it’s just a rehearsal: the real trial over the destruction of St. Petersburg is lying ahead.”
Yulia Minutina, a coordinator of Living City, the group that actively struggles against the destruction of historic buildings in the center, said she is glad that the telethon took place.
“This issue should be discussed and we shouldn’t let it be silenced,” she said by phone on Thursday.
“When you see this list and listen to all these problems being discussed in detail, it has a depressing effect even on me, even though I’ve been working on it for the past 18 months.”
The vast majority of viewers who took part in phone voting organized by 100 TV voted for the preservation of the historic center.
According to Fontanka.ru, 30,000 voted for the preservation of the current appearance of St. Petersburg, while just over 1,000 voted for changing it; 25,000 voted for the preservation of the city’s architectural skyline, endangered by the planned Gazprom tower and already violated by the recently built Stock Exchange, against 906 people who voted for possible changes; and 17,000 said they didn’t have enough information about town planning, while 600 were satisfied.
“The vote’s results made me happy,” Minutina said.
“It gives me hope for the future of our center.” 
Alexander Gorodnitsky, the legendary 1960s singer/songwriter whose songs were performed by the late Soviet legend Vladimir Vysotsky and a St. Petersburg cultural icon, was the final guest on the show, which concluded with his 1960s intelligentsia anthem “Atlantes.” 
“I haven’t seen such a spark of democracy since 1991, but we should not delude ourselves,” he said before performing the song.
“Why did the authorities agree to such a telethon? To help us let off steam. We make some noise and go away: they’ll do everything just as they like in a corner, secretly. I saw the faces of the big bureaucrats, who were sitting here. They are trying to deceive us, don’t delude yourselves. We’ll go away, and everything will stay the same.”
Gorodnitsky said the main demands should be a moratorium on construction work in the historic center and a referendum.
“The image of the future St. Petersburg shouldn’t be different to today’s St. Petersburg, not desecrated by those dreadful structures. It could become different, Manhattan, New York, but it won’t be St. Petersburg,” he said.
Like many city defenders , Siege of Leningrad-survivor Gorodnitsky compared the struggle for its preservation to defending the city during World War II.
“We should not allow it, just as we refused to be defeated during the Siege. Occupiers have come to the city, judging by what they’re doing. That is what’s so terrible.”

TITLE: Generation Arbat
AUTHOR: By Lesley Chamberlain
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Soviet thaw is normally said to have begun with the denunciation of Josef Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, and ended in 1966 with the sentencing of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel to seven and five years of hard labor for slandering the system. 
In “The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat,” historian Stephen V. Bittner broadly accepts those dates but shows that nothing was as simple as we have been tempted to assume. 
Bittner is not so much a revisionist as a realist in his assessment of the many contradictory impulses underlying that era of “three steps forward, two steps back,” and the mythology that overlays them. He brings out the character of a very mixed time by reconstructing the behind-the-scenes controversies of the era and focusing on changes to lives and buildings in one of central Moscow’s best-loved and most historic areas, the Arbat, located west of the Kremlin. 
The result gives real substance to what the Soviet version of democracy was like in the relatively liberal early 1960s.
The meteorological metaphor applied to that period was originally borrowed from a 1954 story by Ilya Ehrenburg, in which “thaw” stood as much for the uncertainty that lay ahead as for the relief of old ice finally cracking. 
Anyone familiar with the Russian springtime knew that frost could reappear several times over before the cold season finally passed. 
The uncertainty of the thaw made it difficult for writers and artists to know how far they could go. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev personally approved the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” but a few months later he fiercely denounced an exhibition of abstract art as abnormal. Teachers at Moscow’s Gnesin Music-Pedagogy Institute were so unsure of how far to distance themselves from the last vestiges of aesthetic Stalinism — the philistine and punitive denunciations of the composer Dmitry Shostakovich and the poet Anna Akhmatova — that they struggled with how to deal with student criticism of the stale curriculum. 
Coming as it did after a quarter of a century of Stalinism, part of the thaw’s self-definition was a nostalgia for the more open and experimental 1920s. But this, too, led to difficulties, for the future could not really lie in the past. The Vakhtangov Theater became famous for reviving a 1922 production of Carlo Gozzi’s fairytale “Princess Turandot,” intended by director Ruben Simonov to give the theater new life. When it toured, foreign audiences marveled at it as being miraculously un-Soviet; but conservative Soviet audiences found it class-alien. 
The same theater followed up with a poor-quality anti-Stalinist play, which generated such internal politicking that it ended up proving the survival of Stalinism. 
Soviet institutions were like Western institutions, Bittner shows, insofar as time and again they pitched modernizers against conservatives, and utilitarian arguments generally won the day. Much intriguing and string-pulling went on, right up to the ministerial level, with officials exploiting ideological controversies for personal gain. 
But adding to Soviet attitudes to change was an often-genuine concern with ideological correctness and, less surprising, a wholly imaginable fear of where being in the wrong might lead. At the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the scholar Yulian Oksman, who took the thaw to mean that he could meet foreign scholars and publish articles abroad that deviated from the party line, was fired in 1964 when his pseudonym was uncovered. He was accused of political naivete. 
With the arrest one year later of Sinyavsky, another literary scholar with contacts abroad, the answer to what should be the right attitude to the West seemed neither clear nor likely to be liberal. 
Take, then, the Arbat project, which was arguably inspired by competition with the United States for cultural prestige, and which led to the destruction of much-loved old lanes packed with centuries of history. 
The old Arbat was a “special city,” according to the writer Ivan Bunin, and felt separate from the rest of Moscow. 
Its 19th-century neo-classical buildings, mixed with Art Nouveau from the turn of the century, gave the cozy area between Arbatskaya Ploshchad and Smolenskaya Ploshchad a character and a meaning. “A district, a country, a living and trembling history, our culture, what is in our souls,” said the singer and famous countryside writer Bulat Okudzhava. As newbuild made the area look more like the anonymous outskirts of Moscow, the old Arbat’s destruction peaked in the early 1960s, Bittner writes, when entire blocks were razed to accommodate Novy Arbat, a gargantuan project a few blocks north. So few people wanted to live in these new high-rises beside a six-lane highway that the buildings were given over for student accommodation.
Aside from replacing the characterful old with the characterless new, an issue on which Bittner quotes the American scholar Jane Jacobs and her concern for cities across the developed world, the question for Soviet architects was how to incorporate the celebrated but awkward heritage of early Soviet Constructivism into the project. 
The freer 1960s at last enabled a return to the ideological purity and aesthetic adventurousness of Leninism’s first decade. 
After years of Stalinist interference, ideologues wanted to continue building the New Man by housing him in functionalist apartment blocks. Constructivism’s pared-down facades also pointedly departed from proud and triumphant Stalinist classicism, which suggested that they were the right choice. 
Yet what style was really right for the times? 
Public opinion was generally against both demolition and the erection of tall buildings in such an area. But Moscow desperately needed new housing, and Khrushchev wanted to deliver. 
The spin-doctors squared the ideological critics of “our Broadway” by insisting that the building project would be socialist by location, not by design, and from then the old Arbat was doomed. 
Khrushchev, actually a man with a real and informed interest in architecture, ended up — and not only in central Moscow — giving his name to a notorious era of penny-pinching prefabricated social housing. And that, in turn, looked much more “socialist” in the eyes of the world than Stalinist Classicism, which favored real construction and more generous proportions. 
Bittner shows not only how changes in town planning and in social philosophy are, as everywhere, slowly and often deviously implemented, but also how often they rebound on the good intentions of those who push them through. He also shows how tricks of language, and constant cultural and political reframing, often lead to changes being experienced one way and remembered another. During the thaw, Okudzhava created the myth of the Arbat as a place where an unreconstructed old intelligentsia still lived. 
In fact, Bittner suggests, like in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s, artists and intellectuals still lived in the Arbat, but only just. As the bulldozers moved in, Okudzhava saw everything he had campaigned against happen. And yet now it is a statue of him walking down the street, through courtyard arches that no longer exist, that presides over “the free culture zone,” where tens of thousands of Russian and foreign visitors now throng to enjoy a “classic” area and its history. 
Bittner suggests that the place the guidebooks love is actually the gravestone of the Russian intelligentsia.
This book is a contribution to the vexed, still continuing history of the modernization of the city of Moscow, based on highly partial notions of what “history” amounts to and how it should be “preserved.” By restaging some of the outspoken, even heckled, neighborhood protests that took place in a world closed to foreign scrutiny, it also explodes any monolithic notion of the thaw as a time of unequivocal optimism and renewal. 
The latest contribution to that myth came in the late 1980s, when the glasnost era claimed the thaw as a worthy predecessor. Change is not easy anywhere, and even when it is positively intended, it often does violence to the fabric of daily life that helps successive generations make sense of who they are. 


Lesley Chamberlain is the author of “Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia” and “The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia.”

TITLE: Resurrection
AUTHOR: By Megan K. Stack
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: KOSTROVO — Today they would learn about drawing, Russian Orthodox saints and God. The 7-year-olds sat straight at their desks, sun pouring through lace curtains and cherry trees blooming in the fields beyond. The teacher set a birch branch before the children and told them it was fragile and unique, just like their souls.
“If you think you can’t draw properly, who will help you?” she asked.
“God will help us,” a boy called out.
“Yes, God will guide your hand, so be confident, have faith.”
This is Tuesday, one of the two days a week dedicated to Orthodox education at this sleepy public school in the lush forests outside Moscow. All the girls and women have forgone pants in favor of skirts, and every student is learning Christian catechism along with reading, writing and arithmetic.
It’s an unlikely scene, not least because this is a public school in a country that, just a few decades back, prided itself on institutional atheism. It’s also a strange sight because as many as half of the pupils are Muslim, with a few Jews, Buddhists and nonbelievers mixed in. Many of their families arrived recently from Central Asia and the Caucasus in search of better schools and jobs.
At school, the students paint massive murals of Jesus, memorize myriad details about Orthodox saints and discuss New Testament stories with the local priest, who barrels into class in flowing black robes to oversee the students’ spiritual formation. At home, some of the children are learning to read the Koran in Arabic.
“Some of the parents doubted. Some were against it,” school administrator Natalia Korolchenko said. “But I told the parents, because more and more children of different nationalities are coming, something should unite them. Something should be done to make them respect the culture of this country.”
Whereas the United States has haggled over prayer in schools, many Russian schools have swung wildly from Marxist havens to institutions steeped in Orthodox symbols and doctrine. 
With pictures of Jesus and the saints displayed on the walls, Kostrovo’s public school probably would be mistaken for a parochial institution by an uninformed visitor.
The struggle over the national religion is playing out across this vast country. 
A grass-roots movement driven by eager priests and local school officials has brought “Basics of Orthodox Culture” classes to regions throughout Russia in recent years.
The constitution orders the separation of church and state, but many observers believe that the gap is narrowing. Under the eight-year presidency of Vladimir Putin, who is rumored to be a fervent believer, Orthodox leaders took on a new prominence. They blessed the military, praised the country’s rulers, encouraged priests to work on behalf of national interests and carefully avoided any criticism of the government’s human rights or democracy record.
In exchange, the government and oligarchs close to the Kremlin have lavished the patriarchy with cash to restore monasteries and churches that went to seed during the Soviet era. An Orthodox construction boom is underway across the country.
The government has so far avoided entanglement in a growing debate over whether the classes are appropriate for public education. The decision over whether to add them — and the nebulous question of where culture ends and theology begins — has been left in the hands of local school officials.
The advent of religious education has provoked outcry from diverse segments of Russian society: Communists, Muslim and Jewish leaders and wary educators have raised alarms over the growing popularity of the classes.
“This seriously affects the unity of the country,” said Arsan Sadriyev of the Russian section of the Spiritual Directorate of European Muslims. “This will lead to the breakup of the country. Ethnic groups will consolidate themselves and look for ways to protect their interests.”
But supporters believe that the courses in Orthodox history and culture will unify Russia by filling an ideological void left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Orthodox Christianity is the defining core of Russian history and identity, they say, and should be a compulsory subject for every student. Muslim immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus are in particular need of Orthodox understanding, they contend, so they can grasp the culture of their new home.
“If we go to Turkey, we must learn the basics of Islamic culture,” school administrator Korolchenko said. “When children come here, they should learn Orthodox culture. It will be easier for them.”
Clerics are locked in debate with the Education Ministry over whether the Orthodox courses should be discontinued or standardized, said Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the Moscow patriarchy.
“Some people are afraid of any religion in the schools,” he said. “They still want to keep the monopoly of materialism and positivism that existed in Soviet times.”
But Russia itself is changing. In Soviet days, this bucolic town was home to a homogenous population of ethnic Russian families who made their living working at the government cattle farm.
Today this region of rolling, fertile hills has been flooded with newcomers: Chechens, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Tajiks and Uzbeks. Korolchenko declares, proudly, that the school is no less dogmatic today than it was when she arrived 30 years ago as a Communist Party member. 
But now, instead of communism and agriculture, the school is teaching religion to give the children a moral framework.
“If you understand the general Christian dogmas and the moral code of communism, it’s the same thing,” she said.
The federal government has made its approval plain. In 2004, the Education Ministry presented the school with an award for “spiritual and moral rebirth of village residents.”
The town’s priest, Vadim Sorokin, is also a former Communist who was an adult when he was baptized. He came to Kostrovo in 1995 and set about reconstructing the ruined hulk of St. Nicholas the Sanctifier Church.
Today, sunlight streams through intricately painted cupolas. Gold chandeliers dangle from an ornate ceiling, throwing light on icons etched with a wolf’s fang and set in hand-carved mahogany.

The renovation cost millions of dollars, all donated by the government and wealthy businesspeople. Sorokin started out buying books for the school and slowly worked up to introducing the Orthodox culture classes in 2003.

TITLE: The big match
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With soccer mania sweeping Russia, even the army has made an exception to its strict regime and will allow recruits to watch Sunday’s Euro 2008 final in Vienna, Austria, while prisons in time zones across the country will record the match for inmates to watch the next day.
If you are not in the army or in prison and want to watch the culmination of Europe’s football festival, then you’ll have organize it for yourself. The big match starts at 10.45 p.m. on Sunday and hundreds of St. Petersburg’s bars, clubs and restaurants — some specially constructed for the month-long tournament — will broadcast it. Given the interest in the competition generated by Team Russia’s success, there are certain to be crowds all over town and booking a table as soon as possible is essential. 

<b>The Office Pub
5 Kazanskaya Ulitsa 
Tel: 571 5428
6 screens</b>
The Office tends to be a little less boisterous than the Irish pubs and attracts a well-heeled crowd with its central location, which is convenient for joining in any consequent street parties on nearby Nevsky. It has numerous screens and an extensive menu.

<b>The Shamrock
27 Ulitsa Dekabristov
Tel: 570 4625
3 screens</b>
This lively Irish pub near the Mariinsky Theater has three screens and enough different beers to make fans from any of the countries participating in Euro 2008 feel at home. The hearty pub grub will satisfy those who feel hungry just from watching all that running around, while the 25 whiskey labels may help to drown the football blues in the event of an undesired result.  

<b>Vegas
6 Manezhnaya Ploshchad
Tel: 710 5000
2 screens</b>
This sports bar is a popular option with die-hard fans for its two giant screens — if size matters, then Vegas is the place to watch the final.  The menu features American classics such as burgers and chicken wings, and beer costs upwards of 100 rubles.

<b>Mollie’s Irish Pub
36 Ulitsa Rubinshteina
Tel: 570 3768
4 screens</b>
Despite its considerable size, Mollie’s retains the welcoming and cozy atmosphere of a real Irish pub thanks to its friendly staff and relaxed crowd. Its four screens enable visitors to see the action from wherever they are sitting, whilst enjoying generous portions of classic pub grub. Mollie’s serves a range of international beers as well as less exotic local names.

<b>Golden Garden Club 
9 Vladimirsky Prospekt 
Tel: 572 2233
1 screen</b>
If you like watching the game but are not so keen on the glass-throwing culture that so often accompanies it, the Golden Garden Club is the perfect place to watch the Euro 2008 final. The boutique hotel will be showing the game on a large TV screen in its elegant lobby bar, which also offers a range of bar meals. Despite being a less obvious destination than the city’s numerous pubs and bars, space is limited and it is therefore advisable to reserve a seat in advance.

<b>Football Bar
28 Karavannaya Ulitsa
Tel: 314 8468
2 screens</b>
As its name suggests, this bar just off Nevsky has dedicated itself solely to the beautiful game, although few would describe the bar’s interior as beautiful. Does that matter? Hardly. Two large screens will show the Euro 08 final, and there will be an entrance fee (which will vary depending on whether Russia defeats Spain in the semifinal).

<b>Tinkoff Brewery
7 Kazanskaya Ulitsa
Tel: 718 5566
3 screens</b>
Tinkoff is a vast complex that includes a restaurant featuring three large screens and a sushi bar (where there are no screens). It is popular with local yuppies, and is a favorite place for watching football.

<b>Tara Brooch 
18 2nd Sovietskaya Ulitsa
Tel: 336 6666
6 screens</b>
A new addition to the city’s Irish pubs, the Tara Brooch is spacious — it has six screens — and is conveniently located near Ploshchad Vosstaniya. The menu is a mix of Russian and western cuisine and the range of beers equals that of the city’s older Irish pubs. 

<b>Ring O’ Bells
4 Ulitsa Kolokolnaya
Tel: 764 2289
4 screens</b>
The city’s newest English pub offers a great view of the bell tower of Vladimir Church, though eyes are more likely to be focused on the pub’s four plasma screens on Sunday evening.  The pub serves good traditional food including English breakfasts, but there is no Russian beer available. England did not qualify for Euro 2008.

TITLE: Salad days
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Fresh FM</b> // 11 Gorokhovaya Unlitsa // Tel: 314 7417 // Open from 9 a.m. through 9 p.m. // Lunch for two 820 roubles ($34) // Menu in Russian only, English version in progress.

Fresh FM, a high-concept salad bar on Gorokhovaya, between Bolshaya and Malaya Morskaya streets near the Admiralty, is something new for St. Petersburg. In a clinical, Japanese-style setting, guests build their own “designer” salads from a choice of ingredients or choose from a set menu. Fresh FM aims to provide an upscale, healthy dining experience quite unlike anything else available in the city. Perhaps a revolution is stirring: director Alexander Zatulivetov told Time Out that he plans to open as many as 14 Fresh FM outlets in St. Petersburg by the end of 2009.
Zatulivetov says Fresh FM is based on Greens & Grille, an American chain of salad bars based in Orlando, Florida, and the apparently simple concept is actually fiendish to negotiate without an English-language menu. For 260 rubles ($11), you choose a base of mixed leaves from a choice of two — Daytona (Iceberg, radish, frisse, cilantro, basil) or Houston (Romaine, rocket, sweetcorn, frisse, mint, parsley) — followed by up to five toppings. There are 40 toppings, from avocado to zelyonaya goroshyok (green peas), to choose from but servings are small, and adding extra ones costs 15 rubles (60 cents) per topping. The next step is to choose a dressing such as honey and balsamic vinegar, 1000 island, ranch or tartar sauce. Then — for 90 rubles ($3.80) — you can add grilled meat or fish that will be prepared, Korean-style, there and then on a hotplate. If all this is too complicated there are “designer salads” for 240 rubles ($10) that more or less follow the same pattern but to one of nine set dishes.
For example, Gorgonzola (No. 5) is a cheese-heavy mix based on the Houston option. It adds cherry tomatoes, green onions, avocado, bacon, onion rings, basil and gorgonzola lumps, tossed in a pungent, overpowering Blue Cheese dressing. The best part of the meal is the grilled meat (or fish) addition to the basic salads. For example, the chicken breast is seared to perfection with a tangy mango, honey and spicy marinade.
The Mexicana (No. 4) is also based on the Houston mix, enhanced by red onion, sweetcorn, the occasional kidney bean, a scattering of tortilla chips, a few squares of cheddar and two whole cherry tomatoes.  It was spiced up further with rare but feisty jalapeno chilies and a delectable lime vinegar and cilantro dressing. Its only shortcoming was the paucity of the toppings, which did not seem to justify the cost.
The combination of the cigarette-free interior, reflective surfaces, healthy salads and fresh juices (far better value for money at 80 rubles, $3.20) is in sharp contrast with the view of traffic-clogged Gorokhovaya Ulitsa afforded by the large glass windows and automatic door. The toilet, a sparkling, fragrant experience, is similarly immaculate, as are the cream leather banquettes lining the second room. 
The sight of the dust and fumes the other side of the glass may be enough to inspire some to order a Vitamix cocktail (180 rubles, $7.20), available in a range of exotic combinations including pumpkin and orange, fennel and Hungarian turnip, and beetroot, apple and lime. 
Not so fresh, however, was the rather underwhelming sliced bread, though it was devoured nevertheless as a welcome element of stodge. Indeed, though the salads are undoubtedly a health option rarely seen in St. Petersburg, they are not enough to satisfy active city-dwellers. And all that cheese and dressing blunts Fresh FM’s healthy-eating claims.  
The menu at Fresh FM also includes a soup of the day and chicken broth with noodles, both for 130 rubles ($5.20), for hungrier diners.

TITLE: Hair-raising comedy
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Let me be blunt: “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen. That it is the only one I have ever seen — and why is that? what cultural deficiency or ideological conspiracy has prevented this genre from flourishing? — does not much detract from my judgment.
Directed by Dennis Dugan from a script by Judd Apatow, Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler (who also stars), “Zohan” has its share of scatology, crude sexual humor and queasy homophobia, the basic elements from which male-centered Hollywood comedies are constructed these days. There are supporting roles for stand-up comedians (Ahmed Ahmed, Nick Swardson) and “Saturday Night Live” veterans (Rob Schneider, Kevin Nealon), a few oddball cameos (Shelley Berman, Chris Rock) and exquisitely random “as themselves” appearances by John McEnroe and Mariah Carey. Why not? Less amusingly, there are also some lumpy computer-assisted special effects, an overstuffed plot and a scattering of awkwardly executed gags. But a lot of the crude bodily-function jokes are actually pretty funny, not least because they are supplemented by more hummus-based humor than you might have thought possible.
You might also think, as I certainly did, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presents a singularly unpromising source of laughs. But as Yitzhak Rabin once said, enough of blood and tears. He did not go on to propose semen, urine, shampoo or hummus as substitutes, but those are, for Dugan, Smigel, Apatow and Sandler, the substances that come most readily to hand. (So does a made-up but scarily realistic Israeli soft drink called Fizzy-Bubbeleh.)
And the filmmakers spray all this stuff around in a brave and noble cause. American diplomatic efforts have so far proved inadequate to the task of bringing peace to the Middle East, but “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” taps into deeper and more durable sources of American global power in its quest for a plausible end to hostilities. Ancient grievances and festering hatreds are no match for the forces of sex, money, celebrity and exuberant, unapologetic stupidity.
Zohan (Sandler) certainly seems to think so, though he might express his views differently, and certainly with a thicker accent. A highly skilled military operative who specializes in counterterrorism, he is basically a less anguished version of the character played by Eric Bana in “Munich.” The brilliant opening sequence places him in a tableau that would bring a tear to Theodor Herzl’s eye. Whether it would be a tear of joy or dismay I will leave to more seasoned polemicists, but there is something both appealing and authentic about a vision of the Jewish state on its 60th birthday that emphasizes lithe young bodies frolicking, flirting and playing Hacky Sack on the beach. If you will it, it is no dream.
But only part of Zohan’s life is carefree, and it’s the other part — the job that requires heavy weapons, deadly stealth and hand-to-hand combat with a superterrorist called the Phantom (John Turturro) — that drives him into the diaspora. Zohan may have a picture of Moshe Dayan on his bedroom wall, but his real idol is Paul Mitchell, the American hair-care mogul whose outdated styles Zohan studies as if they were pages of the Talmud. He wants to stop fighting and cut “silky smooth” hair. And so, like everyone else with a dream, he migrates to New York, where he finds an entry-level job at a salon run by a pretty Palestinian named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui).
A romance between them seems at once inevitable and unthinkable, but the taboos that “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is unwilling to smash are few indeed. The movie is principally interested in establishing its main character as a new archetype in the annals of Jewish humor. He’s a warrior and also, to an extent undreamed of in the combined works of Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Howard Stern, a sexual hedonist, so utterly free of neurosis or inhibition that it’s hard to imagine him and Sigmund Freud occupying the same planet, much less the same cultural-religious tradition.
Sex, for Zohan, is like hummus: there is an endless supply, and no occasion on which it could be judged inappropriate. He is always on the make, but Sandler’s natural sweetness inoculates the character against sleaziness. In his feathery ’80s haircut and loud, half-buttoned shirts, Zohan joins a long tradition, stretching back from Will Ferrell through Steve Martin to the great Jerry Lewis himself, of goofballs who mistake themselves for studs and turn out to be right.
The film’s image of Israelis as hopelessly behind the pop-culture curve — Zohan’s musical taste belongs to the same era as his hairdo — is itself something of an anachronism. The hip-hop-inflected Hebrew pop on the soundtrack (by Hadag Nachash) provides some evidence that real Israelis are much cooler than the ones on screen. And the willingness of the American Jewish filmmakers to mock their Middle Eastern cousins is also a subtle, unmistakable sign of cultural maturity.
“Subtle” and “maturity” may seem like odd words to use about a movie that wrings big laughs from pelvic gyrations, indoor Hacky Sack and filthy-sounding fake-Hebrew and Arabic words. But much as it revels in its own infantilism, “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is also brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks’s “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact.
I suppose some Middle East policy-scolds may find reasons to quarrel with “Zohan,” either for being too evenhanded or not evenhanded enough in its treatment of Israelis and Palestinians. Did I mention that it’s a comedy? Seriously, though, the movie’s radical, utopian and perfectly obvious point is that the endless collection and recitation of political grievances is not funny at all, and that political strife is a trivial distraction from the things that really matter. There is so much hummus, and so little time.

TITLE: Germany Beats Turkey to Reach Euro Final
AUTHOR: By Ryland James
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BASEL, Switzerland — Defender Philipp Lahm’s late strike put three-times European champions Germany in Sunday’s Euro 2008 final and sealed a 3-2 win to knock out injury-ravaged Turkey.
Lahm’s 90th minute goal made sure Vienna will be Germany’s final destination after Turkey’s Semih Senturk had forced an equaliser just four minutes from time to make it 2-2 to set up another dramatic finish.
Germany striker Miroslav Klose had nudged his side into the lead on 79 minutes after Bastian Schweinsteiger’s first-half goal had cancelled out Ugur Boral’s early strike as Turkey had taken a shock lead.
Klose said the three-times European champions must raise their game if they are going to win the Euro 2008 crown in Sunday’s final.
Germany will face either Russia or Spain in Sunday’s final and after a lacklustre first-half performance in Basel, Klose said they must fight much harder if they are to add a fourth European crown.
“We’re near the summit, but it remains to be seen if we can make it to the top,” said the Bayern Munich striker who scored Germany’s second goal with a bullet-like header.
“I think we need to make a bigger effort in the final.
“The Turks played with real fire, they had real belief.”
This was Germany’s first win over Turkey since May 1992 and Fatih Terim’s battered side used their never-say-die spirit forced the Germans to work hard.
“It is an immense happiness that I am feeling,” said 48-year-old Loew.
“That was a battle in which we have expended a lot of energy.
“We weren’t very good in the first-half and in the second we weren’t that good either, but we gritted our teeth and we wanted the victory.
“The Turks played really well, they chased after the ball a lot and maybe they ran after it very well and we had heavy legs and the heat didn’t do us any favours.”
For Terim it was a case of so near but so far.
“I am very sad to have got so close to the final and not made it,” said the 54-year-old, who guided Galatasaray to the UEFA Cup trophy ahead of Arsenal in 2003.
“The players would have deserved it. Unfortunately we have a habit of conceding too many goals too easily. However, the team has honoured the Turkish people.”
Lahm was extremely relieved that he had made up for a glaring error that had led to the Turkish second goal.
“It is one of the most beautiful moments of my career,” said the 24-year-old Bayern Munich star.
“We didn’t play well. Turkey believed in themselves and made life difficult for us. We fought for the goal till the end. I should not have committed the error that led to the second goal. That is why I am happy to have helped the team to win the match.”
Having reached Basel’s St Jakob-Park semi-final by forging a reputation as the tournament’s come-back kings with last-gasp wins over Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Croatia, Turkey threatened Germany with the same treatment.
Terim had said he wanted to put his team on the map and their battling spirit has reminded the footballing world again what Turkey can do having reached the 2002 World Cup semi-final.
Turkey were without the banned quartet of keeper Volkan Demirel, Middlesbrough’s Tuncay Sanli, Arda Turan, who scored their last gasp winner against the Swiss, and Emre Asik.
And captain Nihat Kahveci, whose pair of late goals sank the Czech Republic, was missing with a thigh injury.
In contrast, Germany had all 23 men fit and ready to go having responded to their shock 2-1 defeat by Croatia in the group stages by knocking-out much-fancied Portugal with an impressive 3-2 defeat here last Thursday.
Germany coach Joachim Loew played the same line-up and 4-5-1 formation he had used against Portugal for the semi-final, but it was the Turks who dominated the first-half chances with Kazim Kazim driving a shot against the bar on 14 minutes.
And Turkey took a deserved lead when Kazim again hit the cross-bar before Fenerbahce’s Ugur Boral fired at Jens Lehmann who watched helplessly as the ball trickled over the line on 22 minutes.
Germany’s reply was immediate as attacking midfielder Lukas Podolski slid in a cross which Portugal’s tormentor Bastian Schweinsteiger flicked into the net on 26 minutes for his second goal in two games.
Lehmann was in action again as he punched clear Hamit Altintop’s free-kick just after the half-hour mark, one of nine first-half chances Turkey created compared to Germany’s one.
At the break Simon Rolfes made way for Torsten Frings in Germany’s midfield and match-winner Lahm was unlucky not to have won a penalty when he was brought down on the edge of the area by Sabri Sarioglu on 52 minutes.
In a much-tighter second half, Turkey kept the pressure on with Altintop bossing the midfield against his Bayern Munich colleagues in Germany’s ranks.
But the breakthrough came in the 79th minute when Bayern striker Klose rose above three Turkish defenders and goalkeeper Recber Rustu to score his second goal in two games.
Turkey pulled a late goal out of the bag for the fourth time in succession when Semih slipped marker Per Mertesacker to stab home Sabri Sarioglu’s cross on 86 minutes to equalise.
But Lahm put German fans in seventh heaven with his 90th-minute strike to send his side to Vienna.

TITLE: Bush Lifts N. Korea Sanctions
AUTHOR: By Deb Riechmann
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — President Bush said Thursday he will lift key  trade sanctions against North Korea and remove it from the U.S. terrorism blacklist, a turnaround in policy toward the communist regime he once branded as part of an “axis of evil.”
The announcement came after North Korea handed over a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear work to Chinese officials on Thursday, fulfilling a key step in the denuclearization process.
Bush called the declaration a positive step along a long road to get the nation to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet, he remained wary of the regime, which has lied about its nuclear work before. And North Korea’s declaration, received six months late, falls short of what the administration once sought, leaving it open to criticism from those who want the U.S. to take an even tougher stance against the regime.
“We will trust you only to the extent you fulfill your promises,” Bush said in the Rose Garden. “I’m pleased with the progress. I’m under no illusions. This is the first step. This isn’t the end of the process. It is the beginning of the process.”
To demonstrate that it is serious about foregoing its nuclear weapons, North Korea is planning the televised destruction of a 65-foot-tall cooling tower at its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The cooling tower is a key element of the reactor, but blowing it up — with the world watching — has little practical meaning because the reactor has already been nearly disabled.
Specifically, Bush said the U.S. would erase trade sanctions under the Trading With the Enemy Act, and notify Congress that, in 45 days, it intends to take North Korea off the State Department list of nations that sponsor terrorism.
“If North Korea continues to make the right choices it can repair its relationship with the international community ... If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and its partners in the six-party talks will act accordingly,” Bush said.
The declaration, about 60 pages of documentation, is the result of long-running negotiations the United States, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia have been having with Pyongyang.
A senior U.S. official said the declaration contains detailed data on the amount of plutonium North Korea produced during each of several rounds of production at a now-shuttered plutonium reactor. It is expected to total about 37 kilograms of plutonium — enough to make about a half-dozen bombs.
However, the declaration, which covers nuclear production dating back to 1986, does not contain detailed information about North Korea’s suspected program of developing weapons fueled by enriched uranium.

TITLE: Mugabe May Negotiate With Opposition
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert Mugabe says he is open to talks with the opposition. Mugabe was speaking Thursday at a campaign rally on the eve of an election the opposition is boycotting. He says he is “open to discussion” with the opposition.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai called on Wednesday for talks on forming a transitional authority. Mugabe had until Thursday shown little interest in talks, instead focusing on the election.
World leaders have dismissed Friday’s presidential runoff. Tsvangirai, who had been the only candidate facing Mugabe, announced Sunday he was withdrawing because of state-sponsored violence.
Mugabe’s information minister on Thursday dismissed criticism of Zimbabwe’s leadership from anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, a day before an internationally condemned runoff election was scheduled to take place.
Mugabe’s main rival, who is boycotting the vote, welcomed Mandela’s remarks as a sign of solidarity.
Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said Mandela was only bowing to Western pressure when he referred to a “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe.
Mandela made his comments Wednesday in London before an audience at a fundraiser that included Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former President Clinton.
But Ndlovu nonetheless called Mandela a statesman, and said he condemned the West for pressuring African leaders, not Mandela.
Although out of office for nearly a decade, Mandela remains a commanding and respected figure. He uses his influence sparingly, and it is particularly rare for him to publicly differ with South Africa’s current president, Thabo Mbeki. South Africans and other Africans have been increasingly questioning Mbeki’s unwillingness to publicly criticize Mugabe, so Mandela’s brief but sharp comments will have particular resonance.
“We appreciate the solidarity from Nelson Mandela,” opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said, adding “it is something we cherish.”
Tsvangirai was speaking by phone to Britain’s Sky News Thursday from the Dutch Embassy in Zimbabwe’s capital, where he has sought shelter amid mounting political violence blamed primarily on Mugabe’s government.
Meanwhile, scores of Zimbabwean opposition supporters were seeking refuge from political violence at South Africa’s embassy in Harare for a second day Thursday.
At midmorning, people could be seen sitting in the sun or sleeping in the embassy parking lot. At least one road block obstructed the street leading up to the embassy’s main entrance, and riot police were on a highway nearby.
Ronnie Mamoepa, a spokesman for the South African Foreign Ministry, put the number of people at the embassy Thursday at about 180. He says the ambassador was working with aid groups and Zimbabwean officials to find sanctuary for the group, among them women and children. Mamoepa says officials are also working on finding blankets, food and other supplies.
Also Thursday, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader was quoted as saying negotiations won’t be possible if Mugabe goes ahead with a runoff election the world has denounced as a sham.
“Negotiations will be over if Mr. Mugabe declares himself the winner and considers himself the president. How can we negotiate?” Tsvangirai said in an interview with the British newspaper The Times. The Times said he spoke by telephone from the Dutch Embassy in Harare, where he fled over the weekend, saying he had received a tip soldiers were headed to his home.
On Wednesday, Tsvangirai emerged briefly from the embassy to hold a news conference during which he urged African leaders to guide negotiations aimed at forming a coalition transitional authority in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwean officials scoffed at Tsvangirai’s call for talks and said they were focused on Friday’s presidential runoff.
Tsvangirai, who had been the only candidate facing Mugabe in the runoff, announced Sunday he was withdrawing because state-sponsored violence against his Movement for Democratic Change had made it impossible to run. Electoral officials say the election will go ahead with Tsvangirai’s name on the ballot.
Tsvangirai late Wednesday issued a statement saying he did not write a commentary that appeared under his name calling for United Nations peacekeepers in his country. The essay appeared in Wednesday’s edition of the British newspaper The Guardian. Tsvangirai said The Guardian was assured by “credible sources” that he had approved the article, but that he had not.
A Tsvangirai aide, George Sibotshiwe, said Thursday his party was trying to determine how the commentary was given to The Guardian under Tsvangirai’s name.
The Guardian, which published Tsvangirai’s statement that the essay was not his on Thursday, said it had had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the initial piece, which it said was supplied by a contact who had represented Tsvangirai in the past.
Tsvangirai had been asked about the essay several times earlier Wednesday and did not disavow it then, though he did stress that a call for peacekeepers was not a call for military intervention, a sensitive issue.
The Herald, a Zimbabwean government mouthpiece, on Thursday accused Tsvangirai of calling “for military intervention in Zimbabwe disguised as peacekeepers.”
Sibotshiwe, the spokesman, said Tsvangirai did not equate peacekeepers with military intervention.
“We still need peacekeepers,” Sibotshiwe said.
Also Thursday, The Herald reported that Mugabe had urged crowds north of Harare to “vote for the ruling party to show the world their resolve to defend the country’s sovereignty and independence.”
Mugabe has become increasing defiant in the face of international condemnation he dismisses as Western attempts to meddle in Africa. But Africans themselves are increasingly speaking out against Mugabe.
On Wednesday, the leaders of Swaziland and Tanzania — meeting as a committee of the main regional bloc, the South African Development Community — urged Zimbabwe to postpone the runoff, saying violence and restrictions on the opposition had not created the conditions for a free and fair vote Friday.
The Herald, the Zimbabwean government mouthpiece, quoted officials here Thursday as saying the call for postponement was illegitimate.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s opposition said its No. 2 leader Tendai Biti was granted bail Thursday.

TITLE: Safin Stuns Djokovic At Wimbledon
AUTHOR: By Dave James
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Former world number one Marat Safin sent third seed Novak Djokovic crashing out of Wimbledon on Wednesday while Serbian compatriot Ana Ivanovic narrowly escaped the same All England Club black hole.
Safin, a US Open and Australian Open champion during his glory days before a slump sent his career into freefall, stunned the 21-year-old world number three 6-4, 7-6 (7/3), 6-2 with a magical Centre Court display.
On Court One, women’s top seed Ivanovic, buoyed by her French Open triumph, had to save two match points in extraordinary circumstances to see off France’s experienced Nathalie Dechy 6-7 (2/7), 7-6 (7/3), 10-8.
There were no such dramas for five-time men’s champion Roger Federer who eased into the last 32 with a 6-3, 6-4, 7-6 (7/3) win over Robin Soderling.
It was the world number one’s seventh win in seven meetings with the 23-year-old Swede and the comfortable manner of his victory would have been aided by having seen dangerman Djokovic removed from his side of the draw.
“I’m very happy with the win,” said Federer who was watched from the players’ box by American pop star Gwen Stefani and will next meet France’s Marc Gicquel for a place in the fourth round.
“The conditions were difficult, the sun was low so it was hard to see the ball in the last few points. So I was pleased to get through without playing a fourth set.”
Reigning Australian Open Djokovic, who had reached the third round at least in his last nine Grand Slam appearances, and was runner-up to Rafael Nadal at Queen’s two weeks ago, sent down 10 double faults and 28 unforced errors.
“It was a very bad day. I didn’t do anything I was supposed to do. I made too many mistakes and had no momentum,” said the 21-year-old Djokovic, a semi-finalist last year.
“Marat was one of my idols when I was a junior. I have a lot of respect for him and maybe that played a role today.”
Safin, struggling at 75 in the world, said the win came at the right time for him.
“I’ve been lacking confidence but to beat Djokovic on Centre Court is a great victory,” said Safin who has endured a miserable 2008, only twice winning back-to-back matches before Wimbledon.
Safin goes on to face Italian 29th seed Andreas Seppi for a place in the last 16.
Djokovic was almost joined on the scrapheap by world number one Ivanovic who saw off 29-year-old Dechy in a three-and-a-half-hour thriller and will now face China’s Zheng Jie for a place in the fourth round.
Ivanovic admitted that she was fortunate to escape after a lucky netcord on the second match point in the 10th game of the second set saw the ball flop onto Dechy’s side of the net.
Dechy, playing in her 13th successive Wimbledon, admitted that she wept for an hour after the match.

TITLE: China: Olympics Not Political
AUTHOR: By Christopher Bodeen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — China on Thursday denied injecting politics into the Beijing Olympics despite a rare rebuke from the International Olympic Committee over remarks by a Chinese official about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
The IOC said it sent a letter this week to Beijing organizers expressing regret over a speech Saturday by Tibet’s Communist Party boss Zhang Qingli at a ceremony marking the Olympic torch’s passage through Lhasa.
“The IOC regrets that political statements were made during the closing ceremony of the Torch Relay in Tibet,” the two-sentence IOC statement said.
“We have written to BOCOG to remind them of the need to separate sport and politics and to ask for their support in making sure that such situations do not arise again,” it said.
A spokesman for the BOCOG, which refers to the Beijing organizing committee, said he had no immediate information or comment on the letter.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao also said he had no knowledge of the IOC letter, but insisted that Zhang’s remarks were intended only to foster a “stable and harmonious environment for the Olympics.” 
“China’s solid position is against the politicizing of the Olympics,” Liu said at a regularly scheduled news conference.
The IOC’s comment was surprising given the organization’s general aversion to criticizing Olympic hosts and previous reproaches to activists seeking to use the Beijing Games to spotlight China’s human rights record, policies toward Tibet, and Beijing’s support for Sudan’s authoritarian regime.
Chaotic scenes, including confrontations between protesters and Chinese supporters, surrounded the torch during its earlier international legs, focusing attention on the connection between politics and the games.

TITLE: Ex-Press Baron Appeal Rejected
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CHICAGO — A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the conviction of former press baron Conrad Black and three ex-colleagues found guilty last year of defrauding shareholders of one-time newspaper publishing giant Hollinger International Inc.
The unanimous 16-page decision from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected all of the points lawyers for Black and the others made and affirmed the trial court’s ruling.
Black, a Canadian-born member of Britain’s House of Lords, has been in prison since March 3 when he began serving a 6-and-1/2 year sentence for fraud and obstructing justice.
The court similarly upheld the convictions of three former Hollinger colleagues convicted alongside Black.

TITLE: Woods Has Knee Surgery; Doctor Says ‘No Surprises’
AUTHOR: By Doug Ferguson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Tiger Woods had reconstructive surgery on his left knee Tuesday in Utah to repair a torn ligament, and doctors said it was “highly unlikely” there would be any long-term effects. It was the second time in 10 weeks Woods had surgery on his knee, this time on his anterior cruciate ligament.
“We were confident going into this surgery, and I am pleased with the results,” Dr. Thomas D. Rosenberg said in a statement released by IMG, Woods’ management company.
“There were no surprises during the procedure, and as we have said, with the proper rehabilitation and training, it is highly unlikely that Mr. Woods will have any long-term effects as it relates to his career.”
The surgery came one week after Woods went 91 holes at Torrey Pines to win the U.S. Open in a playoff over Rocco Mediate, revealing later that he also had a double stress fracture in his left tibia.
The surgery, performed by Rosenberg and Dr. Vernon J. Cooley in Park City, was the fourth time Woods has had surgery on his left knee. He had a benign tumor removed in 1994, and he had benign cysts removed in 2002, along with fluid around the ACL.
Woods said he tore his ACL while jogging last year after the British Open, but tried to make it through the end of this season without surgery. Two days after his runner-up finish at the Masters, he had surgery to clean out cartilage in his left knee.
The world’s No. 1 player announced last week that he would miss the rest of the season.

TITLE: Plane Overshoots Destination as Pilots Doze
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: NEW DELHI — An Air India flight headed for Mumbai overshot its destination and was halfway to Goa before its dozing pilots were woken out of a deep slumber by air traffic control, a report said.
The high altitude nap took place approximately two weeks ago, the Times of India reported Thursday. The report, however, drew a furious denial from Air India.
Some 100 passengers were on board the state-run flight that originated from Dubai and flew to the western Indian city of Jaipur before heading south to Mumbai when both pilots fell asleep, a source told the paper.
“After operating an overnight flight, fatigue levels peak — and so the pilots dozed off after taking off from Jaipur,” the source, who was not identified in the report, said.
The plane flew to Mumbai on autopilot, but when air traffic there tried to help the aircraft land, the plane ignored their instructions and carried on at full speed towards Goa.
“It was only after the aircraft reached Mumbai airspace that air traffic control realised it was not responding to any instructions and was carrying on its own course,” the source said.
“The aircraft should have begun its descent about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Mumbai, but here it was still at cruising altitude. We checked for hijack.”
Finally air traffic control buzzed the cockpit and woke up the pilots, who turned the plane around, the report said.
Air India on Thursday said a plane had overshot its Mumbai destination on June 4 but furiously denied it was because the pilots were sleeping, putting the glitch down to a brief communications breakdown.
“The report is absolutely incorrect, devoid of facts, misleading and irresponsible. It is a figment of imagination,” Air India spokesman Jitender Bhargava said by telephone from Mumbai.
“We have gone through the flight reports of the last 30 days. A plane did cross Mumbai for 15 kilometres because it had lost contact for a few moments. At those speeds 15 kilometres is covered in a very short time.”
The plane quickly established contact with air traffic control and landed a short while later, he said.
Bhargava accused the Times of India, one of the country’s biggest papers, of “batting for somebody.” The daily has said in its report that authorities were trying to hush up the incident.
Indian papers also reported this week that a flight operated by private airline Jetlite to the central Indian city of Patna was grounded after the pilot was allegedly found to be drunk.

TITLE: Together for 15 years!
TEXT: On May 19, 2008, the 15th anniversary of the GSM standard in Russia and the anniversary of the mobile phone operator MegaFon were celebrated in Russia. In a meeting with journalists, the company’s top managers reported on the results of its development and plans for the future. 

The First GSM
In 1993 the Russian-Scandinavian enterprise North-West GSM was registered in St. Petersburg – the first Russian mobile phone operator to employ the GSM digital standard. A year and a half later a GSM1800 mobile network was commercially launched, comprising 13 base stations and covering the center of the Northern Capital. In 2002, on the base of the Petersburg company, the first Russia-wide operator MegaFon was created. Today, MegaFon covers 83 subjects of the Russian Federation, its subscriber base numbers 38.5 million subscribers, there are over 19,000 base stations, revenues amount to $5.7 billion and about 18,000 people have been employed by the firm. The General Director of OAO MegaFon, Sergei Soldatenkov noted that one of the most important stages in the development of the company was the creation of the Russia-wide brand that is MegaFon, which involved, first and foremost, expanding beyond the North-West Region to federal level. A new phase in the development of the company is the launching of a “third generation” network. 

The First 3G
The first section in Russia of a “third generation” network is to be found in St. Petersburg, comprising 30 base stations. It was commercially launched in October of last year. At this stage, umbrella coverage of the territory of St. Petersburg and Pushkin, major transport hubs (stations, airports) and densely populated areas in Lenoblast was provided. On June 18, 2008, the commercial launch of 3G in seven regions of the North-West Federal Okrug was announced: Arkhangelskaya, Vologodkskaya, Kaliningradskaya, Murmanskaya, Novgorodskaya and Pskovskaya oblasts and the Republic of Karelia. In addition, as the First Deputy General Director for Operations of OAO MegaFon Alexander Volkov reported, sectors of varied size had been launched in 14 subjects of the Russian Federation – Vladivostok, Kemerovskaya, Novosibirskaya, Sverdlovskaya, Tyumenskaya, Samarskaya and Rostovskaya oblasts, Krasnoyarsky, Krasnodarsky and Stavropolsky krai, as well as the Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous Okrug,  Dagestan, Tatarstan and Bashkiria. In so doing, the company fulfilled the obligatory requirements of its license for the launch of a “third generation” network. In the coming year, according to the managers of OAO MegaFon, the number of regions covered will reach 20-25. Investment in 2008 in the development of the network will amount to $250 million. The director of the northwest branch of MegaFon, Georgy Getmanets, reported that the company planned to build a thousand 3G base stations in the North-West in 2008. At the same time, construction of “second generation” base stations would continue – it is planned that by the end of the year they will number over 3,500.

The First “Package”
The main emphasis in the exploitation of the third generation network will be placed on mobile broadband internet access. In particular, according to the OAO MegaFon Deputy General Director for Commercial Issues, Larisa Tkachuk, the operator will abandon its former strategy within which it did not sell hardware and equipment. MegaFon will now also sell subscription equipment, and it is planned that original offers, such as “device plus special rate for services”, will be launched on the market. Until the autumn the main solution on the market will remain the “MegaFon-3G Modem” package (a USB-modem and SIM card with a rate plan), supplied through the company’s service centers, as well as the Teleforum chain of salons. In the autumn the operator plans to launch the Huawei router, which was presented to journalists by the director of the department for new technologies and projects at OAO MegaFon, Denis Nochevnov. The offer, which is planned for launch on a federal scale, will also come with a rate plan. According to Alexander Volkov, the company’s research shows that subscribers rarely use mobile telephones for voice services and internet access at the same time, so the launching of a solution aimed at internet users is entirely justified. Thus, in investing in the support of leading positions in the 3G segment, the company is establishing its main “growth points” for the future. 

Strength in Unity
Another sphere of development for the business may be the acquisition of a major fixed communications operator to provide convergent services, the company’s management reported. If assets of a sufficient size come onto the market, the operator will attempt to acquire them. Nevertheless, MegaFon is not ruling out purchases on its own traditional mobile phone market. MegaFon is striving not only to be a mobile operator, but also a universal operator, explained Sergei Soldatenkov. In several regions the company is building local communications networks and fiber-optic lines for its corporate clients, and it recently launched a “Home Zone” service allowing it to compete with fixed-line operators. Tatyana Tolmachova, who works with MegaFon’s partner, iKS-Consulting, described the movement towards the universal as being a logical development: “The extensive development has ended, the company can’t grow any larger through the acquiring of new subscribers. Now, for development, it’s necessary for subscribers to start using more and more services. The range of such services at mobile phone operators is limited, and it can only be expanded through related markets.”

Help From Abroad
According to the First Deputy General Director of OAO MegaFon, Alexei Nichiporenko, the company is in negotiations for the purchase of mobile phone providers in Kyrgyzia, including Bimocom, which the company assisted in the construction and launching of its network in 2006. In addition, MegaFon was planning to take part in the privatization of the Afghani operator Afghan Telecom, but ended its participation in the tender due to the high cost of the assets, though it hasn’t entirely lost its interest in that market. The top manager also confirmed the company’s intention to take part in a tender for a GSM license in Iran.

TITLE: The Future Depends On Us
TEXT: The midday shot from the Naryshkin Bulwark of the Peter and Paul Fortress  on June 19, 2008, by the General Director of Megafon Sergei Soldatenkov, marked not only a technological turning point in the history of mobile communications in Russia. It also became a symbol of the solid positions occupied by MegaFon in the St. Petersburg market and the continuity of the history of its development with that of the city on the Neva. In honor of the 15th anniversary of the company, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, on the territory of the Peter and Paul Fortress, an oak-lined alley was created. 
Today, OAO MegaFon is not only a major, financially stable business structure on a federal scale, – it is also a company that has a precise awareness of its responsibilities to society. From the first years of its existence, the operator has taken an active part in the life of the city and the country. Support of events marking the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, Kronshtadt, the Summer Gardens, collaboration with museums and theaters – these are just a number of the projects implemented by the company within the business’s social responsibility programs. At the press conference, the General Director of OAO MegaFon Sergei Soldatenkov announced that “When a business takes on a national scale, it unavoidably begins to think about its social responsibility. Megafon became the first company to provide communication services to the Chechen Republic in the post-war years. MegaFon provided material aid to veterans of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), it supports children’s and youth sports. MegaFon has educational sponsorship projects providing opportunities for talented youths to receive a good education.” Continuing Russian traditions of pre-Revolutionary patronage, MegaFon sponsors social, cultural and sports projects. Having been a member of the board of trustees of the Bolshoi Drama Theater for many years, MegaFon assisted in the release of a unique album, “Artists of the BDT”, which gathered together sketches for productions, set designs, costumes and other works by artists from the last century. Three years ago, several dozen lamps lit up the unique facades of one of St. Petersburg’s first stone buildings – The Peter Palace in the Summer Gardens. MegaFon carried out the financing and technical preparations for this lighting project. Sand sculptures, a jazz festival, the “Island of Childhood” celebration, the resurrection of the carillon of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, the international beach volleyball championship and much more at the Peter and Paul Fortress – all these projects were carried out in collaboration with MegaFon. For many years the mobile phone services provider has supported the Zenit Football Cup – it’s no coincidence that at the celebrations of the company’s anniversary one of the main surprises was the UEFA Cup won by the Petersburg footballers. Thanks to MegaFon, since 2005 the northwest region has held a Mini-Football Championship for Teams from Children’s Homes – The Future Depends on You Cup. The main prizes at this event are trips for the victors to major international sporting events – the final match of the English Football Association Cup in London, the Euro 2008 selection tournament between Croatia and Russia in Zagreb and the final of the League of Champions in Moscow. With the support of MegaFon, on the courts of the Children’s Tennis Center, a DreamCup tennis championship has been held with the participation of young Petersburg sportsmen and women. The company provides charitable aid to the Grafskaya Lavina children’s football team and other sports and social organizations and projects. In May-June of this year, MegaFon supported a unique undertaking for the saving of endangered species organized by the Leningrad Zoo. Nine seal pups and two Baltic phocas – rare animals listed with a very high preservation status in the Red Book for the region – were fostered and reared by the zoo’s specialists and returned to freedom in the Ladoga Lake.

TITLE: News
TEXT: <b>North-West 3G</b>
The 3G network of the MegaFon operator in St. Petersburg and the northwest region comprises 300 base stations. It provides umbrella coverage for the territories of the central cities and major populated areas in the region. The 3G coverage zone includes the cities: Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Gryazovets, Veliky Ustyug, Cherepovets, Sheksna, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, Kola, Veliky Novgorod, Pskov, Petrozavodsk, Olonets and Sortavala. In addition, the coverage in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast has been significantly expanded, now including the cities and towns of Luga, Lomonosov, Vyborg, Gatchina, Sosnovy Bor, Priozersk, Novaya Ladoga, Lodeinoe Pole, Losevo, Levashovo, Roshino, Bolshaya Izhora and others.

<b>A Modem from MegaFon</b>
For convenience of use in services involving the transfer of data, MegaFon offers subscribers the MegaFon-3G Modem package, comprising a miniature USB modem and SIM card with a special rate plan, MegaFon-Modem Plus. The monthly subscription fee includes 100 Mb of traffic in Mobile Internet services and costs from 140 to 290 rubles. All subscribers buying the MegaFon-3G Modem package receive a bonus – 300 Mb of Mobile Internet traffic as a gift. The cost of the MegaFon-3G Modem package is 3,990 rubles. 

<b>Video Calls</b>
From June 18, 2008, regional subscribers to the MegaFon North-West network can use services whereby image and voice services can be used at the same time – “Videocalls.” 
The service is available within the 3G network to subscribers with phones that support the UMTS standard. The cost of a call (to another MegaFon North-West subscriber with a UMTS-standard phone) is 5 rubles, including VAT, for a minute of videocall, while incoming videocalls are free. 

<b>Send a Message to the Future!</b>
For its 15th anniversary, MegaFon opened a special portal, www.15.megafonnw.ru, where internet users can congratulate the operator on its birthday. In addition, MegaFon North-West subscribers can take part in the “Send a Message to the Future” event by sending an SMS or MMS to the 1551 service number. It will reach its final recipient in a year’s time, on June 17, 2009, on the day of MegaFon’s 16th birthday. 

<b>MegaQuest</b>
On June 19, 2008, at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, a ceremony was held awarding the winners in the first season of a global student project, ISIC MegaQuest. ISIC MegaQuest is a model of the computer game scheme in the popular Quest genre that is brought to life – an adventurous logic race in which teams, answering riddle after riddle, undergo varied tests. The aim of each game is to reach a treasure chest and acquire points for the overall rankings. The players move around the city by night in cars, answering questions on historical themes along the way, in so doing establishing the locations of the game zones. In the 2007/2008 season over 3,000 students in 40 teams representing the higher education institutions took part. The games took place on Saturdays from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. from October 2007 to May 2008. During that time, the quest-players underwent 84 tests: they made a 35-meter bungee jump, played “chase” with “parkour”-sportsmen, made their way to a hidden code to the accompaniment of a thundering cannon and the whistling of enemy bullets, broke into a room containing a code through a cordon of professional boxers, solved a detective case involving the theft of jewelry, fled enraged guard dogs and much more. The main prize – a million rubles – was awarded to the Mads team from the Pavlov State Medical University.