SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1387 (51), Friday, July 4, 2008
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TITLE: Kremlin Signals Anti-Graft Measures
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Moscow had to cede some of its powers to regional governments if it is to be successful in rooting out the corruption he described as having become a “way of life” in the country.
Medvedev’s comments, made during the presentation of an ambitious anti-corruption program to federal officials and lawmakers, would suggest a break with the policies of his predecessor Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, who engineered a huge shift of authority from regional governments to the Kremlin during his eight years as president.
Some analysts, however, were skeptical Wednesday that Medvedev’s plans would include any radical measures like the return of gubernatorial elections.
Medvedev said his plan for tackling corruption included “measures for handing over some federal powers to the regions … and some functions of government bodies to the nongovernmental sector.”
The proposed measures will be cemented in new legislation, Medvedev said in comments published on his web site. He did not specify which federal powers might be ceded to the regions or of which responsibilities the state should divest itself, and a Kremlin spokesman declined immediate comment Wednesday.
But an analyst with a think tank to which Medvedev is closely linked said that, although the plan envisioned a transfer of some federal powers to the regional level, it didn’t call for major political reforms.
“It won’t trigger a significant correction in the political regime yet,” said Boris Makarenko, director for social and political programs at the Institute of Contemporary Development, a think tank where Medvedev is head of the trustee council. “There is no politics involved, only new approaches.”
Makarenko did say the federal government had too many responsibilities, some of which should be shifted to regional capitals. As an example, he cited the Emergency Situations Ministry, which regulates the location of fire-protection equipment in buildings across the country.
During his eight years as president, Putin moved to increase the Kremlin’s control at the regional level, including scrapping gubernatorial elections on the pretext of fighting terrorism. Ironically, the nomination of governors by the president was later also promoted as a way to reduce corruption.
Today, the regions may be set to have some responsibilities returned, Makarenko said. “The regional authorities have become more controllable.”
Makarenko’s institute on Wednesday unveiled a report calling for a liberalization of the country’s political system.
“An indispensable condition for the success of Russia’s modernization process is the significant liberalization of social and political life,” said the report, titled: “Democracy: Development of the Russian Model.”
Included in the report are calls for a system of political checks and balances, an independent judiciary and media, political freedoms, human rights and free and fair elections. It said there were no country-specific models of democracy and that the recent characterizations of Russia as a “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy” were nothing more than “ideological cliches.”
Makarenko would not say whether Medvedev’s administration had commissioned the report, only that the president had approved work on the project.
Although the report does not mention gubernatorial elections, Makarenko said he was sure that governors would some day be chosen again by direct vote.
On the main subject of combating graft, Medvedev said he wanted anti-corruption legislation in place by the start of next year.
One of his first steps upon taking office was to order his administration to put together a comprehensive plan to battle corruption. On Wednesday, he announced that a draft had been submitted and that he was studying it.
The plan’s main pillars include legislation defining corruption and more strictly defining requirements for state officials, including judges and Central Bank employees, and creating a system of public and parliamentary oversight over the legislation’s implementation. He also called for stricter regulations on the management of state property and more legal education.
“A number of these laws can create tensions and be interpreted in different ways,” he said. “We have to minimize these difficulties and enter a new year with modern anti-corruption legislation that we won’t be ashamed of and that will be applied effectively.”
“It’s absolutely obvious that corruption in our country is a real and systemic evil that we have to battle,” he added.
Medvedev also said too many state officials currently serve on the boards of state-owned companies. He said one official, in the capacity of chairman, was enough and that others should give up their spots.
“The rest of them are either engaged in lobbying or feeding at the trough,” Interfax quoted him as saying.
Some are skeptical of the chances for Medvedev’s anti-corruption campaign to bear fruit.
“Eight years ago, Putin was also saying all the right things,” said Yevgeny Volk, the Moscow head of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, dismissing Wednesday’s speech as a “PR-campaign ahead of the G8 summit,” scheduled to kick off in Japan early next week.
Another suggestion was that the campaign was designed to show Medvedev as independent from Putin.
“It’s clear Medvedev is facing an acute task in finding his own identity,” said Sergei Mikheyev, deputy director at the Center for Political Technologies.
Makarenko said, however, that Medvedev’s actions would most likely have already been coordinated with Putin.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, repeating a theme often stressed by Medvedev, said Wednesday that economic success would be impossible without battling corruption.
“Small businesses lose more than 10 percent of their profits to extortion,” Gryzlov told a business conference.
TITLE: Russia Speeds Up TNK-BP Work Permits
AUTHOR: By Greg Walters
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — BP Plc will pull more than half the expatriate employees sent to work at its Russian venture TNK-BP from the country, signaling a legal battle with minority shareholders in the unit won’t end soon.
BP will leave a team of about 60 employees in Russia ready to return to TNK-BP when a court injunction barring them from work is lifted, Vladimir Buyanov, a BP spokesman in Moscow, said by phone today. “We’ve decided to keep about 60 people on standby,’’ he said. “Others will be withdrawn and placed at other BP projects around the world.”
A Russian court barred 148 BP specialists from working at TNK- BP in May after ZAO Tetlis, a TNK-BP shareholder, sued to annul an agreement that placed them at TNK-BP. The court case comes as BP battles for control over the Russian venture with billionaire partners Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik.
“Effectively we are in a stalemate,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Moscow-based UralSib Financial Corp. “The only way out is the introduction of a new shareholder: a state company.”
BP’s billionaire partners have repeatedly said they aren’t interested in selling their shares.
TNK-BP paid an average $685,000 a worker, including salary, housing, travel and schooling costs, a year, Buyanov said in May, citing the employment agreement. BP has seconded between 150 and 170 specialists a year to TNK-BP since the venture was formed in 2003, he said.
Tetlis has demanded the accord be scrapped and BP return payments from TNK-BP, according to court documents viewed by Bloomberg. The payments reduced TNK-BP’s profit available as dividends, the documents showed.
Tetlis was founded by Alexander Tagayev and Vadim Zykov, who used to work for Alfa Group, a holding company controlled by Fridman and Khan. Alfa has denied any connection to Tetlis, which bought $40,000 of shares in TNK-BP’s traded unit this year.
Separately, Russia’s Federal Migration Service granted a new work permit today to Robert Dudley, chief executive officer of TNK-BP, along with seven other senior foreign executives of the company. TNK-BP has said dozens of its foreign employees may have to leave Russia in addition to the workers seconded from BP if they are not reissued work permits in coming weeks.
BP’s billionaire partners are calling on Dudley to resign and have pushed for a smaller quota of work permits for non-Russians at the company.
TITLE: Pskov Resort No Holiday for German Investor
AUTHOR: By Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: SPITSINO, Pskov Region — Heiner Berr was inspired to start a resort on Chudskoye Lake, a sprawling body of water in northwest Russia, when a local official showed him the site and promised to support the project.
“Very naively, we agreed and started,” the German businessman said in an interview. “In the first years, there was only trouble.”
Sitting in a wooden cabin, Berr described how he turned a beautiful but barren stretch of land into a European-style resort called Chudskoye Podvorye, which now has 43 cabins amid a landscape of sand dunes and forests.
Located 250 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg, the resort is often full on summer and holiday weekends. Most visitors come from St. Petersburg, braving a bumpy, 2 1/2-hour car ride to enjoy the fishing, hiking and swimming opportunities, as well as amenities like a restaurant, massages, horse rides and a petting zoo.
“We wanted to get away from the city noise,” said Irina Yeliseyeva, a St. Petersburg nurse, as she sat next to her husband Nikolai on the front steps of their cabin, while their son Sergei chopped firewood.
Berr, a native of Bavaria, and two fellow German investors started building the resort in 2002 with a business plan aimed at the St. Petersburg middle class and pledges of support from local and regional officials.
But the years afterward could hardly be described as a model of German efficiency. Instead, Berr and his partners clashed with a Gogolesque world of drunken villagers, inept construction crews and a local mayor who is under investigation for selling valuable lakeside property at knockdown prices to his friends and family.
Despite such hardships, Chudskoye Podvorye started breaking even two years ago. Berr said he and his partners had invested a total of 2 million euros, or $3.1 million, in the project — plus a lot of sweat, tears and exertion.
“The main question when you start such a project in Russia is not the money you must invest,” Berr said. “You must invest time and a lot of nerves.”
When he started building the resort, Berr was a consultant who had seen much of Russia but had no prior experience in the tourism sector.
Berr started his career in the early 1990s working for the Treuhand agency, which handled privatization in the former East Germany. He moved on to Russia and in 1995 co-founded Ost-Euro, a consulting firm that works with regional and municipal governments throughout Russia. He is still the firm’s managing director.
In 2000 and 2001, Ost-Euro oversaw a contest in which the municipal governments of the Pskov region tried to come up with the best local development plan. One of the three winners was Gdov, a town on the shores of Chudskoye Lake, which drafted a plan focused on developing lakeside tourism.
Covering more than 3,500 square kilometers, Chudskoye Lake is the fifth-largest lake in Europe and straddles the border between Russia and Estonia. Known to Estonians as Lake Peipsi, it has a reputation for being ecologically clean and is a popular destination for fishermen.
Many Russians know Chudskoye Lake as the site of the Battle on the Ice, a clash between Teutonic Knights and Russian forces led by Alexander Nevsky in 1242. According to Russian legend, the battle ended when the armor-clad Germans broke through the ice and drowned in the freezing water.
Nowadays, the lake is much more peaceful, although it is patrolled by federal border guards who watch the Russian-Estonian border.
Berr first saw the lake in 2001, when he toured it with Gdov’s then-mayor, Vladimir Konyakhin. In a discussion about Konyakhin’s development plan, Berr showed him photographs of similar resorts in Scandinavia. But the mayor replied that he didn’t want a consultant’s advice; he wanted investors and foreign managers, and he surprised Berr by asking him to build and manage the resort.
“We never planned to have our own investment project in Russia,” Berr said. “It happened only by accident.”
Berr found two co-investors with construction experience and broke ground on the project in 2002. His ties to local and regional officials paid off when he needed to get an array of licenses to start operations. Several years into the project, for example, a deputy governor of the Pskov region organized a televised ceremony to break through a bureaucratic logjam that Berr and his partners were facing, Berr recalled. The deputy governor came to the resort with teams of officials from Pskov and Gdov, as well as camera crews from a regional television station, and within hours Berr had 12 of the 15 signatures he needed, he said.
Berr conceded that it only happened because Chudskoye Podvorye was a high-profile project with the support of the regional government. “Usually you go from one office to another and it’s problems, problems, problems,” he said.
The project experienced new bureaucratic hassles after Konyakhin, the Gdov mayor, left office in 2003. Konyakhin was replaced in an election by Nikolai Mironov, whom Berr described as much less supportive.
“The mayor before invited us [and] did everything to catch us,” Berr said. “And then the new one came and tried to make problems.”
One such problem, Berr said, was the bureaucratic wall he hit while trying to buy the land underneath his resort. He and his partners have a 49-year lease on the land, and they want to buy it before investing more money.
But the Gdov administration has blocked their attempts to buy the land, refusing to answer repeated letters, Berr said. The resort has even sued the municipality in order to force a response, but nobody from the Gdov administration showed up at a recent court hearing, he said.
Not everybody has had such problems buying land in the Gdov district.
In July 2007, Pskov prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Mironov on charges that he had illegally sold real estate to friends and family, costing the government more than 4.5 million rubles, or about $200,000, according to regional media reports.
Mironov sold 20,000 square meters of land to his own son for just 1 ruble per square meter, prosecutors said.
Mironov’s assistant said by telephone that he was too busy to speak to a reporter and referred questions to another official in the Gdov government, who did not answer repeated calls.
Berr said he had never bribed officials for favors. “If they know that they can get money from these Germans, they will never leave us alone,” he said.
When asked what advice he had for other foreign investors working in the regions, Berr said a key ingredient was hiring a trustworthy, well-connected local as general director.
“At the top, you need a general director who can manage staff and network and who knows whom to contact if problems appear,” Berr said.
Now that the resort is up and running, many of its problems involve employees rather than bureaucrats. Early on, the investors decided to use locals for construction rather than professional builders from Pskov or other countries. That saved money but often resulted in shoddy work, Berr said.
“In Germany you build something and it’s OK for 30 years,” he said. “Here, one year later you have to start repairs. You can invite professional building companies, you can take these boys from the village, and it’s all the same.”
Even if locals seem promising at first, they sometimes disappear on drinking binges, Berr added.
Berr complained that he even had trouble finding someone to take care of the horses and the animals in the zoo. At first, he tried hiring boys from the local villages. “For one week it worked,” he said. “And then they stopped taking out the [manure], and the horses stayed inside all day. They could not even be responsible for animals.”
The resort’s first pony was stolen, Berr said. Finally, the resort hired a man from Azerbaijan who now oversees the resort’s small contingent of chickens, geese, goats and horses.
Berr believes he has succeeded in providing quality, Western-style service despite the difficulty of finding good workers. The resort also has a eye-catching Russian-language web site, www.chudskoe.ru.
TITLE: Tycoon Abramovich Quits Job as Chukotka Governor
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich resigned Thursday as governor of a remote Arctic region, a position he has held for almost eight years and long wanted to leave.
His formal resignation request was denied two years ago by former President Vladimir Putin, a signal that the tycoon should continue serving as benefactor of the impoverished Chukotka region. But on Thursday the new president, Dmitry Medvedev, signed off on his departure.
Abramovich, 41, the owner of the Chelsea soccer club who spends much of his time in London, has rarely been seen in Chukotka, which has a population of 50,000 and lies opposite Alaska on the Bering Strait.
But its residents praise him for rescuing the region’s economy. He restored food supplies and built roads, factories, hospitals and schools. He also runs two charities.
Although he has stepped down as governor, Abramovich will continue investing in the resource-rich region, his spokesman John Mann said.
“It’s a change of role, but not a disengagement,” Mann said.
Abramovich was first elected governor of Chukotka in December 2000 and later said he would not run again, describing the job as “too expensive.” But Putin reappointed him in 2005 after direct elections were abolished.
Abramovich, whose current business interests are focused on metals, was ranked 15th in a list of the world’s richest people by Forbes magazine in 2008 with an estimated fortune of US$23.5 billion (euro14.8 billion). Forbes names him as Russia’s second-richest man.
He was an associate of Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, and took over most of his assets after Berezovsky fell out with Putin and fled Russia.
Abramovich’s oil company, Sibneft, was purchased by the Russia gas monopoly Gazprom, which is state-controlled and has close Kremlin ties, in a multibillion-dollar deal in 2005.
Russian business magnates have been careful to cultivate good ties with the Kremlin since the 2003 jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the richest man in Russia, who was convicted of tax evasion and fraud in a politically motivated case.
Medvedev appointed Roman Kopin, the 34-year-old deputy governor, as acting governor.
TITLE: Mystery Shrouds Death Of Journalist Shchekochikhin
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Five years on, the circumstances surrounding the death of Yury Shchekochikhin, a liberal State Duma deputy and one of the country’s most fearless investigative journalists, remain an enigma.
Shchekochikhin, who penned exposes of official corruption for Novaya Gazeta, died five years ago Thursday at the age of 53 after several days of intense fever, during which his hair fell out and his skin peeled away in layers.
The official diagnosis showed that Shchekochikhin died from Lyell’s syndrome, also known as Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis, a grave dermatological condition often caused by an allergic reaction.
There was no indication in the medical report of what chemical or biological agent might have cause the allergic reaction. But his friends and colleagues remain convinced that he was poisoned because of his work.
“I understand why,” said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, a press freedom watchdog. “Shchekochikhin was the first person who unveiled and called public attention to what was then an under-the-carpet war between top law enforcement and secret services officials.”
At the time of his death, Shchekochikhin was investigating the purported involvement of senior officials from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and the Prosecutor General’s Office in Tri Kita, a Moscow furniture store accused of evading import duties and smuggling Chinese goods through FSB storage facilities.
His Novaya Gazeta colleagues have claimed that shortly before his death, Shchekochikhin, who was deputy head of the State Duma’s Security Committee, had obtained evidence that the smuggling case was connected to money laundering through the Bank of New York and illegal weapons trafficking.
He had also accused three deputy prosecutor generals — Yury Biryukov, Vasily Kolmogorov and Vladimir Kolesnikov — of protecting the purported smugglers and pressed the Duma’s anti-corruption committee to demand their dismissals.
In the months before his death, Shchekochikhin was constantly accompanied by a bodyguard and was receiving threatening anonymous notes and phone calls, said Panfilov, a close friend of Shchekochikhin’s.
Investigators have closed three separate probes into the death of Shchekochikhin, who shot to national fame during perestroika for a series of reports on organized crime in the Soviet Union.
A fourth probe — aimed at establishing whether Shchekochikhin was murdered or died accidentally from a severe allergic reaction to a stray chemical agent — was opened in late March on the orders of Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin.
Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin declined to comment on the progress of the probe, citing the ongoing investigation.
Created last year as a semiautonomous body under the auspices of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee — which is handling the new Shchekochikhin investigation — has taken over many of the investigative powers formerly held by the prosecutor general.
Bastrykin and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika have publicly sparred over a number of high-profile cases in a standoff that many observers believe is closely connected with a battle for influence between powerful, competing clans with links to security services and that are close to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Novaya Gazeta deputy editor Sergei Sokolov, who said he and his colleagues believe that Shchekochikhin was poisoned, expressed reserved optimism at the new probe.
“All I can tell you now is that investigators are intensively on the case,” said Sokolov, the newspaper’s point man for its own investigations into Shchekochikhin’s death and the 2006 slaying of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. “But what we greatly fear is that this probe will be used in the war between the clans in the security services.”
The current probe is strictly to establish whether Shchekochikhin was in fact poisoned, Sokolov said.
Identifying the motive and possible suspects in the case of foul play would be part of a separate investigation, he said.
Officials at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, where Shchekochikhin died after 12 days of treatment, have refused to issue the death certificate to his family members and did not allow his son to take tissue samples to be submitted for independent analysis.
Novaya Gazeta has repeatedly stated that some of the doctors who treated Shchekochikhin there told the newspaper’s reporters — off the record — that he was poisoned.
None of those doctors works at the hospital anymore, the newspaper reported last month.
Central Clinical Hospital head Anatoly Brontvein declined to comment for this report.
Panfilov said he doubted that the latest probe would produce any new conclusions.
Senior officials would likely be key suspects, and investigators would be loathed to challenge them, he said.
Panfilov added that he was skeptical at first that Shchekochikhin had been poisoned. “I thought that poisoning would be a too exotic way to get rid of Yura,” he said.
But after Politkovskaya claimed that she was poisoned on her way to Beslan during the September 2004 hostage crisis, and after the 2006 poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in Britain, “I started believing that the security services could pull this off,” Panfilov said.
Nadezhda Azhikina, Shchekochikhin’s ex-wife, said Wednesday that there would be no formal events to commemorate him on the fifth anniversary of his death.
“Only close friends will gather Thursday evening at his dacha in Peredelkino, outside Moscow,” Azhikina said.
Shchekochikhin’s two sons live in Moscow: One is a journalist, while the other is studying medicine.
Shchekochikhin was working on around 10 high-profile corruption cases when he died, Sokolov said.
The most scandalous of those was the smuggling case involving Tri Kita, which is currently being tried in a court in the Moscow region town of Narofominsk.
Nine businessmen, including Tri Kita owner Sergei Zuyev, stand accused of evading import duties and other taxes to the tune of 18 million rubles ($760,000), according to prosecutors and Zuyev’s lawyer, Kirill Polishchuk.
That sum is considerably less than the $2 million bribe that, according to court testimony by senior Interior Ministry investigator Viktor Tsymbal, Tri Kita paid to prosecutors in exchange for calling off the probe in 2002.
None of the deputy prosecutor generals that Shchekochikhin demanded be fired is currently working in the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Biryukov is now a senator representing the Nenets autonomous district in the Federation Council, while Kolmogorov works as an adviser to the president of state-owned bank VTB.
Kolesnikov currently represents pro-Kremlin party United Russia in the Duma, where he is deputy head of the commission for anti-corruption legislation.
TITLE: 2 Killed in Explosion in Sochi
AUTHOR: By Matt Siegel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — An explosion ripped through an apartment building in Sochi on Wednesday morning, killing two people and injuring more than 30 in the city scheduled to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, police and emergency services said.
The explosion, which occurred at around 5 a.m., tore through four floors of an apartment building in the suburb of Blinovo, killing a 67-year-old woman and her 14-year-old grandson, police said.
Television showed images of shattered windows and a gaping hole in the side of the building, its white walls darkened by soot and ash. Rescue workers could be seen scaling the charred facade on ladders to pull out survivors.
Local police found a gas canister at the scene of the explosion, but countered suggestions that the incident was an accident and maintained that an as yet unidentified explosive device caused the blast, they said in a statement on their web site.
Specialists from the government technological watchdog, after inspecting the canister and nearby gas mains, concurred with police that the explosion was not an accident, Interfax reported.
“According to unconfirmed information, it could not have been a gas explosion, because the building was not connected to gas,” a police spokeswoman said, Reuters reported.
Police are considering other versions of events, however, including the possibility that the explosion was caused accidentally by contraband gas smuggled into the building by residents, the news agency said.
TITLE: Vyborg District Set for New City Bus Station
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Construction of a multi-functional commercial and residential complex including an intercity bus terminal, park-and-ride lots, and shopping center is to begin soon in the northwest of St. Petersburg by STEP Construction Group and affiliated companies.
This week, St. Petersburg authorities allocated two land plots in the Vyborg district measuring eight hectares in total to STEP Group’s affiliate, Schongauer Investburo (SIB) which will be responsible for the 11-month planning process in the city’s Parnas industrial zone. Vidiy Zheleznov, SIB’s marketing director, said that the planned intercity bus terminal is a distinguishing feature of the project.
City Hall insisted on transportation infrastructure such as park-and-ride lots being part of the new project, Zheleznov said. “The only bus terminal in St. Petersburg is inconveniently located on the Obvodny Canal. The new construction will solve several existing problems of transportation to the north of the Leningrad Oblast, Karelia and Finland.”
Built in 1963 and renovated in 2003, the bus terminal on the Obvodny Canal in downtown St. Petersburg handles a total of 160 buses a day on domestic routes as well as 20 international routes, and is notorious for sporadic transportation subject to delays caused by traffic jams.
The new center in the Vydorg District will be partly modeled on Finland’s Kamppi Center, which is acknowledged to be Helsinki’s new downtown hub for commercial and residential real estate. The largest single construction site in the history of Finland, Kamppi Center was a four-year project and involved complex and extensive redevelopment of the Kamppi district in downtown Helsinki. One of the first of its kind in Europe, the center combines the commercial need for a streamlined, optimized shopping environment with the necessary supply of customers due to maximum accessibility. The complex was opened in stages, with the new transportation facilities — the Kamppi metro station entrance, central and long-distance terminals for local and intercity buses — having opened early June 2005, while the six-floor shopping center including a supermarket, shops, restaurants, night clubs and service points, and elite offices and residential apartments opened in March 2006.
The new multifunctional center in St. Petersburg will consist of B-class offices occupying a total area of 160 thousand square meters, conference rooms and a hotel. The construction of shopping areas will be a secondary feature of the project since the district is abundant with shopping centers such as Mega and Grand Canyon. STEP will bear all the expenses involved in the design and planning of the project, and the estimated $300 million construction costs will be covered by investments from a large western foundation, whose identity has not yet been disclosed.
Analysts almost unanimously call this commercial and transportation complex a unique construction with promising prospects.
Yekaterina Markovets, consultment director at Arin real estate agency, predicts the project’s pay-back period at 8-9 years and subsequent annual profitability at 15 percent.
Alexei Fyodorov, department manager at Maris Properties in association with CB Richard Ellis, regards the Vyborg district of St. Petersburg as one of the most attractive for office real estate developers. “On the one hand, spacious industrial territories available to development companies are equipped with pre-constructed engineering infrastructure which may be purchased at a reasonable cost. On the other hand, prospective tenants will appreciate and enjoy the proximity to the historic part of the city and good transportation accessibility.”
According to Fyodorov, all business centers that are built in the Vyborg district are currently rented out very quickly, and the demand will most likely continue during the next few years. “At the same time, to compete with numerous similar projects, a developer has to implement exceptional features to make their project stand out from its competitors. Underground and multistory parking lots, catering and business service facilities, and residential areas might be options to consider. As a multi-functional complex, the project in the Vyborg district will be a success,” Fedorov said.
SIB’s marketing director Zheleznov said that the exact terms and cost of the construction will be available once the planning research for the center is complete.
TITLE: Oil Output Has First H1 Fall in Decade
AUTHOR: By Tanya Mosolova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — National oil output edged up 0.3 percent in June from the previous month, but was down almost 1 percent in the first half of the year, casting further doubts over the government’s goal to sustain growth this year.
Officials still hope production will slightly rise this year as the government seeks to avert the first annual decline in output since 1998.
But analysts say the country cannot sustain production growth, at least not until next year, when new fields in eastern Siberia will come on stream to compensate for falling production from depleted deposits in western Siberia.
Energy Ministry data showed Wednesday that the country’s oil firms produced 9.77 million barrels per day, or almost 40 million tons in June, slightly up from 9.74 million bpd in May, and down by 0.8 percent from 9.85 million bpd in June 2007.
Production stood at 9.76 million bpd (242.4 million tons) in the first half, down 0.9 percent from 9.85 million bpd in the same period last year.
Oil production in Russia has fluctuated between decline and stagnation since the beginning of the year, prompting many analysts to revise down their oil production forecasts for 2008.
Russian authorities still expect production to grow by around 1 percent this year after an increase of 2.3 percent in 2007 and much bigger spikes in previous years, including a record 11 percent in 2003.
Analysts expect production to slightly recover in the second half of the year, when a number of new fields will start operating, but they say it will not be enough to achieve a full-year growth.
“The second half will be more successful,” said Konstantin Reznikov, from Dresdner Kleinwort. “But growth is unlikely this year. The maximum that oil companies can do is to achieve flat output [versus the previous year].”
TITLE: Oil Tax Cuts Given Nod In Vital Second Reading
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma approved tax cuts for oil producers to encourage exploration and development in a crucial second reading Wednesday.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urged an easing of the oil industry’s tax burden to reverse an output decline as crude prices trade near a record.
The proposed changes should compensate oil companies for increasing costs and encourage the development of new fields, said Alexander Morozov, chief economist at HSBC Bank in Moscow. “The Russian economy still heavily depends on the oil and gas sector,” he said.
The level at which the oil extraction tax kicks in will increase to $15 per barrel from $9 now, according to the bill. The changes also include extending so-called tax holidays for new deposits in the far northern Timan-Pechora area, where LUKoil is working with ConocoPhillips, the Arctic peninsula of Yamal, which is being explored by Gazprom Neft, the Caspian and Azov seas and the offshore continental shelf.
The tax changes create exemptions from the mineral extraction tax for oil fields that are no more than 0.05 percent depleted, according to the bill. On Russia’s offshore continental shelf, where Rosneft works, and in Arctic areas, tax holidays would last 10 to 15 years or until total output reaches 35 million tons of oil.
In the Caspian and Azov seas, the holidays would last seven to 12 years or until total output reaches 10 million tons. Onshore fields in the northern Timan-Pechora and Yamal peninsula regions would last seven to 12 years or until total output reaches 15 million tons.
The government is set to lose 104.1 billion rubles ($4.45 billion) in 2009 and 112 billion rubles in 2010 because of the changes to the mineral extraction tax, according to estimates by the Duma’s Budget and Taxes Committee.
Revenue losses from the tax cuts will be “insignificant” for the budget because they were taken into account when the Cabinet approved government outlays for 2009-2011, Morozov said.
In May, Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina called the country’s oil industry “the foundation of the Russian economy, the foundation for its competitiveness,” adding that even a slight stagnation would be “alarming.”
The government expects to have a budget surplus of 707 billion rubles, or 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, in 2009. The surplus will shrink to 610 billion rubles, or 1.1 percent of gross domestic product, in 2010, according to the budget.
The tax bill must pass in a third reading in the Duma and a single vote in the Federation Council before it is sent to President Dmitry Medvedev for his signature.
Gazprom said in a statement Wednesday that it held talks with Rosneft on the companies’ strategic partnership. Gazprom deputy chairman Alexander Ananenkov met with Rosneft first vice president Sergei Kudryashov at the gas giant’s headquarters, the statement said.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Ferrari to Open Base
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Ferrari SpA, Fiat SpA’s luxury sports-car unit, will create a company in the next 15 months to oversee its vehicle imports into Russia, Vedomosti reported, citing Fiat Chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo.
Ferrari sold 65 vehicles in Russia in 2007, or 67 percent more than the previous year, according to the Moscow-based newspaper.
Meat Products Banned
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia suspended meat and livestock imports from Brazil’s Pernambuco and Goias states after an outbreak of vesicular stomatitis there, the food safety watchdog said.
The ban, which doesn’t affect other Brazilian states, will be lifted as soon as the disease is brought under control, Alexei Alekseenko, spokesman for the watchdog, said by phone from Moscow on Wednesday.
Brazil is Russia’s largest source of meat imports and last year sold about $2 billion of meat products in the country.
Baltika Signs Pay Deal
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Baltika Breweries, the Russian unit of Carlsberg, signed a labor agreement with its trade union that guarantees annual pay raises for the first time.
The three-year contract codifies labor relations and stipulates benefits for workers, Baltika said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
The St. Petersburg-based company spent more than 500 million rubles ($21 million) last year on insurance, training and other needs of its workforce, according to the statement. Baltika owns 11 plants in Russia, and has more than 12,000 employees, it said.
Yevroset Leaves Baltics
MOSCOW (SPT) — Mobile phone retailer Yevroset said Wednesday that it agreed to sell its 68 stores in the Baltic states, where it had been operating for two years, because costs there had become too high.
“You have to pay for your imperial ambitions,” Yevroset chairman Yevgeny Chichvarkin said in a statement. “We won't repeat this mistake. Everything that we closed … will be made up for by opening new stores in our best markets, such as the Moscow region.”
TITLE: Prokhorov to Invest in Innovations
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov said Wednesday that he would soon create a foundation to support scientists, joining a growing chorus of businessmen eager to invest in new innovations.
“We have to use our advantages, like the high creativity of the population,” Prokhorov told an annual conference of Russian businesses.
“The most important problems to solve with new innovations are connected with energy, the environment, clean water and transportation,” he said, speaking without looking at his notes.
To solve the problems, strong links need to be built between businesses, science and the state, Prokhorov said. IT parks could serve as these bridges, he added.
Prokhorov, Russia’s fifth-richest man with a fortune estimated by Forbes at $22.4 billion, did not offer further details about his planned foundation. But he said he planned to focus on renewable energy sources, hydrogen energy and nanotechnology.
Prokhorov’s enthusiasm was echoed by politicians and other businessmen at the conference. State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov called for the creation of a task force through which the White House, the Duma and United Russia could discuss and adopt decisions aimed at promoting and developing new innovations.
“New innovations have recently become a topic that is passionately discussed among our businessmen,” said Sergei Belyakov, head of the budget and tax policies committee of Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists, or RSPP.
“Having arrived at a stage of stability, Russian businesses understand that they will not be able to compete in the international market if they don’t use new innovations,” he said by telephone.
RSPP has worked out a package of proposals on tax concessions that the state could offer companies that tackle new innovations, he said.
“It will soon be adopted by the Duma,” Belyakov said, adding that the sectors that have shown the most interest in new innovations were oil and gas, light industry, machine building, electricity and nuclear energy.
The roles of state and business in the process have yet to be defined, Prokhorov said, calling on businesses and the state to work more on promoting the sale of Russian inventions.
Russia’s model for innovation should embrace the clear planning seen in the United States and the quick reaction to market changes seen in China, Prokhorov said.
Other billionaire businessmen have also expressed an interest in science. Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man with a fortune estimated at $28.6 billion, spoke about investing in nuclear energy at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month.
“The only practical solution to global warming, in my view, is the development of nuclear energy,” Deripaska said. “We need to develop an international nuclear waste treatment and storage system and unify the standards for building the reactors.”
TITLE: German Airline Positive
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Deutsche Lufthansa, Europe’s second-largest airline, said it will boost passenger numbers between Germany and Russia more than 10 percent this year as demand for both business and leisure travel grows.
The German carrier attracted 1.7 million passengers on its Russian routes last year, a 10 percent increase from 2006, ranking it fourth on international services from the country, after local carriers Aeroflot, Transaero and S7.
“We are very successful here in Russia,” Karsten Benz, Lufthansa’s vice president for European sales and services, said in a Moscow briefing Monday. “We’re confident about growing more than 10 percent. We consider Russia as a strategic market.”
Lufthansa offers 216 direct flights a week between Germany and nine Russian cities. Demand for travel has been buoyed by a 10th straight year of economic growth in Russia, whose 178 airlines flew 45.1 million passengers in 2007, 19 percent more than in 2006.
Lufthansa, which flies to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara and Yekaterinburg among Russian routes, plans to offer more destinations through a partnership with a Russian carrier.
TITLE: Why the Kremlin Is So Scared of Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Andrei Piontkovsky
TEXT: Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 of these cycles since the reign of Tsar Ivan III.
In the past, however, the Kremlin’s sharp anti-Western turns were reversed — usually out of simple necessity — after relations reached rock bottom. Not this time. On the contrary, the current deterioration of the relationship has developed a momentum of its own.
There are four reasons for this. First, the Russia’s “defeat” in the Cold War — and its loss of imperial and superpower status — has created a deep and so far unresolved crisis in the collective mentality of the country’s political class. Russian leaders continue to perceive the West as a phantom enemy, in opposition to which all the traditional mythologies of Russian foreign policy are being resurrected.
Second, by the end of Vladimir Putin’s second term as president, Russia’s modernizing dreams had been shattered. Modernization, indeed, simply turned out to be yet another redistribution of property to those on top, particularly those who came out of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office and the Federal Security Service. The image of the West as an enemy has become the only ideological excuse for Putin’s model of the corporate state.
Third, the soaring price of oil has made the Kremlin believe that it is all-powerful. Today’s Russia, which thinks of itself as a “great energy state,” now laughs at the modest goal it declared before the oil boom — of catching up with tiny Portugal in terms of living standards.
Finally, a series of Western mistakes and misfortunes, a crisis in trans-Atlantic relations, a lack of leadership, and the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism (in both the Middle East and Europe) have led Russian leaders to believe that the West is a sinking ship, to be abandoned as soon as possible.
While this belief unfortunately does have some validity, there is one problem: Russia is part of that ship. Moscow can make advances to Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, and it can remind the Arab world that the Soviet Union helped it develop and offered it protection in the United Nations Security Council. But in the eyes of most Islamic extremists, Russia is part of that same “Satanic” West — indeed, its most vulnerable part. Therefore, it is Russia, with the soaring birth rate among its Muslim citizens, that is the most attractive country for expansion and takeover.
But Moscow’s self-destructive confrontation with the West can be halted, and its centuries-old debate between Westernizers and the Slavophiles can be put to rest once and for all. This, however, will depend on Ukraine’s success on the path of European development it chose in the Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005.
Ukraine does present a threat, but not to Russia’s security, as Kremlin propagandists claim. The real threat is to the Putin model of a corporate, authoritarian state, unfriendly to the West. For the Kremlin it is a matter of life and death that countries that were once part of the Soviet Union but chose a different model of development — Ukraine being the chief example — should never become attractive to ordinary Russians.
The example posed by the Baltic nations does not threaten the Kremlin much because they are perceived as foreigners. Indeed, in Soviet films, Baltic actors were usually cast in the roles of Nazi generals and U.S. spies. Ukrainians, on the other hand, are close to us in their culture and mentality. If they made a different choice, why can’t we do the same?
Ukraine’s success will mark the political death of Putinism — the squalid and bankrupt philosophy of “KGB capitalists.” If Ukraine succeeds in its European choice, if it is able to make it work, it can settle the question that has bedeviled Russian culture for centuries — Russia or the West? So the best way to help Russia today is to support Ukraine’s claim that it belongs to Europe and its institutions. This will influence the Kremlin’s political mentality more than anything else.
If the Kremlin’s anti-Western paranoia continues and its Eurasian fantasy of allying with China lasts another 10 to 15 years, Russia will end up seeing China swallowing its Far East and Siberia. Indeed, the weakened Russia that will be Putin’s legacy will then also lose the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region to their growing Muslim populations.
The remaining lands would then have no other choice but to attach themselves to Ukraine, which should by then have become a successful member of the European Union.
After 1,000 years, Russia will have come full circle, returning to Kievan Rus after wandering on the roads of the Mongol hordes, the Russian Empire, Soviet communism and farcical Putinism.
Andrei Piontkovsky is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. © Project Syndicate
TITLE: The Price of Rotten Stability
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Stability has become the catchword of the Putin era. The country’s political life is now so predictable that most people no longer take any interest whatsoever in politics. It’s indeed all very dull and boring.
Yet at the same time, Russia is experiencing a true consumer boom, with salaries after inflation increasing at an average of 12 percent annually. Imported cars now clearly outnumber Russian models, and their overabundance is causing enormous traffic jams. The countless restaurants, clubs, casinos and other places of entertainment that have sprung up across the country support the message we hear all of the time on ubiquitous state television stations — one that encourages viewers to enjoy life and “Live it up!” And why not, when everything is supposedly going so well in the country and when people are getting richer by the day?
Moreover, state-run television news reminds us daily that the world is paying more attention to Russia now. That sentiment was echoed by the crowds of people who gathered in the streets to celebrate the country’s football wins over Sweden and Holland.
The nongovernmental EU-Russia Centre ordered a survey by sociologists at the Levada Center to determine what Russians who are considered affluent are thinking. These are people roughly belonging to the “upper middle class” — by Russian standards, of course — with monthly incomes of at least 1,500 euros per month in Moscow, 1,000 euros per month in St. Petersburg and 800 euros per month in other large cities.
But the poll revealed that the majority of these prosperous respondents felt uncertain about the stability of their financial condition. They live in fear that their standard of living could easily and quickly deteriorate.
Even after eight years of continuous economic growth, only 13 percent of respondents felt that Russia would be stable for the long term. Fifty-nine percent of the wealthy and successful felt the situation could change radically for the worse at any moment. In addition to this sense of economic insecurity, respondents also expressed a lack of faith in the effectiveness of state institutions, and about 76 percent of those questioned felt they could not defend themselves from the abuses of arbitrary rule, particularly from the police.
Moreover, about 65 percent of those polled were unsure if they could uphold their rights in a court of law. Statistics on Russia’s court system confirm this skepticism; in the past several years, acquittals have been handed down in about only 0.5 percent of all court cases. Even Josef Stalin’s infamous three-judge courts — about as grotesque of a parody of the court system as you can find — reached “not guilty” verdicts in 10 percent of their cases.
But one of the most surprising results of the poll is the amazingly high degree of complacency and passivity among “successful Russians.” They have reconciled themselves to the country’s “rotten stability.” They don’t believe that elections, political parties or nongovernmental organizations can do much to change the political status quo.
How can we cure these societal ills? The problem is that everyone is busy just trying to keep their own financial boats afloat. And to that end, people are prepared to use just about any trick in the book, including those that are generally condemned as immoral. They are willing to give bribes to expedite bureaucratic procedures that would otherwise drag on endlessly. Lacking confidence in the court system, they prefer to find “informal” solutions to disagreements. Having lost faith in the medical system, they are prepared to pay government-employed physicians in the so-called free health care system money under the table for preferential treatment.
This is a vicious circle of cynicism, apathy, complacency and corruption. This circle appears even more dominant now that pollsters have confirmed that these unhealthy attitudes permeate all of Russian society.
Georgy Bovt is a political analyst and hosts a radio program on City-FM.
TITLE: Talking voice
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: U.S. opera star Renee Fleming was in St. Petersburg this week to launch the Russian translation of her book “The Inner Voice,” an autobiographic take on the various sides of her artistic identity.
“The book is meant to tell the audience and young singers about how one becomes a singer,” she said at the presentation of the book at the Grand Hotel Europe on Sunday.
The two-time Grammy Award-winning singer, who gained international recognition in the bel canto repertoire as well as through the work of Massenet, Mozart and Strauss, is frequently referred to as “America’s favorite soprano.”
The singer turned down the opportunity to write a book when she was first approached by publishers because she thought the idea was to pen a tell-all memoir. When Fleming realized the book was intended to be guide for aspiring singers about how to sing and build a career, she promptly reconsidered.
“I did not want to write a story all about flowers and engagements — but singing is something I am very passionate about,” she said.
“Mine is not a path that would work for anybody else but it just gives people an idea of how difficult it is and what is involved,” Fleming added. “People are very surprised, usually, at the many things we have to learn.”
The core audience for the book is young singers and dedicated classical music fans.
“Most people imagine that we are born with a beautiful voice and then at some point we just step on stage,” Fleming explains. But the biggest surprise to readers of the book, Fleming says, is the amount of work and dedication being an opera singer takes.
“Many people are under the impression that we are born with this romantic aura, so the truth was so hard to get people to understand,” Fleming said.
The singer once described the book as “the autobiography of my voice.” She wanted to make clear the distinction between her personality and her vocal ability.
“I wanted to make sure in saying that, that people know that the book is not an autobiography of Renee Fleming per se, it is not fully my story. Yes, professionally and vocally it is, but not personally.”
Fleming earlier inspired Ann Patchett’s bestselling novel “Bel Canto.”
“Bel Canto” was also the name of the record that netted Fleming her second Grammy Award in 2002 for Best Classical Vocal Performance. The performer had previously won a Grammy for her record “Beautiful Voice.”
Born into a family of voice teachers, Fleming has taught singing herself but as her international schedule has grown she has had to stop giving classes. But when she returns to Russia in 2009, Fleming is contemplating giving master-classes to Russian students.
The soprano admits to being enchanted and fascinated by the voices she comes across in Russia. She attended a religious service at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra monastery on Sunday morning — before the book launch — and said she was totally captivated.
“The priest in the choir this morning was absolutely incredible and most memorable,” she said.
The sensational soprano, who has a great passion for Russian culture, nurtures a wealth of future plans that include St. Petersburg and Moscow, including a free outdoor concert at Moscow’s Kolomenskoye park estate and filming a DVD with her long-term stage partner Dmitry Khvorostovsky in the magnificent historic palaces of St. Petersburg and the suburbs.
In an interview after the book launch Fleming mentioned calling the Mariinsky Theater’s artistic director, Valery Gergiev, to discussing a joint project in the future.
In the summer of 2006, the Fleming collaborated with Gergiev and the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra on a recording of late-Romantic composers for Decca Records. In 2007, the resulting CD — comprised of works by Strauss, Corngold, Janacek, Smetana, Cilea, Puccini, Massenet, Gounoud, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky — was nominated for two Grammy awards, as recording of the year and best vocal recording.
These works were new to Fleming who had taken a year to select them and prepare for the recording.
While admiring the Russian repertoire — her unfulfilled dream remains singing Lisa in “The Queen of Spades” which does not really suit her voice — Fleming sings only one Russian operatic role, Tatyana from “Eugene Onegin,” in addition to Russian romances.
“I have sung fifty-one opera roles, and Tatyana is really the closest to who I truly am,” the singer said. “I was that girl once. Obviously I did not marry too well but I had to work very hard.”
Thinking back to her childhood and adolescence, the performer describes herself as being profoundly timid yet remarkably ambitious.
Back in her early years, Fleming dreaded a singing career because she did not feel she was a born performer. Appearing in front of an audience would make her incredibly nervous and stressed.
“The reason why I relate so well to Tatyana is that I read books all the time and I was very, very shy,” Fleming said. “But I had this determination to do well — at some point I dreamt of becoming president — and fought relentlessly against the shyness. Nobody says I am shy anymore!”
Fleming says that intuition is a crucial quality that artists must possess.
“Everything we do is so intangible and without a sense of intuition we would fail,” Fleming said. “Just learning how to sing is a very mysterious process, the teachers do not know what is going on inside our bodies, even we ourselves are not always fully aware of it. We totally need to have that other part of us saying ‘yes that feels right. We have to go on that to a degree’.”
In the U.S., where opera is the most expensive of all performing arts, operas from New York’s Metropolitan Opera are regularly broadcast to hundreds of movie theaters, where tickets are a bargain at $10-$20. Such broadcasts take place about once a month.
“I wish the tradition came to Russia because it gives a chance to see an opera live for just a few dollars,” Fleming said. “The new production of ‘Eugene Onegin’, by the way, was the most popular broadcast event last year — people went crazy.”
Fleming is following in the steps of the late Met singer Beverly Sills, who had for thirty years hosted hundreds of opera performances, charity benefit dinners and awards. She is fronting some of the live broadcasts to the cinemas from the Met, interviewing the soloists and presenting the shows.
The singer is not paid for the work.
“It is a huge challenge, but this new role is both intriguing and exciting,” Fleming said.
Selected operas are later shown on television and released on DVD.
Fleming does not follow a daily rehearsal routine as she feels her tightly packed performing schedule keeps her in the desired shape.
The performer practices Pilates and maintains a strict diet that excludes “white food,” including white sugar and white bread, to keep fit.
“It is undeniable now that the entire music business has become very image-conscious,” she admits. “The sad thing about that is, that it means that these values are eventually going to become more important thanmusical values. However, where I do agree with it is in theatrical issues: we should all be physical and be artistic.”
Yet wherever trends go, America’s favorite soprano vows that the voice always comes first.
TITLE: Chernov’s
choice
TEXT: In March, rock bands such as Mashina Vremeni, Splean and Nochniye Snaipery shocked many fans by performing at a free open-air concert in the Red Square celebrating the presidential election that the opposition describes as “illegitimate” due to multiple violations in the campaign and election itself.
Last week in Moscow, several bands withdrew from an open-air celebration of the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets when they found out it was sponsored by the ruling party, United Russia, which came to power as the result of equally controversial State Duma elections in December.
Mumy Troll, Lyapis Trubetskoi, Basta and Tarakany! chose not to perform when they learned, at a short notice, that the stage for the event, called Mega Beat, was covered with United Russia’s posters and the party was a sponsor.
“On Saturday, on June 28, 2008, it became known that the Mega Beat festival [...] is sponsored by the political party United Russia,” said Belarus band Lyapis Trubetskoi on its web site.
“Because Lyapis Trubetskoi has never taken part in politically engaged events and is not going to do so in the future, the band’s performance [...] on June 29, 2008 has been canceled.
“Lyapis Trubetskoi brings its apologies to Moscow fans and the newspaper MK’s readers.”
Mumy Troll was more vague in its statement.
“Dear friends! Mumy Troll happily agreed to take part in Moskovsky Komsomolets festival to show part of our show [...] for free and without being paid,” it said on its web site.
“Unfortunately, due to organizational reasons we were deprived of such an opportunity. The performance won’t take place.”
Answering readers’ questions about the absence of the listed bands at the actual event on Sunday, the anonymous writer of the newspaper’s blog reply admitted the reason was United Russia’s backing and even described the party’s involvement as a “mistake.”
“The thing was that in the beginning, at the stage of booking the artists, the festival did not have any sponsor at all,” it said.
“Just before the festival, we received a political party as a sponsor. As a matter of fact, some of the artists withdrew at once, some performed only because of a good relationship with the organizers, some just did not give a damn. Some would say from the stage that they had nothing to do with politics, that they play music for people in the first place. [...] I hope we won’t repeat the mistakes in the future, and everything will be even better.”
Locally, as the Maly Gostiny Dvor building on Dumskaya Ulitsa is being closed for development, Sunday will be the last day for indie bars Datscha, Fidel and Belgrad, and all will throw farewell parties during the weekend. And Blondie will play its first Russian concert in the city on Tuesday (see interview).
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Irina Baronova (1919-2008)
AUTHOR: By Anna Kisselgoff
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Irina Baronova, an international ballet star who was one of three celebrated prodigies known as the “baby ballerinas” after George Balanchine discovered them in Paris in the 1930s, died on Saturday at her home in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, the actress Victoria Tennant. Australian news accounts said she died in her sleep.
With her vivacious wholesome beauty, indelible classical style and virtuosic technique, Baronova was one of ballet’s most acclaimed stars until she chose to retire at 27 in 1946. The retirement may have seemed premature, but by that time she had already been a professional dancer for 15 years.
When she was 12, Balanchine cast her in a ballet segment of his 1931 Paris staging of the Offenbach operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld.” As Andre Levinson, the dean of Paris critics, wrote, “The sensation of the evening was the tiny child Baronova, who went through the final gallop like a whirlwind.”
From 1932 to the early 1940s, Baronova, who was born in Russia, toured widely in Europe, the United States, Australia and part of Latin America with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo as well as with Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater).
Like Tamara Toumanova and Tatiana Riabouchinska, the Ballets Russes’s two other “baby ballerinas” (reportedly so named by the British critic Arnold Haskell), Baronova started out in experimental works, including ballets by Balanchine, Leonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska. Her range also extended to one-act versions of the 19th-century classics. She was a memorable Aurora from “The Sleeping Beauty,” and at 14 she danced her first Odette in “Swan Lake,” partnered by the British ballet star Anton Dolin.
When Balanchine recruited Baronova as well as Toumanova and Riabouchinska (who both died in recent years) for the 1932 debut of the company that became the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, he felt confident that the traditional training they received from Russian emigre ballerinas of the Mariinsky Ballet would be a springboard for his new works. Baronova and Toumanova were 13-year-old pupils of Olga Preobrajenska. Riabouchinska, 15, studied with Mathilde Kchessinska.
Balanchine left in 1933 to form his own troupe, Les Ballets 1933. But Ms. Baronova’s versatility served her well and came directly from Preobrajenska, who condensed her own seven years of studies at the Maryinsky Ballet’s school into three years for her Paris pupils. As Baronova told a 1995 conference of critics in St. Petersburg, “She knew we had to begin work soon to help support our families.”
Preobrajenska produced strong centered dancers who executed the multiple fouette turns that both Toumanova and Baronova tossed off effortlessly as spinning tops in the toy-room scene of Massine’s “Jeux d’Enfants.”
At the same time, as the American ballerina Sono Osato recalled in her 1980 memoir, “Distant Dances,” Baronova “danced flowingly, giving as much importance to the small steps that connected the larger ones as she did to the final pose.”
Among her early triumphs was the role she created as Passion in Massine’s celebrated 1933 allegorical ballet, “Les Presages.” Born in Petrograd (the former and present St. Petersburg), Russia, on March 13, 1919, Baronova emigrated with her parents to Romania in 1920 and to Paris in 1928. From 1932 to 1939, her career was identified with the Ballets Russes, under the management of Vassily Voskresensky, known as Colonel W. de Basil. In 1936, at 17, she eloped in Newport, Kentucky, with de Basil’s associate manager, German Sevastianov. When Sevastianov moved over as manager to Ballet Theater in 1941, Baronova became one of its leading ballerinas, leaving in 1943. In 1940 she was a guest artist with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a rival company headed by Sergei Denham, and in 1945, she danced with Massine’s Ballet Russe Highlights.
Along the way, she made two Hollywood films, “Florian” (1940) and “Yolanda” (1943), but retired from dancing after she married her second husband, Cecil Tennant, a British theatrical agent, who died in a car accident in 1967. They had three children, Victoria, Irina and Robert. Baronova resumed her relationship with Sevastianov in 1971. He died in 1974.
In 2000 she moved to Australia to live near her family. She is survived by her children, six grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
TITLE: Platinum Blondie
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In strange circumstances, Deborah Harry and Chris Stein, formerly of the seminal New York band Blondie, spent two weeks in wintry St. Petersburg in 1996, having arrived to perform at the opening of a shady nightclub that has since then folded. The following year, Blondie reformed, and now it is time for the proper Russian debut for the band, which, apart from singer Harry and guitarist Stein, features original drummer Clem Burke. He spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone from New York.
Q: Have you heard anything from Deborah and Chris about being in St. Petersburg?
A: They were there with one of Debbie’s solo records. We actually stopped at the airport [in Moscow] in about 1979, but it was very different then. We were refueling, so we were just at the airport. We sent postcards, though. We were certainly there; I have friends who have the postcards, still. I can’t believe that after all this time we’ve never been before, we’re looking forward to it, that’s for sure.
Q: The tour celebrates the 30th anniversary of the album “Parallel Lines.”
A: Well, you know, first we wanted to remind everybody how old we really are! It’s hard to believe it has been 30 years. But we’re very proud of that record. It was our third full-length album and it was a breakthrough record for us in the United States, because prior to that we really had only been sort of an underground band in the U.S. We were more commercially successful in Europe primarily, and Australia. “Parallel Lines” is a different type of record; it was made by a band that had spent years touring the world, and also there was a change in the band prior to that, with the addition of Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison. They had been touring with us about a year before. And also “Parallel Lines” was the beginning of our relationship with the producer Mike Chapman, it was the first record that he produced for us and he also produced all the rest of the Blondie records. He was a major contributor to a success of this record.
Q: Why did they like the band in Europe, rather than in the U.S.?
A: We were all living in Manhattan in New York City, and New York City may as well have been another country compared to the rest of the United States at the time. So our whole outlook on music and art and culture was more continental, if you will. The kind of music we liked was Ennio Morricone or Nino Rota or the Stooges or the Velvet Underground or the Shangri-Las. Those bands weren’t very popular in the U.S. That music was more special. You know, the bands that were popular in the U.S. at that time were The Eagles and bands like that. We didn’t really fit into that mold of the contemporary music in the States…
And I think Europe, they were a lot more open in a way. You know, a glam rock band, with Debbie’s image, and the sound and the look of the band, was more appealing … a more continental aesthetic, if you see what I mean.
Q: Was it a similar story with the New York Dolls?
A: Oh yeah, absolutely! Well, you know, the New York Dolls were a very big inspiration to us, as well as the Velvet Underground were, and, you know, neither of those bands have ever achieved any commercial success, although today they are seminally influential bands. And I would like to think… If I think of Blondie, I would like to think of Blondie as carrying on that sort of tradition of the Velvets and the New York Dolls. You know, Blondie and Ramones, those kind of bands.
I think the influence of, for instance, of the Velvet Underground can still be heard today in modern rock music, as well as the Dolls and Blondie.
Yeah, that would be the case. The New York Dolls may as well have come from outer space as far as appealing to the rest of the United States, the rest of the country. People weren’t ready for this kind of thing. I think society is a lot more sophisticated now, for better or worse. Everybody’s hip now!
Q: Do you hear Blondie influences in modern bands from New York or elsewhere?
A: I think with Blondie we had this “do-it-yourself” thing going on, and I think any band that’s really kind of doing it from the heart, and doing it themselves, they look to Blondie and maybe they think, “Oh, that band, they kind of achieved success on their own terms.”
I mean, granted, we had a great frontperson in Debbie, very glamorous. That was for sure our foot in the door, getting into the whole business of music.
But, you know, without us carrying on with music and everything, we wouldn’t be as successful as we were. You know, I hear a little bit of Blondie in the Killers, I hear Blondie in the Strokes.
Q: After Blondie became a success some people stopped listening to the band thinking it had gone commercial. How did you deal with that?
A: When we made “Parallel Lines,” when we made “Heart of Glass,” we were being experimental, because we were influenced by the band Kraftwerk, so we were trying to incorporate some electronic music into Blondie. So we thought we were being experimental when we did “Heart of Glass.”
Do you know producer Conny Plank, who produced Kraftwerk and Devo? We worked with Can… Do you know German band Can, Holger Czukay? I worked with Conny and with Holger with the band Eurythmics. And when I first met them they were really responsive to the fact that we were innovative with “Heart of Glass,” they looked at it and they could feel a German influence in “Heart of Glass.”
So we didn’t look at “Heart of Glass” as being a big sell-out song. We were surprised when it was a big hit.
And the thing about dance music… Punk rock was a bit of a “tunnel vision” for us. We never really wanted to have one sound. We liked the way that with the Beatles and the Stones, you know, you would never know what to expect from one record to another, and those were the groups we grew up on.
So we were never one particular style. We weren’t what you would call punk rock. We were more influenced by AM commercial radio in the 1960s in the United States, where you had the Beatles next to Frank Sinatra next to the Rolling Stones next to the Supremes, things like that.
So all that sound is assimilated into Blondie. And, you know, with dance music, with disco music… Disco music is a little more of a liberal type of music, it encompasses all people, you know, gay, straight, black, white, young, old… Disco music wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it kind of brought people together. And punk rock sort of alienated a lot of people. So we were a combination of a lot of things, more of a “people’s band.”
Q: Blondie was very different from both mainstream music and CBGB punk scene.
A: Well, you know, at CBGB no-one really… When we played CBGB along with bands like Television and Patti Smith and Talking Heads and Ramones, no-one referred to themselves as “punk.”
If we referred to ourselves as anything, we thought we were like beatniks, like bohemians. It was only the media that really put the “punk rock” label on it later. And every band at CBGB at that time was different from the other.
So there wasn’t really one particular CBGB sound, if you want, although I think with Blondie once again, we were able to soak up influences of all those various bands, whether it be the Ramones or Television and incorporate that as we were expanding our sound, as we were able to find our way musically. We were able to be around all these great artists, and kind of soaked up what they were doing at a very early stage. And that really helped us to form our sound as well.
You know CBGB was like a handful of people, all of whom were mostly in bands, and they were supportive of one other in the early days, I’m talking about the mid-1970s. And it was really just a bunch of beatniks, there were no punks at CBGB back then.
But we did stand out for a lot of reasons even at CBGB. But we did stand out for a lot of reasons even at CBGB. Obviously with Debbie we were much more a glamorous band.
We wanted to achieve commercial success, but we wanted to achieve it in our own way. And I think also Andy Warhol was a very big inspiration for Blondie in the way he merged commercialism and art. Art and commerce coming together and kind of making people aware of very simple things.
You know, when Andy said, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” I mean in the States now, with all this crazy reality TV, “Pop Idol” and all these shows, obviously it’s what he said, it manifested itself.
I like to think that Blondie have made a cultural contribution in general to music and culture. The whole CBGB thing is the beginning of that.
Blondie will perform at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Tuesday.
www.blondie.net
TITLE: What would Nabokov have said?
AUTHOR: By Steve Coates
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society,” Vladimir Nabokov insisted. “It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.” Nabokov was in fact notoriously averse to groups or “movements” of any sort, whether political, artistic or social. So it’s hard not to be amused at Nina Khrushcheva’s contortionate attempts to recruit him as a sociopolitical figurehead for the land of his birth in her earnest and urgent “Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics.”
“The ‘American’ Nabokov of the second half of the 20th century is the most important cultural and literary phenomenon for Russia in the first half of the 21st,” Khrushcheva contends, hailing Nabokov as a “prophet” and proclaiming herself his “missionary.” With his independent, self-sufficient characters, “he is our textbook and our road map for today’s transitional period from a closed and communal terrain to its Western alternative, one open and competitive.” Khrushcheva is a master of such stirring but ultimately hollow declarations, delivered up in a dizzying whirl of academic formalism, “intensely personal” reflection and wholesale generalization, often involving national characteristics — Russians are romantic, emotional, soulful, spiritual, impractical and so forth.
The result is a “dialogue” with Nabokov that becomes all too literal when Khrushcheva travels to Montreux, Switzerland, to converse with the novelist’s bronze statue in an unfortunate heart-to-heart blending quotations from the writer’s own work and lines composed for him by Khrushcheva. As protean as he may have been, the real Nabokov was never so humorless as this grim puppet.
Khrushcheva, an associate professor of international affairs at the New School, should be better placed than most to imagine the novelist and to assess his impact on Russian readers. Like him, she is a lover of literature, a multilingual expatriate, a “thoroughly middle class” college teacher and a member of a “deposed elite”: Nikita Khrushchev was her great-grandfather. And she is well aware that her claims to spiritual kinship with the author of “Bend Sinister” and “Invitation to a Beheading” will be ridiculed by those who find little to compare between her free passage out of Russia and the Nabokov family’s flight for their lives before the Bolsheviks.
Khrushcheva’s interest in promoting Nabokov in Russia is a worthy one, too. In 2001, teaching a course at Moscow State University called “Nabokov and Us,” she detected a direct relationship between her Russian students’ enthusiasm for her subject and an atmosphere of hope, openness and freedom in the country. Alas, five years later she discovers that Putin’s Russia “has all but given Nabokov up, along with his characters and his master classes, as it has given up the democratic reforms, growing too impatient to see them through.”
This picture of Nabokov’s precipitately aborted adoption by his homeland is gripping, but it may be only a mirage. Khrushcheva’s impression seems almost entirely based on the opinions of the 30 students in her Moscow class on the one hand and, on the other, the mood at a small gathering she addressed at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg in 2006. The skeptical reader is entitled to suspect that the question of Nabokov’s Russian readership is far more complex than the glimpse his missionary allows us.
Khrushcheva is evidently sincere in her belief that Nabokov’s Westernizing tendencies, in his character and especially in his writings, could somehow show her country the way to a modern, that is, Westernized, future. Americans might assume that’s an ennobling role, but they would be mistaken: Nabokov the individualist, in Khrushcheva’s view, became an American success story precisely because of the self-centered indifference and the relentless self-promotion she finds everywhere in his life and work. Nabokov, she argues at length, was “Salieri to Pushkin’s innocent Mozart,” but only Salieris are likely to offer a road map of “how to survive and succeed in this Western world,” which for Khrushcheva, in the abstract at least, seems a harsh, even hellish place, quite the opposite of Nabokov’s America.
Khrushcheva professes to love Nabokov, but she puts much more heart into thrashing him: for his “conceit, coldness and emphatic indifference to all us ordinary folks, unworthy of his genius”; for his “contempt of the Russian tradition of socially minded literature”; for his “heartlessness,” his “unmitigated arrogance,” his “vanity and airs” and his skewering of other writers; for his “lack of ‘physical’ heroism” in contrast to Osip Mandelstam, dead in the gulag; for his aristocratic birth and for much else besides. Nabokov may be the first prophet to be anointed with vitriol.
Khrushcheva is in part echoing a familiar aesthetic case against Nabokov, and her book can also be seen as an extension of the discourse about the author’s “real” personality and the role it played in his work (memorably reflected in the titles of such literary-journal articles as “Nabokov and Nastiness”). Aesthetics are always debatable, but “Imagining Nabokov” does not succeed as an attempt to come to grips with the many puzzles presented by the life of a man who was profoundly complex by nature, by circumstance and by art.
Too often, Khrushcheva builds a castle on a grain of sand. For example, her puzzling insistence that Nabokov arrogantly “slammed the door shut” on readers of “Speak, Memory,” one of the most acclaimed memoirs of the 20th century, appears to be based solely on the fact that he addresses it, in two senses of the word, to his wife, Vera, the regular dedicatee of his books.
Elsewhere, hyperbole destroys Khrushcheva’s case. It is fair to deplore Nabokov’s calculated dismissals of authors of whom he disapproved, but to contend that he “has kind words for no one” is to grossly mislead readers — as it is to maintain that he had “no sympathy for political martyrs.” And Khrushcheva, of course, brings some baggage of her own; she notes that Nabokov, as anti-Soviet a cold warrior as there was, spoke ill of her great-grandfather, both in his fiction and elsewhere.
But to get to the real crux of Khrushcheva’s study, what about that road map and its cartographer? How does she spiritually (in the Russian sense of course) justify appointing an American narcissist as her Russo-cosmopolitan savior? Her case is built on Nabokov’s “artistic kindness,” more specifically on the kindness of two of his characters, Dolores Haze and, above all, on the Americanizing Russian exile Timofey Pnin. “Kindness is immortal,” she writes, “especially when it’s a kindness that breaks through hurt and injustice.”
Khrushcheva is surely right to say that it is ultimately for such heroes “that we read and love Nabokov.” Indeed, innocent, considerate, victimized, tender-hearted or kind heroes seem to lie mysteriously at the axis of many of Nabokov’s stories, even as they are regularly outshone not only by his “charming villains” — the Kinbotes, the Humbert Humberts, the Van Veens — but by his own dazzling literary style. Though Khrushcheva seems surprised at her discovery, this is far from a new observation, and she might easily have added other big-hearted innocents: Lucette in “Ada”; Cynthia and Sybil Vane in “The Vane Sisters”; John Shade and that “poor little person” his daughter, Hazel, in “Pale Fire”; even Klara in “Mary,” his very first novel. But to Khrushcheva, the significance of such heroes (many, incidentally, unambiguously American) seems to be that through them, “generously, in the Russian way,” Nabokov “counterbalanced the indifference of democracy.”
In the end, this seems too frayed a rope to rescue a man as inhumane as Khrushcheva paints Nabokov, in a portrait that his best readers won’t recognize. If Russians really need a prophet, they could surely do better than Khrushcheva’s ugly American.
TITLE: A new dawn?
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: When Vladimir Putin visited the set of the latest movie by Oscar-winning filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, he sat in the director’s chair while actors playing Soviet soldiers marched toward the front.
Putin didn’t direct the action — he left that to his host. But the prime minister’s presence at the $55-million “Burnt by the Sun 2,” the most expensive film in Russia’s post-Soviet history, was a potent symbol of his government’s expanding role in the country’s film industry.
Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin called cinema “the most important of all arts,” and film was regarded by the Communist leadership as one of its most powerful propaganda weapons. Legendary directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, who made “The Battleship Potemkin,” and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose brooding classics can still astonish, won acclaim even as they bent to the will of the totalitarian state.
Now the Russian government is trying to revive the Soviet film tradition, helping to produce movies and miniseries that push the Kremlin’s political views, vilify its critics and glorify the military and intelligence services.
Artistically, the results have been decidedly mixed.
Outside of the work of Mikhalkov, whose international fame dates back to the 1960s and who won a foreign-language film Oscar for 1994’s “Burnt by the Sun,” few government-sponsored films have won either critical acclaim or box-office success.
“History repeats itself with a farce, so this new propaganda seems ridiculous compared to textbook Soviet examples,” said Yury Valkov, a historian of Russian culture.
Throughout the 1990s, the Russian film industry was mostly limited to imitations of Hollywood blockbusters and attempts to preserve the old artistic traditions.
In the new millennium, Russian filmmakers have found themselves in a business-oriented environment of investments and profits. But the government has taken a greater role in film projects and remains the country’s largest film producer. Putin recently proposed a merger of three Soviet-era film studios into a mammoth, state-owned concern.
Some in the film industry — the largest in Europe alongside France — welcome the influence of authorities over which movies get made and the political lessons they teach.
“Law enforcement agencies are part of our state, and the government has the right to propagate whatever it considers necessary,” said producer Leonid Vereshchagin of 3T, Mikhalkov’s own production company, which has released several highly patriotic films.
But critics say government influence has stifled most critical and creative artists. Russian documentary filmmakers, for example, could probably never produce documentaries directly critical of the government, said Vyacheslav Shmyrov, chief editor of Kinoprotsess magazine.
“A Michael Moore is impossible in Russia,” he said, referring to the American filmmaker whose documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” was a scathing critique of the Bush administration.
This year’s most controversial Russian documentary, “The Destruction of the Empire: A Byzantine Lesson,” was written by an Orthodox monk who argued that Western ideas and institutions would ruin Russia as they did Byzantium centuries earlier.
Unlike in the Soviet era, there is no centrally directed state effort to use cinema for indoctrination. Instead, artists know that they can win state support for film projects that promote the views of those in power.
“There are attempts of artists, producers and film directors to profit from patriotic themes and get government funding for their projects,” said political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.
Films critical of the government or at odds with the Kremlin’s view of Russian history can face problems getting made, or gaining recognition after their release. The macabre 2007 film “Cargo 200,” with its Orwellian vision of Soviet society, provoked a scandal at last year’s Kinotavr film festival and was rated X for limited distribution.
The result is a film like this year’s “Alexander: The Battle on the Neva,” which celebrates a 13th century prince who repels a Swedish invasion of his city, puts down a riot of Western-leaning nobles and vows fealty to the Mongol empire.
The message could not be clearer: Russia needs a strong leader to defend it from a hostile West. The film was advertised as a prequel to Eisenstein’s 1938 epic, “Alexander Nevsky,” which was personally commissioned by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to stir anti-German sentiment on the eve of World War II.
Russian intelligence, police and military agencies have underwritten at least a dozen television series or films in recent years, spending tens of millions of dollars to polish their images.
Last year, the Fund to Support Patriotic Films — a nonprofit backed by the FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB — produced “The Apocalypse Code,” a $15-million James Bond knockoff. In the film, a seductively dressed female FSB spy blasts bad guys, outwits her rivals and saves the world from nuclear annihilation. The film flopped with critics and filmgoers. “‘The Code’ is a raving of a drunken horse,” said critic Victor Matezen.
But failure didn’t discourage the film’s backers. Olesya Bykova, executive director of the fund, said it plans a feature film, television series and interactive online projects targeted at a younger audience.
State-financed films have featured Kremlin foes, thinly disguised as fictional characters, as the bad guys. A character apparently modeled on the billionaire Boris Berezovsky plots terrorist attacks in the 2004 film “Personal Number.” Berezovsky fled to London in 2001 after a falling out with Putin.
“The Apocalypse Code” and “Personal Number” were among the winners of the revived Soviet-era award for best works of art that “form a positive image of FSB officers.”
TITLE: Shiny, happy people
AUTHOR: By Stephen Heyman
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Judging from the news lately, Russia is well on its way to restoring that old Evil Empire image. Military parades have returned to Red Square. Key businesses are choked by corruption or are under state control. Journalists who probe too deeply turn up dead. And critics of the Kremlin are jailed, pushed out of elections or, in one instance, mysteriously poisoned.
But on Russia Today, an English-language news channel begun in 2005 and financed by the Russian government, a more generous picture emerges. In this Russia, corruption is not quite a scourge but a symptom of a developing economy. And concerns about street thugs, poverty and Ukraine’s aspirations for European Union membership trump fears over Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
This Moscow-based channel’s view of Russia is available to 120 million television viewers worldwide. That includes 20 million in the United States since last summer, when Russia Today was added to Time Warner Cable’s digital package in the New York City region.
The Russian government has already poured more than $100 million into Russia Today, prompting charges that Kremlin sponsorship affects its coverage. Andrei Illarionov, a former adviser to Putin and now one of his critics, last year called the channel Russia’s “best propaganda machine for the outside world.” The station is part of the state-owned news conglomerate RIA Novosti, and news organizations routinely refer to it as “state-run,” including The New York Times, which has said it was created to promote “pro-Kremlin views.”
Although it was conceived to counter what it sees as a Western news bias against Russia, the channel bills itself as “an autonomous nonprofit organization,” and its executives say they do not take orders from the Kremlin.
“I’m a bit tired to try to explain that we are independent, that I don’t get calls from the government — I do not,” said Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today’s editor in chief. “We want to develop into a really trusted name that people turn to because they want to know what’s going on in the country.”
Simonyan herself has been a focus of the channel’s critics. Andrei Richter, the director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute and a journalism professor at Moscow State University, said the editor, a 28-year-old former pool reporter for the Kremlin, was appointed because she is well-connected.
Simonyan acknowledged she once received flowers on her birthday from Putin. Still, she said, her age often leads people to make assumptions about how she got her job.
“I realize that it’s quite remarkable for someone who doesn’t live in Russia,” Simonyan said, adding that after the fall of the Soviet Union a new crop of young journalists was hired. “I started my career when I was 18.”
With a slick studio and polished graphics, Russia Today looks like most cable news channels. But there are a few differences. Technical problems plague live telecasts. While all the Russian reporters speak English, some have thick accents. And many staff members are as young as their editor. That youthfulness is reflected in many of the segments, like the campy “Technology Update”; in one episode a reporter rolled around in a simulated skirmish with Russian special forces, testing out anti-sniper gadgetry to the tune of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”
The channel has also reported on serious news events. In November, as water cannons struck anti-government demonstrators in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the Russia Today correspondent Katerina Azarova was reporting so close to the protests that she was poisoned by tear gas. Watching the channel’s round-the-clock coverage of the unrest in Tbilisi felt like peeking into a foreign newscast — without needing to know a foreign language.
Despite such ambitions, several former Russia Today journalists said that working for a channel financed by the Kremlin made it difficult to cover news about Russia impartially. “You are understandably walking a very fine line of being full and frank and biting the hand that feeds,” said Carson Scott, a former business news presenter who is now with Sky News Business Channel in Australia. “I had countless heated editorial debates with my editor, frankly speaking. I was very vocal. ‘We have to give the other side of the argument. We have to be balanced.’ And oftentimes eyes just glazed over.”
TITLE: Wild at heart
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia is more known for Soviet-era environmental disasters than for environmental successes like its system of nature reserves, or zapovedniks. But the zapovednik system was what brought Laura Williams here in 1993, when she was sent by the World Wildlife Fund to open the organization’s first Russian office in Moscow.
“There is no analogous system anywhere else in the world, but it is not widely known because the reserves’ purpose is more scientific, not recreational, like in the U.S.,” said Williams as she sipped orange juice at Starlite diner, a place she frequented in her Moscow days when she got nostalgic. Since then, she has moved to a tiny village in the Bryansk region, which has no roads, shops or phone line. She does not visit Moscow frequently.
Williams was hired by WWF at a time of opportunity for environmental activists in Russia. “Before the current oil boom, the number of nature reserves in Russia was growing and environmental awareness was higher,” she said. At the time, she lived in a communal flat on Ulitsa Sretenka and worked on WWF projects out of a small apartment on Tulskaya, which she had to largely remodel herself. She helped WWF raise $10 million to help the zapovedniks at a time when their funding thinned to 10 percent of what it was during the 1980s.
As proposals for funding trickled in by mail, fax, and budding e-mail technology, one reserve director brought it all the way from the Bryansk region in person. “I told him, you could have just faxed it and avoided the trip, but he replied that the nearest fax was in Kiev, six hours in the opposite direction,” she said. Little did she know at the time that the small reserve would soon become her home, and the man, Igor Shpilenok — her husband.
Williams’ decision to move from a well-established office job in Moscow to a reserve employee’s salary of $60 dollars a month in Chukhrai, a village of 21 people, was made after a fateful train ride. As she was coming back from a trip to the Bryansk reserve, a woman went into labor on the commuter train. After “catching the baby, which was going to fall out of the womb onto the bench,” she took the incident as a sign that it was time to start a new life and leave her office to do field work. “By then I had lived long enough in Russia to know that you have to pay attention to such signs,” she said.
The new life involved regularly pushing her car out of potholes, sinking in swamps and having curses put on her by villagers who saw her as a foreign intruder. While kids trailed her asking for an autograph, adults frequently blamed her for their gardening woes like the potato crop-eating Colorado beetle, which Russians think was sent over by Americans. “And I never even told anyone I’m actually from Colorado,” said Williams, a native of Boulder.
Williams published a book this spring about her first year in the village, which follows seasonal changes in the nature reserve, the village’s rural life and customs, and her relationship with Shpilenok. “I’ve always wanted to write, but it was hard to sit down and document the stories that were collected in my head,” she said.
“She has a gift for telling interesting, human stories,” said Paul Richardson, publisher of Russian Life magazine, where Williams began writing a column several years ago. The columns later served as the book’s foundation.
Since the events in the book, Chukhrai’s population has fallen to 14 people — many of whom have strange nicknames like “Lepen” (wet snow) or “Balyk” (cured meat). Some are notorious poachers, who refuse to recognize the strictly protected area of the forest they have traditionally used for hunting. “Many see nature conservation as a luxury for people with no hardships,” Williams said. “So I feel for the local people, and there can be some give and take, but there are also laws that need to be respected.”
Williams and Shpilenok no longer work at the reserve, but continue to live in Chukhrai with their two sons. One of them is seven and is about to start school. Since there is no school for miles around, he will be home schooled, Williams said. The family travels to reserves all over Russia, as Williams continues to write and serve as an environmental policy consultant while Shpilenok works as a nature photographer. Freelancing became more feasible when cell phone reception reached their house five years ago. Prior to that, making a phone call or accessing the internet required riding a horse to the next village nine kilometers away.
Two years ago, they helped launch the WWF office in Kamchatka, which is now working locally to preserve the region’s biodiversity. “It’s harder to get a reserve started now, when economic development is the top priority,” she said.
TITLE: Viva Espania
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Don Pepe Restaurant and Tapas Bar // 19 Bolshoi Prospekt (Petrograd Side) // (Access from Ulitsa Lizy Chaikinoi) // Tel: 498 0349 // Menu in Russian and Spanish // Dinner for two 2115 rubles ($90)
With the Spanish team winning the Euro 2008 soccer championship last weekend and the piratical Spaniard Rafa Nadal storming through the All England Open Tennis Championship in Wimbledon this week, Spain is very much the flavor of the month. Where better to taste that flavor than at Don Pepe, a charming Spanish restaurant hidden away on the Petrograd Side?
The Petrograd Side can be a mystery to those that don’t know it well — and even to those that do — with its confusing tree-lined sidestreets, back alleys and courtyards lined with intriguing Style Moderne townhouses reminiscent of New York brownstones and surprising glimpses of “old St. Petersburg” which often means squalid “Brezhnev-era Leningrad.” Slicing Petrovsky Island, the largest of those that collectively known as the Petrograd Side, is the boutique-lined Bolshoi Prospekt. Toward the Sportivnaya end on a sidestreet named after a famous Bolshevik guerilla and set back from the road, nestles Don Pepe, a self-styled “corner of Spain in the center of St. Petersburg.”
The restaurant is divided into an informal tapas bar at the rear and a dining hall at the front which seats 50 guests. The rotund figure of the chef — perhaps Don Pepe himself — can be seen through a serving hatch to the kitchen. Completely inauthentic, the designers have nevertheless successfully conjured a simulacrum of Spain with terra cotta tiles, pale yellow walls, sky-blue shutters at the windows, salmon-pink tablecloths and lots of lush green potted plants. A framed tapestry of bullfighter and a huge photo of a Spanish street pasted on one wall can be forgiven as lapses in this otherwise enchanting atmosphere.
The selection of dishes is not large with the Russian/Spanish menu running to just eight pages, but there are tempting treats inside featuring welcome Spanish ingredients such as jamon (dry-cured Spanish ham), olives and seafood as well as a range of Italian-style pasta dishes.
Translucent and cool slices of jamon were draped alluringly over the Ensalada classica Espanola con jamon (290 rubles, $12), a pile of lollo rosso, green olives, and marinated white onion rings bathing in a perfectly balanced dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Pechuga de poll con verduras (250 rubles, $10), a large, plump marinated and grilled chicken breast served with pan fried rounds of eggplant and half a grilled beefsteak tomato, drizzled with olive oil and decorated with parsley, was exceptionally good value.
These starters were accompanied with a side order of Empanadillas de chorizo y jamon (160 rubles, $6.80). These dainty sausage and ham filled pastries were exceptionally fresh and a real treat with 1000 Island dipping sauce.
The highpoint of the meal was without doubt Paella de pecado y mariscos (680 rubles, $30). The classic Valencian rice dish was served with some ceremony by the polite and friendly waitress, exactly as it is in Spain. Scooping spoonfuls of sticky saffron rice, infused with the flavors of the freshest seafood ingredients from sizzling pan, she served this dish with well-deserved pride.
Whole shrimp, large cubes of white fish and salmon, octopus, squid and a large mussel served on the half shell joined with the rice, fresh peas, grilled red pepper and lemon wedges to create a perfect paella, which would also be large enough to share between two.
Less stupendous but also excellent was Pato a la naranja (duck a l’orange) served with roast potatoes (380 rubles, $16). Large pieces of sliced duck breast were plentiful and the potatoes cooked to perfection, but something was lacking in the sauce.
It was a minor glitch in an otherwise triumphant meal. With its informal tapas bar option, extensive wine list, scrummy dessert menu and relaxed but efficient ambience, Don Pepe offers a beguiling Iberian welcome to anyone willing to venture into the byways and hidden corners of the Petrograd Side.
TITLE: Bang-bang, boom-boom, exploding heads
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: The money shot in “Wanted,” its piece-de-special-effects-resistance and reason for green-lighted being, appears in the opening minutes of this noisy, ultraviolent shoot-’em-up with Angelina Jolie, her many tattoos and some guys. A man has soared onto the roof of a high-rise where he has laid a handful of others to waste. Suddenly the camera cuts to his face as a bullet exits his forehead in slow motion, his skin stretching forward as the projectile tears through it, going straight for the camera and our already numbed skulls.
Well, that’s one way to get the attention of fickle moviegoers, particularly if, like the director Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve got nothing else going for your big Hollywood debut except Jolie and a couple of ideas recycled from “The Matrix” and “Fight Club.” Mind you, Jolie has been perfectly cast as a super-scary, seemingly amoral assassin named (wait for it) Fox. Few American actresses, especially those with such pin-skinny arms, can make beating a guy to the ground look so easy and, yeah, man, like fun. With her mean smiley-sneer and snug clothes, her heels and hieroglyphics, she cuts the kind of disciplinarian figure who can bring antsy boys of all ages to their knees or at least into their theater seats.
Beating down the audience is what the crudest entertainments try to do, and in this respect, and in every other, “Wanted” is nothing new. And Bekmambetov, a Russian filmmaker who has earned a cult following with his razzly-dazzly thrillers “Day Watch” and “Night Watch,” certainly proves here that he knows how to use every blunt tool of the bullying trade: flashy effects, zippy cuts, simulated death, walls of sound, wheels of steel and, in between the bullets and blood, a hot mama to make the brother-to-brother, man-on-man action less worrisome. This is, after all, a movie almost entirely organized around the sights and sounds of men piercing one another’s bodies, which makes for a whole lot of twitching and spurting.
“Wanted” is a goof, then, and for a short stretch a pretty diverting one. The basic story, culled from a comic-book series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones, revolves around a pusillanimous cubicle drone named Wesley (James McAvoy, going for cheeky and packing new muscle), who, at least in the movie, has been conceptualized along the same Everyman lines as Edward Norton’s character in “Fight Club.” Both have soul-sucking jobs, self-mocking voiceovers and a glamorous comrade in violence who ushers them into thrilling worlds of excitement and life-altering action, except that Norton’s friend is played by Brad Pitt, and McAvoy’s friend is played by Pitt’s real partner, Jolie, which, for about a millisecond makes this sound far more interesting than what actually materializes on screen.
What does turn up looks familiar — the slowed bullets, the air that ripples like water, an underground group, here called the Fraternity — especially if you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Although Bekmambetov and his team take plenty of cues from that film, they have tried to distinguish their dystopian nightmare by borrowing from even farther afield. To that end the Fraternity practices its murderous skills on pig carcasses (much as Daniel Day-Lewis does in “Gangs of New York”) while bunkered in a sprawling factory (that looks like Hogwarts). I’m pretty sure I saw the fabulous recovery room — a concrete spa filled with sunken tubs and lighted candles where Fraternity members go for restorative soaks after a hard day of carnage — in a layout in Vogue.
The problem is that after a grindingly repetitive rotation of bang-bang, boom-boom, knuckle sandwiches and exploding heads, I wanted to sink into one of those tubs myself (minus the rats scuttling nearby). There’s no denying Bekmambetov’s energy or enthusiasm: he blows people and stuff up with gusto. But all his visual ideas, or at least the memorable ones, are borrowed, as are the pitifully few thoughts in the script by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan. Even if the ideas in “The Matrix” didn’t blow your mind or stir memories of college-age woolgathering, at least it has ideas and real feeling. There’s something at stake in its world, which is why its fusion of skepticism and sincerity worked so well, and still does.
Things happen in “Wanted,” but no one cares. You could call that nihilism, but even nihilism requires commitment of a kind and this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference. Fox and the rest of the Fraternity — headed by Morgan Freeman, voice and eyes glazed with boredom — initiate Wesley into their killing ways. He, in turn, discovers their dusty secrets (blah-blah, monks and weaving), eyeballs the other guys (Common and Thomas Kretschmann, both wasted) and learns how to make a bullet curve through the air, a trick that soon loses its wow factor. Bekmambetov jerks the strings, setting his puppets to dancing. Right on cue McAvoy swaggers and Jolie smiles even as Freeman checks his watch, beating me to the punch.
TITLE: Terror Attack Foiled
AUTHOR: By Niniek Karmini
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JAKARTA, Indonesia — Anti-terror police arrested 10 suspected Muslim militants and seized a large cache of high-powered bombs, foiling a major attack targeting Westerners in the Indonesian capital, police and media reports said Thursday.
Among those detained was a Singaporean who met several times with Osama bin Laden, a senior police officer told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The arrests highlighted the lingering terror threat in Indonesia, which has been hit by a string of suicide bombings blamed on the regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah since Sept. 11, 2001, including the 2002 attacks on Bali island that left 202 people dead, many of them foreign tourists.
There were no immediate details about the timing or the exact location of the planned strike in Jakarta.
Some of the suspects told police during interrogations that they had initially planned to attack foreign tourists on Sumatra Island, but shifted their target to Jakarta after realizing too many Indonesian lives could have been lost, TVOne quoted anti-terror police as saying.
The militants canceled a planned attack on Kafe Bedudel, a small cafe in the hilly resort town of Bukittinggi in West Sumatra, police spokesman Abubakar Nataprawira told reporters Thursday.
The Indonesian government has won praise for arresting and convicting hundreds of Islamic militants since the Bali attacks, leaving the terror network severely weakened and isolated, with the most recent strike occurring more than 2 1/2 years ago.
Citing improvements in security, the United States lifted a travel warning early this year that had been in place since 2000 and there were no immediate plans to reverse that decision.
“The Indonesian government’s response to the threat has improved,” said Tristram Perry, the public diplomacy officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. “If anything, these busts validate the lifting of the ban.”
At least 22 bombs were seized during raids Wednesday in Palembang, a coastal city on Sumatra. Some were packed with bullets to maximize the impact of the blast, Nataprawira said.
Many were ready to use, he said, adding that dozens of pounds of explosive powder, grenades and several types of electric detonators also were recovered.
The arrests began Saturday in the Sumatran village of Sekayu when police captured 35-year-old Singaporean terror suspect Abu Hazam, who allegedly met with bin Laden on several occasions and received training in Afghanistan, the police said.
TITLE: David Coulthard Announces F1 Retirement
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SILVERSTONE — Former grand prix winner David Coulthard, at 37 the oldest driver in Formula One, announced on Thursday his retirement at the end of the season.
“I would like to announce today my decision to retire from racing in Formula One at the end of this season,” the Red Bull driver said in a statement issued before his home British Grand Prix.
“I will remain actively involved in the sport as a consultant to Red Bull Racing focusing on testing and development of the cars.”
“I have an open mind as to whether or not I will compete again in the future, in some other form of motorsport, so I am definitely not hanging up my helmet,” added the Scot, who is expected to be replaced by Germany’s Sebastian Vettel.
Vettel, who celebrated his 21st birthday on Thursday, is currently racing for Red Bull’s Ferrari-powered Toro Rosso sister team.
Coulthard said his decision to retire was taken earlier in the year and was based on “a desire to stop while I am still competitive and enjoying the immense challenge that Grand Prix driving represents.”
Coulthard has won 13 grands prix, two of the victories coming at Silverstone, in a Formula One career that started with Williams in 1994 after the death of Brazilian triple champion Ayrton Senna.
He has started 236 races to date, more than any other British driver.
Coulthard’s greatest success came in his nine seasons with McLaren, with the highlight being in 2001 when he finished overall runner-up to Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher.
In 1998 and 1999, when he had a race-winning car, he was eclipsed by Finnish teammate Mika Hakkinen.
Coulthard finished third in last month’s Canadian Grand Prix, his first appearance on the podium since 2006, and he said he would “continue to race with the same focus until the last lap in Brazil.”
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner paid tribute to his driver as “a consummate professional.”
“He has demonstrated that he is a real team player, a fact reinforced by the statistic that he has only driven for two other F1 teams in his career,” he added.
“He scored our first point, our first podium and was the first of our drivers to lead a grand prix. Above all, he is a gentleman and I regard him as a good friend.
“His retirement brings to a close not just his career as a grand prix racing driver but also a chapter in the history of Formula One, if one considers the changes the sport has been through while he has been involved with it.”
TITLE: Venus Beats Dementieva In Semifinal
AUTHOR: By Stephen Wilson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WIMBLEDON, England — Defending champion Venus Williams beat Elena Dementieva 6-1, 7-6 (3) to advance to the Wimbledon final Thursday, setting up a potential championship matchup with sister Serena.
Venus Williams, a four-time Wimbledon winner, overpowered the fifth-seeded Russian in the first set and then prevailed in an error-filled tiebreaker to improve her record to 7-0 in semifinals at the All England Club.
Her opponent in Saturday’s final could be Serena, who was next up on Centre Court to face 133rd-ranked Chinese wild-card entrant Zheng Jie.
It would be the first all-Williams final since 2003 when Serena beat Venus in the championship match for the second year in a row.
“I am dying for S. Williams to get through,” said Venus, who will be going for her seventh Grand Slam title. “This is my seventh final here and I’m looking forward to playing Serena in our third final, and I’m going to be rooting her on.”
Dementieva, playing in her first Wimbledon semifinal, looked nervous and was completely overmatched in the first set by Williams’ sheer power and pace, but settled down and made it competitive in the second.
After Dementieva knocked a forehand into the net to end the 1 hour, 42 minute match, Venus skipped and hopped up and down with joy.
Venus hasn’t dropped a set in five matches.
“It’s so exciting,” she said. “I lost serve once every match. That’s pretty impressive, too. I’m looking forward to that final.”
Venus’ attacking game produced 28 winners and 19 unforced errors. The more defensive Dementieva had 12 winners and 22 errors.
Venus, the biggest server in women’s tennis, averaged 118 mph on first serves and had a fastest serve of 125 mph. Dementieva, known as one of the weakest servers in the game, averaged only 102 mph on first serves.
Dementieva was highly animated throughout the match, shrieking at the top of her voice and spinning around in frustration after errors.
Venus broke immediately to open the match, saved four break points in the next game and moved to a 4-0 lead before Dementieva finally got on the board after 29 minutes of play. The Russian saved four break points in a game that went to deuce six times, but Venus quickly closed out the set, flying high for a putaway forehand volley smash.
Venus continued a run of four straight games and seemed ready to pull away. But Dementieva raised her level, broke for 2-1 on a forehand net cord and stayed even until 6-6.
Dementieva faded badly in the tiebreaker, however. After a service winner from Venus on the first point, all the next nine points ended in errors. Leading 3-2, Dementieva reeled off three straight forehand errors, a backhand mistake and then another forehand error on match point.
The men’s semifinals are set for Friday as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal head to a probable third straight Wimbledon championship showdown.
TITLE: Colombia Frees Betancourt, U.S. Hostages
AUTHOR: By Frank Bajak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BOGOTA, Colombia — Ingrid Betancourt woke up, as always, at 4 a.m., for another numbing day in her seventh year of rebel captivity deep in Colombia’s jungle.
The former presidential candidate listened to news of her mother and daughter over the radio then was told to pack by her guerrilla captors — helicopters were coming.
The sound always filled her with dread, but this time she and 14 other hostages — including three U.S. military contractors held since 2003 — were airlifted to freedom in an audaciously “perfect” operation involving military spies who tricked the rebels into handing over their prize hostages without firing a shot.
The stunning caper involved months of intelligence gathering, dozens of helicopters on standby and a strong dose of deceit: The rebels shoved the captives, their hands bound, onto a white unmarked MI-17 helicopter, believing they were being transferred to another guerrilla camp.
Looking at helicopter’s crew, some wearing Che Guevara shirts, Betancourt reasoned they weren’t aid workers, as she’d expected — but rebels.
This was just another indignity — the helicopter “had no flag, no insignia.” Angry and upset, she refused a coat they offered as they told her she was going to a colder climate.
But not long after the group was airborne, Betancourt turned around and saw the local commander, alias Cesar, a man who had tormented her for four years, blindfolded and stripped naked on the floor.
Then came the unbelievable words.
“We’re the national army,” said one of the crewman. “You’re free.”
The helicopter crew were soldiers in disguise. Cesar and the other guerrilla aboard had been persuaded to hand over their pistols, then overpowered.
Not a single shot was fired in Wednesday’s rescue mission, which snatched from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the four foreigners who were its greatest bargaining chips.
“The helicopter almost fell from the sky because we were jumping up and down, yelling, crying, hugging one another,” Betancourt later said.
The operation, which also freed 11 Colombian soldiers and police, “will go into history for its audacity and effectiveness,” Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said.
It was the most serious blow ever dealt to the 44-year-old FARC, which is already reeling from the recent deaths of key commanders and thousands of defections after withering pressure from Colombia’s U.S.-trained and advised armed forces.
Military intelligence agents had infiltrated the FARC’s top ranks — not one but many — in an operation that began last year and developed slowly and with meticulous care, Colombia’s top generals said.
Many relatives of hostages have opposed rescue attempts, mindful of a botched 2003 operation in which rebels killed 10 hostages including a former defense minister when they heard helicopters approach.
This time, there were no such mistakes.
Through orders the hostages’ handlers believed came from top rebels, they had maneuvered three separate groups of hostages to a rallying point in eastern Colombia’s wilds for Wednesday’s helicopter pickup.
“The helicopter was on the ground for 22 minutes,” said army chief Gen. Mario Montoya, “the longest minutes of my life.”
The agents had led Cesar, the local commander overseeing the hostages, to believe he was taking them to Alfonso Cano, the guerrillas’ supreme leader to discuss a possible hostage swap.
A French and Swiss envoy were reported in the country seeking a meeting with Cano so the operation’s timing was perfect.
“God, this is a miracle,” Betancourt said after the freed Colombians landed in Bogota a few hours later. “It was an extraordinary symphony in which everything went perfectly.”
She appeared thin but surprisingly healthy as she strode down the stairs of a military plane and held her mother in a long embrace.
A flight carrying the Americans — Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell — landed in Texas late Wednesday after being flown there directly. They were to reunite with their families and undergo tests and treatment at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
Betancourt said she will travel to France on Thursday and meet President Nicolas Sarkozy.
President Alvaro Uribe, in a celebratory news conference flanked by the freed Colombian hostages, said he isn’t interested in “spilling blood” and that he wants the FARC to know he seeks “a path to peace, total peace.”
Although only Colombians were directly involved in the rescue, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield said “close” American cooperation included intelligence, equipment as well as “training advice.” He refused to offer details.
The two rebels overpowered will face justice, officials said. But the 58 others left behind on the ground were allowed to escape as a goodwill gesture, said Gen. Freddy Padilla, the armed forces commander.
“If I had given the order to fire on them they would almost certainly all have been killed,” he said. Another 39 helicopters had been standing by, prepared to encircle the rebels and hostages if the rescue failed, Santos said.
Betancourt, 46, was abducted in February 2002. The Americans were captured a year later when their drug surveillance plane went down in rebel-held jungle. Some of the others had been held for a dozen years.
The French-Colombian Betancourt wore a floppy camouflage hat as she arrived in Bogota and hugged her mother, Yolanda Pulecio, and her husband, Juan Carlos LeCompte.
Her two children and sister, Astrid, were expected to arrive early Thursday from France, where they live with her ex-husband.
Betancourt broke into tears several times — first on arrival and later at Uribe’s side during the news conference.
“They used the pain of our families to pressure the entire world,” she said, and appealed to the FARC to release its remaining hostages — about 700 by government count — and make peace.
TITLE: Yevgeny Malkin Signs to Stay At Pittsburgh Penguins for 5 Years
AUTHOR: By Ramesh Santanam
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PITTSBURGH — Yevgeny Malkin is staying in Pittsburgh for quite some time. The Penguins signed the MVP finalist to a five-year extension worth $43.5 million on Wednesday, a deal that will keep him under contract until 2013-14. The 21-year-old forward still has one year left on his initial three-year, entry level contract.
His deal is equal to one signed last year by teammate Sidney Crosby that begins with the upcoming season.
“This is an important signing for our franchise and the city of Pittsburgh and we commend Yevgeny on his commitment to the future of the franchise and the city,” Penguins general manager Ray Shero said in a statement. “This signing continues to ensure the young core of this team can stay intact for years to come.”
The Penguins also signed a six-year, $22.5 million contract with defenseman Brooks Orpik, considered by Shero to be a “mainstay.” The deal averages $3.75 million per year, or less than Orpik was offered elsewhere.
Signing Malkin was key to the Penguins, who lost Marian Hossa to the Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings and forward Jarkko Ruutu to the Ottawa Senators earlier Wednesday. Without a new deal, Malkin could have become a free agent after next season. That led to speculation that Malkin could be dealt by the Penguins, though Shero said such talk was mere fantasy.
“There was never ever a consideration of trading Yevgeny Malkin. I have never offered Yevgeny Malkin to any team,” Shero said.
Malkin will earn $9 million for each of the first four seasons of the deal and then $7.5 million in 2013-14. He has one year left at $984,000.
Malkin, vacationing in the Maldives, did not immediately comment on the deal. But his agent at CAA Sports, J.P. Barry, said his client is “excited to stay in Pittsburgh.”
“He really enjoyed what happened the last two years and he hopes the team can make a run again next year,” Barry said.
Crosby and Malkin took discounts to stay in Pittsburgh, as each could have made about $11 million per season under the NHL salary cap. Hossa, however, went elsewhere despite being offered a far longer deal and much more overall money by Pittsburgh.
The Penguins reportedly offered Hossa $7 million per year for as few as five years or as long as seven years. Instead, he took Detroit’s $7.4 million, one-year offer because he felt the Red Wings offered the best chance to win the Stanley Cup next season.
“I feel like Detroit is the team,” said Hossa, who had 12 goals and 14 assists in the playoffs while playing on Crosby’s line.
After the Stanley Cup finals last month, Hossa said he was willing to play at a discount to stay in Pittsburgh and challenge again for the Cup.
Malkin had 47 goals and 59 assists last season and was a first-team All-Star and a finalist for the Hart Trophy, which is given to the NHL’s most valuable player.
Malkin was selected by the Penguins in the 2004 draft.
TITLE: Severed Heads Of Four Found
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MEXICO CITY — The severed heads of four men were found dumped on a Mexican street on Wednesday with a message accusing a drug gang kingpin of treachery, police said.
Neighbors in the northern city of Culiacan found the men’s bodies wrapped in plastic sheets and a blanket, with their heads stuffed into white plastic bags.
An obscenity-laden note scrawled onto a piece of cardboard invited Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman — the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel — “to see what his stupid acts had caused.”
More than 1,600 people have died so far this year in drug violence as gangs battle for control of lucrative trafficking routes and as the government has stepped up anti-smuggling operations by deploying thousands of army troops.
TITLE: U.S. Airline To Stand Trial for Concorde Crash
AUTHOR: By Crispian Balmer
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — A French judge has ordered U.S. carrier Continental Airlines and five individuals to stand trial over the crash of an Air France Concorde that killed 113 people, a prosecutor’s statement said on Thursday.
The judge said the defendants, including the man who oversaw the development of the supersonic airliner, would be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
The Concorde crashed in flames minutes after take off from Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport on July 25, 2000, killing all 109 aboard and four people on the ground.
Subsequent investigations concluded a narrow strip of metal had fallen onto the runway from a previous Continental flight. This then burst a tire on the departing Concorde sending shrapnel flying into the plane’s oil tanks, which caught fire.
Continental has denied any responsibility for the crash and has said it would fight any charges.
Among the five individuals incriminated were two Continental technicians and Henri Perrier, who was involved in the first Concorde flight in 1969 and was head of testing prior to becoming director of the Concorde program.
Another man who worked on the Concorde project and the head of France’s civil aviation authority at the time of the crash were also ordered to stand trial.
Judges have already issued an international arrest warrant for a welder named John Taylor, who worked for Continental at the time of the crash, after he failed to appear for questioning about the fixing of a metal strip to the DC10 airliner.
The prosecutor’s statement said the Continental workers had failed to follow normal procedures over repairs to the DC10. The prosecutor said Continental itself had been negligent over the maintenance of its fleet of DC10 aircraft.
An earlier judicial report said the Concorde’s manufacturer Aerospatiale, now part of plane-maker EADS (EAD.PA), had failed to correct its design after more than 70 incidents involving the plane’s tires occurred between 1979 and 2000.
The prosecution says France’s civil aviation chief was also negligent because his agency had the responsibility to enforce design safety for the Concorde, which did not add extra protection to its underwing fuel tanks until after the 2000 crash.
Concorde’s two operators, Air France and British Airways, eventually took the plane out of commission in 2003.
French officials said earlier this year that any trial would need massive organization and would probably not begin until late this year or early 2009.
TITLE: Sonics Set to Move to Oklahoma
AUTHOR: By Tim Booth
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEATTLE — Clay Bennett finally found a dollar amount that would sever his contentious relationship with the city of Seattle — $75 million.
As a result, the SuperSonics are headed to Oklahoma City with Bennett leading the way, leaving behind the team name, colors and 41 years of history.
Oklahoma City will have an NBA franchise for the 2008-09 season after a settlement announced Wednesday between the team and the city of Seattle, ending the clashing bond with the city that culminated in a six-day federal trial over terms of the team’s KeyArena lease. The judge was scheduled to rule Wednesday afternoon.
“We made it,” Bennett said after stepping to an Oklahoma City podium featuring the NBA logo and the letters OKC. “The NBA will be in Oklahoma City next season.”
The settlement calls for Bennett and his Professional Basketball Club LLC to pay as much as $75 million to the city in exchange for the immediate termination of the lease. The team’s name and colors will be staying in Seattle.
Bennett said the move would start Thursday and the first focus would be on the SuperSonics’ players.
“In a perfect world I would have liked to see Clay Bennett leave, without the team at all,” said Steven Pyeatt, the co-founder of Save Our Sonics.
It’s a victory for Bennett, who purchased the Sonics in 2006 from Starbucks Corp. chairman Howard Schultz for $350 million, and will take the franchise to his hometown. Bennett faced harsh criticism in Seattle for his efforts in trying to build a new arena as a replacement for KeyArena, and the presumption he wanted to move the franchise all along.
“It was a tough experience for all of us that were involved in it. There was just so much that happened on both sides, so much misinterpreted, miscommunicated and misunderstood that it was difficult,” Bennett said.
Bennett announced that the settlement calls for a payment of $45 million immediately, and would include another $30 million paid to Seattle in 2013 if the state Legislature in Washington authorizes at least $75 million in public funding to renovate KeyArena by the end of 2009 and Seattle doesn’t obtain an NBA franchise of its own within the next five years.
The settlement could become a victory for Seattle as well. In a statement, NBA commissioner David Stern reversed his previous stance and said that a renovated KeyArena could be a suitable venue for an NBA franchise in Seattle. But the time is short.
“We understand that city, county, and state officials are currently discussing a plan to substantially rebuild KeyArena for the sum of $300 million,” Stern said in a statement. “If this funding were authorized, we believe KeyArena could properly be renovated into a facility that meets NBA standards.”