SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1401 (65), Friday, August 22, 2008
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TITLE: Norway: Russia Will Cut NATO Links
AUTHOR: By Bjoern Amland
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OSLO, Norway — Russia has informed Norway that it plans to suspend all military ties with NATO, Norway’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday, a day after the military alliance urged Moscow to withdraw its forces from Georgia.
NATO foreign ministers said Tuesday they would make further ties with Russia dependent on Moscow making good on a pledge to pull its troops back to pre-conflict positions in Georgia. However, they stopped short of calling an immediate halt to all cooperation.
The Nordic country’s embassy in Moscow received a telephone call from “a well-placed official in the Russian Ministry of Defense,” who said Moscow plans “to freeze all military cooperation with NATO and allied countries,” Espen Barth Eide, state secretary with the Norwegian ministry said.
Eide told The Associated Press that the Russian official notified Norway it will receive a written note about this soon. He said Norwegian diplomats in Moscow would meet Russian officials on Thursday morning to clarify the implications of the freeze.
“It is our understanding that other NATO countries will receive similar notes,” Eide said. The ministry said the Russian official is known to the embassy, but Norway declined to provide a name or any further identifying information.
A Kremlin official declined to comment on the report, and the Russian ambassador to NATO did not reply to messages left on his cell phone. But the Interfax news agency, citing what it called a military-diplomatic source in Moscow whom it did not identify, reported that Russia is reviewing its 2008 military cooperation plans with NATO.
Officials at NATO headquarters in Brussels said Moscow had not informed the alliance it was taking such a step.
Washington described the reported move as unfortunate.
“If this indeed is the case, it would be unfortunate. We need to work with Russia on a range of security issues, but we are obviously very concerned about Russian behavior in Georgia,” U.S. State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.
Under a 2002 agreement that set up the NATO-Russia Council, the former Cold War foes began several cooperation projects. They include occasional participation of Russian warships in NATO counterterrorism patrols in the Mediterranean Sea, sharing expertise to combat heroin trafficking out of Afghanistan and developing battlefield anti-missile technology.
Last week, Russia’s ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin warned the Western alliance against cutting off cooperation, saying it would hurt both sides.
The Interfax news agency, citing a military-diplomatic source in Moscow, reported Wednesday that Russia is reviewing its 2008 military cooperation plans as a result of NATO’s decision to suspend meetings of the NATO-Russia Council.
Eide said he hoped NATO and Moscow would get back on track with dialogue and cooperation but said that Russia would first have to comply with a cease-fire in Georgia.
“I regret the situation has come to this,” he said.
The hostilities between Russia and Georgia began earlier this month when Georgia cracked down on South Ossetia. The region is internationally recognized as being within Georgian borders but leans toward Moscow and regards itself as independent. Russia answered by sending its troops and tanks across the Georgian border.

TITLE: Russia Blocks Georgia’s Main Port City
AUTHOR: By Bela Szandelzsky
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: POTI, Georgia — Russian forces blocked the only land entrance to Georgia’s main port city on Thursday, a day before Russia promised to complete a troop pullout from its ex-Soviet neighbor.
Armored personnel carriers and troop trucks blocked the bridge to the Black Sea port city of Poti, and Russian forces excavated trenches and set up mortars facing the city. Another group of APCs and trucks were positioned in a nearby wooded area.
Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has promised that his forces would pull back by Friday, Russian troops appear to be digging in, raising concern about whether Moscow is aiming for a lengthy occupation of its small, pro-Western neighbor.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said that Russia was thinning out its presence in some occupied towns but was seizing other strategic spots. He called the Russian moves “some kind of deception game.”
“[The Russians] are making fun of the world,” he declared.
Nonetheless, a top Russian general said troops were moving out in accordance with an EU-sponsored cease-fire.
“The pullback of Russian forces is taking place at such a tempo that by the end of August 22 they will be in the zones of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers,” Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy head of the general staff, said at a briefing.
The truce says both Russian and Georgian forces must move back to positions they held before fighting broke out Aug. 7 in Georgia’s separatist republic of South Ossetia, which has close ties to Russia. The agreement also says Russian forces can work in a so-called “security zone” that extends more than four miles into Georgia from South Ossetia.
Poti is at least 95 miles west of the nearest point in South Ossetia.
Russian tanks, trucks and troops, meanwhile, continued to hold positions around the strategically key city of Gori and in Igoeti, about 30 miles west of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
Several thousand people rallied Thursday in Sukhumi, the capital of Georgia’s other separatist region of Abkahzia. A similar rally was expected in South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali later in the day.
Russian officials, including Medvedev, have indicated Moscow will recognize the regions as independent.
Nogovitsyn said Georgia has “no moral right” to return its soldiers to South Ossetia, where they had held some swaths of land as part of a peacekeeping mission.
The warfare in a nation straining to escape Moscow’s influence has sent tensions between Moscow and the West to some of their highest levels since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Polish counterpart signed a deal to build an American missile defense base in Poland. Last week, a top Russian general warned Poland was risking an attack, possibly a nuclear one, by developing the base.
A spokeswoman for Norway’s defense ministry said Russia had told its embassy that Moscow plans to “freeze all military cooperation” with NATO and its allies. Later, Russia’s Interfax news agency cited Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko as saying Moscow was reconsidering its cooperation with the military alliance.
About 80,000 people displaced by the fighting are in more than 600 centers in and around Tbilisi. The United Nations estimates 158,000 people in all fled their homes in the last two weeks — some south to regions around Tbilisi, some north to Russia.
A U.S. official in Turkey said three U.S. military vessels were heading through Turkey’s Bosporus, a strait that connects the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, to deliver aid to Georgia. Two of the ships were leaving Crete on Thursday. He declined to be named because he was not authorized to give that information to media.
Since Aug. 19, the United States has delivered aid to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, on 20 flights.

TITLE: City Government, Business to Support S. Ossetian Hospital
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg will restore the hospital in the South Ossetian capital of Tshinvali and will be taking it under its patronage for the foreseeable future.
The City Administration and local businesses are planning to finish the restoration of the hospital by the end of this year, Interfax reported.
St. Petersburg Vice-Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov said on Tuesday that a delegation from the city had inspected the hospital.
“We walked around it, examined it, and took pictures because there is no construction documentation.  We established the volume of work and concluded an agreement with a contractor,” Vakhmistrov said.
Vakhmistrov said that the minimum of works needed to allow the hospital to function will be completed by the end of the year.
Vakhmistrov said that the hospital, with a total area of 16,000 square meters, had been seriously damaged by the shelling of the Georgian army.
“We saw that the hospital suffered several direct hits from artillery and tanks.  The Georgian military knew that it was a hospital and that it was working, and it’s not clear how such a thing could be possible in the 21st century,” he said.
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko also said that the city will provide support for the hospital in the future.
“We have already got offers for the supplying of equipment to the hospital from foreign companies, including Siemens — our long-term partner.  The city’s Georgian and Ossetian communities also offered their financial help for the hospital. The city budget will also allocate money for these purposes,” Matviyenko said.
Matviyenko also instructed the city’s Vice Governor Lyudmila Kostkina to organize training of South Ossetian doctors in St. Petersburg.
Meanwhile, the city’s famed conductor and the head of Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theater Valery Gergiyev, Ossetian by origin, was due to give a requiem concert in Tskhinvali in memory of the victims of Georgian aggression on Thursday evening.
The concert was scheduled for the square near the destroyed building of the South Ossetian Parliament.
The concert was to be transmitted by Russia’s leading television channels.
On Wednesday a convoy loaded with humanitarian aid gathered in St. Petersburg, preparing to set off for South Ossetia.
Over the last week humanitarian aid centers have been working in all 18 districts of the city.  Local firms also played an important role in collecting aid for the beleaguered region.
“We gathered 7,000 pillows and blankets, children clothes, 15 tons of flour.  Businessescollected 100 new jackets and trousers, as well as beds and mattresses,” Matviyenko said, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Arms Talks With Syria Likely to Rile the West
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have been hoping to capitalize on Moscow’s current diplomatic isolation to expand military cooperation with Russia as he met with President Dmitry Medvedev in Sochi on Thursday.
But even though a defiant Kremlin might be taking some perverse pleasure in welcoming the leader of what the United States has branded a “rogue state” at a time when some voices in the West suggest that Russia is on its own way to pariah status, analysts said it was unlikely that any significant arms deals would be signed.
In interviews given to Russian media ahead of his visit, Assad said he hoped to speed up bilateral military cooperation.
“Arms purchases are very important,” Assad said in an interview published Wednesday in Kommersant.
Analysts said any significant new deals with Damascus, already the fourth-largest purchaser of Russian arms, are unlikely, as Russia will want to be careful not to upset Israel, with which its relations of late have moderately improved.
At the same time, when Russia’s ties with the West perhaps at their lowest since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow could be looking for any international support it can get.
“As the French saying goes, in the absence of better options, the king sleeps with the queen,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
The visit to Sochi, where Medvedev is on a working vacation, comes at the invitation of the Kremlin. 
On Tuesday, Medvedev hosted Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, who offered Russia his support and said its handling of the conflict in Georgia was “excellent, very calm, wise and beautiful.” 
After Russian forces drove back an attempt by the Georgian military to retake control of the breakaway republic of South Ossetia and moved into Georgia, U.S. President George W. Bush gave unambiguous support to Tbilisi and threatened Russia with serious consequences if it did not withdraw from Georgia proper.
European leaders took a more measured approach, but many charged Russia with overreacting and also promised consequences if the Kremlin did not cooperate fully.
Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, said that by refusing even to consider Moscow’s position on the conflict, Washington “is pushing Russia to join the forces that the United States wants to weaken.” 
Assad said the Georgian conflict only highlighted the need for Russia and Syria to forge closer ties, as the countries were now in a similar international position.
“The war unleashed by Georgia is the culmination of attempts to encircle and isolate Russia, “ he said in the Kommersant interview. “I think the role of Israel and its consultants in the Georgian crisis is now clear in Russia and in the world.”
Assad also said Syria was willing to help boost Russia’s security in any way it could. In an interview with Gazeta, also published Wednesday, he said he was open to cooperation in relation to the Syrian port of Tartus.
The two countries were preparing a series of deals involving anti-aircraft and anti-tank missile systems, Interfax reported Wednesday, citing a diplomatic source.
“Damascus is Moscow’s long-standing partner in the military sphere, and we expect to reach agreement in principle on new weapons deals,” the source said.
Analysts were skeptical that Thursday’s talks would yield any significant new agreements.
Pukhov said Russia was reluctant to upset Israel, because it could be a “valuable source of modern military technologies.”
He was joined by Lukyanov, of Russia in Global Affairs, in pointing out that Israel had recalled its military consultants from Georgia before the start of the conflict.
“Israel cooperated, and it should be noted that Moscow appreciated this,” Lukyanov said.
Moscow has said Israel supplied explosives and military vehicles to Georgia, as well as the consultants. 
Syria, meanwhile, is a poor country, Pukhov said, and therefore has little to offer Russia.
Russia also does not have the necessary modern vessels to establish a naval base in Syria, Pukhov said.

TITLE: Lieberman Wants Russia Out of G8
AUTHOR: By Vanessa Gera
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW, Poland — Russia should be temporarily kicked out of the Group of Eight and denied entry into the World Trade Organization as punishment for its actions in Georgia, Senator Joe Lieberman said Thursday.
Lieberman spoke in Warsaw after visiting Georgia alongside fellow senator Lindsey Graham, a trip they described as a mission of solidarity with the U.S. ally. They were representing the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“We’re not going to let Russia, so soon after the Iron Curtain fell, to again draw a dividing line across Europe,” said Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and close friend of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. “It is simply unacceptable.”
He advocated a range of steps that the world community should take to “hold Russia accountable,” including expelling it from the G8, which includes the world’s leading industrialized nations, and keeping it out of the WTO.
“The G8 should become for a while the G7 until Russia proves that it is capable of being a law-abiding member of the international community,” he said.
He said he and Graham also want the U.S. Congress to refuse to ratify a pending U.S.-Russian deal on civilian nuclear cooperation, and have signed a letter to President Bush asking him not to present the plan to Congress.
Lieberman also renewed a call for the Georgian military to be beefed up “with sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems.”
Asked if Russia should also be stripped of the right to host the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, he said that step should be taken under consideration later.
Graham described Russia’s military action in Georgia and its continued military presence there as “an effort by Russia to intimidate its neighbors.”
“The Russians are hell-bent on recapturing some of the territory that they believe is rightfully theirs, that now is in the hands of people indigenous to the area who are embracing freedom and democracy,” said Graham, a Republican from South Carolina.
Both expressed strong support for a missile defense deal between Poland and the United States, signed Wednesday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski.
Russia has said agreeing to host a missile defense base will expose Poland to attack, possibly even with nuclear weapons. Moscow has rejected U.S. reassurances that it is only meant as a defensive protection against nations like Iran.

TITLE: Ruling on Parole For Jailed Tycoon Delayed
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CHITA, Russia — Jailed Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky told a Siberian court at the start of his parole hearing Thursday that he does not plan to return to the oil industry, where he made his fortune.
Khodorkovsky — who headed the Yukos oil company and was once Russia’s richest man — has spent almost five years in jail. He was sentenced in 2005 to an eight-year term for tax evasion and fraud and has been eligible for parole for the past 10 months.
Even if granted parole, Khodorkovsky faces new charges and will be detained at least until Nov. 2.
“After my release, I do not intend to return to the oil industry,” Khodorkovsky told a packed courtroom in the Siberian city of Chita, some 3,750 miles east of Moscow. “I intend to engage in humanitarian activities and dedicate myself to my family.”
Khodorkovsky appeared relaxed as he sat behind bars in the courtroom, and occasionally smiled at or joked with supporters and reporters. The hearing was adjourned until Friday.
The prosecution of the oligarch was widely seen as an attempt to silence a Kremlin opponent and consolidate control over Russia’s strategic energy sector.
The charges and subsequent demand for huge back taxes led to the effective renationalization of Yukos, which was taken over by the state oil company Rosneft.
Khodorkovsky’s parole hearing is being watched as a test of new President Dmitry Medvedev’s commitment to reforming the judiciary. Medvedev has promised to combat Russia’s “legal nihilism,” and analysts say a decision in Khodorkovsky’s favor would help the country’s battered investment image.
Prison officials noted Khodorkovsky’s good behavior while in jail, but oppose his early release because he has not admitted his guilt and does not repent his crimes, Judge Igor Falileyev said Thursday.
Authorities had accused Khodorkovsky of flouting prison rules, but recent revelations from a former cellmate undermined their claims and gave the defense ammunition to call for his early release.
Fellow prisoner Igor Gnezdilov told the magazine Kommersant Vlast earlier this year that officials had pressured him to sign a declaration that Khodorkovsky had not held his hands behind his back — as is mandatory — during the prison walk on Oct. 15, 2007.
Defense lawyers said Khodorkovsky also faced new charges of embezzlement and money laundering, brought in June against both the former billionaire and his business associate Platon Lebedev.

TITLE: Officer Arrested, Accused Of Working as Spy for Georgia
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A senior Russian army officer has been arrested in the Stavropol region on suspicion of spying for Georgia, authorities said Wednesday.
Mikhail Khachidze, an ethnic Georgian, was recruited by Georgian intelligence late last year while he was stationed in a unit based on Georgian territory, according to a statement issued by the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
Khachidze is accused of gathering secret information for Georgia about his fellow servicemen and the preparedness of Russian troops, the statement said.
The announcement came on the heels of Russia’s bloody conflict with Georgia over the breakaway Georgian republic of South Ossetia and a day after the FSB said Georgia was planning terrorist acts on Russian territory.
Khachidze is being investigated on charges of high treason, which is punishable by up to life in prison. His exact rank was not indicated in the statement, which identified him only as “a senior army officer.” Video footage of his detention was shown repeatedly on national television Wednesday. Three men in police uniforms were shown struggling to hold the suspect face down on a sidewalk as cars passed by. The timer on the video read Aug. 13. News of Khachidze’s arrest came a day after FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov told the National Anti-Terrorist Committee that Georgian intelligence was planning terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus.
A senior Russian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that Georgian security services were trying to establish contacts with separatist leaders in a North Caucasus republic in order to destabilize the situation there, RIA-Novosti reported.
Four days after the armed conflict between Georgia and Russia erupted over South Ossetia on Aug. 7, Bortnikov told President Dmitry Medvedev that the FSB had arrested 10 Georgian spies, including a senior operative who coordinated the spy network. One of them, Bortnikov said, was a lieutenant colonel in the Russian army. The suspect, who was identified only by his last name, Imerdishvili, is accused of gathering classified military intelligence and identifying potential recruits among Russian servicemen.

TITLE: Georgia Pulls Plug on Russian TV News
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Georgian broadcasters have stopped carrying transmissions by the last Russian-language television news channel operating in the republic after it aired comments by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticizing the Georgian government.
RTVi, an international satellite network that features regular reports critical of the Kremlin, had stopped broadcasting in Georgia as of Tuesday afternoon after airing the interview with Lavrov on the situation in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia, said Yevgeny Kiselyov, a prominent journalist and one of RTVi’s directors in Moscow.
RTVi partners with the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy and is owned by self-exiled Russian businessman Vladimir Gusinsky. Kiselyov is a former television director and anchor on NTV, once part of Gusinsky’s Media-MOST empire.
RTVi’s London office received a letter from the Union of Georgian Cable Television late Monday saying it had suspended its contract with RTVi’s local distributor “due to the military emergency in Georgia,” Kiselyov said by telephone.
Kiselyov suggested the decision was prompted either by Lavrov’s interview or a desire by Georgian authorities to silence all Russian-language media.
“Georgian authorities have been irritated by ... the fact that the citizens had an opportunity to learn about Russia’s stance,” Kiselyov said. 
Alexei Venediktov, editor of Ekho Moskvy, which also aired Lavrov’s interview, called the decision a sign of “weakness” by Georgia and an attempt by Georgian authorities “to hide a different position from Georgian citizens.”
RTVi’s departure from Georgian airwaves marks a rare dovetailing between Russian authorities and the country’s few independent media outlet on the issue of media freedom.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is “talking about democracy and freedom of speech, while at the same time he steps on the basic civil right to be informed,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
RTVi had been the last Russian-language news channel broadcasting in the country after Georgia suspended the operations of Russia’s main television channels and banned access to web sites registered in Russia following the violence in South Ossetia, Lyakin-Frolov said. 
Georgian government spokesman Zura Kachkachishvili said he did not know who was behind the suspension but said he personally approved of the decision.
“I suppose it was done to avoid panic among the population,” Kachkachishvili said. “Russian channels present one-sided opinions.”
RTVi’s London-based directors have asked Georgia’s ambassador to Britain to see that the suspension is reconsidered, Kiselyov said. 
“We think that Russian occupation of Georgia must end, and no other issue is important for us now,” said Georgy Badridze, a spokesman for the Georgian Embassy in London. 
Badridze said, however, that the embassy had forwarded the letter to Georgian authorities.

TITLE: Environmental Groups Picket Toll Highway
AUTHOR: By Boris Kamchev
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Environmentalists have raised concern over the ecological and economic sustainability of the St. Petersburg Western High-Speed Diameter, Russia’s first toll road which is due to be completed by 2012. 
The ZSD Nevsky Meridian consortium was awarded the tender for the construction of the controversial motorway flyover project, which consists of a series of tunnels and bridges, at this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June. The consortium includes the Austrian builder Strabag, France’s Bouygues, Hochtief PPP Solutions and Egis Projects and is controlled by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element.
Analysts say that the construction of the Western High-Speed Diameter (WHSD) will ease traffic congestion around the city center. It will cut journey times and reduce pollution levels, connecting the northern and southern sections of the ring road and forming a circular highway that encompasses the city suburbs.
“This project is significant for all of Russia and determines the development of St. Petersburg. We are proud to say that it is among the first strategic private-public partnership projects in the city,” said Maxim Sokolov, the head of City Hall’s Committee for Investment and Strategic Projects, after the winner of the tender was announced. 
Fifty percent of the necessary investment will come from private investors, 34 percent will be provided by the federal budget and 16 percent will be provided by the city. According to the agreement between the consortium and City Hall, ZSD Nevsky Meridian will have the right to manage the WHSD for the next 30 years.
However, the planned WHSD, a 46.6-kilometer eight-lane toll road, has come up against strong opposition in the city. At a picket held last weekend at the entrance of the Yuntolovo nature reserve in the Primorsky district, activists from the Save Yuntolovo ecological movement invited people to sign a petition against the motorway. The activists, who have already collected 50,000 signatures, say that the road will impinge on residential and recreational areas on Vasilievsky Island and Krestovsky Island and in the Yuntolovo reserve, because various commercial objects will be constructed along it.
“The residents will be deprived of a large green area that has a positive influence on the air quality in the western districts of the city,” said Tatyana Kuzmina, a member of the Save Yuntolovo group.  
According to experts, the zones that the road and its additional facilities will occupy have great ecological and cultural value.
“The project documentation names only partial measures that the operating consortium could conduct to protect the environment. The ecological value of the wetlands and swamps at Lakhta (partly occupied by the Yuntolovo reserve), lies in the harmony of the nature there, which is integrated with the city environment,” said Georgy Noskov, head of the laboratory for ecology and preservation of birds at St. Petersburg State University’s biology research institute.
Negative impacts on the cultural and architectural hallmarks of the city have also been cited as a risk. 
The WHSD site borders on the Kiryanovo country estate and Yekaterinhof park, which both date from the 18th century, as well as on the 19th-century Church of the Epiphany of Christ on Gutuyevsky island.  
“A lack of information about the project has been the main obstacle in our activities. The lack of many materials gives experts the right to consider the WHSD project a violation of the cultural and natural values of the territory on which it will be built, worsening the living conditions of local residents,” said Alexander Karpov, the director of ECOM, a St. Petersburg-based organization that encourages public participation in government decisions connected with nature.
The economic sustainability and risk involved with the project, which will be co-financed by several international developmental banks, are also currently under dispute. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is the biggest global institution mandated to provide infrastructural finance for transition countries to be considering co-financing the WHSD.  
“Instead of stepping into such a megalomaniac and economically and environmentally risky project as this one and filling the pockets of the Russian oligarchs, the EBRD should invest in the rehabilitation of the obsolete existing Russian infrastructure,” said Klara Sikorova, the International EBRD Coordinator at CEE Bankwatch Network, after the results of the tender were announced.
Since spring 2006, the construction costs of the WHSD have risen from $2.4 billion to $8.9 billion — about two thirds of St. Petersburg’s annual budget. Forecasts predict that 94,000 vehicles per day will use the road. 
Opponents of the project say this figure is overestimated and biased, and warn that according to the conditions of the tender, in the event of lower revenues than expected, the city will have to compensate the contractor from its own budget.
“Fluctuations in traffic have to be taken very seriously — the prognosis for traffic through the Gerren tunnel near Lubek (Germany) was 37,000 vehicles per day. In reality, the traffic flow was 22,000 per day, and the contractors Hochtief and Bilfinger Berger soon had to increase the toll rates in order to reach the projected profits,” said Pippa Gallop, a research coordinator at Bankwatch International Network.
According to Vera Ponomareva, a member of Save Yuntolovo, the EBRD has decided to carry out an additional assessment of the project next month.
“During the course of consultations held with the EBRD, the environmental groups Save Yuntolovo, Protect Vasilievsky Island and EKOM were satisfied by the result. The bank is keen to reassess the project and to put pressure on the city’s administration to disclose the documentation, conduct a state ecological inspection and obtain an independent traffic prognosis,” said Ponomareva in an interview.

TITLE: Trio of Business Parks to Open in City
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Colliers International has signed a contract with the Israeli development company Europort to find three land plots in St. Petersburg to accommodate A-class business parks covering 12 to 25 hectares and preferably located to the north, east and south of the ring road.  With its first Russian project, Europort, which was launched in 2006 to handle development projects in Eastern Europe, continues to penetrate new markets and move further east. 
Business parks are usually located far from downtown premises due to their large size, and consequently offer lower rent rates and excellent engineering and social infrastructure, including sports and entertainment facilities, shopping areas, kindergartens, hotels and parking lots. 
Although business parks are a relatively new area of real estate and underrepresented in St. Petersburg, competition in the sector is increasing, with numerous developers including GK Development, Region Development, Setl City holding and Utkina Zavod Development keen to enter the market in around 2010, Val Zherdes, strategy and investment consulting director at Praktis consultancy firm told RBC Daily. 
“Business parks are a promising alternative to C-class centers, which constitute 44 percent of all business real estate,” said Zherdes. 
“Developers who offer better conditions and extensive infrastructure at the lowest prices possible will dominate,” Yekaterina Markovets, director of the consulting department at Arin consultancy firm told Vedomosti.
“Business parks are in demand, as they help decongest the overcrowded and traffic-choked center of St. Petersburg,” Vitaly Malikh, project manager at Aditum consultancy firm told Fontanka news agency. According to Malikh, St. Petersburg is following the trend set by Moscow, where many business park projects have already been completed. “Solvency is what distinguishes us [from Moscow] and makes local businessmen look for affordable and low rates, which can be guaranteed by a business park located in the suburbs, where land costs less,” said Malikh.
Experts say that in St. Petersburg, Europort will face the problem of a lack of plots for sale at around $100 to $150 per square meter — the price at which a business park is a prosperous venture. 
Europort’s projects in St. Petersburg are due to be completed within seven to 10 years, and investment will total up to $500,000. Europort’s deputy CEO, Anna Tsmokun, told Vedomosti that the company intends to focus on St. Petersburg and has no plans to expand across the country. 
“Europort is creating business parks that may become a deciding issue for international companies deliberating whether or not to launch their business in the area. We are very much aware of this due to our previous development experience and cooperation with business park tenants,” said Motti Kirschenbaum, Europort’s CEO.
Europort’s previous projects include Airport City Belgrade in Serbia. The company is currently involved in the development of the 120,000-square-meter Airport City Odessa business park in Ukraine. Europort has four major commercial shareholders, including France’s Societe Generale Bank, in addition to private investors with a combined portfolio of 59.5 percent.

TITLE: G7 Calls for More Aid to Georgians
AUTHOR: By Martin Crutsinger
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The world’s major industrial countries are calling for increased economic support for war-torn Georgia.
Finance ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrial countries issued a joint statement Wednesday pledging support for Georgia’s economy and its financial system. They also urged other countries and institutions to assist in the effort.
“We, the G7, stand ready to support Georgia in order to promote the continued health of the Georgian economy, maintain confidence in Georgia’s financial system and support economic reconstruction,” the finance officials said.
The United States has been leading the international response after fighting broke out in Georgia earlier this month between Russian and Georgian troops over Georgia’s breakaway territory of South Ossetia.
A convoy of food aid for Georgians was allowed past a checkpoint by Russian troops on Wednesday, but there have been few signs the Russian soldiers are preparing to fulfill a promise made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that those troops will complete a withdrawal from Georgia by Friday.
In their statement, the G7 finance ministers endorsed international mediation efforts to “end the hostilities and to bring about a political solution to the conflict in Georgia. The loss of life, humanitarian suffering and wider destruction over recent days is considerable and we welcome commitments to assist with the urgent humanitarian needs.”
The statement welcomed the commitment of Georgia and the International Monetary Fund to work on a financial program to support Georgia’s economy. It also called on other international lending institutions, including the World Bank, to “promptly identify and support” reconstruction efforts in the country.

TITLE: Mechel Fined $32 Mln, Ordered to Slash Prices
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mechel, the miner savaged by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last month, will escape with an enforced 15 percent reduction on coal prices for the steel sector from Sept. 1, less than had previously been feared.
Mechel will also be fined 5 percent of last year’s coking coal revenues, or about 790 million rubles ($32.2 million), for abusing its dominant market share, Federal Anti-Monopoly Service chief Igor Artemyev said Tuesday, Interfax reported.
“It’s lower than the higher end of the range, so, from this perspective, it’s favorable for the company,” said Maxim Semenovykh, a mining analyst at Alfa Bank. Mechel could lose $45 million in potential revenues in the last four months of the year, he said.
Semenovykh said the price cut was serious for Mechel and the industry. “Mechel will just be the first: They will try to implement this price decrease for other coking coal producers and eventually for steel producers,” he said. 
The government, struggling to rein in inflation, has expressed concern over the high price of raw materials used to make steel. Mechel’s case has drawn special attention after Putin twice last month attacked the company’s pricing policy, triggering a sell-off that erased $8 billion, or half the New York-listed company’s market value, in the space of three trading days.
“We will recommend the company lower its prices by 15 percent to the end of the year from Sept. 1,” Artemyev said after meeting with Putin on Tuesday.
Mechel officials were not available for comment.
The anti-monopoly service, in a ruling Thursday, found Mechel guilty of abusing its market position and said a fine of 1 percent to 15 percent could be imposed. Russian media had said the miner could be forced to cut prices by 30 percent. Mechel, majority-owned by billionaire Igor Zyuzin, is Russia’s largest producer of coking coal for the steel industry.
Mechel’s competitors in coking coal, Raspadskaya and Evraz, are also subject to an anti-monopoly investigation.
Artemyev said both companies would be subject to the same demands and sanctions as Mechel. The companies both declined comment Tuesday.
The service said last Thursday that Mechel, which has angered some Russian steelmakers by cutting supplies this year, would also switch to long-term coking coal supply contracts from 2009.
Putin, addressing a meeting on competition Tuesday, said raw material suppliers to the steel industry had already heeded his calls to observe competition laws and that steekmakers should follow this example when agreeing contracts with customers.
“I’m pleased to note our discussions have produced positive movement,” Putin said, Interfax reported. “Steelmakers themselves need to reach agreements with their customers.”
He added, “We should create a system that will regulate the competition situation justly and rationally.”
Mechel’s U.S. shares rose jumped as much as 5.3 percent, the most in five days, and traded 2.1 percent higher at $26.44 as of 10:37 a.m. in New York, after falling Friday and Monday, Bloomberg reported.

TITLE: Russia to Hold the Line On Freddie, Fannie Debt
AUTHOR: By Toni Vorobyova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia is not planning to raise its exposure to debt issued by troubled U.S. agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but will not cut it rapidly, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said Wednesday.
“At the moment we are not planning to increase our holdings. We are also not planning a sharp exit, because this is decent paper and it is bringing us decent earnings,” Pankin told a news conference.
The agencies’ shares later plummeted for a fourth straight day in New York trading, as investors increasingly feared that the stocks would drop to zero if the U.S. government effectively moved to nationalize the companies with a state-sponsored bailout, The Associated Press reported.
Fannie Mae lost 18 percent to $4.94, while Freddie Mac tumbled 19 percent to $3.37, as of 12:25 p.m., Bloomberg reported.
On Tuesday, Freddie Mac had little trouble selling $3 billion of debt, seemingly passing an important test of the U.S. housing finance company’s ability to raise funds. It said global central banks had bought around one-third of the issue.
On Tuesday, Pankin’s boss, Alexei Kudrin, said Russia had continued buying the debt of the U.S. agencies this year, but not in sufficient quantities to replace all of the maturing paper.
At the start of the year, Russia held $100 billion — or over one-sixth of its gold and forex reserves — in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Federal Home Loan Banks. The holdings have since been reduced by around 40 percent, the Central Bank has said.
The holdings have met hostility from some Russian media and the public, who are wary of risky investments.
This hostility has intensified as political tensions have grown between Russia and the West, including the United States, over the military conflict between Russia and Georgia.
Russian officials have tried to allay public concerns by stressing that they have actually made money on their investments in U.S. agency debt.
Pankin said Russia’s oil stabilization funds had around 3.6 percent of their over $160 billion invested in Freddie and Fannie and had earned $72 million on that holding between Jan. 30 and Aug. 19 this year.
The oil funds are part of the gold and forex reserves, and thus its U.S. agency holdings are part of Russia’s total investment in them.
Pankin later told Vesti-24 state television that even a recapitalization of the agencies by the U.S. Treasury would not be a big problem for Russia.
“This [potential move] will be a big event for the U.S. financial markets. ... But as far as our investments are concerned I believe the changes will be minimal,” he said.

TITLE: Medvedev to Talk Business With Oligarchs
AUTHOR: By Oleg Shchedrov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SOCHI — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that he would meet with Russia’s top business lobby in September, while billionaire Vladimir Potanin said the meeting would discuss potential changes to the country’s tax system. 
Medvedev met with Potanin, a top shareholder of mining giant Norilsk Nickel who is ranked the country’s sixth-richest man, in his Black Sea residence near the town of Sochi to tell him that the time had come for the authorities to meet with big business. 
“A number of problems have built up. … We have to talk about the global economy and our economy,” Medvedev told Potanin, who said business wanted the meeting to focus on taxes. 
“We have an agenda. First of all, the issue of taxation, I mean tax reduction and better administration,” Potanin said. 
“We could also discuss the complicated — I would call it a crisis — situation on international financial markets, which limits access of our companies to financial resources.” 
“Perhaps we could talk about boosting lending inside the country to use part of the generated wealth,” Potanin added. 
Russian stock markets are down over 30 percent since reaching their peak in May because of global financial troubles and investors’ uncertainty about the local climate, which has been soured by a military conflict with Georgia and state attacks on private companies, including Mechel and TNK-BP. 
Analysts from Troika Dialog said Wednesday that a new series of tax cuts could be a welcome catalyst for the depressed market. 
“What is desperately needed now is a catalyst. The only one that we can see at this point is a change in oil taxation,” Troika said in written research. 
“This is now crucial if we are to climb out of the current mess for one simple reason: The market has significantly increased the risk premium on Russian equities,” it added. 
Russia has amassed nearly $600 billion in gold and forex reserves because of record high global energy and commodity prices, and business leaders regularly call on the government to allow the use of wealth on projects inside Russia, including lending to private companies. 
The government’s financial hawk, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, has so far managed to withstand the pressure.

TITLE: Iraq Says LUKoil Is Welcome to Bid for Field
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — An Iraqi Cabinet minister invited Russia’s LUKoil on Wednesday to renew its bid on the lucrative West Qurna-2 oil field and urged Russian companies to seek roles rebuilding dilapidated power plants as Iraq searches for foreign investment to revive its oil industry and infrastructure. 
“I hope Russia companies will take part in the bidding,” Iraqi Electricity Minister Karim Wahid told a news conference in Moscow. “LUKoil is welcome to bid for the service contract at the second or third stage of the tender in March or September.” 
LUKoil signed a contract for West Qurna-2, one of the largest oil fields in the world, in 1997. Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein declared the deal void shortly before the 2003 U.S. invasion. West Qurna-2 is believed to hold 6 billion barrels in proven reserves. 
LUKoil’s officials have repeatedly said they continue to consider the contract valid, as it was not revoked within the international legal framework. But in a recent interview with the an-Noor newspaper, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani referred to the contract as no longer valid. 
Wahid and Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko had earlier agreed to set up two working groups to develop power industry cooperation. Wahid also called on Russian companies to bid in tenders to revive the country’s power plants and build new ones.
He said Iraq was eager to renew deals signed in the 1990s and early 2000s. “We are currently reviewing their technical and economic terms, but not their political component,” he said. 
The Iraqis are anxious to find foreign investors to help modernize their vast oil industry, which suffered from years of neglect under Saddam’s rule and during the 13 years of UN sanctions following the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

TITLE: Predicting the Next Aug. 17
AUTHOR: By Marshall I. Goldman
TEXT: What is there about modern-day Russia and the month of August? Each year it is rare that the month passes without Moscow finding itself caught up in some history-making event. This year it is the war with Georgia.
Ten years ago, on Aug. 17, 1998, Russia went through a severe economic crisis. It seemed to mark the financial bankruptcy of the country, a bankruptcy that looked like it would endure for years. As we have come to say, “It seemed to be a perfect storm.” Few if any of the rich, especially the oligarchs, were paying their fair share of their tax obligations, so the government had to borrow heavily to pay its bills. But after months of such borrowing and ever-larger debts, the government eventually found itself unable to attract enough new buyers for these government bonds. Therefore, by mid-August 1998, the government had no choice but to tell those who had earlier bought government bonds that the state would not be able to redeem them. Even sophisticated foreign institutional investors like Bankers Trust in New York got caught and had to write off several hundred million dollars worth of Russian bonds. 
Within Russia, this hurt not only individuals, but most of the country’s banks, whose main asset consisted of those same government bonds. These banks were effectively bankrupt and unable to return money to their depositors. To top it off, the ruble fell in value from 6.29 rubles to the dollar on Aug. 14 to 21 rubles to the dollar a month later, a loss of two-thirds of its value. If all that were not enough, the Russian stock market index tumbled from 571 to 39 points. It was hard to see how the country’s banks and industries would ever recover enough to open their doors again. 
But they did recover — and in a most impressive way. In part, the recovery was a result of good leadership. But more than anything, Russia was the beneficiary of a remarkable turnaround in energy prices. It helped, of course, that the ruble lost so much of its value. That made goods produced in Russia much cheaper in foreign markets. The cheap ruble combined with a gradual but persistent increase in oil prices induced the oil companies and the oligarchs to stop stripping assets and instead invest within Russia, especially to increase oil production. So as world oil prices rose from $12 a barrel in 1998 to $75 a barrel in 2007, Russian oil output jumped from 304 million tons in 1998 to 491 million tons in 2007 — a 60 percent increase.
As for then-President Vladimir Putin’s impact, it has been more positive than negative. On the negative side, his heavy-handed methods with Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Total undoubtedly frightened investors and developers both within and outside of Russia into deferring or canceling some important projects. As President Dmitry Medvedev put it, the blatant disregard for law resembled “legal nihilism.”
But because not many places in the world are as richly endowed as Russia, companies looking to develop energy resources don’t have very many alternatives. And not everything Putin has done has scared off investors: He did support the passage of a flat 13 percent income tax, which accounts in part for an increase in tax collections. He also has been an outspoken supporter of what he calls “national champions.” These are companies that are influenced, if not owned, by the state. They tend to act as agents of the state in promoting its interests, at least as defined by Putin.
But while Russia has paid off most of the state’s debt and built up foreign currency reserves of almost $500 billion, not everything is perfect. Relatively little has been set aside for infrastructure. One glaring example: Portions of the road between the countries two largest cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, are still only two lanes. An equally serious concern is that the Russian population has diminished by roughly 650,000 people each year for almost a decade. Moreover, the high earnings generated by oil exports have caused a strengthening of the ruble. While that is good for importers, it undercuts efforts to build up the domestic manufacturing sector. If oil prices should suddenly collapse, Russia would have very little else going for it. Depending on how far oil prices drop, Russian companies and local government jurisdictions might also have trouble generating the funds they need if they are to pay back the money they have borrowed. Unlike 10 years ago, the central government has not overextended its borrowing, but many of the local and regional governments as well as individual companies have. Should oil revenues shrivel up, we could see at least a partial replay of the credit crisis of 1998.
For the time being, however, Russia in many ways looks to be economically and financially healthier than it has ever been in its history. But one thing we have come to learn about Russia: Predicting a decade ahead about what will happen to Russia is a risky business. As solid as Russia has become under Putin, such predictions remain as unpredictable as ever. 

Marshall I. Goldman, emeritus professor of economics at Wellesley College and senior scholar at Harvard University’s Davis Center, is author of “Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia,” which was published in April.

TITLE: Russia’s Upside in the Georgia Conflict
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: Fortunately, the Russia-Georgia war was short-lived, but its repercussions will be felt for quite a long time. By defeating Georgia and showing that Washington was unable to defend its own ally, Russia humiliated the United States in front of the whole world.
While U.S. officials and the global media criticized Russia for its “unforgivable” conduct in invading South Ossetia and Georgia, most of the world was filled with delight: At last, someone put high-handed Americans in their place. Against the background of anti-U.S. sentiment during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office, this desire to snub the United States is not surprising. 
Perhaps Georgia deserves some sympathy. After all, it is a small country that tried to resist its powerful neighbor. But the conflict was less about Georgia and South Ossetia than it was a global battle between East and West. 
Russia won the latest round with unexpected ease, but this will surely not be the final battle. After experiencing an embarrassing humiliation, the Bush administration will have difficulty forgiving Russia. Even worse, the U.S. government’s indignation has turned into an anti-Russian consensus among Washington politicians and their electorates. As a result, the anti-Russian views of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain hardly differ from those of Bush. Coming from U.S. politicians, however, the argument that Georgia’s territorial integrity should be preserved doesn’t sound very convincing. After all, it was the United States that set an example after it invaded sovereign Iraq and overthrew the local government. It later separated Kosovo from sovereign Serbia.
The war with Georgia was a sharp turning point in U.S.-Russian relations. From now on, the desire to punish Moscow will become an important component of U.S. foreign policy. The underlying conflict of interests will turn into a protracted confrontation.
Paradoxically, this conflict will most likely turn out to be good news for Russia. What Washington thinks is punishment for Moscow may in fact turn out to be a blessing. For example, the United States believes that blocking Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization is one way to retaliate. But for Russia’s domestic industries — particularly when there is a global economic downturn — entry into WTO would be a death sentence. Therefore, if this sentence will be postponed, the Kremlin can only thank the United States and Georgia.
In addition, Washington and London are threatening to investigate the bank accounts of senior Russian officials that are held abroad. It’s surprising that this wasn’t done earlier. Russians can only benefit if the United States leads a new fight against money laundering, particularly when it involves top officials from the Russian government. Moreover, NATO is threatening to suspend joint military exercises with Russia. That means Russia will save a nice amount of money and fuel. Finally, in light of the increased tension, liberal opposition groups in Moscow will receive more active help from the West. This is also beneficial because new financing will mean the creation of new media outlets, new nongovernmental organizations and new jobs.
When it condemned Russia’s incursion into Georgia, the United States appealed to international public opinion and threatened Moscow with global isolation. But it is the United States that will become increasingly isolated in the world. Over the last five years, Washington has met worldwide criticism, including from its allies in Europe. As a result, Moscow’s heightened conflict with the United States makes Russia more appealing for a significant part of the world. The question is only whether the Kremlin is able to take advantage of this new opportunity.

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

TITLE: Freedom rocks!
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian rock musicians will raise their voices in support of democracy and against war at Rock for Freedom, an outdoor concert held Friday.
The concert was arranged to mark the failure of a three-day coup d’etat in the Soviet Union in August 1991 when thousands of Russians rose up to stop Communist Party hardliners, who had sent tanks into Moscow and declared a “state of emergency” in St. Petersburg, from attacking the democratically-dominated parliaments in both cities.
But the concert organizers, the local branch of Garry Kasparov’s oppositional United Civil Front and a group of rock musicians, feel the 1991 victory and democratic freedoms that stemmed from it, have been taken away from them by the current Kremlin leadership. 
Moreover, when the concert — to feature the bands Televizor, SP Babai and Electric Guerrillas — was being prepared, the Russian army invaded Georgia, so an anti-war slogan, “No to War, Yes to Rock and Roll” was added to the concert’s agenda.
“The idea of the event is simple; we think that the freedom won in 1991 has been lost and victory stolen,” said Olga Kurnosova, the local leader of the United Civil Front, in a statement. Kurnosova was a deputy in the Lensoviet — the city’s largely democratic parliament — in August 1991.
“So we want to remind everybody about those memorable events, especially the new generation, and, most importantly, to note that people went to the streets not ‘for sausage,’ as it is accepted to say now, but were ready to sacrifice themselves for freedom.”
Mikhail Borzykin, whose band Televizor is headlining the concert, said the days when people rose up against the self-appointed “committee” of hardliners that tried to steal the power from the reformists, were a time of hope and idealism.
“It was the time of hopes, a noble reaction from people who rose above daily concerns and suddenly looked toward the sky and thought about such notions as freedom and justice,” he said.
“That time for me is linked to romantic hopes, many of which, sadly, did not come true, but it rose the nation’s spirit, there’s no doubt about it.”
Borzykin said that Russians lost this feeling of freedom in the years that followed.
“You can’t compare what was then to the state of Russian minds now,” he said. “Unfortunately, a swamp-like substance has filled the brains of Russians again. A free nation is what we need now, after we’ve made this evolutionary circle, from the Communists to the Communists. We have come to the same model of the state that we had in the 1980s — allegedly surrounded by enemies, who didn’t let us develop. The roots of this disgrace lie, of course, in Soviet ideology. That’s where our current rulers come from.”
According to Borzykin, the Russian invasion of Georgia and how the Kremlin-controlled media covered it is another indication of falling back into a Soviet-style past.
“As a person worried about Russia, I was shocked how easy it has become to brainwash our citizens with the media again. I remember the [Soviet] war in Afghanistan very well, when we were persuaded it was our ‘international duty,’ the rhetoric was absolutely identical; once again they show American labels on Georgian soldiers’ food and weapons.”
Borzykin said the war will do Russia and the world a bad service.
“Turning this corner can affect the future of Russia and the world very badly,” he said.
“Goodbye modernization, goodbye democratization, goodbye struggle with corruption — long live the new ‘mobilized’ thinking. We are surrounded by enemies, so we should arm ourselves, defend ourselves and snarl around. We’ve already been there; this policy leads nowhere. The regime has started to destroy itself rather furiously, without looking back at its past experience.”
On August 19, 1991, the first day of the coup d’etat, when the nation woke up to find every Soviet television channel broadcasting “Swan Lake,” Borzykin was trapped in Pyatigorsk, a town in the south of Russia, where he was on holiday at his grandmother’s house.
“I tried to buy tickets for a plane, a train, or a bus, but it turned out there were no tickets anywhere, everything was sold out, and while I was running around, trying to get these tickets, standing in lines — it all ended.
“The small town of Pyatigorsk reacted rather indifferently, it even gloated over it. I called musicians in St. Petersburg to find out details and tried to tune my radio to Radio Liberty to understand what was happening. It was torture for me.”
Borzykin said that the spirit of resistance born in 1991 is very much missed and needed in 2008.
“It’s surprising that people rose up against tanks in such large numbers,” Borzykin said. 
“Such an increase in people’s consciousness would probably help take the situation in a better direction now. That’s what we need now. History has come full circle, and such events are waiting for us in the future. I hope people will divert their attention from their meals, cottages and cars, and will recall, at least, what they were created for.”
The concert’s organizers said the authorities did not object to the concert when they were contacted for permission 15 days before the event, as a 2004 law requires.
“But that was before the war. If we had submitted the application just a day later, then we wouldn’t have got permission, that’s for sure,” said Mikhail Yeliseyev, the United Civil Front’s local spokesman.
But according to Yeliseyev, on Wednesday, days after permission had been granted, the Vasileostrovsky District Administration attempted to oblige the promoters to clean up the site after the event, even if according to the law, that is the task of the administration. Kurnosova described this incident as “legal illiteracy” on the part of the authorities in a statement on the movement’s web site.
Apart from Televizor, SP Babai and Electric Guerrillas, Sergei Parashchuk, formerly of the 1980s band NEP, will perform as well as younger bands such as Mukhomory, Vremya Ot Kazhdogo and Drugoi Veter. A number of public figures are expected to speak about the failed 1991 coup and current matters between performances.
<i>Rock for Freedom concert is scheduled be held on Ploshchad Sakharova (Strelka of Vasilievsky Ostrov) at 7 p.m. on Friday. www.rock-for-freedom.spb.ru</i>

TITLE: Word’s worth
TEXT: <i>Bèçà</i> (visa) is an odd thing. It’s just a piece of paper, or a stamp, or a scribbled notation. But without it, a person can’t get from one place to another. It’s the legal equivalent of the transporter beam in “Star Trek” — it’s what allows you to be beamed to the Starship USA or RF.
The word comes to both English and Russian from Latin via the French. The original phrase in Latin was charta visa (verified paper; literally, “paper that has been seen”). Most commonly today we think of âèçà as that magical stamp or hologram-decorated, sticky-backed paper in your passport that gives you the right to enter a country. In this case, some person or computer in the bowels of some official building some place has “seen” your documents and decided that you are not a threat.
But in Russian, <i>âèçà</i>, or more commonly the verb <i>âèçèðîâàòü</i> (endorse, sign, approve), can be used in reference to other documents. When Russian documents wend their way up the chain of command at a ministry or a business, they get a “visa” to keep moving up at every level. By the time an important document gets to the top guy or gal, it may have a page of scribbled signatures attached. I have been told that the folks at the top rarely read the document — they just glance at the signatures. <i>Âñå çàâèçèðîâàëè åãî? Òîãäà ÿ ïîäïèøó</i> (Has everyone signed off on this? Then I’ll sign it). In business, the CEO won’t sign something unless the CFO has already put his or her John or Jane Hancockov on it. <i>Ãëàâáóõ äîëæåí âèçèðîâàòü êàæäûé äîãîâîð</i> (The chief accountant must sign off on every contract). 
In Russian, you don’t have to sign something to show your approval. You can also give things: <i>Äàòü äîáðî</i> (to give the OK), <i>îòìàøêó</i> (signal), and <i>çåë¸íûé ñâåò</i> (green light). <i>Âëàñòè äàëè äîáðî íà ñòðîéêó â Ñåðåáðÿíîì áîðó</i> (The authorities gave the OK for construction in Silver Pines). <i>Äàòü îòìàøêó</i> originally meant giving a nautical signal by flag or lantern to a passing ship. Today it means giving permission for something to happen. <i>Ìèíçäðàâ äàë îòìàøêó íà÷èíàòü òåíäåð ïî âûáîðó ïîñòàâùèêîâ ëåêàðñòâ</i> (The Health Ministry gave the OK to start accepting bids from drug supply companies). The phrase <i>äàòü çåë¸íûé ñâåò</i> appeared only with traffic lights, perhaps via English. For some reason, you don’t give a red light (<i>äàòü êðàñíûé ñâåò</i>) in Russian or in English, except with tongue in cheek. But both languages do use another vehicular phrase to mean stopping something: to put on the brakes (<i>òîðìîçèòü</i>). <i>Ñî ñòîðîíû âëàñòè ïðåäïðèíèìàëèñü ïîïûòêè òîðìîçèòü ðàçâèòèå ÑÌÈ</i> (There were attempts by the government to put the brakes on mass media development). 

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

Sergey Chernov is on vacation.</i>

TITLE: Pop star to help sex slaves
AUTHOR: By Stephanie Nebehay
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: GENEVA — Pop star Valeria says she is drawing on her experience as a battered wife and “slave” to help migrant workers break free of sexual exploitation and forced labor in her homeland.
Valeria last week was formally named as goodwill envoy for the Russian Federation on behalf of the International Organization for Migration, an agency she has teamed up with for the past year to combat human trafficking.
“I meet and talk to these people,” the blonde 40-year-old told a news briefing. “I am not a professional psychologist, but I am sure I can help people with my own experience as an ex-victim of slavery. I suffered a lot of domestic violence.” 
“I was forced to work for a man, my [former] husband, who treated me like a slave. So I feel I know the subject maybe even more than many others and am ready to help people with all my heart,” she said.
Valeria — who only goes by her first name — has sold 100 million CDs. She is entering the British music market, where she has been dubbed the Russian Madonna, with an English version of her album “Out of Control.”
Her anti-trafficking clips already appear on Russian television, and she plans to dedicate some of her concerts around Europe next year to raising public awareness of the problem.
“This evil exists. ... It is among us,” she said. “Sometimes we artists, actors and musicians are able to bring more public attention to a problem than officials or politicians. We speak the language of emotions and feelings.”
Russia has become an attractive destination for millions of migrants from neighboring countries looking for better opportunities. The Geneva-based agency says it has good cooperation with Russian authorities.
Some 260 victims of trafficking have been assisted at an Organization for Migration rehabilitation center opened in 2006 in Moscow. Many are Russians, followed by migrants from Uzbekistan, Moldova and Ukraine.
“The one thing we can say with some certainty is it’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Richard Danziger, the agency’s head of countertrafficking activities worldwide.
Valeria recalled her decision to leave her husband of 10 years, who was also her manager, and take her three children to live with her and her parents in their one-bedroom flat.
“He beat me up, cut me with knives and there was sexual exploitation as well — all kinds of bad things. One day I was fed up and couldn’t bear it any longer.
“My main message when I was talking to these poor girls who suffered so badly because of their naivete, was ‘Do not feel sorry for yourself. You have to act, you have to rebuild your life. Do not look back and beat yourself up because this is only destructive,’” she said.

TITLE: Celebrating the Baltic Sea
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Baltic Sea Festival — an annual classical music event with an environmental bent that runs under the joint leadership of Mariinsky Theater artistic director Valery Gergiev, Finnish-born conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tyden, managing director of Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen concert hall — began in Stockholm on Thursday.
Running through Aug. 30 the festival, which has been held each year since 2003, has become a prestigious classical music event that assembles international stars of the caliber of Gergiev, Salonen, Estonian conductor Paavo Jarvi, British percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Danish violinist Nikolai Znaider, French pianist Helene Grimaud and Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.
The festival was created with the eye to campaign for the endangered marine environment of the  Baltic Sea — arguably the most polluted sea on the planet — through the universal language of music. 
 The development of the Baltic Sea Festival into a versatile multi-location international event has been rapid. Its founders now say their brainchild has reached its ideal size and the task facing them now is to balance the input of the growing numbers of new participants.
The festival’s opening concert on Thursday saw Barenboim conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the program of Haydn’s Sinfonia concert, Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra Op. 31 and Brahms’s Symphony No 4.
“The Baltic Sea Festival is an event that is growing and thriving,” Tyden said. “When we began to outline our plans for this festival some years ago, our basic assumption was that music could unite us. This year we are presenting for the sixth time a festival that is attracting more and more people to a sense of community.”
The Mariinsky Theater’s contribution this year will be a concert performance of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra,” one of the company’s most successful recent shows, on Aug. 29 in Berwaldhallen. The Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gergiev will also perform at the closing concert of the festival in Berwaldhallen on Aug. 30 in a program of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker suite,” Shchedrin: concerto for orchestra No. 1, Naughty Limericks and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherezade.”
The festival organizers originally wanted to present prominent musicians from the Baltic Sea area in an event that emphasized the cultural richness and enormous diversity of the region.
“Originally the idea was of lots of musicians, composers, orchestras and choirs building bridges, with the performers moving about freely,” Salonen said. “That would prove — in both practical and symbolic terms — that the Baltic has now once again become an area that shares a common culture.”
The ecological rescue of the Baltic Sea region requires a consistent joint effort from all countries of the region, but not all of the coastal states are taking part in environmental clean-up and revival projects. Russia, the country responsible for the lion’s share of the pollution, has shown little enthusiasm for combating the consequences. 
During the course of the festival Salonen will conduct the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra as well as the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, which will be presented a second time under the leadership of Daniel Harding. Olari Elts will travel to Stockholm with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and Krzysztof Penderecki with the Sinfonia Varsovia.  
The festival will see two world premieres: “Holocene,” a film-concert in the form of an oratorio by author Majgull Axelsson, composer Jonas Bohlin and video artist Lars Siltberg, and “The Polar Sea” by the Swedish composer Klas Torstensson. 
Classical music cruises organized by the festival in collaboration with Silja Line this year create musical links between Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga. 
“The universal language of music has no political restrictions, and can easily reach people across language barriers,” Salonen said. “I believe that a festival of this size can spark a shared desire to improve the deteriorating Baltic Sea environment.”
Gergiev believes the political climate in the region has improved immensely and makes the musician hopeful about stronger integration in the future, in both cultural and political terms. The Mariinsky Theater always funds its own tours to the Baltic Sea Festival as part of its endeavors to help saving the Baltic.

TITLE: Green waves
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Moving Baltic Sea Festival, a traveling film and environmental event, is coming to St. Petersburg today for three days with its program of  film screenings, bands and DJs, environmental activities, creative-workshops, and many other, large and small events, to be hosted mostly at the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center on Vasilievsky Island.
The festival travels by sea on the boat Lovis, which has stopped in Germany, Poland, Kaliningrad, Latvia and Estonia, and is now anchored at Angliiskaya Embankment.
The event aims to bring together artistic and environmental communities from all around the Baltic Sea area, creating a “living space” for film, art and ecological initiatives, as well as a three-day-party wherever it stops. 
According to the festival’s main international organizers, Berlin-based Moviemiento, St. Petersburg is the final destination for the Moving Baltic Sea event, and so the place where the results of the festival can be summed up. Before this festival, Moviemiento already had experience with organizing traveling film festivals. In 2003, 2005 and 2006 the organization traveled across Europe in a bus, creating open-air screenings in many small towns of Central and Southern Europe. A couple of years ago the environmental topic within the Baltic Sea area was added to the film program and the idea of a sailing film festival appeared.
Project coordinator Suzana Radisic said the team then found the Lovis, a vessel built more than a 100 years ago and restored by a group of individuals from Greifswald, Germany, who were interested in sailing and educational programs. The Lovis arrived in St. Petersburg on Wednesday and can be seen on the Angliiskaya Embankment from Blagoveschensky (former Lieutenant Schmidt) Bridge.
The St. Petersburg part of the program was organized by the German-Russian Exchange alongside with a number of partner organizations. The highlights of the St. Petersburg program are the film screenings.
On Friday there’s a showing of the Moving Baltic Sea short film competition on the topic “Stories from the Seaside” (the competition was held earlier this year, and the winning program includes two Russian films; one documentary, called “The Perfect Place” by Yelena Solodkova from Moscow, about life on Shikotan, a small, remote island of on the west border of Russia; and one cartoon “The Tiny Fish” showing the story of a painted fish coming to life). 
Another film program, also to be shown on Friday night, is a collection of art-house short films about water, provided by the partner festival Open Cinema. Saturday will witness the screening of the international short film program “Colors of Green,” which includes advertising videos, short videos, and other film/video works related to the color green. A workshop for young St. Petersburg filmmakers, called “Shoot and Run. A 48-hour Film Workshop” will be run with the State Center for Modern Art, and on Sunday evening its results will be shown in the Kuryokhin Center. 
Bands from St. Petersburg, such as Uniquetunes and Info (Saturday) and Markscheider Kunst (Sunday) will perform, with concerts followed by DJs from St. Petersburg and Berlin playing until morning. A special DJ event at the festival is a “Silent Disco.” The idea is that every participant gets earphones, chooses the music he likes from the DJ and dances in a completely silent room. 
Other events to be presented at the festival are performances on the topic of water (one by U.S.-based artist Ian Winters and the other one by St. Petersburg-based group Lucid Dream Organisation), a “green” graffiti workshop, a photo exhibition organized by the Green Wave movement, a flea market in the courtyard of the festival venue and a creative workshop for young authors, art-critics and photographers from the Plotki cultural magazine.  
There are also ecological events. Among these is the opening of a public discussion on promotion of environmental awareness through art and culture in Europe and Russia, an environmental workshop on pollution in the Baltic Sea organized by a St. Petersburg NGO Keep St. Petersburg Tidy, a roundtable discussion on environmental volunteering, and an action called “Green Finger” from WWF Russia. 
“We’d like to show that the environment is not something distant, but rather close and concrete. It doesn’t belong somewhere out there, but actually starts in your bathroom or kitchen. We’d like to make ‘green’ topics fun,” said Astrid Schorn from the German-Russian Exchange.
      
<i>Moving Baltic Sea Festival at the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, 93 Sredny Prospekt (VO). Tel 718 3793. Entrance is free, however you’re advised to get a free invitation (the addresses can be found at www.obmen.org)  www.movingbalticsea.org</i>

TITLE: Salon
AUTHOR: By Victor Sonkin
TEXT: Rumors about Hollywood adaptations of Russian classics or events from Russian history crop up regularly but often turn out to be hoaxes. One of the funniest was the one about a blockbuster based upon the events of the 1917 Revolution, with Bruce Willis in the part of Vladimir Lenin — apparently, because they are both bald. For a while, this project was seriously discussed in Russian blogs.
Russians have good reason for irony and caution: Most Western productions of Russian classics have been questionable, from the kitschy “Doctor Zhivago” to the dismal recent television series “War and Peace.” Despite this, a Hollywood insider magazine has just announced that Stone Village Pictures, a large U.S. studio, has bought the rights to “The Amphibian Man,” the sci-fi novel written in 1928 by the Russian writer Alexander Belyayev.
The novel, set in an imaginary Latin American country, tells the story of Ichtiander, a young man whose father equipped him at birth with fish gills to save the boy from a breathing disorder, effectively making him an amphibian. The further plot involved a damsel in distress and an ensuing love triangle, as well as the capitalists’ ruthless hunt for Ichtiander, whom they intended to employ as the ultimate pearl diver.
The popularity of the novel was further boosted by a Soviet movie of 1962, shot at beautiful locations in Crimea, with an unforgettable score by Andrei Petrov. Vladimir Korenev, the heartthrob who played Ichtiander, became a star, especially popular among female audiences. Mikhail Kozakov, who played the villain, is now one of the most sought-after and respected Russian actors.
Belyayev was a prolific and inventive sci-fi author. His works were not adapted for screen on a larger scale mostly because of technical constraints: His novel, “The Head of Professor Dowell,” involved several “talking heads” in the very literal sense of the word and several instances of head-and-body exchanges — exactly the stuff that makes today’s blockbusters.
With the dearth of plots in Hollywood ever more obvious, the remake of “The Amphibian Man” — and any other of Belyayev’s novels, come to think of it — can only be applauded. Even the anti-capitalist tone of the novel strikes a chord with today’s climate of anti-globalism and eco-sensibilities. Besides, it is a wiser choice than Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita,” also in development at Stone Village. So far, nobody has come close to successfully transferring Bulgakov’s masterpiece to the screen.

TITLE: Sands of time
AUTHOR: By Darya Protopopova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The cover of the new English edition of Maria Galina’s “Iramifications” does little justice to the novel’s vibrant imagery and to the richness of its plot. In the Russian original, the cover features two men in modern suits floating through a starry Middle Eastern sky over a bas-relief of an Assyrian king. That scene, and the novel’s original subtitle, “A Mystico-Ironic Phantasmagoria,” hints far more successfully at the sweeping flights of Galina’s imagination. Without Galina’s unfaltering irony, “Iramifications” might easily be dismissed as a thriller about businessmen in post-Soviet Ukraine, spiced up with time-machine journeys to the ancient Arab world. Galina’s wit, erudition and mastery of language transform this fantasy plot into a genuine work of art.
The Russian edition of the novel is named after its two protagonists, Givi and Shenderovich. Givi is a typical Georgian first name, and Shenderovich is a characteristic Russian-Jewish surname. The combination is instantly amusing for native Russian readers, who have heard countless jokes about their namesakes. The English-language pairings of Jeeves and Wooster, or Beavis and Butt-Head, have something of the same quality, although “Givi” (the name of one of the giant descendants of the fallen angel Shemhazai) and “Shenderovich” (a Jewish equivalent of “descended from Alexander”) possess much nobler etymologies.
“Iramifications” can best be summarized as a love story. Givi Mesopotamishvili, an accountant for a ferry company, is longing after Shenderovich’s business partner, Alla, an alluring blonde who specializes in comparative linguistics. When their steamer anchors at Istanbul, Alla announces that she is going to do “her bit for public relations,” in other words, spend the night with the captain. After Alla mysteriously disappears, Givi and Shenderovich begin searching for her in the local archeology museum, from which they are magically transported to a distant desert. They are captured first by monks and then by a werewolf, and finally are delivered to the ancient city of Iram. There they find Alla, who has acquired the form of a seductive female demon, or succubus. And though, once again, Givi does not benefit from Alla’s amorous attentions, he magnanimously releases her from her harem. In the end, his devotion wins her heart, but only after he resumes his “ordinary and pathetic” lifestyle, to use the expression of James McAvoy’s character in Timur Bekmambetov’s recent film “Wanted.”
In his quiet unassertiveness, combined with his pronounced male heterosexual libido, Givi resembles another “ordinary and pathetic” personage of world literature, namely, Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Givi shares with Bloom a penchant for daydreaming about the Middle East. Bloom imagines his wife as a voluptuous Turkish woman in a “wide yellow cummerbund” and “white yashmak.” Similarly, Givi anticipates the delights of Istanbul’s nightlife: “Beautiful, dusky maidens appeared to him in a swirling mist, their arms swaying like willowy branches in the wind, their tender faces concealed behind gauzy veils, precious stones glittering in their delicate navels...” Givi and Bloom also have mutual prototypes: Sindbad the Sailor and King Solomon. Like Sindbad, Givi is involved in commerce. In Iram, he plays the role of a wise king, while Shenderovich acts as the latest incarnation of Alexander the Great.
Galina’s dialogue is dynamic and witty, its comic potency often stemming from the characters, who mock each other’s words. At other times, the humor comes from the narrator’s own juxtaposition of modern and ancient mentalities and of elevated and prosaic rhetoric:
“Consider your options, O Bounty Hunter,” Givi undertook one last attempt. “Would it be not better to hand us over to the UN? They’ll pay ten times as much for us...”
“I know not of this Yu-En,” the Leader impatiently stamped his foot again. “Perhaps he eats from plates of gold and drinks from vessels of silver... but even were he to offer me a hundred times as much my intentions would remain unchanged.”
Many of the questions Galina raises will be familiar to readers of fiction about time traveling. How far removed are we from the distant past? Is its lifestyle indecipherable, and therefore ludicrous, to later generations? Are the religions of early civilizations completely irrelevant to modern humankind, or do the spells and incantations of antiquity still affect our lives? At first glance, the old and modern worlds of Galina’s novel are isolated from each other and appear to have little chance of entering into proper dialogue. As the story unfolds, however, it turns out that the universe of Givi and Shenderovich and the dimension inhabited by ancient kings and queens have many links. Shenderovich behaves “like a sheikh” in everyday life, while Givi’s talent for judicious philosophizing earns him the respect of Iram’s viziers and astrologers, including the enigmatic Murshid:
“My prayer rises up into the vaults of this cell,” sighed Givi, “and stays there. It certainly doesn’t reach God. How am I supposed to know where He is? Who He is?”
“God is what flows between your heart and its auricle, like the tears that flow from under your eyelids. He is everywhere.”
“And what does one little Givi matter to him?”
“One Givi is everything to him. For you are the only Givi that he has.” 
Galina was born in 1958 in Kalinin, now Tver. In the 1990s, she terminated her postdoctoral research in biology in order to become a full-time writer. She is the author of 10 novels and is also known as a poet, critic and translator. Her deft turns of phrase and unexpected descriptive details recall the prose of the early Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov and of the science-fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. To the English reader, “Iramifications” will evoke the novels of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. In fact, Barnes’ “A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters” and “Iramifications” belong to the same genre of “hyper-fiction,” which fuses fantasy with sharp satirical realism.
Humor is the most difficult quality to convey in translation, but Galina found in Amanda Love Darragh her perfect interpreter. The English version of “Iramifications” is as pleasurable to read as the Russian original. Galina’s ingenuity in weaving together numerous mythological allusions and literary parallels is astounding. Apart from the Hellenic, Jewish and Arabic myths, she introduces references to popular legends and modern superstitions. The Elizabethan astrologer John Dee, the English occultist Aleister Crowley, djinns, UFOs and the infamous brigantine Mary Celeste all get mentioned, yet Galina’s overpowering irony keeps the mix from descending into absurdity.
It might well happen that, in 50 years’ time, “Iramifications” will repeat the fate of “Ulysses,” and scholars will start writing academic articles on Galina’s combination of Judaic and Islamic narrative techniques. But until that happens, we can simply enjoy the story of Givi and Shenderovich for its delightful pungency and humaneness.

Darya Protopopova is writing a doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf at the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.

TITLE: Treasure trove
AUTHOR: by Catherine Hickley
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Fifty years ago, the Soviet Union returned 1.5 million art treasures looted at the end of World War II to East Germany. Twenty-eight German museums are staging a series of exhibitions to say thank you.
Gratitude is one half of the message. The other is: can we have the remaining 1 million works back now too, please?
Ever since reunification in 1990, Germany has been gently pressuring Russia for the return of the art, with few results. Many Russians, including museum directors, view the booty as legitimate compensation for Soviet treasures looted or destroyed by Hitler’s troops. Under Russian law, German art taken by Stalin’s Soviet Trophy Commission is Russian state property.
It’s safe to assume that with conflict in Georgia to watch, the Russian authorities are paying scant attention to the first of the nine planned shows. Yet “Fifty Years of Loss and Return” at Sanssouci, the summer palace commissioned by Frederick the Great in Potsdam, offers an interesting insight into the scale of the losses — and the scope of that restitution in 1958.
In an act of friendship to communist East Germany, 300 train carriages from Moscow and St. Petersburg carried back 1.5 million of the 2.5 million art treasures that disappeared at the end of the war. Without that gesture, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin would be bereft of the Pergamon Altar and postcards and mouse mats in Dresden’s tourist shops would have to feature something other than the cherubs of Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna.”
Unpacking the crates must have been like a lifetime of Christmases and birthdays rolled into one for the East German museums, many of which celebrated the return of their errant treasures with grand reopenings. Yet the hangover lingers to this day: Almost half of the art never came back.
German museum directors still don’t know what the criteria were in selecting what should be shipped home and what should stay in Russia. It may be that much of the rest was looted by individuals before the arrival of the Trophy Commission, Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Culture Foundation, said at the opening of the Sanssouci show.
“We think much has ended up in private hands,” Parzinger said. He said he doesn’t expect the current series of exhibitions to produce instant results in recovering the art. His main priority is to deepen a dialogue with Russian museums so that curators can get a clearer idea of “what has gone missing, what is where, and what kind of a state it is in,” he said.
The Foundation for Prussian Palaces and Gardens, which manages Sanssouci and other similar sites, is still missing about 3,000 works. Of the 159 paintings that hung in Frederick’s ornate, gilded picture gallery before the war, 99 are lost.
Curators filled the gaps with paintings returned by the Soviet Union that were looted from other palaces, some of which were destroyed in the war. The paintings, including works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Ferdinand Bol, Guido Reni and Jan Lievens, hang in the baroque style — close together, almost completely obscuring the wall on one side of Frederick’s gallery built between 1755 and 1763.
The exhibition includes illustrations of how the gallery looked before the war, with black-and-white photographs of the missing pictures. It’s clear that it no longer fully represents Frederick’s collecting habits: many of the lost works have been replaced with paintings of religious subjects, while Frederick preferred mythological figures.
He also had a taste for voluptuous nudes and love scenes that whoever plundered his collection in 1945 must have shared. Gone are his Danaes and Venuses and Giulio Romano’s renaissance erotica: A young couple depicted kissing naked on a bed as an elderly woman, possibly a nurse, looks on.
One gaping loss is a Rubens masterpiece, “Tarquinius and Lucretia,” that was cut out of its frame by a Soviet officer before the arrival of Stalin’s Trophy Commission. He kept it rolled up and stored in his attic until his death in 1999.
A private collector then purchased it in Moscow for $3.5 million and paid for a costly renovation before trying to sell it back to Germany for $60 million. The German government turned down the offer and sued to try to recover the picture. A Moscow court rejected the claim, saying the current owner had acquired it “in good faith.”
Other cases of private looting have ended more felicitously. One war veteran was weighed down by guilt and handed 101 works on paper over to the German embassy in Moscow in 1993.

TITLE: Across the border
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: Rock and techno fans have flocked to this frontier village for a politically-charged music festival this weekend that’s acquired an edge due to the conflict in Georgia.
For the second year running, the southeast Lithuanian hamlet of Norviliskes is the deeply symbolic venue for Be2gether, where the bill this year features Britain’s Tricky and Groove Armada, and France’s Etienne de Crecy.
The three-day festival, which ends Sunday, is — literally — on the eastern rim of the European Union.
Only a few dozen meters from the five stages is the border fence with Belarus, whose President Alexander Lukashenko is branded “Europe’s last dictator” by detractors in the West.
“We wanted to have a festival that would bring people together, and try to break down the borders that people have inside their heads,” said Egle Remeikaite, one of the organisers of the event, which gets around a fifth of its 3 million litas ($1.28 million) budget from the Lithuanian government.
This year, the conflict in Georgia has boosted the political flavor of the festival which otherwise aims to spotlight the situation over the border in Belarus.
The Georgian flag flutters above the stages, and from many of the tents at the campsite that is home away from home for the 10,000 festivalgoers.
The Lithuanian government and the vast majority of its people are staunch supporters of Georgia in its conflict with Russia. Both nations won independence from Moscow as the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991.
Lithuania is now firmly anchored in the West, having joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, and it supports Georgia’s goal of doing likewise.
Belarus, meanwhile, still leans towards Moscow, notably since Lukashenko came to power in 1994.
Lithuanians have strong ties with Belarussians, notably in this region, where villages on both sides of the border were part of the same rural community in Soviet times, split only by a local government border.
Norviliskes purportedly found itself in Lithuania by accident, when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was redrawing the region’s borders after annexing the Baltic nation during World War II.
Stalin is said to have left his pipe lying on the map and, because no-one dared move it, the border was drawn round it.
Lithuanians and Belarussians have needed visas to visit each other’s country since 1993.
Last year, Lithuania joined the Schengen zone, a 24-nation grouping of West European states where frontier checks are abolished among members in exchange for tougher external controls.
The price of a Lithuanian visa has jumped from five to 60 euros (eight to 93 dollars) because of Schengen rules. That is a huge slice of an average Belarussian’s monthly wage, which is worth around 260 euros.
Belarussian visas, meanwhile, cost Lithuanians 25 euros, a lighter burden in a country where the average salary is 623 euros.
Lithuania grants free visas to Belarussian festivalgoers, but they still have to stump up 60 euros for a ticket.
In the crowd, young Belarussians were draped in the red and white flag which their country adopted after independence, and which has become a standard for the opposition since Lukashenko swapped it for a Soviet-style banner.

TITLE: Handmade festival
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new festival this Saturday in the very heart of St. Petersburg is called “De La’ Ruk,” which means handmade. The event aims to put together professionals and amateurs, who wish to show their works in different areas of design and applied art, lovers of unique things, representatives of design schools and shops that sell handmade goods.
Throughout the day visitors will be able to see the exhibition of handmade designs (bags, jewelry, various accessories, unique toys and dolls, souvenirs etc). The organizers, the Agency of Active Communication, have said there will be a range of different master classes for both children and adults in woodworking, pottery, applique, airbrushing, lamp-making and other and handicrafts. Everybody will get the chance to express themselves: baseball caps and acrylic paints will be distributed to all who wish to express themselves.
The festival will conclude with catwalk shows of various St. Petersburg designers. The creative groups “Glory Box,” “Dream Stone,” the “Veshch” anti-boutique, Marina Bondareva, Elena Strelets, and other young designers will present their street fashion collections. Pentax will provide photographic services for participants of the catwalk shows and also for all the guests who come dressed unconventionally, and there will be a photographic exhibition of street fashion.
Before now there have been few events dedicated to handmade products in St. Petersburg, and the “De La’ Ruk” experiment might become an annual festival with a growing number of participants. The festival will be an opportunity for designers to meet potential clients and colleagues and share ideas about latest trends, materials and technologies.
However, the “De La’ Ruk” event on Saturday, however popular it might become, is only the first step toward putting together a community of creative individuals and companies. The idea is to create a creative cluster in one of the former industrial areas of St. Petersburg. While the U.K., Finland and other countries have creative industries at the peak of their development, in Russia the awareness of the potential of this sector of the economy is only starting to grow.
In Moscow, the process has already begun: for the last few years ART PLAY, the VinZavod Center of Contemporary Art, Art Strelka and other organizations have shown that there is a demand for art and design among tourists and others interested in contemporary culture;  at the same time they have fostered the development of areas which had not been popular before.
St. Petersburg, with its many dozens of former industrial buildings and zones, has the potential to use them as spaces for small and medium-sized creative companies in design, music, and so on. This would save the original aesthetic of industrial architecture, develop the businesses by sharing resources and give a powerful impulse for the regeneration and economic growth of neglected parts of the city. 
It is hoped that “De La’ Ruk” festival will presage the arrival of the FREE’k BAZAR design market in one of St. Petersburg’s former industrial zones. The project’s inspiration is Camden Lock market in London, with its endless variety of design and music shops, bars with gigs every day, representatives of different subcultures, young creators and tourists.

“De La’ Ruk” takes place from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday in the left-hand courtyard at 32 Nevsky Prospekt. Free entrance.

TITLE: Spanish quarter
AUTHOR: By Evgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: El Barrio // 7 Inzhenernaya Ulitsa // Tel: 314-5926 // www.elbarrio.ru // Open daily from 12 a.m. until the last customer leaves // Menu in Russian only // Dinner for two with cocktails 1,540 rubles ($ 63) 
Despite having a prime location at the intersection of Sadovaya and Inzhenernaya Streets close to Gostiny Dvor metro station, temporarily camouflaged from the front by green netting because of never-ending reconstruction work, El Barrio, which literally means «a Spanish-speaking quarter or neighborhood in a city or town» seems to be one of those gourmet locations that is overlooked in downtown St. Petersbourg. 
With the table reserved in advance by telephone — as recommended on the restaurant’s web site — my companion and I were surprised to have the place nearly to ourselves visiting it on a Saturday night. 
For some pre-meal exercise, we were graciously given a tour through the main restaurant hall with low dark tables and chairs to a more beautiful, cozy and private area in the back, with white carpeted sofas for two, awaiting customers. 
The monolingual menu at El Barrio will definately be a challenge for foreigners, and even for Russian speakers it took an age but our waitress was helpful enough to provide numerous tasters of dishes we wished to try, and described each one with considerable knowledge. It was quite a shock as a proficient and friendly serving staff is still a rare bird around most towns in this country.
El Barrio’s wine list of Italian, French, Chilean, and South African wines ranges from 950 rubles ($38.60) to 2,100 rubles ($85.50) a bottle and the impressive geographic insight provided by whiskeys, rums, tequilas, cognacs, and brandies of the world had to include — who would imagine even a Spanish restaurant located in Russia without it? — vodka. Yet two Cuba Libre cocktails with rum, cola and ice cubes and slice of lime became the choice of the night.
The menu at El Barrio features a broad range of Latin cuisine from traditional cold starters  like carpaccios of beef and salmon at 250 rubles ($10), hot appetizers of seafood, a variety of pastas (220–300 rubles, $10-$12), seafood such as seabass in vanilla sauce (330 rubles, $12.60), paella Costa Blanca with veal and chicken (330 rubles, $12.6), risotti and numerous meat dishes. 
Fighting the temptation to sample something from each category, but realizing we had only one evening, we focused on the starters, salads, soups, main courses and cocktails. Of the salads, I chose Guacamole Salad (310 rubles, $12.40) with shrimps, smoked salmon, chopped egg, and green salad leaves wrapped in crispy, flimsy filo pastry, which was a nice summer dish. My dinner date selected Patatas bravas — fried potatoes with tomatos and veal (250 rubles, $10.20) — which for its generous size would qualify as a main dish rather than hot appetizer. 
The choice of a main course was even more challenging amid some very good options. Not wanting to walk away from the restaurant without trying a dish that would at least sound Spanish, I settled on pork chops called Lomo (330 rubles, $12.60) which had an excellent mushroom sauce and Dijon mustard and was accompanied with slightly grilled and refreshing zuccini, onion, paprika and tomatoes to add more flavor to balance and refresh the combination. The chops were tender and well-done although the portion turned out to be enormously generous, something one does not often find.
Even though pleased with my main dish, I was a bit envious of my date’s Dubari cream soup (200 rubles, $ 8.10) which was selected from a tasty variety of soups. It was made with cauliflower, with cheese garlands on wooden sticks, and looked and smelled mouthwatering.
Being unpretentious, and ultimately moderate in price for a downtown bar — it is a restaurant, but its true nature is a cafe bar — El Barrio is an ideal place to take a date and is worthy of a return trip. The decor, with candles on the tables and pictures all over the walls, and bookcases of crude dark boards separating seat areas, is distinguished by simple but elegant furniture. El Barrio’s palatable cuisine, diverse menu and Spanish-speaking bartender singing occasionally to Bessame Mucho tunes, form a center of gravity that will keep pulling in guests to this Spanish-speaking quarter of St. Petersburg.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: This week, naturally enough, the tabloids concentrated on the conflict in South Ossetia. And Tvoi Den stood out with its punchy headlines, scatological humor and extreme patriotic fervor. On Saturday, it printed grim-faced portraits of Medvedev and Putin with a simple headline, “Men!” which probably works better in Russian. The paper’s point was that the leaders are real men, who are defending their citizens. It also introduced the contrasting theme of Mikheil Saakashvili’s cowardice. A charming cartoon showed Saakashvili shitting his pants after meeting the Russian bear and being told to clean himself up by President George Bush. 
The paper continued the cowardice theme with a story saying Saakashvili had tried to shoot himself and was stopped by one of his guards, who grabbed the gun. The story cited “Tvoi Den’s information” as its source and didn’t give any more details. It also included a quote from an unnamed doctor saying Saakashvili takes strong psychotropic drugs and “has the eyes of a madman.” Then there was a quote from an unnamed woman, described as his former lover, who said he enjoyed scratching her when they had sex, and so he must be a coward. 
Just to round things off, Tvoi Den printed a comment from a criminal psychologist, Mikhail Vinogradov, who said Saakashvili was a sociopath with endocrinological problems that led to “brain damage on an organic level.” 
Tvoi Den’s approach was similar to that of Channel One, which had a news item where a bearded “expert” discussed Saakashvili’s psychological flaws and revived the science of phrenology to discuss what the shape of his forehead said about his character. The channel even spliced together footage of Saakashvili and Adolf Hitler, purportedly to make a point about the Georgian leader’s body language.
Tvoi Den also played with Saakashvili’s surname in a one-word headline that could be translated as “Shit Himselfvili.” The story said he tried to run away at the sound of a bullet and had to be knocked to the ground by his bodyguards. The inside pages included a cartoon of Saakashvili dreaming of a crown while shadowy hands held a stripy hat — such as are worn by Russian prisoners — over his head.
The paper has also asked Georgian-born celebrities to give their opinions. The usually outrageous showbiz pundit Otar Kushanashvili told Tvoi Den that he saw both Ossetia and Georgia as his homeland and that he was “very ashamed for my Georgia.” Keti Topuria of pop group A-Studio said she was very worried and “no one wants war,” while the pop singer Diana Gurtskaya, who represented Georgia at the Eurovision Song Contest this year, was photographed praying for peace in a church.
Glamorous television host Tina Kandelaki wrote in a much-quoted blog entry that she met Saakashvili a few years ago and disliked him. “I’m not a psychiatrist who can give a diagnosis,” she wrote, going on to give what sounded very much like a diagnosis. “Hypertrophied love of fame multiplied by hypertrophied vanity and a very unstable nervous system, to put it mildly, are not the best advisers for a president.”
Star Hit magazine, whose editor is Channel One host Andrei Malakhov, ran a big feature on the opinions of Georgians living in Russia. Kushanashvili cropped up again. “My family is still there. It’s scary,” he told the magazine. Here he was quoted at greater length than in Tvoi Den, and his views sounded rather different, too. “You shouldn’t say that Georgians have aggressive intentions,” he said, describing the source of the conflict as “a problem within the family.”

TITLE: Two More Pirate Attacks Off Somalia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Armed pirates hijacked a Japanese-operated tanker and an Iranian ship off Somalia’s coast Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks that have sent jitters among seafarers in an area known for its lawlessness.
The hijackings came after a Malaysian palm oil tanker with 39 crew was seized in the same area late Tuesday. The latest attacks raised to six the number of ships hijacked in the Gulf of Aden since July 20.
In the first incident Thursday, pirates “continuously fired” on the Iranian bulk carrier before boarding and commandeering it, said Noel Choong of the International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur.
Less than an hour later, a Japanese-operated tanker with 19 crew was also attacked and seized in the same area.
He said there had been no communication so far with either vessel, but a multi-coalition naval force in the area has been informed, and “is taking action.” The naval force includes the United States, France, Germany, Pakistan, Britain and Canada, which currently holds the rotating command.
No other details were immediately available.
“In 48 hours, three ships have been attacked and hijacked by armed pirates. It is coming to a very dangerous stage,” said Choong, who heads IMB’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur. “We urge the United Nations and the international community to take serious action to stop this menace.”
The IMB has also issued an urgent warning to all ships in the Gulf of Aden to maintain a strict watch.
The Gulf of Aden connects the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, forming one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
Choong said pirates seized a Japanese-owned cargo ship with 20 Filipino sailors on July 20 in the Gulf. A Nigerian vessel was later hijacked, followed by a Thai cargo ship with 28 crew members this month.
Negotiations were continuing in all cases after pirates demanded ransom for the release of the crew, he said. There were no negotiations in the Malaysian hijacking as the pirates have not contacted authorities to demand a ransom, he said.
Somalia is the world’s biggest piracy hotspot, with 24 reported attacks in the first half of this year.
The impoverished country has not had a functioning government since 1991 and pirates armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic weapons frequently seize foreign vessels for ransom, making it difficult and expensive to deliver aid.
In June, the UN Security Council voted to allow international warships to enter Somali waters to combat the problem. But its 1,880-mile coastline — the longest in Africa — remains virtually unpoliced.
Ships have been urged to stay more than 200 nautical miles from the Somali coast, Choong said.

TITLE: 2 Anastasias Share Synchro Gold Medals
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — Anastasia Davydova and Anastasia Ermakova share the same first name, age, height, weight and hometown. The Russian synchronized swimmers also now share duet gold medals in two straight Olympics. 
Performing a perfect free routine to the “Peer Gynt Suite” before a near capacity crowd at the Water Cube on Wednesday, Davydova and Ermakova won with a combined 99.251 points. The pair received all perfect 10s for technical merit. 
“Competition makes you achieve things you never thought possible,” Ermakova said though a translator. “We waited four years for this gold and a whole row of 10s was our crowning achievement.” 
Gemma Mengual and Andrea Fuentes of Spain took the silver medal with 98.334 points and Saho Harada and Emiko Suzuki of Japan took the bronze with 97.167. 
“Athens was our first Olympics and your first gold is probably the high point of your entire life,” Davydova said. 
“These last four years, it was harder to train, because when you have that status it seems like there is nothing left to strive for. But we were aware that we needed to prove ourselves again.” 
Twin sisters Jiang Tingting and Jiang Wenwen of China settled for fourth with 96.334. 
The final results were determined by the sum of the free routine final score and the technical routine score from Monday’s preliminary. 
The American pair of Christina Jones and Andrea Nott finished fifth. 
Wearing gold-backed suits to fit their golden expectations, the Anastasias matched the high flute notes of Edvard Grieg’s music with perfectly timed twirls and synchronized spins of sheer beauty. On one move, the pair looked like a single body with four limbs sticking out of the water, each one moving in unison. 
“It was a very serious competition. The Spanish girls, especially, were very, very strong competitors,” Davydova said. “We knew no one was going to give us the gold medal on a silver plate.” 
Fans displaying Russian banners clapped along and chanted encouragement and Davydova and Ermakova formed a celebratory embrace while still in the water. 
Davydova and Ermakova are both 25, 1.69 meters (5-foot-7) tall, weigh 55 kilograms (121 pounds) and hail from Moscow. 
The duo has been competing together for 10 years, beginning as juniors. They had to wait until Sydney 2000 winners Olga Brusnikina and Maria Kiseleva retired before they became Russia’s top pair. 
Mengual swept the solo and duet (with Fuentes) titles at the European Championships in March, but the Spanish synchro standout had never won an Olympic medal before. 
Fuentes stepped in alongside Mengual following the retirement of longtime partner Paola Tirados after the 2007 worlds. The new duo already showed promise by winning the Olympic qualifying tournament in April, although the Russians were absent. 
“It was a long road to reach this Olympic medal. It’s been hard work,” Mengual said. “Our goal was to do our maximum, and we were near the Russians, so we reached our goal. 
“The difficulty nowadays in this sport has to do with speed. You have to be quicker and higher. You see that with the Anastasias. They’re not only perfect in technical aspects.” 
Japan has medaled in synchro in every Olympics since the discipline was introduced at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and this was the country’s 12th medal overall.

TITLE: Team USA Lose Baton In Relay
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — With the clank of a baton, the American track team suffered an unexpected disappointment Thursday night at the Olympics.
Another disappointment, that is.
Darvis Patton and Tyson Gay misconnected on the final pass in preliminaries of the 400-meter relay, knocking the U.S. team out and meaning Gay will leave Beijing not just empty-handed, but without even running in a final.
“I take full blame for it,” Gay said. “I kind of feel I let them down.”
Had they advanced, the Americans may not have been favored to win gold considering the world records Jamaica’s Usain Bolt has set in the 100 and 200 over the past week at the Bird’s Nest. Still, it would have been an interesting race.
Not anymore.
And yet another gold medal opportunity slipped away for the American team.
Moments before the relay, American Allyson Felix finished second behind Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown in the women’s 200, adding her name to a long list of U.S. favorites who have failed.
Felix (200), Gay (100, 200), Bernard Lagat (1,500), Brad Walker (pole vault) and Reese Hoffa (shot put) are American world champions who failed to win gold in their events this year. Lolo Jones and Sanya Richards were other American favorites who came up short.
Now the relay team, which failed to reach the Olympic final for the first time since 1912.
For teams like the United States, first-round relay heats are supposed to be about as routine as making the bed, filled with safe passes and no risks.
Things were going smoothly for the United States through the first two legs. But when Patton closed in on Gay and Gay reached backward, they couldn’t connect. Patton made a final lunge to get the stick to Gay before he ran out of the passing zone, but as Gay’s hand closed, the stick wasn’t in it. It bounced off the rain-slickened track, and the crowd gasped.
Patton leaned over and retrieved the stick. He and Gay spoke. Gay walked away, then Travis Padgett came over to talk to Patton, who carried the baton off the track to make room for the next race.
Gay said he felt the baton.
“Then I went to grab it and there was nothing,” he said. “It’s kind of the way it’s been happening to me this Olympics.”
Indeed, Gay may not have even been running in the first round had he done better in the men’s 100. But he failed to make it out of semifinals — a stunner of sorts and a sign that the hamstring he hurt at Olympic trials may not be fully healed.
Gay skipped the American training camp in Dalian, China, earlier this month where the team spent two long sessions working on handoffs. American coaches said it was no big deal. Gay said he and Patton worked on exchanges in Beijing and didn’t miss a single handoff in practice.

TITLE: 153 Dead in Madrid Airport Plane Crash
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MADRID — Grieving relatives and medical staff on Thursday tried to identify the badly-burned bodies of victims of the crash of a Spanish jet in which 153 people were killed as it took off on a holiday flight from Madrid airport.
The investigation into the crash, Spain’s worst aviation disaster since 1983, also got underway on Thursday with officials seeking to find out why the Spanair MD-82 jet aborted an initial take-off attempt shortly before the accident.
“The causes will have to be provided not only by the company but also by the black boxes, which compile all the flight data,” Development Minister Magdalena Alvarez said on Wednesday night.
Relatives gathered at an improvised morgue in a convention centre to identify the bodies, many of which were badly burned.
Only 19 people of the 166 passengers and nine crew aboard survived. Rescue officials said many passengers were children.
“I’d kill the bastard who did this,” a driver shouted at Spanish state television cameras outside the convention centre.
Another passenger said: “Knowing the plane was bad, it took off with my seven-year-old niece.”
The plane was 15-years-old and passed its annual inspection last year, Alvarez said.
Spanair Flight JK5022, bound for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, was originally due to take off at 1 p.m. But after moving away from the terminal and approaching the runway it returned because of a mechanical problem, a source close to the situation told Reuters.
On its second take-off attempt, it shot off the runway, broke into pieces and burst into flames. Survivors were flung from the plane by the force of the impact and landed in a stream, saving them from more severe burns, a rescue official said.
Alvarez said the cause of the accident seemed to be “an error in take-off.” But Spanish media and a source close to the situation said the plane’s left engine, made by Pratt & Whitney, had caught fire.
The flight was a code-sharing operation with Lufthansa serving the Canary Islands, a popular holiday destination for tourists from throughout Europe.
A passenger list published by Spanair, which is owned by Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS), showed mostly Spanish names but officials said there were also passengers from Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Chile.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero interrupted his holidays in southern Spain to fly to the scene.
The Spanish Olympic Committee said the Spanish flag would fly at half mast in the Olympic village in Beijing. Spain’s national soccer team wore black armbands and stood for a minute’s silence at a friendly match with Denmark on Wednesday night.
Spanair has been struggling with high fuel prices and tough competition. It announced it was laying off 1,062 staff and cutting routes after losing $81 million in the first half of the year.
Hours before the crash, Spanair’s pilots threatened to strike. SAS has been trying to sell Spanair since last year.
The MD-82 is a medium-range single-aisle plane, popular with regional airlines. It is a member of the MD-80 family of planes made by U.S. manufacturer Boeing Co.
The crash appeared to be Spain’s worst since 1983, when an Avianca Boeing 747 crashed approaching the same airport, killing 181.

TITLE: Glitter Reluctant to Return Home
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BANGKOK — Thai immigration authorities threatened Thursday to expel former glam rocker and convicted paedophile Gary Glitter to Britain after Hong Kong refused to let him in.
Glitter, 64, was released from a Vietnamese prison on Tuesday after serving nearly three years for committing obscene acts with two girls aged 11 and 12.
He had been booked to fly that night to London via Bangkok, but refused to get on the plane to Britain and instead spent 24 hours in a transit lounge before agreeing to take a flight to Hong Kong.
Chinese authorities refused to allow him in and he was sent back to Thailand, where he has been declared persona non grata.
The head of immigration at Bangkok’s international airport said Thai Airways would have to take Glitter to Britain.
“According to the law, the airline must take responsibility as it brought in someone who is persona non grata,” Major General Pongdej Chaipravej told AFP.
“The first priority is that he must continue his journey to London, as originally booked,” Pongdej added.
Glitter, whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd, has reportedly been contacting countries around Asia in hopes of finding one that will allow him in, but he may finally be forced to return to Britain.
Once famous for his flamboyant bouffant wigs and silver jumpsuits, Glitter now tries to hide his scrappy grey goatee behind a scarf to escape the media spotlight as he hops around the region.
Glitter had earlier served prison time in Britain on child pornography charges. He was arrested there in 1997 after taking his computer to a repair shop, where hardcore child pornographic material was found on its hard drive.
He was sentenced in 1999 to four months in prison, of which he served two.
Keen to avoid the media, Glitter reportedly moved to Cuba and then Cambodia, where he was expelled in 2002, allegedly for trawling for underage sex.
Having settled in communist Vietnam, where a British newspaper reported he was living with an underage girl, he was arrested at Ho Chi Minh City airport in November 2005 while trying to leave for Thailand.
In March 2006 he was sentenced to three years in prison, the minimum term under Vietnamese law, which was later cut by three months.
The singer maintained his innocence, blamed a media conspiracy and claimed he was teaching the girls English and allowed them to stay overnight because they were scared of ghosts.
He has continued to profess his innocence as he shuttles desperately among Asian airports.
“God, am I happy to be leaving Vietnam and that jail. I should never have been in there,” he said on one flight, according to The Sun newspaper in Britain.
Although Britain has not announced any outstanding charges against the singer, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said he would be forced to sign a sex offenders register and warned that he should not be allowed to travel overseas again.
Glitter had several hit songs in the 1970s.

TITLE: China Wins at Table Tennis
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — Top-ranked Zhang Yining of China outclassed her opponent on Thursday despite not being able to play with her normal paddle, setting up a semifinal round that will include all three Chinese players.
The United States’ best showing ever in Olympic table tennis, thanks to a veteran of the Chinese national team who became an American citizen two years ago, came to an end with Wang Chen’s loss.
Wang had clinched her spot in the quarterfinals earlier in the day after defeating South Korea’s Kim Kyung-ah of South Korea 11-9, 9-11, 11-8, 10-12, 6-11, 11-9, 11-5. After the final point in that game, Wang fell to her knees and burst into tears.
“I’m in the quarterfinals, it’s a dream come true,” she said. “I was very emotional.”
However, the 34-year-old Wang could not match up with her quarterfinal opponent, Singapore’s Li Jia Wei, who is seven years younger and ranked sixth in the world. She lost 15-13, 11-6, 12-10, 13-15, 11-4.
“In terms of energy I couldn’t keep up. This morning wore me out and I didn’t sleep this afternoon and I felt so tired,” said Wang, who is ranked 23rd. “I think if I could have played this game tomorrow I could have done better.”
Previously, the best finish for the U.S. was when Gao Jun reached the round of 32 in singles and doubles at the Athens Games.
Meanwhile, all three players on the Chinese team advanced into the semifinals. The hosts are guaranteed at least two medals, although China’s dominance throughout the tournament suggests a sweep is a distinct possibility.
Zhang beat Feng Tianwei of Singapore despite an umpire’s ruling that she could not play with her normal paddle because it did not meet regulations.
The problem might have had something to do with the thickness of the sponge layer in the paddle, Zhang said. She blamed the thin margins in the score, 13-11, 12-14, 14-12, 12-10, 13-11, on her backup paddle, which she said is smaller and difficult to hit with.
“When I came onto the court and saw it was my backup paddle, my heart almost stopped,” Zhang said.
Feng attacked fiercely throughout the match and had Zhang in the uncharacteristic position of playing on the defensive and making errors like hitting the ball out of bounds. High-speed rallies had spectators shouting “piao liang!” (beautiful!) as the ball whipped between the four corners of the table.

TITLE: Rice in Baghdad to Discuss Plan for U.S. Withdrawal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew into Baghdad on Thursday for discussions with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other top Iraqi officials, hoping to iron out remaining differences in a U.S.-Iraq security deal that envisions the withdrawal of American troops.
“The negotiators have taken this very, very far,” she told reporters, “but there is no reason to believe that there is an agreement yet.” She flew into Baghdad amid indications that a draft deal had been concluded, but she said that was premature.
“There are still issues concerning exactly how our forces operate,” Rice said. “The agreement rests on aspirational timelines.”
Rice declined to talk about specifics, but U.S. officials said more work is needed to reach agreements on a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals, immunity for U.S. troops and the handling of Iraqi prisoners.
“Ultimately the prime minister has to make the call on moving forward,” Rice said. She described her visit as “a chance for me to meet with the prime minister and see what we can do from Washington to get to closure.”
Iraqi and American officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday that negotiators had completed a draft agreement that extends the legal basis for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq beyond the end of this year, while calling for them to move out of Iraqi cities as soon as June 30.
A senior U.S. military official in Washington said the deal is acceptable to the U.S. side, subject to formal approval by President Bush. It also requires approval by Iraqi leaders, and some members of Iraq’s Cabinet oppose some provisions.
Also completed is a companion draft document, known as a strategic framework agreement, spelling out in broad terms the political, security and economic relationships between Iraq and the United States, the senior military official said. The official discussed the draft accords on condition that he not be identified by name because the deals have not been publicly announced and are not final.
In addition to spelling out that U.S. troops would move out of Iraqi cities by next summer, the Iraqi government has pushed for a specific date — most likely the end of 2011 — by which all U.S. forces would depart the country. In the meantime, the U.S. troops would be positioned on bases in other parts of the country to make them less visible while still being able to assist Iraqi forces as needed.
There are now about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
U.S. officials have resisted committing firmly to a specific date for a final pullout, insisting that it would be wiser to set a target linked to the attainment of certain agreed-upon goals. These goals would reflect not only security improvements but also progress on the political and economic fronts.
It was not clear Wednesday how that has been settled in the draft security accord, which the two governments are referring to as a memorandum of understanding. The draft agreement must be approved by the Iraqi parliament, which is in recess until early next month.

TITLE: U.S. Women Head for Hoops Gold
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — The U.S. women’s basketball team passed its first test of the Olympics, beating Russia in its closest contest in Beijing. Now it’s on to a fourth straight gold medal game.
Diana Taurasi scored 21 points and Tina Thompson added 15 to help the U.S. pull away from Russia 67-52 on Thursday night in the semifinals. The Americans will face either Australia or China in the gold medal game Saturday. The U.S. will be looking to win its fourth straight Olympic gold medal.
The U.S. had been averaging 99.2 points as they cruised through the first six games, winning by 43 points a contest. The closest win was a 38-point rout of Spain, in which the U.S. only led by five at the half.
However the Americans hadn’t played a team as good as Russia, which had been inconsistent during the Olympics—barely winning games in pool play. In the quarterfinals, the Russians trailed Spain by 18 in the first half before rallying for an 84-65 victory.
For nearly 23 minutes Russia gave the U.S. all it could handle, taking a 38-33 lead on Maria Stepanova’s bank shot with 7:17 left in the third quarter.
Then the Americans scored the next 12 points.
Thompson hit a tough turnaround jump shot to start the run. A 3-pointer by Katie Smith and another by Taurasi, layups by Thompson and Lisa Leslie gave the U.S. a 45-38 cushion.
Stepanova finally ended Russia’s drought with a foul line jumper with 3:25 left in the period. It was the last points they’d score in the quarter as the U.S. led 48-40 going into the final period.
Russia could get no closer than nine in the fourth quarter.
Stepanova scored 14 points to lead Russia, which will play in Sunday’s bronze medal game.
U.S.-born Becky Hammon, a naturalized Russian citizen, didn’t score until making a free throw with 9:30 left in the game. She didn’t hit her first field goal until 2:52 was left in the game and Russia was down by 14. She finished the game with three points going 1-for-6 from the field.
After running through its group, winning by an average of 43 points, the U.S. routed South Korea in the quarterfinals. The only problem they had in the first seven games was in the first three minutes in the opener against the Czech Republic when the U.S. found themselves down 13-2. They went on to win by 40.
The U.S. has won 32 straight games in the Olympics with their last loss coming to the Unified team in the semifinals of the 1992 Barcelona Games.