SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1476 (38), Friday, May 22, 2009
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TITLE: Accused In Arbat Case Offer Bail Of $7.5 M
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former cosmetics retail king Vladimir Nekrasov and reputed crime boss Semyon Mogilevich offered on Wednesday to post bail of $7.5 million — five times more than the amount they are accused of failing to pay in taxes — as preliminary hearings opened for their high-profile trial. 
Moscow’s Tushinsky District Court rejected their surprise offer to post bail of 240 million rubles and ruled that the trial would be closed to the public. 
Prosecutors had asked that the trial be held behind closed doors, citing classified investigative methods used to collect evidence against the two suspects. 
The trial will start on June 1, the court said. 
Nekrasov, founder of Arbat Prestige, once Russia’s biggest chain of cosmetics stores, is accused of evading taxes of more than 49.5 million rubles ($1.5 million). Mogilevich, wanted by the FBI on racketeering, wire fraud, mail fraud and money-laundering charges since 2003, is accused of masterminding the tax evasion scheme. Both have denied wrongdoing, and Mogilevich, also known as Sergei Shnaider, has denied any involvement with Arbat Prestige. His lawyer Alexander Pogonchenkov has said he and Nekrasov only share a hobby of collecting paintings. 
Mogilevich, wearing a gray windbreaker, covered his face with a plastic folder as he walked into the courtroom Wednesday. A courtroom photo published on the Life.ru news portal Wednesday shows Mogilevich sitting on a bench in the steel-barred defendants’ cage, his faced buried in his palms, while Nekrasov, clad in a thick black sweater, stands beside him, reading from a pile of papers in his hands. 
If convicted of tax evasion, the men face up to six years in prison. 
Nekrasov’s lawyer Alexander Dobrovinsky asked the court to release the men from custody on bail and with a written pledge not to leave town. 
When Nekrasov and Mogilevich were detained in January 2008, Arbat Prestige had 95 stores in Russia and Ukraine and boasted a turnover of $475 million in 2007. The company is now bankrupt after its suppliers turned away and it defaulted on a loan payment to Sberbank. The retailer sold off its stores over 2008, closing the last in December. 
From the very beginning, the Arbat Prestige case was unusual, even by Russian standards. Fifty commandos participated in the arrest of Nekrasov and Mogilevich as they dined in an upmarket Moscow restaurant. 
Mogilevich’s wife, Olga Shnaider, disappeared after being questioned by police investigators, a day after a court sanctioned the arrests of Mogilevich and Nekrasov, national media reported at the time, citing her relatives. 
Shortly after the arrest, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said Mogilevich had gotten into trouble because of his involvement with RosUkrEnergo, a Swiss-registered company that was selling Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine. In 2006 and 2007, several Russian and Ukrainian media outlets speculated that Mogilevich owned shares in RosUkrEnergo, but no evidence to back up the claim has ever been released. 
Four weeks after the arrest, Nekrasov’s lawyer Dobrovinsky told journalists that “a very serious man” had made Nekrasov an offer to buy Arbat Prestige for $3 million and make the investigation disappear. If the offer was rejected, Dobrovinsky said, the man warned that more charges would follow. No new charges have been filed since. 
Even before Wednesday’s bail offer, the suspects had shown their eagerness to be released from custody. In April 2008, Mogilevich’s lawyer offered to post bail of 50 million rubles (then worth about $2.08 million), but the Moscow City Court declined. 
In January, Nekrasov, 47, wrote an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev, calling on him to intervene in the case and accusing investigators of blackmailing him into giving evidence against Mogilevich.

TITLE: Banks May Need $16 Bln More in Capital
AUTHOR: By Courtney Weaver
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Banks may need an additional 500 billion rubles ($16 billion) in capital this year to weather an increase in bad loans, a Central Bank official said Wednesday. 
The banking sector faces a rough ride this year as bad loans add up, and those loans now make up 4 percent of the overall total if Sberbank’s credit portfolio is excluded, Alexei Simanovsky, head of the Central Bank’s banking supervision department, said at the annual meeting of the Association of Russian Regional Banks. 
Standard & Poor’s announced this week that problem loans could reach 35 percent to 50 percent this year, and one banking analyst said Wednesday that the figure could go higher. 
The government has already pledged more than $200 billion in loans, guarantees and lowered reserve requirements since the crisis hit last fall. 
Small niche banks are expected to be among the hardest hit in the coming months as more fall victim to bad loans and minimum capital requirements were raised to 90 million rubles in January. 
Regional bankers, however, said at the conference that their institutions must survive to support small business — a key sector in the government’s anti-crisis plan. 
Anatoly Aksakov, president of the Association of Russian Regional Banks, called for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to lower banks’ capital requirements in order to receive VEB funds to preserve the heterogeneity of the banking sector. Banks should be required to hold 1 billion rubles ($31.7 million), not 3.5 billion rubles, he said. 
“In Russia, there need to be large, medium and small banks to support small and medium business in the regions,” Aksakov said. 
While most banks look prepared to encounter some problems with bad loans, the question remains what percentage of their credit portfolios are actually in danger of defaulting, Rusrating CEO Richard Hainsworth said on the sidelines of the conference. 
Standard & Poor’s said Tuesday that problem loans could reach 35 percent to 50 percent of the overall total in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan that and 15 percent to 20 percent of Russia’s loans were already under stress. 
Although the rating agency’s figures are staggering at first glance, one could actually say that 100 percent of loans are under some sort of stress, Hainsworth said, calling S&P’s numbers an “underestimate.” 
At the same time, he said, the figures do not reflect what the banks’ actual losses will be. “Are there loans that have started to default? Yes. But do those loans absolutely need to be written off? No,” he said. 
Borrowers delay payments or pay in other ways. “They fight back, the bank works with them. To say the Russian banking system is on its knees is not true,” Hainsworth said. 
Banks will be able to start using 30-year subordinated loans as part of their capital requirements, the Central Bank said Tuesday, and Aksakov said he did not see a large number of banks failing this year. The government has said Russia has far too many banks. 
Aksakov told The St. Petersburg Times that 10 to 30 of the country’s 1,000 banks could lose their licenses by the end of the year because of either the “new capital requirement measures or because of difficulties tied to the crisis.”

TITLE: Renowned Actor Oleg Yankovsky Dies at Age of 65
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Acclaimed actor Oleg Yankovsky, whose lean face and intense dark eyes made him one of the great heartthrobs of the Soviet era, died Wednesday after an illness. He was 65. 
Yankovsky died at a Moscow hospital after a battle with cancer, Yulia Kosareva, spokeswoman for Lenkom, the Moscow theater where the actor worked for decades, told The Associated Press. 
Yankovsky combined a successful film career with theater roles and was one of the star actors at the Lenkom. Famous not only for his dashing image, he won acclaim for his subtle performances in ambiguous roles. 
President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin both offered their condolences to Yankovsky’s family. 
“Possessing a rare combination of acting talent, charisma and a fine mind, he was able to rise above his time and fully reflect the era,” Medvedev said in a telegram to the actor’s family. 
Putin described him as a “true master, an extraordinary person rich in talents and a born actor.” 
In a screen career spanning five decades, Yankovsky appeared in more than 70 films, often cast as aristocrats in period dramas because of his stately appearance, which contrasted with the proletarian prototypes common in Soviet cinema. 
Of him was famously said, “Only Yankovsky knows how to wear a tailcoat.” 
Yankovsky managed to inject sympathy into unpleasant characters, such as the two-timing, selfish husband in “Flights in Dreams and Waking,” or the morbid, sex-obsessed hero of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” based on Leo Tolstoy’s short story. 
He was the last actor to be awarded the honorary title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. 
While he was president of the Kinotavr film festival for many years and appeared at a few social events, Yankovsky rarely gave interviews or talked about his personal life. 
In 2004, Moskovsky Komsomolets published an interview with him under the headline “The Loudest Man Who Kept Silent.” 
Yankovsky was born Feb. 23, 1944, into a family of Polish origin in the village of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan, where his father — a former tsarist army officer who joined the Red Army — was exiled during Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s crackdown on “Trotskyites” in the military. 
The family talked about his father, who died in a prison camp, “in a whisper,” Yankovsky told Komsomolskaya Pravda in December. “Mother explained to us in veiled terms where our father was. But I remembered my father’s arrest all the same. I saw it with my own eyes.” 
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the family was allowed to move to Saratov. Yankovsky went to drama school there and began acting in the city’s theater. His performance as Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” led to an offer to join the Lenkom in Moscow in 1973. He continued performing at the Lenkom until three months before his death. 
“Without the theater, an actor isn’t an actor,” he said in an interview with Izvestia in 2004. 
Yankovsky’s first screen role was in “Shield and Sword” in 1968. The four-part film told the story of a Soviet spy in wartime Germany. Yankovsky was cast in the supporting role of a German. 
He then appeared in the Civil War drama “There Served Two Comrades,” this time in a starring role. The film also starred beloved Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky. 
President Dmitry Medvedev presenting Yankovsky with a medal on March 5.
The role was a largely silent one, and the director told him to act through observation, he said in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2004. “I then began to develop that quality of watching and putting across something of my own in my gaze,” he said. 
Yankovsky also appeared in Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Mirror” and “Nostalgia,” which was filmed in Italy. 
Tarkovsky chose the actor after his assistant spotted Yankovsky in a hallway at the Mosfilm studio, Yankovsky said in an interview with Izvestia in 2004. 
It was rare for a Soviet actor to spend an extended period filming abroad. “I was bowled over by capitalism most of all when I was filming ‘Nostalgia’ with Tarkovsky — me, Florence,” he told Komsomolskaya Pravda. 
He appeared in several films directed by Mark Zakharov, head of Lenkom Theater, including “That Very Munchhausen” in 1979, in which he played the title role as a misunderstood dreamer who rejects the grimness of what everyone else insists is reality. 
In recent years, Yankovsky drastically limited his screen roles and did not appear in any of the standard television dramas that allow many low-paid theater actors to subsist. 
He told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he refused the role of Woland in Vladimir Bortko’s 2005 television adaptation of “The Master and Margarita” because he did not think that it was possible to act the role of God or the devil. 
He made exceptions for roles in a television adaptation of “Doctor Zhivago” in 2006, where he played Komarovsky, and Sergei Solovyov’s “Anna Karenina,” a film due to premiere May 31, in which he plays Anna’s despised husband. 
Yankovsky’s body will lie in state at the Lenkom Theater on Friday at 11 a.m. for the public to pay their last respects, the theater’s web site said. 
He is to be buried at Novodevichye Cemetery, Zakharov, the Lenkom director, told Interfax. 
Yankovsky is survived by his son, actor and film director Filipp Yankovsky, his wife, Lenkom actress Lyudmila Zorina, and his grandson, Ivan, who is embarking on an acting career.

TITLE: Driver Kills Traffic Cop, Sends Emoticon Message
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The proliferation of the emoticon has been one of the more dire consequences of the rise of the Internet and cell phone text messaging over the past two decades — a blight on written communication. 
There is, after all, only so much sentiment an emoticon can convey. How much happier is a person who types :)))))))) than a person who texts a mere :) to a friend? 
Indeed, we may never know the degree of sorrow felt by a young Novosibirsk woman over the traffic cop she struck and killed with her car while driving drunk. 
But a senior traffic safety official said the “cynicism” of the suspect is exemplified by the text message — complete with emoticon — she sent her boyfriend after killing the officer:  
“Honey, I killed a cop. I’m sorry :( What should I do?” 
This depressing tale began on the evening of April 30, when, police say, the 22-year-old woman had a drinking bout with a girlfriend. The young women downed six liters of beer between them before deciding to go for a joyride on the streets of Novosibirsk. 
 At around 11:00 p.m. that evening, local traffic police officer Dmitry Chulkov, 36, had pulled over two cars for moving violations on Ulitsa Ippodromskaya in the Siberian city. 
He was walking toward one of the cars to issue a fine when he was struck and killed by a Toyota driven by the suspect, whose name has not been released but whose photograph was posted on the regional traffic police’s web site. 
Witnesses said the suspect drove a bit further before pulling over, though she never exited her car. As it turns out, she was sending the text message to her boyfriend, who advised her to create a “scandal and [not to] say or sign anything.” 
Top regional traffic cop Sergei Shtelmakh was incensed at the suspect’s behavior, saying that she appeared more concerned about her damaged car than the police officer’s death. 
The text message also angered Shtelmakh. 
“More than anything, I’m shocked at her reaction to what happened,” Shtelmakh said in a statement. “She spoke with such cynicism about the damage to her car and how her boyfriend — whom she couldn’t even call — was going to yell at her.” 
Novosibirsk’s Central District Court on Monday placed the suspect under arrest, ordering her remanded in custody for two months, regional traffic police said. 
If convicted of vehicular homicide, she faces up to three years in prison.

TITLE: Lavrov Links Treaty to Missiles
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The United States must allay Russian concerns over its planned anti-missile system in Europe if the two sides are to achieve a breakthrough on cutting nuclear weapons, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
U.S. President Barack Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev last month agreed to pursue a deal on cutting nuclear weapons that would replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expires in December.
The world’s two biggest nuclear powers began formal talks Tuesday in Moscow to find a replacement for START, and diplomats hope that progress can be made before Obama and Medvedev meet in Moscow from July 6 to 8.
But the talks are complicated by Washington’s anti-missile plan. It is considering stationing elements of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic in order to intercept rockets fired from what it regards as rogue states, such as Iran. Russia sees this as upsetting the strategic balance and threatening its own security.
“The final product of the negotiations must, of course, be a step forward from the current system of limits and cuts,” Lavrov told reporters at the 19th-century mansion in central Moscow where talks on the successor to START continued Wednesday.
“The fundamental principle of an agreement must be equal security for both sides and the preservation of strategic parity. This, of course, cannot be ensured without taking into account the situation with anti-missile defense,” Lavrov said.
He said the talks should also take account of any plans for space-based missiles and the development of highly destructive non-nuclear weapons.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Forum Security</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Over 5,000 police will oversee security at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the Ministry of Internal Affairs said Wednesday.
Law enforcement personnel during the forum will include approximately 5,000 police officers from St. Petersburg, as well as personnel from around Russia, said the head of the St. Petersburg Ministry of Internal Affairs Vladislav Piotrovsky, Interfax reported.
The focus of the officers’ work will be Vasilievsky Island and the highways and main thoroughfares of the city center, according to Piotrovsky. Preparations have already begun, and the security plan will follow the scheme worked out in previous years of the forum, he added.
The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum will take place from June 4 through June 6. Topics of discussion will include anti-crisis measures in developing countries, RIA Novosti reported.

<strong>Blood Donors Up</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The number of blood donors has doubled at the St. Petersburg Center of Blood Transfusion this year, announced the State Program for the Development of Voluntary Donorship.
According to preliminary data from the center, the quantity of donors increased twofold in 2009 in comparison with the same period last year, Interfax reported Wednesday. Slightly fewer than 3,000 donors gave blood in the first five months of 2008, whereas more than 5,000 people donated from January through April 2009.
The head doctor at the center cited the increase in government funding and outreach as the main factor behind the higher number of donors. According to Dr. Vladimir Krasnyakov, since the State Program for the Development of Voluntary Donorship began an outreach program with potential donors, people have realized that donating blood is safe and even healthy. 
Furthermore, the center has been able to more effectively use donated blood and its components thanks to government-funded equipment for processing blood, Krasnyakov said.

<strong>Duma Passes Bill</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — The State Duma passed in a first reading Wednesday a Kremlin-drafted bill that would tighten control over the selection of the Constitutional Court’s president.
The amendments, approved in a 352-53 vote, would curb the right of the 19 Constitutional Court judges to elect their own president for a three-year term. Communist deputies opposed the bill.
Medvedev currently nominates judges to the 19-member court, who must be then be ratified by senators in the Federation Council, but the judges alone have the autonomy at present to pick their president.
A retired deputy chairwoman of the court, Tamara Morshchakova, told Ekho Moskvy earlier this month that the change would cut judicial independence. 

<strong>Karpov On Crime</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov will head a public advisory board to oversee the powerful Investigative Committee, which handles the most sensitive and high-profile criminal cases at the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Karpov, who became world champion in 1975 and held the crown until he was unseated by Garry Kasparov a decade later, will chair a board consisting of officials, scientists, rights activists, artists and religious leaders, among others, Itar-Tass reported Wednesday.
Such oversight boards have been established in several federal agencies and ministries, including the Defense Ministry and the Federal Security Service, in a nod to the importance of civil society.
Critics say, however, that the boards are largely toothless and symbolic because their recommendations are not legally binding.

TITLE: Macromir in Court Over Debt
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia’s state bank Sberbank is seeking to recover 5.5 billion rubles ($174 million) in debt in court from St. Petersburg’s bankrupt developer Macromir, which belongs to Andrei Rogachyov. 
Sberbank brought five cases to Moscow’s Arbitration Court after Macromir failed to fulfill its obligations under the terms of the agreement, Fontanka.ru reported on Friday.
Sberbank is Macromir’s biggest creditor, and the lawsuits are equal to the company’s total debt to the bank. The company has worked with Sberbank since 2004, and took out all of its loans from the bank to fund the construction of four trade centers in St. Petersburg, including Frantsuzsky Bulvar, City Mall, Rodeo Drive and Felichita. The loans were for a period of seven to 10 years, and the deadlines for paying off the credit were not yet over. However, the bank demanded early repayment, Fontanka reported.
In April, Macromir filed for bankruptcy with the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Arbitration Court. The company’s total debt is about 400 million dollars. Macromir currently owns five trade complexes in St. Petersburg with a total area of 296,000 square meters. 
Macromir also owes money to Narodny Credit bank as well as to Sberbank.
In summer 2008, co-owner Pavel Andreyev sold Rogachyov 49.5 percent of Macromir. Rogachyov subsequently said that before the company was sold, 180 million dollars worth of shares had been taken out of it. The company also had debts of 100 million dollars. Igor Shablovsky, who was Macromir’s general director before the deal between Rogachyov and Andreyev was made, said at the time that all the deals had been agreed with the shareholders, Fontanka reported. 
On Tuesday, Shablovsky, 38, died suddenly from a suspected heart attack while traveling by train from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, Vedomosti reported.
He appealed to a train conductor with complaints of chest pain, but by the time doctors boarded the train at the station in Vladimir, Shablovsky had died. The cause of death is believed to have been a heart attack, though the death is currently being investigated.
Nadezhda Vorozheikina, the former head of Macromir’s legal department, said that according to information from Shablovsky’s relatives and friends, he had never complained about his health or any heart problems, Kommersant daily reported.
Andreyev, who is also the head of local construction giant LEK, said he doubted that health problems had caused Shablovsky’s death, the paper said.
“Those who cause an innocent person to suffer a heart attack will never be able to clear their conscience,” Andreyev said, Kommersant reported.
Rogachyov suspected that Shablovsky, who had been general director of Macromir since 2001, was involved in withdrawing assets worth $240 million. In November last year he was fired. The company said it was due to him “causing major damage to the organization, violating labor contract conditions, and exceeding his authority, according to Agentstvo Business Novostei (ABN). 
Last fall, Macromir fired about 320 employees of its staff of 400, including top managers.
Some time before the firings, Rogachyov became the sole owner of Macromir after buying out Andreyev’s shares, ABN reported.

TITLE: More Firms Are Recruiting Managers
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — An increasing number of Russian companies are looking to hire managers, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, according to a survey released Wednesday. 
The quarterly survey of 400 local and multinational companies by recruitment agency Antal found that 58 percent of them wanted more managers in April, compared to 42 percent in January. 
This rate is higher than the 53 percent recorded in France, which was ranked as having the healthiest level of hiring managers among major West European economies, said Antal, a subsidiary of the British recruiter FiveTen Group. 
Antal’s Russian survey is part of a bigger international survey of companies from 32 countries. 
“If you think things are bad here [in Russia], believe me, they are much worse over there,” said Luc Jones, a partner at Antal, referring to Western Europe. 
The findings indicate that companies have stopped viewing cuts in head count as the single way of reducing costs, Michael Germershausen, Antal’s deputy managing director, said in a statement. 
“We are seeing some early optimism developing,” he said, adding that several companies were trying to reverse staff cuts made during the end of last year and early this year. 
The findings appear to reflect government statistics. The registered unemployment rate began dropping last month for the first time in the six months since October, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov said Monday. He attributed the modest fall of 0.2 percent every week beginning April 23 to government support measures and seasonal farming jobs. 
Antal’s survey showed that pharmaceutical companies in Russia were leading the way in looking for new professional staff, with 83 percent of them offering vacancies, mostly in marketing. 
Russian companies feel that their medicines grew more competitive against foreign brands after the ruble devaluation over the winter, Jones said. Multinational drug makers want to hire better staff to promote their products because candidates have sharply moderated their compensation demands, he said. 
Pharmstandard, a leading Russian pharmaceutical producer, said recently that it would consider buying new brands, products and facilities this year despite the economic downturn.

TITLE: Most Russians Believe Their Managers Are Dishonest
AUTHOR: By Ira Iosebashvili
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A majority of Russian employees think that corporate fraud will grow in coming years, and only a small fraction think that their management is honest, a survey of Russian and European employees found. 
The survey, whose results were publicized on Wednesday by Ernst & Young, interviewed over 2,000 corporate employees in Europe and Russia, the majority of whom worked in companies with over 1,000 staff. 
The 64 percent of Russian employees who feel that incidents of corporate fraud will increase in the future cited a variety of reasons, including insufficient attention paid to corporate fraud by management, new risks tied to changes in the business climate, distrust of management and the desire to reap personal gain from the company’s activities. 
More than a third of the respondents said the risk of corporate fraud was highest during mergers and acquisitions, a time when many employees face layoffs, while others are forced to lighten their workload. 
And while 44 percent of Russian employees thought that their companies had increased efforts to combat corporate fraud in recent years, only 14 percent of employees said their employers were “always honest.” Slightly more than half said top management was most likely to commit fraud, while a quarter said middle managers were more likely. 
Russia perennially places at the bottom of corruption rankings. In a 2008 ranking by watchdog Transparency International, it slipped from 120th to 143rd place out of a total of 163 countries. 
President Dmitry Medvedev has promised to make stamping out corruption a priority of his presidency, introducing a number of bills to the State Duma late last year. In March, he submitted a public declaration of his personal income and property as well as those of his family members, leading other top government officials to follow suit.

TITLE: Strong Ruble Could Be Dangerous
AUTHOR: By Emma O’Brien
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble’s 15 percent rebound against the dollar since January is eroding the competitiveness of non-energy businesses in Russia and risks pushing the country back to a “boom-bust cycle,” said Roland Nash, chief strategist at Renaissance Capital.
 “The danger for Russia is a stronger ruble, not a weaker one,” Nash said in an interview in Moscow on Thursday. “A weaker ruble definitely helps the non-oil economy and a stronger ruble definitely hurts them.”
The ruble has rallied from its 35 percent devaluation against the dollar in the six months to Jan. 31 as oil prices gained 39 percent and the central bank pledged to prevent further depreciation. A stronger ruble makes local products less competitive against imported goods and also increases their ruble-denominated production costs on the ground, Nash said.
After slumping to as low as $32.34 a barrel on Dec. 24, Urals crude, Russia’s main oil blend and biggest export earner, is now trading close to $60 a barrel, a situation that will see “lots of pressure” on the ruble to strengthen, Nash said.
Should oil continue its ascent, “the level of volatility in the ruble will be almost impossible to insulate the economy from and the result is a boom-bust cycle,” he said.
After expanding every year since 1998, Russia’s economy may shrink as much as 8 percent this year as the global financial crisis crimps demand and companies struggle to repay debt amid sluggish credit markets, Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina said in an interview on Tuesday.
The worst economic crisis since the 1998 default highlights the need to reform the financial system so that the world’s largest energy supplier can absorb income from oil, Nash said.
“They need to create a domestic capital market that’s able to absorb the excess value created by the commodity-producing sector,” Nash said. “Russia needs huge investment in its infrastructure but at the moment all the money goes offshore into things like U.S. Treasuries.”
Renaissance, a Moscow-based investment bank, forecast in March the ruble would reach 29 per dollar by the end of 2009, an 8.3 percent advance from now.

TITLE: List of Cars Eligible for Subsidies Could Grow
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Russian officials proposed almost doubling the price ceiling for car purchases that can be subsidized by the government as it tries to boost vehicle sales.
The plan calls for expanding the subsidy to automobiles manufactured in Russia that cost as much as 600,000 rubles ($19,000), compared with the 350,000-ruble threshold approved in February, the Industry and Trade Ministry said in a statement published on its web site late Wednesday.
The subsidy will equal two-thirds of the central bank’s key refinancing rate, seen as the limit for borrowing, which currently stands at 12 percent.
The ministry also proposed applying government aid both to passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, lowering the minimal upfront payment to 15 percent of the total price and giving buyers 36 months to pay back the loan.
As of May 14, Russian banks have received 14,700 requests from borrowers and issued 5,498 car loans as part of the government’s program, according to the statement. The ministry now plans to submit the new plan to the government.
Russian sales of new cars and light commercial vehicles plunged 44 percent in the first four months of the year to 413,156 units, the Moscow-based Association of European Businesses said on 
May 12.

TITLE: EU Can Offer Moscow Lots of Carrots
AUTHOR: By Fraser Cameron
TEXT: As leaders met in Khabarovsk on Thursday for the next EU-Russia summit, they were due to review progress in negotiations for a new strategic agreement. 
Since the last summit in Nice in November, there has been a number of major developments affecting the relationship. Russia has come to recognize that it is not immune from the global economic crisis. Indeed, its economy has been severely affected by declining growth, high inflation, rising unemployment and capital flight. 
Second, there is a new occupant in the White House keen to see some progress in U.S.-Russia relations. Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev enjoyed a good first meeting during the April Group of 20 summit in London and agreed to initiate a new round of arms control negotiations. This could bring dividends to EU-Russia relations as well. 
Third, the European Union has launched its Eastern Partnership designed to align several former Soviet republics closer to the EU. Moscow has criticized the new policy as an EU attempt to expand its sphere of influence in Russia’s backyard. 
Fourth, the Kremlin has still not complied with all elements of the cease-fire agreement on Georgia in terms of withdrawing its troops to prewar levels. To make matters worse, three weeks ago Medvedev authorized sending additional Russian border guards to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The EU-Russia summit takes place just before the fifth round of negotiations on a new strategic agreement. So far, there has been little progress in the areas of security, human rights, economic cooperation, research, education and culture. Moscow is pushing for a framework agreement, and the EU prefers a comprehensive agreement where nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. But both sides are beginning to understand each other better, which is essential if progress is to be made.
The difficult areas of the negotiations are not surprising with energy and human rights at the top of the list. Russia was annoyed that the EU and Ukraine discussed a deal to modernize the gas pipelines running through Ukraine without involving Moscow. The Kremlin has sought more explicit EU support for both the Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines. Medvedev has announced proposals for a revised energy treaty that would replace the Energy Charter that Russia has signed but not ratified. European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, however, has rejected this new proposal. On human rights, Russia is seeking to minimize commitments already undertaken at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and Council of Europe.
The European Parliament is pressing the European Commission to be tough on Russia, stressing that the violation of Georgia’s territorial integrity and the January gas dispute have seriously endangered EU-Russia relations. They also want a tougher EU line on human rights and support for civil society. There is a limited number of areas of agreement between the two sides, including terrorism, drug trafficking, science and culture. No one knows how long the negotiations will last. An educated guess would suggest a minimum of 18 months to two years, and ratification will require the same amount of time.
The recent spat between Russia and NATO over military exercises in Georgia and tit-for-tat spy expulsions will also affect EU-Russia relations. Russia seems split between those who think that the country can still go it alone in world affairs and those who would like to integrate the country fully into the global community. The debate on accession to the World Trade Organization is a good example of this struggle. Relations with the EU are another. 
Many in the business community and the more forward-looking politicians would prefer to continue working toward a strategic partnership with the EU. Most economists understand that Russia can only modernize its economy with the support of the EU. Despite the rhetoric about not fearing another Cold War, both Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Medvedev know that the country could not sustain another arms race. In addition, with a falling population, Moscow must be worried that the country does not have the resources to provide adequate defense of its own territory, let alone engage in reckless expansionism. 
How should the EU react to inevitable Kremlin pressure and attempts to divide it? The first step is for member states to recognize that the EU has a number of strong cards to play in negotiating with Russia. The EU has almost 500 million citizens compared to Russia’s 140 million. The far wealthier EU has the largest and most attractive internal market in the world, and Russian companies want a slice of this pie. Europe pays top rates for Russia’s natural resources, and Gazprom gets 70 percent of its profits from sales to the EU. The EU buys nearly 60 percent of Russia’s total exports. Moscow wants to join the WTO, and the EU can help facilitate this process. 
Although the EU has no single big carrot, it has many things that the Kremlin would like. EU policy, therefore, must be based on a firm understanding of its common interests and then pursuing these interests with a single voice. It is difficult, but not impossible.

Fraser Cameron is director of the EU-Russia Centre in Brussels.

TITLE: Between Genghis and Caesar
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: You may not have known it, but in terms of his biological progeny, Genghis Khan was the most successful man of all time. It is estimated that one in every 200 people is a descendant of the prolific 13th-century khan of the Mongol Empire. That means that his military strategy of killing and raping brought countless biological dividends for future generations. 
But if we look a bit deeper into the fate of Genghis Khan’s empire and its legacy, this is another matter entirely. 
You can divide empires into two basic types: those whose legacies live on after being conquered, and those that disappear completely. The Roman Empire shredded the Gauls, Brits and Dacians like heads of cabbage. Nonetheless, the British take great pleasure in showing tourists Hadrian’s Wall, built in the second century by Roman invaders in what is today northern England. 
In dozens of countries which Roman troops never touched, the people still love to name businesses and ships in honor of Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, or Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn. One thousand years after the Roman Empire ceased to exist, William Shakespeare wrote “Coriolanus” and Racine wrote “Britannicus.” A full 1,500 years later on the North American continent, U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh named the planet he discovered Pluto in honor of the Roman god of the underworld.
Thus, the empire of Genghis Khan is the antithesis of the Roman Empire. Entire countries were subjected to fundamental changes not only to their histories but even their climates after falling prey to Genghis Khan’s despotism and destruction. For example, Afghanistan had thriving cities and fertile valleys that had been conquered by every army from Alexander the Great to the White Huns before Genghis Khan invaded the region. After the Mongols destroyed Afghanistan’s irrigation system and carved up its cities, it became nothing more than a barren country of deserts and mountains that nobody has been able to subdue ever since. Before the Mongol invasion, the Middle East was one of the world’s most prosperous regions. After the Mongols destroyed the Middle East, Europe became the most prosperous region of the world.
Any nation’s contribution to world history is easily measured by the words and ideas it left behind. The Arabs developed astronomy and mathematics, and to this day we use the words “nadir,” “zenith” and “algebra.” In the early 20th century, the French were leaders in aircraft construction, and we continue to say “chassis” and “longitude.” How many gods, laws and legends did the Mongols leave to their vanquished peoples and later generations? Zero.
My point is that the Russian Empire under the tsars was probably more like the Roman Empire because they both gave the people they conquered more than they took from them. The Soviet Union, starting with Vladimir Lenin and intensified under Josef Stalin, destroyed Russia’s rich legacy in the best tradition of Genghis Khan.
Now both the Russian and Soviet empires are gone. So it is completely up to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to determine whether Russia’s historical legacy will look more like the Roman or the Mongolian legacy. Will we remain a global cultural center — a country of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky — or will we become nothing more than the creator of Nashi, the aggressive, xenophobic pro-Kremlin youth movement?
Now, unfortunately, Russia is doing everything in its power to ruin its global reputation. Genghis Khan would be proud of us.

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

TITLE: All-star cast
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Rodion Shchedrin’s fairytale ballet “The Little Humpbacked Horse,” choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, opened the 17th Stars of the White Nights Music Festival at the Mariinsky Theater on Thursday, marking the start of a spectacular eight-week long fiesta of classical music, opera and ballet.
The brains and engine behind this grand-scale project, undeniably Russia’s most prestigious festival of classical arts, is Mariinsky’s charismatic and talented artistic director Valery Gergiev, who every year manages to draw a pantheon of international stars to St. Petersburg.
The scheduling of a work by Shchedrin at the opening is no coincidence. Rodion Shchedrin, one of the most acclaimed Russian composers, has won the heart of Valery Gergiev, and many of his works have been added to the Mariinsky’s repertoire during the past two years.
Shchedrin’s musical vision of the famed Russian soul received its first stage incarnation with the premiere of “The Enchanted Wanderer” at the Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall during the Stars of the White Nights Festival in July 2008.
“The success of ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’ was overwhelming,” Gergiev said. “We are thrilled to continue working with Rodion Shchedrin, and there are many plans, indeed.” Gergiev devotes special attention to contemporary music and is especially interested in the works of living composers.
The festival this year began simultaneously in the Mariinsky’s historic building — where the ballet was performed — and the company’s new Concert Hall, which hosted Mahler’s celebrated Eighth Symphony, also known as the symphony of a thousand instruments.
Renowned Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who excels in the repertoire of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and German lieder, is coming to the festival to sing in Wagner’s “Die Walkure” on June 5.
Other eye-catching names include talented Russian soprano Maria Guleghina, one of the world’s top Wagner specialists, bass Rene Pape, one of the planet’s finest ballerinas, now with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Svetlana Zakharova and baritone Dmitry Khvorostovsky. Popular Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who was originally brought to international attention by Yury Temirkanov, the artistic director of the St. Petersburg Shostakovich Philharmonic, will make an appearance, too.
Olga Borodina, one of the world’s greatest mezzo-sopranos and bass Ildar Abdrazakov will go on stage together in Verdi’s “Requiem” on May 28. Guleghina sings in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” on June 13, while Rene Pape takes part in a concert performance of Wagner’s “Parsifal” on June 6 and June 12.
A top operatic event is the premiere of the concert version of Berlioz’s titanic work “Les Troyens,” that plays on two evenings, on June 23 and 24. The Mariinsky promises a full stage version to follow in the next season — a joint-production created by the Mariinsky, the Polish National Opera, the Valencia Opera and the Baden-Baden Festival Center. The company invited Spanish director Carlos Padrissa, one of the artistic directors of the acclaimed theatrical company La Fura Dels Baus, to work on the stage interpretation of “Les Troyens.”
A key attraction in the ballet repertoire at the festival is the revival of Leonid Jacobson’s legendary ballet “Shurale,” based on an ancient Tatar legend and set to a marvelous score by composer Farid Yarullin. The vintage reconstruction will see the stage on June 29 and 30. 
The Mariinsky’s best dancers will perform often over the course of the event’s eight weeks. Do not miss a special program by Diana Vishneva — “Diana Vishneva. Beauty in Motion” — on July 12 and 19.
The main focus of the symphonic program this year will be the Beethoven Cycle — all nine symphonies by the composer will be performed by the Mariinsky symphony orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev, Paavo Jarvi and Gianandrea Noseda, as well as all five of his piano concertos. Beethoven’s only violin concerto will be featured, too, performed by virtuoso Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos on June 28.
One of the earliest not-to-be-missed performances features Kavakos and pianist Enrico Pace at the Marinsky’s state-of-the-art concert hall on Saturday, performing a program featuring Beethoven’s violin concerto and works by Shostakovich and Strauss.
A regular at renowned international festivals, including the Salzburg Festival, the BBC Proms and the Ravenna Festival, and the winner of the 1991 Gramophone Award for the first-ever recording of the original version of Sibelius’ violin concerto, Kavakos performs a stunningly diverse repertoire spanning centuries of classical music. His programs feature works by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Stravinsky, Schubert, Ravel, Sibelius, Debussy and George Enescu as well as cutting edge contemporary composers such as France’s Henri Dutilleux — all played on a Stradivarius made in 1692.
A key to Kavakos is his diverse repertoire. “As a musician, one has to be aware of all the different eras and aesthetics of the music, which is why it is beneficial for a performer not to confine themselves to one or two ‘key composers’,” Kavakos told The St. Petersburg Times. “I seek to expand my horizons and enrich my expressive possibilities as widely as humanly possible.”
Such an approach helps the performer to understand the legacy of the music of the past. 
“We have to imagine that all the great 20th-century composers were looking back to their predecessors — Mozart, Haydn or any other composers — and using these reflections when trying to take a step forward,” he explains. 
The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, deservedly enjoying widespread international acclaim, makes a debut at the White Nights Festival with two performances under the baton of Christian Tileman on May 31 and June 1 with sophisticated programs comprising Bruckner, Schumann and Grieg. 
Joining the orchestra for the May 31 concert will be world-famous pianist Rudolf Buchbinder. A darling of the respected Salzburg Festival, Buchbinder is most admired for his interpretations of 20th-century compositions.
July 4 to 7 sees one of the Mariinsky’s biggest operatic successes — Wagner’s entire “Der Ring des Nibelungen” in a renewed scenic version.
Indeed, Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” is one of Gergiev’s most ambitious projects.
Its 2003 premiere, which won rave reviews, marked the first staging of the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Russia since the tsarist era.
Since then the production has played to full houses and critical praise at the New York Metropolitan Opera, Baden-Baden’s Festispielhaus, and Orange County Hall in California. This year’s festival offers an opportunity to see the successful production again.
During the festival’s 2008 rendition, one of the signature events was the visit of French composer Henri Dutilleux, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, who follows the traditions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel yet possesses his own unique style. Dutilleux’s works were performed by Kavakos and the Mariinsky symphony orchestra.
This year, the famous contemporary composer to look for in the playbill is the German maestro Hans Werner Henze, whose musical language was inspired by Igor Stravinsky. Gergiev feels the innovation will generate much interest from the public.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: <strong>Boris Grebenshchikov</strong> may be a friend of Vladislav Surkov, seen as the Kremlin’s gray cardinal, and may have supported president-turned-prime minister Vladimir Putin’s policy in an interview, but that has not stopped a provincial lawyer from attacking the Russian rock guru for promoting “homosexuality, alcoholism and drugs” in his lyrics and, basically, a lack of love for his motherland.
In a letter to General Prosecutor Yury Chaika, lawyer Dmitry Yamshchikov from the Siberian city of Tyumen demanded that Grebenshchikov be stripped of the 4th Degree Order of Merit of the Motherland medal that he received for his “great contribution to the development of the art of music” for his 50th birthday in 2003. 
He described giving the musician who founded the seminal Russian band Akvarium the award as “amoral and unlawful.”
Yamshchikov analyzed Grebenshchikov’s lyrics and found that the song “Rastas from the Provinces” uses the word “joint” and thus call on fans to smoke marihuana, while “Cool Beer” “cultivates the need for alcohol” and “Barge Hauler” promotes cocaine.
“Ancient Russian Despair” creates a “negative image of Russia” and insults Orthodox Christians and Russian patriots.
The lawyer demanded Grebenshchikov be stripped of his medal for “committing multiple amoral acts, calling for the use of psychotropic and narcotic substances and promoting alcohol, sodomy, truancy, suicide and anarchy.”
Yamshchikov also called for an expert analysis of Grebenshchikov’s lyrics to establish whether they contain criminal offenses, and demanded those responsible for awarding him the state medal be found, since they might also have committed a crime in doing so.
But Grebenshchikov has done a lot to deserve a good attitude from those in power, saying in interviews that Russians are not ready for democracy and that the Kremlin’s current rulers should not be changed.
“There can’t be a well-balanced democracy in Russia for 200 or 300 years at least because you can’t remake people that fast,” he told The St. Petersburg Times in 2005.
In October 2003, Grebenshchikov was shown on state TV drinking tea with Putin-backed Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov during Gryzlov’s election campaign. 
Grebenshchikov said that Gryzlov had not talked to him about the campaign at the time. The following month, the musician was awarded the Order of Merit of the Motherland medal. 
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, a former Soviet cultural official, was booed when she arrived at Grebenshchikov’s 50th birthday concert in 2003 to give him the honor.
“Akvarium’s music has always met the expectations of youth,” she said. She even went as far as to add: “It’s thanks to you that rock music has become the 20th century’s classic.” 

<em>— By Sergey Chernov</em>

TITLE: Chilean landscapes
AUTHOR: By Marina Darmaros
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Little known outside South America, Lukas was one of Chile’s finest and most-loved cartoonists. Visitors can check out his warm style at an exhibition this week organized by the Chilean embassy. 
Renzo Pecchenino was born in Ottone, Italy, in 1934 and would only later become known as Lukas.  He emigrated with his family to Chile when he was one year old and went on to study architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaiso, but was forced to leave when his father died.  However, his time at the university had a great effect on him. 
The city was one of his greatest passions, said curator Rafael Torres. Lukas would later write a book on the history of the city and the draftsman’s technique he learned at the university influenced his work throughout his life. 
The exhibition has a series of charming drawings of Valparaiso which show the fruits of his study. Lukas’ career as a cartoonist began at the end of the 1950s, during the “golden age” of Chilean comics when magazines entirely dedicated to the genre, such as Barrabases, El Condorito and El Ping?ino, first appeared. 
Pecchenino’s debut came when he illustrated the cover of the daily La Union, where he first used the pseudonym Lukas. His works regularly appeared in national newspapers and later on in magazines, such as Topaze, El Ping?ino and Mampato. 
Featuring real problems of ordinary people, his drawings captured the soul of the Chilean nation, said Torres. “I like all the drawings because they are very simple, have a subtle humor — flippant — and they have the great line of a draftsman,” he said. 
Lukas died in 1998 at the age of 53. His wife, Maria Teresa Lobos, with whom he had five children, now runs a non-profit institution that aims to collect her husband’s works and preserve his legacy as an artist. 
One of the drawings at the exhibition shows an everyday scene of his family. Lukas is lying in bed whilst his children are bouncing round, holding a newspaper and asking the meaning of his cartoons. 
The exhibition is part of Semana de Chile (Chilean Weeks), a cycle of cultural events organized by the Embassy of Chile, that began with the official visit of the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to Russia in April.
The Lukas exhibition is showing together with an exhibit of Chilean engravings from the second half of the 20th century as part of St. Petersburg’s Latin-American Week. The exhibition will go on to Lukas’ home country of Italy in September. 

The Lukas exhibition runs through Sunday at the Artists Union of Russia Exhibition Center. 38 Bolshaya Morskaya Ul. Tel. 314-3060. Daily, 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

TITLE: Fusion frenzy
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although Rusalina opened back in February, the solitary waitress looked flabbergasted to see a trio of expectant diners enter the restaurant on a recent midweek evening, suggesting that it may not yet have established a regular clientele.
The restaurant is a rather unexpected, eclectic establishment. The d?cor in the main room fuses exposed brick walls with multiple chandeliers, and silk drapes and artfully arranged netting with na?ve paintings and the ubiquitous flat-screen TV. The formal atmosphere created by the immaculately laid tables with their deep green tablecloths and real napkins was undermined by the loud pop music that the waitress seemingly switched on especially for us — once she had recovered from her shock.
The music turned out to be as eclectic as the d?cor, moving from terrible ’90s Russian pop to Roy Orbison, and finally easing into soothing ’40s crooners by the end of the lengthy meal.
One of a trio of eateries in the same building on Ulitsa Vosstaniya, Rusalina complements the other cuisine on offer in this miniature culinary hub — sizzling chicken wings at Hot Wings and traditional pub fare at the Bulldog Pub — with its epic menu of Caucasian and European dishes ranging from shashlyki to pasta. Unsurprisingly, not everything in this encyclopedic volume, which includes a children’s menu, was available.
Taking our pick from what was, the Malta salad (300 rubles $9.50) was a fresh feast of iceberg lettuce, mango, chicken breast, cloudberry sauce and pomegranate seeds that is undoubtedly a healthy option, but could have benefited from more of a sauce. 
Gazpacho soup (220 rubles, $7) was considerably more promising, despite a distinctly Russian touch in the form of the addition of the dreaded dill — its fresh, tangy, crisp flavor was sublime.
Since Georgian khachapuri (hot pastry stuffed with cheese) was among the dishes that were not available, we settled instead for a trio of kutaby, thin, fried pastries filled with meat, cheese and herbs, respectively. At 250 rubles ($8), they were regrettably not hot enough and were too greasy for some tastes.
“Volshebny gorshochek” — “magic pot” — sounded too enticing not to try, at 400 rubles ($13) for a mixture of pork and beef, potatoes and mushrooms stewed in an earthenware pot with mixed vegetables. Though it was inevitably less exotic and original than its ambitious title, it went down very well indeed due to the quality of the ingredients and harmonious balance between them.
The equally imaginatively named Hawaiian Fantasy (450 rubles, $14), was described in the menu as consisting of chicken breast, pineapple, spices, Hawaiian rice and yellow sauce. It took such a long time to arrive after the starters and other mains had been served that expectations had been truly raised by the time it was brought out of the kitchen. Ultimately, it was somewhat of a disappointment — overly dry due to the scarcity of the promised yellow sauce.
While teetotalers will be gladdened by Rusalina’s impressive assortment of reasonably priced rare teas, the restaurant has a standard wine menu, from which we ordered a Medoc at 950 rubles ($30). The waitress, who was pleasant enough but seemingly lacking in experience, seemed inordinately reluctant to bring the wine before the food, but eventually did so at our request. When it finally arrived, it was already open, and overly chilled. 
Hopefully, such rumples in Rusalina’s service will be ironed out once the restaurant gets into its stride.

TITLE: New Sitcom 
Avoids Weighty Issue
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This week, CTC started a new sitcom called “Love Isn’t What It Seems.” The heroine is a plump girl called Alisa who blames all her troubles on her extra pounds. She escapes to the Internet, where she constantly chats with a mystery man but is too afraid to meet him. When she starts a new job, the grumpy but gorgeous boss ignores her because he’s too busy tapping away at his computer. 
I think you can fill in the rest of the plot.
The storyline is similar to the Russian version of “Ugly Betty.” In that sitcom, the heroine had retainers, bottle glasses and a grannyish wardrobe. But this sitcom has taken a different route, casting an actress who is so grotesquely overweight that she might have to buy a size medium in Topshop.
It’s not as if there aren’t any larger actresses in Russia, despite a national tendency for slinky hipbones. Anna Mikhalkova, who sometimes presents the children’s show “Good Night, Little Ones,” comes to mind, for a start. So it’s pretty depressing that a plum role like this went to Darya Ivanova, an actress with round cheeks and dimples but a blatant lack of spare tires. 
In the first episode, Alisa was shown in a dead-end job wearing a giant foam-rubber pretzel costume to hand out flyers for a bakery. I initially thought that this was a brilliantly surreal touch and that she would wander around like this for the whole sitcom. But when she pulled off the pretzel costume, we saw a normal-sized girl who was simply wearing lots of layers of clothing.
A friend persuaded Alisa to apply for a job at an ad agency in the first episode. It turned out that she has a degree from Moscow State University, so she was a bit overqualified to work as a pretzel. 
She got the job, because the motherly recruitment lady said she was sick of leggy but clueless girls. But she faced hostility elsewhere. “The cleaning job is already taken,” an ad man told her, after looking her up and down.
She also got off to a bad start with her boss, Artyom, by knocking over his computer and pouring coffee on his keyboard. She immediately decided he was a “psycho,” so very different from her Internet heartthrob.
Even worse, she encountered Artyom’s bitchy, thin girlfriend, who told her to get liposuction.
In subplots, we saw that Alisa’s so-called extra pounds come from a grandmother who feeds her pirozhki for breakfast. And there was also a little homily about her pretty friend who doesn’t appreciate what she’s got and who decided to pay for silicon lip implants and dump her poor but loving boyfriend.
Even though its message of girl power is pretty shallow, the sitcom is trying to break some new ground. It experiments with split-screens and voice-overs expressing the characters’ inner thoughts. As a fun extra, it also has a web site, Ilove.mail.ru, where you can read blogs written by Alisa and her boss, who call themselves “Thumbelina” and “Film Lover” online. 
You can also spy on their virtual correspondence, which is a little too correctly spelled to be authentic. “All my life goes on in virtual reality. How I understand you!” Alisa writes. “In the real world, I’m lost and I hurry back to the screen to find you.” 
At the moment though, poor Artyom is unable to use instant messaging because Alisa dropped his computer in the first episode — although you would expect an ad director to have a Blackberry. 
He posted his mood as “enraged.”

TITLE: Shakhtar Donetsk Prevail in UEFA Finale
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ISTANBUL — An extra-time goal from Brazilian midfielder Jadson earned Shakhtar Donetsk a 2-1 victory over Werder Bremen in the UEFA Cup final here on Wednesday to clinch the Ukrainian side’s first European title.
Jadson’s 15-yard shot slipped through the grasp of Werder goalkeeper Tim Wiese in the 97th minute after the teams had been locked 1-1 at the end of normal time.
The Germans thought they had snatched an equalizer in the last minute of the additional period, only for on-loan Chelsea striker Claudio Pizarro’s bundled effort to be ruled out for a foul on Dmytro Chygrynskiy.
Brazilian striker Luiz Adriano had finished coolly to give Shakhtar the lead in the first half, before an error by goalkeeper Andriy Pyatov allowed Werder centre-back Naldo to level.
Shakhtar become the first team from Ukraine to lift a European trophy since the break-up of the Soviet Union, while they will also be the last team to lift the UEFA Cup before its re-launch as the Europa League next season.
“We weren’t able to play our usual football, we didn’t put enough pressure on our opponents,” said Werder coach Thomas Schaaf.
“We gave them too much space and lost too many balls. I congratulate Shakhtar, they were the best team on the night.”
Mircea Lucescu’s side settled first at the Sukru Saracoglu stadium and spurned the game’s first clear opening when Adriano shot wide after being cleverly picked out on the cusp of the Werder area by Jadson.
The Ukrainians, inspired by the inter-play of their five-man Brazilian contingent, then went ahead in the 25th minute when Adriano ran onto a loose pass and delicately lifted the ball over the advancing Wiese.
Werder had overturned deficits against pre-tournament favorites AC Milan and local German rivals Hamburg earlier in the competition, and 10 minutes before half-time they drew level when Naldo’s thumping 30-yard free-kick was tamely palmed into the net by Ukraine international Pyatov.
Wiese proved to be made of sterner stuff when he superbly touched away a stinging drive from Mariusz Lewandowski at full-stretch just before the interval.
The German shot-stopper kept out a Jadson free-kick early in the second period as Shakhtar resumed their occupation of the Werder defensive third, the orange-shirted players zipping passes across the pitch with beguiling ease.
Werder missed the promptings of their suspended Brazilian playmaker Diego, but they were inches away from going in front when Pizarro’s glanced header was repelled by a sprawling Pyatov.
Wiese pushed away a long-range effort from Darijo Srna as Shakhtar began extra-time on the front foot and moments later they took a decisive lead when Jadson met Srna’s centre with a low drive that crept beneath Wiese into the bottom-left corner.

TITLE: Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced Over Diva
AUTHOR: By Maggie Michael
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAIRO — A real estate mogul with ties to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s son was sentenced to death Thursday for ordering the killing of a Lebanese pop star who had been his lover.
Hisham Talaat Moustafa, a member of the ruling National Democratic Party, was accused of paying a former Egyptian State Security officer $2 million to kill Suzanne Tamim in Dubai. The green-eyed diva, who was 30 at the time of her death last July, rose to stardom in the late 1990s, drawing huge audiences with her sultry dancing and cascading chestnut hair.
But she hit troubled times, separating from her Lebanese husband-manager who filed a series of lawsuits against her.
Moustafa, who is married, and Tamim were lovers before the relationship soured. The case — a sensational tale of a jilted lover out for revenge after spending millions of dollars on his mistress — in the eyes of many Egyptians served as a litmus test for the notion that the country’s elite are above the law. It attracted a media frenzy.
The former officer, Mohsen el-Sukkary, was also convicted and sentenced to death in a court session that quickly turned chaotic as police and Moustafa’s relatives clashed with reporters scrambling for a reaction to the verdict from the defendants.
Moustafa’s two daughters burst into tears after the verdict, and his sister fainted.
“This verdict is cruel,” Sameer el-Shishtawi, one of Moustafa’s lawyers told reporters outside the southern Cairo court. He said he would appeal, and was confident the verdict would be overturned.
In Tamim’s Aisha Bakkar middle-class Muslim district of Beirut, a picture of the slain singer still hangs above the door of the family’s ground floor residence.
Najib Liyan, who identified himself as the family’s lawyer, told Associated Press Television News he was “grateful for the verdict.”
“We had no doubt about justice,” Liyan said. Still, he added, “no one can be happy about death, whether it is a crime or a death sentence.”
Both Mousatafa and el-Sukkary had pleaded not guilty to the charges. The death sentence must still be certified by the government’s top religious official, the Grand Mufti. 
The defendants can appeal the ruling within 60 days of the mufti’s decision effectively after June 25, a date set by the judge.
Tamim’s murder, and leaked images of her lying dead, her throat slashed, dominated headlines across the Middle East.
Everything about the case was high-profile and, as common in the region, political overtones crept into what would have otherwise been a common, albeit particularly grisly, crime.
Authorities maintain Moustafa paid el-Sukkary, who worked for the tycoon at one of the Four Seasons hotels he owned in Egypt, to kill Tamim while she was staying in a luxury apartment in Dubai. Her friends have said she moved to London then Dubai after ending the relationship with Moustafa.

TITLE: Sharapova Happy 
To Be Back In Business
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: WARSAW — Maria Sharapova insisted on Wednesday the long hours she spent recovering from a crippling shoulder injury will reap rich rewards with more Grand Slam titles to add to the three she’s already captured.
The former world number one showed no signs of rust, and a dazzling array of powerful groundstrokes, as she stormed into the quarter-finals of the Warsaw claycourt tournament with a 6-2, 6-0 thrashing of Darya Kustova of Belarus.
Once she has finished here, the 22-year-old heads for the French Open, with the pressure off after 10 months out of the game.
“Obviously I want to win many more Grand Slams. That’s every player’s goal,” said the Russian, whose ranking has slipped to 126.
“Just keep playing and winning matches. The more matches you win, the better you’re going to get, and the more tournaments you’re going to win.”
Sharapova took the tennis world by storm when she defeated Serena Williams in the 2004 Wimbledon final to win her first Grand Slam title at the age of 17, but is now just happy to back on court and competing at the highest level.
“It’s giving me a big thrill. But I’m not going to go out there and laugh every day. I still have to take care of business.
“I’m really enjoying myself. After putting so much work in and being out for so long, it’s gives you so much satisfaction to know that the work you’ve put in is going to bring you victory at some point.
“Right now it’s just a thrill to be out there, competing and playing. You obviously never know, during those injuries and the setbacks that you have, if you’re ever going to get an opportunity to play again.
“So obviously it gives me a great feeling to be out there.”
With just two matches under her belt since her long-awaited return, Sharapova knows she has to be patient before hitting the kind of level that also took her to wins at the 2006 US Open and 2008 Australian Open.
“Time will tell. I tell myself it’s going to come with every match. We’ll see. I’m not in a rush,” she added.
“I still need matchplay. Being in a situation with matches is going to give me that feeling and experience back.
“I think that’s the most important thing. I’m happy to be out there, I want to finish the job as fast as I can. But I’m also appreciative of each situation and how I can come out and try to play a good ball game.”
Her next opponent in Warsaw is Ukrainian Alona Bondarenko for a place in the semi-finals.

TITLE: 3 U.S. Soldiers Killed by Bomb in Baghdad
AUTHOR: By Sinan Salaheddin
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Three American soldiers were killed Thursday in a bombing in Baghdad, the U.S. military said, part of a burst of violence only weeks before American combat troops are due to leave Iraqi cities.
The attack was one of a series of bombings to hit Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 66 people and wounding dozens more in two days.
The deadliest blast Thursday occurred in Baghdad’s southern Dora district, where a bomb exploded near an American foot patrol, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.
The U.S. military initially reported nine U.S. personnel were wounded in the attack. Later, the military said it could not confirm that number because the injured were still being evaluated and treated.
The attack occurred about 10:38 a.m. as the soldiers patrolled near an outdoor market, said Army Major David Shoupe.
Iraqi police said a suicide bomber was responsible, but Shoupe said the U.S. could not confirm that. He said four civilians died in the blast, but Iraqi police and hospital officials put the civilian toll at 12 killed and 25 wounded.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
Earlier Thursday, another suicide bomber killed seven U.S.-backed Sunni paramilitaries as they waited in line to receive salaries at an Iraqi military base in the northern city of Kirkuk.
Police Major Salam Zankana said the victims in the Kirkuk attack were members of the local paramilitary Awakening Council — Sunnis who turned against the insurgents and help provide security. Eight others were wounded, he said.
Awakening Council members, also known as Sons of Iraq, have been frequently targeted by al-Qaida and other Sunni groups still fighting U.S. troops and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.
Sami Ghayashi, 37, who was among the injured, said the local council members had been waiting three months to receive their salaries.
“While we were waiting at the gate talking to one another a big explosion took place,” he said from his hospital bed. “I saw several colleagues dead, among them my cousin. I have no idea how this suicide bomber got among us.”
Also Thursday, a bomb exploded inside a police station in western Baghdad, killing three policemen and wounding 19 others, an Iraqi police official said. The bomb was hidden inside a trash can and carried into the station, he added.
The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
Despite a dramatic drop in violence in Iraq, attacks still occur, although with less frequency. Bursts of attacks tend to be followed by periods of calm, only to have the violence spring up again.
The attacks came a day after a car bomb exploded near a group of restaurants in a Shiite neighborhood of northwest Baghdad, leaving 41 people dead and more than 70 others injured.
That incident was the capital’s first major car-bombing since May 6, when 15 people were killed at a produce market in south Baghdad.It was also the deadliest in the city since twin car blasts killed 51 people in another Shiite neighborhood, Sadr City, on April 29.
The failure to stop the bombings adds pressure on the Iraqi government to demonstrate that it can meet security challenges ahead of a June 30 deadline for the U.S. to remove all combat forces from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.
A day after the Shula bombing, dozens were still being treated at an area hospital for shrapnel wounds and burns. The blast blew out the front of a building housing shops and restaurants.
Coffins draped with flags were carried through the streets near the bombing as funerals began for the dead.
U.S. troops are due to leave Iraqi cities under terms of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement that took effect Jan. 1. President Barack Obama plans to remove combat troops from the country by September 2010, with all U.S. forces out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
Under the agreement, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could ask the U.S. to delay the pullout from the cities. However, the issue is politically sensitive in a country worn out by six years of war, and the government has insisted there will be no delay in the withdrawal schedule.

TITLE: Court Blocks Ferrari's Bid to Stop F1 Budget Caps
AUTHOR: By Verena Von Derschau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — A French court dismissed Ferrari’s bid to stop Formula One from instituting a budget cap next season, and the Italian team reiterated its threat to pull out of the 2010 championship.
Ferrari sought a court injunction against governing body FIA’s plans to introduce a voluntary $60 million cap for racing teams from 2010, but the appeal was rejected Wednesday by Judge Jacques Gondrand de Robert.
“There is no imminent damage that needs to be prevented or clearly unlawful unrest that needs to be stopped,” the judge said.
Ferrari, Renault, Toyota, Red Bull and Toro Rosso have threatened to pull out of next year’s championship if the cap isn’t overturned.
The judge accepted Ferrari’s legal right to challenge the plans but agreed with the FIA that the team should have taken its case to the World Motor Sport Council earlier.
“No competitor should place their interests above those of the sport in which they compete,” FIA president Max Mosley said after the ruling. “The FIA, the teams and our commercial partners will now continue to work to ensure the well-being of Formula One in 2010 and beyond.”
Teams that accept the budget cap will be allowed to make more technical changes to their cars than those that don’t. Teams opposing the cap have claimed that Mosley and FIA pushed through the changes without proper consultation.
Ferrari said it hadn’t decided whether to continue with legal action, adding it wants to ensure that “Formula 1 is a series where the rules are the same for everyone” and where cost cuts are “gradual.”
“Ferrari will not enter its cars in a competition that, with the planned scenario in place, would see a watering down of the characteristics that have endowed Formula 1,” Ferrari said in a statement.
The team hinted it would consider competing in a breakaway series.
“In this situation, Ferrari will continue to compete in races of a caliber worthy of the marquee, matching its level of innovation and technological research,” the team said.
The deadline for entering the 2010 championship is May 29, giving disgruntled teams little more than a week to find an alternate solution. Ferrari driver Felipe Massa said the dispute was frustrating for racers, who are preparing in Monaco for Sunday’s Grand Prix.
“For sure that doesn’t help the sport,” the Brazilian said. “This fight means many people are going to be upset. The only thing is it would be nice to have more sport and less political [fighting]. I hope things [are] going to be OK.”
Massa hopes a resolution will be reached to prevent an exodus of teams from F1.
“If we lose Ferrari, Formula One won’t be the same,” Massa said.
F1 team owners met with Mosley and F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone in London last week but failed to resolve the dispute.
Ferrari sent a team of three lawyers to a high court in Paris on Tuesday, arguing that FIA should not be able to change the rules.
The Italian team’s lawyers, Emmanuel Gaillard and Henri Peter, said F1 was in danger of becoming a two-tier championship if budget caps were applied. They argued with 700 employees worldwide, Ferrari is unable to reduce its budget significantly in such a short time.
The FIA insisted that the survival of F1 means cutbacks are necessary in a time of “deep financial crisis.”
Ferrari is F1’s most famous team, having competed in the series since its inception 60 years ago. Mosley has said Ferrari must adapt, regardless of its prestige within the sport.

TITLE: British Government Backtracks Over Gurkha Residency
AUTHOR: By Guy Jackson
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — The British government on Thursday announced a climbdown over settlement rights for Gurkha veterans, saying all of the Nepalese fighters who have served at least four years can apply to live here.
The amended settlement guidelines, announced by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in the House of Commons, were greeted by an explosion of applause and victory cries by Gurkhas and campaigners gathered outside parliament.
Gordon Brown has “made a brave decision on behalf of the bravest of the brave,” said Indian-born actress Joanna Lumley, who spearheaded the fight against residency restrictions on Gurkhas who retired before 1997.
“This will be received in Nepal today with the greatest joy and gratitude,” she added, standing in front of Gurkha veterans in wheelchairs wearing their service medals awarded by the British army.
Under the outgoing rules, Britain would only grant residency rights to 4,300 ex-Gurkhas, falling short of demands that they be granted to all 36,000 Nepalese ex-soldiers who served with the British army before 1997.

TITLE: Russia To Pay $135,000 For Gold At 2010 Olympics
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian sports authorities will more than double bonus payments for medal winners at the 2010 Winter Olympics in a bid for a record-beating performance.
Deputy Sports Minister Gennady Alyoshin said Tuesday that gold medal winners will receive $135,000 while winners of silver will earn roughly $81,600 and bronze medalists $54,400.
“Such incentives are not matched by any other country,” said Vladimir Vasin, vice president of the Russian Olympic Committee.
Officials have high hopes that a strong performance in Vancouver could be a springboard for 2014, when Russia’s southern city of Sochi hosts the Winter Olympics.
Russia is aiming for around 40 medals, with a minimum of nine golds, at next year’s games. That would be almost double the country’s 22-medal haul in Turin, Italy, in 2006.

TITLE: Tsvangirai: Zimbabwe Tries for Compomise
AUTHOR: By Angus Shaw
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HARARE, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe’s unity government has agreed on key appointments in an attempt to resolve the political impasse that has paralyzed the new administration, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said Thursday.
However, regional leaders will still be asked to mediate in the dispute over two positions considered vital to Zimbabwe’s economic recovery and restoration of the rule of law.
A former opposition leader, Tsvangirai formed a coalition with President Robert Mugabe in February but progress has been slow as the parties have deadlocked over the division of key posts.
Tsvangirai said continuing violations of the power-sharing deal threatened the unity government. He singled out seizures of white-owned farms blamed on militants and officials of Mugabe’s party in recent weeks.
But he added: “I think it is also important that we recognize that progress has been made and continues to be made with respect to rebuilding Zimbabwe.”
Tsvangirai said the appointment of 10 provincial governors would be divided between the parties and that the five vacant ambassadorial posts would be filled by his Movement for Democratic Change and a smaller coalition partner.
Mugabe will also allow opposition lawmaker Roy Bennett to be sworn in as deputy agriculture minister.
Bennett was charged with weapons violations just as the unity government was being formed in a case linked to long-discredited allegations that the MDC plotted Mugabe’s violent overthrow. He has been free on bail since March.
Tsvangirai said the parties failed to break the deadlock over the status of the Reserve Bank governor, Gideon Gono, and the attorney general Johannes Tomana.
Both were unilaterally appointed by Mugabe in what Tsvangirai’s party claim was a violation of the agreement that set up the unity government.
Gono, who has held the position for a number of years, has been blamed by many for the economic collapse of the country. His reappointment was seen as a major stumbling block in accessing foreign aid so desperately needed to kickstart the economy.
Tsvangirai said he deplored recent arrests of independent journalists and lawyers and called for a “new culture of respect.”
He said a new state media commission would be formed to “facilitate the opening up of media space.”
Tsvangirai added that previous stringent licensing of local and foreign journalists that effectively banned most foreign news organizations from entering the country had ceased to apply under the power-sharing agreement.
There was no longer any legal obligation for journalists or media organizations to apply for accreditation until a new commission was in place, Tsvangirai said.
“There’s no reason why these news agencies and groups should not be in the country,” he said.
Agreement was also reached on the posts of permanent secretaries, the top civil servants in government ministries, which had been a key sticking point in the coalition.
All previous appointments under Mugabe’s government, many open loyalists to the longtime ruler, remained in their jobs on the strength of their experience and qualifications Tsvangirai’s nominees couldn’t match.
George Charamba, a high-profile Mugabe loyalist and harsh critic of Western media organizations, stays on as secretary for information and Mugabe’s principal spokesman.
But Tsvangirai warned that civil servants showing party allegiance could be fired.
“We are coming through a history of political affiliation by individuals. From today, it must be a thing of the past,” Tsvangirai said.