SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1482 (44), Thursday, June 11, 2009
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TITLE: Nearly All Belarussian Dairy Goods  Prohibited
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Federal Consumer Protection Service doubled a list of banned Belarussian dairy products to about 1,200 products on Tuesday amid assurances from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the decision was not politically motivated. 
The watchdog banned the first 600-odd items on Saturday, following a weeklong exchange of unpleasantries between officials in both countries. On Tuesday, it banned another 593 items, citing the same reason: a breach of technical rules for the dairy industry that went into affect last December. The rules require producers to include additional information on their packaging. 
The watchdog’s head, Gennady Onishchenko, said late Tuesday that only 58 products were left untouched by the ban. Imports of “almost all these products have been banned,” Onishchenko said, Interfax reported. 
Onishchenko sent mixed signals about the issue Monday, first publicly inviting Belarussian officials to discuss the possibility of restarting imports and then canceling the invitation several hours later. 
Belarus exports 40 percent of the 5 million tons of milk it produces annually, and 95 percent of that goes to Russia, according to the Institute for Agriculture Market Affairs. The Russia-bounded exports are worth $1 billion per year. 
The ban is being described in media reports as a “milk war,” but both Russian and Belarussian officials denied Tuesday that it had a political undertone. 
“Russia has not started any sanctions against Belarus,” Lavrov said during talks with visiting Belarussian Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov. “These measures are dictated by a concern for the health of our consumers.” 
Martynov said he did not see political motives in the decision to enforce the new rules, Interfax reported. 
Belarussian Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky also took a diplomatic stance about the matter in remarks made in Minsk before flying to a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow. He said Belarus’ Agriculture Ministry, Committee for Standardization and State Sanitary Service should “sit down, analyze the positions and give a comprehensive answer” to the Russian side instead of engaging in a “war of words,” Interfax reported. 
Despite the careful rhetoric, the ban appears to single out Belarus, even though its dairy industry is not the only one that has failed to upgrade all Russian export products to meet the new rules. 
While half of all Belarussian dairy products don’t follow the new regulations, the figure for Lithuania is 53.6 percent, Latvia is 71.4 percent and Ukraine is 90.6 percent, according to a letter Onishchenko sent to the watchdog’s regional branches late last month, which is available on the official web site. 
A spokeswoman at his watchdog declined to explain why Belarus was the only former Soviet republic currently affected by the ban. 
The spokeswoman also could not say what share the 1,200 banned products made up in the overall volume of dairy imports from Belarus, concluding the short telephone conversation by saying she did not give phone interviews and hanging up. 
Some of the companies listed among the banned producers denied that they were having problems with exports. 
Savushkin Product and the Rogachevo Factory, which are both on the list, said they have updated all of their documents and are in full compliance with the new regulations. 
“We have reregistered all 46 certificates, and all of our packaging is in accordance with the law,” said Yelena Babkina, deputy director of Savushkin Product, a producer based in Brest. 
“We were surprised to see ourselves on the list,” she added. 
The list is likely to include some items that have been discontinued by their producers, which would explain the inconsistency, said Tatyana Rybalova, an industry specialist at the Institute for Agriculture Market Affairs. 
Companies had six months to make the necessary changes to meet the rules, so the watchdog has the right to press them now, she said.

TITLE: Putin Ditches Unilateral Bid for WTO Entry
AUTHOR: By Ira Iosebashvili
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s 16-year quest to join the World Trade Organization took a wild turn Tuesday when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan would abandon their separate accession talks in favor of a bid to enter as a single regional bloc. 
The move threatens to further delay Russia’s ascension to the world trade body. The European Union, which said just last week that Russia could join by the end of the year, said Tuesday that it might need to re-evaluate its support. Analysts said Putin had drawn a “line in the sand,” indicating that Russia’s patience with the WTO had run out. 
Putin announced the joint WTO bid at a meeting of the Eurasian Economic Community, a fledgling customs union encompassing the three nations and three others former Soviet republics. 
Putin said Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan still sought WTO entry, “but as a united customs union, not as separate countries.” 
He said the new customs union would become active next year. 
But Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov cautioned that it would be difficult to make the deadlines set by the customs union. “We have set a difficult goal before ourselves, for there to be no customs posts along the Russian-Kazakh border by July 1, 2011,” he said at a news conference. 
First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov later told reporters that the three counties were in “100 percent agreement” on the customs union. Russia will chair the grouping and will therefore be in charge of WTO talks for now, Shuvalov said. 
Formal negotiations on WTO accession of the three countries will begin after Jan. 1, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said, Itar-Tass reported. He acknowledged that the talks might be more difficult as a three-party bid. “This process will be a bit more complicated,” he said. 
The other members of the customs union are Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan has been a member of the WTO since 1998, while Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are working separately to join the trade body. 
EU officials sought to play down Tuesday’s development but said it could lead to a reappraisal of WTO negotiations. 
“We just had a very important and productive meeting in St. Petersburg last week, where the Russian side confirmed its objectives at the highest level,” Lutz Guellner, spokesman for EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton, said in a telephone interview from Brussels. “We have no reason to believe that this has fundamentally changed.” 
Guellner said the trade commission would “want to know the exact details” before commenting further. 
However, he said the formation of a customs bloc could prompt a revision of the trade commission’s policy toward Russia. 
“The basic parameters of this customs union … could create a new situation, which we would first need to carefully analyze to determine the potential impact on Russia’s WTO negotiations,” he said. 
Russian, EU and U.S. officials made a series of overwhelmingly positive comments about Russia’s WTO chances during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week. 
Ashton, the EU trade commissioner, told a panel on Russian-EU business ties on Thursday that the two countries “have agreed WTO accession should be completed before the end of this year,” although she said it wouldn’t be easy. 
Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina said Russia, the only major economy outside the 153-member WTO, hoped to finish talks by the year’s end. “We feel we are coming to agreement with the European Union,” she said. 
Washington’s trade representative, Ron Kirk, also said during the forum that negotiations on Russia’s WTO admission had progressed recently and could be over by the end of the year. 
Rusnano chairman Anatoly Chubais, however, offered a warning about the customs union that foreshadowed Tuesday’s developments. “In recent months, there’s been active work to form a new customs union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan,” Chubais told the panel. “And it’s possible that the process may become an alternative [to WTO]. If the new customs union is formed, a new party to the talks will appear,” meaning that negotiations could be further delayed. 
Despite recent progress on the WTO, Russia’s accession might have been farther away than thought, analysts said. 
“Russia’s been close many times before in the last 16 years,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital. “This sends a signal that Russia is incredibly frustrated with the process.” 
Putin’s comments could represent an ultimatum to the WTO, said Alex Kliment, an analyst at Eurasia Group. 
“He is drawing a line in the sand,” Kliment said. “He’s saying that Russia is running its last lap, and if it doesn’t get to the finish line soon it will simply join another race.” 
Kliment said that while a great deal of trade went on between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, forming a customs bloc with two countries whose economies were a fraction the size of Russia’s would “not be in Russia’s best interests.” 
An official at the Belarussian Foreign Ministry refused to comment on the joint WTO bid. 
Trading issues between Russia and Belarus have been anything but friendly as of late. Russia has banned nearly all dairy products from Belarus in the last four days, citing health concerns.

TITLE: Oligarch, Matviyenko Rock the Boat With 'Capitalist Orgy'
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Leningrad military district prosecutor has opened an investigation into a banquet held aboard the famed  cruiser Avrora during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum by Russian multi-billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s Russian Pioneer magazine.
“I can confirm that we opened an investigation after we saw a TV report about the banquet. Currently we are trying to ascertain whether or not the event was legal,” Igor Lebed, head prosecutor of the Leningrad military district, said on Wednesday.
The prosecutors are gathering evidence from a number of officers from the Leningrad Navy Base. They are trying to establish why and by whom permission was given to organize a banquet on the territory of the military base, to which the cruiser Avrora belongs, Interfax reported.
The banquet took place on board the Avrora, which is both a museum and the property of the military, on the night of June 5 to 6.  The party was held to celebrate the first birthday of Russky Pioner (Russian Pioneer) magazine. A number of the Economic Forum’s VIP guests, including Prokhorov himself, were present at the banquet. Representatives of the St. Petersburg authorities, including City Governor Valentina Matviyenko, also attended the event.
During the party, the ship was converted into an all-singing, all-dancing party venue. Huge speakers were installed on the upper deck, while on the lower deck, waiters dressed in Russian naval shirts served the guests with wine and canapes, Fontanka reported.
Popular rock singer Sergei Shnurov and his musicians performed explicit songs for the guests from a stage erected on a barge berthed alongside the Avrora, and a ballerina performed the famous Dying Swan dance on the windy deck. 
At the end of the party, some of the banquet’s guests even jumped into the cold waters of the Neva River to have a swim, Russian Pioneer magazine’s own video showed.
Andrei Kolesnikov, who is chief editor of the magazine as well as a well-known daily reporter for Kommersant newspaper, was recorded on the video as saying the magazine was glad “to finally get to the ship.”
“I don’t think the Avrora has seen so many people at any one time since 1917, when it was a key participant in the revolution,” Kolesnikov said at the banquet.
Avrora Museum Director Lev Chernavin said on Wednesday that he hadn’t known anything about the plans for the party.
“It was my day off that day, and nobody asked my permission,” Chernavin said. 
Chernavin assumed that permission for the party had been given by senior authorities in the Russian Navy.
“If they had asked me for permission, I would have refused it, because the Avrora is still a museum, and its exhibits are sacred,” he said. “I think  it is morally inappropriate to hold such parties on board the Avrora.”
He added however that everything was left clean and intact on the ship after the party.
Chernavin explained that they had also previously organized meetings for the country’s war veterans on the ship, but he considered such gatherings “correct.”
Meanwhile, the banquet has provoked serious criticism from an organization known as the Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, who branded the shindig a ‘capitalist orgy.’
“The Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast are angered by the capitalist orgy on the cruiser Avrora. This is a monstrous sacrilege,” the organization said in an official statement on its web site.
“Our organization protests against the capitalist orgy on board the revolutionary ship. We see this action as an act of historical revenge on the proletariat on the part of the bourgeois class that was defeated in 1917,” they said.
Russian Pioneer magazine, however, did not express any embarrassment about the situation. In fact, it went so far as to publish the comment of the Communists of St. Petersburg on its web site, accompanied by the magazine’s response.
The magazine said that the party had been “anti-glamor and tongue-in-cheek”.
“The meaning of Russian Pioneer’s celebration was the precise opposite of what the organization saw in it. Our event heralded the beginning of the new post-glamor epoch, which is more honest, open and sincere,” the magazine said.
Tatyana Pchelyanskaya, an art expert from the city’s historic Peter and Paul Fortress, said that “from a moral point of view” she didn’t consider holding events and celebrations on the territory of museums “a big sin.”
“It’s a worldwide practice to hold events in historic palaces and estates sometimes,” Pchelyanskaya said.
“The main condition in such cases is not to cause harm to the exhibits.  Therefore I would never advocate having dinners or food near exhibits. It’s the same as having concerts on the city’s Palace Square, when the main concern is the potential effect on the Hermitage artifacts,” she said.
“Besides, we must not forget that Russian museums often need to find the means to survive. However, they don’t have the right to rent out their rooms,” Pchelyanskaya said.
Similar celebrations held on military territory have invoked the ire of military prosecutors in the past. Back in 2007, the prosecution gave notice to the commander of the Leningrad Navy Base, Antatoly Lipinsky, for illegitimate use of a boat belonging to the Leningrad Military District.  The prosecutors then launched an investigation into Lipinksy’s son’s use of the boat on his wedding day. Lipinsky subsequently received a warning that the private use of military equipment was unacceptable, Fontanka reported.
The long-suffering Avrora herself is also no stranger to scandal. Several years ago, Russian pornography director Sergei Pryanishnikov was rumored to have used the interior of the cruiser as the set for one of his productions.  He reportedly obtained permission by pretending to have been filming a regular film, rather than a pornographic one.  There was also, however, a version that the filming on the Avrora was faked. The military authorities at the time denied having had anything to do with the case. However, after the incident, it became very difficult for filmmakers to get permission to film on board the ship.
The Avrora, a battle-cruiser that defended Russia in three wars and played a key role in the revolutionary events of February-October 1917, later became a museum. To this day, it retains  the status of Russian Navy ship No. 1.

TITLE: Finnish Diplomat Barred for 'Kidnap'
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: A Finnish diplomat has been declared persona non grata for helping a Finnish man illegally spirit his son, who also has Russian citizenship, out of the country last month, the Foreign Ministry said Monday.
The ministry said Simo Pietilainen, a consul at the Finnish consulate in St. Petersburg, illegally took Paavo Salonen and his son, Anton, 5, out of Russia in his car. Finland’s ambassador was informed of the decision against Pietilainen on Monday.
The boy is the subject of a custody battle between his father and his mother, who is Russian. The Finnish Foreign Ministry has said the mother illegally took the boy to Russia in spring 2008.
Pietilainen is in Finland, working for the Finnish Foreign Ministry in a different post.
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: Mariinsky-II Competition  To Open Within 45 Days
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An architectural competition to design a second stage for the world-famous Mariinsky Theater will be announced within the next 45 days, and the winner will be chosen within the coming six months, said Valery Gutovsky, head of the board for construction, reconstruction and restoration in the northwest.
The contest will be held in St. Petersburg. The organizers said they are not setting any restrictions on the number of participants.
“All the designs will be exhibited to the public and there will be no restrictions imposed on viewing them,” said Alexander Vakhmistrov, deputy governor of St. Petersburg. “This time, all deadlines will definitely be met. We have a lot on our plate, but we are extremely confident that everything will go according to schedule.”
Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev stressed that work on the foundations for the new building will be completed by the end of June. According to the Russian government, the new building is due to be finished by 2011.
Vakhmistrov said 2.5 billion rubles ($80 million) has already been spent on the project. “To reduce the costs, we are planning to use, for the most part, Russian-made construction materials,” he said. “That will help a lot.”
Governor Valentina Matviyenko has asked Avdeyev to preside over the competition’s jury. She also invited the Mariinsky’s artistic director Valery Gergiev and St. Petersburg’s chief architect Yury Mityurev to join the jury. According to Vakhmistrov, Matviyenko herself may consider being on the jury and is looking forward to discussing the opportunity.
Gutovsky said the design of the facade is being chosen from 15 different proposals. “The designs have been submitted by prominent architects from France, Germany, Canada and Russia,” he said. “I very much hope that the project that the jury chooses will be very different from the concept offered by Dominique Perrault. I would also insist that the winning design get the approval of state experts.”
Mariinsky II, a new theater to be built next to the 1840 original, was originally designed by French architect Dominique Perrault in 2003 and scheduled for completion by 2009. Perrault gained the right to build the theater’s second stage after winning a prestigious international competition that involved, apart from Perrault, Switzerland’s Mario Botta, Japan’s Arata Isozaki, the U.S.’s Eric Owen Moss, Netherlands’ Erick van Egeraat and other architects ranked among the world’s finest. The participants were all personally invited to compete by the Russian government.
Gergiev had hoped that the construction, which will be paid for entirely by the federal budget, would be completed within three years of Perrault winning the contest, but in January 2007 the Russian government suspended its contract with the architect, citing concerns that his French firm might fail to deliver the project on time.
Many St. Petersburgers said they would never accept the French design, branding it too revolutionary, or lacking in taste. One of the more harmless nicknames applied to the new building was “the golden potato.” Critics said Perrault’s design was too elaborate and not in keeping with the classical lines of the neighborhood.
After the inauguration of the second stage — whenever that finally happens — the company’s historic premises will be closed for a two-year renovation period.
The issues of repairing the Mariinsky’s current building and the need for a second stage have been a high priority for Gergiev for over a decade. The maestro first approached City Hall about the issue back in 1997 when Vladimir Yakovlev served as governor.
“The technical parameters of our stage can’t compete with the possibilities offered by modern theaters in Europe and the United States,” Gergiev said. “We have to close the theater for days in order to mount the sets for some shows. It’s a great shame.”

TITLE: President Blames Foreign 'Freaks'
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev blamed foreign “freaks” for violence in the North Caucasus during a visit Tuesday to Dagestan, where the region’s top police official was assassinated last week. 
“All kinds of freaks are coming here to do harm on our territory,” Medvedev said in televised remarks. 
He said corruption, unemployment and poverty added to the unrest. 
State television showed Medvedev observing special forces training before inspecting an array of weaponry. He also visited a local medical center, where he signed autographs for the staff. 
The president said the attack that killed Dagestani Interior Minister Adilgirei Magomedtagirov on Friday posed a challenge to the state. 
“This is a gauntlet thrown down to authority, to the state. Law enforcement agencies must do everything possible to find the criminals and bring them to justice,” Medvedev said, Interfax reported. 
A sniper shot Magomedtagirov, 53, in the heart as he stood outside a Makhachkala restaurant during the wedding of the daughter of one of his subordinates. He died later in the hospital while undergoing an operation. A senior police official was also killed in the attack, and eight officers were wounded. 
Medvedev said Tuesday that he would posthumously award Magomedtagirov with the title of Hero of Russia. 
Speaking at a meeting of his Security Council in the Dagestani capital, Medvedev said 112 suspected “bandits” had been killed in counterterrorism operations in the North Caucasus since the start of the year. 
A total of 75 law enforcement officers and 48 civilians have been killed over the same period, he said. 
(SPT, AP)

TITLE: No Weekend Holiday for Pikalyovo
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: PIKALYOVO, Leningrad Oblast — Pikalyovo residents won’t celebrate the Russia Day holiday with an extended weekend with the rest of the country. They will celebrate by going to work. 
The three Pikalyovo factories, whose closure prompted protests and a personal visit by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, agreed on Tuesday to reopen this weekend and signed off on production plans for the rest of the year. 
Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov, who chaired negotiations at the site of the three factories, left without giving any comment. He said later in a written statement that the main factory, BaselCement, would reopen Saturday, even though the day is in the middle of the long Russia Day holiday weekend, when few other factories are working. 
The statement, issued jointly with BaselCement and the Leningrad regional government, also said the factories had agreed on a production plan through the end of 2009. 
Under the plan, the plants will eventually work at 100 percent capacity, Pikalyovo Mayor Sergei Veber said in an interview at the entrance of the complex. He did not elaborate. 
Veber also said three-month contracts allowing the resumption of work at all the plants were signed Tuesday. 
The first shipment of nepheline concentrate, the key component of alumina produced at the BaselCement plant, will come to Pikalyovo from the Murmansk region-based FosAgro plant on Wednesday, Manturov said in the statement. 
Metakhim, another factory at the complex, which uses carbonate solution from BaselCement to produce soda and potash, will reopen “a couple of days later,” Manturov said. The third factory, Eurocement-controlled Pikalyovo Concrete, which uses mud from the BaselCement’s alumina production, will reopen June 24. 
“All three enterprises are now analyzing the production cost to evaluate their profitability,” Manturov said. 
The agreements were reached at meetings chaired by Manturov that lasted until midnight on Monday and continued until late Tuesday afternoon. 
The talks included the management of the factories and the representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, the Leningrad regional government and the Pikalyovo administration. 
The BaselCement plant closed in January amid growing prices from suppliers and stopped paying salaries to its 2,600 employees the next month. The shutdown forced the other two plants, linked to BaselCement in the supply chain, to suspend operations, putting another 1,400 workers out of work. Putin rebuked the plant owners, including billionaire Oleg Deripaska, when he came to Pikalyovo on Thursday, ordering them to sign new contracts and transferring 41.24 million rubles ($1.3 million) to the factories to pay off wage arrears. 
President Dmitry Medvedev will hold meetings this week aimed at preventing further unrest over unpaid wages and unemployment in crisis-battered towns, a Kremlin source said Tuesday, Reuters reported.

TITLE: HSBC Targets the Rich With New Retail Banks
AUTHOR: By Courtney Weaver
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: HSBC will open five retail branches in Russia this month, including one in St. Petersburg, as part of a $200 million program to expand its local operations, bank executives announced Tuesday at a news conference in Moscow marking the first branch’s opening. 
HSBC will open four retail locations in Moscow in additional to a branch on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, and has plans to continue expanding “organically” afterward, HSBC Russia CEO Stuart Lawson said. 
The bank hasn’t had to divert any capital toward “mending fences,” Lawson said, which has allowed it to proceed with plans to offer high-end financial services in Russia after investing an initial $100 million here last September. He added that HSBC was one of the few banks worldwide that has not accepted government bailout money. 
Staged outside HSBC’s first Moscow branch alongside leafy Tverskoi Bulvar, the news conference initiated a series of kickoff events in the capital, including a swanky opening party with entry “for the select few” and a three-day outdoor concert by the Gnessin State Musical College beginning Thursday. 
While the concert is free for the public, those hoping to enjoy HSBC’s Plus Russia services must have 75,000 rubles ($2,390) worth of savings to open a basic account and at least 1.5 million rubles worth of savings for the bank’s Premiere brand, a service that sets up clients with personal account managers and allows them access to the same HSBC services globally. 
Betting that affluent Russians are still in the market for internationally focused financial services, HSBC is branding itself as a portal to the non-Sberbank world. 
“We’re not trying to say to the marketplace that we’re the cheapest debt or that we’re the most expensive deposits,” Lawson told The St. Petersburg Times in an interview following the conference. “What we’re saying is that you will get a well-priced offer that incorporates all these service elements.” 
HSBC will be following in the footsteps of Citibank, which began offering its own high-end Citigold service here in 2002. 
Declining to comment on HSBC’s competitors, Lawson said he thought that it was a perfect time for the bank to be entering the market. 
“Some people have asked if we’re too late,” he said, speaking at the conference. “I don’t think we are.” 
While the global recession has left the sector in a weakened state, HSBC has at least benefited from cheaper advertising and property prices for its new branches, said Johan Sekora, head of the bank’s personal financial services in Russia. 
What’s more, the bank is leaving its mark with a party that, while lavish this year, might have seemed run of the mill 12 months ago. 
“Sometimes it pays to be countercyclical and grow when others are leaving the market,” said Tony Mahoney, head of the bank’s international operations.

TITLE: Bad Bank Loans Growth Down
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian growth of bad bank loans is slowing for the first time since the global financial crisis started, Kommersant reported, citing Alexei Simanovsky, head of supervision and regulation at the central bank.
The slower pace “may become a tendency” and prompt the Central bank to review its delinquency forecast of 10 percent of all loans by the end of the year, the newspaper said. 
Overdue corporate loans stood at 529 billion rubles ($17 billion), or 4 percent of the total, on May 1, while bad consumer loans stood at 191 billion rubles, or 7.4 percent, Kommersant said.

TITLE: Oil Export Duties Face 39-Percent Hike
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s oil export duty may rise as much as 39 percent from July 1 after crude prices gained, the Finance Ministry said.
The levy may advance to between $210 a metric ton ($28.65 a barrel) and $212 a ton ($28.92 a barrel) from $152.80, Alexander Sakovich, the deputy head of the ministry’s customs payments department, said by telephone from Moscow on Wednesday.
Russia determines the duty using the previous month’s Urals blend crude export prices in the period from the 15th of each month to the 14th of the next. The Urals export blend averaged $62.46 a barrel from May 15 to June 9, Sakovich said. The estimate came from a price range of $67 a barrel to $70 a barrel during the next three days, he said.
Export duties on light oil products may rise to $154 to $155 a ton, while heavy product exports may be taxed at $83 to $84 a ton, Sakovich said.

TITLE: Year-on-Year Rise In Inflation Falls By Over 1 Percent
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s inflation rate in the year through June 8 fell to 7 percent from 8.1 percent a year earlier.
Consumer prices climbed 0.2 percent between June 2 and June 8, after rising by the same amount the previous week, the Moscow-based Federal Statistics Service said in an e-mailed statement on Wednesday.
Russia’s inflation rate dropped more than expected in May to 12.3 percent, a 17-month low, as the economic decline and falling wages constrained price growth.
The central bank cut its main interest rates for the third time in six weeks on June 5 to help spur growth as inflation slowed and government officials and policy makers suggested the slump in the economy of the world’s biggest oil supplier may have reached its low point.

TITLE: History Under Lock and Key
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Rzyhkov
TEXT: The only way to fight a real battle against the falsification of history — something that President Dmitry Medvedev has made a priority after creating a special commission to handle this issue — is to keep government archives as open as possible for historians. Unfortunately, the government is doing the exact opposite, depriving historians access to the most sensitive and important historical documents. Among other things, this is a violation of the Constitution. 
Medvedev’s commission “for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests” is headed by presidential chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, who will control which documents remain classified and which ones are opened to the public. There are many reasons to be concerned that the documents most essential to an open and honest study and discussion of Russian and Soviet history will remain locked up.
Former President Boris Yeltsin had a much more liberal policy toward releasing government archives. On July 7, 1993, he signed a law governing Russia’s archives that remained in force until 2004. The law stipulated that documents containing state secrets should be declassified and made available to the public in no more than 30 years. Documents containing sensitive information of a personal nature had to be released in 75 years or less. 
But under Vladimir Putin’s presidency, a new law was passed in 2004 that imposed far greater restrictions on access to state archives. The 30-year limit disappeared completely. Although Article 25 of the new law states that all documents should be made available to the public, the final decision as to which documents contain state secrets and are held under restricted access is made by the very same commission on state secrets headed by Naryshkin. This means that citizens’ constitutional right to have access to archival documents will be rendered meaningless. What’s more, since Article 25 contains no time limits for declassifying documents, the government can keep “inconvenient” or incriminating documents that it considers to be “to the detriment of Russia’s interests” classified forever. 
Strangely enough, Russia’s so-called “state secrets” are most vigorously guarded when they relate to Stalin-era documents, which remain the most highly classified. For example, historian Mark Solonin of Samara was recently denied access to the Foreign Ministry’s archives following a request to study documents connected with Soviet-Czechoslovakian relations on the eve of the Munich Agreement in 1938, even though more than 70 years have passed since those events took place.
Most of the documents connected with the 1940 execution of more than 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn, which was carried out by the NKVD under direct orders from Stalin, also remain locked away. After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin officially acknowledged the massacre and released many related documents from government archives, then-President Putin decided to do an about-face. The chief military prosecutor recently closed the investigation into the tragedy, and even the decision to halt criminal proceedings was deemed classified. The Kremlin’s decision to sweep the matter under the carpet raises the question whether Russia really wants to break with Stalin’s bloody past or whether it has a sick attachment to it.
Also classified — or simply lost or destroyed — are documents from Stalin’s Politburo of 1939 related to the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the partitioning of Poland, the annexation of the Baltic states and the Soviet invasion of Finland.
Documents pertaining to political killings abroad carried out by Soviet secret service agents are still classified, even if decades have passed since the killings took place. 
The government continues to deny access to materials documenting the behavior of Soviet forces in Europe in 1945. This automatically provokes speculation that the scale of the looting, violence and rape carried out by Soviet soldiers and officers was greater than we have been led to believe.
Also off-limits are documents connected with the mass deportation of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian citizens on the eve of the outbreak of World War II in 1941 and the expropriation of their property.
Still classified are huge stacks of documents on the Soviet gulags and NKVD crimes. Yeltsin’s decree of June 23, 1992, calling for the full declassification of materials documenting the violation of human rights — and particularly those involving political repression — remains unfulfilled. 
It is absurd that documents regarding the famine deaths of millions of people in 1932 and 1933 in southern Russia and Ukraine are still classified. Interestingly enough, Russia never tires of accusing Ukraine of falsifying history when Kiev claims that the Holodomor, or famine, was an act of Soviet (read: Russian) genocide against the Ukrainian people. Moscow maintains that Stalin’s policy of seizing food supplies was directed against all the agricultural regions of the Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — regardless of ethnicity. If that is the case, why doesn’t the Kremlin immediately declassify those documents and expose Stalin’s decisions? In this way, the Kremlin warriors for historical truth could pull the rug out from under Ukraine’s allegedly “brazen attempt to falsify history.”
As a result of all the crimes committed by the Soviet government, tens of millions of innocent citizens were killed or falsely imprisoned. Historians estimate that the number of victims in the Stalin era alone approaches 60 million people; the exact figure is difficult to pin down, and restricting archives will make it even harder to get to the truth. Most shocking is that Stalin came in third place in the “Name of Russia” nationwide television contest held in November for the most notable personalities in Russian history. Moreover, new history textbooks, scheduled to be released in the fall semester, contain a description of Stalin as being an “effective manager.” The creeping rehabilitation of Stalin has been under way for the past eight years, and restricting archives will help keep this process going strong.
The Soviet regime went to great lengths to conceal its heinous crimes from the public. Why would today’s Russia, which boasts a democratic Constitution and which has officially condemned the mass killings and imprisonment during the Soviet period, guard the secrets of the failed, bankrupt totalitarian state so diligently? Perhaps because Russia’s ruling elite view the Soviet model as being worthy of imitation? If so, we may soon see the mustachioed, grinning face of Stalin hanging in bureaucrats’ offices all across the country — side by side with Putin’s portrait.

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: The Wahhabi Rule Dagestan
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Dagestani Interior Minister Adilgirei Magomedtagirov was killed by a sniper on Friday. He had been attending the wedding of the daughter of his friend, the chief of the local Interior Ministry’s economic crimes department. The wedding was held at The Marrakesh, the most popular restaurant in Makhachkala, where guests have to make reservations for the banquet hall three months in advance and where drunken shootouts happen at least once a month.
Contrary to official reports, which claimed that the sniper used a rifle typically used by special police forces, the shots were fired from a machine gun from the ninth floor of an adjacent building. 
That explains why Magomedtagirov was riddled with bullets and why eight police officers who had been standing nearby were also injured, including Magomedtagirov’s brother, Sokhratulla, and Abduzhapar Magomedov, the head of the economic crimes department. Why would the sniper lose precious time shooting at so many people with a rifle?
The killing has generated a wave of absurd statements. For example, it has been alleged that the special forces betrayed Magomedtagirov and that several snipers took part in the attack, presumably to explain away the high number of victims. Just imagine a horde of snipers, all elbowing and stumbling over one another to use the same rifle and fire from the same vantage point to mow down Dagestan’s top police officials. Dagestani President Mukhu Aliyev even announced that the minister had been “lured” to the wedding with the help of members of the “dishonest” law enforcement agencies.
There are celebrations at The Marrakesh restaurant every day. The killers had only to rent a room in the nine-storey building across the street and wait until the minister showed up. After all, everyone knows three months in advance when and where a wedding will take place. Moreover, the likelihood that Magomedtagirov would show up at the wedding of his high-ranking subordinate’s daughter should have come as no surprise to anyone — except perhaps to Aliyev. 
All of this nonsense demonstrates one simple fact: The authorities are scared. They are scared to admit the obvious fact that the insurgents are getting hold of more money, and this means that they can now shoot better. That is why we hear so many ridiculous statements about “dishonest police” and about multiple snipers who fight over a single gun. 
Several years ago, everyone in Dagestan was happy about its new president, Aliyev, because he didn’t kill people or take bribes. He still doesn’t, but this also meant that he didn’t have the two main tools that are required to rule in Dagestan — money and guns. As a result, the power vacuum in Dagestan was quickly filled by the Wahhabi.
Interestingly enough, only a couple of years ago the Wahhabi were just a marginal force in the republic — something like the Red Brigades in Italy. But as soon as they became an influential force, people began paying them protection money. With the new funds, the Wahhabi obtained better weapons and became more proficient at hitting their targets. 
Aliyev is busy bouncing from one Moscow government office to another, trying to resolve problems over his bete noire, oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, or trying to secure a second term in office. 
Meanwhile, Russia is losing the Caucasus.

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

TITLE: Labor of love
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “Anna Karenina” has long been a favorite subject for filmmakers. The latest director to bring Leo Tolstoy’s timeless novel to the big screen is the Russian director Sergei Solovyov, whose film premiered at St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theater on May 31 after fifteen long years of work on the movie, and is to be shown in tandem with another film about the shooting of “Anna Karenina.” 
Almost all of the scenes were shot in historic interiors in St. Petersburg. 
“Two shadows hovered over me when I was filming,” said Solovyov, who was born and raised in St. Petersburg. “They were the Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel, and the Italian director Luchino Visconti. Illustrations by Vrubel for Tolstoy’s novel that I saw at the Russian Museum showed me a visible way in which I could create my Anna Karenina. And my admiration for Visconti’s interpretation of classics guided me to create a composition that is both open and true to its primary literary source.” 
In the past, various directors have chosen to focus on different themes and aspects of the novel when filming their adaptations. Solovyov said at a press conference at the Mikhailovsky Theater that in most previous versions, the classic story was no more than an opportunity to showcase a particular actress, such as Greta Garbo (1935) or Sophie Marceau (1997). Although the director said that his intention was not to adapt “Anna Karenina” to modernity, his screening shows an independent interpretation of the classic plot and presents Tolstoy’s universe from unexpected angles. 
There are around 30 screenings of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, and very few of them reflect the full complexity of the novel’s plot. “Anna Karenina” is not only a tragic love story; it is a profound narrative about two very different relationships, and family values in general. Juxtaposed with the storyline that follows the engulfing, passionate and destructive affair between Anna Karenina — a married woman — and her lover Alexei Vronsky, is the story of Konstantin Levin (Kostya) and Yekaterina Shcherbatskaya (Kitty), who have a more harmonious relationship and family life, despite life’s hurdles. 
Solovyev’s film is stylish and realistic, and recreates the refined, extravagant world of Russian high society in the late 19th century, with many memorable stylistic and modern details, including erotic subtlety in episodes such as one showing a nude Anna and Vronsky after their amorous encounter, or another in which they kiss in a gondola in Venice.
One of the key figures in the novel’s structure is Alexei Karenin, Anna’s husband. His character and transformation through Anna’s infidelity provide an example of forgiveness in accordance with genuine orthodox principles, which were a crucial part of Tolstoy’s outlook.
The character of Anna is played by Tatyana Drubich, Solovyov’s ex-wife, who is well known for her parts in Solovyov’s previous films. Oleg Yankovsky, who died at the end of last month, gives a brilliant performance as Karenin and is the highlight of the film. Yaroslav Boyko, who has made a name for himself due to his roles in action movies, looks like a man for whom winning is the most important thing in life as Vronsky. 
Solovyov’s “Anna Karenina” took about 15 years to film, during which time the director made a parallel film about the shooting of “Anna Karenina.” 
“When faced with another financial and creative crisis during shooting, I suddenly saw my film with irony, set apart from all the processes, and decided to make a film about the difficulties endured by me and all my team,” he said. “So I made ‘Assa 2,’ featuring all the heroes from my first ‘Assa’ (1987).” 
Assa is a cult film for some generations, featuring the then-underground music of Boris Grebenshchikov, Viktor Tsoy and others. “Assa 2” will feature the infamous music of local rock musician Sergei “Shnur” Shnurov, who is known for his use of obscene language. The sequel follows an actress named Alika who is playing Anna Karenina in a film version, and many moments in the film illustrate the impossibility of finishing the film. 
Solovyov said that “Assa 2” could “help” audiences who are unfamiliar with Anna Karenina and Leo Tolstoy to learn about them. Unfortunately, he admitted, “today there are a lot of young people in Russia who haven’t read the famous novel, and maybe by using novel methods such as films like ‘Assa 2’ that are full of modern culture and music, we can attract young people to serious literature and make them watch the film ‘Anna Karenina.’”
The director plans to show both “Assa 2” and “Anna Karenina” at cinemas and presents them as one project. “Both films should be released soon,” Solovyov said, “and I have already made an English version of ‘Anna Karenina,’ because there is great interest in the film from foreign producers.”

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: With the St. Petersburg Economic Forum having been and gone, <strong>Duran Duran</strong>, which played an outdoor concert on Palace Square last week, now seems to be a better choice as a “gift from the Forum to guests and residents of St. Petersburg],” as the event’s official web site put it.
Last year’s “gift,” <strong>Roger Waters</strong>, who spent much of his career as a member of Pink Floyd criticizing capitalism, tried hard to persuade the media that he had no idea what his concert was in aid of — after performing on Palace Square to an audience that included tycoons such as Roman Abramovich (who traveled to the city on his state-of-the-art private yacht) occupying VIP seats. 
However, the promoter was quick to comment that, of course, Waters was informed about the details of his local concert well in advance. This year, a local publication paid close attention to Duran Duran’s 2003 song, “What Happens Tomorrow,” which it said could serve as a sort of comment on this year’s gathering of the rich and powerful. 
“But nobody knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow,” sang the British band in the song, which they performed close to the end of the show. “We try not to show how frightened we are.”
Meanwhile, an interesting scandal is developing around a party held on the Avrora Cruiser museum on the Friday of the forum and attended by businessmen and bureaucrats including St. Petersburg Governor <strong>Valentina Matviyenko</strong>, Delovoi Peterburg newspaper reported.
The music program was provided by foul-mouthed singer <strong>Sergei Shnurov</strong>, who has been frequently seen entertaining all kinds of bigwigs during the past six years, despite his heroic punk past as the leader of local rock group Leningrad.
On Wednesday it was reported that the Leningrad Military District Prosecutor was checking information about the party on the historic battleship, which is the property of the Defense Ministry, while the director of the Avrora museum, which is a branch of the Central Naval Museum, denied he had any idea that the party was being planned, claiming he had a day off on Friday (see story, front cover).
Even though a concert that the local artists on hunger strike near City Hall were planning was canceled because of the rain, artists and musicians conducted events in support of the arrested Novosibirsk artist <strong>Artyom Loskutov</strong> in Novosibirsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg on Tuesday. 
Perhaps due to the protests, or perhaps not, a court ordered the release of Loskutov on Wednesday — at least until his case is heard. The local artists said they would perhaps end their hunger strike by Wednesday evening, when the governor’s Human Rights Committee was due to look into their complaint about mass arrests on May Day.
Local concerts this week include <strong>Zappa Plays Zappa</strong>, Dweezil Zappa’s homage to his legendary father Frank Zappa (Oktyabrsky, Friday) and <strong>Foreigner</strong> (Ice Palace, Tuesday), as well as Finnish bands <strong>Pan Sonic</strong> (A2, Friday) and <strong>Jesse</strong> (Achtung Baby, Sunday).

<em>— By Sergey Chernov</em>

TITLE: Tajikistan’s disco dancer
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: KOLOMNA — Baimurat Allaberiyev, a diminutive native of Tajikistan who has herded sheep, picked cotton and toiled in construction, hardly looks like Russia’s latest musical sensation.
But Allaberiyev’s remarkable talent sets him apart from the millions of Central Asians who come to Russia to escape crushing poverty at home.
A musical prodigy, he can perform Bollywood show-stoppers as a one-man band, equipped with nothing but an uncanny falsetto and a metal bucket.
That — and the miraculous star-making powers of the Internet — have turned this 37-year-old into a cult celebrity here.
Allaberiyev won fame after shaky videos shot with mobile phones surfaced on the Internet that showed him performing songs like “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” from the 1983 Bollywood classic “Disco Dancer”.
Set against grim backdrops like a construction site or a storeroom full of boxes, the videos became a viral sensation. They have now been viewed more than 400,000 times on YouTube, the movie-sharing website.
Allaberiyev — who is widely known as “Tajik Jimmy” despite the fact that he is actually an ethnic Uzbek — now has a record deal and has given concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
His success is striking given that Central Asians suffer widespread discrimination in Russia and are often targeted in racist attacks.
Despite his budding musical career, Allaberiyev remains down-to-earth and has not quit his day job hauling cardboard boxes at the Rio shopping centre in Kolomna, a town 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Moscow.
“I can’t quit working here,” Allaberiyev said in an interview, surrounded by the sleek glass and metal of the shopping mall. “But if someone asks me to do a concert, I’ll go and perform.”
But fame has led to surreal changes for Allaberiyev, who has been compared to Susan Boyle, the middle-aged Scottish woman who soared to fame when her audition on “Britain’s Got Talent” became a smash hit on YouTube.
Allaberiyev spoke to AFP the same day he was filmed by a television crew and visited by a local newspaper photographer.
He recalled how his talents were noticed after he arrived in Russia in 2008 to build the Rio shopping centre, toiling side by side with laborers from across the former Soviet Union.
“When I worked on the construction site, I used to sing songs to myself. Then all the guys — Russians, Uzbeks, Tajiks — would come up and film me,” said Allaberiyev, who looks much older than his 37 years.
“And they’d say, Jimmy, now we’re going to put that on the Internet. And it got on the Internet and lots of people downloaded my songs and heard them.... And that’s how I became a star.”
Music came early to Allaberiyev, who was born on a collective farm in what was then the Soviet republic of Tajikistan, close to the Afghan border, in a family where he was one of 10 brothers and sisters.
Encouraged by a musician uncle, Allaberiyev enrolled in after-school music classes, while a projectionist brother introduced him to the colourful world of Indian musical films.
Relatives noticed that Allaberiyev could break out into a falsetto and sing the female parts of Bollywood songs, as well as the male ones.
No less impressive was his ability to memorize a song within several days by repeatedly listening to it on tape, and then re-create it with perfect rhythm, without even knowing the language.
“My uncle used to play drums. He used to tell me, when you grow up, I’ll buy you drums and a synthesizer,” Allaberiyev said.
But history interfered when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and civil war broke out in newly independent Tajikistan. The country plunged into deep poverty.
Allaberiyev spent some time herding sheep in Tajikistan, then picking cotton in more prosperous Kazakhstan.
He sang for friends and performed at the occasional wedding, but was only noticed by a broader public after coming to Russia.
The videos that brought him fame reflect the grittiness of migrant workers’ lives as well as Allaberiyev’s exuberant love of performance.
In one movie, after he is done singing, a man dressed in a suit walks into the storeroom and commands: “Let’s go. Get dressed and get out of here.”
Allaberiyev went mainstream after local journalists tracked him down and one of them introduced him to a music producer, Ilya Bortnyuk, head of the Light Music promoting company in St. Petersburg.
Bortnyuk agreed to let “Tajik Jimmy” be the opening act for the politically outspoken British electronica group Asian Dub Foundation when it played in St. Petersburg in April.
When Allaberiyev’s performance got an enthusiastic reception from the hip club-going crowd, Bortnyuk was so impressed that he signed a record deal with him that same night.
“I consider him a very talented person,” Bortnyuk told AFP.
The producer said he would seek to preserve Allaberiyev’s aura of raw talent as they worked together in the recording studio.
“We will not impose any strict conditions on him. For instance, he might not need any instrument other than an aluminum bucket,” Bortnyuk said.
Despite his new-found fame, Allaberiyev faces the same risks as other Central Asians in Russia.
One April evening, he was riding a train when he was attacked by a group of strangers who knocked out his two front teeth.
Allaberiyev said the attackers were not skinheads and that he was assaulted “for no reason” — but violence against Central Asians motivated by racist hatred is frequent in Russia.
In fact, before Allaberiyev’s rise to fame, the best-known Internet video featuring a Tajik was perhaps “The Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani,” a notorious clip apparently created by Russian ultranationalists.
The video, which surfaced online in 2007, shows masked men decapitating one dark-skinned man and shooting another in the head after they are forced to kneel under a Nazi flag.
But Allaberiyev says he feels comfortable in Russia, and he says his fame has helped shield him from another problem that plagues migrants — police harassment.
For many Central Asians in Russia, being stopped by the police means they must pay a bribe or face jail and deportation.
But not Allaberiyev. “The police all know me,” he said. “They say, Jimmy, you’re a good singer, you’re our star! And they let me go.”

TITLE: Tea for two
AUTHOR: By Rachel Wetherfield
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nestled on the second floor of the iconic building opposite Kazan Cathedral that formerly housed the Singer company and is now home to the popular bookshop Dom Knigi, this hidden gem is a refreshing change from the monotonous franchises found elsewhere on Nevsky. 
Recently renovated, with an impressive cake counter on the right as you walk in, the interior is characterized by dark wooden circular tables, gleaming white china, an authentic-looking parquet to match the rest of the shop and walls and chair covers in a deep green color scheme, so that guests can almost imagine themselves transported back to St. Petersburg’s glorious imperial past.
The serving staff, dressed in green and black to match the decor, were falling over themselves to serve us. Their willingness to speak English, with the courteous touch of inquiring which language we would prefer, suggests that the caf? is no stranger to the tourist trade.
The window seats, with their impressive view of the fountain in front of Kazan Cathedral, are certain to be the most coveted, but the caf? does not lack space, and stretches beyond the first hall into a second, much larger room with extensive seating and a bar serving alcoholic drinks.
The clientele is an eclectic mix: two English students at a neighboring table were soon replaced by a quartet of immaculately dressed Russian women who appeared to be St. Petersburg’s answer to “Sex and the City,” while across the aisle, a young Russian family looked to be enjoying a quiet  lunch.
The menu is attractively presented on a single sheet of card, with a slightly pretentious nod to its surroundings in the form of literary quotes in both Russian and English decorating its edges. It offers a range of sandwiches (350 rubles, $11), both European and Russian soups (150 to 175 rubles, $5 to $5.50), fresh salads (175 to 450 rubles, $5.50-$14.50) and a few hot dishes, including omelets and blini.
The Caesar Salad with jumbo prawns (450 rubles, $14.50) was beautifully presented in a deep white china dish, garnished with strips of parmesan cheese and the ubiquitously Russian touch of a sprig of dill, but the toughness of the prawns and the rather-too-generous sauce somewhat marred the overall experience. A much better bet was the solyanka soup (175 rubles, $5.50), which was both well-presented and flavorsome, followed by a toasted tuna sandwich (350 rubles, $11), the attractive presentation of which was only tainted by the somewhat incongruous addition of fluorescent cocktail sticks.
Having walked past the shiny glass counter containing tempting pastries and gateaux on the way in, diners may find it impossible to leave without sampling them. The wait staff are happy to offer personal recommendations about the impressive selection of cakes, which unfortunately are not listed on the menu. 
The hot chocolate with chili (150 rubles; $5) was divine — served in the Russian style and more like a cup of melted chocolate than many Western equivalents, and topped off by the chili’s warming kick. The cappuccino cake was a decadent accompaniment to this, though it was a little pricey (250 rubles, $8) and slightly dry. The alcoholic drinks menu is separate, and far more extensive than the range of specialty teas.

TITLE: Magic Have 'Skip' in Step in Finals Victory
AUTHOR: By Antonio Gonzalez
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ORLANDO, Florida — Orlando Magic skipped past their point guard controversy in style Tuesday night.
Rafer Alston helped the Magic get back into the NBA finals, scoring 20 points to lead them to a 108-104 win over the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 3.
Alston made eight of 12 shots for the Magic, who shot a finals-record 75 percent in the first half and a crisp 62.5 for the game. It was Orlando’s best offensive performance of the series, and by far the most efficient for its struggling backcourt.
“I just wanted to come in and be aggressive tonight and set the tone,” Alston said.
Alston put an end to any friction over All-Star Jameer Nelson’s return trimming his playing time — if only briefly — the only way he knows how.
The former streetballer on New York’s blacktops showcased some of his moves from the days when he was known as “Skip to my Lou.” Crissing and crossing with his razzle-dazzle moves, he was blowing by every Lakers defender, including Kobe Bryant.
Behind-the-back dribbles. Floating jumpers. A no-look pass. Alston was right back in his element.
For the first time all series, he made the Lakers pay for slipping screens and double-teaming center Dwight Howard. He added four assists and two rebounds in 37 minutes of play.
“He’s tough,” Magic forward Hedo Turkoglu said. “When he gets it going, we’re almost unstoppable.”
That’s the way it’s been all season.
Alston boosted the Magic’s championship hopes when he was acquired from the Houston Rockets at the trade deadline. He had 26 points in Game 4 of the conference finals against Cleveland to help the Magic take a 3-1 series lead.
But helping Orlando avoid an 0-3 hole — and get its first finals win after losing its first six games — might be his biggest comeback performance yet.
He also may have ended the debate about who should start at point guard for the Magic.
When Nelson returned for the finals after being out since early February recovering from what was then-called season-ending shoulder surgery, he cut into his replacement’s minutes enough that Alston publicly voiced his displeasure after Game 1. Alston had just 10 points in the first two games of the series combined on 3-for-17 shooting.
A win pushed those struggles aside.
“Just find a rhythm and stay in it,” Alston said. “That was the key. I never once was furious or upset. ... Tonight I was able to find a rhythm, and keep it going when I came back in.”
He and Nelson shot so poorly in Game 2 that coach Stan Van Gundy benched them for most of the fourth quarter and had 6-foot-10 forward Turkoglu run the point. The Magic coach has been desperate for some relief, resorting to a pep talk for Alston that even he admitted was far-fetched.
“I’m a motivational genius, that’s what I am,” Van Gundy joked. “I thought for two days about what to say to him, and I said, ‘Play your game.’ You can write that down. That’s a quote. It took me two days to come up with that.”

TITLE: Sub at Air Crash Scene To Hunt Black Boxes
AUTHOR: By Marco Sibaja and Greg Keller
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RECIFE, Brazil — A French nuclear submarine reached the crash zone of Air France Flight 447 on Wednesday to comb the Atlantic depths for black boxes that should help determine what brought the Airbus down in the sea off Brazil with 228 people on board.
The slow-moving attack sub Emeraude will be able to trawl patches of about 13 square miles (35 square kilometers) a day trying to pick up the boxes’ acoustic beacons or “pingers,” which are expected to start to fade 30 days after the May 31 crash, French armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck said Wednesday.
Brazilian searchers said they have now recovered 41 bodies from the scene. The remains are expected to be flown Wednesday to Recife, where investigators hope to identify them and find clues into the crash based on the victims’ injuries.
Without key information from the Airbus 330’s missing data recorders, investigators have focused on the possibility that external speed monitors — Pitot tubes — iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers as it flew into thunderstorms.
Wreckage and the bodies were found about 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast.
Airlines around the world have begun replacing Pitot tubes on their aircraft. And the European Aviation Safety Agency, responsible for certification of Airbus planes, said Tuesday that it was “analyzing data with a view to issuing mandatory corrective action” following reports about the possible malfunctioning of the Pitot tubes.
It said this action should not prejudge the outcome of the investigation into the Air France crash and that the causes of the accident are still unknown.And it said the A330 and other Airbus aircraft are safe to operate.
It issued a safety information bulletin on Tuesday as a precautionary measure reminding operators of the correct procedure if speed indications are unreliable or missing.
An important part of the investigation relies on a burst of 24 automatic messages the plane sent during the last minutes of the flight. 
The signals showed the plane’s autopilot was not on, officials said, but it was not clear if the autopilot had been switched off by the pilots or had stopped working due to conflicting airspeed readings.
The L-shaped metal Pitot tubes jut from the wing or fuselage of a plane, and are usually heated to prevent icing. The pressure of air entering the tubes lets internal sensors measure the speed and angle of flight. 
A malfunctioning tube could mislead computers controlling the plane to dangerously accelerate or decelerate.
Air France said it began replacing the tubes on its A330 and A340 jets in May after pilots reported several incidents of icing leading to a loss of airspeed data, and that it had already replaced the Pitots in smaller A320 jets after similar problems were reported.

TITLE: Kaka Aims For New Era With Real Madrid
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ROME — Brazil’s 2007 world footballer of the year Kaka completed his transfer from Serie A side AC Milan to Real Madrid late on Monday, both clubs announced.
The 27-year-old signed a six year contract with the Spanish giants for a reported fee of 65 million euros which both clubs refused to confirm.
If it is 65 million euros it would be the second biggest ever transfer - after that of French great Zinedine Zidane, who cost Real Madrid 75million euros in 2001.
“I wanted to stay (at Milan) but the world crisis affected my decision. I knew I’d only leave Milan to play for Real,” the player said at a press conference in the Brazilian city of Recife.
“I will be part of a new Real Madrid that will once again be champions in Europe and in Spain,”
“It will be a new challenge for me and to live up to all the expectations placed on me will be motivation enough.
“I want to help write a new page in the history of the club by winning trophies with them.”
Kaka had earlier undergone in Brazil a problem-free medical attended by Real Madrid’s Dr Juan Carlos Hernandez as well as the Brazilian squad’s doctor, Jose Luiz Ronco.
Real chairman Florentino Perez has established a 200 million euro war chest for players, vowing to create a “spectacular team” capable of overtaking arch-rivals Barcelona - who won the title, Champions League and Spanish Cup in coach Pep Guardiola’s first season in charge - next season.
Perez oversaw the era of the “Galacticos” when he was in charge at Real between 2000 and 2006, when world stars such as Zidane, England’s David Beckham and Brazil’s Ronaldo were attracted to the club.
Kaka has been at AC Milan since arriving from Sao Paolo in 2003, scoring 70 goals in Serie A and 23 in the Champions League.
He has won the 2007 Champions League with them, the 2004 league title, two European Super Cups and the world club championship in 2007.
He had been the subject of a massive transfer offer from English Premier League side Manchester City in January but the deal eventually came to nothing.
Kaka, who was in Brazil on World Cup duty for his country, said that although a new page in his career was opening up he would always have a soft spot for AC Milan despite their decision to sell him.
A statement from AC Milan read: “It will be very difficult to fill the void that will be left by Kaka.
“We offer him the most cordial and affectionate wishes for the continuation of his sporting career.
“AC Milan thank the man and the great champion Kaka for his decisive contribution to the many victories achieved in the six years of his commitment.”

TITLE: Aid Workers Among 11 Dead in Hotel Blast
AUTHOR: By Riaz Khan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Investigators searched a wrecked luxury hotel in northwestern Pakistan for evidence Wednesday after a bold suicide bombing killed 11 people, including aid workers, in what the UN condemned as a “heinous terrorist attack.”
Elsewhere in the volatile region, security forces killed 70 suspected militants in an area close to two major Taliban tribal strongholds, intelligence officials told The Associated Press.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the late Tuesday’s bombing of the Peshawar Pearl Continental, but the blast followed Taliban threats to carry out major attacks in large cities to avenge an army offensive against insurgents in the nearby Swat Valley.
At least three suicide attackers shot their way past guards and set off the explosion outside the hotel, a favorite spot for foreigners and well-off Pakistanis and a site that the U.S. was considering for its consulate.
The attack reduced a section of the hotel to concrete rubble and twisted steel and left a huge crater in a parking lot. Senior police official Safwat Ghayur said counterterrorism experts, police and intelligence agents were combing the rubble for clues Wednesday.
The Pearl Continental, affectionately called the “PC” by Pakistanis, is the ritziest hotel in the rugged frontier city of 2.2 million.
Security camera footage show the attackers in two vehicles: a white sedan and a small truck. The vehicles pull up to a guard post outside the hotel, with the car in front. A puff of smoke appears near the car window. A guard collapses, apparently shot. The vehicles move into the hotel compound. A flash and eruption of dust follow seconds later.
The truck was carrying more than half a ton of explosives, senior police officer Shafqatullah Malik estimated.
The chaotic scene echoed a bombing last year at Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel that killed more than 50 people. Both hotels were favored places for foreigners and elite Pakistanis to stay and socialize, making them high-profile targets for militants despite tight security.
Both hotels are owned by Sadruddin Hashwani, who vowed to rebuild quickly and claimed the government was partly to blame for the attack by not providing better security.
“This is (the) government’s failure,” Hashwani told Geo TV, claiming that government ministers get much better security escorts than the high-profile Pearl. “Government needs to think seriously about who they have to give security to — foreigners or the ministers. Half of the hotel’s occupants were foreigners.”
North West Frontier Province senior minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour denied the government was at fault and said closed-circuit TV footage showed the hotel had removed some security barriers.
“I do not buy that there was any security lapse. There was enough security arrangements made by the government,” Bilour said. “I would say that this was a failure on part of the hotel management’s security. We are at war. Terrorists are out to cause big losses.”
In Washington, two senior U.S. officials said the State Department had been in negotiations with the hotel’s owners to either purchase or sign a long-term lease for the facility to house a new American consulate. The officials said they were not aware of any sign that U.S. interest in the compound had played a role in its being targeted.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were not public and had not been completed. They said no immediate decision had been made on whether to go ahead with plans to base the consulate on the hotel grounds.
The exact death toll remained elusive Wednesday.
North West Frontier Province Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told AP that officials reported 11 fatalities. Other police and government officials could confirm only five dead.
The three attackers also died, said an intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. UN spokeswoman Amena Kamaal said three bodies pulled from the rubble Wednesday were two Pakistani government staffers whose work was funded by the UN’s population agency, along with their driver.
The UN also identified staff members among the dead — Aleksandar Vorkapic, 44, from Belgrade, Serbia, and UNICEF staffer Perseveranda So, 52, from the Philippines.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday condemned the hotel bombing as a “heinous terrorist attack.”
UN officials declined to comment Wednesday on whether they might scale back their programs in Pakistan. Such a move could have significant consequences because of a refugee crisis sparked by the military offensive in Swat, where more than 2 million people have been displaced.
“Humanitarian workers around the world are coming under increasing attack, and it is the poor, the uprooted and the vulnerable who will suffer the most by their loss,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said. “Now, once again, we are forced to ask ourselves, ‘How we can meet their urgent needs while ensuring the safety of our own humanitarian staff?’ It is a truly terrible dilemma.”
Hiro Ueki, a UN spokesman in Pakistan, said besides the two UN staffers killed, four were wounded.
“We have moved most of the UN staff to Islamabad in view of what happened yesterday,” he said. “Only a skeleton staff is staying in Peshawar at the moment. We are reviewing the security situation.”

TITLE: Chelsea Make Offer for Atletico Ace Aguero
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Chelsea have made an offer of 50 million euros for Atletico Madrid’s highly-rated Argentinian striker Sergio Aguero, according to English media reports on Wednesday.
The 21-year-old, who scored 17 goals last season to help Atletico claim a place in the Champions League, is one of the hottest properties in European football.
He said earlier this month that he wanted to stay in the Spanish capital but urged Atletico’s owners to invest in player reinforcement to ensure the club was capable of making an impact among Europe’s elite, suggesting he could be attracted by a switch to a club challenging for major honours every season.
The size of Chelsea’s reported offer will severely test the resolve of the Atletico board to keep Aguero, who is the son-in-law of Diego Maradona.
Chelsea’s desire to rejuvenate an ageing squad has also resulted in moves to sign Manchester City’s 19-year-old Daniel Sturridge, who is a free agent from the end of this month.
Sturridge is set to become the best-paid teenager in English football after turning down a reported 45,000-pounds-a-week offer from City in favour of negotiating a deal with Chelsea.
City would be entitled to compensation for developing the player and will argue that Sturridge is in the same category as Theo Walcott, who could eventually cost Arsenal 12.5 million pounds under the terms of his transfer from Southampton.
The amount Chelsea will have to pay may have to be decided by a Football Association tribunal if the clubs cannot agree a price.
Chelsea are also said to be leading a three-horse race for the signature of their former defender Glen Johnson, who has established himself as England’s first-choice right-back under Fabio Capello.
Liverpool and Tottenham are also believed to be interested in signing the 24-year-old, who will cost considerably more than the four million pounds it cost Pompey to make what was initially a loan deal from Chelsea permanent in 2007.
Liverpool’s position in the transfer market is unclear because of uncertainty over the finances of their American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who face a July 24 deadline to refinance 350 million pounds of debt they used to acquire the club.
Hicks and Gillett have played down fears the banks will call in their loans and manager Rafael Benitez, who remains hopeful of signing Spain striker David Silva from his former club Valencia, has confirmed that he has money to spend.
“Clearly we don’t have much to spend but I think we have enough money to add the one or two players that we need,” Benitez said.
Reds midfielders Javier Mascherano and Xabi Alonso have attracted interest from Barcelona and Real Madrid respectively but Benitez has ruled out selling any elements of the ‘spine’ of his team.
Any prospect of first-choice midfielders being sold receded when England’s Gareth Barry, who came close to joining Liverpool last summer, opted for Manchester City’s cash over the chance of Champions League football at Anfield.

TITLE: Israeli Woman Junks $1 Million Mattress by Mistake
TEXT: JERUSALEM — An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress with $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites, Israeli media reported Wednesday.
The woman told Army Radio that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise on Monday and threw out the old one, only to discover that her mother had hidden her life savings inside. She was identified only as Anat, a resident of Tel Aviv.
When she went to look for the mattress it had already been taken by garbage men, she said. Subsequent searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel.

TITLE: Hayes Hopes For Title Fight in July With Klitschko
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — David Haye hopes his world heavyweight title fight against Wladimir Klitschko can be rescheduled for July.
The British fighter pulled out of the scheduled June 20 bout against the IBF and WBO champion on Wednesday after injuring his back in training.
The fight was scheduled to take place before a sellout crowd of more than 60,000 at Schalke’s soccer stadium in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
Haye’s manager, Adam Booth, said Thursday the boxer was returning to Britain for treatment and hoped a new fight date would be arranged.
“It looks like there will be only a three-week delay from the original fight date, which hopefully means that Wladimir will only postpone the fight, rather than cancel it,” Booth said in statement.
Haye is 22-1 and has recently moved up from cruiserweight. Klitschko, considered the best of the heavyweights, is 52-3.
Klitschko’s manager, Bernd Boente, said the fight could be moved to late July.

TITLE: Car Bomb Kills 35 in Shiite Area in South Iraq
AUTHOR: By Hamid Ahmed
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — A car bomb ripped through a market district Wednesday in a mainly Shiite area in southern Iraq, killing as many as 35 people and wounding dozens, officials said.
The blast is the latest in a series of high-profile explosions that have raised concerns about a resurgence of violence as the U.S. military faces a June 30 deadline to withdraw from urban areas in Iraq.
The explosives-laden car was parked in the center of the commercial area in the town of Bathaa when it blew up about 9 a.m., according to police.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, but car bombings are a signature of al-Qaida in Iraq. The U.S. military has warned the Sunni terror network could be expected to try to foment sectarian violence in a bid to upset security gains ahead of the U.S. withdrawal.
Persistent violence as the Americans begin to withdraw has raised new questions about the readiness of Iraqi forces to take over their own security.
Officials gave conflicting death tolls Wednesday, as is common in the chaotic aftermath of bombings in Iraq. They also faced the difficulty of gathering information from a small town.
A spokesman for the Nasiriyah hospital, Kadhim al-Obeidi, said 35 people were killed and 45 wounded.
An Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to release the information, put the death toll at 28.
The town is near Nasiriyah, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Baghdad.
The area has been the site of past violence — mainly fierce internal fighting between Shiite militia factions before a cease-fire took hold.
Also, a Nov. 12, 2003, bombing struck the military barracks of the Italian forces who were stationed in the area at the time, killing at least 19 Italians.
Dhi Qar province, of which Nasiriyah is the administrative capital, was the second province to be transferred from U.S.-led coalition control to the Iraqis in September 2006.
A U.S.-Iraqi security pact that took effect on Jan. 1 requires all American forces to pull back from urban areas by the end of this month and from the entire country by 2012.
The Iraqi government has agreed to hold a national referendum on the agreement as required by parliament but said it wanted to hold the vote early next year instead of this summer as originally planned.
Tuesday’s Cabinet decision, which needs approval from Iraq’s parliament, means the referendum would be held together with national parliamentary elections on Jan. 30.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the move would “save time and money.”
The inclusion of the referendum met a demand by the main Sunni bloc in parliament and raised the possibility that the deal could be rejected if anti-U.S. anger and demands for an immediate withdrawal grew.