SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1502 (64), Friday, August 21, 2009
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TITLE: PM Backs Infrastructure Spending After Tragedy
AUTHOR: By Nataliya Vasilyeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered Thursday that key parts of Russia’s aging infrastructure be checked and upgraded after a power plant accident in Siberia left scores feared dead and strained the vast region’s power supply.
The confirmed death toll in the Russian power plant accident rose to 17 Thursday after three more bodies were found, and harrowing escape stories emerged from the few survivors.
Over 1,000 rescue workers searched the massive Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant in southern Siberia for the 57 people who remain missing and are feared dead. On Thursday, workers pumped out the remaining water from the damaged engine room to try to find more bodies.
A powerful explosion Monday blew out walls and caused the power plant’s turbine room to flood. Three of the plant’s 10 turbines were reportedly destroyed and three others were damaged. The cause of the accident is unclear but officials cited a faulty turbine and a rise of pressure in the pipes as possible triggers.
“The tragic event at the Sayano-Shushenskaya have clearly shown how much we need to do to ensure safety of hydropower facilities,” Putin told a Cabinet session in Moscow. “We need to conduct a thorough check of all strategic and vital parts of infrastructure and work out a plan for their regular upgrade.”
He also emphasized the need to make sure that workers observe industrial safety standards.
“In our country ... discipline in dealing with technology is very low,” he noted, adding that he would visit Sayano-Shushenskaya, Russia’s largest power plant, on Friday.
The crippled power station has been shut down since the accident and could be out of service for a significant time as repairs are made.
The accident prompted new warnings about increasing risks posed by Russia’s aging infrastructure.
“(This accident) exposed the fairly fragile state of key parts of the infrastructure,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at the UralSib investment bank. “Time and time again in Russia it does take an accident to spur the government into taking some actions in terms of improving safety or regulations.”
Columnist Sergei Leskov wrote in the Izvestia paper that the Russia government has failed to modernize the nation’s crumbling Soviet-built infrastructure, threatening the nation’s security.
“Equipment and infrastructure are horrendously worn-out and neglected. An urge for modernization and support for high technology are no longer an issue of economic security — they are badly needed for the survival of Russian citizens,” he wrote.
The first victims of the accident were buried Wednesday in the nearby town of Cheryomushki, which has been deeply shaken because whole families worked at the plant.
Nikolai Shchip, covered head-to-toe in oil from a destroyed turbine, was blown away by the bursting water into the Yenisei River, but somehow made it to the shore, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets daily.
Shchip’s 28-year-old son Roman, who also was working at the plant Monday morning, never got out of the engine room. Roman’s pregnant wife Yelena was rushed to hospital once she heard about the accident and gave birth to a daughter, the newspaper said.
Another worker, Alexander Podkopayev, spent 15 agonizing hours in icy water at a flooded section of the plant, surviving thanks to a 10-centimeter air space under the ceiling, according to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
Authorities acknowledged days ago that people who are still missing are most likely dead.
Sayano-Shushenskaya is Russia’s largest power plant, providing 10 percent of Siberia’s energy needs, and a key energy supplier for Siberian metallurgy.
The accident caused power shortages in several towns and major factories, but by Wednesday the power supply in Siberia had been restored with the help of rerouted supplies from other power plants.
Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said it would cost 40 billion rubles ($1.2 billion) to rebuild the power plant’s engine room.
Oleg Deripaska, director general of aluminum producer RusAl, toured the damaged plant Wednesday and talked with Russia’s energy ministry and plant owner RusHydro about securing energy supplies during the upcoming repairs, which are expected to take up to two years.
More than 70 percent of all the energy from the hydroelectric plant goes to four RusAl smelters, which are believed to be the company’s most efficient plants. RusAl is the world’s largest aluminum producer.
The accident also produced an oil slick that stretched over 100 kilometers down the Yenisei.

TITLE: Arctic Sea Crew, Hijackers Interrogated
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators immediately whisked the crew of the Arctic Sea away for interrogation Thursday after they flew into Moscow, as officials tried to determine whether the 11 seamen were involved in their ship’s curious hijacking.
The news deepened the mystery surrounding the cargo ship, which the Russian military said it had freed Monday off West Africa weeks after it went missing. Officials said later they were withholding details about the ship’s whereabouts in an effort to help the rescue effort.
Russian federal investigators said they were questioning the sailors and the eight suspected hijackers. Interfax news agency said both groups had been brought to the notorious Lefortovo prison run by the FSB — the main KGB successor agency.
Interfax cited an unidentified law enforcement official as saying the crew would be set free if the investigators confirm they weren't involved in the hijacking.
The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, confirmed that 11 crew and eight suspected hijackers returned to Moscow from Cape Verde on Thursday and said the ship’s captain and three other crew members stayed on the ship.
The Arctic Sea had been due to dock in Algeria on Aug. 4 and unload its cargo of timber, but the Kremlin said the ship was being brought to Russia’s Black Sea Port of Novorossiisk for further investigation. The Kremlin statement on Thursday made no mention of any plan to stopover in Algeria.
State-run Vesti-24 TV showed footage of what it said were the air force planes arriving at the Chkalovsky air base field outside Moscow, and men believed to be the hijackers being escorted by special forces soldiers.
Earlier, men identified as Arctic Sea crew members told Vesti that the ship and its cargo of 1.3 million euros ($1.8 million) worth of timber was seized in the Baltic Sea by armed gunmen.
One unidentified man told Vesti that a crew member sent a text message saying the ship had been hijacked, but the hijackers then forced the captain at gunpoint to report that everything was normal on board.
Vesti also showed men it identified as the suspected hijackers in handcuffs being led by Russian marines to buses on the Cape Verde island of Sal. Russia says four of the detained hijackers were Estonians, while the others were from Russia and Latvia.
The group was reportedly brought to Moscow in three heavylift Il-76 transport planes, each capable of carrying 40 metric tons (44 tons) of cargo.
It was unclear, however, why three planes were needed to fly a small group to Moscow, and why one of Russia’s largest planes — often used to transport heavy weapons and other bulky cargo — were used for the operation.
Officials have said the hijackers demanded a ransom and threatened to blow up the freighter if their demands were not met. But Russian and European maritime experts have cast doubt on the ransom reports and speculation has grown that the freighter was carrying undeclared or even contraband cargo, possibly weapons or drugs.
Those suspicions have been fueled by the thin trickle of information from the Russian government.
Yevgeny Limarev, a former Russian security agent, said the Arctic Sea was likely at the center of a struggle between competing Russian business and Kremlin clans, and the Kremlin was forced to intervene to prevent an international scandal.
The ship left a Finnish port on July 21 with a crew of 15 Russians. More than a week later, Swedish police said they received a report that masked men had raided the ship in the Baltic Sea and beaten the crew before speeding off 12 hours later in their inflatable craft.
The Maltese-flagged freighter gave no indication of any difficulties or change in its route during radio contact while passing through the English Channel on July 28. Signals from the ship’s tracking device were picked up off the French coast late the next day.
A Swedish police spokeswoman, Linda Widmark, said Swedish authorities last had contact with the ship on July 31, in a brief telephone call with someone who identified himself as the captain.
“It was a very short phone call, it was cut off, but it seemed as if everything was normal,” she told The Associated Press.
A Russian company, Renaissance Insurance, said it received a ransom demand for $1.5 million on Aug. 3.
The Arctic Sea was operated by the Finnish company Solchart, which has Russian management and a sister company providing technical support in the Russian city of Arkhangelsk, the home of all 15 crew.

TITLE: 'Ghost Bus' Takes Uzbek Migrants on Journey to Russia
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirovalev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BUKHARA, Uzbekistan — On paper, the bus does not exist.
It has no schedule, and no route. It shows up mysteriously, and just as mysteriously, the dozens of men who await it know when it is coming.
Every year, the ghost bus — and its many cousins throughout Uzbekistan — transports hundreds of migrants to Russia, crossing two state borders and 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) of steppe, desert and farmland. The men it carries do not exist on the books either, but Russia needs their labor, and they need the money.
Russia’s enormous oil wealth and its plummeting population have turned it into the world’s biggest immigration destination after the U.S., attracting 10 to 15 million labor migrants a year from former Soviet states. Uzbeks make up between two million and four million of them. They build houses, till the soil and work in Siberian oil towns and even on the Pacific Coast, eight time zones and 10,000 kilometers from home.
Scrawny and swarthy, seasoned by the Uzbek sun and Russian frosts, with a wilted face and the bloodshot eyes of a man who has not seen a doctor in years, Saidullo Sadykov is a veteran labor migrant in Russia. The 54-year-old Uzbek takes the ghost bus every year to what he calls his battlefield.
The bus emerged in the late 1990s, back when it was legal. But in January 2006, a rattletrap bus broke down in the western Usturt plateau, and all 30 passengers froze to death, their bodies turned into ice cocoons. Russia-bound buses were prohibited.
These days, only corruption keeps the buses alive and greases their wheels. Each year, hundreds of Uzbeks without registration and work permits get deported and barred from entering Russia for five years. They can’t get through computerized passport controls at airports or railway stations, so they get on the bus.
To book a $150 ride, Sadykov goes to see the bus owner.
Azim Azizov, 37, has the look and bling of a movie mobster. He sports four golden teeth, two golden chains on his neck, two golden rings on each hand and the complexion of a retired boxer.
He has two houses under construction in suburban Bukhara and Moscow, two wives and five children. Both marriages are legal in each country. He has two passports, and his fathers-in-law shuttle with him twice a month, helping him earn about $5,000 for each trip.
In Uzbekistan, where an average salary is about $50 a month, it is a fortune.
Despite the money the passengers bring, Azizov treats them with a disdain and arrogance they find natural. Clad in a velvet bathing robe and puffing on an expensive cigarette, Azizov scribbles down their names and their passport and telephone numbers. Some bring thick wads of soums, Uzbek currency. Those unable to pay upfront leave their passports. They will work off their debt with Azizov or his “friends.”
Azizov is part of an informal chain of recruiters who lure Uzbeks abroad with promises of jobs. Some of these recruiters use elaborate schemes to ensure the virtual enslavement of their clients, says Shukrat Ganiev, a Bukhara-based human rights advocate and analyst.
“It’s a profitable business perfected to the last bit and piece,” he says.
A recruiter brings up to 200 people to Russia. Their passports are taken away for registration, the promised jobs never materialize, and the migrants panic, agreeing to work for less, he says.
The economic crisis has multiplied cases of forced labor, enslavement and delayed or refused payment, rights groups say. Some companies hire migrants, only to kick them out without payment after a month or two.
In Russia, most Uzbeks live in squalor and save every kopeck to send to their families. In 2008, they wired home $1.3 billion — almost 10 percent of Uzbekistan’s GDP, according to the World Bank. Remittances from abroad account for 38 percent and 19 percent of the economies in neighboring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, two other major exporters of labor to Russia.
Sometimes, missing migrants return home in sealed coffins. In 2008, the Bukhara airport received 14 of them, Ganiev says. Uzbek officials refused to comment.
Until recently, walls of the Uzbek embassy in Moscow were covered with handwritten notes about missing relatives. Some began with “Dear Uzbek Muslims, help us find...”
On Sadykov’s last day at home, his family prays for his safe return at a 14th-century mausoleum of a Muslim saint.
“It’s like a small hajj,” he says
When he leaves Bukhara the next morning, his head is covered with the snowy white cap pilgrims wear after making the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.
“I’m going to the front line,” Sadykov says.
The Nightingale arrives at a chaotic bus station at noon. This 33-year-old ghost bus is painted lime yellow, with the Russian word for nightingale and the bird’s cartoonish silhouette on its windshield.
Its drivers look like a comic duo — a corpulent, mustachioed six-footer nicknamed Tyson and his scraggy, almost rodent-like sidekick Alisher. Above their seat dangles a souvenir dagger, Muslim worry beads and a laminated Playmate postcard.
Seventy-three men aged 17 to 60 clamber aboard in the scorching sun. There is one woman, Khafiza Ibragimova, whose braid of henna-dyed hair hangs down her long purple dress. She is travelling with Ulmas Tashev, her gaunt brother, to work at an Uzbek restaurant near Moscow.
Azizov’s fathers-in-law are on board. The Uzbek one is a taciturn man in his sixties who dozes most of the time and occasionally drives. The Russian one is The Nightingale’s figurehead owner, Alexander Kopeikin, who gulps vodka shots and chain-smokes.
Its windows sealed and its air conditioner broken, the Nightingale ventilates on the go through ceiling hatches and open doors. It also carries a Russian license plate to avoid the attention of Russian police.
This time, it attracts the attention of Uzbek police instead. They forbid Azizov to use the Russian-registered bus on Uzbek territory.
So Azizov finds a decrepit Uzbek-registered bus to take the passengers to the border with Kazakhstan, about 700 kilometers (440 miles) westward. He brings along Tozagul, a plump and energetic matron who negotiates with police.
The bus breaks down twice, then is forced to stop overnight at a police station in the Kyzyk-Kum desert. The passengers sleep aboard, in the sand and on the warm asphalt. Many wake up with bug bites.
The next day, the lumbering bus is pulled over five times, once by an armed anti-terrorism squad. After each halt Tozagul jumps out to negotiate a bribe, and comes back cursing “greedy redneck coppers.”
By the second sundown, the bus stops at an inn. Tornadoes of bugs swirl around the bare light bulbs, and the desert outside reeks of burning garbage. Arif Ortykov, 52, airs his grievances over a cup of tea.
“If only I could make $150 a month, I wouldn’t go there,” the potbellied welder says.
It takes him two more cups to get to the fact that Uzbeks depend on jobs in Russia because of their large families and unemployment at home.
“If they close borders, we’ll all be at war with each other,” he says. “There’s too many hungry and too few well-fed.”
Uzbeks have fled their country, a Muslim nation of 27 million, because there are no jobs. In the countryside, farmers are forced to sell cotton to the government at a fixed low price. In the cities, growth is stifled by corruption and state control.
But now, the economic crisis in Russia is likely to send millions of jobless migrants back, which could destabilize Uzbekistan. At least a quarter of migrants have left Russia, experts say, and many of those who stayed have joined the army of illegal workers and day-laborers.
The bus moves all night, passing fields encrusted with salt. It enters the lifeless Usturt plateau, where the passengers froze to death in 2006. It drives by a road sign showing directions to Jaslyk, Uzbekistan’s most notorious gulag, located in impassable sand dunes.
By the third night, the bus reaches a Kazakhstan border checkpoint. The passengers of three other migrant buses are already there. The steppe around is dotted with bushes and human excrement, and two mangy camels bellow in the distance.
Over tea and chewing tobacco, Sadykov instructs the youngest passenger, 17-year old Kamol Shamsutdinov, on how to dodge policemen in Moscow.
“Don’t swerve when you see one, but don’t look him in the eyes,” Sadykov says, sounding like an experienced trapper describing a dangerous predator. Men around them nod their heads. “They can smell your fear,” he says.
Even the Russian police admit to routinely preying on labor migrants.
When looking to detain a labor migrant, police officers “make up anything, because they want to live and eat,” says Mikhail Pashkin, head of the Moscow police trade union. “The state created a system where a policeman cannot survive on his salary.”
Rights defenders are less understanding. “Policemen fleece (migrants) like sheep and beat up those who resist extortion so often that they see these incidents as something usual,” says Russian rights defender Svetlana Gannushkina.
Police officers top the list of people Uzbek migrants fear the most. They also fear skinheads. In 2008, 99 people were killed in Russia in apparent racial attacks, 49 of them natives of Uzbekistan and neighboring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Sova, a Moscow hate crimes watchdog, reports.
To Sadykov, skinheads are easier to avoid than police. “Don’t take suburban trains at night and don’t go outdoors after football games,” he warns Shamsutdinov.
After a night on a dirty reed mat, Sadykov wakes to the sound of honking cars and trucks. “Hope we’ll get through by noon,” he says, putting on his pilgrim cap smeared with sweat and dust.
The border crossing takes nine sweltering hours. Kazakh border guards tell the Uzbeks to line up, and rummage through their bags, throwing their belongings on the dusty asphalt. Then the passengers leave — all but Khafiza Ibragimova.
She has a prior deportation from Russia. She whispers goodbye to her brother and walks away, her head hanging despondently.
The passengers rush to The Nightingale, which is waiting. There are 73 men for 62 seats.
Azizov nonchalantly tells the passengers who did not pay upfront to sit and sleep in shifts.
He occupies his seat of power — an oblong wooden box behind the driver’s seat. Covered with blankets and pillows, it serves as his bed and vault for plastic bags of Uzbek money.
The fathers-in-law, the drivers and respected veterans such as Sadykov occupy the first five rows. The youngest passengers sit and sleep in the aisle, on the dust, next to butt-ends and spits of tobacco.
The bus passes through western Kazakhstan in less than two days, but it takes almost another two days to cross the Russian border at the village of Ilek. Since the bus is too crowded, Azizov tells 11 passengers to stay in the no man’s land.
The passengers again line up with their bags open. Red-faced Russian guards ridicule their shabby clothes and old-fashioned shoes. “He’s gonna dance at a strip bar in these,” one of them says, pointing at a pair of worn-out platform shoes.
The guards tell Azizov to remove some of the Nightingale’s paneling. Azizov says later that the check was “harmless” compared with previous examinations. He says he paid the guards $1,000 for not delaying the bus and letting through several people with prior deportations.
At dawn, eight of the 11 stragglers knock on the bus door. They say three others were deported. Azizov says it is their own fault because they did not bribe him to get them through.
The bus moves past meadows with waist-tall grass and pine forests. Despite the Russian license plate, police pull it over several times. “They stop you less, but charge more,” Azizov says.
Sadykov, his face covered with gray stubble, is getting fidgety.
“We have to hurry to build Moscow,” he tells Kopeikin.
“Moscow was built long ago,” Kopeikin growls angrily. “All you need is our money to run away with.”
Many Russians think the same way, partly because of a massive anti-migrant campaign by the state-controlled media. Experts say it is designed to divert anger over the financial crisis away from authorities to foreigners.
After the sixth night on the road, the bus approaches southern Moscow and stops near Azizov’s unfinished house. Several Uzbeks are installing plastic windows on the third floor.
Azizov collects the passports of 22 passengers who did not pay and herds them in. “They’ll work it off in here,” he says.
Other passengers pour out, smiling happily. They take their bags from the trunk and rush to a nearby bus station.
Sadykov takes off his gray and dusty pilgrim cap, exposing his bald head to a Russian drizzle.
“The battle is beginning,” he says.
In a week or two, the bus will take another load of Uzbeks home. They will bring along second-hand refrigerators, TV sets and gas stoves for their families.
In the meantime, in the giant yard of Azizov’s house, The Nightingale will wait.

TITLE: Moscow Authorities Start Razing Market
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — City authorities on Tuesday began demolishing the sprawling Cherkizovsky Market, which was closed in June over sanitary and safety violations amid a broader crackdown on smuggling.
The once-bustling, 300-hectare bazaar was deserted except for several photographers and reporters, a few guards and several migrants helping clean out the market, who said they were not former vendors.
Earlier this summer, the complex in eastern Moscow employed tens of thousands of migrants, but only a few dozen were there Tuesday. Some managed to find jobs elsewhere in the city, but many have left for home amid signs that City Hall wants them gone.
Dozens of illegal migrants were deported following the closure and many others were left in dire financial straits.
The city has promised to help find new trading space for Russians who had been selling domestically made goods, but Mayor Yury Luzhkov said in July that helping accommodate “our friends from China is not our job.”
Several migrants hung onto a fence surrounding the market and silently watched a crane lifting an empty pavilion onto a truck. They said they came to see the market one last time.
Denis Saakyan, 38, and Artur Sarkisyan, 32, said they were going home to Armenia after working at the market for nine years because they didn’t hope to find another job in Moscow.
Saakyan said renting space at other Moscow markets was too expensive. He lambasted authorities for closing down the market amid a crisis. “They closed all of our options,” he said.
Cherkizovsky was closed June 29 after inspectors found a host of violations there. The crackdown followed a demand by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier that month for “convictions” in the 2008 seizure of $2 billion in goods purportedly smuggled from China.

TITLE: Ingush Death Toll Rises
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The death toll in the suicide bombing of an Ingush police station grew to 21 on Tuesday and could reach 30 as hopes dwindle for finding nine missing police officers alive.
Thirty-five people remained hospitalized in Ingushetia’s main hospital, and nine who suffered more serious injuries were flown to Moscow for treatment, officials said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack Monday in which a     GAZelle van packed with explosives rammed into the gates of the police station in Nazran, Ingushetia’s main city.
The nine missing officers are believed to have been buried in the rubble of the police station, which was destroyed in the explosion.
Investigators have identified a previous owner of the GAZelle and are looking for him, Interfax reported, citing an Ingush law enforcement source.
“We already know the GAZelle owner who sold it to people who might have been connected to the rebels who stuffed it with explosives for the Nazran attack,” the source said.
On Monday, the Ingush Interior Ministry said it had been tipped off about preparations for an attack with the use of a GAZelle. President Dmitry Medvedev dismissed Ingush Interior Minister Ruslan Meiriyev later in the day, saying the police could have averted the tragedy.

TITLE: Bombed Monument Dismantled
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Representatives of the Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast political organization gathered at the monument to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin by the Finland Railway Station on Wednesday to protect it from being dismantled.
The organization’s press service called on local residents to join them in their attempt “to defend the monument and not to let capitalists steal the main monument to Lenin from working people.”
The monument to Lenin was damaged by an explosion in the spring of this year and it is currently being dismantled for repairs, the city’s Committee for the Use and Preservation of State Monuments or KGIOP said on Wednesday.
“We’re keen to complete the dismantling process by the end of summer.  It’s a very labor intensive process and we want to do it with a great deal of care,” Vera Dementyeva, head of KGIOP said on Wednesday, Interfax reported.
The restoration of the monument will take about six or seven months, Dementyeva said.
“The restoration work itself has actually already begun and specialists are trying to develop the right methods for the work,” Dementyeva said.
Dementyeva said the restoration work will be financed from the Culture Committee’s budget.
“In addition, the city’s communists have also gathered some financing for that purpose,” she said.
KGIOP has said that the cost of the monument’s restoration will amount to 8.4 million rubles ($260,000).
The bronze sculpture of Lenin is classified as a federal monument and was originally unveiled on Nov. 7, 1926.

TITLE: Missile Maker Offers Fix to Shield Dispute
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — Aeroflot will be the official carrier of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, pledging $100 million in money and services between 2009 and 2016, Aeroflot head Vitaly Savelyev said Wednesday at the MAKS-2009 air salon.
Sochi Olympic Committee president Dmitry Chernyshenko said at a signing ceremony that Aeroflot won the tender, “leaving competitors far behind” with a bid that beat “practically all Russian and some foreign airlines” that participated.
He declined to name the participants or say how many bids they received. The companies signed a memorandum of understanding and said they would ink a full deal soon.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, who is overseeing the Olympic preparations, told Prime Minister Vladimir Putin later in the day that the Aeroflot deal brought the sum of Sochi sponsorship agreements to $750 million.
Aeroflot’s sponsorship includes transporting the Russian Olympic teams and delegations over the next seven years, starting with the Vancouver Olympic Games next winter. In exchange, it can use the Sochi Olympics brand in its marketing for the duration of the deal.
“This is not charity but a partnership that is profitable to both sides,” Chernyshenko added, presenting Savelyev with the trophy of a gold medal. Savelyev gave him a model plane.
The Aeroflot chief declined to say how much of the $100 million would be in the form of services.
“Aeroflot is undervalued on the market, still perceived as a Soviet company, and we need to change that image. We’re a different company with different possibilities,” Savelyev said. The carrier said it plans to use the partnership to raise its passenger volume enough to compensate for the sponsorship by 2016.
“We hope to use the Superjet on our Moscow-Sochi route and in trips taken by the organizing committee,” Savelyev said, referring to a new Sukhoi regional jet.
The Sochi Olympic Games have already signed partnership agreements with MegaFon, Rostelecom, Rosneft and Sberbank. The government is still accepting bids for an official insurer and a gas company.
“We’re certain that events connected to the Olympics will be hosted without using budget funds,” Kozak said in a meeting with Putin, according to a transcript on the government web site.
He said the organizers were expecting to get considerably more funds from the two remaining sponsorship deals. 
The organizing committee decided Wednesday to not take funds allotted for them in the 2009 and 2010 federal budgets, he told Putin.
Kozak also noted the serious environmental concerns that have been raised about building through Sochi National Park.

TITLE: Peres: Kremlin Rethinking Sale
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Israeli President Shimon Peres said Wednesday that the Kremlin has promised to reconsider the planned delivery of air defense missiles to Iran that Israel and the U.S. fear could be used to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities. 
President Dmitry Medvedev made the pledge during their talks Tuesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Peres said. 
“President Medvedev gave a promise he will reconsider the sales of S-300s because it affects the delicate balance which exists in the Middle East,” Peres told reporters via video link from Sochi. 
A Kremlin spokesman wouldn’t immediately comment on Peres’ statement. 
Russia has signed a contract to supply the S-300 missiles to Iran, but has dragged its feet on delivering them. 
Israel and the United States fear that Iran could use the missiles to protect its nuclear facilities — including the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz or the country’s first atomic power plant, which is being completed by Russian workers in Bushehr. The use of the missiles by the Iranians would make a military strike on their nuclear facilities much more difficult. 
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak insisted last month that Israel would not rule out any response to the Iranian nuclear program — an implied warning that it would consider a pre-emptive strike to thwart Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. 
Israeli and U.S. officials have strongly urged Moscow not to supply the missiles, and the issue has been the subject of intense diplomatic wrangling for years.

TITLE: Communists Raided
AUTHOR: By Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Law enforcement agencies seized computers during a raid on the offices of the Communists of Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast late Tuesday night.
Agents from the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Kalininsky district in eastern St. Petersburg forced their way into the office of lawyer and municipal district deputy Yuri Savin, a part of which is rented by the Communists of Petersburg, seizing two computers and opening a safe and an archive of print materials, the communist organization announced on its website and in a press release. 
The seized computers included information about members of the organization, candidates for government positions in the Leningrad Oblast and the activities of communist groups, Interfax reported Wednesday.
According to the release, the law enforcement agents said they were checking the legality of a housing transaction conducted by an employee of the legal consulting service.
The search was conducted under orders from the Investigative Committee of the St. Petersburg Prosecutor General’s Office and lasted from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., but members of the communist organization were not allowed back into the office until Wednesday morning, the press release also stated.
Attempts to reach the prosecutor general’s office and the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for comment Wednesday were unsuccessful.
The communists announced they will file a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office for the “unjustified actions of the police” and seek damages in a lawsuit, as well as inform the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation and international election-monitoring organizations.
Savin often defends the Communists of St. Petersburg, according to the organization's web site, and has been reported to be a member of the group.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Kremlin Instruder</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — A man was under psychological observation at a hospital after he pulled up at the Kremlin gates in a Zhiguli car at 6:20 a.m. Wednesday and announced that he was a special services officer arriving for a meeting with a government official.
Police detained the unidentified man at the Borovitsky Gate and took him to the nearest police precinct, where he had a severe nervous breakdown and was hospitalized, RIA-Novosti reported. 

<b>65 Migrants in Forest</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Migration officials confirmed Wednesday that they had found 65 illegal Vietnamese migrants living in a Moscow region forest after they lost their jobs because of the closure of Moscow’s Cherkizovsky Market, Interfax reported.
Forty-eight migrants without any identification documents were found in the forest near Malakhovka, 30 kilometers southeast of Moscow, on July 30, and another 17 were found in the same forest on Aug. 6, Interfax said.
The migration officials denied news reports earlier this week that put the number of migrants in the forest at 200.
The migrants had worked at an illegal sewing factory that made goods for Cherkizovsky Market, which was closed by Moscow authorities in late June.

TITLE: Ministry Seeks to Buy Gold-Decorated Bed
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Kazmin, Vera Kholmogorova and Maxim Tovkailo
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Interior Ministry is looking to spend 24.4 million rubles ($764,000) on new furniture, including a bedroom suite decorated with pure gold, according to publicly available documents.
The ministry published documents on the official web site for state orders seeking bids for furniture to be bought with federal budget funds. The order can be viewed at Zakupki.gov.ru/Tender/ViewPurchase.aspx?PurchaseId=471351.
The tender includes three lots. The first is for furniture and other interior design items for a total of 15 million rubles, while the other two are for “office furniture” worth a combined 9.4 million rubles. The documentation was approved Aug. 17, 2009, by Colonel A.A. Smolin, director of the ministry’s main purchasing department.
Vedomosti discovered that the ministry wasn’t seeking just any old furniture. For example, the order includes a bed with a hand-carved frame made from European cherry, including headboards and footboards covered with “a thin layer of gold — 24 karats.”
The office furniture must also be of the highest caliber. The varnish for a conference table can only be from Germany, while “all of the table’s fittings should be of German or Italian origin.”
Everything in the tender documents is correct, Nikolai Meshcheryakov, listed as the contact person for the order, told Vedomosti.
The results of the tender should be released Oct. 1, and the furniture must be delivered within 10 days.
The first two lots are headed for the Interior Ministry’s main directorate. Furniture from the third lot is going to Ulitsa Serebryany Bor, 4th Line, 76. A source in the Interior Ministry’s administration told Vedomosti that the address is for a reception office, as well as several state dachas where the ministry’s leadership resides.
The information was confirmed by Mikhail Starshinov, a member of the State Duma’s Security Committee.
Valery Gribakin, the ministry’s head of communications, said Tuesday that the furniture was needed because protocol for accepting high-level guests, such as other country’s police chiefs, required that they be put up in a five-star hotel.
Renovating a guesthouse once would be cheaper than constantly paying the hotel bills, he said, adding that only “gold-like foil” would be used.
State orders have not been discussed by the Interior Ministry’s Public Committee, said VTsIOM director Valery Fyodorov, who sits on the oversight and outreach body. He said the issue could be raised, however.
Fyodorov said it has been a difficult year for the ministry, and the committee has been focused on personnel issues, fighting corruption and the functioning of the law enforcement system.
Starshinov said that if the information was accurate, then it was a direct order to the Audit Chamber to begin an investigation into how the Interior Ministry is spending its funds. “It’s just not humanly decent,” he said.

TITLE: Sberbank Staff Embezzle $180M
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A group of Sberbank employees has defrauded the company of more than $180 million, which was issued in fraudulent loans from a Moscow branch, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday.
In another high-profile bust, the ministry announced that it had uncovered corruption in the Moscow city government’s construction committee — a success attributed to a special unit created on the orders of President Dmitry Medvedev.
Both announcements were made at a news conference held by the ministry’s economic crimes department, which later released a summary of these and other crimes it said were uncovered amid the recent economic turmoil.
It was not immediately clear why the ministry chose to release the details all at once. Sberbank said it had uncovered and reported the theft in March, and a City Hall spokesman said no officials had been arrested for crimes described by the ministry, describing the report as “slander.”
The announcements come amid a broader effort by the Interior Ministry to show that it is serious about fighting corruption. The busts would be a welcome victory for Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, who faced a dressing down from Medvedev on Tuesday over violence in Ingushetia.
The Interior Ministry has also been coping with fallout from an officer’s shooting rampage this spring.
Sberbank, the country’s largest lender, confirmed that its employees accepted fictitious documents when handing out loans to individuals and companies at the bank’s Stromynskoye branch in eastern Moscow from June 2006 to April 2007.
The bank’s internal security department spotted the “fraudulent actions by organized crime groups” and reported them to the police in March, the lender said in a statement. Moscow police are studying the case and whether former employees from the branch were involved, it said.
The Interior Ministry’s economic security department reported the employees’ involvement as a fact, however, saying the group included the branch’s director and security officers. The group scammed Sberbank out of $109 million and 52 million euros ($73 million), the department said on its web site.
The report did not say how many people were involved or whether any had been detained. Police began a criminal investigation of the fraud in May, and it is ongoing, said Albert Istomin, a spokesman for the economic crimes department.
If convicted on the fraud charges, the Sberbank employees would face up to 10 years in jail.
In the city government case, the department said police busted a group of Moscow construction officials, whom they accused of extorting bribes totaling 8 billion rubles ($250 million) between May 2008 and May 2009 from companies bidding for city contracts.
The group’s ringleader was nabbed red-handed when he was being given a bribe of 2 million rubles, the department said on its web site. None of the officials was named, and the report provided no additional details.
The city government angrily denied the report.
“The information … is slander that needs immediate retraction,” City Hall spokesman Sergei Tsoi said, Interfax reported.
Police have detained one employee at the city’s contracts and capital construction committee, Sergei Tatintsyan, and that was in April, he said. Tsoi called him a rank-and-file bureaucrat, who acted alone and had no authority to hold bidding for city contracts.
“Like any other official, Tatintsyan was unable to influence the bidding results because the system of placing city contracts in the capital is absolutely transparent,” Tsoi said.
Tatintsyan was not immediately available for contact.
A leading corruption expert, Kirill Kabanov, said he was excited about the reported bust of a group of officials, rather than a single bureaucrat, because it indicated that police began employing a more comprehensive approach to corruption cases.
“It’s a positive signal and quite new for our law enforcement system,” said Kabanov, director of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, a nongovernmental organization.
Kabanov attributed the new approach to the creation of a special unit at the Interior Ministry’s economic security department — Operations and Investigations Bureau No. 3 — a move he said was made on orders from Medvedev, who made fighting graft one of his top priorities immediately after taking office in May 2008.
In a Sept. 6 decree, Medvedev ordered the Interior Ministry’s economic security department to assume responsibility for fighting corruption. The department subsequently set up bureau No. 3.
Istomin, the department’s spokesman, confirmed that a deputy chief of the new bureau spoke at the news conference but declined to provide more details.
Kabanov also praised the new unit for interacting with his NGO, unlike other agencies that the National Anti-Corruption Committee contacts with ideas and proposals.

TITLE: Dam Disaster May Cause Electricity Prices to Rise
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said Wednesday that electricity prices will have to increase after a disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant knocked out a quarter of RusHydro’s power production.
At least 17 died and57 were missing as of Thursday after the turbine room flooded at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power station Monday.
RusHydro’s stock price plummeted 11.4 percent Wednesday after shares resumed trading following a two-day suspension. The shares fell as low as 1.09 rubles on the MICEX, their biggest one-day loss this year.
“A 5-7 percent growth in electricity rates in Siberia would be an optimistic scenario,” Shmatko said. “The price will go up, as cheap electricity from the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric station will be replaced by energy from coal-powered sources.”
The power station is the primary generator for several key factories in the region, including two United Company RusAl smelters, which consume 70 percent of the hydroelectric station’s energy, and two Evraz steel plants. The plants have been getting reserve supplies from other nearby power plants, but the resultant shortage has sent electricity prices up 24 percent on the Siberian spot market, Reuters reported.
RusAl could not be reached for comment. An Evraz Group spokesperson declined to say what effect the disaster had on its business.
An increase of only 5-7 percent next year is an unlikely scenario, however, as the winter heating season is months away and power generators will have no other option but to boost prices, said Nikolai Podlevskikh, an electricity analyst at Zerich Capital Management.
“Gas and coal-powered generators will not miss their chance to say that they’re running out of capacity and will raise prices,” Podlevskikh said. “I expect electricity prices to go up 20-30 percent this fall in eastern Siberia, which will result in at least a 10 percent rise in aluminum prices.”
In July, the government set the limit for year-on-year growth in electricity prices at 5 percent in 2010, but the cap may now be reconsidered.
After the accident Monday, RusAl’s director of corporate strategy, Anton Volynets, said the company’s aluminum production was under threat and that the accident may “shock” global aluminum prices.
“We estimate that as much as 500,000 tons of annual aluminum production capacity is under threat and maybe even more,” he said.
The company is currently relying on reserve capacities of energy, although this is only a temporary solution to the problem, he said, forecasting a total production of 3.9 million tons in 2009, down from the 4.4 million tons the firm produced in 2008.
But not everyone is convinced that RusAl’s woes are quite as serious as advertised.
“Apart from being a forecast figure, the decline rate voiced by RusAl aims at pressuring power suppliers and the state regulator who set the electricity prices,” Podlevskikh said. “Moreover, it sets a favorable background to bargain subsidies from the state, including the funding for the Boguchansk construction.”
RusAl owner Oleg Deripaska said in a statement Wednesday that RusHydro and the aluminum giant would speed up the construction of the Boguchansk hydroelectricity plant in order to cover the needs of the aluminum industry.
The two parties squabbled over the project earlier this year, after RusAl delayed payments for construction and proposed suspending the project. They later came to an agreement and RusAl is currently up to date on its funding.
Boguchansk was scheduled to start working late 2010 or early 2011, but Podlevskikh said the project’s time frame could by reduced by six months at the most.
Replacing equipment at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power station may take two years, RusHydro said, and the rebuilding could cost 40 billion ($1.25 billion), Shmatko said.
Shmatko waxed optimistic about the reconstruction, however, saying the capacity of each of the plant’s 10 generation units could be increased to 730 megawatts from 640 megawatts.

TITLE: Seasonal Labor Helps Jobless Rate
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG — Russia’s unemployment rate was unchanged in July after falling for four consecutive months as seasonal demand for labor in farming and construction picked up and after industrial output rebounded.
The number of unemployed was 6.3 million, or 8.3 percent of the workforce, the Moscow-based Federal Statistics Service said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. The result matched the median forecast of 12 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
“It now appears that July may have been the first month of positive sequential growth,” Rory MacFarquhar, a Moscow-based economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said before the release. “We continue to expect a broad recovery in the second half.”
Industrial production rose for a second month in July, advancing 4.7 percent from June, while the year-on-year decline eased to a drop of 10.8 percent. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on June 9 the “peak in unemployment growth has passed.”

TITLE: Foreign Investment in City Plummets
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The volume of foreign investment into St. Petersburg’s economy fell to $1.4 billion from January to June — 35 percent less than the same period last year, Kommersant daily reported Thursday. 
The volume of direct investment decreased by 33.5 percent to $358.7 million, St. Petersburg’s Committee for Investment and Strategic Projects said.
Local industry received $1.2 billion, including $274.3 million of investment into the production of transport vehicles and equipment, $104.8 million into production of food products including drinks and tobacco, and $107.9 million into construction, the committee reported.
“The statistics for the first half of 2009 are the result of decisions made by investors during a period of crisis in the global economy, in which investors hardly considered participating in new projects at all,” it said.
Projects begun by foreign investors in St. Petersburg before the crisis continued, however.  
The Nissan plant started operating this summer, construction of the Hyundai plant and its supplier companies continues, and the Baltic Pearl complex is also still under construction, the committee’s press service said, Kommersant reported.
The list of the city’s top five investors for the first half of 2009 include the Republic of Belarus with 22.9 percent of the total volume of investment, Finland with 10.7 percent, Germany with 10.2 percent, the U.S. with 9 percent and Sweden with 7.9 percent.
Sergei Fiveisky, first deputy head of the city’s Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade Committee, said foreign investment had been influenced by decreased volumes of short and long-term loans.
The volume of loans fell by almost 66 percent compared to the first half of 2008 as a result of the unstable ruble exchange rate, a decrease in companies’ liquidity, and frequent lack of investor confidence that loans would be paid back on time, Kommersant cited Fiveisky as saying.
The slump in direct investment was partly caused by longer time periods for the realization of investment projects, he said.
Fiveisky said that the volume of portfolio investment in St. Petersburg grew five-fold, however.
Foreign investors continued to increase their presence in the charter capital of St. Petersburg companies during the first half of 2009.
Earlier, the committee said that the companies that saw the biggest foreign investment during the first half of the year were Toyota Motor Manufacturing Russia, Baltic Pearl, YIT St. Petersburg, YIT Lentek, United Heineken Brewery, Petro and Kulon SPb.

TITLE: Plans Unveiled for Oil Terminal at Ust Luga
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Transneft presented its plans for the construction of an oil shipment terminal for the Baltic Pipe System-2 (BTS) at Ust Luga port to the government of the Leningrad Oblast on Tuesday.
The terminal will receive oil from the main BTS oil pipeline and store and ship it to sea oil tankers, the press service of the regional Economic Development and Investment Committee said, Interfax reported.
The volume of oil cargo will be 30 million tons per year at the first stage, and 38 million tons per year when the terminal starts working at full capacity.
The main users of the terminal will be Transneft and the Ust Luga Bunker Complex.
The interdepartmental commission of the Leningrad Oblast plans to consider Transneft’s proposal next month.
Transneft began construction of BTS-2 on July 10. The route of the pipeline will go from Unecha to Ust Luga in the Leningrad Oblast with a branch line going to the Kirishi oil-processing plant. The construction of the 1,170-kilometer long pipeline will be completed in two stages, at the first of which it will have a capacity of 30 million tons per year. At the second stage, total capacity will reach 50 million tons per year.
BTS-2 is planned to start operating at full capacity by the end of 2011.  By the end of 2009, construction is due to be completed of the first stage of a fuel oil shipment terminal with a capacity of seven million tons at Ust Luga port.

TITLE: Saving the World Over a Goblet of Bordeaux
AUTHOR: By Gilbert Doctorow
TEXT: It is the dog days of summer in France. The country has shut down for traditional August vacations, and the Russian colonies de vacances in the Departement of Landes, between Bordeaux and Biarritz, on France’s southwest seacoast, are doing a brisk business. All the bungalows are fully occupied, mostly by Russian speakers from the Paris region, from the French provinces, from Central Europe … and from Russia itself. Summer camps set up by cadres of the White Army in emigration welcomed the generation of dissidents who landed on these shores in the 1960s and ‘70s and later the generations of simply curious travelers and nature lovers from Russia’s cities, who first appeared in the mid-1980s perestroika and continue to come over for an exotic getaway and interesting table talk with the Russian diaspora. And the seacoast resort provides a societal kaleidoscope, including the occasional movie star from Moscow, cabaret performers from Cap d’Antibes who sing old Russian romances to amuse friends and celebrate birthdays, and well-to-do businessmen from Northern Palmyra who come just for the company at dinner and take day trips down to the corrida in San Sebastian, just across the Spanish border.
After languishing for several days at the table of an extended French family from the Jura, I had the good fortune to be re-seated with a newly arrived Russian, rumored to be almost an oligarch and hailing from one of the palace suburbs of St. Petersburg, where he heads the local Chamber of Trade and Industry. He says he is a friend of Yevgeny Primakov, a former prime minister and head of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and knows Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov fairly well. Over a bottle of 1996 St. Emilion, which he generously passed around for sampling, the table talk moved from the variable weather and dangerous ocean currents at nearby beaches to bigger economic and political questions, even to questions of war and peace. In that spirit, my interlocutor mentioned in passing that the best way to solve the world’s divisions and present dangers would be to combine forces — by inviting Russia into NATO. The suggestion was tantalizing. The next day, I asked how widespread was this notion, and I was told that it is the general view of the Russian leadership, from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on down.
Is this improbable notion of Russian membership in NATO truly the shared property of the country’s political elite? Perhaps. But whether or not that is the case, it is surely an issue that merits renewed examination in the West, where it is routinely cast aside without any rigorous and consistent thought.
The most obvious objection is that NATO is a military alliance of democratic countries sharing common values, whereas Russia is authoritarian and has pleaded the case for its own political uniqueness. However, the so-called sovereign democracy that the Kremlin advanced several years ago was nothing more than a defensive slogan to ward off any U.S.-financed “color revolution” at home. And it could be argued that since the emergence of the Russian Federation from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the country has been moving toward rule of law and practices of parliamentarianism with at least as much commitment and possibly greater success than in the euphemistically termed young democracies of Ukraine and Georgia, whose NATO membership the United States has been enthusiastically supporting.
If corruption is the sticking point in NATO membership, then most of Eastern Europe, including not only the Balkan states of Bulgaria and Romania but even Poland, suffer from the same malaise and have in no way been disqualified from NATO.
The point is not to overlook the grave structural and political flaws in Russian democracy. On the contrary, it is to apply to Russia the same logic that has been used to justify bringing on board all the new member states: namely that the process of applying for membership is a lever for accelerating democratic reform. Moreover, in the case of Russia, reversal of the current exclusionary policy and open acceptance into a common security structure would provide the strongest possible relief from the Kremlin’s fear of encirclement and concerns over threats to its defense infrastructure from irresponsible neighbors. The release from these immediate external threats would make it possible and reasonable to relax controls within the country, which is precisely what foreign critics of Russian nationalism and exceptionalism say they are seeking.
With prospective NATO membership, we could reasonably expect much more accommodating Russian behavior concerning nuclear arms reduction, common action on nonproliferation and other high-priority issues with both the U.S. and European governments. Moreover, with its ongoing military reform aimed at training and equipping highly mobile battalions for rapid reaction, Moscow could be a major contributor to NATO’s international peace missions.
This does not mean that Russia would cease to have national interests or would start to see eye to eye with Washington on every potential military intervention in the world’s trouble spots. But then, neither do France and Germany, which together are quietly exercising a veto on various Washington initiatives today, including increased forces in Afghanistan.
Russia’s presence in NATO would raise the level of internal democracy further and would be entirely salutary.

Gilbert Doctorow publishes analytical articles on international affairs on the blog portal of La Libre Belgique.

TITLE: The Mysterious Cargo of the Arctic Sea
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The Arctic Sea turned up just as suddenly as it disappeared, and Russian officials acknowledged Tuesday that they had known the cargo ship’s location and fate for several days. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said eight hijackers who had seized the ship on July 24 had been arrested on board.
Here’s the timeline for this fantastic tale, if you haven’t been following. On July 24, the Arctic Sea suffered (or supposedly suffered) an attack off the Swedish island of Oland, in the Baltic Sea. News of the incident only broke on July 29 — possibly by accident or possibly leaked by the ship’s owner in hopes of influencing the attackers. In any case, the reports at the time suggested that “pirates” tied up and tortured the crew before leaving the ship 12 hours later.
The following day, at 1:29 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on July 30, the ship’s signal vanished. It’s technically possible that by July 24 the Arctic Sea was already on a different course and that the Automatic Identification System transponder was installed on a different boat (or that its parameters were simply entered into another transponder). It’s unlikely, however, that the attackers would try to navigate the Danish straits and English Channel without any communications. More likely, the AIS was working aboard the Arctic Sea and then cut off after information about the ship’s seizure was leaked.
The ship’s owner, though, wasn’t worried, even by the silenced AIS. The alarm was only sounded Aug. 4, when the ship failed to arrive as expected in Bejaia, Algeria. In other words, the owners must have known what happened to the vessel — there’s no other way to explain their actions.
Neither the run-of-the-mill explanation (that the owners allegedly stole the ship to claim the insurance money) nor the bandits hypothesis (that attackers were supposedly looking for drugs) adequately explains the disappearance. An old bathtub packed with timber, or even a load of cocaine, wouldn’t be worth enough to justify the risk and commotion, or the preparation required.
Then there’s version No. 3: the special services. The Arctic Sea was carrying something, not timber and not from Finland, that necessitated some major work on the ship. Something that required dismantling the bulkhead, complete with gas cutting torches, during two weeks of “repair work” in Kaliningrad before the voyage, and something so large that it couldn’t be loaded for delivery onto just any little boat. To put it plainly: The Arctic Sea was carrying some sort of anti-aircraft or nuclear contraption intended for a nice, peaceful country like Syria, and they were caught with it. And this wasn’t a one-time delivery. I’m not a believer in the omniscience of the CIA or Mossad, who might have somehow found out that on a certain date a certain old vessel would be delivering a certain little something. Most likely, it was a tried and true route that had been used successfully for quite some time. And now they’ve been caught.
On Saturday, Aug. 15, the Arctic Sea’s AIS again worked briefly in the Bay of Biscay. Shortly thereafter, France announced that there was no cargo ship in the area and that the signal was coming from one of the three Russian Navy ships there.
It’s tough to say why a Russian military ship would suddenly decide to send out the Arctic Sea’s signal (they removed the AIS transponder, took it with them and then somehow clumsily bumped into it and turned it on?), but, by the looks of it, that’s when Russia found itself backed into a corner. And now instead of a possible tragedy we’ll see a cover-up operation.

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

TITLE: Highs and lows
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Mariinsky troupe returns home this week after a challenging three-week tour to London where the renowned company saw it all, from thunderous applause to scathing criticism, from sour grimaces to reverence and recognition.
The emotional range of the tour’s reception was staggering. The British press, which was treated to the Mariinsky’s rendition of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” followed by “Romeo and Juliet,” “Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty” and an evening of George Balanchine choreography, was dismayed by the operatic part of the tour but delighted by the ballets.
Ivan Hewitt of The Daily Telegraph appreciated what he described as “the noble goals of the production” in The Ring.
“It has the courage to treat the religious and mythological basis of Wagner’s great work head-on, rather than smothering it in some bleakly disillusioned urban setting or smirking at it in a spirit of satire,” Hewitt wrote. “The imagery evoked the primeval Slavic steppes, though there are hints of Africa and Polynesia here and there. In the Gibichung court, the Slavic references become overt. When Gunther and Hagen appeared in their Tartar skirts and turbans, it felt as if we’d been whisked away into the world of Borodin’s Prince Igor.” 
Overall, however, the critic felt the production was inept. Hewitt was not the only reviewer to be disappointed by the Mariinsky’s audacious take on The Ring.
Richard Morrison’s review in The Times begins diplomatically. “The people in the posh seats at the Royal Opera House this week are paying ?840 each (or almost ?1 for each minute of music) to watch allegedly the world’s finest opera company tackle the world’s greatest operatic challenge over four consecutive nights,” Morrison wrote. “To judge from the thunderous applause after Das Rheingold, the first installment of Wagner’s Ring, most think that their money is well spent.”
Yet the critic himself was utterly disappointed by the performance, which he branded as nothing less than slapdash. “It wasn’t so much the hilarious hitches — Fafner’s apron falling down, so this murderous monster had to nip off for a safety-pin; or a technician slipping on with a drill to fix the lights on the head-filled totem-poles framing the stage; or the shouted instructions audible from the wings — though all these suggested production values more apt for a village hall,” Morrison wrote. “No, it was more the feeling that The Ring is being toured round the world by an ensemble with plenty of big, brawny voices but no real interest in probing what the piece is all about, or even in singing German competently.”
Barry Millington branded the show “an amateurish grip.” The critic was not impressed by Georgy Tsypin’s monumental god-like creatures inspired by the Caucasian Nart Sagas, and questioned the concept of the staging, with its multicultural references incorporating Tartar, Slavic, Mayan and Egyptian folklore.
“The idea of detaching the Ring from its problematic Teutonic legacy is a potentially fruitful one,” Millington admits. Yet this acknowledgment was about as much as the production enjoyed from the critic.
“But without an ideological or dramatic framework it is pointless,” Millington continues. “This production (Alexander Zeldin was credited as stage director) tells us nothing about the characters, their moral dilemmas, machinations and passions, because there is no credible interaction between them on stage. Acting is rudimentary, if not derisory, throughout. Worse still, it’s clear that the singers do not know their parts well enough. The G?tterd?mmerung Br?nnhilde, Larisa Gogolevskaya, spectacularly mistimed her final entrance, omitting a dozen bars in the process, while Hagen failed to appear in the flood in his vain attempt to reclaim the ring.”
The Mariinsky’s dancers, on the other hand, received far more generous reviews. 
“In the challenging dual role of Odette/Odile, Uliana Lopatkina displays a superb technique [...] Daniil Korsuntsev as Prince Siegfried is more than a pleasing and secure partner,” wrote Gavin Roebuck in ‘The Stage.’ “With powerful leaps and spins, he engages the audience with his bravura dancing and the acting of his love dilemma, which has a happy ending. The main pas de deux is danced with a flawless elegance unique to this company.” 
“The soloist swans are unrivalled in grace and the well-schooled corps are a heavenly delight,” Roebuck continues. “The second act national dances are executed with an exhilarating effervescence. As the sorcerer von Rothbart, Ilya Kuznetsov is a suitably wicked force. It is a tonic to hear a Russian orchestra at this venue, and with a heritage of more than 260 years and exceptional performances, a chance to see the Mariinsky is not to be missed.”
Vladimir Shklyarov was a spectacular hit as Romeo in Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” choreographed by Leonid Lavrovsky in 1940. The British critics as if by tacit consent declared him a new rising star of the Mariinsky ballet and one of the troupe’s most dazzling assets.
“Shklyarov’s dancing is ardent: excitement builds as he whips through a series of jumps, a young man caught up in his emotions,” wrote Zo? Anderson in The Independent. “Similarly, he hurls himself into the confrontation with Tybalt — it’s the one duel that actually looks like a fight. He always looks caught up in the world around him, ready to fling himself into love or battle.  His dancing is clean and bold, with high jumps and strong, clear lines. It’s a performance without mannerisms or ennui.”
Sarah Crompton of The Telegraph was equally impressed. The critic saw in Shklyarov’s Romeo a real man in an unreal world, his emotions strikingly genuine and spontaneous. “His smile when he first encounters his Juliet is like an embrace; his pleasure as he strews lilies at her feet at their wedding touchingly tender; his despair when he realizes that he will have to take up his sword and fight Tybalt unbearable,” she wrote, describing the whole performance as “Shklyarov’s night.”
“In his outstanding performance, he gave a reminder of why such excitement always surrounds the Mariinsky whenever it visits; the productions may be old hat, but again and again the company produces dancers who dance like dreams and understand the art of classical ballet in their bones,” Crompton wrote in her review.
Perhaps predictably, throughout the tour the critics’ eyes remained on the company’s charismatic and indefatigable artistic director, Valery Gergiev.
“The Gergiev Ring may be a self-imposed challenge too far, but Mr. Gergiev’s hyperactivity is overwhelmingly his strength rather than his weakness,” said a leading article in The Guardian. “His lifestyle may be intense, but so is his music-making. Mr. Gergiev may look as though he has not slept or shaved for days, but his performances of the Russian and German repertoires in which he specializes always have a visceral tension. With or without a baton in his hand (he often conducts without one), Mr. Gergiev’s structural control and care for detail are often impeccable, and like all great conductors he never seems to relapse into podium autopilot. How long he can keep all this up, and whether he should be doing it in the first place are serious questions. But Mr. Gergiev is an elemental artist. Asking him to be different is like commanding the sun not to rise. Let him blaze on.”

TITLE: Word’s Worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: <em>Ñìåñèòåëü</em>: faucet
No one can accuse me of not doing my part to help Russia in her hour of need. The only solution to a crisis, as everybody knows, is to spend your way out of it.
And so — always willing to do my share — I’ve turned into a one-woman engine of the Russian economy. I’m doing ðåìîíò (remodeling).
In Russian there are two basic types of <em>ðåìîíò — êîñìåòè÷åñêèé è êàïèòàëüíûé</em>. <em>Êîñìåòè÷åñêèé ðåìîíò</em> is what we’d call cosmetic repairs or home improvement. <em>Êàïèòàëüíûé ðåìîíò</em> — often abbreviated to <em>êàïðåìîíò</em> — is what we’d call major repairs. I’m doing <em>êàïðåìîíò</em>, which should really be translated as a long, incredibly expensive and multi-stage nightmare.
First you choose your <em>ñòðîèòåëüíàÿ áðèãàäà</em> (work crew) and spend hours detailing what you want done with the <em>ïðîðàá</em> (the foreman, or what Americans would call the contractor).
Next, if you have signed up with a reputable company (and you’d be a lunatic not to), you will be given a ñìåòà (estimate) or even several of them: for <em>äåìîíòàæíûå ðàáîòû</em> (dismantling: ripping out all the old fittings); <em>ïîäãîòîâèòåëüíûå ðàáîòû</em> (prep work: introducing the concept of the 90-degree angle, putting in new pipes); and <em>îòäåëî÷íûå ðàáîòû</em> (finishing work: wallpaper, painting, floors). You’ll also get two more estimates — <em>ðàñõîä ÷¸ðíûõ ìàòåðèàëîâ</em> (cost of building material — the boring stuff: plaster, wires, pipes) and <em>ðàñõîä îòäåëî÷íûõ ìàòåðèàëîâ</em> (cost of finishing materials — the fun stuff: wallpaper, paint, paneling).
After you’ve recovered from a heart attack and signed the contract, the crew turns your apartment into a filthy slum. Meanwhile, you order your kitchen. The first thing the salesperson asks you is: <em>Ñêîëüêî ïîãîííûõ ìåòðîâ?</em> (How many running meters?) To which you reply: <em>×àâî?</em> (Huh?) It turns out that in the kitchen context, <em>ïîãîííûé ìåòð</em> is a price estimating tool that is the linear measure of where the kitchen cabinetry will be, and includes all the cabinetry and fittings.
You will be asked to decide between <em>ÄÑÏ</em>, aka <em>äðåâåñíî-ñòðóæå÷íûå ïëèòû</em> (particle board) or <em>ìàññèâ äåðåâà</em> (solid wood); pick out <em>ôóðíèòóðà</em> (a catch-all word for accessories; <em>òåõíèêà</em> (appliances); <em>ìîéêà</em> (sink) and <em>ñìåñèòåëü</em> (faucet). And what, you might ask, is the difference between <em>ñìåñèòåëü</em> and <em>êðàí</em>? <em>Ñìåñèòåëü</em> mixes (<em>ñìåøèâàåò</em>) hot and cold water; <em>êðàí</em> is a spigot for just one stream of water. The stuff you learn in a kitchen salon.
I’ve also discovered a key cultural difference concerning remodeling. When I tell Americans I’m renovaing my apartment, they cheer: Cool! When I tell Russians, they sigh: <em>Áåäíÿæêà</em>! (You poor thing!) Once again, the Russians are right.

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

TITLE: Downsizing
AUTHOR: By Winnie Agbonlahor
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: If you are sitting in a traffic jam, you may have noticed that you are being overtaken by young men going at a speed that your car hasn’t hit during rush hour for years.
They might not quite be Rome, but Moscow and St. Petersburg are seeing a scooter boom and in turn a scooter-crash boom, riders in Russia’s two biggest cities say.
“Scooters are the best way of getting around in Moscow,” said Sergei Dovedov, 28, from the Moscow Scooter Club, which was formed in 1999.
The first scooters started appearing in 1999, but it wasn’t until 2006 that sales began to spike, said Alexander Kuklev, a salesman at the Moscow scooter shop Skuter Siti, who is expecting to sell about 1,000 scooters this year.
“I remember parking my bike in Moscow in 2000, and everyone was staring at me, asking what I had there,” said Dima Pantyushen, a manager of Clevermoto, a company that sells an Indian moped that is a copy of the classic Vespa moped.
The boom has been helped by the arrival of cheaper scooters like the Chinese-made Stels, which cost no more than 90,000 rubles ($2,800). Prices can go as low as 20,000 rubles for secondhand scooters.
The boom comes on the heels of a bicycle boom that has hit Moscow and St. Petersburg in the last few years, despite the cities’ seeming incompatibility — in road-worthiness and driving culture — with either forms of transportation.
You might assume that riding a scooter in cities where a driver who stops at a pedestrian crossing is almost certainly a tourist would be dangerous.
And you’d be right.
There are no official statistics on scooter accidents, but scooter drivers have plenty of tales of fellow drivers who have come to a bad end.
“If you have a serious accident on a scooter — I’m talking torn-off hands, arms, legs — death is most likely. Really,” said Alexander Pomankov, 25, from the scooter club Riders.
“Unfortunately, accidents involving scooters are not rare. Sometimes, car drivers don’t see us, and then all sorts of things can happen,” said Dovedov.
The glut of scooters has been boosted by lax legislation regarding the mini-motorcycles. Anyone 16 or over can drive a scooter. No driver’s license or insurance is necessary, and there is confusion over whether a helmet is compulsory.
“It became obligatory in 2008 to wear a helmet on a scooter in Russia,” said Misha Kyshtinov, co-manager of Clevermoto. “But not all traffic officials know that.”
Indeed, when asked about traffic rules for scooter drivers, a traffic policeman on Okhotny Ryad in Moscow, who refused to give his name, said that wearing a helmet is not required by Russian traffic law.
“Well, if you bump your head really hard, I think that’s punishment enough,” he said laughing.
The Moscow traffic police did not respond to repeated attempts to contact them.
In Britain, anyone 16 or over can drive a moped, but they must have a driver’s license and insurance. Those who break the law can face fines of more than ?5,000 ($8,200) and/or imprisonment. Fines in Russia are rarely more than 1,000 rubles.
The dangers do not seem to be putting off the scooter pioneers who say the freedom of the vehicle and its mobility is what attracts them in cities overloaded with cars.
“If everyone went to work on a scooter instead of a four-seater car, driving around town would be a lot more pleasant,” said Dovedov.

TITLE: Georgian gem
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A recent mention on the Internet of Rustaveli — a newly opened restaurant on the Moika, just round the corner from the expat haunt that is The Other Side — led to a brief squall of debate among St. Petersburg expats and former expats about where to go in the city for a Georgian meal. Aficionados weighed in from around the globe, and among the cries of Georgian-food deprivation from Australia and the British Isles, the results were as follows: Ket on Stremyannaya Ulitsa rules, but isn’t exactly cheap; Voda Lagidze on Ulitsa Belinskogo is cheap, but the quality of the food isn’t a hit with everyone; Khachapurnaya on the corner of Gorokhovaya Ulitsa and the Moika is a super caf?, with great wholesome food, but doesn’t really rank as a full-on restaurant; in the glam and d?cor restaurant rankings, Tbiliso, opposite Sytny Rynok, probably comes tops, although the food could be better. Kvareli, a humble caf? on Ulitsa Lizy Chaikinoi on the Petrograd Side, also got an honorable mention.
With the arrival of Rustaveli, this brief overview of the local Georgian scene (apologies if anyone’s been overlooked), must now be expanded to include this restaurant with a family-run feel that doesn’t really attempt to make it as a glitzy eatery but is way above the level of a caf?.
The small dining room, which seats about 30, features the usual Georgian restaurant kit — gaudy paintings, plastic vine leaves growing up the walls, open brickwork and the like. The waiter was extremely helpful and very well-informed about the menu — he was only momentarily thrown when one of us confessed to being a vegetarian, quickly recovering and pointing to a rather limited range of meat-free dishes on the menu,  and then yet another range of dishes that he could ask the chef to prepare especially. 
He was also quick to offer a complimentary glass of “homemade” Georgian wine (such a shame the real stuff from Georgia is banned by the Russian authorities and we have to drink this Petersburg-made offering, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.)
The Georgian salad with walnuts (250 rubles, $8) was tart, tangy and exceeded all expectations of flavor, as well as being magnificently presented — a delicate, spiraling tower construction, peppered with crushed walnuts and kinza — the magic herb.
The traditional kharcho soup (220 rubles, $7), packed with beef, rice, vegetables and spices could easily have passed for a meal in its own right, the bouillon avoiding the usual pitfall of being too watery. 
The lobio (180 rubles, $5.80) — a kidney-bean stew with onions, herbs and spices — was served piping hot in a traditional earthenware pot, a hearty, filling dish packed with flavor. And, thankfully, not too much dill. 
The kuchmachi — fried offal — at 290 rubles ($9) was perhaps not up to the standards of the other dishes on offer. Even if you’re a little squeamish about this dish, you shouldn’t be put off, as it seemed to be entirely made of liver (not much in the way of scrotum or testicles was observed), but the ingredients could have been fresher and lighter, as it made for quite a heavy chew. We ordered it with its traditional garnish, mchadi corn bread rolls (100 rubles, $3), which were another heavy option and could have done with a sauce of some kind. 
But it’s the cheese breads that true Georgian-food addicts will want to know about. From the list (Rustaveli offers all the traditional favorites) we chose the imeretinsky khachapuri (250 rubles, $8). This cheese bread is often prepared earlier, then reheated and ruined by frying it in a pan, where it turns crisp. At Rustaveli, it was perfect — soft, gooey, cheese oozing out of it, far from being greasy, but nevertheless wonderfully bad for you. A masterpiece. Much like the restaurant it was served in.

TITLE: Polls Close, Counting Starts in Afghanistan
AUTHOR: By Jason Straziuso and Robert Reid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL — Taliban threats appeared to dampen voter turnout in the militant south Thursday when Afghans chose the next president for their deeply troubled country. Insurgents launched scattered rocket, suicide and bomb attacks that closed some polling sites.
After ten hours of voting, including a last-minute, one-hour extension, election workers began to count the millions of ballots cast across the country. Initial results weren’t expected until Saturday.
Low turnout in the south would harm President Hamid Karzai’s re-election chances and boost the standing of his top challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Turnout in the north appeared to be stronger, a good sign for Abdullah.
International officials have predicted an imperfect election — Afghanistan’s second-ever direct presidential vote — but expressed hope that Afghans would accept it as legitimate, a key component of President Barack Obama’s war strategy. Taliban militants, though, pledged to disrupt the vote and circulated threats that those who cast ballots will be punished.
A voting official in Kandahar, the south’s largest city and the Taliban’s spiritual birthplace, said voting appeared to be 40 percent lower than during the country’s 2004 presidential election. The official asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to release turnout figures. Associated Press journalists reported low turnouts in Kabul compared with longer lines seen in the 2004 vote.
Militants carried out attacks around the country. Security companies in the capital reported at least five bomb attacks, and Kabul police exchanged fire for more than an hour with a group of armed men; two suicide bombers died in the clash, police said. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed that five gunmen were fighting with police.
The tight security across Kabul was relaxed after polls closed, as Afghan troops and police vacated checkpoints.
Karzai, dressed in his traditional purple-and-green-striped robe, voted at a Kabul high school in the morning. He dipped his index finger in indelible ink — a fraud prevention measure — and held it up for the cameras. Presidential palace officials released a rare photo of Karzai’s wife casting her vote.
“I request that the Afghan people come out and vote, so through their ballot Afghanistan will be more secure, more peaceful,” Karzai said. “Vote. No violence.”
Karzai, who has held power since the Taliban was ousted in late 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion, is favored to finish first among 36 official candidates, although a late surge by Abdullah could force a runoff if no one wins more than 50 percent.
The next president will lead a nation plagued by armed insurgency, drugs, corruption and a feeble government. 
Violence has risen sharply in Afghanistan in the last three years, and the U.S. now has more than 60,000 forces in the country close to eight years after the U.S. invasion following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 
A U.S. service member was killed in a mortar attack in the east Thursday, bringing to at least 33 the number of U.S. troops killed this month.

TITLE: Scotland Frees Sick Lockerbie Bomber
AUTHOR: By Ben McConville
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EDINBURGH, Scotland — Scotland freed the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds Thursday, allowing him to die at home in Libya despite American protests that mercy should not be shown to the man responsible for the deaths of 270 people.
Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said Abdel Baset al-Megrahi’s condition had deteriorated from prostate cancer. Al-Megrahi had only served some eight years of a life sentence, but MacAskill said he was bound by Scottish values to release him.
“Our belief dictates that justice be served but mercy be shown,” MacAskill said, ruling that al-Megrahi “be released on compassionate grounds and be allowed to return to Libya to die.”
“Some hurts can never heal, some scars can never fade,” MacAskill said. “Those who have been bereaved cannot be expected to forget, let alone forgive ... However, Mr. al-Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power.”
Al-Megrahi, 57, was convicted in 2001 of taking part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988. He was sentenced to life in prison.
The airliner — which was carrying mostly American passengers to New York — blew up as it flew over Scotland. All 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground died when the aircraft crashed into the town of Lockerbie.
The former Libyan intelligence officer was sentenced to serve a minimum of 27 years in a Scottish prison for Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack. But a 2007 review of his case found grounds for an appeal of his conviction, and many in Britain believe he is innocent.
The White House said Thursday it “deeply regrets” the decision to free al-Megrahi.
“As we have expressed repeatedly to officials of the government of the United Kingdom and to Scottish authorities, we continue to believe that Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland,” the White House said in a statement. “On this day, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families who live every day with the loss of their loved ones.”
Earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton phoned MacAskill urging him not to release al-Megrahi, and seven U.S. senators wrote a letter with a similar message.
MacAskill said he stood by al-Megrahi’s conviction and the sentence for “the worst terrorist atrocity ever committed on U.K. soil.”
He said he ruled out sending the bomber back to Libya under a prisoner-transfer agreement, saying the U.S. victims had been given assurances that al-Megrahi would serve out his sentence in Scotland.
But he said that as a prisoner given less than three months to live by doctors, al-Megrahi was eligible for compassionate release.
“I am conscious that there are deeply held feelings and many will disagree whatever my decision,” he said. “However, a decision has to be made.”

TITLE: Iran Lawmakers Give Warning Over Government
AUTHOR: By Nasser Karimi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad submitted a new Cabinet purged of critics and packed with loyalists and little-known figures, and lawmakers on Thursday warned it could face a challenge from members of his own conservative camp in parliament.
Ahmadinejad is forming his new government while still under a cloud from claims by the pro-reform opposition that his victory in June elections was fraudulent. But he is also under pressure from fellow conservatives, who have long criticized the president for hoarding power by putting close associates with little experience in key posts.
Parliament must approve the new government lineup, setting the stage for a possible fight over the nominees. Mohammad Reza Bahonar, one of parliament’s deputy speakers, told state television that Ahmadinejad’s list of 18 names was submitted late Wednesday.
Parliament speaker Ali Larijani indirectly criticized Ahmadinejad, suggesting his nominees lacked experience and political weight.
“Ministers must have enough experience and expertise, otherwise a huge amount of the country’s stamina will waste,” he said, according to state radio. “A ministry is not a place for tryouts.”
Larijani appeared to focus on the nominee for intelligence minister — Heidar Moslehi, a close Ahmadinejad loyalist — as too inexperienced. “A security official should have a vision” and know how to deal with both security and political issues, Larijani said.
Bahonar also warned that some of the nominees would not be approved.
“Our initial estimation shows some four or five members of the list would not achieve a vote of confidence,” he said, according to the state news agency IRNA.
He said the close Ahmadinejad allies named for the posts of health, energy and labor ministers are not as “efficient” as the current ministers holding those posts. For the health ministry, Ahmadinejad has nominated Marzieh Vadi Dastgerdi, one of three women he has named — who if approved would be the Islamic Republic’s first female ministers.
The parliament will hold a week of discussions on the ministers before voting on each minister separately on Aug. 30.
Six of the nominees are holdovers from Ahmadinejad’s previous government, though two of them are being moved to new ministries. Among them is Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who will retain his post.
Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, who is close to the elite Revolutionary Guard, has been nominated as the new interior minister, in charge of police. The move could signal an even tougher domestic security stance amid the crackdown on the opposition following the disputed election. 
The opposition says at least 69 people have been killed in the fierce crackdown by police, the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia.
Ahmadinejad also appeared to have purged conservative critics. Gone from the list were four members of the outgoing government — the intelligence, culture, health and labor ministers — who criticized him earlier this month over his attempt to name a close associate, Esfandiar Mashai, as his top vice president.
Mashai was sharply opposed by conservatives because of past comments friendly to Israel, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei forced Ahmadinejad to remove him from the vice presidency.
Ahmadinejad had already fired his intelligence minister, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, soon after the Mashai controversy, raising a storm of criticism from conservative lawmakers and hard-line clerics. His nominee for the post is a close ally, Moslehi.
Another nominee who could draw fire from parliament is Ali Akbar Mehrabian, whom Ahmadinejad is seeking to maintain as industry minister. Mehrabian has been convicted of fraud in an intellectual property rights case — fueling complaints among conservatives that the president rewards loyalty over competence.
For the key oil minister post, Ahmadinejad named the commerce minister from his outgoing government, Masoud Mir Kazemi, a former Revolutionary Guard commander with no experience in the oil sector. Some 80 percent of foreign revenue in Iran, the second largest oil producer in OPEC, comes for oil exports.

TITLE: China Says 1,300 Sick in New Lead  Poisoning Case 
In Central Region
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — More than 1,300 children have been sickened by lead poisoning in central China, the second such case involving a large number of children this month, state media said Thursday.
The official Xinhua News Agency said 1,354 children — or nearly 70 percent of the children tested — who lived near a manganese plant in Wenping township in Hunan province were found to have excessive lead in their blood.
Local authorities shut down the Hunan smelter last week and detained two of its executives on suspicion of “causing severe environment pollution,” Xinhua said. General manager Liu Zhongwu was still at large, it said.
A staffer from the Wenping township government office who declined to give his name said the numbers are expected to rise as more children are tested.
Calls to local health offices rang unanswered Thursday.
It is the latest case showing serious environmental problems caused by China’s economic growth. For decades, many Chinese companies dumped poisons into rivers and the ground rather than disposing them safely, counting on the acquiescence of local governments unwilling to damage their economic lifelines.