SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1520 (82), Friday, October 23, 2009
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TITLE: Controversial Ombudsman Mikhailov Dismissed
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A United Russia politician who was  elected as St. Petersburg’s first ombudsman in the summer of 2007 amid indignant protests from the local human rights community, Igor Mikhailov, was stripped of his duties this week by the city’s Legislative Assembly. 
According to the official version offered by the parliament’s speaker Vadim Tyulpanov, Mikhailov brought the trouble on his own head by endorsing several members of his administrative staff to participate in the municipal elections held this fall. 
The ombudsman, who has vowed to defend his rights in court and said that he is prepared to take the fight to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, maintains he has apparently irritated the authorities by doing his job too vigorously. “Democracy is vanishing in St. Petersburg,” the ombudsman said about his firing.
The St. Petersburg Human Rights Council may well agree with the ombudsman about the state of democracy, yet many human rights advocates refused to buy into Mikhailov’s version of events, instead issuing an official news release welcoming his dismissal. “Our council has always regarded Igor Mikhailov as completely unfit for the ombudsman’s job, and the parliament’s decision simply proves us right,” the statement reads. 
When Mikhailov assumed the ombudsman’s post, a group of the city’s leading human rights organizations refused to cooperate with him and formed an informal council of ombudsmen comprising experts from the city’s nongovernmental organizations and human rights groups.
At the same time, Olga Kurnosova, the St. Petersburg representative of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front said Mikhailov might be paying the price for his recent efforts to win the political opposition the right to hold public meetings without constantly getting in trouble with the authorities.
Mikhailov dismissed all allegations concerning his involvement with his staff’s election campaigns. “I personally never engage in any political activity; as for my staff, they have a legal right to take part in elections so I do not see a problem here,” he said. “Besides, two of my staff had previously been successfully elected to municipal councils and back then my colleagues at the parliament did not make an issue of it. The excuse the parliament has used to get rid of me is absurd.”
Reports that Mikhailov’s position was weakening began to appear in the summer, with the ombudsman’s critics — some of them members of his own party — alleging that he had made a joke of himself by regularly uttering ridiculous comments that attracted nationwide coverage and even reached foreign audiences. A glaring example was his opinion on children’s punishment, voiced during a televised discussion on Channel Five in June 2009. 
When asked whether he considered corporal punishment to be appropriate for children, Mikhailov offered instructions to parents on how to select a “moderately hard” leather belt to do the job. 
“I personally used it [corporal punishment] with my daughter, but I would give her two warnings, and only resort to physical punishment on the third offense,” Mikhailov said during the discussion. “Do not use your hand. If you feel corporal punishment is needed, try not to use a very hard belt because you may damage the child’s internal organs.”  The speech prompted a wave of outrage in human rights circles. Television reporters went round local shops asking embarrassed saleswomen whether specific belts from the shop’s range would be suitable for punishing children. Within days of the incident, members of the local branch of the democratic party Yabloko had made a puppet of Mikhailov and publicly whipped it outside the ombudsman’s office with a specially chosen belt.
Tyulpanov said a new ombudsman would be elected before the end of the year. The Legislative Assembly is also introducing a new position of children’s ombudsman.
Mikhailov is preparing to file a libel case. “My dismissal appears to be a tit-for-tat game; apparently, when defending someone’s rights we somehow damaged the interests of an influential politician,” he said. “I do not know yet who is masterminding this game, but we’ll no doubt figure this out. We have to start by examining the most recent cases that I have supported.”
Despite numerous highly publicized human rights violations in Russia, most regions in the country do not have ombudsmen. Each of Russia’s 83 subjects, or administrative regions, has the right to elect an ombudsman, yet less than half of the regions have appointed anyone to the position.

TITLE: Clock Ticking for State Corporations
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that many state corporations must change their legal status or be shut down, signaling the beginning of the end of the state behemoths.
Medvedev also urged business leaders to help the Kremlin fight graft and called for the imprisonment of court intermediaries, whom he described as “the highest form of corruption.”
State corporations have gotten out of control, and those that work in competitive sectors face two alternatives: being turned into public companies or liquidation, Medvedev said at a meeting of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
The president said state corporations that were created to carry out a specific business activity over a certain period of time should also be closed.
But “state corporations will remain in the sectors where we have not been able to provide normal competition so far,” he said, Interfax reported.
State corporations have come under fire from the likes of Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and Kremlin aide Arkady Dvorkovich for hampering economic growth since they were created in 2007. Medvedev himself signed an order placing government stakes from more than 400 companies into Russian Technologies last year, but he has shown a change of heart after his legal council advised him in March that state corporations should operate under the same laws as private businesses.
Medvedev on Aug. 7 ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office and the head of the Kremlin’s oversight department to carry out a sweeping investigation into how state corporations function.
The results of the investigation will be presented to the president on Nov. 1, Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, said Wednesday.
In addition to Russian Technologies, state corporations include Olympics construction firm Olimpstroi, nanotechnology giant Rusnano, state lender Vneshekonombank, nuclear conglomerate Rosatom, the Housing Maintenance Fund and the Deposit Insurance Agency.
The head of one state corporation cautioned Medvedev against changing his company’s legal status in August. “Any experiments conducted on the Olympics project will only lead to negative consequences,” said Taimuraz Bolloyev, president of Olimpstroi, which was created Oct. 10, 2007, to prepare Sochi to host the 2014 Winter Games.
Medvedev’s call, however, seems to have some support from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Amid complaints from government officials that the state corporation model had made it difficult to oversee expenses for Olympics preparations, Putin proposed returning to the previous financing model — a federal targeted program, Vedomosti reported in late August. The Finance Ministry later rejected the idea.
Analysts said the economic crisis meant that the time was not right to overhaul state corporations. “I don’t think it’s a good time to denationalize Russia’s economy,” said Alexander Osin, chief economist at Finam. “The risks of inflation growth in the long term are high, but it’s possible to avoid them through the state regulation of the economy.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, billionaire Oleg Deripaska complained to Medvedev about the difficulty of doing business because of intermediaries used by courts, “without whom it is impossible to receive a fair ruling.”
“Everyone knows that for this you have to pay,” Deripaska said.
Medvedev said businesspeople did not have to pay. “In this situation, a businessman’s duty is to file a complaint to prosecutors, the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service,” he said.
As for the intermediaries, “they must be put in prison. This is the highest form of corruption,” he said.
Medvedev, who has made the fight against corruption a hallmark of his presidency, appealed to the businessmen to join him in the battle. “If we don’t start fighting against it ourselves, they will keep taking your money and you will pay because there’s no other option,” he said.
Also Wednesday, Medvedev reiterated that Russia has too many banks. But he added, “We must not emerge from the crisis with only three state banks,” RIA-Novosti reported.
Medvedev also said the state could not abandon its involvement in the economy. “The crisis has shown that all our aspirations to abandon state involvement are without a foundation,” he said.

TITLE: Klepach Says Ruble May Hit 23 to Dollar If Oil Stays High
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble could surge back to its 2008 highs next year, reaching 23 against the dollar, if oil prices remain high and there is an influx of foreign investment, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach said Wednesday.
But the comments from the ministry’s top forecaster were more of a warning than a prediction. The stronger currency could keep economic growth anemic and threaten the budget with bigger deficits, as exporters’ commodities become more expensive on the global market and taxes paid from their foreign-currency revenue are worth less in ruble terms.
The ruble “may be 26 rubles per dollar, or even 23 or 24, if oil prices are above $80 and there’s a high influx of capital into the country,” Klepach told reporters at a UBS investment forum. But he said he hoped that would not happen, since further strengthening of the ruble to even 26 or 27 rubles per dollar “could be rather dangerous from the economic recovery point of view.”
After spending a third of its foreign currency reserves to orchestrate a gradual devaluation last fall and winter, the Central Bank has been forced again to intervene lately to temper the ruble’s gains. But the regulator has also shifted its focus from the exchange rate to fighting inflation and controlling volatility as part of its ultimate goal of moving to a free float.
Speaking at the same conference, Alexei Ulyukayev, a Central Bank first deputy chairman, suggested that the benefits of a strong ruble could ultimately outweigh the losses incurred to the budget.
“It influences everyone in a different way, there’s no common rule that devaluation is helpful, and revaluation is harmful, or vice versa,” he said. “For those who hold assets in the national currency, the strengthening [of the ruble] is unambiguously helpful, everyone becomes relatively richer and can acquire more goods and services.”
But the budget would be seriously affected, he said. “If the export duty [for natural resources] is nominated in a foreign currency and charged in rubles, one rate would be better for the budget than the other, of course,” Ulyukayev said. “But this is quite secondary, the gains for the real economy — consumers and business — are more important than budget surpluses.”
The ruble has been steadily strengthening against the dollar since mid-August, and was trading at 29.13 in Moscow on Wednesday. The currency closed at a post-default high of 23.14 per dollar on July 14, 2008, and subsequently fell as low as 36.34 on Feb. 17.
Ulyukayev revealed some of the Central Bank’s recent moves to fight volatility, stressing that the regulator was “not defending the exchange rate limit, but is rather targeting inflation and volatility.”
The bank’s current intervention limit is 35.7 rubles to the euro-dollar basket, he said. “In September, the limit was 36.4 rubles, but we’ve gone down 70 kopeks.” The Central Bank has decreased its intervention by 5 kopeks for every $700 million bought.
The rising ruble has been accompanied by upward trends in the economy and a soaring stock market. Klepach, who received a rebuke from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in December for being the first to say the country was in recession, has also had the good fortune of being among the first to announce the nascent recovery.
Speaking to conference delegates earlier Wednesday, he was quite optimistic on the state of the Russian economy, saying GDP could grow by 3 percent to 4 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with the third quarter.
“Of course, monthly estimation of the GDP is more of an exotic methodology … but based on these estimations, we have a 0.6 percent increase in the third quarter compared with the second quarter, and expect a 3 percent to 4 percent boost in the fourth quarter,” he said. “But in 2010, we think the overall growth will be only 1.6 percent.”
The economy grew 5.6 percent in 2008 and by at least 6 percent annually in the preceding five years, and it could be a while yet before Russia sees such paces again. Continued unemployment — nearing the 10 percent mark — the poor situation in retail trade and a crippled credit market will prevent a bigger GDP increase in 2010, he said.
“The potential for unemployment is still big and the retail trade is down 0.8 percent in September compared with August,” he said. “The amount of banking loans, in real terms, is still going down. We expect slight growth in 2010, but it would still be difficult to switch to steady growth next year.”
If oil prices continue to grow, they could automatically add 0.5 percent to 0.8 percent to the annual GDP growth figure next year, he said, without specifying how much oil would need to rise.
Speaking on the support provided to the banking sector, Ulyukayev said the Central Bank would continue to decrease the refinancing rate “even though, we already lowered it by 3 percentage points.” Currently at 10 percent, the refinancing rate has been cut seven times since April, which the government hopes will bring down lending rates.

TITLE: NMG Claims Restructuring Of Channel Won’t Affect Jobs
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The restructuring of the federal television and radio station Channel Five, based in St. Petersburg, which envisages its division into regional and federal channels, will only begin in a year’s time and will not lead to mass layoffs at the channel, its management announced on Tuesday.
Vladimir Tyulin, head of the channel’s information and analytical office (DIAV), made the announcement to the staff of Channel Five’s news section on Tuesday, Fontanka reported.
Tyulin said the channel’s current employees would be offered new positions at the new regional channel that is due to be created and that Channel Five’s news programming would retain its present style, though the focus on St. Petersburg and the surrounding region would be greater. 
Olga Kluyeva, producer of DIAV, also said at the meeting that the channel’s regional broadcasting would operate with the support of the RIA Novosti news agency, based in Moscow. Kluyeva did not say if the Russian state television channel or Russia Today would participate in the project in any way, Fontanka reported.
Meanwhile, Yekaterina Sukhova, spokeswoman for the National Media Group or NMG — the holding that owns the channel and recently announced plans for restructuring — said that cooperation between Channel Five and Russia Today would be possible “only in the field of technical support.”
“All the production of the news will remain at Channel Five itself,” Sukhova told The St. Petersburg Times.
Sukhova said that the scale of the restructuring, its form and the terms of it are still under discussion.
“However, the strategy of restructuring for Channel Five doesn’t mean a reduction of its activities — on the contrary, its work will be expanded,” she said.
The purpose of the restructuring is “to increase the effectiveness of the channel’s work,” including its financial performance, Sukhova said.
Alexander Ordzhonikidze, head of REN-TV, who is to take up the position of general director of NMG on Friday, said that in order to increase the effectiveness of the holding’s television channels “the possibility of a partnership for production of news in order to make it more intensive and interesting is being discussed,” Lenizdat.ru reported on Thursday.
“However, it’s important that it be stated that, no matter what business strategy is chosen in that sphere, editorial policy regarding the news production and the content of the news won’t change,” Ordzhonikidze said.
Tensions rose at the channel on Monday when the staff began gathering signatures for a letter addressed to President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In the letter the channel’s employees asked that the destruction of the channel be prevented.
The channel’s employees had been alarmed by NMG’s plans for a restructuring of the management of Channel Five and REN-TV. There had also been reports that the production of news broadcasts would be handed over to Russia Today.
Later on Monday, Vladimir Khanumyan, general director of NMG, appealed to the channel’s employees for calm on Monday, saying that the company was not planning redundancies.
The letter was nevertheless sent on Wednesday, although Fontanka.ru reported that of Channel Five’s 1,700 employees, only about 300 signed it.
St. Petersburg’s Channel Five began its federal broadcasting three years ago, although it is yet to turn a profit.

TITLE: Historic House Faces Demolition
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg residents are struggling to save a classic, early 19th-century building in the city center, just as they did more than 20 years ago when the Soviet authorities tried to demolish the same structure to make way for what became Dostoevskaya metro station. The protests in the late 1980s against the authorities’ arbitrary attitude toward the city’s cultural heritage helped to form a large-scale democratic movement.
As well as its value to the city’s architectural heritage, the protected three-story building, known as Delvig House, is seen as priceless because the poet and editor Anton Delvig lived there from 1829 until his death in 1831. His lifelong friend Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s best loved poet, was a frequent visitor to the house. 
Delvig House could soon be demolished in the course of planned reconstruction, preservationists and scholars warn. Last week, the staff of the Pushkin House Russian Literature Institute wrote an open letter to St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, asking her to prevent “yet another barbaric act directed at the destruction of St. Petersburg’s historic appearance.”
“Delvig House, which survived all the wars and revolutions by a miracle and is one of the few authentic buildings remaining from Pushkin’s St. Petersburg, should not suffer from ill-conceived planning decisions today,” the letter said.
Dozens came to a rally against the planned reconstruction of Delvig House on Monday, collecting signatures calling for the cancellation of reconstruction plans. Four hundred and seventy signatures were collected during the six-hour event, Sergei Vasilyev of the Salvation Group preservationist organization said Thursday.
Although Matviyenko promised at a news conference last week that the historic building, which was planned to be turned into a business center, would “fully retain its appearance,” opponents expressed doubts. 
Monday’s rally, which was timed to coincide with the Oct. 19 anniversary of the founding of the lyceum where both Delvig and Pushkin studied, was not authorized by City Hall on grounds of its proximity to the metro station, but police did not hinder the protesters, standing across the street from them and communicating with their superiors by cell phone.
“When the rally was announced, Matviyenko decided to make a counter-move and invalidate all our actions with her statement that there was nothing to worry about,” Yelizaveta Istomina of the Salvation Group said this week.
“But from the project it can be seen that there will be an additional story and reconstruction, while reconstruction itself is inflicting irreparable damage on the building.”
In its letter to Matviyenko, the Salvation Group said that the building was in satisfactory condition, according to a 2006 technical review, and does not require any work to preserve it, contrary to the developer’s claims. They also asked for all construction on Vladimirskaya Ploshchad to be halted until a detailed development plan has been created with the participation of cultural heritage organizations and under the condition of public discussion.
Opponents of the reconstruction cited a number of historic buildings in the center that have been destroyed or disfigured during the course of what was described as reconstruction, and the fact that Fastcom Holding Company, the developer assigned for the job, was responsible for Regent Hall, a large business center next to Delvig House. 
The eight-story structure, which features a 15x4.5-meter advertizing display on its fa?ade, dwarfed the Vladimirsky Cathedral and other buildings on Vladimirskaya Ploshchad when it was built in 2006, and was last year recognized by Matviyenko as a “town-planning mistake.” 
“The transfer of a building of cultural heritage into such hands is dangerous adventurism,” the Salvation Group said in its letter to Matviyenko.
The Salvation Group was formed when Delvig House came under the threat of demolition in 1986. The month-long protests forced the Soviet authorities to cancel plans to destroy Delvig House. 
The protests to save these historic buildings were the first unauthorized rallies to take place in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, during perestroika.

TITLE: Memorial Wins Award From EU
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS — The European Union’s parliament has awarded its annual Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought to Russia’s Memorial group of human rights activists.
Thursday’s decision lauds the group, which was founded two decades ago to memorialize the victims of Stalinist oppression but quickly expanded to cover a broad array of civil-society development issues.
One of its activists in Chechnya, Natalya Estemirova, was abducted and killed in July.
The award was given to Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Sergei Kovalyov and Oleg Orlov, three prominent rights activists in Russia. All three are leading critics of the Kremlin.
The 79-year-old Kovalyov is a survivor of the Gulag and a contemporary of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.

TITLE: Berlusconi Visits City On Personal Visit to See Putin
AUTHOR: By Antoine Lambroschini
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MOSCOW — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday on a private visit to Russia that has been ridiculed by the Italian left, officials said.
Berlusconi met Putin in St. Petersburg on “a private visit” that will also include talks on energy.
Russian television showed the two prime ministers shaking hands and speaking briefly at the St. Petersburg airport where Putin welcomed the Italian leader. The former president was joined by St. Petersburg governor, Valentina Matvienko.
Putin said the he expected to hold talks Thursday with the Italian prime minister and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan concerning an oil pipeline project known as South Stream.
“Tomorrow we will have the opportunity to talk (about South Stream), with the Turkish prime minister,” Putin said.
The Russian-Italian South Stream project is seen as a rival to the EU-led Nabucco pipeline, which is intended to bring Caspian Sea gas to Europe via Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary.
The two men boast of having a strong personal rapport and Putin in April 2008 stayed with Berlusconi at his villa on the Italian island of Sardinia. St. Petersburg is Putin’s home city.
According to foreign media reports, Berlusconi will attend a belated party marking Putin’s 57th birthday — which fell on October 7 — at a lakeside villa outside St. Petersburg.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, denied reports that former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, another close political ally and personal friend of Putin, would be attending.
But the visit has proved controversial with Berlusconi’s left-wing opponents in Italy, already exasperated by a series of legal and sex scandals involving the embattled prime minister.
“Where else in the world can a government leader go on a secret trip to meet with the leader of one of the main countries in the world?” asked Democratic Party senator Francesco Rutelli in the daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera.
“Berlusconi has a special relationship with Putin but also with (the Libyan leader) Moamer Kadhafi. I have nothing against this, but a country like Italy should also have special relations with other countries,” said former prime minister Massimo D’Alema.
According to the left-leaning daily La Repubblica, Berlusconi will arrive in Russia “carrying fine wines” for Putin.
Amid tight-lipped secrecy over the visit, no other details were available from Russian officials. It was not clear if Berlusconi had already arrived in the country.
His trip is not the first visit by a foreign dignitary to be marked by secrecy in recent months. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Russia in September in a visit that was initially denied and whose purpose was never made clear.
Italy has strong diplomatic and economic ties with Russia and its energy firms in particular have enjoyed solid cooperation with Russian gas giant Gazprom.

TITLE: VW Bets on Budget Models
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: KALUGA — Volkswagen Group will double production at its Kaluga plant and roll out a new model tailored for Russian drivers next year as it bets that demand will grow for budget cars, the company said Tuesday.
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, who visited the plant with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for the launch of the assembly of complete knockdown kits, said the Russian market would grow by 30 percent by 2018 to become one of the world’s top five markets with sales of 3.6 million cars.
Russian sales have halved in the first three quarters of this year after reaching a record 3.2 million vehicles in 2008.
The Kaluga plant, located 170 kilometers west of Moscow, aims to roll out 150,000 cars next year and use complete knockdown kits to produce five models, including a concept car developed especially for the Russian market.
Complete knockdown kits require workers to paint and weld locally instead of simply assembling vehicles. Currently, only the Volkswagen Tiguan and Skoda Octavia have been launched for complete knockdown assembly at the plant.
The new “limousine-sedan” model with a longer chassis for Russian drivers will premiere at the Moscow Motor Show next August, Winterkorn said.
The car, which has not yet been given a name, will be based on the Volkswagen Polo and cost about 440,000 rubles ($14,990), officials said.
Volkswagen, which opened the plant in late 2007, is a flagship investor that paved the way for other major foreign investors to enter the region, Kaluga Governor Anatoly Artamonov said. “It was the first and therefore a difficult project,” he said.
Putin, who earlier this month warned France’s Renault to invest in the struggling AvtoVAZ car giant or risk seeing its 25 percent stake diluted, lavished praise on the governor for defending foreign investors “like they are a Russian company,” thereby showing his commitment to “making the investor feel comfortable.”
Putin called the plant a model for international partnerships in the “difficult auto industry,” adding that he discussed potential challenges for Volkswagen in Russia with German Chancellor Angela Merkel “during our talk about the problems with Opel.” Sberbank and Canada’s Magna recently placed a winning bid to take over General Motors’ Opel unit, which is based in Germany.
Putin seemed especially pleased about Volkswagen’s sponsorship of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the Russian national football team.
“This means we will win the Sochi Olympic Games together,” Putin said in German.
Volkswagen signed up to sponsor the Games last month, agreeing to provide 3,000 vehicles, most of which will be produced at the Kaluga plant, both before and during the event. Sochi 2014 head Dmitry Chernyshenko has put the value of the sponsorship at $100 million.
Chernyshenko, who was present at the plant Tuesday, said the Volkswagen cars used for the Olympics would be fitted with Glonass navigation systems, the Russian version of GPS.
Enthusiastic speeches were also delivered Tuesday by the German Ambassador Walter J?rgen Schmidt and Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout, who said the plant was a sign that Skoda had made the right decision to team up with Volkswagen in the 1990s rather than stay independent.
Somewhat tarnishing the celebration of diplomacy and sports, Olympic champion figure skater Maria Butyrskaya went on stage with a dozen children from her skating school and recalled how she had beat German star Katarina Witt at the beginning of her career.
Along with the Russia-tailored car, the plant will start complete knockdown production of the Skoda Favia and one other model in 2010, said Jochem Heizmann, Volkswagen’s head of production.
Localization of all production is expected to be “over 30 percent” next year and will include seats, “some spare parts” and painting, said Volkswagen’s Russia director, Dietmar Korzekwa.
He said a decision to further localize would depend on developments on the Russian market because localizing requires a substantial investment in tools and instruments.
The decision to switch the Tiguan and Octavia to complete knockdown was based on their success in Russia, he said.

TITLE: Russia Drops $22.5Billion Lawsuit Against U.S. Bank
AUTHOR: By Nataliya Vasilyeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia dropped a $22.5 billion lawsuit Thursday against Bank of New York Mellon after the company agreed to pay $14 million to settle a decade-old money-laundering case involving one of its former executives.
The agreement, announced in a joint statement, was expected after Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said in September that Russia had reached a settlement with the bank under which it would receive no less than $14 million for court costs — the amount of a non-prosecution fee that the bank paid in the United States.
Kudrin said the government would also receive a $4 billion discounted loan from the bank, which he insisted was not related to the lawsuit.
Russia’s federal customs service formally asked the Moscow Arbitration Court to close the case Thursday and the court agreed, bank spokeswoman Natalya Miroyevskaya said from the courtroom.
The case stems from a scandal in which a Bank of New York vice president and her husband were convicted of illegally wiring $7.5 billion of Russian money into accounts at the bank in the 1990s. The customs service went to court in 2007 to claim lost tax revenues on those transfers.
Bank of New York, which later merged with Mellon, was never charged with any wrongdoing in the United States. It reached a non-prosecution agreement with U.S. federal prosecutors in 2005.
The litigation in Russia raised concern among investors about the rule of law.
Andrei Belyaninov, chief of the customs service, said in the joint statement that the case demonstrated Russia’s “vigilance in international financial markets” and “the efficiency and independence of Russian courts.”
An official explanation of the case from the U.S. Attorney’s Office had helped the customs service conclude that “there is no basis to hold the bank liable,” Belyaninov said.
Matthew Biben, executive vice president of Bank of New York Mellon, said the bank is “pleased to have this matter behind us.”

TITLE: Duma OKs Budget, Vents Rage at Finance Minister
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma gave preliminary approval Wednesday to the federal budget for next year in a session where the Communists reappeared after a weeklong boycott to slam the budget proposals and berate their Cabinet nemesis, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.
The Duma passed the budget in a first reading with 315 votes, the exact number of United Russia deputies, after the three other Duma factions said they wouldn’t support the Cabinet’s spending plan. Kudrin presented the budget before the vote, reiterating that its priority would be to raise pensions 46 percent and fund high-tech industries.
The government wants to spend 9.89 trillion rubles ($340 billion) next year, with a deficit of 2.94 trillion rubles, or 6.8 percent of gross domestic product.
The budget may include even more generous expenditures. If revenues are as expected by the middle of next year, the Cabinet may raise salaries for military personnel from Sept. 1 and for teachers and doctors from Dec. 1, Kudrin said. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov had discussed the option at a meeting Tuesday, Kudrin said. The raises would match the inflation rate, he said.
But the finance minister sounded a note of caution about increasing expenditures too much.
“We have reached a line in social spending that reduces our potential in the area of modernizing the economy,” he told a Communist deputy who said the budget disregarded social welfare.
The Duma’s minority trashed the budget, as they do every year.
Communist Party Chairman Gennady Zyuganov said the budget earmarked insufficient money to maintain industrial safety, saying Kudrin hadn’t learned anything from the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydropower Plant accident in August. He also said too little was allocated for economic development, saying spending in this area would fall 27 percent from this year’s amount.
“Underpants are from China, flowers are from Holland, apples are from Turkey and cars are foreign-made,” Zyuganov ranted. “Mr. Kudrin, you prepared the Cabinet’s collective letter of resignation rather than a budget.”
Zyuganov urged the government to raise revenues by introducing state monopolies on vodka and tobacco, as well as a progressive income tax. Russia now has a flat 13 percent income tax.

TITLE: Denmarks Approves Nord Stream Pipe
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: COPENHAGEN — Denmark gave approval for Gazprom’s Nord Stream to place its natural gas pipeline through its territorial waters in the Baltic Sea on Tuesday, making it the first country to grant final permission for the project.
Denmark approved the 137-kilometer Danish stretch of the pipeline that will connect Russia with Germany, the Danish Energy Agency said. The 1,220-kilometer link will also pass through Finnish and Swedish waters and requires permission from all five nations.
“We have investigated the safety and the environmental aspects of the project very thoroughly,” Kirsten Lundt Erichsen, an engineer with the Danish agency, said by telephone.
Nord Stream can start construction in four weeks, she said.
The Nord Stream venture seeks to transport 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year when it’s completed in 2012. The project has been delayed by a year because of adjustments to routes and environmental reviews.
Finland approved the environmental aspects of Nord Stream’s application in July, paving the way for the government to give final approval.

TITLE: Gagging Ren-TV
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Ryzhkov
TEXT: There are two types of media in Russia: influential and independent. The influential media — read: state-controlled — cannot be independent. Conversely, independent media, whose numbers are getting smaller and smaller, cannot be influential. The moment the authorities suspect that an independent publication or broadcaster that is critical of the government is influencing public opinion in a significant way, the chances that the media outlet will be forced to change its orientation and political views become very high.
Ren-TV is Russia’s last remaining national television channel that airs the critical views of members of the political opposition, who present facts and give opinions that are terribly “inconvenient” for the authorities. Not surprisingly, the station’s ratings have continued to grow over the past few years. Television viewers in search of objective and unbiased coverage regularly rate Ren-TV news and analytical programs as being some of the best in the country. Consistent with this, over the past several years the station’s news anchor, Mikhail Osokin, and the host of the weekly analytical show “Nedelya,” Marianna Maximovskaya, have regularly received the TEFI award, the most prestigious prize in the country’s television industry for journalistic quality and integrity. And it is precisely because these highly professional and talented journalists continue to investigate the abuses, weaknesses and ineffectiveness of government institutions and bureaucrats under Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev that Ren-TV may be forced to change its editorial position.
National Media Group, which is owned by Putin’s friend and fellow St. Petersburg native Yury Kovalchuk, controls both Ren-TV and Petersburg Channel 5. Last week, National Media Group announced a restructuring of its top management. Ren-TV announced that its new general director will be Mikhail Kontserev and that it will soon move to new premises — the same building on Moscow’s Zubovsky Bulvar that is occupied by state-owned RIA-Novosti and the Kremlin-friendly RT cable news channel.
Most important, however, is the prospect that Ren-TV’s editorial policy will undergo a fundamental change. To be sure, there have been contradictory statements on this account: First, it was reported in Kommersant on Oct. 16 and in other media outlets that RT would take over the news programming for Ren-TV. Two days later, that report was refuted by Ren-TV spokesman Anton Nazarov, who announced that Ren-TV would continue producing its own news and that RT would be offering only “technical assistance.”
Matters are far worse for Petersburg Channel 5. Staff members sent an open letter to Medvedev and Putin promising to stage a protest if the proposal to lay off 1,300 employees is carried out. Petersburg Channel 5 commands only 2 percent of the national television audience, but it broadcasts critical news and analysis, as well as live political talk shows with independent analysts and opposition members as guest speakers.
Ren-TV was the only station to provide full coverage of the Dissenters’ Marches held in Moscow and St. Petersburg, airing incriminating footage of riot police beating peaceful demonstrators and interviewing political opposition members on the scene. The station also ran a critical story on the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant tragedy that explained the real causes behind the accident and who was really responsible for it. And when the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party and A Just Russia staged a protest on Oct. 14 in the State Duma, Ren-TV was the only television channel to report it as a serious political crisis that was directly related to the blatant, widespread falsification of regional election results on Oct. 11. This was in stark contrast to the distorted language that state-controlled television used to describe the walkout — as a “political demarche and intrigue” and a “provocation caused by outside forces.”
National Media Group management is quick to explain that the underlying reasons for managerial — and possibly editorial — changes at Ren-TV and Petersburg Channel 5 are dictated by economic circumstances and not political ones, claiming that advertising revenues have fallen off sharply during the crisis. Everyone remembers how state-controlled Gazprom-Media in 2001 forced NTV, once Russia’s most-popular television station, to push out the channel’s top management and completely overhaul its news and editorial coverage, citing the same “economic” reasons. As a result of Gazprom-Media’s takeover of NTV, Russia’s most critical and most popular television programs — such as Yevgeny Kiselyov’s “Itogi” and  Savik Shuster’s “Svoboda Slova” political talk shows, as well as Viktor Shenderovich’s “Kukly” puppet show that lampooned Russia’s top leaders — were kicked off the air despite their high ratings. Will the current reorganization at Ren-TV and Petersburg Channel 5 cause the two channels’ most critical informational programs to be cancelled as well under the same pretext of a “cost-cutting measure”?
Unfortunately, everything that has happened on the television media front since Putin became president in 2000 suggests that the last vestige of independent television will be muzzled as well.

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

TITLE: Falsification Par Excellence
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Sonin
TEXT: Following Moscow City Duma elections four years ago, one of Russia’s top political analysts, Alexander Kynev, wrote that they had been “something of a ‘high point’ in the assault against the voting rights of citizens as the authorities tried to minimize political competition in the country.”
As it turned out, he was mistaken. The 2005 elections were not the worst example of rigged electoral practices. The results of subsequent elections reflected the will of voters less and less. That year would better have been designated as the start of a dark period for Russian democracy. The question is not whether the most recent elections conformed to minimum democratic criteria: elections involving the wholesale disqualification of candidates cannot be considered democratic in any way. The question now is simpler: Were the results falsified? If there was any debate as to the scale of falsification in the 2007 State Duma elections, the recent Moscow City Duma elections put an end to it.
It would be pointless to conduct an analysis of these elections. Even the simplest chart illustrating the official preliminary results of the share of votes each party received relative to the turnout at each polling station indicates a high likelihood that hundreds of thousands of votes were stuffed into the United Russia ballot box. Of course, there might be another way to explain why, wherever voter turnout exceeded 50 percent, the “extra” votes almost always went to United Russia, whereas the distribution of votes below the 50 percent benchmark was decidedly more varied. But a comparison of these results with those from elections prior to 2005 — and even with the apparently falsified 2007 election results — leaves little room for any other explanation.
Here is just one example: According to the Central Elections Commission, District 160 had a voter turnout of 18.3 percent, with United Russia winning 32.6 percent of the vote, the Communist Party 28.5 percent and Yabloko 18.2 percent. Nearby District 161 reported a turnout of 94.3 percent, with United Russia taking 77.8 percent of all votes, the Communist Party 2.8 percent and Yabloko only 0.9 percent. There might very well be a valid reason for the huge discrepancy — for example, one district might contain an enormous, low-rent housing complex with residents who vote en masse. The second might be dominated by expensive townhouses from which wild horses couldn’t drag the occupants to fulfill their civic duty. But that is only in theory. In reality, the discrepancy between those two particular districts was substantially lower in previous elections.
So the elections were falsified, and yet even under the best of conditions, United Russia failed to earn 50 percent of Muscovites’ votes. The practical considerations are even more complex. Up until recently, in any discussion regarding the falsification of election results, there was always the argument, “In any case, the majority of people support Putin (or Mayor Yury Luzhkov), so what difference do the election results make anyway?”
I once made a similar point when commenting on election results. But now I have my doubts. Now it seems that Muscovites really don’t support United Russia and its leader anymore. Winning 40 percent — at best — of the vote in an electoral race can by no means be interpreted as receiving a mandate from the voters.

Konstantin Sonin, a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, is a professor at the New Economic School in Moscow and a columnist for Vedomosti.

TITLE: Staging the impossible
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In an important turnaround in St. Petersburg’s musical world, the contemporary Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s “The Enchanted Wanderer” is arguably the best show of the 2008-09 season at the Mariinsky Theater. 
This year’s Golden Mask for the best female role was awarded to the opera’s lead singer, Christina Kapustinskaya, while the Golden Sophite went to Sergei Alexashkin for the male lead. Moreover, following its performance Thursday evening, the new production is now entering the Mariinsky’s regular repertoire. It is also set to tour France, Sweden, Finland and Holland in coming months. 
There are several explanations for the extraordinary success of “The Enchanted Wanderer,” beginning with the international reputation of its composer. Shchedrin has long been composer in residence at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.  
Shchedrin based “The Enchanted Wanderer” on the story of the same name by Nikolai Leskov. Even for this 19th-century Russian master of tragic realism, the gloom and hopelessness of the work is particularly stark. 
“It is hopeless and tragic, like Leskov’s story,” Alexei Stepanyuk, the opera’s stage director, told The St. Petersburg Times. “When I shared my impressions with the composer, he replied: ‘What do you expect from me? That at 69 years of age I would start composing optimistic music?!’”
The plot is simple. A man joins a group of travelers crossing Lake Ladoga and goes to the island of Valaam to lead a monastic life. Along the way, he tells his traveling companions the story of his life. He is going to the monastery to escape from life, not because of his religious convictions. He is prompted by the desire to evade responsibilities, to find a cell where he can hide from the world and primarily from himself. 
The audience is shown a talented, clever and energetic Russian man who instead of trying to be happy is plunging into a precipice of despair of his own creation. The resulting spectacle is an exploration of the state of despair.
“For me it is a mystery of the Russian mind that a man does nothing to succeed in life and goes to God because he has lost everything; he looks to Christ, the Savior as though he is trying to save himself from himself,” said Stepanyuk.
 Shchedrin remains true to Leskov’s text and has created a piece that is equally powerful in transforming a tragedy of the mind into powerful dramatic music. 
The opera was created 10 years ago, and the composer himself labeled it as “an opera for concert performance.” That is how it was performed, until one day two years ago, when after one such performance in Moscow, the Mariinsky’s Valery Gergiev suggested holding a staged version of the piece to the composer. Shchedrin initially objected, saying he could not conceive of anyone succeeding. But Gergiev already knew who among his collaborators in the Mariinsky Theater could undertake it. The next day, Alexei Stepanyuk got a phone call from the maestro.
“After I received the offer of staging the opera, I began listening to the music,” Stepanyuk said. “The more I listened to it, the more it penetrated my mind. I came to the conclusion that the opera is close in concept to Tchaikovsky’s ‘The Queen of Spades.’ Rodion Shchedrin started with a particular case and individual life and moved to the general so as to create a world drama, a tragedy of conscience. 
“The music communicates this beautifully. It is tidal music, a music of images which I would call ‘Dreams of Russia.’  I understood what Rodion Shchedrin meant when he said that his opera could not possibly be staged. It is so sensitive that it is very difficult to adjust it for visual presentation.” 
The original staging is accompanied by unusual stage decoration. Live reeds fill the stage, and the figures of the protagonists move through the thickets in traditional Russian costumes. The slow movements and meditative music are almost trance-like, and the audience feels the religious atmosphere from the very beginning. 
Stepanyuk said the opera could be characterized as a travelogue by a Russian journeying through Russia, or by a Russian soul in time and space. “But this travel deals with cruelty and indifference to the hero’s own fate and to the fate of others,” he explained. 
Three singers — a bass, tenor and soprano — and a corps de ballet that is constantly on stage for the nearly two-hour-long performance communicate the story.
“After long debates and periods of reflection, I wrote the script for the staging and began rehearsals,” said Stepanyuk. “The singers knew their parts because they had performed the concert version, but for the dancers it was all new. 
“I worked with the dancers, trying to teach them to listen to the complex music and feel the period described in the story. They are constantly on the stage performing different roles. Either they are monks or Tatars or gypsies. At the end of the rehearsal process they had learned to walk slowly and meaningfully like monks and to react to the music.”                                                
Stepanyuk has worked for the Mariinsky Theater since 1993, during which time he has staged over 70 operas there and at other Russian opera theaters where he is a guest artist. The Mariinsky’s current repertoire includes six of his productions.
Gergiev, the music director of the production [replaced in the pit for Thursday’s performance by Mikhail Tatarnikov] delivers a highly expressive and nuanced reading of Shchedrin’s music, moving smoothly from culminative heights to pianissimo. The maestro uses volume masterfully, such as the ‘Ships on the Volga’ episode to emphasize the dramatic content of the piece. Equally interesting were the parts featuring gypsy music, when the orchestra reached a frenzied crescendo. In contrast, the beginning and end of the opera used pianissimo with great effect, wrapping the audience in barely perceptible sound.
Oksana Kapustinskaya and Andrei Petrov perform superlatively in leading roles, along with Sergei Alexashkin, who plays the opera’s protagonist, Ivan Fliagin. “There is something particular in Russian literature and Russian people that Dostoevsky revealed with great talent,” said Stepanyuk. “We pity criminals and sinners. Here, Sergei Alexashkin beautifully renders the complex nature of his hero both dramatically and vocally.”

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Rock music may sound horrible, but it requires a weird and cynical mind to turn it into an instrument of torture, especially as many musicians whose music was allegedly used to break the will of terrorism suspects were against the Iraq War and Guantanamo prison from the very beginning.
A coalition of U.S. and international rock musicians has announced they are joining the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo (NCCG) and demanded that the U.S. government release the names of all the songs that were used at the naval base’s prison for terrorism suspects as torture, the campaign’s organizers said in a news release on Thursday.
<strong>Tom Morello, Billy Bragg, Michelle Branch, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, David Byrne, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Steve Earle, the Entrance Band, Joe Henry, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, R.E.M., Trent Reznor, Rise Against</strong> and <strong>The Roots</strong> are all protesting against the use of music in conjunction with torture that took place at the prison and other facilities and announced they were supporting an effort seeking the declassification of all secret government records pertaining to how music was utilized as an interrogation device.
The release said that music by Nine Inch Nails’ Reznor and Morello, formerly of Rage Against the Machine, has been linked to torture tactics at the prison, according to public records.
“Guantanamo is known around the world as one of the places where human beings have been tortured — from water boarding, to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating sexual acts — by playing music for 72 hours without stop at volumes just below that necessary to shatter the eardrums,” Morello was quoted by the NCCG as saying. 
“Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine. The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me — we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now.”
The United Nations has banned the use of music as torture under the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, although the convention has gone largely unenforced, the NCCG said.
“Having these acclaimed artists join the campaign to close Guantanamo will help ignite a prairie fire of grassroots support across the nation. We are thrilled and grateful to have them aboard,” said Tom Andrews, director of the NCCG.
The National Security Archive, a freedom of information act organization, has already found at least 20 declassified documents that refer to the use of “loud” music to “create futility” in uncooperative detainees at Guantanamo. 
A 2004 Defense Department report on abuses at the military base in Cuba stated that the “futility technique included the playing of <strong>Metallica</strong>, <strong>Britney Spears</strong> and rap music.” 
An investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee cited detainees who were subjected for hours to the music of <strong>Eminem</strong>, <strong>Bruce Springsteen</strong> and the <strong>Bee Gees</strong> played at loud volumes as a sleep deprivation technique, the NCCG said.

<em>— By Sergey Chernov</em>

TITLE: Diaghilev: the early years
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As part of the Diaghilev. P.S. festival that opened in the city on Oct. 12, the Russian Museum has unveiled an impressive exhibition titled “Diaghilev. The Beginning.,” which highlights the period of Diaghilev’s life that preceded his activities as world-renowned impresario and creator of the Ballets Russes.
Sergei Diaghilev was an ambitious young man when he came to St. Petersburg in 1890 from provincial Perm to seek his fortune. Thanks to his extraordinary talent and energy, as well as a mission to leave a significant impact on the artistic development of his country, he soon found himself at the center of artistic life in the imperial capital.
The five-part exhibition in the Russian Museum takes visitors through this exciting period, which began with the launch of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) journal. The magazine was more than a glossy publication; it was an important step toward Diaghilev’s future great projects. Art exhibitions were organized under the banner of the journal in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where work by contemporary Russian artists was shown to the public for the first time. Altogether, there were six such exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The magazine also published reviews of the achievements of contemporary foreign and Russian artists. 
As time has proven, the circle of creative talent that Diaghilev brought together in the magazine showed remarkable editorial perspicacity. Leading literary figures included Gippius, Merezhkovsky and Remisov, while the painters included Korovin, Bakst and Serov.
The idea for a magazine like Mir Iskusstva, devoted to the popularization of the new trend sweeping the art world, had already circulated among the artistic elite of the capital before Diaghilev’s arrival. Alexander Benois, for one, was known to have talked about it. But it needed the creative genius of Diaghilev for the concept to be realized and succeed.
The new exhibition at the Russian Museum focuses on Diaghilev, his friends and contributors to the magazine, and presents work by the painters and graphic artists that the magazine promoted. But not everything is celebratory or serious. A place of honor is reserved for the art of caricature, one target of which was Diaghilev and his publishing work. 
After Mir Iskusstva, Diaghilev undertook an exhibition of contemporary Russian and Finnish artists. This art comprises the focus of the next section of the exhibition. Diaghilev realized that the Russian public was not familiar with the art of their Finnish neighbors, and decided to fill that gap. The result was a vast and very successful exhibition that has left traces in the permanent collection of the Russian Museum to this day. It took place in 1898 in the exhibition halls of Baron Stieglitz’s School of Art.  The show attracted 12,000 visitors, a huge number at the time, and stirred up controversy — always the lifeblood of artistic events.      
The eminent Russian critic Vladimir Stasov said the exhibition was one-sided. His criticism was not unjustified, since Diaghilev had intentionally avoided any work by realist painters such as Repin or any work by the Peredvizhniki (Itinerants) like Kramskoi, who were the “gold standard” of the day. Instead, he intentionally concentrated his efforts on presenting the Impressionists and Symbolists. “Diaghilev. The Beginning.” presents 40 works from the original 200 canvases seen by visitors to the 1898 show, including now famous works by Vrubel (whose depiction of naked young women in “Morning” particularly outraged Stasov), Serov, Levitan and Korovin. Luckily for Diaghilev, art enthusiasts who came to see his show disagreed with Stasov. The exhibition traveled to European cities and eventually all the canvases were sold. Many pieces went to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, some went to other Russian museums, and still others were taken up by private collectors.   
In 1905, Diaghilev undertook one of his most ambitious projects — an exhibition of Russian portraits from the dawn of Russian portraiture to the beginning of the 20th century. He spent months traveling around Russia and visiting provincial estates in order to persuade their owners to part with family treasures for several months. Diaghilev’s gift of persuasion enabled him to assemble the greatest showcase ever in this genre, consisting of some 3,000 portraits altogether. The Russian Museum is now showing 114 of these pieces. However, even this small sampling of the original collection demonstrates the richness of Diaghilev’s exhibition. It was visited by 45,000 people and brought in 60,000 rubles — an enormous sum at the time — which was then donated to widows and orphans of the 1905 war. 
The curators of the Russian Museum have recreated the atmosphere of the 1905 event in the Tauride Palace, which was at the time the most prestigious exhibition venue in the city. Its rooms were decorated for the occasion in the style of the historical periods of the paintings they contained. Now, above the canvases in the Russian Museum hang large photos from the original exhibition.
Diaghilev himself described his project as a “journey through the reigns” of Russian history. 
The sheer quantity of works was striking. The portraits, sculptures, oil paintings and watercolors together created an impressive social picture of Russian society, and contemporaries were pleased by what they saw.
Encouraged by the success of this exhibition, in 1906 Diaghilev ventured on his first international demarche. Seven hundred and fifty sculptures, paintings, watercolors, icons and examples of graphic and folkloric art were brought to Paris for an exhibition titled “Two Centuries of Russian Sculpture and Painting.” The 12 halls of the Grand Palace in the center of Paris were given over to this epic showcase of Russian art. Precious icons that had never before left Russia’s palaces were shown abroad for the first time. Portraits from the 1905 exhibition in St. Petersburg were complemented by landscapes, genre works and graphic art. There were few works of the traditional academic variety: several Repins, no Itinerants, but plenty of 20th-century contemporary artists. One exception was the portraits by Dmitry Levitsky, the 18th-century painter famous for his dreamily beautiful images and perfect technique. The French did not know what to make of his works and compared him to their icon of good taste and technique, Batiste Greuze. 
The organizers of the 1906 exhibition in Paris, Leon Bakst and Alexander Benois, were decorated with the Order of the Legion d’Honneur. This event in Paris showed Russians both to the French as well as to Russians themselves. The Tretyakov Gallery loaned out a substantial number of important works, including those by Somov, Levitan and Nesterov.
The final sensation at “Diaghilev. The Beginning,” is the curtain that Leon Bakst, a member of the Diaghilev circle, created for the Kommissarzhevsky Theater in St. Petersburg. “Elysium” was created exactly 104 years ago, and is being displayed by the museum for the first time.  The curtain depicts exotic, transparent beauty: The sea, a fountain and a sphinx rising above vivid red patches of exotic flowers. Bakst was later to design the scenery for many of Diaghilev’s productions in the world of dance and opera.

The exhibition “Diaghilev. The Beginning” runs through March 10, 2010 at the Russian Museum. www.rusmuseum.ru

TITLE: What’s in a name?
AUTHOR: By Patricia Pluijmers
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In the play “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde, the English playwright and poet whose face and name — though in slightly adapted form — grace the entrance of the Wild Oscar Pub, various characters take on fake identities to escape from their social obligations. Several aspects shape the identity of Wild Oscar Pub; and unmasking its true identity and deciding whether it is in fact an honest one requires considerable effort.
Naturally, a pub whose name refers to Oscar Wilde creates expectations of a certain “Britishness.” On a recent visit, a large flat-screen TV was showing the football match between Zenit and England’s Manchester United, and supporters could enjoy the match over a Newcastle Brown Ale. Wild Oscar has seemingly not yet been discovered by many football supporters — only two people appeared to have come specifically to watch the game; other people sitting at the bar were engaged in conversation and paid no attention to the action. The volume of the match was however loud enough to be noticed by everyone.
Though we wanted to sit in the part of the pub where food is served, we were prevented from entering, and told that all the tables were taken already. The next minute however, two other guests entered the pub and were taken straight to a table. This confused us somewhat; was there space there or not? The pub’s manager directed us to a bigger table in the noisy bar area, with a view of the bar and TV. After this initial turmoil, we sat down on the striped couches — reminiscent of the Victorian age — amid lamps and golf-patterned wallpaper that added to the Wild(e) atmosphere.
Vegetarians should not come to the pub hungry, because their choice is limited to a plate of cheese and desserts. 
The starters — grilled cheese (190 rubles, $6.50) and shrimps in tempura roll (180 rubles, $6.20) — did not arrive at the same time; the waitress explained in Russian that this was due to the fact that one of the dishes was a “cold starter” and the other was not. The shrimp rolls did not come, as promised, with flavors of mango and avocado, and the taste of shrimps was heavily weakened by the overpowering flavors of tomato and paprika.
The chef’s choice of cheese was, to our surprise, not in the least bit British. Instead, the three cheeses decorating the plate were a disappointment. The grilled mozzarella was creamy, but no extra seasoning had been added to enliven its slightly bland taste. Another had been deep-fried and offered only a crunchy texture and fatty taste. Over-salted nuts completed the fast-food greasy taste, and built up a thirst. Fortunately, a bottle of red Chilean Chardonnay (800 rubles, $27.50) was very good, full-bodied and spicy. 
The main courses offered more surprises. While the lamb (580 rubles, $20) and roast beef (310 rubles, $10.60) were well prepared, the presentation of the meat, as well as of the side dishes, seemed misplaced and even absurd. Most of the dishes (thankfully not the desserts) were decorated with a sprig of rosemary. Why, exactly, was confusing, perhaps it was the chef’s last attempt to give some resemblance of English cuisine to a menu that was otherwise bizarrely dominated by Asian-style cuisine and overly complex combinations of flavors not expected in a standard British pub, such as Yorkshire puddings served with a dire, possibly Mexican-inspired chili sauce, and bacon wrapped around asparagus. 
The intriguingly-titled “homemade British cake with warm chocolate and pistachio ice cream” (140 rubles, $4.80) turned out to be an ordinary chocolate cake, though it was exquisitely good, with a pure dark, powerful taste that will leave chocolate-addicts asking for more. The pistachio ice cream neither tasted nor looked like it contained any pistachio; it was merely generic nut. The top of the cheesecake (120 rubles, $4.10) appeared to be burnt, and didn’t seem fresh. 
Wild Oscar Pub does not yet seem to have found its own identity, trying hard to combine pub and restaurant, standard and sophisticated, but failing to come forward with a style it can claim as its own.

TITLE: Treasury of the World. Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals
AUTHOR: By Veronika Solovyova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum entitled “Treasury of the World. Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals,” which runs through Nov. 8, provides a rare opportunity to appreciate the era’s extraordinary craftsmanship. 
The exhibition comprises over 400 pieces from the personal collection of Sheikh Nasser Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah and his spouse Sheikha Hussah Sabah Al-Salim Al-Sabah.
The Great Mughals were a Turkic dynasty that ruled India from 1526 to 1858. They traced their history back to the Mongols, via Persia, and the early Mughal emperors maintained Turko-Mongol practices. For the most part, however, it was their highly-developed Persian culture and refined etiquette that they brought to the Indian sub-continent, and over the course of the two centuries for which their empire existed, the arts went through a period of dramatic development, and nowhere is that more evident than in the sphere of jewelry.
The current exhibition at the State Hermitage, which is sited in the museum’s Concert Hall (Room No. 190), is broken up into 13 sections and gives a comprehensive introduction to these unique works and the various techniques and locking mechanisms used to create them. 
Materials used in the items exhibited include jade, chalcedony, crystal, ivory and gold. The range of decorated items is equally broad: a hookah pipe on a stand, a dagger encrusted with about 2,400 precious stones; miniature cups; vessels mirroring all imaginable natural forms; spectacularly colorful birds and cameos. The brilliance of the items is matched by comprehensive illustrative materials on the walls which give a powerful impression of the context of the place and period.
“India’s jewelry arts aren’t very well represented in Russia,” said Olga Deshpande, the exhibition’s curator. “This exhibition was first held six months ago in Moscow, and now it has come to St. Petersburg — it’s worth noting that the Hermitage is including an additional 100 items, so the exhibition has actually been expanded. The collection is fascinating, multi-faceted and very colorful; it’s a very rare opportunity to learn about the work of Indian master craftsmen of the 16th to 18th centuries.” 

<i>The State Hermitage exhibition is open from 10.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays, closed on Mondays.</i>

TITLE: House of Finland
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia’s first center of Finnish culture, business and science, Dom Finlyandii (House of Finland) is set to open in St. Petersburg on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa on Sunday.
The creation of the center, whose opening ceremony will be hosted by Russian and Finnish prime ministers Vladimir Putin and Matti Vanhanen, is an important stage in the development of cooperation between the two countries, Alexander Prokhorenko, head of the city’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said at a press conference on Thursday.
The center, which will begin its official work in spring next year, is the only one of its kind in Russia, Prokhorenko said.
“St. Petersburg has a very special relationship with Finland,” he said. 
Prokhorenko expressed his hope that his Finnish colleagues “would feel at home in the house and would live there as a happy family.”
The center will house the city’s Institute of Finland, the Helsinki Center, Finland’s Foreign Trade Association (Finpro), the local office of the Russian-Finnish Trade Chamber, representative offices of the biggest Finnish cities, the children’s educational center of the General Consulate of Finland and other cultural and business organizations.
The complex is also to have facilities for students, artists and researchers.
The center is located in three buildings — 4, 6 and 8 — on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa, which have recently been reconstructed and are traditionally associated with Finland and Scandinavia. They are closely connected with the history of Finns in St. Petersburg, since they were once part of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran parish.
The first Lutheran church was built in St. Petersburg in the 1730s.  In 1803, a new stone church, the Finnish Church of St. Mary, was built on the site of the former wooden church.
In the 1990s, the church building was given back to the parish and renovated using the funds and help of Finnish organizations.
The complex of buildings at Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa was built from 1842 to 1847 to house St. Mary’s Church, a churchyard and a Finnish school. Church schools, shelters and almshouses were opened in the buildings belonging to the church.
The first director of the school was the eminent Finnish teacher Uno Signeus, who founded the Finnish education system.
The buildings also housed a Finnish charity society; the editorial offices of Finnish newspapers, including the city’s Peterburgskiye Vesti in Finnish; a shop selling Finnish goods; a Swedish-Finnish bookstore; and a library.
The Finnish community in St. Petersburg was at its largest at the end of the 19th century, when it numbered 25,000 people. The Finnish church and the school were focal points for meetings and socializing.
Today about 4,000 Finns live in St. Petersburg, and there are almost 500 Finnish firms in the city.
Dom Finlyandii was organized by the St. Petersburg Foundation. The main investor of the project, which cost 14 million euros to build, is Sampo Pankki Oyj Bank.

TITLE: Word’s Worth
TEXT: By Michele A. Berdy
<em>Êàê èçâåñòíî</em> … : As everyone knows …
The other day a translator friend reminded me how much I loathe the phrase <em>êàê èçâåñòíî</em> (literally, “as is known”) and its various derivatives, such as <em>êàê âñåì èçâåñòíî</em> (as everyone knows) and <em>îáùåèçâåñòíî</em> (it is generally known). If I were editorial queen of the universe, I’d grab my red pencil and strike these phrases from the majority of texts. 
The main problem is that the ubiquitous <em>êàê èçâåñòíî</em> can serve several functions in Russian sentences, while the phrase “everyone knows that” is not nearly as common in English and usually serves one function. In most cases it sets up a contrast between common wisdom and a narrower truth. “Everyone knows that fast food is unhealthy. But few people know how to choose a healthy diet.” 
Sometimes you find the same construction in Russian: <em>Êàê èçâåñòíî, ïî çàêîíîäàòåëüñòâó ïðîäàæà ñïèðòíûõ íàïèòêîâ ðàçðåøåíà ëèöàì, äîñòèãøèì 18 ëåò. Íî ìàëî êòî çíàåò, ÷òî ðàñïèòèå ñïèðòíûõ íàïèòêîâ ðàçðåøåíî òîëüêî ñ 21 ãîäà.</em> (Everyone knows that alcoholic beverages can be legally sold only to individuals 18 years or older. But few people know that the legal drinking age is 21.)
But in most cases, when êàê èçâåñòíî is used in Russian, “as everyone knows” would be deemed unnecessary in English. <em>Êàê èçâåñòíî, ïðîáêè äëÿ âèíà èçãîòàâëèâàþò èç êîðû ïðîáêîâîãî äóáà.</em> If you translated the phrase literally as, “Everyone knows that corks for wine bottles are made from the bark of cork oaks,” an English-speaking reader would expect a “but” in the next sentence. 
In some cases I rephrase to avoid this problem. <em>Êàê èçâåñòíî, íàø îðãàíèçì ñîñòîèò èç âîäû ïî÷òè íà 90%.</em> (Science has shown that our bodies are almost 90 percent water.) 
And then there are times when <em>êàê èçâåñòíî</em> doesn’t mean “everyone knows”; it really means “I know.” For example: <em>Èçâåñòíî, ÷òî Âëàäèìèð Ïóòèí íå ëþáèò ïðèíèìàòü ðåøåíèé.</em> (Literally, “It’s known that Vladimir Putin doesn’t like to make decisions.”) Here <em>“èçâåñòíî, ÷òî …”</em> might stand for: “I’ve been told by a number of sources I can’t quote that …” Or it might mean: “I’ve written about this in detail before, so trust me on this.” If I were an English-language newspaper editor, I’d never let a journalist get away with that. But when I’m wearing my translator’s hat, I grit my teeth and type: “It’s common knowledge that …”
In other cases <em>êàê èçâåñòíî</em> is used to pass off an outrageous assertion as accepted fact. Take this heinous example: <em>Êàê èçâåñòíî, óêðàèíñêèé ÿçûê ñìåøíîé.</em> In these cases I don’t try to fiddle with the English to make it more palatable. I translate baldly: Everyone knows that Ukrainian is a comical language.
But if red pencils could be used as weapons …

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

TITLE: Cirque du Soleil to Make Debut in Russia
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian super-circus credited with reinventing the art of big-top performance for the 21st century, begins a month-long series of dates in Moscow on Friday. Marking the first time that the troupe has performed in Russia, the Grand Chapiteau — as the massive tent complex that houses the circus, merchandise and outrageously priced snacks is called — has taken up temporary residence on the grounds of the Luzhniki sports complex. 
With a back catalogue of more than twenty-five productions from which to choose, the Cirque has selected “Varekai” with which to regale Moscow audiences. A rainforest fantasy and one of six Cirque shows currently touring the globe, its suggestion of tropical climates and the inclusion of Russian performers and Georgian dance is sure to appeal to Muscovites just as the city heads into another long dark winter. 
“Varekai” means “wherever” in the Romany language and brings together performers from eighteen countries. Like all Cirque performances, it eschews the use of animal acts in favour of acrobatics and mime. Set at the summit of a volcano, the story begins with the fall of Icarus into a kaleidoscopic world populated by fantastic creatures. The non-linear narrative is held together by thematic elements and punctuated with regular musical and comic interludes. According to its creators, it “pays tribute to the nomadic soul and to the spirit and art of the circus tradition.”
Written and directed by Canadian Dominic Champagne, “Varekai” is a heart-stopping fusion of drama and acrobatics layered with the mysticism and new-age soundtrack that have become the Cirque’s hallmarks. And while their particular brand of spectacle has some detractors — there is a definite formula to the company’s shows — there is no denying the physical prowess of its gymnasts and the memorable images that the performances create.
It is fitting that a show based on the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and melted the wax holding his artificial wings together, causing him to fall to his death — has been chosen for the Cirque’s Russian debut. It was only a few weeks ago that Cirque creator Guy Laliberte blasted-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Laliberte became the seventh space tourist in history, and the first clown to go into orbit. 
The trip was part of a campaign to help raise awareness of the perils facing the world’s fresh water supply, the campaign itself having garnered support from former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and U2 singer Bono. It’s thought that the attention the event has focused on Russia might go a long way toward making the decades-long wait for their first appearance here go down a little easier. Constantly developing new ways of working, it remains to be seen what fruit Laliberte’s trip into outer space may yet bear. Given the seemingly endless reach of the franchise, it could be that it was research into the sort of entertainment that might be possible for space travelers in the future.
Founded in Canada in 1984, the company has come a long way from its origins as a rag-tag band of colorfully dressed characters roaming the streets of Quebec City. Having survived near catastrophic cash flow problems at the beginning of its career, the Cirque is now one of the largest global entertainment brands, with traveling shows currently found on four continents and numerous resident shows in Las Vegas. 
Now employing more than 4,000 performers, artists, designers, musicians and technical crew worldwide, it was a partnership with casino-guru Steve Wynn, and later MGM Grand, that helped the Cirque to develop into the behemoth it has become. It also allowed the company to redefine the Las Vegas spectacular with multimillion-dollar shows like ‘O’ — staged over water — and ‘KA,’ with its huge flying stage. The resident shows are where the company really pushes the limits of the possible, even going as far as to get the surviving Beatles and the heirs of George Harrison and John Lennon to agree to a reworking of the group’s back-catalogue for the aptly titled “Love.”
Russian audiences, with their notoriously high standards and extremely strong circus-going traditions that survive to this day, will be a tough sell. But if anyone can make them experience the circus anew, Cirque du Soleil can. 
Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai is performed under the Grand Chapiteau at S/K Luzhniki, Luzhnetskaya Nab. 24, Moscow, through Nov. 29.

TITLE: Hollywood Project Aims to Retell Georgia-Russia Conflict
AUTHOR: By Eteri Kakbadze
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Tens of thousands of cheering people filled the streets in front of Georgia’s parliament, but they came to make a movie, not stage one of the capital’s frequent mass demonstrations.
Tuesday night’s crowd gathered for a scene in a new Hollywood film about the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, with the working title “Georgia,” in which movie star Andy Garcia plays Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
The filmmakers have said they aren’t making propaganda, but the movie seems certain to figure in the ongoing struggle between Russia and Georgia over how their short war is remembered.
Garcia, mimicking the gestures of the sometimes emotional Georgian president, spoke to the crowd during a re-creation of a real demonstration that took place Aug. 12, 2008, toward the end of active fighting.
Mock demonstrators carried banners reading “Russian Troops Get Out of Georgia,” while actors playing the presidents of Poland and the Baltic States appeared on a stage in support of Garcia as Saakashvili.
The Russian media have questioned whether director Renny Harlin’s film will take the Georgian side in portraying the conflict.
A recent Russian film used the fictional story of a nerdy American scientist and a blonde Russian photojournalist to offer the Kremlin’s version of the war.
Harlin, best known for “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger,” has said the tale of a journalist and cameraman caught up in the fighting is an impartial indictment of war.
Harlin said on Tuesday that the movie will have a universal appeal.
“I am from a small country myself — I am from Finland originally — so I know what kind of things small countries can sometimes go through,” he said. “These kind of wars are fought around the world from Africa to Asia to South America. Georgia is just one example. I think it is a great opportunity to tell the universal story that touches a lot of people around the world.”
Harlin said Garcia, who stared in “The Godfather: Part III” and “The Untouchables,” was his first choice for the role of Saakashvili.
“It was my dream from the beginning,” Harlin said. “When I started on this film a few months ago, I said Andy Garcia has to play the president and when I gave him a script and he heard about it, he said he absolutely thought it was a great role for him.”
Producer George Lasku described Garcia as enthusiastic about the film.
“He is of Cuban origin and his country and his people went pretty much through the same pain for the last 50 or so years,” Lasku said. “He was very enthusiastic. He found the president to be a very interesting character to portray and he is thrilled to be here.”
Several people in the crowd outside parliament Tuesday said they hoped the film would rally international support behind Georgia.
A September report by a panel sponsored by the European Union concluded that Georgia had started the war with an indiscriminate rocket and artillery barrage on the capital of the separatist-controlled region of South Ossetia. The report also found Russia had taunted and provoked Georgia for years before the assault, then responded with disproportionate force, sending its troops deep into undisputed Georgian territory.
“It’s good that the Americans are shooting a film about our war,” said Dzhemal Maziashvili, a 72-year-old stage actor. “If they tell the truth, the whole world will learn it. Let everybody know that Russia is an aggressor and that it can be cruel. I very much hope that the film will be truthful.”
Schoolteacher Zemfira Akim, 40, said: “Many people abroad don’t know what really happened in Georgia. Maybe this film will help them understand.”
Others came out to catch a glimpse of the actors and watch the making of what may be the biggest-budget film ever shot in Georgia.
“I’ve never seen how a movie is made, and suddenly it’s Hollywood here,” said Nuzgar Areshadze, a 23-year-old student. “This is really an event in our lives. And such stars! I saw Andy Garcia in person.”
The television network Russia Today, founded by Russia’s state-owned RIA Novosti news service, asked in a headline on its Web site: “Will Andy Garcia Eat His Tie?” The question refers to BBC video clip of Saakashvili nervously chewing on his tie in the aftermath of the war, a clip that has aired repeatedly on Russian television networks.
“So, it’s not yet known whether Georgian authorities are planning to use the screenplay as yet another instrument to blacken the Russian side and again complain upon hearing a threat from Russia — not from a rostrum but from the cinema screen this time — which, obviously, seems to exist only in their imagination,” Russia Today’s Web site said.
It won’t be the first film to deal with the war.
In Russian director Igor Voloshin’s action-packed “Olympius Inferno,” a Russian-born American insect expert arrives in South Ossetia to film rare butterflies, but his cameras capture Georgian troops crossing into the region instead. He and the blonde Russian photojournalist flee a Georgian officer sent to get the video footage, which she convinces him must be given to the media so the world will learn the truth about the war.
The film was heavily promoted and ran on state-owned Channel One with no commercial breaks in March.
The Georgian government has actively supported the makers of Harlin’s film by allowing them access to public buildings. But it says it is not helping to fund the project.
Garcia was in Tbilisi to shoot several scenes, including one set in the presidential complex overlooking the center of the city. Some battle scenes were shot in the southern Georgian town of Tsalka, as well as in Gori, one of the cities hardest hit by the war.

TITLE: Militants Kill Brigadier, Driver in Pakistan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISLAMABAD — Suspected militants on a motorbike shot and killed a senior army officer and a soldier in the Pakistani capital Thursday, striking at security forces as the military wages a major anti-Taliban offensive in the northwest.
Civilians fleeing the army operation in South Waziristan said Taliban fighters were roaming freely through much of the area and digging in their positions, a sign of tough battles ahead.
The new South Waziristan offensive is considered a critical test of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s campaign against Islamist extremists blamed for attacks inside the country and on Western forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
Thursday morning’s attack in Islamabad was the latest in a wave of militant attacks that have killed more than 170 people across the country over the past three weeks.
The two gunmen fired on an army jeep in a residential area of the capital, police official Zaffar Abbas said. A soldier and a brigadier - a high-ranking army officer - were killed, while the driver was wounded, authorities said.
“Terrorists and extremists are behind this,” Islamabad’s top police officer, Syed Kalim Imam, told reporters.
The military is advancing on multiple fronts in South Waziristan. The exodus from the region has intensified since the ground offensive’s launch on Saturday, and more than 100,000 people are said to have been displaced so far.
More than 300 tired and dusty refugees lined up to register for aid in one center in Dera Ismail Khan, a gritty town not far from the tribal belt on Thursday.
“We saw no ground forces on the way, not even any movement except helicopters and airplanes. But we saw a lot of Taliban movement,” said Awal Jan, a refugee from Sarwakai town. “They were roaming around on their vehicles and digging trenches in the mountains.”
Baton-wielding police beat back refugees crowding an aid distribution center run by Pakistani authorities in Paharpur town, some 30 miles (45 kilometers) outside Dera Ismail Khan. The lines to the center were long, and some refugees tried to climb the facility’s boundary wall to get inside. Associated Press reporters saw an old man with a bloodied head.
“We came here for bread, but the police beat us up,” said Rahmatullah Mehsud, one of the injured. “There, the Taliban were messing with things and the army was showering bombs. Here, we have to bear the clubs.”
Aid administrator Javed Shaikh said there was plenty of food, but that the refugees were “impatient.”
“There are some policemen deployed who are fed up with the indiscipline of the people,” he said.
Over the past few days, the army has been fighting for control of Kotkai, the hometown of Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud.
The battle for Kotkai is strategically important because it lies on the way to the major militant base of Sararogha.
An army statement Wednesday said forces were engaged in “intense encounters” in hills surrounding Kotkai and had secured an area to its east. Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said there was no significant fighting inside the town yet.
The army believes Mehsud and his deputy, Qari Hussain, remain in the region directing militants’ defenses.
An army statement Thursday reported two more soldiers were killed, bringing the army’s death toll to 18, while 24 more militants were slain, bringing their death toll to 129.
It is nearly impossible to independently verify information coming from South Waziristan because the army has closed off all roads to the region. Analysts say both sides have exaggerated successes and played down losses in the past.
The army has deployed some 30,000 troops to South Waziristan against about 12,000 Taliban militants, whose ranks include up to 1,500 foreign fighters, many of them Uzbeks.

TITLE: Ethiopia Asks For Aid For 6.2 Million Starving
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ADDIS ABABA — Twenty-five years after Ethiopia’s famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government appealed on Thursday for help for more than six million facing starvation.
State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the drought-stricken country needed 159,000 tons of food aid worth 121 million dollars between now and year’s end for 6.2 million people.
He said nearly 80,000 children under five were suffering from acute malnutrition and that nine million dollars were required for moderately malnourished children and women.
“Since... January, the country continues to face several humanitarian challenges in food and livelihood security, health, nutrition, and in water and sanitation,” Mitiku told donors.
In a report to mark the 25th anniversary since the 1984 famine, Oxfam called for a change of strategy towards human suffering in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country after Nigeria.
It urged donors to focus on helping communities devise ways of preparing and dealing with disasters, such as building dams to collect rain water to be used during dry seasons rather than sending emergency relief.
Ethiopia adopted a controversial aid law early this year, under which any local group drawing more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad would be classified as foreign and subjected to tight government control.
Oxfam said lessons still had to be learned from the 1984 crisis and bemoaned that long-term strategies receive less than one percent of international aid.
“Sending food aid does save lives, (but) the dominance of this approach fails to offer long-term solutions which would break these cyclical and chronic crises,” said the report: “Band Aids and Beyond.”
“We cannot make the rains come, but there is much more that we can do to break the cycle of drought-driven disaster in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,” Oxfam director Penny Laurence said.
“Food aid offers temporary relief and has kept people alive in countless situations, but does not tackle the underlying causes that continue to make people vulnerable to disaster year-after-year.”
Of the 3.2 billion dollars of US aid to Ethiopia since 1991, 94 percent is food which is delivered there rather than grown locally or imported from the region, said the aid group.
However, some Ethiopian regions have learnt from the adversity of the 1984 drought and the palliative effects of emergency food aid and turned to modern agriculture for sustenance.
“It was horrible. There was nothing I could do to save some of my dying neighbours,” recalls 55-year-old farmer Tayto Mesfin in Abay village, some 800 kilometers north of the capital Addis Ababa.
“There is nothing worse than food aid, it is never sustainable,” said Tayto, standing at the gate of a wheat farm. “If the right methods are practised, food shortages can be overcome.”

TITLE: Sun Lights 2010 Olympic Torch in Greece
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece — The flame for the Vancouver Olympics was successfully lit by the sun’s rays in an ancient ceremony Thursday, heralding the start of the torch relay for the 2010 Winter Games.
The sun shone just enough over the fallen temples at the birthplace of the ancient Olympics for a Greek actress in a pagan priestess’ white gown and sandals to focus its rays on a silver torch using a concave mirror.
The flame will burn at the Feb. 12-28 Vancouver Games, following a torch relay across Canada and a shorter run in Greece.
“More than just a sporting event, the Games offer us a unique moment to serve the cause of humanity and celebrate the human spirit,” Vancouver Organizing Committee CEO John Furlong said.
Bad weather disrupted the meticulously choreographed ceremony for the last three Winter Olympics — Turin, Salt Lake City and Nagano — and officials had to use backup flames kindled at rehearsals.
In addition to good weather, Thursday’s ceremony also benefited from a lack of protesters this time, even though Vancouver relay officials had been worried that activists would be on hand to protest against seal hunting in Canada.
Ahead of the 2008 Beijing Games, pro-democracy and Tibetan activists protesting China’s human rights record unfurled a banner in Olympia’s ancient stadium during the lighting ceremony, and tried to stop the torch relay in several cities around the world.
The protests led the IOC to scrap round-the-world torch relays, and dozens of police were stationed at the archaeological site Thursday.
IOC president Jacques Rogge said the Olympic torch conveyed a global message “of friendship and respect.”
“The Olympic torch and flame are symbols of the values and ideals which lie at the heart of the Olympic Games,” Rogge said, as hundreds of spectators looked on from the stadium’s grassy banks.
Greek giant slalom skier Vassilis Dimitriadis, 31, was the first torchbearer to run out of the ancient stadium after accepting the flame from actress Maria Nafpliotou. After an eight-day journey across Greece, the torch will be handed over to Canadian officials at the restored ancient Panathenaean Stadium in Athens on Oct. 29.
It will reach Canada on Oct. 30 for what organizers say will be the largest ever national relay, starting in Victoria, British Columbia, and involving 12,000 torchbearers.
Furlong said the Vancouver organizing committee wanted “to be sure no Canadian is denied the right to dream and celebrate.”
Over 106 days, the relay will span Canada, being flown as far north as the Alert forestry station in Nunavut, which at some 800 kilometers from the North Pole is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world.
Although cauldrons were lit during the ancient games, held in Olympia from 776 B.C. to 394 A.D, the torch relay is a modern addition to the Olympics. It made its first appearance during the 1936 Berlin Games, and its Winter Games debut was at the Innsbruck Olympics in 1964.

TITLE: Drug Kingpin Gets 45 Years 
In U.S. Jail
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MIAMI — A court in Miami sentenced Colombian drug kingpin Diego Montoya to 45 years in prison following his guilty plea on trafficking, murder and racketeering charges.
Montoya, 48, whose Norte del Valle cartel once supplied well over half the Colombian cocaine smuggled into the United States and Europe, had agreed to serve the time as part of a plea deal back in August.
Once an FBI top-ten fugitive, he also signed a document detailing his rise to the top of Colombia’s cocaine underworld.
Prosecutors estimate that between 1990 and 2004, Norte del Valle exported more than 1.2 million pounds (500 tons) of cocaine, worth in excess of 10 billion dollars, from Colombia to the United States.
Federal judge Cecilia Altonaya gave Montoya the maximum prison sentence requested by prosecutors, but dismissed a dozen other charges against him after he pleaded guilty.
She also ordered Montoya to pay 500,000 dollars to the family of John Garcia, a former associate of his who was kidnapped and beaten to death.