SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1596 (57), Friday, July 30, 2010
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TITLE: President Widens Powers Of The FSB
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirovalev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has broadened the authority of the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s main successor agency, giving it Soviet-style repressive powers in a move critics say could be used to stifle protests and intimidate government opponents.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a law Thursday allowing the agency, known by its initials FSB, to issue warnings or detain people suspected of preparing to commit crimes against Russia’s security — which could include participating in anti-government rallies. Perpetrators face fines or up to 15 days detention.
Like many past restrictions, the law was described as part of an effort to combat extremism. The bill, submitted to Russian lawmakers in April, followed twin subway bombings in Moscow that killed 40 people and reflected the Kremlin’s dissatisfaction with critical media coverage of its anti-terrorism efforts.
A senior lawmaker said the law protects people from abuse by law enforcement officers.
“Officers of law enforcement agencies have long talked about the necessity of switching from investigating crimes to their prevention,” Mikhail Margelov, the Kremlin-connected head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russian parliament, said in a statement. “The amendments do not turn FSB into a new edition of once-almighty KGB but protect Russian citizens from outrages by men in uniform.”
Some of the law’s articles, including ones that toughen control over media for “extremist statements” and allow FSB to publish warnings in the press, were removed or toned down following severe criticism from opposition and even Kremlin loyalists.
However, a lawmaker with the Communist Party, which remains the largest opposition force in Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament, said the amendments did not change the law’s repressive character.
“Despite all the promises to correct the most odious articles, by the second reading nothing has been changed in the text,” Viktor Ilykhin told The Associated Press.
A Kremlin loyalist from a nationalist party praised the law for its “preventative measures.”
“This is not a repressive law,” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic party, told Gazeta.ru online daily. “We’re only talking about preventive measures.”
Kremlin critics say, however, that the new measures could be used to violate the rights of opposition, and its obscure wording would leave the legislation open to interpretation.
“It’s an ugly law with obscure formulas,” independent political analyst Yulia Latynina said. 
“In case a drunken FSB officer is shooting at you, and there have been many such cases, you might end up getting jailed for 15 days for merely trying to escape.”
The opposition has accused the Kremlin of turning Russia into a Soviet-style police state, and many Russians say they have experienced or fear abuse at the hands of FSB officers. Government critics say corruption among the FSB and other agencies stifles business activity and stunts the economy.
Some rights activists say the law simply legalizes practices FSB officers have been using for years.
“I don’t think it adds anything to what the FSB has been doing without any laws,” former Soviet dissident and head of the Moscow Helsinki group Lyudmila Alexeyeva told AP. “But it’s very sad when a law approves the outrage of such a dangerous service as FSB.”
The legislation continues a trend under former President Vladimir Putin, who has been blamed by the opposition and the West for rolling back Russia’s democratic reforms of the 1990s. 
The former KGB officer and FSB head allowed the security services to regain power and influence at the expense of Russia’s democratic institutions.

TITLE: Medvedev Targets Kremlin’s Olympian Graft
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to investigate possible Kremlin corruption linked to the 2014 Sochi Olympics — and issued the handwritten order on a copy of the opposition-minded newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Novaya Gazeta on Wednesday published a photograph of Medvedev’s order, dated July 20 and written on an Internet copy of a story that the newspaper previously printed about the corruption claims.
In the order, Medvedev told Chaika to investigate corruption allegations against Kremlin official Vladimir Leshchevsky at the request of businessman Valery Morozov, who has accused Leshchevsky of extorting bribes in connection with construction for the Winter Olympics.
Moskonversprom chairman Morozov told Russian and British media in early June that he had paid 180 million rubles ($5.7 million) in kickbacks to Leshchevsky, a deputy head of construction in the Office of Presidential Affairs, for winning a tender to reconstruct the Primorye complex at a sanatorium called Sochi and to draft a reconstruction plan for the Dagomys sanatorium. Both sanatoriums are affiliated with the Office of Presidential Affairs.
Leshchevsky has called the accusations unfounded and said Morozov was looking to avoid repercussions for violating the terms of his contract.
A spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s Office said Wednesday that there would be no comment on Medvedev’s order “until there are results” in the check into Leshchevsky’s activities. He could not say whether the check was under way but added, “It has to be.”
Leshchevsky was on vacation and unavailable for comment, said Viktor Khrekov, a spokesman for the Office of Presidential Affairs. He added that Leshchevsky, who has been on vacation for the past week, remained in his post in good standing.
Morozov applauded Medvedev’s order and said it “may become the decisive moment” in his firm’s battle with Kremlin officials.
“This has to nudge the consciences of the officials who are torturing us,” Morozov said by telephone.
In ordering the investigation, Medvedev is seeking to fulfill a promise made soon after he assumed office “to reinforce the role of the media in the fight against corruption,” said Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, a nongovernmental organization.
But Kabanov said Kremlin officials, not including Medvedev, have formed “a well-organized system that can protect itself and prepare run-around replies to the president and the prime minister, deluding them.”
Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center of Political Technologies, said the president sought to show that he respected the media and opposition voices while underlining his desire to fight corruption “without double standards.”
Novaya Gazeta deputy editor Sergei Sokolov said Medvedev was “sick that his orders are not fulfilled.” Medvedev selected Novaya Gazeta for his first interview to a Russian newspaper as president.
Moskonversprom first complained about Leshchevsky in June 2009 to the Interior Ministry’s economic crimes department, which recorded Leshchevsky receiving a bribe from the firm and handed the recording over to the Investigative Committee, which said it saw no crime in Leshchevsky’s actions, Moskonversprom general director Irina Morozova said in late January in the first of three complaints to Medvedev, a copy of which is posted on Moskonversprom.ru.
In reply to Morozova’s January letter, Medvedev ordered Chaika to investigate Leshchevsky, but prosecutors brought no charges against Leshchevsky despite confirming the corruption allegations, Morozova said in her second letter to Medvedev in May.
The second letter went unanswered, and Moskonversprom published an open letter to the president in early June, seeking disciplinary action against Leshchevsky and his colleague Sergei Smirnov for continuing to “put economic pressure” on the firm.
In March, construction workers at a Moskonversprom project in Sochi told The St. Petersburg Times that they had not been paid in months and were forced to pawn their belongings for food. Morozov denied the allegations at the time, saying the strikers were part of a campaign to discredit his firm for the sake of local construction companies.
Moskonversprom had also been building housing for Sochi residents relocated because of the construction for the Olympics, before state corporation Olimpstroi said it broke off the contract with the firm in early June over Moskonversprom’s “failure to abide by the contract terms, such as labor conditions.”
Moskonversprom has worked with the Office of Presidential Affairs since 2003, Morozova said in one of her three letters to Medvedev.
Further complicating matters, two unidentified Sochi police officers on Monday beat up one of Moskonversprom’s directors, Andrei Shurpyak, and forced him to sign documents that said a developer, Sochiremstroi, had carried out construction on a residential complex for displaced Sochi residents, while the work in question had not been done, Morozov said in an e-mailed statement.
Morozov said the incident was part of an attempt by the police to open a criminal case against Moskonversprom on orders from unidentified senior officials.
A Sochi police spokesman said he could not immediately confirm Morozov’s account.

TITLE: Budding Artists Seek Inspiration From Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Ten British schoolchildren visited St. Petersburg this week as part of a program for budding artists organized by British portrait painter Alexander Talbot Rice.
The artists have been attending lectures and anatomy classes at the Repin Institute of Arts as well as visiting the city’s celebrated museums, including the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, to get acquainted with Russia’s cultural heritage. 
Talbot Rice, whose subjects have included Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Pope, organized the trip with the aim of fostering the young artists’ talent by exposing them to great works of art and new techniques and methods.
The artist spent two years studying at St. Petersburg’s Repin Institute of Arts, including under Mikhail Pimanov, after hearing of the prestigious school while studying in Florence. 
“I heard about the Repin Institute, which has an almost mythical reputation among European artists,” he said at a presentation of the program and young artists held Tuesday at HSBC bank, the event’s sponsor.
“I turned up at the director’s office without an invitation, and said I wanted to study there. Thanks to the education I received at the Repin Institute, when I returned to Europe I was able to pursue a successful career as an artist.”
Having made a name for himself painting members of the British royal family and other eminent figures, Talbot Rice — whose father told him to “get a proper job” when he resolved to become an artist — decided to set up a program to help nurture young talent.
“I felt I had the opportunity to help young artists who are passionate about art but might otherwise not be able to pursue a career in fine art,” he said. 
The artist held a competition among schools in Wales within a 15-mile radius of Dinefwr Castle — the artist’s ancestral home. From about 8,000 students, 100 of the best pieces of work were selected, and 50 schoolchildren were chosen to interview. 
“From 50, we selected these 10 exceptional young people,” said Talbot Rice. “It was my belief that if I could expose these young people to centers of artistic excellence at an early age, then they’d be able to understand the rich language of art, and this would enable them to also pursue a career in fine art.”
St. Petersburg is not the first European center of art the Welsh students have visited. Last year, they were taken on a trip to Florence, where Talbot Rice spent five years studying and teaching art. 
“I’ve been trying to expose the students to some of the great works you have here at for example the Russian Museum, and also of course to an understanding of anatomy and of the Russian technique of drawing, which means drawing in mass rather than in line, as well as getting them to appreciate the psychology of the Russian portrait,” he said.  
Talbot Rice said he would like to set up a similar scholarship program in Russia, visiting schools in St. Petersburg to select students who are serious about pursuing a career in art.
“I’d like to try to identify exceptional young people who we can then bring back to Wales to celebrate Anglo-Russian relations and fulfill the purpose of art, which is I think a universal language. In this way, we can perhaps create a cross-pollination of ideas,” he said.
Fifteen-year-old Elleni Meliou, one of the competition winners, said it had been “absolutely amazing” to come to St. Petersburg. 
“I’m really impressed by the architecture,” she said. “We’ve had anatomy lessons and been taught the Russian method of drawing through mass, which consists of using three tones at the beginning, and is in complete contrast with what we did in Italy, which was using lines and measurements. 
“I find this to be a more expressive kind of art,” she said. “There’s more emotion, you can see that in the way that Russians do portraits; they seem to capture something in the eyes.”

TITLE: Khabarovsk Court Bans YouTube for ‘Extremism’
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Far East court has banned YouTube and four other web sites for “extremist” content in a ruling that promises to raise new worries about free speech.
The Internet is widely recognized as the last uncensored media in Russia, and the ruling nudges the country toward the likes of Iran and Pakistan, which have blocked YouTube.
Incidentally, the court’s decision also bans videos by President Dmitry Medvedev.
The Komsomolsk-on-Amur City Court said Rosnet, a Khabarovsk region Internet provider, must block three online libraries — Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru — as well as YouTube.com and Web.archive.org, which stores archived copies of old and deleted web pages.
YouTube.com was banned for the nationalist video “Russia to Russians,” which was ruled extremist by a Samara court in November and subsequently placed on the Justice Ministry’s federal list of banned extremist materials.
The other four sites contained Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” blacklisted by an Ufa court in March.
Once added to a list of extremist materials, a book or video can only be removed by another court ruling. The list, first published in July 2007, has since swelled from an initial 14 items to 686.
Judge Anna Aizenberg passed her verdict on YouTube on July 16, but the decision was only made public on Wednesday, when Rosnet filed an appeal.
The provider said it has proposed several ways to filter the illegal content without blocking access to the entire web sites, but the court has ignored all alternatives.
“Not a single one of our employees supports or condones extremism,” Rosnet said in a statement.

TITLE: Spanish Star Choreographer Joins Mikhailovsky Theater
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The internationally renowned Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato has been appointed creative director of the Mikhailovsky Theater ballet troupe. He was previously at the helm of the National Spanish Dance Company. 
“Once Duato said he was giving up that job, he was invited to take charge of four or five ballet companies around the world,” RIA Novosti reported. “He decided on the Mikhailovsky Theater, and said this was the best place, as well as a step forward for him.”  
Duato started out as a ballet dancer before moving on to choreography in 1988. He has choreographed ballet productions at the most prominent theaters around the world.  
The choreographer is due to start at the Mikhailovsky on Jan. 1 next year. 
“I will start working in St. Petersburg with energy and enthusiasm. It is a challenge for me,” Duato was quoted by Agence France Presse news agency as saying.
According to the Mikhailovsky Theater’s press office, Duato’s contract will last for five years, with the possibility of extending its duration. Duato also nurtures plans to hold a modern dance festival at the Mikhailovsky Theater in spring 2011.
Duato was born on Jan. 8, 1957 in Valencia. He began his dancing career at Stockholm’s Cullberg Ballet in 1980, and the following year, Jiri Kylian invited Duato to the Netherlands Dance Theater, where he was promoted to the position of choreographer in 1988. Duato’s works have been staged across the globe by some of the finest companies, including the American Ballet Theater, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Deutsche Oper, the Finnish National Opera, Stuttgart Ballet and the Australian Ballet. 
“Engaging an internationally known choreographer at the peak of his strength and talents is incredibly significant, not only for the Mikhailovsky Theater, but for Russian ballet as a whole,” said Vladimir Kekhman, the general director of the Mikhailovsky Theater. 
“Today you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of the world’s master choreographers — meaning choreographers with their own, fresh dance idiom who think in choreographic images. The opportunity to work under such a master is both a privilege and a responsibility: Our troupe will take on the style, idiom and choreographic vision of a great artist whose work is set to shape the future of international ballet.”
Kekhman said he hopes that Duato’s work in Russia will serve as a catalyst for fostering home-grown young choreographic talent in Russia. 
“It is no secret that as things stand, we have, to all intents and purposes, no new big names,” he said.

TITLE: Youth Camp Brawl Fuels Ethnic Unrest
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A brawl at a youth camp near the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics has turned into an ethnically charged battle pitting Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov against Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachyov.
What exactly happened on Sunday night at the Don camp in the Krasnodar region’s Tuapse district remains a matter of dispute, but the incident serves as an embarrassment for Tkachyov, who is overseeing preparations for the Sochi games.
Prosecutors said the fight broke out after a deputy camp director saw three Chechen campers arguing with a 14-year-old girl from the Rostov region and asked them to back off.
Fists started flying, and the deputy director, Boris Usoltsev, suffered a broken nose and an injured leg, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement.
A Chechen adult supervising the Chechen teens at the camp joined in the melee, the statement said.
Then, a few hours later, a throng of unidentified people arrived at the camp and initiated a clash with the Chechen campers, it said.
Three people were hospitalized — Usoltsev, a Chechen teen and a local resident who was stabbed — and nine others suffered minor injuries, including the coach of the Chechen youth wrestling team, Ruslan Ginazov, prosecutors said.
Cell phone footage of the interior of a camp building aired on Channel One television showing broken windows and furniture with shards of glass scattered across the floor.
Kadyrov has denounced the fight as “extremism,” saying in a statement that a drunken Usoltsev had initiated the fight with ethnic slurs and later invited local residents to the camp to attack the Chechen campers.
Chechen ombudsman Nurdi Nukhazhiyev said 300 local residents had entered the camp and attacked the Chechen campers.
He also said that about 400 Chechen children and teachers, who arrived at the Don camp on July 13, have been bussed home together with two Omsk teachers who were fired from the camp for refusing to blame the Chechens for the fight. The Omsk teachers will now have to return home from Chechnya, he said.
The camp hosts up to 600 campers from across the country for three-week stints every summer.
“We have complaints about the governor, and if they don’t conclude [that human rights violations occurred], the Olympic Games in the Krasnodar region might be in jeopardy,” he said, Gazeta.ru reported.
“Billions are being invested into the region. One should check who is running it,” Nukhazhiyev said.
Tkachyov denied that ethnic hatred had played any role in the brawl and insisted that locals were tolerant of children from Chechnya.
“We consider this as a clear incident of domestic hooliganism,” Tkachyov said in the statement.
Local investigators have opened a criminal case and detained at least seven local residents on suspicion of hooliganism. If charged, they face up to five years in prison.
A senior Chechen official involved in youth affairs, Said-Magomed Ustarkhanov, said Chechnya would not send children to the Don camp anymore.
Separately, the Kremlin’s deputy envoy to the North Caucasus, Vladimir Shvetsov, said the Caucasus republics should compile behavior codes for youth who visit other parts of Russia.
He said national dances, for instance, can be irritating for people outside the North Caucasus, RIA-Novosti reported.

TITLE: Court Declares Poet Militant Leader
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow region court ruled Wednesday that an amateur poet crossed the line between art and crime by turning a youth commune into an illegal militant group and abusing several of its members.
But Yulia Privedennaya, 34, who was handed a 4 1/2-year suspended sentence, said the commune’s goal was only to educate the young through poetry.
Privedennaya was convicted of being the leader of a militant group, as well as depriving people of freedom and torturing them.
Privedennaya, a senior activist with PORTOS, an acronym that stands for “The Poetic Society for Development of the Theory of the Common Good” in Russian, promised to appeal.
“We have been educating kids and bringing them to museums, but the court didn’t want to find out the truth,” a shy-looking Privedennaya said as she was leaving the courtroom.
The accusations about a militant group stemmed from the fact that several air guns, hunting rifles and a pump rifle were found at the PORTOS camp. The weapons were legally owned by PORTOS members.
Witnesses claimed that a uniform-clad Privedennaya used a pellet gun to threaten commune members. She denied the accusations.
She was also found guilty of illegally holding four Ukrainian teenagers, who were forced to perform heavy work, had their freedom restricted and were spanked for misdeeds.
“Privedennaya and other group members took documents from them ... under fear of heavy punishment,” the judge said.

TITLE: Two Men Imprisoned for Paying Homeless ‘Slaves’ With Alcohol
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two men from the Perm region were sentenced Wednesday to jail terms for holding 11 homeless people captive for up to five years at a scrap metal processing plant and plying them with alcohol in lieu of salaries, prosecutors said.
A jury convicted Alexei Kiselyov, 32, and Vyacheslav Bobchikhin, 30, of kidnapping, false imprisonment, using slave labor, and battery and sentenced them to eight and six years imprisonment, respectively, the regional prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
They were also ordered to pay a combined 525,000 rubles ($17,300) to the victims.
For five years, from 2003 to 2008, the pair sought out homeless people with alcohol abuse problems in the Perm region towns of Gubakha and Gremyachinsk, prosecutors said.
Kiselyov and Bobchikhin then took their victims to a scrap metal plant in Gubakha and seized their documents.
“The accused forced the victims to live and work at the facility in inhuman conditions. What’s more, the labor was not paid, and for their work the victims were given food (bread, bullion cubes, cereals) and liquor,” the statement said.
“For leaving the facility, not following orders, refusing to work or doing poor quality work, the victims faced psychological and physical violence,” the statement said.
Police uncovered the scheme after one of the victims managed to escape and report his kidnapping.
Such cases are not uncommon and often involve migrant workers illegally brought into Russia from impoverished Central Asian countries.

TITLE: Russians Dislike ‘Rich’ PR People
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russians think that public relations jobs are prestigious and profitable, but immoral, and do not want their own children to take up the line of work, according to a new survey released Wednesday in celebration of PR Specialist Day.
“Black PR” and “cheating” are two main associations the expression “PR” evokes for 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively, of the people surveyed last week by the state-run VTsIOM polling agency.
Twenty-seven percent simply said they associate the acronym with “development of public relations.”
Respondents gave PR jobs a grade of 3.8 out of 5 for profitability and 3.35 for prestige, the survey said. But the phrase only earned 2.61 on a “moral level.”
Only 16 percent of the 1,600 respondents have no objections to their children becoming PR specialists, while 56 percent said they would not approve of such a career choice.

TITLE: Starbucks Postpones Plans to Open in City by Two Years
AUTHOR: By Lyudmila Tsubiks
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The opening of the first Starbucks coffee shop in St. Petersburg has been postponed by two years, while its fellow popular American cafe chain Cinnabon is due to open two outlets in the city this fall. 
“Now I can say for certain that a Starbucks cafe will not open in St. Petersburg until 2012; we are not disclosing information about the reasons for the delay due to investors’ plans,” said Liya Dovgun, marketing manager of Monaks Trading company in Moscow, Starbucks’s business partner in Russia.  
Monaks Trading is owned by the Kuwait-based retailer Alshaya Group, which operates Starbucks branches in Moscow and the Middle East. 
Starbucks was originally due to open in the Leto mall, which is located on the Pulkovskoye Shosse. Leto is due to open in the fourth quarter of this year. 
Stanislava Bilen, a representative of Jones Lang La Salle, the mall’s agent, said a five-year lease agreement had been concluded at the end of 2009, but now Starbucks will not be part of the project “for political reasons.” 
The opening of the first Russian Starbucks in Moscow was delayed due to a long-running legal dispute with a Moscow lawyer. The reasons for the delay in St. Petersburg seem to be more economic, however. 
“I’m not sure that Starbucks is doing well now,” said Andrei Petrakov, general director of RestCon consulting company. “It’s a good time to take a break and see how they fare,” he said.  
According to a report in The New York Times, in 2008, Starbucks closed 600 stores in the U.S. and laid off 12,000 employees due to the difficult economic situation. The company said it would continue to focus on expanding internationally, however. 
“I can’t say that this brand has any advantages compared to the Shokoladnitsa and Coffee House coffee shop chains; I would say that Starbucks is maybe even in a worse condition,” said Petrakov. 
In Moscow, there are currently 148 Shokoladnitsa cafes, about 190 Coffee House outlets and just 32 Starbucks. The potential development of the coffee shop market in Russia is enormous, however. According to research conducted by AMICO consultancy, there are 0.7 stores per 100,000 Muscovites, while that figure is 27 in New York, 62 in Seattle and 135 in Milan.       
One company trying to take advantage of that potential is Cinnabon. The bakery and cafe chain has signed rental agreements with the Galeria and Leto malls, Kirill Budarin, general director of Sinakor SPB, which bought the Petersburg franchise from the Russian franchise-holder Megagroup, was cited by Vedomosti as saying this week.        
The cafe will occupy 97 square meters in the Leto mall, Vedomosti reported, citing Tatyana Malyanova, head of retail real estate at Sistema-gals, which is building the complex together with Apsys. The operator has rented about 150 square meters in Galeria, confirmed Byulent Sarakaya, general director of the mall’s developer, Briz. Like Leto, Galeria, which is located on Ligovsky Prospekt next to the Moscow train station, is also due to open this fall.           
Budarin did not disclose the volume of investment. Petrakov estimated the cost of setting up a cafe in this format at about $2,000 per square meter. Rent at Leto could cost about 2,000 rubles ($66) per square meter per month, and 3,000 rubles ($99) per square meter per month at Galeria, Yekaterina Lapina from the Property Development and Research Agency (ARIN) told Vedomosti.
Budarin said that the chain’s development in St. Petersburg depended on the success of the first two outlets, and added that he has not ruled out street outlets. He bought the Petersburg franchise because of the low level of competition and high potential of the market compared to that in Moscow, he told Vedomosti. A large cinnamon roll will cost 116 rubles ($3.80) at Cinnabon.
Cinnabon is unlikely to present serious competition for coffee shops; it is the beginning of the development of the bakery-confectioner’s niche, which has great potential but is not yet saturated, Yakov Pak, a representative of Idealnaya Chashka coffee shop chain told Vedomosti.

TITLE: Pulkovo Airport Financing for Expansion Twice as Expensive as Peers
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport is financing its expansion at almost twice the average cost for similar projects in emerging markets through the country’s first syndicated loan for a public-private partnership.
Banks including UniCredit of Milan and Standard Bank Group of Johannesburg are demanding interest of 425 basis points to 475 basis points more than the euro interbank offered rate for the 12-year, 200 million euro ($260 million) loan to Northern Capital Gateway, the group operating Pulkovo that includes VTB Capital, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal. Syndicated project-finance loans in developing markets during the past year charged average interest of 265 basis points, or 2.65 percentage points, more than benchmark rates, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“The perception of Russia remains less optimistic, which explains the higher pricing,” said Florence Bachelard-Bakal, operations leader for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development in London, which is co-arranging the loan with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.
The Pulkovo project, a partnership between the VTB-led group and St. Petersburg City Hall, is the first deal of its kind to obtain financing without the backing of Russia’s federal government, which is paring infrastructure-spending plans to reduce the second annual budget deficit since 1999. Banks are demanding higher interest spreads because they lack confidence in Russian laws governing the project, said Laura Brank, a partner at law firm Dechert in Moscow.
The group managing the 1.2 billion euro Pulkovo project got more than 700 million euros of its financing from long-term debt with no government grants or subsidies, according to VTB Capital. “It was crucial for us to prove that infrastructure projects in Russia can be financed without government support,” Oleg Pankratov, co-head of global banking at VTB Capital, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “We are certain that the success of the Pulkovo project will pave the way for commercial long-term debt financing for other infrastructure projects in Russia.”
The syndicate of eight banks providing the 200 million euro loan, which also includes Stockholm-based Nordea Bank, will get a commitment fee of 150 basis points and upfront fees of 225 to 280, depending on the amount they agreed to lend, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because terms are private.
The project is the first public-private partnership in Russia to attract funding from international commercial banks, according to the EBRD.
“There is a country-specific risk premium involved,” said Damian Secen, head of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States for Macquarie Capital in Moscow. At the same time, “it’s a very positive deal; these are very credible lenders and some are newcomers to this market,” he said.
The yield on ruble bonds sold by state-controlled gas producer Gazprom is 226 basis points above the same-maturity Gazprom debt in dollars, down from a yield difference of about 600 a year ago, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The spread narrowed to as little as 115 on June 14.
Russia’s budget deficit was 5.9 percent of gross domestic product last year as the economy shrank 7.9 percent, the most since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said this month that the budget gap may narrow to 5 percent of GDP this year. The economy grew 2.9 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier.
Government spending on transportation in Russia will fall to 1.9 percent of GDP this year from the “already low level” of 2.5 percent in 2009, the World Bank said in a report published June 16.
Polish Energy Partners, a Warsaw-based renewable energy developer, raised 151.63 million zloty ($49 million) through one of its units in June to finance the construction of the Modlikowice wind-farm project. The company will pay 375 basis points over the Warsaw interbank rate for the loan due 2026, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Reliance Industries, India’s largest company by market value, agreed July 9 to pay 340 basis points over the London interbank offered rate for a $500 million loan due 2015 to fund company projects, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Russia is the world’s 20th riskiest place to do business, according to Maplecroft, an England-based risk-management adviser. The firm’s study of 172 countries ranks respect for the rule of law, property rights, access to the legal system, corruption, corporate governance and regulatory frameworks. India was the 59th riskiest and Poland was ranked 124th.
“Commercial banks are scared of the lack of corporate governance framework,” said Dechert’s Brank. For the Pulkovo deal, “the involvement of the EBRD and IFC mitigates concern,” she said.

TITLE: Hayward Nominated for Seat on TNK-BP Board
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former TNK-BP chief Robert Dudley, forced from the post in 2008, will take the helm at BP in October, while outgoing CEO Tony Hayward will be nominated for a board seat at Russia’s third-largest oil producer, BP said Tuesday.
Both the Russian and British shareholders in TNK-BP said Tuesday that Dudley’s appointment would not rekindle their high-profile dispute.
TNK-BP’s Russian owners repeatedly accused Dudley of acting in BP’s interests during his time as CEO, while BP said its billionaire partners were using ties with the government to take control of the 50-50 joint venture.
“We fully welcome Mr. Dudley’s appointment as head of BP. … We had some tension but it was not personal, rather it was related to some disagreements in approach on the shareholders’ level,” TNK-BP executive director German Khan, one of the four Russian owners, told reporters Tuesday.
He also cheered the prospect of Hayward joining TNK-BP’s board as a nonexecutive director.
“He is a highly qualified specialist and has fallen victim to subjective circumstances. But he has serious potential, and we will welcome his work in the board,” Khan said.  
The U.S.-born Dudley — who led TNK-BP from its creation in 2003 — said he did not expect his promotion to hurt the British company’s interests in Russia.
“I worked in Russia for five and a half years with TNK-BP and was part of building the company with [the Russian owners],” Dudley said on a conference call, Bloomberg reported. “I left with the governance dispute. I’ve remained in contact with them; the relationships were very professional. I don’t expect that will cause any issues for us.”
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the country’s top energy official, also welcomed Dudley in his new role at BP, where he is currently leading the oil spill cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico as managing director.
“We have developed good and warm relations during [Dudley’s] time in Russia. He knows the Russian market well,” Sechin said through a spokesman, Reuters reported.
Sechin created an uproar last month, saying he knew that BP would replace Hayward — two hours before the two met for closed-door talks in Moscow. BP strongly defended their CEO until Tuesday’s announcement, which BP and Hayward said was mutually agreed upon to help the company move forward.
“Nothing will change in the relationship between BP and TNK-BP with Dudley’s appointment,” VTB Capital analyst Svetlana Grizan said.
“The head of BP is not involved in organizational questions, and he has too much on his plate already. The conflict with AAR was resolved two years ago,” she said.
Hayward was a vocal supporter of former BP executive Dudley during his time at TNK-BP, while the consortium of Russian owners, known as AAR, accused him of favoring the British shareholder’s interests.
“AAR wants to tear up the agreement they made with us. We are not going to be intimidated by their strong-arm tactics,” Hayward said in 2008.
AAR comprises Mikhail Fridman and German Khan’s Alfa Group, Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries and Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group.
The consortium’s chief executive, Stan Polovets, said AAR was happy to have Hayward join TNK-BP’s board, but he ruled out any larger role.
“TNK-BP’s board has made a decision to appoint Maxim Barsky as CEO effective Jan. 1, 2011,” Polovets said. “We don’t have any plans to reconsider this decision.”
Barsky, a former executive at the midsized Russian oil company West Siberian Resources, was selected as a compromise CEO in November. He joined TNK-BP in June 2009 as a vice president for strategy.
Hayward’s appointment to TNK-BP’s board does not require his presence in Russia, but he and Dudley are planning to meet with business partners and government authorities here soon, Moscow-based BP spokesman Vladimir Buyanov said Tuesday, Bloomberg reported.
“Mr. Hayward was already on the board of directors at TNK-BP once, so he already had experience with Russia,” London-based BP spokesman Tony Odone told The Moscow Times. “He will bring a wealth of experience and contacts along with big knowledge of the industry.”
TNK-BP represents one-fourth of BP’s output, and the British oil giant has said repeatedly that it is not among the $30 billion in assets it will sell to fund cleanup operations in the United States.
Khan reiterated on Tuesday that BP had no plans to sell its stake in the joint venture, which fellow shareholder Vekselberg has referred to as a “diamond” in BP’s portfolio.
Hayward will remain on BP’s board until Nov. 30, working with Dudley until he transitions into his new role, the company said.
“The BP board is deeply saddened to lose a CEO whose success over some three years in driving the performance of the company was so widely and deservedly admired,” BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said in a statement.
The executive was widely panned in the U.S. media for saying he wanted “his life back” as BP continued to struggle to plug its gushing oil well.
An explosion at the company’s Macondo well on April 20 killed 11 people and created a spill that has sent as much as 60,000 barrels per day into the gulf.
BP has created a $20 billion compensation fund and said Tuesday that it lost a record $17 billion in the second quarter as it set aside more than $32 billion to cover costs related to the spill.
“The Gulf of Mexico explosion was a terrible tragedy for which — as the man in charge of BP when it happened — I will always feel a deep responsibility, regardless of where blame is ultimately found to lie,” Hayward said in a statement.
Separately, TNK-BP reported Tuesday that net income fell to $1.16 billion in the first half, down from $1.27 billion a year earlier, despite 29 percent growth in sales over the period.
“Our financial performance remains strong despite a challenging cost environment, particularly relating to growing transportation and energy tariffs,” Fridman, TNK-BP interim chief executive, said in a statement.

TITLE: Drought Could Cause Significant Losses for Bondholders
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s worst drought in a decade will probably generate losses for bondholders as food prices rise and the government may be pushed to tap debt markets for funds to support farmers.
High temperatures, which rose to a record 37.8 degrees Celsius on Thursday in Moscow, have damaged 32 percent of land under cultivation and forced Russia to declare a state of emergency in 23 regions. Grain prices may double this year because of the drought, according to the Grain Producers’ Union.
Inflation may quicken to 8.1 percent by December, compared with the government’s annual forecast of less than 6.5 percent, said Yaroslav Lissovolik, Deutsche Bank’s head of research in Moscow. That will put pressure on the Central Bank to raise its benchmark rate by year-end for the first time since December 2008, said Natalya Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank.
Higher rates “may cause a correction in short-term sovereign bonds and, later, in long-term sovereign bonds,” said Yevgeny Nadorshin, senior economist at Trust Investment Bank and an adviser to Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina.
The government, which plans to sell 1.2 trillion rubles ($39.3 billion) of bonds on the domestic market this year to finance its budget deficit, may increase that figure to pay for subsidies and contain the drought’s fallout, Nadorshin said.
“The risk of higher spending makes the government likely to borrow more,” he said. “This in turn creates a risk that bond yields will increase.”
So far, the government has been reluctant to pay more to sell its debt.
The Treasury last week failed to sell 30 billion rubles of federal bonds, known as OFZs, due July 2015. At a subsequent auction the same day, it sold 11 billion rubles of notes due January 2013, compared with the 15 billion rubles planned. The average yield was 6.28 percent. A week earlier the Treasury sold 11 billion rubles of 2012 notes at 5.92 percent, falling short of the 20 billion rubles offered.
“It’s very likely that rates on bonds will increase,” said Vladimir Osakovsky, chief economist at UniCredit Bank. The July 21 auction “supports this view.”
The government has signaled that it may pay higher rates as it floods the market with debt. Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said in a July 19 interview that the treasury “may offer a premium” over secondary market rates at this month’s auctions.
Thursday’s temperature in Moscow was the highest since Russia began keeping records 130 years ago, according to the web site of the Hydrometeorological Monitoring Service. Before Monday, when temperatures reached 37.5 degrees, the previous high was 36.8 degrees C in July 1920, during the Civil War. 
Russia, the world’s third-biggest wheat exporter, will harvest about 80 million metric tons of grain this season, 17 percent less than last year, according to researcher SovEcon. Grain prices rose as much as 33 percent last week on drought concerns, SovEcon said on its web site.
Drought is likely to have a bigger impact on prices in Russia than in other countries, Orlova said. Food accounts for 38 percent of the consumer price index in Russia, compared with 15 percent in the United States and 32 percent in China, Alfa estimates.
A domestic economic recovery also may encourage retailers to pass on higher grain prices to consumers. Unemployment fell 0.5 points to 6.8 percent last month. Retail sales grew an annual 5.8 percent and have risen every month this year.
“This intensifies inflationary risks and justifies our expectations of higher inflationary pressure in the second half,” Orlova said.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s administration may try to limit inflation by releasing grain from storage or curbing exports to distance itself from Russia’s history of volatile prices, said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib.
The inflation rate reached 120 percent in 1999 after Russia defaulted on $40 billion of domestic debt, and prices rose more than 2,000 percent in 1992, a year after the fall of communism.
“Inflation control is one of the government’s most important priorities,” Weafer said. “It is by no means a given that prices will therefore be allowed to rise as a result of the weather, even if the economic conditions warrant.”
The inflation rate fell to a record-low 5.8 percent in June, the statistics office said July 5. Last year’s record 7.9 percent economic contraction allowed the Central Bank to cut its benchmark 14 times to a record-low 7.75 percent in May as demand eased and price increases slowed.
“August will be the decisive month” for the interest-rate outlook, said Yulia Tseplyayeva, head of research at BNP Paribas.

TITLE: BP’s Future May Be Decided in Russia
AUTHOR: By Matthew Hulbert
TEXT: As BP CEO Tony Hayward clears his desk from St. James’s Square in London, Robert Dudley is getting ready to take his place, effective Oct. 1. The rationale is clear: BP wants an American to take care of its U.S. assets. But in the end, this could prove to be misguided. BP is a global player, not just a Gulf of Mexico upstart.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ National Resource Committee is currently wasting its time pushing an amendment to effectively bar BP from obtaining future drilling permits. You don’t need a law to do this. BP will never obtain new permits in the United States. It would be like trying to sell Bermuda shorts to an Eskimo.
Alas, London has made it quite clear that it has no interest in allowing a BP fire sale to U.S. majors at the behest of Congress. It wants to weather the storm, spin off $30 billion of noncore assets and raise easy money as it goes along.
But if BP is to survive, it must surely look beyond the United States, where it will struggle to maintain concessions, let alone secure new contracts. It must look toward the markets of tomorrow. This, of course, raises a thorny question: Is Dudley, who was raised in Mississippi, the right man to navigate global markets in jurisdictions such as Libya, Colombia, Angola and Algeria, or is he merely the guy who knows how to sweet-talk the White House into taking its foot off BP’s neck?
Russia might well provide an answer here. Before being shipped back to the United States, Dudley had been walking a tightrope to ensure that BP remained part of the TNK-BP equation. Many in Moscow thought that Gazprom would be a better partner than TNK-BP to develop Kovykta, one of the country’s largest undeveloped natural gas fields in East Siberia.
Hayward understood this, which explains why his first plane out from his congressional grilling was not back to London but to a far more important meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin to affirm BP’s Russia position. It is precisely these markets where BP’s future fortunes rest. In addition, BP has important interests in Azerbaijan and Georgia, where BP operates the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
To put it bluntly, Dudley is not liked in Russia. He had to flee the country to avoid alleged labor law violations and visa problems in 2008 when TNK was piling on pressure to take more of the 50-50 cut from BP. Moscow offered a stark choice: Either Dudley goes or BP can pack up and leave.
Being honest, no doubt many of these claims had about as much credence as the environmental charges laid against Royal Dutch Shell when they were cut off the Shtokman development in 2006, but that is the whole point in Russia. Political risk is high. Cordial political relations are therefore crucial to success.
No doubt Dudley thinks that if he takes over BP, his main risk is that the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico will continue to leak. But his real problem is whether some of the low-hanging fruit in Russia, Central Asia or in the United States decide to turn the contractual tables on BP. The market has already priced in BP’s U.S. write-off, but it has not thought about the potential of BP’s global empire crumbling before Dudley’s U.S.-centric eyes.
The temptation for Russia to bite into the contract renegotiation apple is no doubt immense. A gas dispute with Belarus and a shaky Collective Security Treaty Organization following the recent regime change in Kyrgyzstan have left the Kremlin bruised. Hanging BP out to dry could well be seen as a quick and easy political ointment for Moscow to apply. But this is a bad time to be playing fast and loose with upstream hydrocarbon provision. Oil markets remain very lax, with a slack of more than 6 million barrels per day from OPEC supply alone. International oil companies such as BP have also been given a second life in the form of shale gas discoveries in the United States, Europe and Asia. Access to reserves is no longer the sacrosanct prize that states had previously sought. Consistent investment to bring resources online is, however.
If Russia helps put pressure on BP, the company could well be subject to an outright takeover bid. ExxonMobil would no doubt be the front-runner. But Moscow surely understands two key factors also in play: The first is that in a globalized market, China has the deepest pockets of all to launch a credible BP bid. The second is that money is the only thing that matters in London. BP assets might not go to the “vulture of choice.”
Unless Russia really wants Washington or Beijing to start playing in its backyard, it should probably give Dudley some slack. This might be made all the easier should Hayward turn up for his new prospective job as a director at TNK-BP. What plays well globally obviously does not play well in Washington. This is where the contrasting fates of Dudley and Hayward will be determined. Whether this proves to be in BP’s long-term interests remains to be seen.

Matthew Hulbert is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies in Zurich.

TITLE: The Mole Who Gave Away Russia’s Spies
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: During his visit to Ukraine on Saturday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told journalists that he met with the 10 Russian “illegals” — who pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to being agents for the Russian government — at some point after they arrived in Moscow on July 9.
“They will find decent work — I’m sure,” Putin said. “I have no doubt that they will have interesting, colorful lives.” Perhaps he was referring to Anna Chapman, who has already received an offer from Vivid Entertainment to play the leading role in a porn film.
“I can tell you that it was a hard fate for each of them,” Putin said. “First, they had to master a foreign language as their own.”
Here, Putin was clearly exaggerating their English-language skills. Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs at The New School in New York, was the academic supervisor of Richard Murphy — one of the spies whose real name is Vladimir Guryev. She wrote in Foreign Policy magazine about how she did a double-take when she met this supposedly Irish-American student with a strong Russian accent. Plus, he had that insolent, downtrodden demeanor that screams, “I was raised in Russia!”
But the most important open question is: Who was the informer who helped U.S. authorities to uncover the spy network? Since Putin met with all 10 of the agents, it is safe to assume that none of them was the informer.
The first person the media and analysts named as the most probable informer was Sergei Tretyakov, a Russian spy who defected to the United States in 2000. But Tretyakov’s biographer, Pete Earley, insists that Tretyakov knew nothing about the 10 agents. Moreover, if Russian intelligence knew that Tretyakov was passing secret information on to the FBI about the 10 agents, surely the Foreign Intelligence Service would have evacuated the agents as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, there is one person left — spy No. 11, the most important figure in the network. I’m talking about Christopher Metsos. In contrast to the 10 clowns, Metsos was a top-level spy.
According to the official version, he apparently “fled” the United States to Cyprus, where he was arrested and released on parole before disappearing. On the surface, allowing Metsos to leave the United States appears to be a blatant act of negligence by the FBI, particularly since he was supposedly under much heavier surveillance than the other 10 agents.
But maybe Metsos’ flight was just a smokescreen to cover up his work as a double agent. Maybe Metsos was a mole who was feeding the Foreign Intelligence Service false information while working for the Americans during the 2000s.
Another indicator supporting this theory is that no one is blaming the FBI for letting the ringleader go free.
Another strange thing: Why has Russia not said a word about its brilliant victory — that it was able to evacuate its top spy from Cyprus in a secret operation? To be sure, the security service is probably prohibited from giving details, but if Russia did, in fact, save Metsos, we would have surely heard bits and pieces of this amazing operation through leaks or anonymous sources.
The whole world is looking for Metsos, but maybe he is comfortably living in the United States, where he has been debriefed by the FBI and CIA and has already received a new name and face.

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

TITLE: Summer surrealism
AUTHOR: By Lyudmila Tsubiks
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The artistic life of St. Petersburg is not losing ground, even during the summertime. New exhibitions of modern art are currently on display at 5 Etazh studio, Art re.Flex gallery and Al Gallery. 
At the 5 Etazh (Five Floors) studio,  an art photography exhibition titled “On the verge of reality” has opened in conjunction with the KOPPA advertising agency and photo center. 
“Originally we had an idea to organize a series of exhibitions,” said Yulia Povorotnaya, head of the KOPPA advertising agency. “For the initial exhibition, we have chosen the genre of artistic photography because it seemed the most interesting today.”
Thirteen photographers are taking part in the project, including two artists from Belarus and the participants of the first Russian Museum Biennial, Arseny Semyonov and Pavel Kuznetsov. The exhibition will run through Aug. 6.
Meanwhile, the Art re.Flex gallery presents the first individual exhibition by young artist Natalya Rumyantseva, titled “Dreams of a diver.” 
Rumyantseva graduated from the Academy of Arts and now works in the field of abstract painting. The current exhibition shows a series of works devoted to diving. 
“The artist herself does not dive for a hobby,” says Anastasiya Lesnikova, the project’s curator. “She is playing in an imaginary world, where divers plunge into painting.”
In addition to painting, video works titled “The cult of the ocean” will be introduced at the exhibition in order to create a unique marine atmosphere, the curator said. The exhibition will run through Sept. 1. 
To mark the end of the season, Al Gallery has opened a combined exhibition of works presented during the year. Among them are projects by Andrei Rudyev, Masha Agureyeva, Alexei Chistyakov and others, including a Belarussian project titled “Motornina” which was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize. 
“We didn’t want to close for the summer, so we have successfully demonstrated key projects of this year once again. For those who haven’t visited any exhibition during the year, it is a good opportunity to come now,” said Liza Savina, the gallery’s director. The exhibition is open through Sept. 6. 

5 Etazh is located at 134, Nab. Obvodnogo Kanala. Tel: +7 921 951 5690.www.5etage.ru 
Art re.Flex is located at 5, Prospekt Bakunina. Tel: 332 3343. 
www.artreflex.ru
Al Gallery is located at 76, Nab. Reki Fontanki. Tel: 713 3534. 
www. album-gallery.ru

TITLE: Word’s worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ðàé: paradise
Goooood morning, Moscow! You’re listening to Radio TMT, and it’s time for the weather report. Looks like it’s going to be another beautiful day: temps in the 30s, clear blue skies and humidity at 33 percent. It’s another day in paradise!
Wait a minute … How come weather that would be heavenly in New York or London is hellish in Moscow? As we pause to ponder yet another mystery of Russian life, this is a good opportunity to consider Russian notions of heaven and hell.
Ðàé is paradise or heaven in the hereafter. If you want to describe a place that is indescribably beautiful here and now, call it ðàé çåìíîé (paradise on earth). Before the drought, some friends invited me out to their dacha: Ïðèåçæàéòå ëåòîì, êîãäà ó íàñ ó÷àñòîê — ðàé çåìíîé (Come out in the summer when our yard is heaven on earth). Now their scorched plot is more like ïîòåðÿííûé ðàé (paradise lost), which — grim joking aside — is a time or place of great happiness or beauty that is now gone. 
At my dacha community there is a pair of newlyweds who are totally oblivious to the raging heat and our daily power, water and cell phone outages. In cases like this, you can say: Ñ ìèëûì ðàé è â øàëàøå! (Love makes a cottage a castle; literally, “with your sweetheart it’s paradise even in a shelter of twigs.”) Another divine expression is âúåõàòü â ðàé íà ÷óæîì ãîðáó. Here ãîðá (a hump) stands for a person’s back and back-breaking labor. The idea is that someone wants to reap the benefits (âúåõàòü â ðàé — enter heaven) of someone’s labor (íà ÷óæîì ãîðáó — on someone else’s back). This is something like a piggy-back ride with the rider hogging all the glory.
Àä is heaven’s opposite: hell, the underworld in the hereafter. In the here and now, àä and its derivatives àäñêèé and àäîâ (hellish, infernal) are used to describe anything blazingly hot, painful or unbearable, like àäñêàÿ æàðà (unbearable heat). Or as someone whined on a blog: Âûêëþ÷è óæå, ïîæàëóéñòà, ýòî àäîâî ïåêëî! Ñèë íåò òåðïåòü! (Please turn off this infernal furnace already! I can’t take it anymore!) In cases like this, you need àäîâî òåðïåíèå (literally, “hellish patience”). This is actually infinite patience, which you’d think would be heaven sent, not the devil’s work. Perhaps it’s the infinite patience required to endure eternity in hell, or what seems like an eternity of hellish weather.
Cheer up! Instead of descending into the pit of pandemonium, we can use another hellish Russian expression and fly to Tartarus. Òàðòàðàðû is the Russian version of Tartarus, the underworld of Greek mythology, and ïðîâàëèòüñÿ or ëåòåòü â òàðòàðàðû is what we Americans call going to hell in a hand basket.
That’s what our utilities are doing, and I don’t blame them at all.

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

TITLE: Sing when you’re winning
AUTHOR: By Kristina Aleksandrova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Choirs from around the world will flock to St. Petersburg this weekend for the Singing World international festival of choral art, which runs from Friday to Wednesday.
Every year, professional and amateur choirs appear on the city’s leading stages, including the State Academic Cappella, Kazan Cathedral, Alexander Nevsky Monastery and other churches of different confessions for the festival. 
“Our main objective is to unite people of different religions and from different countries,” said Yelena Bizina, the festival’s director and producer. 
“We want to demonstrate the great variety of melodies and songs to be found in choral art. All the ensembles are different, and listeners will hear both classical and modern music,” she said. 
During the opening ceremony, each choir will introduce itself and sing one song — the choir’s “calling card.”
The festival is charitable, so any musical collective can participate. According to the terms of application, members of the choir should send a CD and give a brief account on their group. 
“We give everyone who sends an application the chance to perform,” said Bizina. “Our arts council listens to all the CDs we get, then they devise the program. For example, we get applications from children’s choirs. Of course, they are inexperienced, but we always find a suitable place for them,” she said.
This year, a large number of international choirs feature on the program, including singers from Finland, Italy, Japan, Iceland, Poland, Spain, Israel, Slovenia, Romania and another 11 countries. 
“I would like to draw attention to the Anjo Gakuen female choir from Japan,” said Bizina. “It’s a high school choir, which means they are very professional. I think they are interesting, because there are a lot of national songs in their repertoire,” she said. 
“People imagine choral music as something boring and archaic,” said Bizina. “Most people think that it’s only religious music. We want to get rid of all those stereotypes; our objective is to show that such concerts can be interesting and understandable,” she said.
This year the festival is expanding its horizons, with many choirs coming from former Soviet republics. They have not participated in the festival before due to financial constraints, but their culture committees for this year agreed to provide sponsorship. In St. Petersburg, they are being welcomed by local diasporas. 
A three-day competition will also be held, but will not duplicate the festival program. An international jury of seven experts will judge performances by 40 collectives in seven categories: children’s choirs, male and female choirs, mixed choirs, vocal ensembles, church and gospel music, modern music and folk music. Decisions, no matter how difficult, will have to be made quickly, because the total performance time for each collective is no more than 12 minutes. The choirs with the most points will qualify for the Grand Prix contest, and the winners will get prize money.
The festival, which was listed as one of the most remarkable cultural events in the city by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, is being held for the eighth time. 
“This year we decided to turn it into a forum,” said Bizina. “We wanted to give our participants time to communicate. In addition, some workshops run by jury members and other professionals will be organized. It’s great when people can share their skills with each other.”

TITLE: In the Spotlight: Twitter
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Last week, President Dmitry Medvedev tweeted about a visit to Finland, the blast in a hydroelectric power station in Kabardino-Balkaria, oh and a rather impressive rain storm in Moscow. And he wasn’t the only one.
Twitter users were baffled last Tuesday when Russians got so excited about the first rain for a couple of weeks that the Russian word dozhd was in the top 10 of the most popular topics, marking the first time that a Cyrillic word has ever made the listing.
Bang on trend, Medvedev wrote: “I heard there was rain in Moscow?”
Not realizing that Russians can be just as boring about the weather as any other nation, some jumped to the conclusion that there was some kind of nuclear war brewing. Dozhd is “the name of a new Russian nuclear bomb,” a user called Glacialmax wrote.
The word even made Rossia-24 television news, which showed a joke photograph of a missile with the word “dozhd” written on it.
Since Medvedev joined Twitter on his visit to Silicon Valley in late June, there has been a stampede of Russian bureaucrats eager to show that they share Dear Leader’s taste for the Internet.
Among them are brilliantined Kremlin children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov and several regional governors. Even the Finance Ministry has launched a Twitter account with snappy posts on foreign debt.
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov dug his heels in, however, using a lovely metaphor: “I don’t fear openness. I’m already in a Speedo.”
Medvedev’s Twitter so far has been unchallenging soundbites with the odd flash of personality. When he visited a food factory he confessed to a sweet tooth “even though it’s unhealthy,” which could have been a cri de coeur from a man who has slimmed down drastically in recent years.
When he met U.S. President Barack Obama for a much-photographed visit to a burger restaurant, he wrote wistfully: “I haven’t had a burger in a long time.”
A microblog cleverly titled KermlinRussia follows Medvedev’s every statement with a satirical paraphrase. After Medvedev wrote about the birthday of an actor famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, it wrote: “You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to guess who will be president in 2012.”
Paraphrasing a message by Medvedev about the chaos in Kyrgyzstan, it wrote: “For us in Moscow, everything that happens in Russia is not something far away; it is a country close to us.”
It’s a good idea, though you wonder whether they realized how prolific Medvedev was going to be.
The best Twitter account from a Russian official is one written by Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s representative to NATO. He once did a television ad featuring immigrants from the Caucasus with the slogan: “We’ll clear our town of rubbish.” But I have to admit he does have a sense of fun.
He writes of being mistaken for falsetto-voiced pop singer Konstantin Meladze and of a waiter at NATO who gives him special treatment. “I’ve got a fan at NATO. A waiter. When talks are on, he brings everyone else brown filter coffee, but he makes me a pot of Turkish coffee,” he gloated recently.
Not surprisingly, Russia’s showbiz stars have also gone in for Twitter in a big way. It can be an eye-opener. Yevgeny Plushenko leaves everyone else in the dust when he’s carving through the ice, but his Twitter account reveals a man apparently more interested in collecting designer labels.
While skating in Tokyo recently, he name-dropped his “favorite shop” Gucci, as well as Chanel and Louis Vuitton. “It’s a kind of illness. If I go in, I come out with parcels,” he sighs.

TITLE: Stellar service
AUTHOR: By Ashley Blum
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With attentive wait staff, a relaxed atmosphere, simple yet chic d?cor and an extensive menu offering a variety of classic Italian dishes, the owners of the old-standing favorite Da Albertone on Millionaya Ulitsa seem to have come up with another winner with this new offering on Zagorodny Prospekt — dining at Portobello is a pleasant experience that will satisfy taste buds and surpass expectations of service. 
An exotic mix of jazz and Italian music and the sound of two waterfall-like fountains form the only background noise. Though the walls are bare, the ceiling is decorated with small lamps that evoke a starry sky. Customers may recall Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” as they walk into the room. A fireplace in the back completes the romantic effect. Yet the decor is not overdone; the restaurant could also be used as a meeting place for a business lunch. The front room, in particular, is less lavishly decorated and could easily function as a business setting. 
A smiling waitress speaking fluent English greeted us and pointed us to a wine list with a diverse array of options in terms of quality and price that can be purchased by the glass or bottle. 
The menu at Portobello comprises traditional favorites and classics of Italian cuisine. Options include a variety of pasta and risotto dishes for about 400 rubles ($13), pizza (230 to 480 rubles, $7.60 to $16) and several fish, chicken and meat dishes including veal chops in a demi-glaze with porcini mushrooms (1,200 rubles, $40) and filet mignon (550 rubles, $18).
From a list of appetizers including plates of classic Italian cold cuts, cheese, and, for more adventurous eaters, tuna tartar with avocado, papaya and raspberry dressing, we chose to begin our meal with freshly baked focaccia bread sprinkled with Parmesan and oregano (70 rubles, $2.30), and Carpaccio of filet mignon with arugula, Parmesan and house vinaigrette (320 rubles. $10.60), accompanied by a glass of rose wine (250 rubles, $8.20). Our food arrived almost immediately. 
The focaccia was superb: Warm, fresh, crispy on the outside and doughy in the middle, while the Carpaccio was fresh, tender and perfectly seasoned so as not to overwhelm the meat’s delicate flavor. 
Proceeding briskly to the main dish, we selected pan-fried poussin with mushrooms, potatoes and pears (450 rubles, $15) and Agnello in 3 Modi, which comprised baked baby lamb chops, braised leg of lamb and roast leg of lamb with polenta and potatoes (730 rubles, $24). 
The chicken was well prepared and well cooked, though simple and somewhat bland. The roasted pears that accompanied it were the most flavorsome part of the dish. The lamb, by contrast, was rich in both flavor and texture. The meat was tender and perfectly cooked, and each of the three components had a distinct sauce, seasoning, cut and texture, guaranteed to please those who have trouble deciding on a dish or who find themselves bored by the end of a meal. 
Dessert offered a satisfying conclusion to an overall pleasant meal. The lemon panna cotta (160 rubles, $5.30) was satisfying and well made, though unremarkable, while chocolate lovers will relish the rich flavors of the warm molten chocolate cake (240 rubles, $8). The homemade ice cream that accompanies it offered a nice touch.
Although dishes are simple and the flavors predictable at Portobello, each was perfectly executed. What makes dining at the restaurant notable though is the personal attention from the wait staff and the relaxed, comfortable atmosphere they provide that is still far from being a given in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: French Woman Admits to Child Murders
AUTHOR: By Catherine Gaschka
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VILLERS-AU-TERTRE, France — A French woman who admitted to suffocating eight of her newborns and concealing their corpses in the garden and garage of her home has been charged with manslaughter, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Dominique Cottrez, a 46-year-old nurse’s aide by profession, said that after a bad experience with her first pregnancy she never again wanted to see a doctor. She admitted to delivering the babies herself and placing the corpses in plastic bags. She buried two of the newborns in the garden and hid the rest of them in the garage, prosecutor Eric Vaillant said.
“She explained that she didn’t want any more children and that she didn’t want to see a doctor to take contraceptives,” Vaillant told a news conference. “She was perfectly conscious of the fact that she was pregnant each time.”
Cottrez and her husband, Pierre-Marie Cottrez, were detained Wednesday after two corpses were discovered by the new owners in plastic bags in the garden of a house that had belonged to the woman’s father in the town of Villers-au-Tertre in northern France. Under questioning, the woman admitted that there were six other corpses and told investigators that they were in plastic bags in the garage of her home where the two were found.
The woman is still in detention and will undergo further psychiatric testing, Vaillant said. Her husband was freed from custody and not charged, although he remains under judicial control. He claimed that he knew nothing about the pregnancies of his wife, who is very large and apparently easily concealed her condition. Earlier, Vaillant said in a statement that the husband could be charged with failure to report a crime and concealment of corpses.
The couple’s two grown daughters, who are in their 20s, have been questioned, Vaillant said. He refused to provide any further details about them or what they said.
The discovery was not major news Thursday in the mainstream French newspapers, which briefly noted them on their front pages but buried the stories inside. The main stories were the ban of bullfighting in Catalonia, Spain and the movie that French first lady Carla Sarkozy-Bruni is making.
Police sealed the doors, gate and windows of the house where the remains of some of the babies were discovered. DNA tests are being conducted to establish for sure whether the couple are the parents, and autopsies are being conducted on the corpses to try to determine the cause of death.
France has seen a string of cases in recent years of mothers killing their newborns and saving and hiding the corpses.
In one case, Celine Lesage was sentenced in March to 15 years in prison after acknowledging in court that she killed six of her newborns, whose corpses were found in plastic bags in her basement in northwest France.
Another Frenchwoman, Veronique Courjault, was convicted last year of murdering three of her newborn children.

TITLE: Spanish Region Makes Bullfighting Illegal
AUTHOR: By Joseph Wilson and Daniel Woolls
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BARCELONA, Spain — Lawmakers in the region of Catalonia thrust a sword deep into Spain’s centuries-old tradition of bullfighting, banning the blood-soaked pageant that has fascinated artists and writers from Goya to Hemingway.
Wednesday’s vote in the Catalan parliament prohibits bullfighting starting in 2012 in the northeastern region that centers on Barcelona. Although animal rights activists want to extend the ban, there is no significant national movement to do away with bullfighting in the rest of Spain.
Many see the vote as a political statement by a wealthy and powerful region that likes to assert how different it is from the rest of Spain, rather than an expression of concern over cruelty to the half-ton beasts by sword-wielding matadors.
The center-right Popular Party, which is fervent about the idea of a unified Spain run from Madrid, said it will fight the ban — the first by a major region in the country. It will press the national Parliament to pass a law giving protected status to bullfighting and bar regions from outlawing it, said Alicia Sanchez-Camacho, president of the party’s Catalan branch.
Still, animal rights activists rejoiced and cheers broke out in Catalonia’s 135-seat legislature when the speaker announced the ban had passed 68-55 with nine abstentions.
“We are euphoric with the banning of bullfighting in Catalonia. It’s the beginning of the end,” said Nacho Paunero, president of the animal rights group Refuge, which collected 50,000 signatures in a bid to force a similar vote in the Madrid regional parliament. “We want debate in Madrid now.”
The practical effect of the ban is limited: Catalonia has only one functioning bullring, in Barcelona, while another little used one is being turned into a shopping mall. It stages 15 fights a year that are rarely sold out, out of a nationwide total of roughly 1,000 bouts per season.
Still, bullfighting fans — who count King Juan Carlos in their number — and Spanish conservatives have taken the drama over the “fiesta nacional” very seriously, seeing a stinging rebuke in the grass roots drive that started in the region last year.
“I’m not particularly a fan of bullfighting, but there’s a long tradition of it in Spain, especially in Barcelona. I am pretty much against banning anything. I would have voted against it,” said Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., son of the late former head of the International Olympic Committee.
“On such a decisive issue I think the safer response is not to ban anything. We should show respect for the tradition. It’s part of our culture,” said Samaranch, a Barcelona native and IOC member who added that he does not attend bullfights.
Joan Puigcercos, a lawmaker from a Catalan pro-independence party, insisted the ban was not about politics or national identity but rather “the suffering of the animal. That is the question, nothing more.”
Even though attendance at bullfighting is declining, the lawmakers needed to assert their moral authority, Puigcercos said, rather than just allow it to die on its own.
But Catalan regional president Jose Montilla said the legislators should have let bullfighting vanish on its own, rather than legislate an end to it and deny the people’s right to choose whether to go the ring.
Ernest Hemingway wrote about bullfighting and the running of the bulls in Spain’s annual San Fermin Festival in his 1924 novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” and about the traditions of the sport in his later nonfiction book, “Death in the Afternoon.”
Bullfighting is also popular in Mexico, parts of South America, southern France and Portugal.
Animal rights groups seeking bans in other parts of Spain or abroad were energized by the vote.
“The suffering of animals in the Catalan bullrings has been abolished once and for all. It has created a precedent we hope will be replicated by other democratic parliaments internationally, in those regions and countries where such cruel bullfights are still allowed,” said Leonardo Anselmi of PROU, the animal rights group whose signature-collecting campaign last year forced Catalonian lawmakers to debate and vote.
In the Madrid area, the Refuge group recently presented more than 50,000 signatures to force a similar vote, but it faces a tougher battle because the regional parliament is controlled by conservatives. Two other regions also controlled by conservatives — Valencia and Murcia — have granted protected status to bullfighting.

TITLE: Woman Survives Grizzly Bear Attack By Playing Dead
AUTHOR: By Matthew Brown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: COOKE CITY, Montana — A woman who was attacked by a bear in the middle of the night at a busy campground was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone, she said Thursday.
At least one bear rampaged through the campground near Yellowstone National Park on Wednesday, killing a man and injuring Deb Freele of London, Ontario, and another young man.
Appearing on the network morning talk shows from a Wyoming hospital, Freele said she woke up just before the bear bit her arm.
“I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite,” she said, adding that she could hear her bones breaking.
Her survival instinct kicked in, and she realized that the screaming wasn’t working.
“I told myself, play dead,” she said. “I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go.”
Freele said the bear was silent.
“This, to me, was just an absolutely freaky thing,” she said. “I have to believe that the bear was not normal. It was very quiet, it never made any noise. I felt like it was hunting me.”
A frequent camper, Freele said that she was already prepared hours after the attack to go camping again.

TITLE: 152 Dead In Plane Crash In Pakistan
AUTHOR: By Munir Ahmed
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISLAMABAD — Relatives desperate to find the bodies of loved ones joined emergency teams Thursday at the scene of Pakistan’s worst-ever plane crash, but recovery work was badly hampered by rain and thick mud on the slippery hills.
The Airbus A321 operated by local carrier Airblue crashed into hills overlooking the capital, Islamabad, during monsoon storms, killing all 152 people on board. Wreckage was strewn over about a third of a square mile (one-square kilometer) of the forested slopes.
The Civil Aviation Authority said the plane had been ordered to take an alternative approach to the runway, but had veered off course. 
Finding out why will be a key task of the investigation team, said Riazul Haq, director general of the agency.
“The fact remains it flew where it should not have,” he said.
Army troops and civilian rescue workers searched a large stretch of the hills scorched by the crash, but the tough conditions slowed the operations. Helicopters could not fly in the heavy rain and low clouds, according to the Capital Development Authority which helps handle emergencies.
An Associated Press Television News cameraman in the hills saw relatives of passengers working with soldiers and other rescuers at one crash site, where the undercarriage of the jet had come to rest. They collected several body parts in small bags.
Dozens of relatives and friends of those killed slept outside Islamabad’s largest hospital overnight, hoping to receive bodies. They were still there Thursday morning, hugging one another as their tears mixed with the heavy rain, but few corpses were released.
The plane’s “black box” flight data recorders have yet to be recovered. Information extracted from them is needed to determine the cause of the crash. Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and other officials have said the government does not suspect terrorism.
The plane was flying from Karachi, the country’s largest city and commercial capital.
Even when the search is completed, it could take days to identify all the victims with DNA testing since most of the bodies were torn apart and burned in the crash, a grim scene described by rescue workers scouring the twisted metal wreckage.