SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1599 (60), Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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TITLE: UNESCO Proposes Alternative To Tower
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While the St. Petersburg authorities continue to promote the Okhta Center skyscraper by publishing interviews in support of the controversial building in a City Hall-owned newspaper, the project’s opponents continue to lose their cases in local courts and have criticized UNESCO’s recent decision on the project as a “compromise.”
Last week, the City Court upheld a ruling of the Smolninsky District Court rejecting the claim of opponents to the planned Gazprom Neft headquarters that City Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s decision to permit the 400-meter height contradicted laws prohibiting the construction of buildings taller than 100 meters on the site. The court also refused to summon Matviyenko to the hearing.
“I wouldn’t say that we lost in court, I would say that a Russian court issued another illegal ruling,” said Boris Vishnevsky, one of the five plaintiffs. Vishnevsky is a member of the Yabloko Democratic Party.
“The hearing lasted for an hour and a half, but the three judges didn’t ask participants in the trial a single question, which means that the ruling was written even before the session. The most bitter pill to swallow is that the City Court flounced a recent ruling by the Constitutional Court, which proved indisputably that we are right.”
Last month, the Constitutional Court ruled that construction projects such as Okhta Center must comply with Russian and international laws. But it refused to declare the infamous Sept. 2009 public hearing on the project, at which opponents were beaten and arrested, anti-constitutional.
Critics claim the Okhta Center violates local and international regulations on world heritage because it will ruin the city’s UNESCO-protected skyline. 
The Constitutional Court’s decision obliges lower courts, which have so far thrown out all lawsuits against the project, to take these regulations into consideration.
Vishnevsky criticized the local courts as being dependent on City Hall. “This is a fact that hardly needs any confirmation,” he said.
“There is a science called the theory of probability. It is not possible that all the citizens who contest decisions of the city authorities in court could be illiterate idiots, and that the courts would never rule in favor of them, with only very rare exceptions. But this is exactly what is happening. 
“A huge number of citizens can confirm that when there’s a dispute between us and the authorities, the courts turn out to be biased, and don’t even really try to hide it.”
Vishnevsky said the opponents of the skyscraper would continue to oppose Matviyenko’s decision in court and would go to the European Court of Human Rights if the Russian courts continue to decide in favor of the authorities.
Late last month, the World Heritage Committee discussed the situation regarding the Okhta Center at a session meeting in Brasilia, but Vishnevsky criticized the decision as too mild.
“I am not really satisfied with it, it’s a compromise decision,” he said.
UNESCO’s decision included a request that Russia develop fundamentally different alternative projects and analyze their impact on the surroundings.
“On the one hand, it’s clear that UNESCO continues to oppose the Okhta Center; on the other hand, it hasn’t ordered the St. Petersburg authorities to stop the project straight out,” said Vishnevsky. “[The decision] allows them to kill time for a while — for another year at least, until the next session — while making some insignificant promises.
“I think it’s bad, but we understand that very few dare to take a firm stance toward Russia and its authorities. It’s very bad, because the only language that Putin’s authorities understand is the language of force, the language of extremely firm formulations and clear consequences that arise from failing to comply with decisions taken by international bodies.”
City Hall and Gazprom deny violating the law with the skyscraper project, while continuing to campaign to persuade residents of the benefits they claim the project will bring them.
Peterburgsky Dnevnik, City Hall’s official publication, ran an interview Monday with pop singer Igor Kornelyuk praising the project, which appeared on Okhta Center’s official web site the same day.  Previously, Mariinsky Theater artistic director Valery Gergiev and opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya spoke on behalf of the project in the same publication.
According to the publication information printed in Peterburgsky Dnevnik, the weekly newspaper’s managing director is Vladimir Gronsky, who is also the communications coordinator for Gazprom Neft in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. 
Many more artists and musicians have spoken out against the project in independent publications and petitions, saying it would be destructive for St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Police To Get New Name In Reform
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A first step in President Dmitry Medvedev’s reform of the notoriously corrupt police force will be to replace its Bolshevik-imposed name “militia” with the tsarist-era “police.”
Medvedev rolled out his much-anticipated bill to reform the Interior Ministry on Saturday, but it remained unclear whether the legislation would bring about any change more substantial than a name change.
The bill, which is to replace a 1991 law on the police, aims to compile all the rights and responsibilities of the police, whose activities are currently regulated by hundreds of additional laws and bylaws, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev wrote in a commentary attached to the legislation.
Medvedev said in his own commentary that the bill should clearly define the police force’s sphere of activities and close all loopholes for potential abuse of power. He said the bill should be the only legislation that citizens need to consult to know the police’s powers.
The old police law is used as the foundation for the draft but is expanded from 43 articles to 57 and is almost twice the size, Nurgaliyev said.
The 11-chapter draft was posted on the government’s web site Zakonoproekt2010.ru on Saturday, and viewers are encouraged to comment on it on the site. More than 2,000 comments had been posted 24 hours after the draft was put online.
The bill is expected to be submitted to the State Duma in the fall after undergoing a review by the Public Chamber, said Anatoly Kucherena, head of the chamber’s commission on police reform. It would come into force on Jan. 1.
The biggest obvious change that the reform offers is renaming the police force from “militsiya” to “politsiya.” The Bolshevik government introduced its “worker and collective farm militia” in 1917 to differentiate the force from the tsarist police, a longtime enemy of the revolutionaries.
Medvedev announced the name change Friday, saying the police needs “professional, effective employees … so I think the time has come to return its name,” Interfax reported.
Medvedev did not say how much the name change would cost the state, which would have to buy new uniforms, repaint vehicles and replace official stamps, among other things.
Internet users who posted comments about the bill on the government’s web site were more interested in how the police would be able to treat citizens than how much the name change would cost. The draft offers some notable improvements on the current law, they said, because it not only prohibits police officers from torturing people but also obliges them to prevent fellow officers from doing so.
Lev Ponomaryov, head of the Committee for Human Rights, praised the draft for including many proposals from human rights activists but said it still afforded opportunities for abuse. He cited as an example an article on the legal framework for police work that says, “All actions of a police officer are assumed as legal unless otherwise stated by legal procedures.”
The bill’s chapter on police work contains vague wording that makes it “much tougher toward citizens” than the current law, which provides a clearer definition of the work, said Eduard Sukharev, a civil lawyer.
The bill also gives no clear definition on how public control over police would be enforced.
Sukharev added that “many police officers currently have very little understanding of the existing laws required for their duty.”
As if echoing Sukharev’s reservations, Nurgaliyev said Friday that police officers would undergo regular tests on the Constitution and other laws.
Alexei Volkov, deputy head of the State Duma security committee and a retired police general, said vagueness in the police bill could undermine the Kremlin’s hopes to fight corruption through transparency. “The police system should be transparent,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
Volkov, a member of the ruling United Russia party, praised Medvedev and Nurgaliyev for posting the bill online for public review.
But Gennady Gudkov, a fellow committee member from A Just Russia, remained skeptical, saying the timing for a discussion was questionable because many Russians were distracted by smog and wildfires.
“Who is going to discuss it? People who can hardly breathe because of the smog?” he said.
One key proposal from human rights activists that did not make the draft was for elections for the chiefs of local police precincts, which the activists said would give officers more public support.
Instead, the bill proposes centralization by making the whole police force funded by the federal budget. Currently, the police are divided into the federally funded “criminal police department” and the regionally funded “public safety police.”
Volkov said a fully federally funded police force would cut police officers’ dependence on governors. “They will not have to bow low to them in order to obtain financing,” he said.
A new police law is just one step proposed by Medvedev to reform the police force, which is ranked as the most reviled state institution in polls. A March survey by the Levada Center found that about 70 percent of Russians do not trust the police.
The reform also proposes the dismissal and re-evaluation of every one of the 1.2 million police officers nationwide by October, with only 75 percent of the staff to be hired back.
But many observers have questioned the reform, pointing out that Medvedev has not replaced the unpopular Nurgaliyev, who was appointed by then-President Vladimir Putin in 2004.

TITLE: Heat Wave in City Continues to Smash Records
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Temperatures in St. Petersburg broke yet another record Saturday when the mercury soared to 37.1 degrees Celsius, while the smog that has been choking the capital for the past few days also caught up with the city at the weekend. 
Weather forecasters say Saturday’s temperature is the highest registered in the history of meteorology in St. Petersburg, which is to say in about 150 years.
Throughout the summer, a series of record temperatures has been registered in St. Petersburg and across central Russia. Alexander Frolov, head of the Russian Federal Meteorological Center, said that recent temperatures had reached a level higher than any reached during the last thousand years. 
“No description of such heat has been found in any historical documents covering the past millenium,” Frolov told reporters Monday. 
As of Monday, more than 200 forest fires had been registered in northwestern Russia, with a large number of them in the proximity of St. Petersburg. During the weekend, several parts of the city including the Moskovsky district and the Petrograd Side were covered by a cloud of smog, which also completely covered some of the city suburbs, including Gatchina, Kirovsk and Tosno. In Gatchina, the smog cloud lay so low that residents were forced to close their windows to prevent the smoke from entering their houses and apartments. The cloud was nearly 1,000 kilometers in length, meteorologists said.
According to the local branch of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, half of the fires have already been extinguished. The ministry’s experts told reporters that the fires pose no danger to any villages or towns in the St. Petersburg area.
The extreme weather conditions have resulted in a rapid increase of heat-related illnesses and deaths. According to city statistics, 6,600 people died in the city in July — 1,500 more deaths than in July last year. The numbers of calls made to the emergency medical services have jumped by 40 percent this summer.
Weather forecasters say rain, strong winds and storms will come to the city on Tuesday, after which temperatures are expected to decrease by about five degrees by the end of the week. 
“The winds are going to be extreme, up to 25 to 30 meters per second, which is very dangerous,” Frolov said.
According to a nationwide telephone survey carried out by the Moscow-based Levada Center on Friday, 50 percent of Russians find the heat seriously disturbing and damaging, while a quarter of respondents said they have been enjoying the unusually hot summer.
Muscovites have been flocking to the northern capital at weekends to seek relief from the smog suffocating the capital — where temperatures are even higher — according to the Russian Tourism Industry Union. More than 120 anti-smog tents set up to provide ventilation and clean air are operating in Moscow, where the number of deaths this summer has doubled compared to last year.
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko has made an official statement in connection with the weather conditions, asking residents to pay particular attention to fire safety.
“As analysis of the situation has shown, most of the fires are caused by carelessly dropped cigarette butts and thoughtless picnicking,” said Matviyenko. “During such heat, a tiny spark is enough to cause a fire that can spread to a huge area.”

TITLE: Russia Accuses United States of Loose Arms Control
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry accused the United States on Saturday of breaching its obligations over the nonproliferation of weapons, a sign of strained relations between the two powers, Reuters reported.
The charge came after the New START arms control treaty between the United States and Russia suffered a setback last week when the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee delayed a ratification vote until mid-September.
The Russian military said it had successfully test-fired two ballistic missiles from the Barents Sea on Friday, Interfax reported, in another sign of muscle-flexing from Moscow.
The Foreign Ministry said on its web site that the United States had been in breach of several arms-related treaties including the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and a treaty on conventional weapons.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Poker Den Busted</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An illegal poker club has been discovered operating in one of the city’s shopping malls and shut down, the press department of the St. Petersburg police announced Monday.
“Despite a complete absence of any advertising, it was operating as a rather busy underground casino when raided,” the statement read. “Almost all of the poker tables were full.”
An investigation into the organizers of the casino has been opened, although charges have not yet been filed.

<strong>Wave of Forgetfulness</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The number of items left behind on St. Petersburg’s trams and trolleybuses has increased dramatically during the summer, the press office of the local state transport operator Gorelektrotrans said Monday.
The operator said that the high temperatures have been to blame, increasing levels of absent-mindedness among passengers beyond their normal levels. Reports of passengers falling asleep have also increased. 
Gorelektrotrans reported that passengers only return to collect 10 percent of items left on the public transport that it operates.

TITLE: 2 Years On, President Stands by Statehood
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev visited Abkhazia to defend Moscow’s recognition of the breakaway republic Sunday, two years after a war with Georgia over the territory and nearby South Ossetia.
In a further show of support, the Russian government said Friday that it would donate nearly $330 million to the two breakaway regions next year to build roads and power plants, while asking South Ossetia and Abkhazia to model their economic legislation after Russia’s.
Medvedev told Russian tourists that the country had prevented a much more dramatic turn of events by recognizing the regions as independent on Aug. 26, 2008, two weeks after the war ended.
“The decision was difficult, but I don’t regret anything,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, we wouldn’t be having coffee here now. Everything would have developed into a long, bloody conflict.”
The brief, five-day hostilities resurrected Cold War-style divisions and rhetoric between Moscow and the West, but the ties gradually mended after U.S. President Barack Obama announced a reset in relations with Russia last year.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said in a radio address broadcast Saturday — the anniversary of the day when Georgian troops invaded South Ossetia two years ago, prompting Russia to strike back the next day — that his country’s historic mission was to “liberate” the regions.
In Moscow, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia would budget 9.8 billion rubles ($329 million) to build roads and power plants, and to develop telecoms in the separatist regions next year. He was responding to First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who had said the two new states required a lot of investment in infrastructure before local and foreign private businesses would want to operate there.
Russia will earmark 6.8 billion rubles for South Ossetia in 2011 — 45 percent more than Moscow set aside for this year — and 3 billion rubles for Abkhazia, unchanged from its spending this year, Putin said.
Shuvalov said previous funding, which Russia began disbursing after the war, had achieved its intended effect.
“We agreed to rebuild certain roads and communications lines. This work has been completed,” Shuvalov said, following a trip to the two regions. “Communications lines, including mobile communications, are up and running. We have checked.”
As Moscow is sinking money into the regions’ economies, it wants them to draft economic legislation that would be like Russia’s, Putin said. Shuvalov responded that he had reached an understanding on the issue with the separatist governments.
Russia is seeking to remove all hurdles for goods and money to travel to South Ossetia and Abkhazia and back, and to have a common approach to regulating the market, said Boris Shmelyov, director of the Center for Comparative Political Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“The economies of these tiny states must become part of the Russian economy,” he said. “There’s no way around it. Otherwise, they will just not survive.”
In other economic support, many residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia get more than 1 billion rubles in retirement pensions from Moscow because they hold Russian passports. Russia is also spending billions of rubles on transportation links with the separatist states and fortifying their borders.
Russia will assist Abkhazia in building an airport and organizing air traffic, Medvedev said during a visit to the region’s capital Sukhumi, where he chatted with Russian tourists, who flock to the area’s scenic Black Sea coast. Local beach resorts should be comparable to their close foreign competition in Turkey, he said.
Medvedev also visited a music hall and a secondary school being rebuilt with Russian money.

TITLE: Russian Finalist Dies in Sauna Contest
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HELSINKI — A Russian man trying to win the Sauna World Championships died after collapsing with severe burns in the final stage of an event that required contestants to sit in a 110 degree Celsius room as water was tossed onto a searing stove, officials and witnesses said.
Vladimir Ladyzhensky, an amateur wrestler who was in his 60s, was pronounced dead late Saturday after he collapsed alongside reigning champion Timo Kaukonen of Finland roughly six minutes into the final round.
Nearly 1,000 spectators had gathered in the southern Finnish town of Heinola to watch 130 competitors from 15 countries, waving flags and cheering on the contestants before medical workers pulled the shaking and bleeding men out of the sauna.
Video footage shows workers pouring cold water over the two men and administering first aid as organizers tried to cover up the scene and calm spectators.
The men were bleeding from what appeared to be severe burns, said Hakon Eikesdal, a photographer with the Norwegian daily Dagbladet.
Ladyzhensky headed a charity fund in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. The fund’s spokesman Konstantin Kruglyansky told the LifeNews daily that his family has demanded an investigation into his death.
Kaukonen, about 40, was hospitalized in stable condition Sunday, contest spokesman Ossi Arvela said.
The annual contest had been held since 1999. It will never be held again, Arvela said.
Half a liter of water is added to the stove every 30 seconds and the last person to remain in the sauna is the winner.
There was no prize other than “some small things” Arvela said. He declined to provide details.
Eikesdal said Kaukonen — the defending world champion — had refused to leave the sauna and that organizers had to force the men out.
Sauna bathing is a popular pastime in the Nordic countries and Russia, but especially in Finland, which has an estimated 1.6 million saunas for a population of 5 million people. Temperatures are normally kept at about 70 to 80 degrees Celsius.
“I know this is very hard to understand to people outside Finland who are not familiar with the sauna habit,” Arvela said. “It is not so unusual to have 110 degrees in a sauna. A lot of competitors before have sat in higher temperatures than that.”
According to a research report from 2008, the annual death rate in Finnish saunas was less than 2 per 100,000 inhabitants, representing around 100 Finns a year. It said the majority of deaths were due to natural causes, such as heart problems and that half of the deaths occurred under the influence of alcohol. Around 25 percent of the deaths were the direct result of the heat exposure.
Arvala said all rules in Saturday’s competition were followed and the temperatures and times were similar to those in previous years.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Armenian Base</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Armenia will allow Russia to extend its lease on a military base in the city of Gyumri because the base contributes to the country’s security, Armenian Security Council chief Artur Bagdasaryan said Thursday.
Bagdasaryan said the 25-year lease, which was signed in 1995, might be extended to 49 years or even more, the Novosti-Armenia web site reported.
He did not say when the new agreement might be signed, but an unidentified diplomatic source told Arminfo.info that it might happen during President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Armenia later this month.

<strong>Chavez Visit</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — The presidents of Venezuela and Nicaragua, countries that have recognized the independence of Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia, will visit its capital, Tskhinvali, this fall, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity said Thursday.
Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega will attend celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of South Ossetia’s declaration of independence on Sept. 20, Kokoity said, Interfax reported.
Kokoity also said the Sept. 20 celebrations would be attended by former football player Diego Maradona.

<strong>Kadyrov Streets</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Jordan will name a park in its capital, Amman, after slain Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, and another street after his son Ramzan Kadyrov, the incumbent Chechen president, the Chechen government said on its web site Thursday.
In return, a street in Grozny will be named after Jordanian King Adbullah II, and a city park will bear the name of his late father, Hussein, said Grozny Mayor Muslim Khuchiyev.

<strong>Cannabis Zapped</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Interior Ministry planes have discovered a 17-hectare field of wild-growing cannabis near the village of Poltevo in the Moscow region, Interfax reported Thursday.
Fifty tons of the plant were destroyed with “special equipment” after experts confirmed that the weed contained the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol, the report said, citing a law enforcement source.

<strong>Pletnev Gigs Canned</strong>
LONDON (SPT) — Renowned pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev, accused of raping a 14-year-old boy in Thailand, has canceled two scheduled performances in Britain.
Pletnev said Thursday that he did not want the charges against him to overshadow the concerts by the Russian National Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Aug. 18 and in Edinburgh the next day.

<strong>Gypsy Attacked</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — A man was jailed by a Kemerovo region court on Thursday for assaulting a Gypsy fortuneteller who predicted that he would be jailed, the Investigative Committee said.
Gennady Osipovich tried to kill the unidentified female fortuneteller, who told him she saw a “state-owned house” — a Russian euphemism for jail — in his future, the committee said in a statement on its web site.
The woman managed to escape, but Osipovich stabbed to death two unidentified witnesses of the assault, which took place in October. He was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum-security prison.

TITLE: Airports Set Records As Muscovites Flee Smoke
AUTHOR: By Anton Doroshev
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow’s airports set a 2010 passenger record for outbound flights Sunday as residents scrambled to escape thick, acrid smoke from wildfires east of the capital that has doubled the death rate.
More than 104,400 people flew out of Moscow yesterday, topping the previous record of 101,000, according to the Federal Air Transportation Agency. On Aug. 7, 95,000 left the city by plane, 20 percent more than the year-earlier date, agency spokesman Sergei Izvolsky said by telephone today.
The heat wave that has plagued Moscow since June, combined with smoke, nearly doubled the city’s death rate to 700 a day from 360-380 in normal conditions, Interfax reported, citing Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city’s public health department.
The city’s morgues are nearing capacity, with 1,300 of 1,500 spaces occupied, the news service said, citing Seltsovsky. Carbon monoxide and suspended particulate matter in Moscow’s air is at least twice as high as acceptable levels, Yelena Lezina, a spokeswoman for the state environmental monitoring agency, told Rossiya 24. Smoke from fires has reached St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the state news channel reported (see related stories, page 1, this page).
Crews are battling 557 fires on 174,035 hectares, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry. So far this year, 747,722 hectares, an area about three times the size of Luxembourg, have burned, the ministry said on its web site.
The wildfire situation in the Moscow region remains “tense,” Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a statement on the ministry web site. At the current pace of work, rescue officials will be able to cope with the flames in five to seven days, he said.
Heat and the country’s worst drought in half a century have hobbled agriculture, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency in 28 crop-producing regions. Agriculture accounts for about 4 percent of gross domestic product, according to Moscow-based VTB Capital.

TITLE: Fire Put Out In Vicinity Of Nuclear R&D Center
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Firefighters scored a small victory in their battle against wildfires Sunday when they finally put out blazes that had threatened the Sarov nuclear research center, Reuters reported.
But wildfires continued to ravage other areas, and the opposition accused authorities of being in denial.
Soldiers dug an eight-kilometer canal to keep fires away from Sarov, ringed by forest in the Nizhny Novgorod region, before the fires were finally extinguished Sunday, emergency officials said.
On Friday, firefighters had to extinguish two blazes inside the perimeter of the city.
Sarov is a closed town whose nuclear site produced the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 and remains the main nuclear design and production facility in Russia.
Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko had assured President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday that all explosive and radioactive material had been removed from the nuclear site as a precautionary measure.
Forest and peat fires caused by the hottest weather ever recorded have killed at least 52 people in central Russia and left more than 4,000 homeless. The most difficult fire situations were in the Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Kirov regions, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Sunday.
The opposition Yabloko party on Sunday accused Nizhny Novgorod Governor Valery Shantsev of deliberately denying residents access to information on the fires raging in his region by not reinstating the web site Wyksa.ru, which was shut down on Thursday as a result of a cyber attack.
The web site had served as a lifeline for residents by giving detailed information on how to get help, Yabloko said in a statement, adding that its closure “killed people.”
Meanwhile, Natural Resources Minister Yury Trenev said Friday that there was no water shortage yet despite the heat wave because officials had kept reservoir levels high. 
But Trenev noted that river levels are down by more than 20 percent because of increased demands for water to battle the fires and practically no water flowing in.

TITLE: Top Doctor Says No Need to Fear Smog
AUTHOR: By Alexey Eremenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A top doctor implored foreigners not to be scared off by the thick smog that has blanketed Moscow for the past three days, even as embassies evacuated staff and at least one closed altogether.
The smog, caused by fires in peat bogs and forests in the Moscow region amid a record heat wave, will not lift before Wednesday at the earliest, weather forecasters said.
The level of air pollution Sunday hovered around three times above the maximum acceptable level after peaking at more than six times above the acceptable level Saturday, the worst day on record this year, the city’s environmental monitoring service said.
In a possible indication that the air quality might worsen, the total area covered by fires in the Moscow region tripled from 65 hectares Friday to 210 hectares Sunday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
Mayor Yury Luzhkov cut short a vacation to return to Moscow after initially insisting that there was no crisis.
Gennady Onishchenko, the country’s top public doctor, said the smog could pose a health risk for those without facemasks but asserted that it was not a reason for foreigners to avoid Russia.
“An overwhelming part of Russian territory does not pose any danger and is not engulfed in smoke,” he said Friday.
He advised business travelers to stay indoors, saying, “If a businessman visiting Moscow stays in a hotel, or an office, or a car, it is safe,” Interfax reported.
“As for tourists, some adjustments could be made. For instance, visit first St. Petersburg, where everything is fine, and then Moscow, when the situation improves,” he said.
But the smog reached St. Petersburg on Sunday, news reports said.
In Moscow, the German Embassy announced that it was halting operations, while Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel and Poland have ordered the partial evacuation of their diplomats, Ekho Moskvy radio reported Saturday, without elaborating on whether the staff were being sent home or simply away from the city.
The United States and Italy advised citizens to think twice before visiting Moscow.
“Persons contemplating travel to Moscow and surrounding areas should carefully consider their plans” because of “hazardous levels of air pollution” that have caused “numerous flight delays and cancellations,” the U.S. State Department said Friday in a statement on its web site. The warning expires Sept. 5.
Italy’s Foreign Ministry advised citizens to “postpone any travel plans that aren’t strictly necessary,” Bloomberg reported.
After dozens of flight delays Friday and Saturday, about 40 flights were delayed at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport on Sunday and about 20 more at Vnukovo. Sheremetyevo Airport said it was operating without smog-related delays.
About 2,000 stranded passengers spent Saturday night at Domodedovo, while at Vnukovo, several children were hospitalized after spending hours in the smog-filled departure hall.
But leaving Moscow still looked like a better prospect than staying for some people. One travel agency said Saturday that its number of clients had doubled, RIA-Novosti reported.
For those who choose to stay in Moscow, the best protection against the smog is facemasks, said Onishchenko, who heads the Federal Consumer Protection Service.
“We demand and beg you to wear masks. A mask really stops pollutants, especially if it’s moistened,” Onishchenko said.
Some Moscow residents complained about not being able to find masks in drug stores, but the Russian Drugstore Union, which represents more than 3,000 stores nationwide, denied any shortage, saying some stores might have sold out before they managed to restock.
Some companies were handing out masks to their employees, and the supermarket chain Perekryostok was offering them free to customers.
Even the Butyrskaya pretrial prison was providing detainees with facemasks and fans on request, Interfax reported Sunday.
Germany promised to send 100,000 masks to Russia on Saturday.
An ambulance station presented President Dmitry Medvedev with 50 masks when he asked for advice on how to cope with the smog during a visit Friday.
Medical staff told Medvedev that the masks were the second best option — after leaving the city altogether. Other recommendations included avoiding direct sunlight, refraining from alcohol and drinking lots of liquids.
“I woke up this morning and looked around — it’s an abysmal situation,” Medvedev said. “Have patience because I hope this will all end.”
Medvedev left the city over the weekend for a visit to Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths in Moscow has tripled, with morgues admitting up to 30 bodies a day instead of the regular 10, RIA-Novosti reported Thursday, citing unidentified sources in the funeral industry.
Some burials had to be delayed because gravediggers were swamped with work, the report said.
The head of the Moscow branch of the Federal Consumer Protection Service, Tatyana Popova, confirmed on Friday that the number of deaths had increased, mainly because of people succumbing to lung and heart problems, but she refused to provide exact data.
“I will not announce the figures now to avoid fanning tensions,” she said, Interfax reported. “Later we will prepare the data on how much the mortality rate has increased because of the heat and other climate conditions.”
A blogger who identified herself only as Mamako, a Moscow doctor, wrote on her LiveJournal blog on Saturday that doctors were unofficially banned from diagnosing people with heatstroke.
But the blog was deleted Sunday, shortly after an unidentified emergency doctor denied any ban in an interview with Ekho Moskvy.
The Liberal Democratic Party called for a state of emergency to be declared in Moscow, saying in a statement that the city was “unbearable for living” and all factories should halt work in order to curb pollution.
Luzhkov, who left Moscow on Aug. 2, agreed to return Sunday because of “the developing situation in the city due to fires,” his spokesman Sergei Tsoi said, Interfax reported. He added that the mayor had been away to undergo treatment from an unspecified “sports injury.”

TITLE: Unique Exercise Tests Response to Hijacking
AUTHOR: By Dan Elliott
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colorado — The United States and Russia, which have more bluster than cooperation in their often contentious history, will have their jet fighters take turns pursuing a civilian plane across the Pacific Ocean this week in a first-of-its-kind exercise to test their response to a potential international hijacking.
Aircraft and officers from Russia and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canadian agency, are to track the civilian plane, an executive-style jet that was playing the role of a hijacked civilian airliner.
The goal is to test how well the two forces can hand off responsibility for the “hijacked” plane. The three-day exercise started Sunday in Alaska.
Also participating in Operation Vigilant Eagle were both countries’ civil air traffic control agencies.
Officials on both sides of the trust-building military exercise chose a mutual, modern-day interest — the fight against terror — to create an incident that could entangle the two countries.
“We try to anticipate any potential areas in which it might be necessary for us to launch fighter jets,” said Major Michael Humphreys, a NORAD spokesman.
A terrorist hijacking, he said, “is every bit as probable as any other” scenario.
Moscow faces terrorist attacks by radicals from the North Caucasus. In March, suicide bombers killed 40 on the Moscow metro, and an explosion in November derailed a Moscow-bound train, killing 26. More recently, on July 29, a man caused a hijacking scare at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport when he seized a plane with 105 passengers and crew for about two hours.
The United States is still wrestling with terrorist threats to airplanes and subways nearly nine years after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings. A Nigerian man is accused of trying to blow up a jetliner over Detroit on Dec. 25. Authorities thwarted a purported plot to carry out three suicide bombings on New York subways in September 2009.
It is unlikely that Vigilant Eagle was devised to deal with a specific threat, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which tracks military and homeland security news.
The purpose is more likely a combination of confidence building and rooting out any communication and jurisdictional problems before they crop up in a real emergency, he said.
Pike cited the Korean Air Lines flight that the Soviet Union shot down in 1983, killing 269 people. There was an “interface” problem between the Americans and the Soviets because they were looking at different information, Pike said. “I could easily imagine [NORAD] looked at this and said, ‘We don’t know if we have the phone number of Russian air defense.’ This is not something you’d want to improvise on the fly.”
Progress has come in fits and starts since the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving Russia without the Soviet satellite nations. But the two countries have performed many joint exercises, including search-and-rescue scenarios, and have participated in multinational peacekeeping missions in places like Bosnia.
This is the first U.S.-Russian exercise involving NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian command that patrols the skies over North America, Humphreys said. NORAD’s headquarters are at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
Vigilant Eagle calls for NORAD F-22s flown by U.S. pilots to follow the “hijacked” plane west across the Pacific until it gets closer to Russian airspace, where Russian MiG-31s take over. On the return trip east, the process will be reversed.
Airborne warning and surveillance aircraft from each country will also take part.
Officers from Russia, Canada and the United States were aboard the target plane to observe, along with an interpreter. For a short time during the handoff, fighter jets from both sides were to be alongside the target plane.
The exercise comes at a time of improving relations between Washington and Moscow, after a low point in August 2008 when Russia sent troops into Georgia to side with a secessionist movement, drawing U.S. criticism.
Also complicating the relationship was the U.S. plan to put part of a missile defense system in Central Europe. That drew objections from Moscow because of the proximity to Russia’s western border.
Vigilant Eagle, originally planned for August 2008, was postponed indefinitely as relations soured.
In early 2009, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama began pursuing a “reset” with Russia, and relations began to improve.
Both sides may have something to gain from military-to-military cooperation beyond the practical knowledge that comes from a joint exercise.
The United States benefits from having better integration and cooperation with the Russian military elite, a group often seen as anti-Western, said Andrew Kuchins, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“The more we can [cooperate and integrate], the better the mutual understanding will be,” he said.
Russia, which is overhauling its military structure, will benefit from the chance to see how the all-volunteer U.S. force works, with its strong corps of noncommissioned officers, said Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst in Moscow.
“The Defense Ministry quite a while ago rejected the idea of mass mobilization and woke up to the idea” of a professional army, Golts said.
The need for a permanent, professional force capable of rapid deployment became obvious in the 2008 war in Georgia, he said.
Russia “welcomes any experience the country can gather to strengthen the ability” of a noncommissioned officer corps, he said.

TITLE: Defense Ministry Vague On War’s Toll
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two years after a brief war with Georgia, the Defense Ministry still has not provided a final account of the casualties, while its reports of lost military hardware widely differ from estimates by experts.
By contrast, it took Georgia’s Defense Ministry a month to compile a detailed list of its losses in the August 2008 hostilities and post it online.
Contacted last week, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman referred all queries for similar information to the portion of the ministry’s web site that runs news clips containing quotes from top military officials. 
According to the clips, the number of the Russian troops killed in the conflict varies between 48 and 74, differing from official to official and without any clear pattern.
In an interview published in the government’s Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Aug. 8 last year, Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin said his agency, which led the investigation into the conflict, had counted 67 names of those killed. 
He would not add other details about them other than claiming that 10 of them were Russian peacekeepers killed by their Georgian peers in the first hours of the conflict.

TITLE: Veteran 
Soccer Coach Slain
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A veteran soccer coach who recently defended his boss in a major embezzlement trial was gunned down in central Moscow, investigators said Thursday.
Yury Shyshlov, 66, died in the hospital after being seriously injured in the attack late Wednesday, said Sergei Marchenko, spokesman for the Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee.
Marchenko said the unknown attacker used a gun equipped with a silencer, which was found at the crime scene on Ulitsa Sergeya Makeyeva near the Ulitsa 1905 Goda metro station, RIA-Novosti reported.
Investigators were trying to establish a motive for the killing.
Shyshlov testified in a Yaroslavl court on behalf of his boss Vladimir Shepel, general director of Yaroslavl’s Shinnik football club. Shepel was sentenced to five years in prison in late July on charges of embezzling $500,000 allocated for the team.
Shyshlov criticized the case as “made up” in an interview with the Sovietsky Sport newspaper in June 2009. As for Shepel, “Volodya is a very hard-headed guy, but you have to be flexible,” he said.

TITLE: Prime Minister Putin Gives Inflamed Blogger a Bell
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Taking a new tact in fighting wildfires, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday granted a fire bell to a blogger who published a profanity-laden post accusing the government of incompetence.
In a rare deviation from his tough public image, Putin said he agreed with the blogger’s harsh criticism, which included a dig at President Dmitry Medvedev by asking, “Why the [expletive] do we need an innovation center in Skolkovo if we don’t have common firefighting vehicles?”
Medvedev hopes to create a Russian version of Silicon Valley at Skolkovo, outside Moscow.
Unlike Medvedev, Putin is not known for being technologically savvy, and his first known reply to a blogger smacks of populism ahead of the 2012 presidential election, an analyst said.
The LiveJournal blogger, known only by the nickname top_lap, complained in a post Sunday about lax fire safety measures in an unidentified village 153 kilometers away from Moscow in the Kalyazin district of the Tver region, where he said his dacha is located.
“With the [expletive] communists, who are scolded by everyone, there were three fire ponds in the village, a bell that tolled when a fire began, and — guess what — a firetruck,” the blogger wrote in the 600-word post titled “Do You Know Why We’re on Fire?”
He said everything changed when “the democrats” came to power, with authorities replacing the bell with a village telephone and filling the ponds with sand.
“Give me back my [expletive] fire bell, you [expletive], and take away your goddamn telephone,” the blogger wrote.
The blogger also suggested that his tax money be directed toward a firetruck.
A copy of the post, which has ignited a flurry of attention in the Russian blogosphere, was forwarded to Putin by Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy radio.
The post, Venediktov wrote to Putin, is a typical and “not overly sharp” example of the public criticism that the government is facing as it struggles to extinguish the wildfires.
“I knew I was taking a risk,” Venediktov told The St. Petersburg Times. “I purposely sent the text of the post to Putin, not Medvedev, because I know for sure that Medvedev really reads blogs on the Internet himself, while Putin would never see that post himself.”
He said the post was found by station staff who monitor blogs and had caught his attention because the blogger had offered a solution by proposing that his own tax payments be used to buy a firetruck, rather than just complaining.
On Wednesday evening, Venediktov received an e-mail from the government’s web site with Putin’s answer. He called Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who confirmed that the letter had been written by Putin longhand and then typed up as an e-mail.
Peskov said by telephone that the government’s press service had showed the blogger’s post to Putin and Putin had decided to write the reply himself.
Addressing the blogger as “dear user,” Putin wrote that he had read the post “with interest and enjoyment.”
“You are surely an amazingly honest and candid person,” Putin wrote, adding that the author was also “a gifted writer.”
Putin said the authorities were partly excused by the fact that the current heat wave that fueled the fires is the hottest on record, meaning that the Communists never faced such a large problem.
He also noted that Europe and the United States have to deal with similar disasters. The blogger did not mention any other country in his post.
But Putin wrote that he agreed with the criticism “in general.”
He said he hoped that both he and the blogger would “manage to survive until pension age” despite the ordeal and invited the blogger to claim a fire bell from Tver Governor Dmitry Zelenin.
Zelenin confirmed on Twitter late Wednesday that he had, at Putin’s request, asked the head of the Kalyazin district, where the blogger’s dacha is located, to install a bell and added that it was already being installed.
But the blogger wrote early Thursday that the bell had not been installed and the real problem was not bells but a lack of resources to fight fires.
An e-mailed request to the blogger for an interview went unanswered Thursday. His LiveJournal blog was created just last week, on July 27.
Zelenin’s spokeswoman Zhanna Lyapunova said Thursday that the Tver administration had failed to make contact with the blogger, saying he had not provided his name or the name of his village, Interfax reported. She did not explain why her boss had earlier said the bell was being installed if the village name remained unknown.
“The governor was aware of the problem even before the correspondence with Putin was released,” Lyapunova added.
The head of the Kalyazin district, Konstantin Ilyin, told Ekho Moskvy on Thursday evening that a new bell had been installed in Vysokovo, a village whose location matches the blogger’s description.
He added that a second bell for the blogger’s personal use had been left with the village’s administration because he could not locate the blogger.
He also said there was no threat of wildfires in the district.
Venediktov said he found the blogger by sending a reporter to the village. He declined to identify the blogger.
Putin, with state television cameras rolling, has met nearly daily with Russians who lost everything they owned in the fires that have destroyed more than 3,000 homes and killed at least 50 people over the past week.
But communication with bloggers has hitherto been the domain of Medvedev, who runs a LiveJournal blog, a channel on YouTube and even a Twitter account.
Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the fire bell story resembled an elaborate publicity stunt aimed at attracting a younger generation of voters. He noted that Putin also met with bikers and rode a three-wheeled Harley-Davidson last month.
“It all looks like an election campaign,” Petrov said, referring to the 2012 election.
Putin and Medvedev have not said whether they would run in the election.
Petrov said he did not expect public discontent over the wildfires to grow or pose a threat to the popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev, which top 70 percent.

TITLE: Local Salaries Lag Behind Moscow Levels by 24%
AUTHOR: By Maria Buravtseva and Yelena Dombrova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Average salaries in St. Petersburg are 24 percent lower than in Moscow, with the biggest discrepancies seen among advertising and marketing managers and IT specialists.
Case research agency, together with Ancor recruitment agency, surveyed 588 companies in 17 Russian cities, finding that average salaries in St. Petersburg stand at 76 percent of the level in Moscow. Average salaries in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk stand at 57 percent of rates in the capital, while in Saratov that figure is just 41 percent. 
Alexei Zakharov, president of the recruitment portal SuperJob.ru, estimated the average St. Petersburg salary at 80 to 82 percent of that in Moscow at the end of the first half of 2010, up from 78 to 80 percent a year earlier. 
“The difference in wages between St. Petersburg and Moscow decreased by 5 to 7 percent due to the crisis, which lasted through 2009, causing demand and salary levels in the capital to fall,” said Artyom Savko, information and public relations director for Ilim Group. 
“Salaries of MTS employees in Moscow, Petersburg and other regions vary, of course, as pay levels depend on economic development in the region, the size of the labor market, the social situation and price levels,” said Yulia Nemenova, public relations specialist for MTS Northwest. 
A system of varying salaries has also been adopted by Brewery Baltika. “In St. Petersburg, a city with developed industry and commerce, wages are 20 to 30 percent lower than in Moscow, and 20 percent higher than in other cities,” said Nadezhda Sirotkina, Baltika’s HR director. 
“In St. Petersburg, salaries are 5 to 10 percent lower than in Moscow,” said Valeriya Silina, public relations director for Rosinter restaurants holding. According to her, the company bases its salaries on the market average, but pays closer to the Moscow level to avoid high staff turnover. 
“The corporate center, which coordinates the work of the entire regional network, is located in Moscow, but the size of the an employee’s salary also depends on the value of the specialist to the company,” said Larisa Zemlyakova, HR director of Summa Telekoma. “Some employees in St. Petersburg earn more than in Moscow,” she said.
Laborers’ wages are closest to those of their Muscovite counterparts at 98 percent, the research showed. A skilled worker in St. Petersburg may receive, on average, 10 to 15 percent less than their Moscow colleagues, said Zakharov. 
“The wage gap between Moscow and St. Petersburg laborers began to close about three years ago, when foreign production companies came to St. Petersburg,” Case’s CEO Natalya Danina was cited by the company’s press service as saying. “Skilled workers were already in short supply, and the only way to attract them was basically to constantly raise wages,” she said. 
“On average, salaries in Moscow are higher, but wages for specialized workers are comparable in size to those in the capital,” said Polina Golubeva, HR director for LSR Group.
The salary level of advertising and marketing managers in St. Petersburg, however, stands at just 52 percent of that in Moscow. 
“When I disclosed my salary to potential employers in Moscow, they said it was humiliating,” the former PR manager for a large company said. According to him, the owners and senior managers of St. Petersburg firms do not fully understand the role that those specialists play, and furthermore, the work required of staff in the capital is more demanding in general. 
“Often, advertising and marketing managers outside the capital implement company policies like an operating officer, while in Moscow, the same specialist has a strategic impact on the development of this policy,” said Danina. 
“The market of specialized workers developed evenly in both cities, while the marketing and advertisement market developed at a faster pace in Moscow,” Zemlyakova said. 
“The difference in salaries is linked to both the high cost of living in the capital, and to the fact that, major businesses and parent companies, which have the largest budgets, including for personnel expenses, are concentrated there,” said Yegor Alexeyev, head of marketing and PR for HeadHunter in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: New Bill Drawn Up To Anticipate Oil Disasters
AUTHOR: By Lyudmila Tsubiks
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology has prepared an amendment bill to the federal law on Russia’s continental shelf. If the bill is passed into law, oil companies will have to provide mandatory funding for dealing with the consequences of oil spills.
President Dmitry Medvedev tasked the government with drafting amendments at a presidium of the State Council on May 27, a month after the accident on BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico. At the G20 summit at the end of June, the president invited his colleagues from other countries to consider the adoption of an appropriate international legal framework.
If the law is adopted, oil companies will have to develop a plan and funding for the prevention and elimination of oil spills. According to the proposed amendments, oil companies will either have to demonstrate that they have sufficient funds in the bank to deal with a spill, take out an insurance contract, or, as a third alternative, put aside the required amount into a special reserve fund. 
The emergency plan should be coordinated with the appropriate federal agency, which according to Kommersant daily could be the Ministry of Natural Resources or state environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, and undergo an official state ecological analysis. According to the draft law, any damage caused by a spill should be fully compensated by the oil company responsible. 
Reactions to the news from oil companies have been minimal.
Only state-run oil giant Rosneft and Lukoil, the country’s second-largest oil producer, currently have operations on the Russian shelf, while state-run companies Gazprom and Zarubezhneft are due to start working in the area. According to a Lukoil representative, three of Lukoil’s offshore projects in the Baltic, Barents and Caspian seas are insured by the company, and plans for eliminating the consequences of possible leaks have been developed for each of them. 
“We will provide copies of these documents; [the bill] is irrelevant to us,” the company representative said.
Rosneft has not yet had time to get acquainted with the details of the proposal, but the company is insured against disasters, a representative from the company’s information and advertising department said. Rosneft has three offshore oil projects — in the Black Sea, the Azov Sea and off Sakhalin.
Alexander Cherepanov, a correspondent for the Moscow-based Neft Rossii (Oil of Russia) magazine, assessed the state project as “fairly positive.” 
“Our shelves should be insured against the kind of accidents that have befallen our British counterparts,” he said. 
“In addition, oil companies should take natural conditions into account and develop the technical side [of their operations],” Cherepanov added.

TITLE: Oil, Commodities Lead Stock Market Surge
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian stocks jumped the most in a week Monday, advancing for the first time in three days as oil and metals gained, boosting the outlook for commodity producers.
Novolipetsk Steel, Russia’s biggest maker of the metal by market value, jumped 2.2 percent. Oil producer Rosneft added 1.7 percent, helping to push the Micex Index of 30 stocks higher by 1.3 percent to 1,421.11 at 1:52 p.m. in Moscow trading, the steepest climb since Aug. 2.
Oil, Russia’s chief export, advanced as much as 94 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $81.64 a barrel in New York. Copper rose as much as 1.6 percent to $7,489 a metric ton on the London Metal Exchange. Aluminum, zinc, tin, lead, and nickel also climbed. 
Stocks in Russia gained even as acrid smoke from wildfires to the east of Moscow continued to shroud the city. 
Alfa Bank canceled its daily research note, and the Russian unit of Austria’s Raiffeisen International Bank Holding said it was letting non-essential staff stay at home.
“Despite the smog and smoke engulfing Moscow, markets are advancing thanks to support from oil and commodities,” John Heisel, a sales trader at Citigroup in Moscow, said by telephone. 
“Volumes in Moscow have dropped off because there are less traders about but levels are being propped up by institutions in London.”

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Grain Export Ban</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Russian Grain Union is seeking a delay to the export ban on the produce to Sept. 1 from Aug. 15 to avoid damaging the country’s reputation as a supplier and ease port and rail bottlenecks, said Arkady Zlochevsky, the head of the industry group.
The union asked Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik in a letter Saturday to petition Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to amend his decree, Zlochevsky said Monday by telephone.
“It’s not too late, we still could fulfill our contracts to Egypt,” Zlochevsky said.

<strong>Grain Rescheduling</strong>
CAIRO (Bloomberg) — Russia will study a proposal by Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat buyer, to reschedule shipments of wheat following Russia’s grain export ban, Nomani Nomani, the vice chairman of Egypt’s General Authority for Supply Commodities, said.

<strong>Kazakh Imports</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will seek to buy Kazakh grain this year as the nation’s crop is damaged by drought, Interfax reported, citing Yevgeny Aman, a Kazakh Agriculture Ministry official.
Aman reiterated that Kazakhstan has no plans to curb grain exports, the news service said.

<strong>Sugar Beet Down</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Russian sugar beet crop may drop 30 percent to 35 percent because of the country’s drought and winter crop sowing will probably be delayed as little rain is forecast for August, the national weather forecaster said.
“There will be virtually no rain in August, according to the forecast,” Federal Hydrometeorological and Environmental Monitoring Service head Alexander Frolov said Monday in comments broadcast on state-run Rossiya-24 television. “Sowing season is coming up in some regions but the situation in many areas is such that there is no point starting winter crop sowing.”

<strong>Car Sales Up</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian sales of new cars and light vehicles climbed 48 percent in July from a year earlier, the Association of European Businesses in Moscow said.
Sales rose to 173,171 vehicles from 117,264 in the same month last year, the business group said Monday in an e-mailed statement.

<strong>Severstal Mulls Buy</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Severstal may seek control of Yenisey Industrial, a unit owned by the bank’s shareholder Sergei Pugachyov, Vedomosti said, citing an unidentified person close to Pugachyov. 
Yenisei Industrial, which owns the Elegest coal field, may be valued at $5 billion, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified official at Pugachyov’s holding company United Industrial Corp.  

<strong>Vimpelcom Shares</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — VimpelCom Ltd. completed a “mandatory squeeze out,” buying out all owners of shares and American depositary receipts in OAO VimpelCom, the New York-listed telecommunications company, which operates in Russia and Ukraine, said Monday on its web site.

TITLE: Bloomberg Rejects Profit Tax Charges
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Kazmin and Ksenia Boletskaya
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow tax authorities charged the Bloomberg news agency 120 million rubles ($4 million) in profit tax in 2006 to 2007, but the company refused to pay, saying it does not have a regular representative office in the country.
For the first time, a U.S. company working in Russia has been accused of tax evasion by taking advantage of an intergovernmental agreement on avoiding double taxation, Vedomosti has learned.
Information on Bloomberg LP’s contestation of the decision from the Federal Tax Service’s Moscow Branch No. 47 was posted on the web site of the Moscow Arbitration Court on Thursday.
The tax inspectorate charged the company 120 million rubles in profit tax, penalties and fines for 2006 to 2007, said a city tax official and a second tax service source. A spokesperson for the inspectorate declined to comment.
Bloomberg paid no profit tax, believing that its operations in Russia do not constitute a permanent representative office, the source told Vedomosti. That benefit for U.S. companies is included in a 1992 agreement between Russia and the United States on avoiding double taxation on income and capital. The agreement allows American residents not to pay taxes in Russia if they are engaged in preparatory or auxiliary activities, or if there is a representation that is only engaged in gathering information or making purchases for the head office.
But the inspectorate believes that there has been a regular office in Russia all along, a tax service employee said, adding that the firm’s Moscow employees were not limited to gathering information, but were creating a finished product, which was even sold to Russian clients. The company’s Moscow office included about 20 reporters, editors, experts and analysts at the time.
According to the inspectorate’s findings, the Bloomberg office’s revenue over the two years was more than 1 billion rubles ($33.6 million). It was calculated indirectly, a tax official said. The company paid about 200 million rubles in value-added tax, which is not excluded under the bilateral tax agreement. After Bloomberg provided those figures to the tax service, the company gave its data on expenses, which were used to calculate the taxable profit, the source said.
The Moscow branch of the Federal Tax Service, where Bloomberg appealed the decision, agrees with the inspectorate’s position, the Moscow tax source said. A spokesperson for the branch could not be reached by phone.
At the end of 2009, the news agency requested clarification on the issue from the Finance Ministry. In a letter dated April 14, the ministry responded that preparing and editing material to be sent to the head office could not be considered auxiliary or preparatory, and that Bloomberg’s Moscow office should calculate its profit tax in accordance with the principles adopted by the head office.
Bloomberg Group spokeswoman Pam Snook said only that the company always pays taxes as required by law.
Bloomberg’s New York head office did not respond to a request from Vedomosti.
The market for subscription information in Russia was worth $160 million to $200 million in 2009, of which Bloomberg controlled more than 20 percent, according to Interfax calculations. According to Burton-Taylor International Consulting, in 2008, Bloomberg controlled 24 percent ($5.5 billion) of the world market for financial and analytical information.
So far, no similar dispute has made it to court, said Dmitry Kostalgin, a partner at Taxadvisor. The agreement with the United States frees a company engaged in gathering information from profit tax, even if it has a permanent office, he said — but only if the information was gathered, for example, for the opening of a plant, he said, noting that gathering information was Bloomberg’s primary line of work.
The dispute could become a precedent for companies similar to Bloomberg, said a Federal Tax Service employee. In theory, it could also become a precedent for any foreign companies’ Russian offices, Kostalgin said.
Until now, there have only been a few such cases: against foreign airlines, the British Council and China’s Huawei. But the disputes with airlines concerned agreements on air traffic, while the British Council successfully challenged most of the complaints it faced. The Huawei case has not gone to court.

TITLE: Drought Won’t Raise Interest Rates
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov and Halia Pavliva
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s central bank is unlikely to raise interest rates to combat inflationary pressures caused by the nation’s worst drought in 50 years, investment banks including UBS and Citigroup said.
“The effect of the bad harvest isn’t a permanent trend, so we shouldn’t expect a change in central bank policy,” Dmitry Vinogradov, a Moscow-based analyst at UBS, said Monday by phone. “Higher rates cause more problems for the central bank because it makes the ruble more attractive for carry trades. This is exactly what the central bank is trying to avoid.”
Russia banned grain exports from Aug. 15 to Dec. 31 after the Agriculture Ministry cut its crop forecast to as little as 70 million metric tons from 97.1 tons last year.
The annual inflation rate, which reached a record low 5.5 percent in July, is “likely to pick up in the second half of the year on the back of recovering demand” and rising wheat prices, which affect other food costs, Citigroup analysts including Elina Ribakova said in a research report Friday.
Russian wheat prices rose as much as 9 percent last week, Moscow-based researcher SovEcon said Monday on its web site. 
UBS raised its annual inflation forecast for this year to 6 percent from the previous estimate of 5.5 percent. The bank also cut its estimate for economic growth to 7 percent from 7.5 percent, it said in an e-mailed report.
“The central bank will not be considering the increase of the key interest rates as an effective tool to curb inflation,” Anton Nikitin and Nikolay Podguzov, analysts at Renaissance Capital in Moscow, said Monday in an e-mailed note. “As inflation risks linked to wheat price growth are not monetary-driven, we do not think that they can be mitigated by the Central Bank of Russia’s interest rate policy.”
Bank Rossii left its main interest rate at 7.75 percent for a second month in July, citing “significant signs of recovering economic activity.” The record low rate will be acceptable for “the coming months” if trends such as expanding investment and retail sales remain unchanged, the bank said July 30.
“The exchange rate will be the main tool for keeping inflation in check,” Citigroup said, adding that inflation may reach an annual 7 percent this year. “While in the short-run we do not see much room for an aggressive appreciation, we are very positive over the medium-term.”
The government forecasts an annual inflation rate of 6 percent to 7 percent and economic growth of 4 percent this year. The estimate for the gross domestic product may be raised, according to Deputy Economy Minister Andrei Klepach.

TITLE: Food Poisoning Case on Sakhalin ‘Criminal’
AUTHOR: By Scott Rose
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The country’s top sanitary doctor said Friday that he was seeking criminal charges against a firm providing food services at the ExxonMobil-led Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project after 70 people suffered mild to moderate food poisoning.
The Federal Consumer Protection Service’s branch on the island of Sakhalin said 70 cases of intestinal infection were registered from Tuesday to Thursday, including three “moderate” illnesses that required hospitalization.
Food poisoning cases are extremely common in Russia and often hit poorly funded summer camps, schools and other state institutions.
Gennady Onishchenko, the consumer protection service’s director, told a Moscow news conference that the ill workers on Sakhalin included 49 Russians and three Americans.
“Trampling all of Russia’s legal norms, the firm continues to play food roulette,” Onishchenko said, Prime-Tass reported.
The same company — which he identified only as a “firm from Houston” — was responsible for 20 cases of food poisoning in June and an outbreak that sickened 60 people last year.
“I’ve given the order to hold the firm criminally responsible for trampling Russian law on public nutrition,” Onishchenko said, without elaborating.
Russian-registered Remote Project Services Group Global is responsible for running the Sakhalin-1 cafeteria, which was designed to feed up to 600 people, Interfax reported, citing the watchdog’s local branch. The company has been serving as many as 1,400 people, it said.
The press service for Exxon Neftegas, the operator of Sakhalin-1, confirmed the illnesses to Interfax but said the company had not yet found any link to the cafeteria’s heavy workload.
Exxon Neftegas is 30 percent owned by ExxonMobil, based in Irving, Texas, while state-run Rosneft owns 20 percent. Japan’s Sodeco owns 30 percent, and India’s ONGC has the remaining 20 percent.
The consortium, which is operating under a production-sharing agreement, is developing an estimated 307 million tons of oil and 485 billion cubic meters of gas. Exxon wants to sell Sakhalin-1’s gas to China, arguing that the PSA exempts it from Gazprom’s export monopoly.
State-run Gazprom opposes the plan.
The partners have also clashed with the government over the project’s budget, since the state only gets a share of production after the operator recoups its expenses. Exxon Neftegas sought a 2010 budget of $3.5 billion, but the state has so far only agreed to $1 billion.
In late June, Sakhalin Governor Alexander Khoroshavin said the state could seek to replace the Sakhalin-1 as operator.
Separately, at least three mass food poisonings have been reported in Russia since Friday, including nearly 30 people hospitalized after a wedding in the republic of Chuvashia and another 20 in Volgograd who fell ill after eating at a local cafe.
In last week’s most prominent public health scare, the consumer protection service in Omsk was forced to track down anthrax-infected pelmeni produced by the firm Darina, which had purchased contaminated horse meat for its “Russian” and “Special” meat dumpling varieties.
One worker at an Omsk horse-slaughtering facility died from anthrax, while more than 120 were put under medical observation.
Onishchenko said Wednesday that all shipments of the tainted pelmeni sent to Moscow had been confiscated.

TITLE: Insurance Providers Weathering the Fire Storm
AUTHOR: By Gyuzel Gubeidullina
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Despite the thousands of homes destroyed by fires raging throughout central Russia, insurance firms are weathering the disaster as few homes are insured and even fewer claims are made for damaged property.
There are 831 registered focal points of the forest fires, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Friday. More than 3,000 people have lost their homes and property, and about 2,000 dwellings have been burned down.
The government has promised to compensate every fire victim with 3 million rubles ($100,700), of which 2 million will go toward rebuilding his home and 1 million to infrastructure. About 5 billion rubles have been earmarked from the federal budget for this. And if every victim can count on these payments, then fewer victims will get additional compensation from insurance companies. Insurance payouts are smaller anyway — the average claim for a real estate policy in 2009 was 500,000 rubles ($16,800).
Only 7 percent of Russians insure their homes, and only 2 percent get policies for dachas, according to a poll conducted by VTsIOM in September 2009.
Of the 60 million homes and apartments in Russia, 8 million are insured, according to Alexei Zubets, head of Rosgosstrakh’s center for strategic research. But the scope of coverage varies highly by region.
For example, in the Moscow region and in Tatarstan, real estate insurance coverage is 26 percent and 24 percent, respectively, while 9 percent of the homes in the Volgograd region are insured, 12 percent in Nizhny Novgorod and 9 percent in Rostov-on-Don, Zubets said.
Rosgosstrakh, by its own estimates, has a third of the market share, while Rosno has 8 percent and Reso-Garanti has 7 percent. Rosgosstrakh’s share on the market for low-cost homes and dachas is as high as 80 percent, said Pavel Samiyev, deputy head of the Expert rating agency.
About 800 structures insured by Rosgosstrakh burned in fires in the Central and Volga federal districts, but no more than one-third of them managed to file a claim, a company spokesperson said.
The total damages, according to preliminary data, are estimated at about 200 million rubles.
The biggest compensation payments are in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The regional center for claims settlements has already accepted 130 claims, and the listed damage amounts have reached 50 million rubles. The first claims were made last weekend.
At the beginning of August, Rosgosstrakh introduced a simplified system for settling claims for the fire victims — they must present their original policies, and the Emergency Situations Ministry’s database is used to confirm eligibility. Insurer VSK has had such a system since July.
Even fewer claims have been received by other insurers.
“We have so far received only three claims from the forest fires: from the Nizhny Novgorod region, the Ryazan region and the Moscow region for 2 million rubles,” said Artyom Iskra, director of Rosno’s consumer insurance department.
Iskra has noticed an increased interest from clients in insuring their dachas. Demand for insuring property in many regions has increased, the Rosgosstrakh spokesperson said.

TITLE: President Seals Deals With South Africa
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev met with his South African counterpart, Jacob Zuma, on Thursday in Moscow, where the two oversaw deals in the metals and nuclear industries.
Under the deal, Russian state uranium trader Tenex will sell enriched uranium to Eskom Holdings for use at South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear station, which accounts for 5 percent of South Africa’s energy needs.
The contract is an extension of one reached 15 years ago that is about to expire. Under the new contract, deliveries will begin in 2011 and last until 2017 to 2018. Russia hopes to eventually control 45 percent of the low-enriched uranium market in South Africa, Rosatom head Sergei Kiriyenko told reporters.
Additionally, Norilsk Nickel signed a memorandum with the South African government to create a joint mining venture in South Africa.
“We will be engaged in the exploration and production of minerals in the framework of this venture with the South African government,” Norilsk Nickel head Vladimir Strzhalkovsky said, Interfax reported.
The metals giant is already involved in a joint venture with African Rainbow Minerals, which mines for nickel, zinc, cobalt, chromium and platinum.
The two countries also agreed to work on space issues and may jointly launch satellites using Russian equipment.

TITLE: Television Advertising Market Grew in Q2, CTC Media Says
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — CTC Media indicated that there are signs of increased activity in the advertising market in the second quarter, Reuters reported.
“The level of growth in the Russian TV advertising market has accelerated in the second quarter, and we have captured this growth with a fully sold-out position and 8 percent year-on-year Russian advertising sales growth in ruble terms,” chief executive Anton Kudryashov said Thursday.
“Our CIS television advertising sales grew by 12 percent year on year in U.S. dollar terms,” he added.
Revenues rose 15 percent year on year to $130.5 million, helped by increasing demand from advertisers and a stronger ruble.

TITLE: Why ‘31’ Matters
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: Most people probably spend the evening before their birthday either cooking or going over the menu at the restaurant where they plan to celebrate. I spent the entire evening of July 31 — the day before my birthday — sweating in a police van and then discussing charges at the Basmanny police precinct. I wasn’t hauled in because I started celebrating early. I was detained on Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Ploshchad along with 81 other people, including former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, for wearing a badge with the number 31 on it. This number symbolizes Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, guaranteeing Russian citizens the right to assembly. As the police protocol noted, I also shouted, “Down with the police state!” and “Freedom! Freedom!”
One might ask why someone about to turn 54 chose such a strange way to spend the Saturday evening before his birthday. One reason is that exactly 30 years ago I spent my 24th birthday in the Butyrskaya prison after being accused of “slandering the Soviet system.” My “slander” consisted of being part of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. My punishment was three years imprisonment in a special psychiatric hospital.
After my release, I immigrated to the United States, where I covered human rights issues in the Soviet Union for Voice of America and Radio Liberty. When the coup in August 1991 failed, I was happy to return to Russia, where it seemed that our dream of freedom had come true. Neither I nor my fellow dissidents could have imagined in our worst nightmares that we would once again have to go out on the square and risk arrest to defend our basic civil rights.
True, compared with my detention in the Soviet period, I have to say it wasn’t too bad this time. The cells in the Basmanny precinct were clean and well-lit — much different from Soviet-era cells, which were working copies of the dungeons of the Inquisition. And although the cops were far from friendly, they weren’t any ruder than the New York police who arrested me with a group of protesters by the Soviet UN mission during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in 1986. (We were accused of coming too close to the building, but the charges were later dropped.)
On Saturday night, I was in good company. Most of the other 15 detainees in the bus were students in their early 20s, but some were much older, like Dmitry Vaisburd, a soft-spoken man with a gray beard and nearly crippling arthritis who took part in the rally on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad for the 10th time. There also was Sergei “Serge” Konstantinov, one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement, a young lawyer with the torso of a bodybuilder and a resonant orator’s voice that reminded me of U.S. President Barack Obama.
More than 1,000 of us went to Triumfalnaya Ploshchad to demand that our constitutional right to freedom of expression and assembly be respected. Instead of respect, we found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of police, OMON riot police and Interior Troops. We were detained after being roughed up. The violent events on a central Moscow square — a main topic on the Russian Internet this week — have been ignored almost completely by the Russian mass media. Not one television station covered the event with the exception of privately owned Ren-TV. Russian news agencies provided short accounts of the event, citing police statements that lowered both the number of participants to 200 and the number arrested to less than 40.
Meanwhile, the Russian political establishment lost no time accusing the organizers of “extremism” for turning down Moscow city authorities’ proposal to hold the demonstration in another place.
There is a reason why the organizers haven’t agreed to change venues. Triumfalnaya Ploshchad wasn’t chosen randomly. It is one of the cradles of modern Russian freedom. In the 1960s, it was here, by the statue of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, where young people first congregated for unsanctioned poetry readings. Later, it was here that samizdat literature was passed from hand to hand, and where the leaders of the dissident movement met — people like Vladimir Bukovsky, Eduard Kuznetsov and Vladimir Osipov. For democratically minded Russians, Triumfalnaya Ploshchad — Triumphal Square — is a symbol of freedom like the Liberty Bell or the Declaration of Independence in the United States. It is not a bargaining chip.
Moscow city authorities — obviously getting signals from above, though not exactly from heaven — have 10 times refused to “sanction” the “31” demonstration on Triumfalnaya. Their reason is always the same: Another group previously requested the space. However, when it gets to court — as in the hearing on the Dec. 31 rally — the Moscow city government can’t provide documents supporting its case. These refusals make a mockery of citizens’ constitutional rights. If we demonstrators accepted the authorities’ terms, it would mean accepting that the authorities, not citizens, have the right to determine when and where a demonstration might be held. This is certainly what the Soviet authorities believed: It was their sacred right to dictate to their citizens. Unfortunately for them, citizens had a different opinion and found a way for their point of view to prevail.
For those of us who lived in the Soviet period and remember perestroika and glasnost, it remains a mystery why the current leaders are following the path of their Soviet predecessors. Do they think that today’s citizens, unlike their Soviet dissident predecessors, will give up? If that is the case, to show them that they are wrong and to remind them that rights belong to citizens and cannot be taken from them by the authorities, I’ll go to Triumfalnaya Ploshchad again on Aug. 31. And if I have to, I’ll come every 31st day of the month — at least until I’m 84. That was the age of the oldest demonstrator on July 31.

Victor Davidoff is a writer who is working on a book about Soviet psychiatric abuse.

TITLE: Going Over to the Dark Side
AUTHOR: By Anna Shcherbakova
TEXT: Some of my colleagues — or rather former colleagues in search of career development, or simply of a better life — have gone over to the other side to become PR managers. It must be like the other side of the moon, I suppose, entangling facts and stories instead of making them clear and understandable. The skill of untangling or puzzling out the basic facts is essential for a good reporter. But some of these professional characteristics seem to be the opposite of those required of departmental managers, which is what they usually become in strict corporate structures. 
A former successful reporter for a national daily who now works for a national retailer, the activities of which she covered a lot in her former job, wrote in her blog that she had enjoyed her journalism work for the buoyant feeling of not being subject to any constraints, and for having the possibility to influence the market and be in contact with the most successful and powerful people in the industry. Ambitious journalists are always proud of the results of their efforts and have absolutely no doubt that it was their article that moved the money. And who in this job does not thirst for fame? But you can forget about front-page bylines once you become part of a major company.
There must be other rewarding possibilities, however. What about the money? I regularly hear about positions for PR directors with huge paycheck. The figures are absolutely enormous compared to the average salary of a reporter. To be fair, it should be remembered that the majority of current vacancies offer a fairly modest salary. Other sad news for PR people, as well as marketing managers, is that in St. Petersburg their average salary is only 52 percent of what their Moscow-based colleagues earn, according to research carried out by the Case research agency. 
In general, salaries in St. Petersburg are only 24 percent less than in Moscow. This unbelievable fact was confirmed by a PR manager of a local company (a former journalist, of course) who was looking for a new job 600 kilometers to the south (i.e., in Moscow). 
“When potential employers learned of my current job conditions, they said I was being cynically exploited and taken advantage of,” he claimed. At the same time, he admitted that the goals of the majority of PR people in St. Petersburg — though not him — are mostly technical, and their role in the company fairly modest. In my experience, they only send out press releases that are often pointless and pester journalists not to publish really important news on which they have been asked to comment. In national companies, on the other hand, spokespeople often have the status of vice president and can comment literally 24/7. 
Another major issue of journalism is independence and freedom, even freedom of dress — or rather undress, in the case of this summer. On one of the recent unbearably hot days, I met my friend who recently got a PR job she had been dreaming of. I wondered whether I would wear a suit, tights and leather shoes in temperatures exceeding +30 degrees Celsius, even for her six-digit salary (in rubles). 
In times of instability and an unclear future for the media, many people will follow this path and change their job. But crossing over to the other side and becoming a good PR manager is as hard as being a good journalist. 

 Anna Shcherbakova is the St. Petersburg bureau head of business daily Vedomosti.

TITLE: Collages Mix War, Present-Day Life
AUTHOR: By Marina Darmaros
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The idea is simple and effective: Take a photo from World War II and mix the action into a photo from the present day so that you see defensive sand bags being put up on glossy, modern Tverskaya Ulitsa in Moscow, or tourists standing on the same steps as victorious Russian soldiers at the Reichstag.
The photos are meant to remind people of the sufferings of war, said Sergei Larenkov, whose collage photos have won praise around the world.
A maritime pilot from St. Petersburg, Larenkov now spends much of his time researching historical photographs at the Russian archives.
“Everybody forgets a little,” he said.
Larenkov began making collages about five years ago. “I started with old postcards that I collect,” he said. Then he came up with the idea of making collages of the Siege of Leningrad that soon brought him fame after he posted them on his LiveJournal account.
“Then a clerk from the Museum of History of St. Petersburg contacted me with a proposal to do an exhibit about the siege,” he said. The exhibit ran for almost nine months.
Larenkov was surprised at the reaction to the photos.
“I did not expect such a reaction. My main goal was to show this work to school children, and that’s exactly where I made my first exhibition, at a school. Children understand history in a unique way when they can see so clearly the events that took place in a setting that is familiar to them,” he said.
The most important stage of his work, Larenkov said, is researching historical photographs in the archive. “You have to sit and search, search, search ... It’s something good to do in the winter,” he said, adding that he is a good friend now of the clerks in the Russian State Archive in Krasnogorsk.
Larenkov’s new works portray Vienna, Prague and Berlin. Before working on the series, Larenkov left St. Petersburg for Central Europe with a fixed goal and a well-defined plan. “Before making it, I sat for a long time in the archives looking for these photographs, and then also spent a lot of time searching the Internet, satellites and Google, looking for the concrete locations where they were taken.”
Following the new series, Larenkov plans to work on other cities, such as Paris, London and Istanbul.  
He has completed work for United Russia’s web site and has also made a movie for the party, which he enthusiastically promotes.
“It must be shown on the big screen because it has a lot of small details. It is just living history!” he said.

TITLE: Moscow’s Bolshoi Takes ‘Maid of Pskov’ to Its Actual Setting
AUTHOR: By Raymond Stults
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In mid-July, the ancient city of Pskov, located on the far western edge of Russia near the borders of Estonia and Latvia, marked the 500th anniversary of its accession to the Grand Principality of Moscow. As part of the celebration, the city’s huge and splendidly preserved Kremlin played host to a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Maid of Pskov,” a highly romanticized account of an expedition undertaken by Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1570 to place his stamp of authority on the city.
Musically, the performance proved to be of a very high standard, thanks to excellent work on the part of the chorus, orchestra and, with one exception, soloists of the Bolshoi Theater. But the staging by Yury Laptev, a former Mariinsky Theater baritone who now serves as advisor to President Dmitry Medvedev on matters of cultural development, verged on the primitive. And a much too gently sloped seating area caused a large part of the action to take place out of sight of all but a handful of the 4,000 spectators.
Nevertheless, the spectators, who filled every seat at the performance and at a dress rehearsal the previous evening, seemed to find “The Maid of Pskov” an engrossing spectacle. No doubt the pageantry, complete with armored soldiers on horseback and a contingent of the Tsar’s personal guards, plus a horde of extras, had much to do with keeping nearly all of both audiences in their seats to the very end. Adding to the allure was the historic significance of seeing the opera performed for the first time ever on the very spot where much of its story takes place.
Based on a play by mid-19th-century writer Lev Mei, “The Maid of Pskov” was the first of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 15 operas and had its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1873. The role of Ivan the Terrible was a great favorite of legendary bass Fyodor Chaliapin, who performed it, most notably perhaps, in a production staged in 1909 as part of impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s very first Saison Russe in Paris. It was last heard at the Bolshoi in 1999, in a brief run of performances that marked the final appearance at the theater of the greatly revered maestro Yevgeny Svetlanov.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s score contains a couple of fine tunes that, as is typical of the composer, are played over and over again. Otherwise, it mostly relies on declamation, similar to, but not nearly as powerful or imaginative as that heard in Modest Mussorgsky’s almost simultaneously composed opera “Boris Godunov.” Later in his career, Rimsky-Korsakov produced yet another opera, “The Tsar’s Bride,” also adapted from a play by Mei and set in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and came up with a much more compelling score.
Bass Alexei Tarnovitsky, borrowed for the occasion from St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, sang a powerful Tsar Ivan, though his acting, like that of many others in the cast, harked back to the era of silent movies or, perhaps more accurately, to what was seen on the Russian operatic stage five or six decades ago. Vyacheslav Pochapsky, a veteran of the Bolshoi’s 1999 performances, brought a still-resonant bass and great dignity to the role of Prince Yury Tolmakov, the Tsar’s appointed head of Pskov’s government.
While much of the opera’s story involves politics and the suppression of a popular uprising, its real focus rests on the maid of the title, Prince Tolmakov’s supposed daughter, Olga, and her struggle to marry the man she loves rather than an odious boyar’s son chosen by the Prince. Eventually recognized by the Tsar as his own daughter, she ends up losing her life in a skirmish between the Tsar’s soldiers and a group of local dissidents.
Fortunately for the Pskov production, the Bolshoi came up with a near-perfect Olga in the person of soprano Yekaterina Shcherbachenko, who last year won the prestigious Singer of the World contest in Cardiff, Wales, and, as a result, is soon due to make her debut at some of Europe’s leading opera houses, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Looking the picture-perfect Russian princess and singing with extraordinary purity of tone and diction, Shcherbachenko raised the level of the performance to heights of grandeur at her every appearance.
Pskov itself should be on the list of places to visit for anyone with interest in the history of Russia and its art and architecture in the first half or so of the last millennium. A five-hour train ride from St. Petersburg, the city boasts, in addition to its dramatic Kremlin, an array of churches and palaces, some dating back to the 12th century, that are rivaled only by the better-known Novgorod, some 150 kilometers to the northeast. And not far from the city are fortresses and monasteries of similar antiquity, set in a countryside as beautiful as any to be found in the European regions of Russia.

TITLE: 1,300 Missing in China Amid Asian Flooding
AUTHOR: By Ng Han Guan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ZHOUQU, China — Rescuers dug through mud and wreckage Monday searching for more than 1,300 people missing after flash floods and landslides struck northwestern China, one of a series of floods across Asia that have killed hundreds and spread misery to millions more.
In Pakistan, frustrated victims railed against the government’s anemic relief effort for the estimated 13 million affected by the country’s worst-ever floods, while rescuers in mountainous Indian-controlled Kashmir raced to rescue dozens of stranded foreign trekkers and find the 500 people still missing in flash floods that have killed 140.
Sunday’s disaster in China’s Gansu province killed at least 137 people and swamped entire villages. The government said 1,348 were missing as of 4 p.m. Monday.
Vehicles carrying aid supplies choked the road over bare, eroded mountains into the remote county seat of Zhouqu. Bodies wrapped in blankets were collected and laid on truck beds.
“There were some, but very few, survivors. Most of them are dead, crushed into the earth,” said survivor Guo Wentao. Associated Press Television News showed the bodies of his younger brother and sister, wrapped in quilts, being carried away on a stretcher as crying relatives followed.
Work was under way to restore power, water and communications. It was not known how many of the missing were in danger or simply out of contact.
More rain is expected in the region through Tuesday morning, the China Meteorological Administration said on its website.
Hoping to prevent further disasters, demolitions experts set off three sets of charges to clear debris blocking the Bailong River upstream from the ravaged Zhouqu, which remained largely submerged.
The blockage had formed a 3-kilometer-long artificial lake on the river that overflowed in the pre-dawn hours, sending deadly torrents crashing down onto the town. Houses were ripped from their foundations, apartment buildings shattered, and streets covered with a layer of mud and water more than a yard (meter) deep.
This area of China is known to be prone to landslides, worsened by deforestation, erosion and the weakening of cliff faces by the massive 2008 earthquake that struck Sichuan province just to the south.
State broadcaster CCTV showed Premier Wen Jiabao comforting victims. At one point he was shown calling out to people waiting to be pulled from their buried home, saying: “Don’t move! We’re getting you out.”
China’s worst flooding in a decade has killed more than 1,100 people this year. Floods have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage across 28 provinces and regions.
In Pakistan, the United Nations said the number of people suffering from the massive floods there could exceed the combined total in three recent disasters — the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti quake.
The death toll in each of those three disasters was much higher than the 1,500 people killed so far in the floods that first hit Pakistan two weeks ago. The Pakistani government estimates more than 13 million people have been affected.
“It looks like the number of people affected in this crisis is higher than the Haiti earthquake, the tsunami or the Pakistan earthquake, and if the toll is as high as the one given by the government, it’s higher than the three of them combined,” Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The Associated Press.
Rescue workers have been unable to reach up to 600,000 people marooned in the northwestern Swat Valley, where many residents were still trying to recover from an intense battle between the army and the Taliban last spring, Giuliano said.
Victims’ frustrations showed no sign of dissipating as heavy rains continued. Rising national anger has been directed at an already unpopular government that has deployed thousands of soldiers for aid but has been overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster.
Thousands of Pakistanis in the neighboring districts of Shikarpur and Sukkur camped out on roads, bridges and railway tracks — any dry ground they could find.

TITLE: Chavez To Meet New Colombian President
AUTHOR: By Christopher Toothaker
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARACAS, Venezuela — A bitter diplomatic faceoff between Venezuela and Colombia over allegations that President Hugo Chavez let leftist rebels take refuge in his country — a dispute that has seen stinging insults and talk of possible war — could be cooling now that power has shifted in Colombia.
Chavez and Colombia’s new president, Juan Manuel Santos, plan to take the first step toward restoring relations between the South American neighbors Tuesday when they sit down together in Colombia, their foreign ministers announced Sunday.
Both leaders have said they desire friendly and mutually respectful diplomatic ties, a sharp contrast to the acrimonious relations between Chavez and Santos’ predecessor, Alvaro Uribe.
Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said the presidents’ meeting will try to smooth over the conflict that boiled over last month when Chavez severed diplomatic ties with Uribe’s government.
“We’ve taken this first step ... with the objective being the reestablishment of relations between the two countries,” Holguin said at a joint appearance in Bogota with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro.
Chavez broke off ties after Uribe’s government presented the Organization of American States with video of alleged Colombian rebel camps in Venezuela and demanded that Chavez’s administration investigate the allegations. Chavez refused and accused Uribe of lying about the alleged guerrilla presence, accusing the Colombian of plotting to attack Venezuela.
Chavez denies he has given haven to Colombian rebels, and the former paratroop commander says he has instructed his military to confront members of any illegal armed group that slips into his country.
Venezuela’s leader reiterated Sunday that he wants to forge friendly relations with Colombia following Santos’ inauguration Saturday.
“We have much hope that the new government will begin to construct all that Uribe’s government destroyed,” Chavez said.
In Colombia, Santos told reporters he hoped that at “this meeting we can draw conclusions that lead us to normalize relations between the two countries.” He did not reveal where the two leaders would meet.
Earlier Sunday, Chavez urged Colombia’s rebels to release their hostages as a means of kick-starting negotiations with Santos on ending the nation’s decades-long armed conflict. His comments appeared to be a show of support for Santos.
“Just as one proposes that Colombia’s government seek the path to peace, the guerrillas also must do it,” said Chavez.
Then he called on the rebels to release dozens of hostages held in camps located deep within Colombia’s jungles.
“Why do the guerrillas have people held hostage?” Chavez asked, suggesting they should not be using kidnapped Colombians to try to negotiate the release of imprisoned rebels.

TITLE: Radical Indonesian Cleric Arrested in Terror Plot
AUTHOR: By Niniek Karmini
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s anti-terrorism unit arrested a radical Islamist cleric Monday for alleged ties to an al-Qaida-affiliated cell accused of plotting high-profile assassinations and Mumbai-style attacks targeting foreigners in the capital.
Abu Bakar Bashir, who has been arrested twice before and spent several years in jail, was heading home after delivering a sermon when the police swooped, surrounding his van and smashing in the rear window when body guards tried to stand in their way, according to Bashir’s son, Abdul Rohim.
“The United States is behind this!” shouted the white-bearded cleric, who was wearing his traditional flowing white robe. He smiled as he was escorted under tight security into police headquarters, and said: “This arrest is a blessing ... I will be rewarded by Allah!”
The fiery 71-year-old is best known as one of the co-founders and spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaida-linked network responsible for a string of suicide bombings in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, including the 2002 attacks on Bali island that killed 202 people, most of them Western tourists.
Bashir, who has always denied terrorist links, was also one of the founders of al-Mukmin boarding school in the Central Java town of Solo that produced some of the country’s deadliest bombers.
Police spokesman Major General Edward Aritonang told reporters Monday this was the first time authorities had evidence Bashir was not just inspiring militants with his anti-Western rhetoric, but directly involved in planning attacks.
He allegedly provided funds for a new terror cell in westernmost Aceh province and played “an active role in preparing the initial plans for their military struggle.” The cleric also helped appoint its leaders and received regular reports from their field coordinator, the police spokesman said.
Police have one week to file official charges.
Monday’s high-profile arrest was the latest in a series of raids targeting Al-Qaida in Aceh since authorities discoved their jihadi training camp in February.
Aritonang said more than 100 suspects have been rounded up — including five on Sunday — and several large caches of assault weapons, ammunition and explosives have been seized.
Police also discovered a bomb-making laboratory in Cibiru, a village 180 kilometers southeast of the capital, he said, and there were indications that at least two powerful test blasts had been carried out in nearby mountains in recent weeks.
The overwhelming majority of Indonesians are moderate Muslims who reject violence, but a small extremist fringe has gained strength in recent years. Bashir is considered by many to be a driving force for radical movements.
He served 2 1/2 years in jail for allegedly giving his blessing to the Bali bombers, but his conviction was later overturned. After his release in 2006, he started holding sermons nationwide calling for the creation of an Islamic state and spewing hatred toward foreigners.
Recently, Bashir formed a new radical movement, Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid, or JAT, described by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group as an “ostensibly above-ground organization” that embraced individuals with known ties to fugitive extremists.
Bashir came under renewed police scrutiny in May after three JAT members were arrested for allegedly raising funds for al-Qaida in Aceh.
The cell was accused of planning gun attacks on luxury hotels in the capital in an alleged plot reminiscent of the attacks in India’s financial center of Mumbai, where 10 gunmen rampaged through the city in 2008 and killed 166 people.

TITLE: U.K. Man Walks Length of Amazon
AUTHOR: By Felipe Almeida
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MARUDA, Brazil — After 859 days, thousands of miles and “50,000 mosquito bites,” Ed Stafford became the first man known to have walked the entire length of the Amazon river when the waves of the Atlantic Ocean lapped at his feet in northern Brazil on Monday.
“It’s unbelievable to be here!” Stafford told The Associated Press the moment he entered the sea. “It proves you can do anything — even if people say you cannot. I’ve proved that if you want something enough, you can do anything!”
A few hours earlier, Stafford had collapsed at the side of the road, just short of his destination. 
But upon arrival at the Maruda beach — and his journey’s end — Stafford looked like he had all the energy in the world, as if walking for 2 1/2 years were nothing as he jumped into the ocean and hugged anyone in sight.