SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1640 (2), Wednesday, January 26, 2011
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TITLE: Medvedev Blames Airport for Suicide Blast
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev and Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday described security at Domodedovo Airport as “simply a state of anarchy” and promised to hold airport management responsible for a suicide bombing that killed at least 35 people, including four foreigners.
Airport officials denied the accusation, saying the transportation police was in charge of screening people entering the public area of the international arrivals hall.
A suicide bomber detonated explosives the equivalent of at least 7 kilograms of TNT in the public area of the arrivals hall at 4:32 p.m. Monday, officials said Tuesday. The Investigative Committee initially said the attack had occurred in the hall’s baggage claim area.
Among those killed in the attack at Moscow’s busiest airport were two Britons, a German and a Bulgarian, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. Another 110 people, including nine foreigners, were hospitalized, it said.
While Medvedev placed blame on the airport, he also said the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service were at fault and demanded sanctions against responsible officers.
“I instruct the interior minister to suggest which ministry officials responsible for transport security could be dismissed or face other sanctions,” Medvedev said.
He said FSB officers should face similar punishment.
The president also said a system needed to be set up that would offer the “total examination” of passengers and baggage at airports and train stations.
“This will make it longer for passengers, but it’s the only way,” he said.
The Kremlin said Medvedev still planned to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos but his itinerary has not been finalized. Medvedev was supposed to arrive Tuesday evening and speak at a plenary session Wednesday.
No one has claimed responsibility for the blast.
State television showed footage of passengers busily moving inside the airport without any sign of panic in the hours after the attack. Several passengers confirmed that they saw no panic, even though broken glass littered the floor and injured passengers were being rushed to ambulances.
“It’s very bad. It’s 100 percent terrorism,” Ariel, who flew in from Israel, said in an interview after arriving on an airport express train at Paveletsky Station about two hours after the blast. “I think I’m going back to Israel right now.”
A YouTube video shot on a cell phone camera in the smoke-filled arrivals hall showed bodies lying on the floor. Several people in regular clothes, apparently passengers, walked around unrestrained, together with rescue workers and businesslike security officials. A man in a black suit stood with a baggage cart in the hall.
Airport personnel broke down a brick wall to help passengers quickly exit the baggage claim area, RIA-Novosti reported.
Planes continued to take off and land after the explosion. Sibir and Transaero, the biggest Russian airlines based at Domodedovo, said Monday evening that no flights had been affected.
The last deadly blasts in Moscow occurred March 29 when two female suicide bombers originating from the North Caucasus blew themselves up in the Moscow metro, killing 40 people and wounding 160 others. North Caucasus insurgents later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The insurgents have targeted Moscow in several high-profile terrorist attacks since fall 1999.
But the Domodedovo blast was not necessarily perpetrated by North Caucasus insurgents, said Maxim Agarkov, a retired Interior Ministry officer who has worked in airport security.
“The attackers might have targeted a plane heading to Domodedovo, but the bomb went off too late,” he said by telephone.
According to the airport’s web site, passengers from flights from Cairo, Ashgabat, Tokyo and Dusseldorf were collecting their baggage at the moment of the blast.
Still, an unidentified law enforcement official told Interfax that three North Caucasus natives — suspected rebels living near Moscow — had been put on a national wanted list after Monday’s explosion.
The official said investigators had linked the men to two suspected female suicide bombers, one of whom died in a largely unnoticed blast in a Moscow sports club on Dec. 31. No one but the woman died in the explosion. The second woman, a 24-year-old native of Chechnya, was arrested earlier this month in Volgograd on suspicion of illegally transporting explosives.
“It is possible that one of these three men blew himself up at Domodedovo,” the official told Interfax.
At Paveletsky Station, some passengers were convinced that the bombing was linked to the restive North Caucasus, where federal forces have fought two wars since 1994.
“I am not surprised,” said Andrei, who spent an hour at the gate waiting to deplane after arriving on a flight from Germany.
“What else do you expect after 15 years of civil war?” he said, referring to the military conflict in the North Caucasus.
After the attack, the Aeroexpress train offered free rides between the train station and Domodedovo Airport, while sympathetic Twitter users offered free rides to the airport and back. Interfax reported that taxi drivers at the airport had hiked prices to as much as 20,000 rubles ($670) for the 42-kilometer ride into the city. The trip usually costs about 2,500 rubles to the city center.
A Domodedovo employee spoke of the confusion and shock that settled over the airport in the moments after the explosion.
“At the very beginning we didn’t understand what was happening. When we did, it was already late,” said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media.
Details about those killed and injured slowly trickled out Tuesday.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said on its web site that four foreigners had been identified among the injured: Diana Shtotts, 36, of Germany; Suzanna Fialova, 36, of Slovakia; and two Tajik citizens, Saidbek Iskadarov, 42, and Bakhtiyor Gafforiv, 29.
Also injured were Romano Rosario of Italy and Frederic Ortis of France, Interfax said, citing the Health and Social Development Ministry.
Shortly after the explosion, state television reported that dozens of ambulances were headed to the airport from Moscow and hospitals in the nearby town of Domodedovo.
Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Moscow region Governor Boris Gromov also rushed to the airport, together with investigators from the Federal Security Service, the Interior Ministry and the Investigative Committee.
Security was beefed up at Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo airports. No flights were canceled, but all passengers and luggage were thoroughly searched, passengers said in televised remarks.
Passengers are advised to arrive at Moscow airports extra early for their flights in the upcoming days. Airport checks will be stepped up, and police will expand their checks to include the people seeing off passengers and their bags as well, the Federal Air Transport Agency said.
U.S. President Barack Obama and European leaders offered their sympathy and support over the bombing.
TITLE: Pulkovo Feels Shock of Moscow Suicide Bomb
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport has adopted heightened security measures in the wake of the suicide bombing that killed 35 or more at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow on Monday, while local and national officials hurried to express their outrage and announce measures aimed at preventing similar tragedies in the future.
“All passengers are asked to arrive at the airport three hours prior to departure as safety precautions have been increased,” said Olga Antipova, a spokeswoman for Pulkovo Airport. All departing passengers and anyone accompanying them will now have to walk through metal detectors installed right at the entrance to the terminal building. Detectors were originally placed at the entrance to the airport in 2004 following an earlier devastating attack when two female suicide bombers carried out terrorist attacks on two planes — one en route from Moscow to Sochi, the other going from Moscow to Volgograd — but were removed recently, reportedly in an effort to cut costs.
Tightened security measures have led to enormous queues at departures. However, there have so far been no reports of flight delays or passengers missing their planes due to the additional checks. Vadim Kashirin, head of the Transport Office of the Interior Ministry for northwest Russia, said additional staff from his forces had been sent to the airport to enhance security. “We have sent 260 transport police officers to Pulkovo; we have also brought in dog handlers to monitor the premises of the airport,” Kashirin said.
“We are aware of the long lines and we are sending all available people to the airport to resolve the situation. However, passengers themselves must be patient and make sure they arrive in advance,” Kashirin said.
At least one St. Petersburger was among the more than 150 people injured at Domodedovo, 43 of them seriously, when a bomb went off at around 4.25 p.m. in the international arrivals terminal of Domodedovo Airport.
St. Petersburg resident Denis Zhulyov, 39, sustained minor injuries and is undergoing treatment in Moscow’s State Clinical Hospital No. 71.
City Hall has announced that it is ready to cover the cost of travel for the victim’s relatives to and from Moscow and give him other financial assistance if necessary.
City Governor Valentina Matviyenko expressed her condolences to the families of those who had perished in the explosion. “Those behind this dreadful attack are monsters, they do not deserve to be called human beings,” Matviyenko said. “Attacking innocent, peaceful people is a most despicable act.”
The governor also said that security precautions had been strengthened at all local metro stations and on other public transport.
Igor Levitin, Russia’s Transport Minister, announced that a government commission is being formed with a brief to travel around Russia inspecting the country’s regional airports. Pulkovo Airport will be the subject of one such inspection in the very near future.
TITLE: Finger-Pointing: Soccer Fans Insist They Were Innocent Victims
AUTHOR: By Philip Parker
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The number of St. Petersburg residents among the victims of the bomb attack at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport on Monday is not yet known, nor had anyone claimed responsibility for the atrocity by Tuesday evening. It is unlikely that the latter will provoke much surprise, but in a relatively slow week in St. Petersburg, blame for the few newsworthy incidents has been ascribed in some intriguing and educational ways.
The first tragedy of the week came last Wednesday evening, when the recently launched Allegro high-speed rail link between St. Petersburg and Helsinki claimed “its first victims,” as Fontanka.ru reported, killing two young men between Shuvalovo and Udelnaya stations. Later reports clarified that the train was not actually itself to blame for the accident — the victims were crossing the tracks at an unsanctioned place, ignored warning signals from the train, and were apparently intoxicated.
Weather conditions were said to be the cause of a helicopter crash in the Leningrad Oblast on Thursday afternoon that left one dead and three seriously injured. The AS-355M helicopter, owned by a local club, was flying from the island of Valaam to Rzhevka Airport, northeast of St. Petersburg, when it crashed into the ice on Sukhodolsky Lake in the Priozersk district. Unusually, there has been no attempt to contest the official reports.
The biggest blame game this week, however, has been that surrounding the brawl in the southern district of Kupchino on Sunday evening, which saw 20 people arrested and two hospitalized. The fight was between fans of Zenit FC and a group of Azerbaijani origin gathered around a caf? at the corner of Budapeshtskaya Ulitsa and Ulitsa Yaroslava Gasheka. No official report has yet been released describing the catalyst for the fight, but the blogosphere was dominated by outraged nationalist sympathizers claiming that the aggression was all on the part of the Azeris, and that the Zenit fans were merely protecting their fellow Russian citizens. They continue to propagate the dangerous but frankly laughable notion that Caucasians enjoy special protection from the police, and tenuous parallels were drawn with the killing in Moscow of soccer fan Yegor Sidorov.
As in that case, there were attempts to organize a mass protest, with a group on social networking site Vkontakte.ru calling for 100 to 150 people to gather on Tuesday evening at Kupchino metro station to deliver money and supplies to their hospitalized comrades and ensure “public monitoring of the treatment of the injuries and their safety, and of the process of the legal case against the criminals,” as reported by Rosbalt. The unsanctioned event resulted in some kettling and ten further arrests.
According to Fontanka.ru, however, sources in local law enforcement claim that the fight began when young soccer fans started kicking a car with Azeri nationals inside, shortly after Azeri football team Inter Baku won the 2011 CIS Champions’ Cup, having beaten a Zenit youth team in the semi-finals on Friday. This is the latest in a series of fights between soccer fans and people of Caucasian origin in the city, and the former are becoming increasingly adept at spinning their warped version of events online.
A more light-hearted vein of racism was mined in response to the announcement last week that the city’s Culture Committee was publishing an “Alphabet for St. Petersburg Beginners,” designed to introduce guests — including migrant workers — to the culture and customs of the city. Judging by extracts published online, the “Alphabet for Beginners” is a fairly mundane and inoffensive document, partly a sightseeing guide and partly a primer in the lexical quirks of St. Petersburg Russian (prompting a depressingly large number of bloggers to question how many “guests” could actually read, let alone understand the subtle linguistic differences between words for “staircase” or “pavement”). This was in contrast to the controversial Muscovite’s Codex, announced in the capital last June and purported to contain sanctions on wearing national dress and slaughtering livestock in city courtyards.
Never mind national costumes, one disturbed St. Petersburg resident appears to be waging a single-handed terror campaign to rid the city of miniskirts, if online rumor is to be believed. Among several unsubstantiated reports of young women being poked on the metro by a man with a sharp object, possibly a bradawl, police confirmed one incident in which a 31-year-old woman was poked in the buttock with a sharp object at Gorkovskaya metro station Jan. 12, according to Fontanka.ru. This incident was linked to a series of similar attacks in various regions of northern St. Petersburg over the last 18 months, all against young women in miniskirts. You have been warned.
TITLE: Blatter Attends Cup Ceremony
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: FIFA President Sepp Blatter said he was certain the 2018 World Cup was in good hands and joined Russian officials in signing a formal declaration Sunday in St. Petersburg that awards the soccer tournament to Russia.
“Congratulations to Russia, its government and its nation on having the privilege of organizing the World Cup,” Blatter said at a ceremony in which Russia was conferred the official status of the cup’s host country.
Blatter was less focused on the organizational challenges than on his greater vision of bringing soccer to largely unchartered territory such as Russia and Qatar, which was awarded the 2022 World Cup.
“Football is more than just kicking the ball,” he said at a news conference after the signing ceremony. “It is also important to connect different nations, and our philosophy this time was to give the World Cup to territories that had never hosted it.”
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko picked up on the theme in thanking FIFA for choosing Russia over countries that already have much of the necessary infrastructure in place.
“FIFA is not just a football organization,” he said. “It develops the world and it goes to new countries.”
Mutko said St. Petersburg would play “one of the most serious roles” in Russia’s World Cup.
The preliminary draw for the matches will take place in the Mariinsky Theater. The city will also host a number of the cup’s matches, while some teams will base themselves in the area, Mutko said.
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said FIFA’s decision plays an important role for the country and the city.
“The World Cup will favor not only the development of soccer but also the development of children’s sports and sport infrastructure,” Matviyenko said on City Hall’s web site.
“We have started building a new modern stadium that meets all the FIFA and UEFA standards right in time,” the governor said.
Matviyenko said the city’s victory in the Russian Soccer Championship last year confirmed the city’s title of the country’s soccer capital.
Blatter met Saturday with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has promised that Russia will follow through on its commitments to spend tens of billions of dollars on new stadiums and infrastructure.
Russia has never organized a World Cup and has an enormous amount of work to do to get ready. Besides building stadiums and hotels, Russia will need to upgrade airports and roads to transport 32 soccer teams and millions of visitors to 13 cities spread across much of its vast territory.
TITLE: Waste-Processing Facility Contract Assigned to Firm
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Last week City Hall announced that the Greek consortium of Helector, Aktor Concessions and Aktor had won the contract to construct a waste-processing plant in the village of Yanino outside St. Petersburg, a project which, according to St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, will help to improve the ecological situation in the city and surrounding area. Local ecologists, however, voiced concerns that some technologies used at the plant could still pose threats to the environment.
According to Rosbalt, Matviyenko said that waste processing presented a major problem for the city, which can currently only process around 25 percent of the two million tons of solid residential waste it produces annually. “We have no right to postpone this issue; the city can’t exist without a modern waste-processing plant anymore,” she added.
Work on construction of the plant is to begin at the end of 2011. The consortium plans to complete the plant by 2015. The plant will have the capacity to process 350,000 tons a year, which can possibly be increased to 460,000 tons in the future. Investment in the project will amount to 300 million euros.
Kostas Triantafilu, head of the project at Helector, said the consortium had already built a similar plant on Cyprus, and that the waste-processing technology used would decrease the emission of harmful substances to a minimum. ABN reported that 30 percent of waste delivered to the plant would be used to produce fuel for industry.
However, the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace said it intended to oppose construction of the plant, claiming that the methods used amounted to harmful incineration of waste, according to a press release from the NGO.
“Although the city authorities call the plant a waste-processing facility, part of the waste at the plant will be processed into fuel and then burnt. Just because the mixed waste is called fuel, it won’t be any safer for people,” Greenpeace said.
The use of incineration was the result of conditions in the tender stipulating that waste mass be decreased by not less than 70 percent. There are only two ways to achieve this result: Through the organization of sorted waste collection for further processing at the plant, or through incineration of mixed waste that is not suitable for sorting, it said.
According to a letter received by Greenpeace from the consortium, the systems to be employed at the plant will involve the sorting of the waste at the plant, followed by mechanical and biological processing, which would produce a dry fuel that can be burned in cement stoves.
However, Greenpeace insists that it will be impossible to completely remove the dangerous substances collected in St. Petersburg in conjunction with domestic waste. Therefore, they claim, the emissions from burning such “fuel” will not be significantly different from the emissions of a regular waste incineration plant, negating the supposed environmental advantages of the system.
Residents of Yanino village have also regularly spoken out against the construction of the plant in their area, ABN news agency said.
TITLE: Metro Boss Calls for Investment Boost
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vadim Alexandrov, general director of Metrostroi, the main constructor of metro lines in St. Petersburg, used a press conference last Friday marking the company’s 70th anniversary to highlight the need for greater investment and a massive increase in metro building in the city.
Alexandrov estimates that St. Petersburg will require 30 to 40 new metro stations to make underground rail travel convenient for all city residents, but suggested that such an expansion was essential to ease the city’s increasingly acute traffic problems.
“Local subway construction lags at least 20 years behind the city’s needs,” said Alexandrov in his speech. “For metro travel to be convenient and accessible to everyone, there should be a metro station within at most 700 meters of any city resident. Besides, there is no other city in Russia where transport problems can only be solved with the help of the metro.”
Alexandrov said the main reasons for the recent slow development of the city metro were a lack of financing and unnecessarily long tenders. The former factor prompted Alexandrov to criticize the decision to stop federal funding of metro construction, leaving investment entirely dependent on local budgets. The city has allocated nine billion rubles ($302 million) for metro construction in 2011 which, in Alexandrov’s opinion, is two billion rubles less than the proper level of investment.
“In many other countries federal budgets cover from 30 to 100 percent of expenses on metro construction, because it is in the interest of all the state’s citizens. We should not forget that St. Petersburg and Moscow are the two capitals of our country,” Alexandrov said.
Harking back to the Soviet glory days of the company, Alexandrov said that when Metrostroi began its activities in St. Petersburg (which was then known as Leningrad), the speed of construction of the new metro was considerably faster than today.
The order to begin construction of the metro in Leningrad was signed on Jan. 21, 1941. The initial plans were astonishingly ambitious, assigning two years for the construction of all 19 kilometers of the first line.
“It was definitely an absurdly short time period but, had it not been for the war that began in June of 1941, it could have been completed by the deadline,” Alexandrov added.
To build the metro, the city hired 25,000 workers. When hostilities began, however, they were obliged to flood the tunnels they had already dug to protect them from bombardment. It was not until 1955 that the first line was opened, linking eight stations between Avtovo and Ploshchad Vosstaniya.
Since then, a further 56 stations have been opened on five lines with a total length of 112.5 kilometers. The heyday of metro construction ran from the 1960s to the early 1980s, but was downscaled considerably during Perestroika and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the next two years, Metrostroi is planning to open only three new metro stations in the city.
All three new stations will be on the Fifth Line, or purple line, which was officially opened in December 2008, although it features in plans dating back to the early 1980s. Two of the stations, Mezhdunarodnaya and Bukharestskaya, will extend the line further into the Frunzenskaya district, a residential area in the south of the city. More interesting, however, is the long-awaited opening of Admiralteiskaya, which has been a “ghost station” on the stretch between Sadovaya and Sportivnaya stations (formerly part of the orange line) for more than a decade. The station could not be opened due to its sensitive location under Ploshchad Truda, close to many of St. Petersburg’s most cherished monuments — including the Winter Palace — which has made it difficult to find a suitable site aboveground for the station vestibule, and entailed particular care in construction work.
“We are doing everything possible, using completely new technologies, to ensure the safety of the historic buildings. I have no desire to put pressure on my staff to complete the station any faster. It is our desire above all to make sure that the surrounding buildings do not suffer any deformation or subsidence,” Alexandrov said.
A further two-month delay has been caused because area residents have complained about noise levels at night, meaning that Metrostroi’s employees can only work on the site during the day, even though an inflatable marquee has been erected over the site to reduce noise pollution.
Alexandrov said that, provided there were no further delays, Admiralteiskaya would finally be opened at the end of this year or the beginning of 2012.
TITLE: Animal Lovers Protest Dog Culling in LenOblast
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Hundreds came Sunday to protest the killing of cats and dogs ordered by City Governor Valentina Matviyenko as part of measures to fight the outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) in Volodarsky, a village to the southwest of St. Petersburg.
The disease is often fatal to pigs and wild boars, but does not pose a threat to humans or domestic animals, although it can be carried by some species of tic. Concerned citizens have petitioned the Russian authorities and the Prosecutor General, as well as international animal welfare organizations, against what they call the illegal and unreasonably cruel actions of City Hall.
The authorities claim that only stray animals are being culled, but alarmed residents allege that those responsible for exterminating the animals don’t distinguish between stray animals and pets, while domestic cats and dogs are frequently let out on their own, especially in villages such as Volodarsky.
Officially, 27 dogs were killed in Volodarsky. “We decided not to shoot the animals, and chose a more human method — specialists put 27 dogs to sleep,” said Svetlana Valeyeva, chair of the Veterinary Service Assistance Association.
Svetlana Los, a chair of the Right to Life animal rights organization and co-organizer of Sunday’s rally, said the real number was much higher.
“All this is lies, in reality a lot more dogs were killed,” she said.
“I was present at the extermination of dogs, and I had to pull a dog away from one of the exterminators and save its life. It had been shot with a syringe from a pneumatic gun, with a triple dose of sedative for a small dog. If I had not managed to take it from it, it would have died.” She added that the dog had been sterilized and chipped in 2008.
According to Los, she went to Volodarsky along with other people Saturday to interview and videotape witnesses of the culling.
“The exterminators were culling animals near the church in broad daylight — it was noon, when children were coming home from school, the extermination was happening right before the eyes of the children.”
Los said that one large dog that had been shot with a syringe managed to run home. “Then the catcher came and demanded money from the owner, so she had to pay him 1,000 rubles ($34) to save her dog’s life,” she said.
“Then she had to call a vet to come and treat the dog, because it had been poisoned and was vomiting.”
Although City Hall reported that the outbreak of ASF was under control by Jan. 14, Los said that the extermination of animals continues and has expanded beyond the limits of Volodarsky.
“This morning I received a call about three dogs being killed in Martyshkino, and there were reports about dog killings in Otradnoye,” she said Wednesday.
There have been no reports of cats being killed.
According to Los, the culling is being carried out by Spetstrans, an organization that deals with the transport of trash.
“This brings shame on our city,” Los said.
“They are permanently drunk, anti-social looking dog-catchers and torturers who kill dogs.” An Animals Rights Alliance activist, Dmitry, who asked that his last name be withheld, said the figure of 27 culled dogs was understated.
“For certain, it’s more than the officials are saying to calm down the public, but it’s not hundreds like the emotional dog defenders are saying; as always, the truth is somewhere in between,” Dmitry said.
TITLE: Slain Briton Was Due To Marry
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Briton killed in the bombing at Domodedovo Airport was a regular visitor to Russia who was looking forward to getting married in the spring and raising his infant daughter, his brother said Tuesday.
Gordon Cousland, 39, was a property consultant with CACI, a British marketing and IT consultancy, and one of 35 people killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the airport’s international arrivals hall Monday.
It was the first time that Western expatriates have been killed in a terrorist attack in Moscow since the Dubrovka theater siege in 2002.
Cousland is survived by a 6-month-old daughter and was due to marry in April, his older brother Robin said by telephone from the family farm in Lincolnshire, east England.
Robin Cousland described his growing fears when he heard about the suicide bombing, but received no reassuring phone call from his brother.
“We knew he was flying in to Moscow yesterday, and we heard there had been an explosion. Normally he would phone home, or at least my father, when he got somewhere, and we never heard anything,” he said.
“As time went on we got more and more worried, and we contacted his work. They had tried to contact him as well. They couldn’t get hold of him; he was supposed to meet somebody there who he didn’t meet.”
The bad news arrived hours later from a diplomat at Britain’s Foreign Office.
“As time went on we eventually heard from the U.K. Foreign Office that he’d been confirmed dead late last night,” Robin said.
Cousland was the only British citizen killed in Monday’s attack, the British Embassy said. Another victim earlier identified as British, Kirill Budashev, turned out not to be a British national, the embassy said.
The youngest of five children, Gordon was thought of as “always the baby of the family,” his brother said.
“He was about seven years adrift of everyone else, and we all tried to look after him a bit, I think. This has come as a terrible shock to us,” Robin said.
Brought up on the family farm in Lincolnshire, Cousland made himself a career in London as a property consultant. “He went away to university to study agriculture and economics, and he went down the kind of economics side of agriculture rather than the working side,” said Robin, who still runs the family farm.
His business training eventually led him to CACI, where he worked as a property consultant specializing in Eastern Europe.
TITLE: Norway Expels Celebrity Immigrant Back to Russia
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — She managed to get a university degree, land a job and become citizen of the year in Norway. But this did not save 25-year-old Maria Amelie — born as Madina Salamova — from being expelled to Russia as an illegal immigrant.
Salamova flew into Moscow on Monday, arriving in Russia for the first time in 11 years. Her plane was bound for Sheremetyevo Airport, not Domodedovo, which saw a bomb attack the same day.
Salamova’s plight sparked a heated debate in Norway, with local authorities claiming they upheld the law and critics saying her human rights were violated. Diplomats said only her celebrity status differentiates her from hundreds of illegals quietly deported from Norway every year.
Salamova’s family moved from North Ossetia to Finland in 2000. Her parents, Khetag Salamov and Yelena Gutiyeva, remain in hiding in Norway.
Norwegian media reported that Salamov was a businessman who had to flee debtors, Komsomolskaya Pravda said. North Ossetian blogger Madina Sageyeva speculated that his debts may reach millions of dollars.
Finnish authorities rejected an asylum claim from the family, prompting them to illegally move to Norway in 2002, Radio Liberty reported.
Despite not having a legal status in the country, Salamova mastered the Norwegian language, graduated from a local university and even published an autobiography called “Illegal Norwegian.”
The book, out in September under the pen name Maria Amelie, prompted the local weekly news magazine Ny Tid to proclaim her 2010 Citizen of the Year — and the authorities to initiate her deportation.
Salamova unsuccessfully campaigned against deportation in court, and rights groups, politicians and celebrities in Norway joined a campaign in her support.
Some 1,000 supporters rallied for her release in Oslo this week, and more than 91,000 people have joined her support group on Facebook. A group favoring her deportation numbered less than 6,000 people.
Sagalova spent some time at a detention center for illegal immigrants, and though she was eventually released, police detained her again on Monday and shipped her off to the Oslo airport. Her Norwegian boyfriend, Eivin Traedal — who could not marry her because she has no documents, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda — followed her to Moscow.
Salamova said she felt no attachment to Russia and considered herself a Norwegian citizen. “I live in constant fear” of deportation, she told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation soon after her release from custody last week, Radio Liberty reported.
“My friends and the whole country supported me in this fight,” she said. “Where am I supposed to go now? My home is here, in Norway.”
Norwegian authorities said she was welcome to return with a work permit, which she is entitled to because of a job offer from the local Teknisk Ukeblad newspaper, Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang reported Monday. But it remains unclear how long the procedure might take.
Russian authorities said after her arrival at Sheremetyevo that Salamova would be provided with accommodation and “would not have to sleep in the streets,” Norwegian daily Dagbladet reported, without elaborating.
TITLE: Know-Who Beats Know-How
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The plea was clear and out of the ordinary.
“I’d like to initiate dialogue with the mayor of Moscow as he’s connected at the top,” Canadian businessman John Walmsley wrote in a recent e-mail to The Moscow Times.
Walmsley, of Winnipeg-based Biovaildiagnostics, a medical diagnostic research and development, settled on Mayor Sergei Sobyanin as a target because he is a former associate of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He calculated that such an approach “could be more fruitful than random shots at low-end functionaries.”
He said in a subsequent e-mail exchange that he wrote to The Moscow Times because he didn’t know where else to turn.
“Phones are not much help. As you can imagine, once connected, costs can get a little ridiculous with no results,” he said. “My experience has been dismal.”
Walmsley’s appeal to a local newspaper illustrates the frustrations faced by businesspeople looking to establish contacts in Russia without representatives on the ground.
“You can’t run Russia by remote control, you have to be here,” said Chris Gilbert, the Russian director of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, or RBCC, which has been promoting business ties between Russia and Britain since 1915.
A physical presence is necessary because much business is still conducted face-to-face. “A Russian company will work with a Western company for reasons other than price; there will also be a human factor involved,” Gilbert said.
A multitude of private organizations, of which the RBCC is just one, help member companies, for a fee, make these sorts of personal contacts. For U.S. businesses there is the American Chamber of Commerce, the U.S.-Russia Business Council and the Mid-Atlantic Council, among others. For European companies there is the Association of European Businesses in Russia, or AEB.
Canadians like Walmsley struggling to enter the Russian market could turn to the Canada Eurasia Russia Business Association.
These organizations have not been seriously affected by the crisis, said Gilbert, adding that the RBCC, which has about 600 corporate members, saw an increase in requests for assistance in both 2009 and 2010. Companies that previously would have “gone it alone,” he said, were now more cautious and sought help, making up for any fall in demand precipitated by the crisis.
The governments of many countries, including Canada, also use their political clout to help businesses find the right partner.
The British company Tensar, based in Blackburn, develops and produces ground stabilization solutions called geogrids that create a stable, weight-bearing layer in the soil.
With the help of U.K. Trade and Investment, or UKTI, a government-run body that assists British businesses in international markets, and the networking events of the RBCC, the company has had a flourishing local presence for 14 years.
“As a medium-sized British manufacturing business,” said David Cashman, the company’s Russia and Central Asia business manager, “trying to make contact at a very high level in Russia is almost impossible.”
The company was, however, greatly assisted by the British Embassy, said Cashman, who gave the example of Tensar’s involvement in construction projects linked with the building program for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
As a part of a trade mission organized by UKTI, Tensar was introduced to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak and given an opportunity to discuss the specifics of one aspect of the company’s work.
“We got answers right from the top level,” Cashman said. “I can’t fault it really.” Tensar has been working in Sochi since 2008.
The company has even managed to break into Russia’s natural resources industry — a notoriously difficult part of the country’s economy for foreigners to work in.
“You do need the two P’s — patience and persistence” — to crack the tricky energy sector, Cashman said, but Tensar is now supplying a Gazprom-funded railway project on the mineral-rich Yamal Peninsula in the north, and they were recently approached by a major oil company.
Though strong state support and clever use of available commercial organizations can assist companies, there remain problematic areas for those seeking to make contacts and exploit potential markets.
Making contacts in Moscow or St. Petersburg is one thing, said Val Kogan, president of the Mid-Atlantic – Russia Business Council, which has more than 500 high-tech U.S. companies as members, but it is more complicated in the regions.
“If you take a regional chamber of commerce,” he said, “in some cases it will be a very real and helpful organization, in some cases just a paper cut-out.”
The process of establishing a presence is simpler for larger companies that have more resources to spend on consultants and public relations. Accessing some industries can be “particularly difficult for small and medium-sized companies,” Kogan said.
John McCaslin, the senior commercial officer with the U.S. Commercial Service, based in the embassy in Moscow, highlighted several other areas where Russian business puts obstacles in the way of those seeking an entry.
He said one issue is a lack of readily available, quality information about opportunities, while another is making sure investors know who is the ultimate beneficial owner of a company, as “there are all sorts of ways to make that information very convoluted.”
To this end the U.S. Commercial Service — in a similar fashion to the branches of other foreign governments — employs six full-time staff members to research industries and write reports in English that are freely available online.
They also lobby with the Russian government on the behalf of businesses, when appropriate. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov is the “key guy,” McCaslin said.
“We pretty much act like an international business consulting firm whose clients are U.S. companies,” he added.
McCaslin was upbeat about future developments and said opportunities — and openness among officials — had surged in parallel with President Dmitry Medvedev’s rhetoric about creating high-tech industries and the promotion of the Skolkovo innovation center.
Russia’s scheduled accession to the World Trade Organization will also have a positive impact “that will really help things in a very broad way, making it easier over the next few years to do business” he said.
TITLE: Cold Baths, Tabasco Sauce Spark U.S. Adoption Dispute
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian authorities are considering canceling the adoption of a 7-year-old boy from Magadan whose U.S. parents said they punished him by dousing him with cold water and forcing him to drink spicy Tabasco sauce.
Moreover, U.S. authorities have opened a child abuse case against Jessica Bigley of Anchorage, Alaska, for her treatment of Daniil Bukharov, adopted in 2008 along with his twin brother, Oleg. If convicted in the U.S. case, Bigley faces up to a year in prison.
A video of the boy being punished by an exasperated and sometimes screaming Jessica Bigley was aired on the television talk show “Dr. Phil” in November. The video, available on YouTube, shows Bigley calling the boy “the biggest stress of my life.”
Bigley is an elementary school teacher and her husband, Harry, works as a police officer specializing in child abuse investigations.
Children ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said he would seek criminal charges against the adoptive parents, whom he called “monsters,” and that the boys might be removed from the family for the duration of the investigation.
“This is not strictness but real torture, the abuse of a child,” Astakhov said, Interfax reported.
He said a moratorium should be imposed on U.S. adoptions until a bilateral agreement is signed. Astakhov and the Foreign Ministry called for a moratorium last year after a U.S. mother sent her adopted son back to Russia unaccompanied on a plane.
Natalya Zelenskaya, head of the department in the Magadan Mayor’s Office that handles adoptions, said Daniil Bukharov’s case was under review and his adoption might be annulled, Interfax reported.
A representative of the U.S. agency that helped the Bigleys adopt the twins said the Russian consul would visit the boys this week together with representatives from the adoption agency. The representative, Zoya Krainova, also suggested that the video showing the boy being forced to drink what appears to be Tabasco sauce and to take a cold shower was staged at the request of the show’s producers.
The Bigleys adopted Daniil and Oleg from a Magadan orphanage in 2008, Interfax reported.
At the time, Jessica told a local television station that she loved the twins even before she saw them in person, and her husband said he and his wife wanted to “share what we have” with the “deprived” boys.
The Bigleys have four biological children in addition to the twins.
Bukharov’s case could be considered relatively mild compared with several other instances in which U.S. parents severely beat or even tortured their adopted children to death. Fifteen Russian children died in adoptive families in the United States between 1996 and 2008. In all but one case, the parents faced criminal charges.
TITLE: Rage Over Kremlin Envoy’s Car Crash
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Blue Buckets, a bellicose public group campaigning against abuse of road privileges by officials, confirmed on Sunday that it would stage a rally this week in support of a driver hospitalized after her car collided with that of a Kremlin official.
But the group’s head, Alexei Dozorov, conceded in a phone interview that if the fault lies with the official and his driver, it will be hard to prove even if a host of witnesses come forward.
Alyona Yarosh, a 23-year-old architecture student, was hospitalized late last Wednesday after her Opel Astra collided with the BMW sedan of Garry Minkh, presidential envoy to the State Duma, on Rublyovskoye Shosse outside Moscow, home to many of the city’s elite.
Yarosh sustained numerous broken bones and a head injury. The BMW driver Vladimir Shugayev, 53, died on the spot, while Minkh escaped with minor bruises.
Police were reluctant to give any versions of the accident. Moscow region traffic police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev said Friday that an investigation was opened and that investigators were examining video from a nearby surveillance camera.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has refused to comment, citing the ongoing investigation. “I like to have facts first to make an assumption,” he told Interfax.
Yarosh’s father, Alexander, who arrived at the scene after the crash, said a traffic police report that he signed specified that the BMW had veered into the oncoming lane, Slon.ru reported. He added that Yarosh had more than four years driving experience.
Witnesses told several media outlets that they saw the BMW — equipped with flashing blue lights that give officials’ cars priority on the road — driving in the wrong lane.
“The presidential envoy was driving in the oncoming lane with the flashing light turned on. Everyone barely managed to swerve from him. We saw it, and we’re ready to confirm it,” one unidentified witness told Gazeta.ru.
Kommersant also cited people who implicated Minkh’s car in the crash, and a law enforcement source told Interfax that the video from a nearby surveillance camera confirmed this version.
But some Kremlin officials have already disagreed. A spokesman for the Office for Presidential Affairs, Viktor Khrekov, said it was Yarosh who drove in the wrong lane, Gazeta.ru reported Thursday. He cited unspecified “preliminary data” and said the investigation would settle matters. Asked about the accident in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio on Friday, Khrekov refused to blame either driver.
No witnesses had been identified as of Sunday, but Alyona Yarosh’s brother, Anton, said many have left contact information with the traffic police, Interfax reported.
Cars with flashing blue lights are allowed to drive in the oncoming lane but have to stay within the speed limit and take other measures to avoid accidents. The flashing lights are also supposed to be used for official, not personal, trips.
Dozorov, of Blue Buckets, expressed worries that the authorities might try to cover up the accident by shifting blame on Yarosh.
“Taking into an account what Khrekov said after the accident, this is a first step toward Leninsky Prospect,” he said, referring to another high-profile accident that took place in Moscow last February. Two women died there after their car collided with the sedan of LUKoil vice president Anatoly Barkov. Police immediately blamed the women and only opened an investigation under public pressure. The inquiry cleared Barkov’s driver last fall.
Dozorov speculated that the BMW driver had gone over the speed limit. Also, bloggers said videos posted earlier by user Vladimir Shugayev on MySpace showed the BMW violating traffic rules on Rublyovskoye Shosse.
The videos were removed from MySpace, but purported copies remained on YouTube on Sunday. The videos might imply that Minkh’s driver — who the Kremlin’s Khrekov said had 30 years of driving experience — had a habit of violating traffic rules.
Krekhov said Friday that he did not trust the videos, which he said were posted two to three weeks earlier by unspecified ill-meaning “forces.” He did not elaborate.
Minkh, 51, has not commented on the incident but said Friday that he has not seen any videos by Shugayev, RIA-Novosti reported. He also said he only used the Kremlin-owned BMW for work purposes.
TITLE: Lukashenko Growls at Inauguration
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko warned Friday that no dissent will be tolerated as he took the oath of office for a fourth time in a ceremony that was boycotted by European Union ambassadors.
Lukashenko was re-elected last month in a vote widely seen as fraudulent and has since cracked down on the opposition, including jailing hundreds of opposition protesters and also seven candidates who ran against him in the Dec. 19 poll. Lukashenko also closed the office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe after its election observers called the vote flawed.
“The people have spoken, confirming once again that Belarus is a free and democratic state, and the choice made by the people is sacred and indisputable,” Lukashenko said from the podium.
The 56-year-old president has accused Poland and Germany of plotting to overthrow him, claims both countries have rejected. The resulting tensions between the EU and Belarus are pushing the country back into Russia’s orbit.
This was on display during the swearing-in ceremony Friday, which was attended by Russia’s ambassador but boycotted by envoys of EU nations, who visited a university for students exiled from Belarus in neighboring Lithuania.
Lukashenko defended the legitimacy of his re-election and vowed that Belarus would stamp out any signs of the kind of peaceful revolutions that overthrew regimes in Ukraine in 2005 — known as the Orange Revolution — and Georgia in 2003, in what came to be known as the Rose Revolution.
“The virus of color revolutions defeats only weak nations,” Lukashenko said, adding that Belarus has “exhausted the limits of revolutions and upheavals” and his government would “safeguard security and stability against plots from within and outside the country.”
Those words were upheld outside the building on a central square later Friday, when up to 10 people who had arrived to peacefully protest the inauguration were bustled aboard a police bus.
One of the detained demonstrators, Maxim Vinyarsky, called Lukashenko “a dictator who stole power and takes political prisoners.”
The EU has threatened to reimpose travel restrictions on Lukashenko and other top officials over the flawed elections and subsequent crackdown if 30 opposition activists, including four presidential candidates, are not released. Lukashenko, who appeared to rule that out on Thursday, ordered his government to prepare harsh retaliatory measures if the sanctions are applied.
The travel ban on Lukashenko and others had been lifted in 2008 as the country, once described by the United States as Europe’s last dictatorship, made modest progress on rights issues.
Several EU member states and EU’s Foreign Affairs chief Catherine Ashton also have said they may reinstate the ban when EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels on Jan. 31.
Lukashenko’s security forces have conducted an uncompromising crackdown on anyone thought to have played a role in the protests, making more arrests, collecting fingerprints and confiscating journalists’ files and hard drives.
TITLE: ‘Mafia Boss,’ 7 Others Butchered in Stavropol
AUTHOR: By Alexey Eremenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A second mass slaughter in less than three months in southern Russia left eight people in the household of a reputed mafia don dead, although the killers missed an 8-year-old boy and a newborn, news reports said.
Vladimir Slizayev, 60, nicknamed “Khan,” was killed in his house in the city of Stavropol on Friday along with a daughter, three other relatives, a driver, a babysitter and a dog breeder, Interfax reported, citing the police. Gun-shot and stab wounds were found on the bodies of the victims, whom other than Slizayev were not identified.
Two of Slizayev’s grandchildren, the boy and the newborn, survived the slaughter, an Investigative Committee spokesman said, without elaborating or providing their names, RIA-Novosti reported.
Several news reports said the attackers missed the children because they were on the second floor of the house, while the other victims were on the first floor. But Lifenews.ru said the older child escaped and hid in the bushes in the yard, while the infant was to be killed by a blast that the killers hoped to carry out by leaving the gas vents in the house open.
A funeral has been scheduled for Monday, Interfax said, citing an unidentified family friend.
Jewelry and antiques were stolen from the house, and the attackers tried to open a safe but failed, Gazeta.ru said.
The Investigative Committee, which has opened a criminal case into the killings, said Slizayev was suspected of trafficking illegal drugs and had served prison time.
“Slizayev was a so-called ‘criminal authority’ involved in drug trafficking, according to police data. He had numerous criminal convictions,” the committee said in a statement on its web site Saturday.
Police believe the attack was prompted by a conflict between criminal gangs but have not ruled out the possibility that it might be simple robbery, a law enforcement source told RIA-Novosti.
Another source said composite pictures of suspects have been provided to local police, Interfax reported Saturday. He did not elaborate.
Slizayev survived an attempt on his life in 2003 that killed his wife. The attack was blamed on a rival gang, and most of its members were imprisoned last year, news reports said.
Twelve people were killed in the neighboring Krasnodar regional village of Kushchyovskaya in an attack on a local farmer’s family in November that shook the country. Eleven people have been detained, all of them suspected members of a criminal gang that has terrorized the village for years.
A Stavropol government official denied any link between the mass murder in Kushchyovskaya and Friday’s killings, saying these are “fundamentally different events,” RIA-Novosti reported.
TITLE: High Bidders Absent at Celebrity Auction
AUTHOR: By Alla Tokareva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: If the results of a celebrity auction at the weekend are any indication, charity is not what is used to be.
After raising 81.5 million rubles ($2.7 million) for children’s charity last year, a sixth auction of dignitaries’ artwork on Saturday brought in a scant 31.2 million rubles ($1 million), with the biggest bid going for a painting by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko — who skipped the event.
Some businessmen who attended the event at the Grand Hotel Europe blamed Matviyenko’s absence for the lackluster bidding.
But Matviyenko’s deputy, Mikhail Oseyevsky, who paid 1.35 million rubles ($45,000) for two works, told guests at the end of the auction that the governor did not attend because she was participating in talks with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and visiting FIFA president Sepp Blatter (see story, page 2).
Another explanation for the lack of high bidders may be that the auction lacked the big-name contributors from previous years, including Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev.
In addition, the starting price of each lot was 50,000 rubles ($1,680) this year, whereas at previous auctions it was 20,000 rubles ($670).
The auction, titled “Children’s Alphabet,” featured 29 pieces of art — one for each letter of the Cyrillic alphabet — painted at the outdoor Christmas market that operated on Ploshchad Ostrovskogo during the buildup to the festive season. The works were submitted by representatives of the government, the arts, show business and sport, and then touched up by professional artists for sale at the auction.
Saturday’s biggest bids were both placed by Vladimir Podvalny, co-owner of the Velikoluksky meat factory and the Divo Island amusement park on Krestovsky Island, who walked away with Matviyenko’s “New Year’s Eve” for 6 million rubles ($201,350) and Pskov Governor Andrei Turchak’s “Blini” for 3 million rubles ($100,675).
The artwork sold quickly, with other closing bids ranging from 400,000 to 800,000 rubles ($13,400 to $27,000). Buyers included two high-ranking city officials. Yevgeny Yelin, chairman of the Commission for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade, paid 450,000 rubles for businessman Igor Bukato’s “Firebird,” while Deputy Governor Oseyevsky paid 800,000 rubles for boxer Nikolai Valuyev’s “Raccoon” and 350,000 rubles for actress Tatyana Kalganova’s “Skirt.”
At the last auction, the most intense bidding was for a photograph by Medvedev, “Tobolsk Kremlin,” which ended up selling for a record 51 million rubles ($1.7 million). In 2009, the focus was on a painting by Putin, “Pattern on a Frosted Window,” which went for 37 million rubles ($1.2 million).
TITLE: Changes To Rules For City Properties
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The St. Petersburg administration passed a resolution Dec. 30 on new regulations concerning decisions to assign city-owned properties to developers.
The document appeared on City Hall’s web site Monday, and will be published officially in the next few days, according to a representative of the Construction Committee’s press service.
The new regulations will abolish the requirement for investors to undertake surveying works including site development plans. The Legal Code for Urban Planning stipulates that development plans should be drawn up by the authorities, and it was the infringement of this clause that prompted the change in regulations, according to Nikolay Krutov, deputy chair of the Construction Committee.
Development plans will now be the responsibility of the Committee for Urban Planning and Architecture. Despite the extra work, however, the budget for development planning has not been raised for 2011.
Developers will now have to lodge an application for the property that interests them with the Construction Committee, which will poll the views of specialist committees and district administrations before deciding whether to approve the investment project, according to Krutov. If approval is granted, the Committee will announce the application on its web site, giving other potential investors 30 days to declare their interest in the property.
If there is more than one application, the property will be opened for bidding. Otherwise, the government will pass a resolution to redesignate the property via a construction decree.
Krutov is confident that the new regulations will simplify business for investors, and significantly decrease the period required to obtain approval of projects. They will also benefit the city’s coffers, as properties will immediately be rented out for construction purposes at market prices, which are much higher than those for rental for surveying purposes.
The new system follows standard European practice, but there is a danger that the Committee for Urban Planning does not have sufficient resources to draw up so many development plans, warns Konstantin Kovalev, project director of the Nevskaya Ratusha development.
According to Alexander Pushkarsky, general director of Senator, a leading management company, 30 days is enough for a company to decide if a land plot interests them. Provided, he adds that the information on the Construction Committee’s web site is suitably comprehensive.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Mortgage Growth
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — In 2010, St. Petersburg banks issued 7,804 mortgage loans at a total value of 14.6 billion rubles ($490 million), according to the St. Petersburg Mortgage Agency — an increase on 2009, but still a long way from the 2008 pre-crisis high of 43.1 billion rubles.
The increase complimented a growth in the primary market for apartments of 30 percent, with sales predicted to return to 2008 levels by the summer, says local construction company Setl City.
Broadband Acquisition
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Mobile communications giant VimpelCom completed a deal late last week to acquire 100 percent of Eltel, a St. Petersburg broadband provider with 32,000 private and 2,000 corporate clients, according to sources at Eltel.
The deal was approved by the Federal Antimonopoly Service at the end of 2010. It is VimpelCom’s first major acquisition in St. Petersburg, according to Denis Kuskov, general director of TelecomDaily.
Supermarket Fines
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg Office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has fined supermarket chains Lenta and Norma for raising prices on flour and buckwheat last year. They were among eight retailers found guilty in December.
Lenta, which faces a total fine of 4.5 million rubles for price hikes on both products, blamed high procurement prices after a poor harvest last year. Norma was fined 126, 000 rubles ($4,233) for raising flour prices.
TITLE: Capital Thresholds Increasing for Banks
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government wants the country’s smallest banks to raise their capital to at least 300 million rubles, or $10 million, by 2015 and is looking to increase competition among lenders, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Monday.
The minister was speaking at a government meeting that mapped out a development strategy for the banking sector over the next five years.
Kudrin said he was sure that the 372 banks currently below the 2015 threshold would take the new target in their stride.
“We are confident that we will clear that bar as well,” he said at the meeting attended by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Central Bank Chairman Sergei Ignatyev and other government officials, which continued uninterrupted, despite the deadly bomb attack at Domodedovo Airport.
Since January last year, banks have had to maintain a minimum of 90 million rubles in capital — a requirement that has strained the more than 100 smaller banks.
As an intermediary goal in meeting the requirement, all banks are required to ensure that their capital exceeds 180 million rubles by next year.
Kudrin mentioned that the strategy’s other goals would include increasing competition on the market and promotion of high technology, but he didn’t elaborate, according to a transcript of the meeting posted on the Cabinet’s web site.
The minister noted that banking services were less profitable than steel making or energy generation. Banks posted a combined profit of 161 billion rubles in the first nine months of last year, while steel makers showed a total net income of 360 billion rubles and energy companies 250 billion over the same timespan, he said.
Putin was upbeat in summarizing the banking sector’s performance last year. Bank deposits grew 30 percent to 9.8 trillion rubles in 2010, he said.
“This tells of the trust that people have in banks,” he said.
Loan portfolios grew 12 percent to 18 trillion rubles, Putin said. Of that amount, 4 trillion rubles was given to individual borrowers, he said.
Mortgage loans grew 150 percent last year compared with the previous year, while the average ruble rate dropped to 12.8 percent by the end of last year from 14.2 percent from past January.
In other changes, Putin said the number of bank cards increased to 140 million last year.
The Cabinet said in a statement Tuesday that 955 banks and 57 other lenders currently operate in the country. Their assets grew 13.7 percent to 33.5 trillion rubles as of the start of this year, it said. The sector employs 800,000 people, the statement said.
Central Bank Chairman Sergei Ignatyev predicted that assets, capital and loans would grow at a rate of 17 percent to 20 percent over the next five years.
Putin noted that the Central Bank revoked licenses from 27 banks last year, down from 44 in 2009.
Kudrin said banks’ assets amount to 75 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Capital was 12 percent of GDP, while outstanding loans were 41 percent of GDP.
Bad debts owed by individuals stand at 7.3 percent of total loans, while bad corporate debts are 5.6 percent, Kudrin said.
Before the meeting, Putin visited the Central Bank’s main vault in Moscow to take a look at 6,100 boxes containing 766.5 metric tons of gold bullion stored there, including the 136.6 tons the bank bought last year.
About two-thirds of the country’s gold and currency reserves are stored in the vault.
TITLE: President to Tout Resorts in Davos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev will be looking to drum up international financial support for a $15 billion plan to construct a chain of ski resorts in the North Caucasus when he travels to the World Economic Forum later this week.
The proposed ski resorts are designed to rival the best that Alpine skiing has to offer and will be completed by 2020.
Medvedev will formally unveil the scheme at the Davos forum, which will be attended by thousands of business leaders and politicians from around the world, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported Monday.
The ski complexes will be located at Matlas, Dagestan; Mamison, North Ossetia; Arkhyz, Karachayevo-Cherkessia; Lago-Naki, Adygeya; and on Mount Elbrus in Kabardino-Balkaria.
The project, which has been named Peak 5642 after the height of Europe’s tallest peak, Mount Elbrus, is run by the state-owned company North Caucasus Resorts. Sberbank and VEB both are minority shareholders in the enterprise, which is 98 percent state controlled.
TITLE: Mazda Plans Automobile Assembly in the Far East
AUTHOR: By Alexei Nepomnyashchy, Yelena Vinogradova and Maxim Tovkailo
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mazda plans to begin assembly of its cars in Primorye, the region’s government announced, making it the first foreign car manufacturer to start a production facility after the crisis.
The deal was discussed at a meeting of Primorye Governor Sergei Darkin and a delegation from the Japanese company. Mazda will either build a new plant in the region or use existing production facilities and infrastructure, with primary capacity possibly reaching 30,000 automobiles, according to the announcement Friday.
A Mazda spokesman confirmed that talks with the governor had taken place, but declined further comment. In December 2010, Mazda president Takashi Yamanouchi said his company plans to examine the possibility of building new factories in developing countries, including Russia.
Mazda has not officially informed its dealers about local manufacturing, said Sergei Shcherbinin, executive director of retail at Rolf Group. But employees of two dealerships confirmed that they have heard about such plans.
The Far East is a logical choice because the lion’s share of components will be supplied from nearby Japan. For the project to be economically feasible, it must be done using an industrial assembly regime that enables the import of components at minimal rates, said Ivan Bonchev, head of Ernst & Young’s automobile practice.
An Economic Development Ministry spokesman said Mazda has not asked to conclude an industrial assembly agreement. A separate agreement will not be required because Mazda can do assembly with Sollers, a government official said.
Sollers already has an industrial assembly agreement but has not negotiated with Mazda yet, an Economic Development official said. A Sollers spokesman said the company is not in discussions with Mazda.
Sollers opened a factory with an annual capacity of 25,000 automobiles in Vladivostok in late 2009. The plant assembles crossovers for the Korean firm SsangYong. This year it will operate at maximum capacity, but in 2013 capacity will go up to 40,000 vehicles per year, a Sollers spokesman said.
Last year, although the Russian market grew 30 percent, Mazda’s sales in the country dropped 19 percent to 24,926 vehicles — in part due to the unfavorable yen-to-ruble exchange rate that made Mazda a very expensive brand, Shcherbinin said.
TITLE: At Davos, Kremlin Will Test Investor Interest
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev will gauge foreign interest in the companies that are slated for privatization during his two-day trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this week, his economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich said.
Medvedev will join executives from companies such as Deutsche Bank, Novartis, Siemens, PepsiCo and Boeing for a panel session, a closed-door meeting and a private reception at the ski resort of Davos on Wednesday and Thursday.
“It’s important for us to understand which [Russian] companies [slated for privatization] enjoy greater interest, and which less,” Dvorkovich said Friday. “This will affect how we will draw up the schedule for the privatizations.”
The government selected a group of domestic and international banks to advise on selling stock in several major state-controlled corporations over the next five years. The companies include oil producer Rosneft, bank VTB, electricity generator RusHydro and shipping operator Sovkomflot.
Medvedev will kick off his visit by sitting down with 100 captains of the global economy for a closed-door session of the International Business Council, Dvorkovich said.
“I think the main signal that Medvedev will give to the partners will be the one that Russia is open for investment … and for doing business together,” he said.
Later Wednesday, Medvedev will deliver a 20-minute keynote speech on the global economy at a plenary session before — for the first time in the forum’s history — taking a few top-voted questions that are being posted on the forum’s YouTube page.
Seven days after the launch of the service, the most popular of the 20 questions asked as of Friday afternoon, with 11 supporting votes, has prompted Medvedev to speak about how he would ensure the central role of youth in any decision on climate change. The author of the next best question wondered whether the World Economic Forum’s budget would be better used if it were donated to charitable organizations.
A reception at the end of the day Wednesday will provide a chance for forum participants to exchange “informal and candid” opinions with the president and hold short pre-arranged one-on-one conversations with him in a special area for five to seven minutes each, Dvorkovich said. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will attend the reception.
“I think they will talk and the conversation will be interesting,” Dvorkovich said.
On Thursday morning, Medvedev will host a session dedicated to economic modernization in Russia, such as the plan to build a Silicon Valley-like high-tech hub in Skolkovo, outside Moscow, and ambitions to turn the capital into one of the top-10 global financial centers.
Dvorkovich said he expected foreign companies at the forum to sign several deals to invest in Russia. He declined to elaborate.
The Russian delegation will include First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, several regional governors and business leaders.
TITLE: Bigger Bureaucracy Can Be Better
AUTHOR: By John Earle and Scott Gehlbach
TEXT: With great fanfare, President Dmitry Medvedev has announced his intention to slash bureaucracy by 20 percent. It is a bold attempt to deal with an unmanageable government apparatus, perhaps the chief cause of the country’s persistent economic problems. It is also profoundly mistaken.
The push to shrink the Russian bureaucracy is founded on two myths. The first myth is that the bureaucracy is unusually large. The second is that larger bureaucracies necessarily impede private economic activity. There is no empirical support for either proposition.
The myth of the mammoth Russian bureaucracy has its roots in an undisputed fact: The government is largely corrupt and inefficient. It does not immediately follow, however, that the bureaucracy is corrupt and inefficient because it is too big. Indeed, the Russian bureaucracy is quite small by world standards, even after substantial growth in recent years. Consider these numbers: In 2009, public administration employment at all levels of the Russian government accounted for 2.5 percent of the employed labor force. By comparison, public administration in members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, constituted on average 9 percent of the labor force in the early 1990s, according to the single available cross-national study of government employment. Indeed, there was not a single OECD country with a smaller bureaucracy in the early 1990s than Russia has today.
Of course, the more appropriate comparison may be with Russia’s peers among developing and transition countries. Yet even by this standard, Russia’s bureaucracy appears small. In the early 1990s, the typical post-Communist bureaucracy accounted for more than 4 percent of total employment — far smaller than in the wealthy states of the OECD, but larger than Russia’s today. As to the high-performing developing economies that are Russia’s foremost competitors for international capital, the bureaucracy in China was close to 3 percent of total employment in the early 1990s, and in Turkey close to 4 percent. However one slices the data, Russia’s bureaucracy does not look large.
Surely, the argument goes, any bureaucracy can be cut to the benefit of private economic activity. This is the second myth behind the Kremlin’s ill-considered drive. Without a concomitant push to cut red tape, shrinking government employment may leave entrepreneurs even more at the mercy of venal public servants. If it’s hard for a private firm to get a license or permit today, imagine what it will be like when the line backs up because of staff cuts. Desperate to get to the front of the line, owners and managers will be even more tempted to grease the wheels by providing side payments to those with the authority to make or break their businesses. Alone behind the counter, Russian bureaucrats will be like store clerks in a Soviet establishment: all power and no responsibility.
This is no mere theoretical possibility. Our research with David Brown of Heriot-Watt University, based on the statistical analysis of data from numerous Russian firms, suggests that precisely this dynamic was at work during the first decade and a half of the post-Communist economic transition. Our analysis takes advantage of large variation across regions in the size of the Russian bureaucracy. After stripping away the effects of other factors — population, urbanization and the like — what is left is regional patterns of public employment that appear to be rooted in Soviet-era development priorities.
Therefore, Russia offers a sort of experiment by which the effects of bureaucracy on private economic activity can be estimated. First, public servants actually appear to work more responsibly and honestly in regions where bureaucracies are relatively large. Firms in those regions report spending less time and money acquiring licenses from the state, and they pay smaller kickbacks for government contracts. Second, private firms are more productive (relative to state enterprises in similar industries) in regions with relatively large bureaucracies. With a less-hostile state apparatus, private-enterprise owners and managers face fewer constraints when taking actions that raise their productivity — for example, seeking out new markets, laying off redundant employees, starting new product lines and so forth.
The proposal to cut Russia’s bureaucracy is a misguided solution to the wrong problem. The country’s problem is not that its bureaucracy is too large. It’s that the bureaucrats it does have aren’t responsive to the people they serve. There are no easy solutions to that problem, but concentrating power in the hands of a few state officials runs the risk of making the situation worse, not better.
John Earle is professor of public policy and economics at George Mason University and professor of economics at the Central European University. Scott Gehlbach is associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
TITLE: Raising Patriots Rather Than Physicists
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: United Russia is apparently planning to solve the problem of Russia’s “brain drain” once and for all. Thanks to its proposed school reforms, there may very well be no more brains to drain from Russia.
The reforms presented to the Education and Science Ministry could be implemented as early as this year and propose that, beginning in the ninth grade, the school day will be divided in two parts.
During the first part, students will attend class as usual, but in the second, they will take part in “patriotic education.” This will include an old Soviet tradition of sending schoolchildren to old prominent World War II battlesites to dig for heroic artifacts and other activities aimed at increasing the level of student patriotism through the prism of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s autocratic power vertical.
Meanwhile, the number of academic subjects will be lowered to ten, of which only three will be obligatory: physical education, general safety and Russia in the World. The remaining seven will be optional. In other words, learning to love Putin will be obligatory, while math and English will be optional.
These reforms would mean that the ruling regime has not only destroyed modern Russia but now wants to destroy Russia’s future as well.
A state’s future success can be measured by how much it invests in education. Look at China, for example. The cumulative value of scholarships awarded to university students in China increased more than tenfold from $240 million in 2006 to $2.7 billion in 2008.
Russian schoolteachers earn an average of just 13,500 rubles ($450) per month, and high school graduates cannot get into universities without paying bribes. Take a look at what Russia’s privileged are learning at the so-called foreign campus of Moscow State University’s law school in Geneva. Their knowledge of international law leaves a lot to be desired, but they are very well versed in “extracurricular activities,” such as holding drag races in the Lamborghinis and Maseratis that their daddies gave them as high school graduation presents.
Even with its obsession with Communist ideology, the Soviet Union was nonetheless successful at turning out world-class scientists and technicians. The fact that the Patriotic Education class is replacing algebra and Love for Putin is replacing physics are clear signs of a dying society that has no more need for the exact sciences. I wonder where the top graduates of Love for Putin courses will find jobs. Surely not in Rusnano.
United Russia claims that the Education and Science Ministry’s reforms are needed to combat fascism. But education, of course, is both a country’s best weapon for modernization and its best defense against extremism. Who, after all, is the most likely to organize pogroms against minorities from the North Caucasus and Central Asia — university graduates with degrees in physics and mathematics, or Pyotr Pupkin who only has a high school degree whose favorite subject was the Love for the Motherland class in which he learned how the Jews crucified Christ?
The only difference between the Kremlin’s so-called youth policy and fascism is its ostensibly unofficial character. Yes, Russians did burn books in public squares, but that was organized by the Youth for Russia, and not by the Kremlin.
Recall how the pro-Kremlin youth group Stal translated the “Ten Commandments of National Socialism” written by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, replacing “Germany” with “Russia.” But that was a private matter.
If Lake Seliger becomes a place of formal instruction, if Goebbels’ slogans are studied in schools and if books are burned in Love for the Motherland classes, how will that differ from fascism?
Yulia Latynina hosts a radio talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Chekhov gets the Lithuanian treatment
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Lithuanian director Ionas Vaitkus opted for grotesque theatricality over realism in his new rendition of Anton Chekhov’s drama “The Seagull” that saw its premiere at the Baltiisky Dom theater festival on Friday, Jan. 21.
The first performance began with the disappointing announcement that the eminent Lithuanian actor Yuozas Budraitis, who was due to play Pyotr Sorin, had been admitted to hospital with a heart condition. The last-minute replacement, Anatoly Dubanov, was however an excellent choice, showing a touching old man, fragile and sentimental.
Natalya Indeikina projects the image of a minx bordering on a courtesan in her provocative portrayal of Irina Arkadina, Sorin’s sister. The character, an aging actress, sports a glitzy over-exposed outfit that includes a shiny red top and shamelessly short lacy skirt, and coquettishly flexes her muscles and pampers herself in an enormous bathtub.
This interpretation reaches its climax in a domination sex scene, with the diva passionately pulling at the hair of the utterly bewildered belletrist Boris Trigorin (Leonid Alimov).
In comparison with Chekhov’s delicate prose, the production offers a heavy dose of physicality that quickly becomes rather hard to bear. The image of the unfortunate seagull shot by the hunter appears in the form of a seductive-looking woman dressed in a furry red garment that is more reminiscent of the delights of a striptease club than of a wounded bird.
Set designer Ionas Archikauskas made a winning decision in creating a small performance space that revolves around itself in the center of the main stage – a virtual venue for the “shows within the show” staged by Arkadina’s son, Konstantin Treplev (Anton Bagrov). As some of the characters blur the boundaries between acting on stage and playing roles in real life, the smaller stage serves as a smart reminder of Arkadina’s hypocrisy and Trigorin’s shallowness.
The production’s weakest point, however, was Daria Mikhailova as the aspiring young actress Nina Zarechnaya.
Those who have seen a dozen or more renditions of “The Seagull” may discern two bizarre tendencies. The first is that it is typically the portrayal of the helpless Zarechnaya that ruins the show, and the second is that all bad Zarechnayas bear a clone-like resemblance to one another. Mikhailova, who is still a student of the St. Petersburg Academy of Theater Art, was a classic example of such a depiction, bursting with exultation while desperately lacking depth. The only thought prompted by watching Nina’s ecstatic behavior is to give the excitable young lady some valerian drops — the medicine we hear another of the play’s characters, doctor Yevgeny Dorn, routinely suggesting to his patients as a cure for their many ailments.
Nina Zarechnaya is undoubtedly a tough character to perform. The actress has to captivate the audience with her vitality and youthful energy, while showing why the character of the young woman craves the stage and exposing the talent that she has — and while the vitality is often overdone, the heroine’s soul and talent are rarely revealed and remain only on paper.
The farcical element is apparently the director’s response to Chekhov calling “The Seagull” a comedy. Yet the effort lacks consistency.
The drama that “The Seagull” is supposed to transmit is the story of how the talentless Arkadina and Trigorin flourish and prosper, while the gifted Treplev dies and Nina loses everything, including even her joie de vivre that originally drew people to her. Instead, the Baltiisky Dom’s production is a farcical take on the emotionally dead characters, and an ethereal Nina. The director creates no conflict or tension between the antagonistic characters, while “The Seagull” is first and foremost a story of frustration and dissatisfaction: Treplev’s unfulfilled aspirations, Maria’s unreturned feelings for Treplev, Nina’s lofty ambitions, Trigorin’s eternal fatigue...
This show is worth seeing, however, for the brilliant work of the unfailingly elegant Regimantas Adomaitis as Yevgeny Dorn, for Anatoly Dubanov’s warm and heartfelt Sorin — or for what Yuozas Budraitis is going to show in the role when he recovers — and out of curiosity about an attempt to inject some farce and grotesque elements into what is traditionally regarded as the sacred and well-protected territory of nostalgic drama and dry humor. This production is above all an experiment, which means there is room for growth.
“The Seagull” will next be performed on Feb. 2, 3, 17 and 18 at the Baltiisky Dom theater, 4 Alexandrovsky Park, tel: 232 3539. M: Gorkovskaya.
www.baltichouse.ru
TITLE: Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Íå ñòîèò âûåäåííîãî ÿéöà: It’s not worth a plugged nickel
ßéöî (egg) is a thing of beauty and the food of the gods. OK, I made up the bit about the gods. But down here on Earth, people like eggs, and I think it’s fair to say that Russian people especially like eggs. This used to be very clear back in the days before suburban supermarkets, when at the dacha you fed the family only on what you hauled out from the city. And so on Friday afternoons, every second car leaving the city had a big box of eggs balanced on the back window ledge, safe from rowdy dogs and antsy children.
For the record, the egg consists of a ñêîðëóïà (shell), æåëòîê (yolk or “yellow part”) and áåëîê (white). At breakfast, your Russian hosts might ask you how you want your eggs and offer you some poetic possibilities: âñìÿòêó (soft-boiled, from the now archaic word ìÿñòè, to mix up — presumably what you can do to a mushy egg); â ìåøî÷åê (a medium-boiled egg, when the soft yolk is in a “pouch” — ìåøî÷åê — of firm white); âêðóòóþ (hard-boiled); ÿè÷íèöà-ãëàçóíüÿ (fried eggs, from the image of an eye — ãëàç); or ÿè÷íèöà-áîëòóíüÿ (scrambled eggs, from the verb áîëòàòü — to mix or beat something). The humble hard-boiled egg can also be called êðóòîå ÿéöî and is a standard staple at picnics. Some day someone will explain why a boiled egg sprinkled with salt, so disdained in the kitchen, is transformed into the most delicious food on a river bank.
You should know that in most cases with eggs you use the verb pair åñòü/ñúåñòü (to eat), although you can also say âûïèòü (to drink), which is what you do with a raw egg. Well, not you — but some people who are very hungry or very hungover.
Eating eggs has given us an expression that I found puzzling at first: íå ñòîèò âûåäåííîãî ÿéöà (literally, “it’s not worth an eaten egg”). The phrase âûåäåííîå ÿéöî (literally, “eaten egg”) means something worthless, trifling, or of no concern. Now why would a nourishing, consumed egg be worthless? It turns out that the âûåäåííîå ÿéöî refers to what is left over after you eat an egg — the cracked and useless shell. In American English the equivalent in worthlessness is a plugged nickel — that is, a nickel with a plug in the center (after the valuable metal had been removed). Âñå ýòè ñåêðåòû ÿéöà âûåäåííîãî íå ñòîÿò (All those secrets aren’t worth a plugged nickel).
Russians raise their children with a little parable about eggs and hens. When a young’un gets too big for his britches and starts lecturing his elders, the elders say: ßéöà êóðèöó íå ó÷àò! (literally, “eggs don’t teach a chicken”). In English, this is often expressed by the odd phrase: Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, which brings us back to drinking your breakfast egg raw.
And then there’s a peeled egg — îáëóïëåííîå ÿéöî or ÿè÷êî. This is a nice metaphor for something clearly known (the bare egg) or ready to go (just pop it in your mouth). Some etymologists believe it’s the source of the phrase çíàòü, êàê îáëóïëåííîãî (to know someone inside out), another phrase uttered by elders to upstart kids: È òåáÿ, è Àíäðþøêó çíàþ êàê îáëóïëåííûõ, êîãî âû õîòèòå îáìàíóòü? (I can see right through you and Andryushka — who do you think you’re fooling?)
After all, we’re no spring chickens!
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, whose collection of columns, “The Russian Word’s Worth,” has been published by Glas.
TITLE: Honest rock and roller
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Rock and roll is still a form of rebellion for Vadim Kurylyov, the 46-year-old local musician who became famous for his work with Russia’s leading rock band DDT and now leads his own angry, guitar-driven punk band Electric Guerrillas.
“They say artists are not obliged to provide answers; artists should pose questions, but I thought, ‘Why can’t an artist sometimes give an answer as well?’” he says.
Kurylyov, who describes Electric Guerrillas’ most recent album as “firmly socially-oriented” and the band’s “most radical so far,” believes it will attract young supporters to his struggle against the Kremlin, and for his drastic dream of the creation of an independent republic of Ingria, the historical territory covering St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
“Ingria, as the closest region to Europe, should be the first to take the role of the destroyer of the empire from the northwest and escape from the authority of the Kremlin’s leadership,” Kurylyov wrote in the notes to the album, which is titled “A Century Under the Unquiet Sun” and features songs with titles such as “Protest and Fight” and “Revolution Is Within Us.”
Kurylyov performed with DDT, the mainstream rock band led by Yury Shevchuk, for 16 years, from its semi-obscure underground days to its national fame, first as bass player then as guitarist. He had been writing his own songs before he joined the band in 1986 and continued his career, both solo and with Electric Guerrillas, after he quit DDT in 2002.
“When I quit DDT, I stopped being a mainstream musician and became an underground, independent musician immediately,” Kurylyov said, speaking to The St. Petersburg Times at a local cafe late last week.
“I saw it all from the outside; it was like a revolution of consciousness. When I exited the door of DDT’s studio I found myself in another, open world… It’s like Buddha, who sat in a castle for 30 years and didn’t even know that people die.
“It was concealed from him that death existed so as not to damage his psyche, and he found out about it when he was 30, and it had a far greater impact on him than if he had learned about it as a child. That’s why he embarked on his complex journey that resulted in him becoming Buddha as we know him.”
Despite its success and income, DDT was an “anti-bourgeois” band, as Kurylyov puts it, performing half of its concerts for free for various causes and charities.
“Living in DDT’s world, I felt protected, even psychologically protected from many things, and stopped being protected when I went outside,” he said.
“I realized that there were only a few bands like DDT or Alisa, while all the rest are pure showbiz; everybody was busy making money. Even a lot of musicians who called themselves rock musicians haven’t done anything except make money for a long time. They have had nothing to do with rock culture.”
Kurylyov came up with the name “Electric Guerrillas” (Elektricheskiye Partizany) to distance himself from commercially-minded acts.
“I have positioned myself as a representative of the culture driven into the underground by the capitalist system of values — the one we’re fighting against,” he said.
“We can’t act directly; we are not allowed on television, or radio or anywhere. So what should we do? We’re waging our struggle by guerilla methods. We’re operating in territory occupied by showbiz.”
Originally, Electric Guerrillas performed what Kurylyov describes as “lyrical rock and blues psychedelia,” though not without a touch of punk. He says he became more and more radical as a result of the current political regime.
“It gets worse and worse in this country, and perhaps that pushes me to some sentiments of protest that punk music fits best,” Kurylyov said.
“I got tired of writing blurry, semi-surrealistic lyrics and wanted to call a spade a spade, wanted to poke fun at somebody, for instance the President. If I feel that that capitalist has a negative image, that he is a creep and a piece of shit, I want to sing exactly that. That’s why this album is so direct and open; it contains the spirit of protest.”
The history of rock music for Kurylyov, who sees himself as an anarchist, is a continuous struggle between the spirit of protest and corporations that try to stifle it.
“At some point, I realized that I couldn’t stand outside of the social processes,” he said.
“As an honest rock and roller, I think that the root of rock music is rebellion. Rock music was born as rebellion and has always produced protest explosions — primarily from young people who were not happy about the world they lived in. Rock music calls for changing the world for the better, that’s the essence of its rebellion, in the first place.”
Having started as “cultural guerrillas,” in Kurylyov’s words, the band eventually arrived at social punk rock.
“First we opposed commercial music, then I started to look further, to get to the root of it, and understood that commercial music or showbiz were not the main reason for our culture’s troubles. Commercial music and showbiz are consequences of the capitalist system, this type of social structure.
“That’s when I realized that we were not simply against showbiz, but we were against this whole system — not only culture, but its construction, industry, legal system, whatever. We’re against this system.”
Kurylyov says he was a revolutionary socialist before he arrived at his current anarchist views and started to reject the state.
“To put it simply, the state is a huge, mega racketeer, that’s how I see the state itself,” he said.
“It says to its population; ‘Look, I protect you, and you pay us and obey us,’ just as a racketeer does. The state always needs an enemy, even if there isn’t one, external or internal. ‘See how our glorious police fight criminals,’ even if everybody knows that the ‘glorious police’ are the main gangsters. We are ruled by a certain criminal body, the so- called ‘system.”
Even more direct is Underground Front, Kurylyov’s other project created to protest against specific actions by the authorities, and featuring musicians such as Televizor’s Mikhail Borzykin and Razniye Lyudi’s Alexander Chernetsky.
In October 2009, Underground Front wrote the song “City, Wake Up” — a protest against Okhta Center, Gazprom’s planned 400-meter skyscraper that opponents said would destroy St. Petersburg’s historic views — where Kurylyov sang with several singers of local rock groups, urging residents to oppose the construction, which was finally canceled late last year.
July 2010 saw the creation of “Song 31” supporting national protests in defense of the right of assembly, guaranteed by the constitution but routinely violated by the authorities. Both are featured on “A Century Under the Unquiet Sun.”
Kurylyov, whose grandmother worked in a firefighting crew extinguishing firebombs on the roofs during the Siege of Leningrad by putting them in baskets of water, said he could not tolerate the continuing destruction of historic St. Petersburg under the current city governor Valentina Matviyenko. He said the destruction was symbolized by the planned Okhta Center skyscraper, which he described as the “material embodiment of Putin’s power vertical.”
Underground Front and Electric Guerrillas uploaded the song onto YouTube, submitted it to be played at a rally and performed a club gig against Okhta Center, but Kurylyov is critical of more popular musicians, like Shevchuk or Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, whom he claims could have done more to protest the skyscraper.
“Neither Grebenshchikov nor Shevchuk, who had great opportunities, held any concert or event to protest it,” he said.
“They could have organized a rock festival, ‘Rock Against the Tower,” with the opportunities they had. They could have drawn lots of people. But they didn’t do it.”
Although some opponents of the Okhta Center are celebrating victory, Kurylyov mentioned the Literary House, a historic building on Nevsky Prospekt that is currently being demolished.
Kurylyov sees himself as a patriot of St. Petersburg, rather than a patriot of Russia.
“I see what’s happening here; the city is perishing and it’s first and foremost Moscow and the authorities in the Kremlin that are killing it,” he said.
“We are not allowed to elect the governor anymore, and we all know what this governor is doing here. They have destroyed more than the Nazis did during the war.”
The answer to the Kremlin’s oppression, in Kurylyov’s opinion, could be the Republic of Free Ingria — Kurylyov’s dream country where, according to the sleeve notes to “A Century Under the Unquiet Sun,” the album was recorded.
Ingria, or Ingermanland, is a historical region in the eastern Baltic stretching from Finland to Estonia that existed centuries before Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in the area.
Although the movement for an independent Ingria is practically non-existent, the idea is not perhaps as insane as it may at first sound. The Republic of North Ingria did once exist, from January 1919 to December 1920, enthusiastically producing its own postage stamps until the Bolsheviks put a stop to its ambitions.
“I am for Ingria separating itself from the empire, I’m anti-imperialist,” says Kurylyov, who uses the Ingermanland flag — which is yellow with a blue Scandinavian cross with red fimbriations — in Electric Guerrillas concerts and album designs.
“An anarchist can’t stand for an empire, while an anarchist society cannot be established on such a vast territory as the Russian Empire. It can be established regionally. Everything is being divided into regions in Russia now, and that’s why there is nothing impossible or unfounded about Ingria seceding.”
Electric Guerillas will play on Sunday, Jan. 30 at 7 p.m. at Orlandina, 3 Instrumentalnaya Ulitsa. Metro: Petrogradskaya. Tel. +7 921 961 1911.
TITLE: Chernov’s Choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: With the arrival of the New Year, the city’s club map is looking pretty different, for better or worse. There have been some sad losses, but there are also some interesting additions.
Gone is Tantsy, a great place in the center where some memorable concerts took place in the past couple of years.
Translated as “dance party,” it closed in November for a number of reasons, primarily financial, according to director Denis Rubin. Its all-night dance parties did not attract large crowds, while live concerts alone did not bring sufficient income, which all sounds fairly typical.
Meanwhile, Rubin said he was promoting live concerts at Erarta, Russia’s largest private museum of contemporary art, which was launched last year.
Occupying a five-story building on Vasilyevsky Island, Erarta houses several rooms where concerts can be held, from chamber experimental jazz to larger rock shows. The museum’s music program will be printed in the Gigs section of this newspaper.
Although Rubin mentioned this week that there is still some chance that Tantsy might reopen in some form or other, it will not be clear for several weeks.
Mod, a music club oriented at younger audiences that closed a year ago alongside other clubs and bars occupying the large building on Konyushennaya Ploshchad when the owner came up with other ideas for the building’s use, is back.
It found a new location close to its former one, and although it functioned partly as a terrace bar in summer while the concert room downstairs was still being renovated, it is now fully open, with almost daily concerts. It is still, however, a far cry from its heyday when the place frequently hosted three gigs a night.
Achtung Baby, another Konyushennaya Ploshchad venue, has been reincarnated as Radio Baby on Kazanskaya Ulitsa.
Due to the tiny size of the stage, there is no regular live program, but there are occasional “friendly” performances or showcases. The place’s specialty is internet radio broadcasting, with a couple of original programs and DJ sets transmitted live from the club at nights. One of the programs is compiled by DJ Messer, otherwise known as Denis Kuptsov of Spitfire and Leningrad fame. The broadcasts are available from Radio Baby’s web site at www.radiobaby.com.
Unpredictably, Arctica, a venue mostly known for its metal and folk-rock shows, has started to demonstrate some imagination. And So I Watch You From Afar, an intriguing four-piece instrumental post-rock band from Belfast, Northern Ireland, will perform there on Wednesday, Jan. 26, while Friday will see a gig by -OZ-, a visual kei, alternative metal band from Tokyo.
Wikipedia teaches us that “visual kei” is a “movement among Japanese musicians that is characterized by the use of make-up, elaborate hair styles and flamboyant costumes, often, but not always, coupled with androgynous aesthetics.” Hajimemashite!
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Space age modern: Architecture around the U.S.S.R.
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Mention the words “Soviet architecture” and the cavalcade of buildings that immediately springs to mind is that of hulking brutalism, Stalinist neo-classical kitsch or, the scourge of inner cities everywhere, the pre-cast paneled apartment block. A new book and exhibition project looks set to change all that, however, bringing an overdue appreciation for what can only be called Space Age Modern.
The project is the brainchild of Frederic Chaubin, chief editor of the French fashion and lifestyle magazine, Citizen K. Too clever by half, it is titled “Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed” in a convoluted bid to render the Russian abbreviation for the U.S.S.R. in English.
Divided into five sections — Entertainment and Culture, Science and Technology, Sports and Youth, Rites and Symbols, Health and Resorts — the book presents 90 buildings from fourteen former Soviet republics that express what the author considers to be the fourth age of Soviet architecture. “An unexpected rebirth of imagination, an unknown burgeoning that took place from 1970 until 1990.”
Rather than let the images exist as what they are — admirably composed pictures of some striking and surprisingly handsome buildings — the author embarks on an elaborate bout of mythologizing that is often as chauvinistic as it is naive. These buildings are “unexpected” and “unknown” only in so far as they have heretofore gone unrecognized by Western Europe’s fashion pack.
In the search for a conceptual framework with which to support his understandable but rather obvious interest in these buildings, the author invokes the exotic with an emphasis on inaccessibility and otherness. Preferring hollow cliche and circular logic, Chaubin minimizes the fact that these buildings have been part of the landscape for quite a long time. Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel and Daniel Liebeskind have all drawn on the legacy of Soviet architecture. And one need only ask local residents for whom these buildings are part of their daily lives to know that the structures, while certainly marginalized, are far from unfamiliar. Who in their right mind could fail to notice a flying saucer parked on their doorstep?
When asked if there was any message behind the photographs in a 2006 interview on the occasion of an exhibition at British fashion designer Paul Smith’s gallery in Japan, Chaubin’s rather feeble response was: “Some kind of emotion… could be nostalgia.” Which is exactly right and places the project in a context that makes sense: As part of a larger trend that some have dubbed “ostalgie” — a portmanteau of the German words for east and nostalgia.
Flash forward four years and the marketing machine has started piling on the conceptual baggage with the result that these buildings, in the words of the press release for the book, “outline the geography of the U.S.S.R., showing how local influences made their exotic twists before the country was brought to its end.”
One of the few moments of clarity and honesty comes mid-way through the introduction when the author says, “The key to Soviet architecture is above all political. The causes of its evolution are to be sought not in architectural theory but, more prosaically, in the regime and its evolution. Nowhere else and nowhere over such a long period of time has the urban landscape been so directly shaped by power.” Which is about all that needs to be said. But such brevity doesn’t necessarily fulfill the needs of publishers.
It can only be hoped that the project will go some way toward bringing about a change in attitude towards these often-maligned buildings here in Russia and the CIS. It might just help postpone their destruction in a climate where even well loved buildings are routinely demolished to make way for tasteless new apartment blocks, malls and luxury hotels. For this reason alone, the book is to be celebrated even if it does make for a rather exasperating read.
“Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed” by Frederic Chaubin is published by Taschen Books and released to coincide with an exhibition of photographs at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany that runs from Jan. 29 through March 27.
TITLE: In the Spotlight: Orthodox Dress Codes
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Last week, Vsevolod Chaplin, a top Orthodox Church spokesman, had a go at Russian women for “mistaking the street for a striptease,” saying that women who wore too few clothes and too much makeup would never find Mr. Right.
Chaplin, who unfortunately is far more talkative than his famous namesake, has already given his august opinion that women who wear miniskirts and get drunk are to blame if they get raped.
His latest statement got a bit of sneaking sympathy from artsy blogger types who would not be seen dead in leopard print, while rights activists such as Lyudmila Alexeyeva became unlikely defenders of lipstick.
Chaplin was backed by Muslim clergy, including Mukhammedgali Khuzin of Perm, who told Interfax, “It’s very difficult for me to imagine Mrs. Alexeyeva wearing a miniskirt.”
Without getting into a theological debate, I couldn’t help noticing that he made the comments on the same day as the Russian Orthodox Church actively encouraged people to strip down to bikinis and jump into holes in the ice in front of priests.
Tabloid photographers at least tend to have unholy thoughts about this and concentrate on the younger, more nubile contingent.
As for the church’s views on women’s clothing, it’s fair to say that I would have gone into a lot more beautiful churches if I hadn’t feared an elderly woman shouting at me for wearing trousers as if it were still the 1950s.
Chaplin’s wisecracks were also badly timed, since it’s hard to imagine anything less like a stripper than the bundles of fur coats, jumpers, thermals and woolly tights walking down the streets at the moment — unless he was referring to the hasty removal of such layers when entering another superheated office.
Personally, I admire Russian women for trying to dress sexily in difficult circumstances.
Chaplin should appreciate what an art it is to dress nicely when you can’t wear white or anything that trails in slush, mud and dust, and your footwear needs to be able to maneuver on polished ice and wade through giant puddles.
And surely most men agree.
One expat journalist told me recently that “Russian women wear tight jeans and high heels, and British women wear baggy jeans and trainers. I know which is sexier,” as I guiltily hid my baggy jeans and clumpy boots under the table.
I’d say Chaplin was years out of date, anyway.
It may have been a fashion free-for-all in the 1990s when people did not have Elle or Afisha magazines to rap them on the knuckles. But now people with the money not to shop at markets for their clothes are just as scared of fashion faux pas as anyone else.
Wear tight, revealing clothing and lashings of lipliner, and you might as well shout “up from the provinces” or “nouveau riche and hasn’t gotten around to hiring a stylist.”
It is the exceptions that prove the rule, and this month ballerina Anastasia Volochkova decided that it would be a good idea to publish photographs on her blog of herself lying on a beach completely nude.
Recently upbraided by it-girl Ksenia Sobchak for her taste in acrylic nails and permanent makeup, Volochkova doesn’t have much sense and was seemingly unaware that she might be causing offence, since she was in the Maldives, a Muslim country.
She explained her decision to publish the snaps to the Moskovsky Komsomolets tabloid, saying that she’d been stalked by a photographer and decided to get some properly posed shots, as well as quash rumors that she had breast implants.
But she seemed outraged by the attention she caused.
“When I published photos from my concert, saying how great it was, no one raised an eyebrow,” she complained.
“But as soon as I showed my body, they turned on me. People in our country have completely degraded!”
TITLE: Culinary exchange
AUTHOR: By Philip Parker
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: There are less than a handful of Indian restaurants in St. Petersburg, so the idea of serving Indian in a pub is positively avant-garde. It is certainly the main attraction at Baltika Brew, the new brewpub a few steps from the archway of the General Staff Building. Its peerless location and sponsorship from local brewing giant Baltika almost guarantee its longevity, but a recent visit suggested there is still plenty of fine-tuning to be done.
Let’s start with the premises. Built to house the Azov-Don Commercial Bank in 1907-1913, the building is a fine example of Russian Neoclassical Revival, granite-faced and austerely elegant. It is not the most obvious site for a pub, but microbreweries require a lot of space. Baltika Brew occupies the bank’s 1,700-square-meter operations hall, which until recently served as the city’s long-distance telephone exchange, so any foreigners who were in St. Petersburg in the nineties may remember coming here to call home.
For first-time visitors, on the other hand, the dimensions — particularly the seven-meter-high ceilings — come as a shock.
In the daytime, the huge windows and soft yellow and pink tones of the walls provide warmth and light, but after dark, minimal lighting means that almost anywhere you choose to sit, there are at least two meters of oppressive gloom hanging over your head. The bar’s web site claims the space is a mixture between “an English pub, a Russian tavern, a waiting room....” Unless a significant proportion of Baltika Brew’s 500 dining places are occupied, it can just as easily call to mind the hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
Come with a decent-sized group, and you can probably generate enough good cheer to dispel the foreboding atmosphere. A decent group was also, it turns out, what our party of two needed to get through our order.
Supervised by Delhi native Sumit Gupta, the Indian section of the menu covers only two pages (the rest of the menu includes Russian, German and British pub favorites), and is disappointingly short of vegetable dishes. We ordered lamb samosas (145 rubles, $4.80), along with pakora mix (140 rubles, $4.70) to start with, followed by Goan fish tikka (240 rubles, $8) and the Baltika Brew house Indian tandoor mix (730 rubles, $24.35). This was a mistake, as one of the “six types of kebab” in the mix turned out to be the fish tikka. This could, of course, have been avoided if our friendly, English-speaking waiter had had even the faintest idea about the items on the menu or been prepared to check with the kitchen rather than simply shrugging his shoulders. As side dishes, we chose dal makhani (230 rubles, $7.65) and rice with saffron (130 rubles, $4.35).
Everything was brought at once, and it was immediately obvious that we had over ordered. Some warning would have been appreciated. The tandoor mix took up nearly the whole table, the portions of rice and dal were a meal in themselves and, as it soon became clear, nearly every dish we had ordered was incredibly calorific.
The samosas were excellent — light, crispy pastry encasing moist, subtly spiced lamb. The pakora mix (potatoes and cauliflower deep-fried in batter) was also a success, showing the same light hand with spices and accompanied by the same three sauces — sour and spicy tomato, buttery cashew, and mint. They cropped up again with the tandoor mix, which was indeed a mixed pleasure. Two varieties of chicken, paneer cheese, and especially peppery minced lamb kebabs were all superb, but the pork was fatty and forgettable, while the fish was unpleasantly pungent and incredibly greasy. And there was still another full plate of it to get through. We turned to the dal in the hope of some fat-free relief, but that too was very, very heavy on the butter. It smelled good, but the texture and floral spices prompted my companion to describe it as “like eating hand cream.”
The table was still covered with uneaten food when we were forced to admit defeat. The cooking had been for the most part commendable, but the menu definitely requires some changes to make it possible to order a more or less balanced meal, and at the very least the wait staff need a crash course in the basics of Indian cuisine.
A final note on the beer: The microbrewery on the premises has yet to be completed, so the beers on offer are currently brewed off-site under the auspices of Baltika. The lager (110 rubles, $3.65) was not available (somewhat disconcertingly, considering it was 8 p.m. on a Friday evening), so we tried first the ale (120 rubles, $4), which was a reasonable but rather bland approximation of a light English bitter, and then for the same price the barkhatnoye, a fruity, Czech-inspired brew that, along with the samosas, was the only unqualified success of the evening.
TITLE: Abbas Defiant Over Al-Jazeera Leaks Scandal
AUTHOR: By Karin Laub
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinians now have their own version of a WikiLeaks scandal.
President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides went on the attack Monday, accusing Al-Jazeera television of lies and distortions in publishing the so-called “Palestine Papers,” which claim that Palestinian negotiators were ready to make significant concessions for a peace deal with Israel.
Despite the angry denials, the hunt was on for the leaker.
The new documents indicate 2008 talks made progress on dividing Jerusalem — and the resulting backlash suggests the Palestinian public has not been prepared by their leaders for the far-reaching concessions deemed necessary for a peace agreement.
The Arab satellite station said it obtained hundreds of transcripts and notes from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It began releasing them in a Sunday broadcast, the first of four prime-time shows on the documents this week.
On Monday, an angry crowd of about 250 Palestinians gathered outside the West Bank’s main Al-Jazeera office, with some smashing the station’s logo and glass panels in the front door.
In the search for the leak, suspicion fell on low-level employees from a support office for Palestinian negotiators. Palestinian intelligence searched computer files in the office Monday, but it was not clear if any arrests were made.
Abbas dismissed the broadcasts as “shameful.” Members of his inner circle accused Al-Jazeera of distorting reality, and said the station and its sponsors in the Qatari government were trying to discredit the Western-backed Palestinian leadership. They suggested the station was promoting the agenda of Abbas’ rival, the Islamic militant Hamas, which opposes negotiations with Israel.
The Palestinian leader’s detractors say Abbas has been misleading the Palestinian public about the extent of the concessions he is willing to make in exchange for an elusive deal with Israel.
The uproar could further weaken Abbas and boost Hamas, with some analysts predicting the nightly revelations may cause serious damage to Abbas’ standing.
Al-Jazeera, citing the transcripts, said Palestinian leaders agreed to an Israeli annexation of large areas of war-won east Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ would-be capital, and that they were willing to consider a resettlement of only a nominal number of refugees.
The report is bound to inflame Palestinian public opinion, said Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
“Palestinian opinion is still quite adamant about Palestinian rights,” she said. Palestinians “are not willing to entertain, if this is true, any of the compromises that were revealed in the documents.”
Negotiations between Abbas and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu are deadlocked, and Netanyahu had no comment on Monday.
The Al-Jazeera documents focused on talks with Netanyahu’s more pragmatic predecessor, Ehud Olmert, and indicate the outlines of a possible deal were discussed — confirming previous, less detailed accounts provided by Olmert and Abbas.
In such a deal, a Palestinian state would be established in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 Mideast War. Borders would be adjusted to enable Israel to keep some of the largest of the dozens of settlements it built there.
In negotiations in 2008, Abbas and Olmert had made enough progress to haggle over the size of a land swap. The Palestinians offered 1.9 percent of the West Bank in exchange for an equal amount of Israeli territory. Olmert asked for 6.5 percent. Those talks ended abruptly in December 2008, when Israel launched its three-week war on Hamas-ruled Gaza, to halt rocket fire from there.
Al-Jazeera says Palestinian negotiators agreed that as part of a land swap, Israel could annex all but one of the Jewish enclaves it has built in east Jerusalem, home to some 200,000 Israelis.
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said there was “nothing new” in the documents because any partition is likely to be based on parameters set a decade earlier by former President Bill Clinton — which provided that areas settled by Jews in east Jerusalem remain Israeli and Arab neighborhoods go to Palestine.
Transcripts of two rounds of negotiations in May and June of 2008 were striking in the way they ostensibly showed Palestinian leaders making that concession.
Officials close to the talks confirmed Monday that a land swap map presented by the Palestinians at the May 4, 2008 meeting had Israel annexing all but one of its east Jerusalem enclaves. As part of that proposal, the Palestinians said they refused to let Israel keep several major settlements, including Maaleh Adumim near Jerusalem and Ariel deep inside the West Bank.
TITLE: Accused In Giffords Shooting Enters Plea
AUTHOR: By Jacques Billeaud
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHOENIX — The 22-year-old man accused in a deadly Arizona rampage that critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has made his first public statement regarding his role in the shooting: He’s not guilty.
Jared Loughner entered the plea Monday to federal charges of trying to assassinate Giffords and kill two of her aides. He also faces murder charges in the deaths of a federal judge and another Giffords aide killed in the Tucson shootings, and more charges were expected.
The Tucson man had his wrists cuffed to a chain around his waist; eight U.S. marshals kept watch in the packed Phoenix courtroom and gallery above. Investigators have said Loughner was mentally disturbed and acting increasingly erratic in the weeks leading up to the attack on Jan. 8 that killed six and wounded 13.
Giffords, a three-term Democratic congresswoman, was shot in the forehead and spent two weeks in a Tucson hospital before she was flown to Houston to begin her rehabilitation. Among the six who died in the attack at a constituent event was a 9-year-old girl who was interested in politics and was taken there by a neighbor to meet Giffords.
Christina Taylor Green’s family, as well as a Giffords intern who cared for the congresswoman after she was shot, are expected to attend President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night. Daniel Hernandez was hailed as a hero for rushing to Giffords’ side and applying pressure to her wounds before paramedics arrived.
Also expected to attend the address is the four-member Arizona medical team that treated Giffords, her office said Monday. Her new medical team in Houston said the next update on her condition would come when they are ready to move Giffords to the rehab hospital.
Loughner’s hearing Monday did not offer any indication of a defense strategy. His attorney, Judy Clarke, said she wasn’t raising issues of competency “at this time” after the judge asked whether there was any question about her client’s ability to understand the case against him.
If Clarke uses mental competency questions as a defense and is successful, Loughner could be sent to a mental health facility instead of being sentenced to prison or death.
The federal murder charges Loughner faces carry a potential death penalty, which require a painstaking process under Justice Department rules.
Prosecutors said they would know within the next 30 days whether additional federal charges would be filed against Loughner.
TITLE: More Australians Flee as Floods Move Across SE
AUTHOR: By Rohan Sullivan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia — An inland sea of muddy floodwaters swamping southeastern Australia pushed its way toward rural communities Tuesday, threatening homes and businesses as the death toll from the disaster climbed.
Emergency services were focusing their efforts on Swan Hill, a town 340 kilometers northwest of the Victorian state capital of Melbourne, where the Loddon and Murray rivers meet. Floodwaters are expected to peak there next week when the sea arrives, the State Emergency Service said.
Australia’s flood crisis began with record rains in November that left huge parts of the northeast state of Queensland under water. On Monday, Queensland police said they had found the remains of two more flood victims west of the state capital, Brisbane. Since November, the floodwaters in Queensland have killed 35 people, police said.
The Queensland floods damaged or destroyed 30,000 homes and businesses and caused at least $3 billion in damage to crops and lost coal exports. Brisbane, the country’s third-largest city, was swamped for days.
The flood disaster is now moving across southeast Victoria, where driving rains have forced swollen rivers over their banks. The State Emergency Service said 76 towns in Victoria have been affected by flooding, with 1,770 properties suffering some water damage.
Volunteers have spent the past week piling tens of thousands of sandbags around Swan Hill, a town of 10,000 people that lies in the water’s path.
But on Tuesday, State Emergency Service operations director Tim Wiebusch said smaller communities surrounding the town were the areas of most concern, with 250 properties at risk of inundation.
“We are expecting at this time the main levee around Swan Hill will hold, protecting the main township,” Wiebusch told Australia’s Nine Network. “It’s really those communities and houses on the outside of the main township’s levee that we have concerns for at this time.”
Hundreds of residents from those towns have been evacuated since Sunday. At 90 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide, the inland sea is 900 square kilometers larger than the area Paris covers.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has appointed a task force of some of Australia’s wealthiest corporate leaders to help formulate plans to deal with the crisis, which the government says will be one of the costliest in the country’s history.
Gillard met with the task force in the stricken city of Brisbane on Monday and said afterward she wanted its members to keep pushing for business donations to help recovery efforts.
Some economists have warned the floods could shave almost 1 percent from Australia’s economic growth this year, which is variously forecast at between 3 percent and a little less than 4 percent.
The government has not yet given its estimates of the cost of the disaster, but Treasurer Wayne Swan said this week the impact will be felt for years. The government will announce its first cost estimates on Friday.
TITLE: Japanese Monkey Captured After Daring Cage Break
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO — A marauding monkey confined to a zoo after it bit 120 people during a two-month rampage in resort towns of central Japan briefly escaped captivity Tuesday before it was captured again.
The macaque named Lucky slipped out of a government-run nature park Monday while a keeper was cleaning her cage. Officials raised the alert across the scenic town of Mishima, where she had attacked residents last year. Park and city officials found Lucky at a public park a day later.
“Her capture was easy. We called her name repeatedly, and she came to us,” city official Hidetsugu Uchida said. “She has been used to being called by her name.”
Lucky will be sent back to Mishima’s Rakujuen zoo where she has become one of the most famous residents since her previous capture in October.
Macaques are one of the most common wild mammals in Japan, and are considered a nuisance in rural areas.