SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1735 (46), Wednesday, November 14, 2012
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TITLE: South Stream Pipeline Gets Final Approval 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Gazprom-led consortium gave a final approval to the underwater part of the 10 billion euro ($12.7 billion) South Stream gas pipeline, the gas giant said Thursday.
Gazrpom also separately cleared the final hurdle for the pipeline's overland leg. 
The board of the South Stream Transport consortium convened in Milan on Wednesday and made a final investment decision that paves the way for construction of the underwater section, Gazprom said in a statement.
Italy's Eni, France's EDF and Germany's BASF joined Gazprom in the consortium, which they decided Wednesday to register in Amsterdam.
The consortium plans to break ground on the project near Anapa on Dec. 7 and begin gas supplies at the end of 2015.
Gazprom made separate final investment decisions for the stretches of the pipeline that will traverse European countries. The last investment deal was signed Thursday with Bulgaria. 
Some industry experts have criticized the project as dubious for reasons that include the contraction of Gazprom's exports to Europe over recent years.
"It's not that Gazprom badly needs additional capacity for deliveries to European customers," said Yulia Voitovich, an industry analyst at Investcafe. 
Work on South Stream will increase Gazprom's spending, much to the chagrin of company stockholders, she added. 
The underwater pipeline will have a capacity of 63 billion cubic meters and run for more than 900 kilometers, resurfacing near Varna, Bulgaria. The route will then continue overland to ultimately reach Italy.
A portion of the underwater pipeline will cross Turkey's exclusive economic zone, and Turkey has given its consent.
Gazprom owns 50 percent of the consortium, and Eni owns 20 percent. The two other participants split the remaining stock.
Gazprom will build a liquefied natural gas plant with a capacity of 10 million tons in the Primorye region's Khasan district, the regional government's press service said, Interfax reported. 
The plant's first production line will be put into operation in 2018, the second one will be launched in 2020, and construction will be completed in 2025, according to Interfax.

TITLE: Belarus Sees Itself as Commercial Gateway to the Customs Union 
AUTHOR: By Lena Smirnova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MINSK — The Belarussian government has thrown open its doors to foreign investors by lifting restrictions on the privatization of state-owned companies.
Any state-owned company can be privatized, said Belarussian Prime Minister Mikhail Myasnikovich at the opening of the 7th Belarussian Investment Forum in Minsk on Friday.
"Belarus needs foreign direct investment. Belarus will do everything to get it here," he said.
In March 2011 the government gave a list of 244 state-owned enterprises that should be privatized by the end of 2013 and another 134 that were supposed to be transformed into joint stock companies. Friday's announcement extends the list further.
About 600 guests from 30 countries are attending the forum. The biggest delegations are from the European Union, China and Russia, but also present are representatives of multinational companies and major international financial institutions.
Foreign investors, including companies from the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy and Cyprus, are expected to sign 12 agreements with the Belarussian government at the forum about joint projects.
Belarus already has about 6,000 foreign enterprises — most of them from Russia and former Soviet Union republics — that work on its territory. Officials hope that liberalizing privatization will tempt more private investors to take a slice of the largely state-controlled economy. Currently, up to 80 percent of the companies in Belarus belong to the state.
In addition to privatization, the forum touted information technology and pharmaceuticals as the investment areas with the most potential.
Investment activity in Belarus will be particularly lucrative for foreigners because it will open the doors to the bigger economies of Russia and Kazakhstan, which together with Belarus function as a common economic space, said Grigori Rapota, the Belarussian secretary of the Union State.
"By developing your business in Belarus, you will have access to the markets in Russia and Kazakhstan," Rapota said.
Viktor Khristenko, chairman of the Eurasian Economic Commission, added that Belarus may soon start actions to become a member of the World Trade Organization, which would further increase its attractiveness to investors.

TITLE: Dozens Rally for Jailed Opposition Activists 
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Investigative Committee headquarters Thursday and demanded that opposition activists Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev be released from jail.
A criminal case against the two senior Left Front members was opened last month following allegations in a state television program that they plotted riots with a Georgian power broker.
At Thursday’s “Occupy” rally, protesters also called for the release of several people detained on allegations of inciting violence at a May 6 opposition rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad, saying the government crackdown on the opposition had gone too far.
The day before the rally, the Investigative Committee officially refused to allow members of President Vladimir Putin’s human rights council to visit Razvozzhayev in jail.
“While the investigation is under way, additional meetings are unnecessary,” the council’s head, Mikhail Fedotov, told the Izvestia newspaper Wednesday, relaying the Investigative Committee’s statement.
Council member Valery Borshchyov added by phone Thursday that the Investigative Committee had begun checks into Razvozzhayev’s alleged abduction following a request by the Public Monitoring Commission.
Borshchyov emphasized that Razvozzhayev’s case was similar to that of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in pretrial detention after accusing state officials of embezzlement.
“Conditions in the detention center where Razvozzhayev is being held are fine, but the fact that he was intimidated and tortured make it possible to draw such an analogy,” Borshchyov said.
While details about Razvozzhayev being taken into custody in Kiev remain hazy — he has claimed he was abducted by masked men and later tortured by Russian authorities — Ukraine said Wednesday that it would not open a criminal case into the incident.
Nikolai Kovalchuk, head of the Ukrainian Migration Service, told reporters that his nation had not received a political asylum request from Razvozzhayev, though he confirmed that Razvozzhayev had approached an Israeli refugee organization.
A representative of the United Nations Refugee Agency in Kiev, Alexandra Makovskaya, told RIA-Novosti that the Ukrainian Interior Ministry would not open such a case because Razvozzhayev legally crossed the border into Russia and did not make any claims at passport control.
Razvozzhayev’s lawyer Mark Feigin said by phone Thursday that Russian investigators were going to bring additional charges against his client on Nov. 22, but because he signed a nondisclosure agreement he could not say what the charges would be.

TITLE: With Anti-Corruption Drive, Kremlin Adopts Navalny Tactic 
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — When President Vladimir Putin was asked in an interview last month about anti-corruption lawyer Alexei Navalny, he indicated that he thought opposition leaders had achieved little of substance.
“I’m not repudiating anyone, and I don’t want to cheapen the merits of any of the possible leaders of the opposition,” he said. But “besides sensation, clamor and putting on a show, a person must do something to demonstrate that he is capable of positive [results], and only after that can he aspire to be a leader of anything.”
But over the last two weeks, the Kremlin has indicated that it knows the value of Navalny’s anti-corruption campaigns, initiating an apparent drive of its own that experts say could have unpredictable consequences for the ruling elite.
Following the dismissal of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on Nov. 6 amid a fraud scandal at a defense agency, allegations have surfaced regarding the misuse of billions of rubles connected to the implementation of the Glonass navigation system and the ambitious Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Both Glonass and APEC were overseen by powerful members of the Kremlin elite: head of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov, who formerly oversaw Glonass, and First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who was the government’s point man for September’s APEC summit.
Ivanov, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer, said he had known about the investigation into the misuse of Glonass funds but kept silent so as not to disrupt the case.
While it remains to be seen how far the Kremlin will go in its anti-corruption campaign against members of the elite, some government officials and pro-Kremlin politicians say the signal has been sent.
“Investigators understand that they are allowed to act, Putin understands that he needs to act, and those who oversee the budget have understood that they can’t do this anymore,” said Mikhail Barshchevsky, the liberal-leaning federal courts representative for the government, a position comparable to the U.S. solicitor general.
Barshchevsky made his comment in a TV expos&#233; aired earlier this week about corruption at the Defense Ministry supply agency Oboronservis, the case linked to Serdyukov’s dismissal.
The program, hosted by Arkady Mamontov, a journalist whose shows often signal a Kremlin-orchestrated campaign, detailed the enrichment of close members of Serdyukov’s family who were allegedly involved in selling lucrative Defense Ministry property through Oboronservis.
Investigations of Oboronservis, members of whose management are accused of illegally selling $95.5 million worth of real estate, land and shares at below-market rates, have led to the arrests of some company executives who were Serdyukov proteges. Oboronservis was chaired by Serdyukov until last year.
Serdyukov was replaced as defense minister by close Putin ally Sergei Shoigu, the longtime emergency situations minister, who has initiated a reshuffle in the Defense Ministry.
On Thursday, two more Serdyukov appointees, Yelena Kozlova and Dmitry Chushkin, were dismissed from their posts as deputy defense ministers and replaced by Ruslan Tsalikov, an ally of Shoigu, and Yury Borisov, a former deputy industry and trade minister who most recently held a senior post on a government military-industrial commission.
The order making the replacements was signed by Putin, who as president oversees all senior defense appointments.
The ouster of Serdyukov, who was unpopular with the public, has led to a rise in Putin’s approval ratings, according to internal polls prepared for the Kremlin, RBC Daily reported Thursday, citing Kremlin officials.
Putin’s approval rating rose to 51 percent by Nov. 10, a 6 percent increase from October, according to a VTsIOM survey, although the number of respondents who said they disapproved of Putin also grew from 7 to 11 percent in November. The survey had 1,600 respondents and a margin of error of 3.4 percent.
Valery Fyodorov, head of the state-run VTsIOM polling agency, has said that the government’s new anti-corruption drive could lead to a further increase in the president’s ratings.
That campaign, which the Kremlin has said is not coordinated but simply typical anti-corruption work, has included inquiries into the theft of 6.5 billion rubles in federal funds earmarked for the troubled Glonass system and the recent report of misuse of 15 billion rubles allocated for construction projects for the APEC summit in Vladivostok.
Former Deputy Regional Development Minister Roman Panov, one of the people responsible for APEC summit preparation, was arrested late last week. While no arrests have been made in the Glonass case so far, Glonass’ general director, Yury Urlichich, was fired over the weekend as chief engineer of the project.
Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies think tank, said the recent anti-corruption measures were a “warning sign” by the Kremlin.
“All the members of the elite have their own skeletons in the closet, so if some members go against others, those skeletons will start appearing,” Makarkin said.
But Makarkin said he doubted that big heads would start to roll over corruption allegations. He noted as evidence Thursday’s report that Serdyukov had been appointed adviser to defense corporation Russian Technologies, chaired by longtime Putin ally Sergei Chemezov, an apparent signal that the former minister will not be prosecuted as part of the Oboronservis case.
Head of the Indem Foundation think tank Georgy Satarov echoed Makarkin, using the analogy of Putin’s fight against unruly governors in his first term.
“Deputies were targeted to put their bosses under restraints. The same is being done today,” Satarov said.
Putin is known for protecting his loyalists even if they become embroiled in corruption scandals, but political analyst and former Kremlin insider Gleb Pavlovsky said the president is destroying his own rules of the game.
“We see that the turf war was legalized, and for the moment the president has allied himself with a clan fighting against Serdyukov. But in order to do this, he has to apply to other powerful groups to get support,” said Pavlovsky, who added that the process within the system could spin out of control.
“The stakes are high,” he said.
Observers have theorized that Serdyukov’s ouster from the Defense Ministry was related less to corruption and more to infighting among powerful factions within the political elite, including over trillions of rubles in defense spending.
Some liberal columnists have suggested that by giving a green light to investigators to start cracking down on corruption, Putin is trying to steal one of the opposition’s most prominent tactics, one championed by the charismatic Navalny.
“It seems possible that Putin wants to take away the banner of fighting corruption from all kinds of Navalnys,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a political columnist at opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, said in an article this week.
Navalny’s anti-corruption projects, which address everyday problems such as damaged roads and the embezzlement of state funds, have become popular with middle-class Russians.
The opposition leader’s recent initiative to fight for transparency in the utility sector even prompted federal inspector for the utilities sector Nikolai Vasyutin to address a letter to his regional subordinates regarding Navalny.
While calling the project “a clear attempt to discredit all levels of power,” Vasyutin urged his subordinates in a letter last week to provide Navalny campaigners with “fact-based” answers.
Snob magazine columnist Leonid Bershidsky said Putin had “transformed himself” into Navalny to steal the “trump card” from the opposition.
But while a majority of liberal experts called Putin’s actions a form of warning to the elite, Bershidsky said Putin was driven by an ideological agenda and is interested in fighting corruption in defense-related sectors.
“These are priorities in Putin’s model of the world,” he said.

TITLE: Russia Vows Retaliation If Magnitsky Bill Passes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry on Thursday responded to the advancement of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. House of Representatives by issuing a warning of retaliation.
The bill, which seeks to punish Russian officials involved in the jail death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, is expected to come up for vote in the House on Friday.
Russia will get back at the United States if the bill becomes law, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.
"We will have to react, and it will be a tough reaction," he said, Interfax reported.
He did not specify what the government had in mind, saying only that Russia's response would depend on the final content of the "unfriendly and provocative" legislation and cover the complete range of bilateral ties.
Lukashevich also branded as "unacceptable" the linkage of the Magnitsky Act with the vote to allow permanent normal trade relations with Russia. The House Rules Committee moved Tuesday to combine the two bills into one package.
Lukashevich said the United States had no "moral grounds" to point the finger at Russia after the U.S. record of poorly treating its prisoners at Guantanamo.
William Browder, chief of Hermitage Capital, who has campaigned for passage of the Magnitsky bill, said the progress of the U.S. legislation was hugely important both in its own right and as a historic precedent.
"Twelve European countries and Canada are all looking to the U.S. before passing their own versions of the Magnitsky Act," he said. "I predict a major domino effect on this being implemented in other countries after this becomes law in the U.S."

TITLE: Merkel Faces Balancing Act in Kremlin
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Angela Merkel faces a seemingly impossible task in Moscow on Friday.
During the course of a visit scheduled for just eight hours, the German chancellor is expected to mend serious rifts in mutual ties while at the same time telling President Vladimir Putin that the crackdown on the opposition is going too far.
Relations between Berlin and Moscow, which Putin has characterized as “privileged” in the past, have been overshadowed by unusually blunt criticism of the Kremlin by German politicians.
Last Friday, the German Bundestag expressed alarm over the ongoing persecution of opposition leaders and Kremlin critics like the jailed members of the punk band Pussy Riot by passing a motion that calls on the government to campaign for more democracy and rule of law in Russia.
The nonbinding motion was prepared by Andreas Schockenhoff, a lawmaker from Merkel’s Christian Democrat party and Berlin’s point man for civil society relations with Russia. Last month, the Foreign Ministry got so angry at Schockenhoff that a ministry source told Interfax that Moscow refused to recognize him as a government official because of his “libelous” remarks.
Campaigners stepped up the pressure this week. On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch called on Merkel to live up to the resolution and urge Putin “to end the crackdown on civil society.”
“There has never been a more important time to put human rights front and center of Germany’s relationship with Russia,” Hugh Williamson, the organization’s director for Europe, said in a statement.
On the other hand, German business is urging Merkel to avoid confrontation and stick to Berlin’s traditional pragmatist course toward Moscow.
“Germany has been an important mediator between Russia and the West in the past decades,” Eckhard Cordes, chairman of the influential Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, said last month. “I trust that Germany will continue to fulfill this role,” he added.
This was echoed by Frank Schauff, CEO of the Association of European Business, who said Wednesday that ties need to improve. “It is always better to have good political ties between trading partners,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
Trade between both countries is expected to reach a record $102 billion this year, according to the Russo-German Chamber of Commerce, making Germany the nation’s second-largest trading partner behind China.
German firms are increasingly looking to Russia as European markets stagger through the ongoing eurozone debt crisis.
Energy is a key ingredient in trade ties, and analysts have said Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022 means greater leverage for Russia and its abundance of fossil fuels.
Some experts argue that Russia’s role will be diminished because of fundamental changes in the gas market. They point to the rise of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and shale gas, which are currently underdeveloped in Russia.
Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister who now is an opposition leader, said the fact that Gazprom had already lowered prices in Europe this year was a sign that Russia missed the boat. 
“Rather than Europeans standing in line for Russian gas, Gazprom should be running to Merkel to lobby their interests,” he said.
But Schauff argued that the country would remain among the most important energy providers for 20 years to come. “Russia remains the biggest single player in Europe and a key place to be for business,” he said.
Schauff said he hoped that progress would be achieved at the Petersburg Dialogue, an annual forum for experts from both countries, which kicked off in Moscow on Wednesday night. Merkel and Putin are expected to attend the forum’s final plenary debate Friday afternoon.
The forum includes an “angry citizens” round table Thursday to debate parallels between the protest movement that has sprung up in Russia over the past year and rallies against a new railway station in the southern German city of Stuttgart.
Lothar de Maiziere, the forum’s German co-chairman, said Wednesday that “tensions have been the elixir of life” since the event’s 2001 inception, according to an e-mailed statement.
Schauff also criticized the Bundestag resolution as one-sided: “Yes, you need to address disagreements openly but that should not be all. You also need to look forward,” he said.
Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a German member of the European parliament, said Merkel was facing an extremely difficult balancing act because of unprecedented political pressure.
He argued that the unusually harsh tone of the Bundestag resolution showed that disappointment over Putin was rife among Germany’s governing coalition.
“This was not written by some rights activists but by people from her own camp,” he said by telephone from Brussels.
Lambsdorff is a member of the German Free Democrats, a junior coalition partner of Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who is also a Free Democrat, tried to solve the dilemma earlier this week by saying that while partnership did also mean criticism, Moscow should not be antagonized.
“The challenges of our time cannot be tackled without Russia, let alone against its will. They can only be met together with this great nation,” Westerwelle wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily, according to an English-language transcript on his ministry’s website.
Hans-Henning Schroder, an analyst with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said Friday’s talks, which run parallel to intergovernmental talks between both countries’ Cabinet ministers, would likely see some tough talking.
He argued that as with British-Russian ties, a dip in political relations does not necessarily hinder economic ones. Relations between London and Moscow went through the worst post-Cold War period after the 2006 poisoning death of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London, while trade figures did not go down.
But Schroder warned that nobody expected Merkel to seriously depart from Berlin’s hitherto-pragmatic policies toward Moscow, not least because Russia’s role in German politics was eclipsed by the European Union and the ongoing currency crisis.
“This government won’t shift its foreign policy course before the next general election,” he said. Germany’s parliamentary election will take place next fall.
Schroder added that this was mirrored by Moscow’s recent emphasis on relations with the East. “The Kremlin is busy with Eurasia and Asia,” he said.

TITLE: Kremlin Silent as Magnitsky Bill Heads to House
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The Kremlin remained silent Wednesday after U.S. lawmakers moved to advance a bill to punish Russian officials for human rights violations.
A decision Tuesday by the House Rules Committee will bring the bill, which aroused strong opposition in Moscow, up for a vote by the full House later this week.
The committee decided to combine the human rights legislation, known as the Magnitsky Act, with a bill that would grant Russia permanent normal trade relations, or PNTR.
The full House is expected to vote Thursday on the plan to merge the bills and could consider the combined package Friday, Reuters reported.
Moscow has long campaigned against the Magnitsky bill, warning that it would damage relations between the countries.
The legislation is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing lawyer who died in jail in 2009 after exposing purported fraud involving government officials.
Leonid Kalashnikov, first deputy chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, said Wednesday that Moscow would be unable to commensurately respond to the legislation.
The bill directs the administration of President Barack Obama to deny visas to officials involved in the detention, abuse or death of Magnitsky and to freeze any assets they might have in U.S. banks.
The bill also empowers the White House to punish other human rights abusers in Russia and allows certain members of Congress to suggest individuals deserving of sanctions.
It would be pointless to apply similar measures to U.S. officials, Kalashnikov said.
“American officials don’t invest money in our country and don’t positively strive to come here,” he said, Interfax reported.
Lawmakers feel the need to complement PNTR with a punitive measure because they don’t understand that normal trade with Russia is, first of all, in America’s interests, international affairs expert Fyodor Lukyanov said.
The move requires lawmakers to lift a Cold War-era provision known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
The measure, adopted in 1974, restricts trade with Russia because the Soviet government prevented Jews from emigrating, a rights violation that is long gone.
“[Legislators] see a repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment as a gift to Russia [and believe that] such a gift can’t be given to Russia for free,” Lukyanov said.
He also said binding the two bills into one package is likely a tool to force Obama to sign the Magnitsky bill.
Obama is often accused of being on President Vladimir Putin's “leash,” but he will have little choice but to sign the legislation if it’s the only way to PNTR with Russia, Lukyanov said.
Obama’s administration previously stated that Russia could view the Magnitsky bill as meddling with its internal affairs. The White House also argued the bill is unnecessary because the U.S. government had already imposed visa restrictions on the Russians thought to have been involved in Magnitsky’s death.
Lukyanov warned that some U.S. companies could face problems in Russia because of the bill, although the government would never openly admit any link.
It makes sense to link the two bills because both the Jackson-Vanik amendment and the Magnitsky bill deal with human rights, said Valery Borshchyov, a member of the presidential human rights council.
Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said the merger of the bills is intended to demonstrate U.S. concern about human rights and show the scale of human rights violations both in Russia and around the world.
U.S. Representative Kevin Brady, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee’s trade subcommittee, said the package had strong bipartisan support.
“We can’t miss any opportunity to create jobs and support our exporters,” Brady told the rules panel, referring to the trade aspect of the legislation, Reuters reported.
Congress has to grant PNTR to Russia to ensure that U.S. firms receive all the market-opening benefits of the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
WTO rules require countries to provide each other with normal trade relations on an unconditional basis.
U.S. farm-equipment-maker John Deere, which is a strong supporter of PNTR for Russia, reiterated its position Wednesday but declined to react to the linkage of trade relations with the human rights bill. 
“We believe passage is important to the heavy-equipment industries in which we sell our products,” spokesman Ken Golden said. “We welcome continued progress in the effort to approve PNTR in the U.S. Congress. However, we do not feel it would be appropriate for Deere to comment on any effort to link the PNTR passage with other legislation.”
Many U.S. lawmakers were opposed to removing the Jackson-Vanik amendment without putting in place new human rights legislation to keep pressure on Moscow. The Senate Finance Committee developed a similar bill that aims to punish human rights violators anywhere in the world.

TITLE: Treason Law Expanded Despite Putin's Pledge
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Amendments expanding the legal definition of treason came into effect Wednesday despite a presidential pledge two days before that the clause would be reconsidered.
Now, Russians who work for international organizations can be tried as traitors, according to the amended Article 151 of the Criminal Code, which went into effect following publication of the redactions in the state's official newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
The listing indicated that the amendments had been approved by President Vladimir Putin on Monday, the same day he told a meeting of his human rights council that he would review the text.
At that meeting, Putin said he was "ready to return" to the amendments to look at them more "carefully."
"There shouldn't be any broader definition of state treason, [and] it shouldn't address issues that have nothing to do with the instance of state treason," he said.
But his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Wednesday that the president meant that the amendments could be adjusted if "problem areas" were to arise.
The expanded definition of treason includes divulging a state secret or "providing consulting or other work to a foreign state or international organization" if said organization works against Russian security interests. Traitors can be punished by up to 20 years in prison.
The previous version of the same law had referred only to "foreign organizations," not "international" ones.
The amendments could affect human rights activists who work with international organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Independent political analyst Pavel Salin told The St. Petersburg Times that Putin's comment on possibly revising the text indicated that the Kremlin had felt pressure from the public regarding the changes.
"The entire scientific community is outraged because any relationship with a foreigner, if it is proven that he's a spy, can be considered treason," Salin said by phone Wednesday.
Since 2002, more than two dozen people have been jailed under the treason law. Several cases involved prominent scientists collaborating with foreign organizations.
One of them was Siberian physicist Valentin Danilov, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2004 for selling space technology secrets to China. He was granted parole Tuesday after spending almost a decade behind bars, including his pretrial detention.

TITLE: Putin Approves Plan to Move Courts to St. Petersburg 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin has given his approval to plans for the relocation of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Arbitration Court and the Supreme Court's judicial department from Moscow to St. Petersburg, though he stressed that no final decision had been made.
The proposed relocation is part of a wider plan to expand the courts, something that Putin said would be better off taking place in St. Petersburg, rather than Moscow.
Vladimir Kozhin, head of the Office of Presidential Affairs, estimated the cost of the move at 50 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) in comments carried by Interfax on Wednesday.
Kozhin said the process could take between two and two and a half years. He emphasized that part of the cost would be recouped from assets currently owned by the courts in central Moscow.
Putin pointed to the successful relocation of the Constitutional Court to St. Petersburg in 2008 in comments about the proposed move, adding that a similar relocation by other federal courts would be beneficial to the city.
Itar-Tass reported that the new site for the courts would be the former naval museum on Vasilevsky Island.
Vyacheslav Makarov, spokesman for St. Petersburg's Legal Council, told the news agency that he wholeheartedly endorsed the move, saying it would "raise the profile of the city."

TITLE: Serdyukov 'Appointed' to Russian Technologies
TEXT: MOSCOW – Amid a Defense Ministry shakeup, President Vladimir Putin replaced two deputy defense ministers  Thursday as former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov reportedly joined Russian Technologies as an adviser.
Putin dismissed Yelena Kozlova and Dmitry Chushkin from their posts as deputy defense ministers and replaced them with Ruslan Tsalikov, a close ally of new Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu who worked under Shoigu at the Emergency Situations Ministry and most recently served as deputy governor of the Moscow region, and Yury Borisov, a former deputy industry and trade minister who most recently held a senior post on a government military-industrial commission.
The Kremlin announced the shuffle in a brief statement.
Shoigu, who served as emergency situations minister for 18 years, was appointed Moscow region governor earlier this year but then abruptly transferred to the Defense Ministry on Nov. 6 after a corruption scandal engulfed Serdyukov.
Vedomosti, citing an unidentified official close to the leadership of Russian Technologies, reported that Serdyukov has been appointed an adviser to the state-owned corporation's head, Sergei Chemezov.
The appointment was confirmed by Interfax, which also cited a source close to the company's leadership.
But RIA-Novosti, citing a source familiar with the situation, said a final decision was pending.
Chemezov and Serdyukov have butted heads in the past. In spring 2011, Chemezov, in a public complaint to then-President Dmitry Medvedev, accused the Defense Ministry of impeding the fulfillment of contracts.

TITLE: Shoigu Puts Planned VMA Move On Hold
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: New Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has put on hold the planned transfer of St. Petersburg’s Military Medical Academy (VMA) from its historical central location to a city suburb. 
The decision to transfer one of Russia’s leading military medicine schools and hospitals, announced by Shoigu’s predecessor at the beginning of this year, elicited a wave of protests in St. Petersburg. Both the city’s political opposition and representatives of the ruling United Russia party spoke against the move. The city parliament appealed to then-President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate the situation.
Sergei Andenko, a deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, said the defense ministry’s latest statement referred not only to freezing the VMA’s move, but also to the termination of the whole reform of Russia’s military medical system, Fontanka.ru Internet portal reported.
“Today it’s necessary to freeze everything that has been done wrong and to work out a good quality program for the development of the Military Medical Academy,” Andenko said. 
“It should take into account the opinions of military medical service veterans, the scientific council of the VMA and leading specialists,” he said.
St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko welcomed Shoigu’s decision, saying that the VMA should remain in its historical location.
“I believe the defense minister has the right to take management decisions. I think it’s the right decision. He needs to get to the bottom of the situation,” Poltavchenko was cited by Interfax as saying.
Meanwhile, defenders of the VMA are in no hurry to rejoice.
“The freezing of the transfer is not a stop to the destruction,” said Ivan Novikov, co-chairman of the VMA Legacy organization.
 “A plan for the development of the VMA is needed,” he said. “The institution should be focusing on its original purpose and enrolling students. Because the future of the academy was unclear in the past few years, the study and medical treatment processes have been under destruction. Now all those experiments should be stopped,” Novikov was quoted as saying by Fontanka.

TITLE: Synagogue Opens Doors to All Faiths
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue will hold an open doors day on Sunday, Nov. 18 to mark International Tolerance Day.
The event is open to all city residents, regardless of their religion and nationality, and allows members of the public to visit the synagogue and get acquainted with Jewish culture. Visitors will be able to take guided excursions around the site, learning about the synagogue’s architecture, Jewish wedding traditions and other interesting facts about the city’s Jewish community. 
The open doors day will also offer visitors the chance to sample Jewish dishes such as matzo and gefilte fish, ask a rabbi any question and watch a concert of Jewish folk music. Entrance to all the events is free of charge.
“We experience great interest from the public in the life of the synagogue and Jewish community,” said Mikhail Grubarg, head of St. Petersburg’s official Jewish community. “But at the same time many people are shy to come over, maybe thinking that the synagogue is closed to them. The open doors day is our answer to all those people who are shy. You’re welcome! We are open for everyone, and not only on Tolerance Day,” he added.
The synagogue will be open to visitors from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday with the program starting every hour. The concert will start at 6 p.m.

TITLE: Energy Company Says Lenfilm Is Bankrupt
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A local energy company has filed a lawsuit in the city’s arbitration court claiming that Lenfilm is bankrupt because it can’t pay up around 2 million rubles ($63,000) that it owes for energy use.
In September, the arbitration court upheld the rights of state-owned Fuel and Energy Complex of St. Petersburg, which covers around 40 percent of the city’s thermal-energy needs, to recover energy-supply debts from the studio over a contract totaling 1.35 million rubles, RIA-Novosti reported.
No date has yet been set for looking at the new lawsuit, and the film studio’s managers remain optimistic about resolving the matter.
The companies came to an agreement on the unpaid bills in September, so the lawsuit could have been filed because the energy company’s lawyers were confused about the previous debt, Lenfilm’s director Eduard Pichugin told the news agency.
“The claim over the bankruptcy of Lenfilm is a misunderstanding, and we hope to resolve the issue today and expect that the lawsuit will be withdrawn,” Pichugin said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Less Crime in City</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg has become one of the safest cities in Russia, St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko claimed last week. 
The crime rate has seen a significant decrease, Poltavchenko said when congratulating local police on Nov. 10, the date designated the official professional holiday of the police in Russia.
The number of crimes decreased by 11 percent during the first nine months of this year, Poltavchenko said.
There are currently six Cossack brigades and 34 voluntary people’s guards helping the city police in St. Petersburg. They have uncovered 14,000 administrative violations and helped to detain 2,500 criminals, Poltavchenko said.

<b>Teen Cruise Death</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A teenage Russian passenger aboard the Princess Anastasia ferry died in a Finnish hospital after being urgently airlifted from the ferry by medical helicopter. The girl was evacuated after she was diagnosed with a serious heart problem, the Rosbalt news agency reported.
The ferry was on its way back from Stockholm to St. Petersburg via Tallinn after visiting the Swedish capital and Helsinki when the 13-year-old girl began to feel unwell. The crew called a helicopter, and the girl was taken to a hospital specializing in heart problems in the Finnish city of Turku, where she later died. The girl’s heart had stopped, Rosbalt reported.
The preliminary cause of death was determined to be thrombosis, web portal Fontanka.ru reported, citing a source from St. Peter Line, the company that operates the ferry service.
The girl was traveling with her mother and father. According to preliminary information she was suffering from an illness affecting the immune system, Fontanka.ru reported.

<b>Palace Bridge Closure</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Palace Bridge over the River Neva will be closed to traffic at night from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. from Nov. 15.
Traffic on the bridge was limited to four lanes beginning Oct. 21 due to repair work, Interfax reported.
According to the city authorities, the bridge is safe for traffic but the mechanism that raises the bridge up to allow large ships to pass underneath it requires repair work. The bridge’s opening mechanism was constructed in 1916 and cracks in it may appear at any moment, they say.
The repair work is being carried out by Pilon. The cost of the work is estimated at 2.7 billion rubles ($85 million). Traffic will be limited on the bridge until Dec. 20, 2013.

<b>Smart Hermitage</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Boris Piotrovsky, son of the State Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky, is promoting a project called Smart Museum that will allow visitors to the museum to access information about any exhibit there with the help of QR-code technology in Android and iOS applications, Delovoi Peterburg newspaper reported.
The Smart Museum system is already operating in 12 of the city’s museums, including the Sheremetyev Palace, the Rimsky-Korsakov apartment museum and the Fyodor Chaliapin apartment museum.

<b>Anti-Drug Calls</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The second All-Russia “Report Where They Trade In Death” anti-drug campaign will be held in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast from Nov. 12 through Nov. 23. 
Residents of the two regions will be able to call the drug control departments of districts in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast and report any information they have about drug dealing to authorities, the web portal Fontanka.ru reported.
People can leave information by calling a 24-hour hotline on 004 or 495 5264.

TITLE: Putin’s Human Rights Council Increases by 39
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s human rights council gained 39 new members on Monday as its total membership count rose from 40 to 62 in a reshuffle that saw more than a dozen leave.
A longtime head of the council told The St. Petersburg Times that, in its expanded form, the panel would have a hard time coming to “consolidated decisions linked by a single logic.”
Ella Pamfilova, who headed the presidential human rights panel from 2002 to 2010, said by phone that it was “no longer a community of likeminded people but a motley crew. Allowing more people into the council makes it unclear whose voice will be taken into account and whose will not.”
She added, “There are very professional and profound rights defendants, like Igor Kalyapin, Pavel Chikov and Yelena Topolyova-Soldunova, but there are also many controversial individuals whose names I don’t want to mention.”
Topolyova-Soldunova, who heads the Agency for Social Information and attended a Monday council meeting chaired by Putin, said by phone that “it became clear that such a large council cannot work effectively without a clear structure, as all members are very different.”
Another newly elected member, however, said by phone that “increasing the number of members in the council was the right decision because the council is not a closed organization but rather a public institution, where everyone can be represented.”
Maxim Shevchenko, who heads the Center for Strategic Studies of Religions and Politics of the Modern World, added that “the council will enable more people to accomplish their ideas, a unified position is not necessary.”
A presidential order Monday also confirmed the release of more than a dozen human rights defenders from the council who had resigned earlier this year.
A wave of members, including Moscow Helsinki Group’s Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Transparency International’s Yelena Panfilova, exited the panel after Putin regained the presidency then proposed that new members be decided by an online vote.
Their departure nearly halved the council’s membership count. The panel’s head, Mikhail Fedotov, said at the time that, if 20 members left, he would leave.
Despite the controversy, the council’s new makeup was selected by online voting. A popular vote was held in early September, with more than 100,000 candidates registered. 
Eighty-six candidates were chosen by that vote, then they competed for 13 places, each one dedicated to a human rights issue in Russia, such as the rights of prisoners and the disabled, as well as public monitoring of the judicial system.

TITLE: General Staff Gets New Head
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova and Ezekiel Pfeifer
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Recently appointed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday named Colonel General Valery Gerasimov the new head of the General Staff, which wields operational control over the armed forces.
The appointment was anticipated following Tuesday’s ouster of longtime Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov amid a corruption scandal. Three deputy ministers may soon be fired as well.
Shoigu wants to build a loyal team, military analysts told The St. Petersburg Times, adding that Shoigu would likely pick those he would be comfortable working with and who would be grateful for their appointment.
The minister announced the decision that Gerasimov would replace former chief Nikolai Makarov at a Kremlin meeting attended by Gerasimov and President Vladimir Putin.
“You’re an experienced person,” Putin told Gerasimov, according to a transcript on the Kremlin website. “I think the minister has chosen a suitable candidate, and I hope you will work effectively and efficiently.”
Gerasimov, 57, said he would do his best to achieve all the goals set for the military, which Putin said included rearmament of the Army and Navy and completion of the restructuring of the armed forces.
Putin the same day fired the first deputy defense minister, Alexander Sukhorukov, and appointed Arkady Bakhin, commander of the Western Military District, in his stead. He also named aerospace defense commander Oleg Ostapenko a deputy defense minister, the Kremlin website announced.
Three other deputy defense ministers — Tatyana Shevtsova, responsible for housing and finances, Dmitry Chushkin, responsible for information equipment policy, and Yelena Kozlova — may be fired soon, Kommersant reported, citing undisclosed sources.
Shevtsova may be replaced by two deputies, Kommersant said, adding that Moscow region Deputy Governors Roman Filimonov and Dmitry Kurakin are candidates to oversee the ministry’s finances in her place.
Three of Serdyukov’s eight deputy ministers will likely keep their positions: Nikolai Pankov, responsible for cooperation with the Emergency Situations Ministry, which Shoigu previously headed; Dmitry Bulgakov, who oversees combat service support units that function well; and Anatoly Antonov, who oversees international activities and is one the best negotiators of the missile shield issue, Kommersant said.
Media reports had predicted that Gerasimov would replace Makarov, citing the latter’s closeness to former Minister Serdyukov, ousted after a firm that had been under his control was suspected of unlawfully selling ministry property.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, had recently told The St. Petersburg Times that the former General Staff chief improved bilateral military ties by supporting direct military-to-military contacts between Russian and U.S. generals.
He added that the supplying of NATO’s non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan over Russian territory had gone from 4 or 5 percent to “well over” 50 percent during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term.
Gerasimov served as first deputy head of the General Staff from 2010 until April of this year, when he was removed from the post by Makarov. Since then he has served as commander of the Central Military District, one of the country’s four regional command posts.
Igor Korotchenko, head of the Defense Ministry’s public advisory council, said by phone that “professionalism” and “confidence in being comfortable working with these people” would be primary criteria in Shoigu’s appointments to the ministry’s top brass.
But military analyst Alexander Golts said by telephone that “the candidacy is not important. … They are appointed in order to make them loyal to Shoigu.” He added, “This is the bureaucratic logic in Russia.”
The new General Staff chief has combat experience, having served as a commander in the North Caucasus during the second Chechen war. He personally took part in the high-profile 2001 arrest of a colonel later convicted of abducting and murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman. Gerasimov testified at the 2003 trial that the colonel had no right to detain the woman or conduct a sweep of her village.
Vladimir Komoyedov, head of the State Duma’s security committee, said Gerasimov should “prepare military forces for effective actions in the Arctic,” broaden powers of the General Staff of all kinds of forces, boost the amount of military intelligence operations outside the country and in space, and maintain the army recruited both from conscripts and contract officers, RIA-Novosti reported Friday.
Korotchenko told RIA-Novosti that Gerasimov’s other tasks should be modernizing the Army’s and Navy’s weapons and military equipment and preparing counter measures to the U.S. missile shield in Europe.

TITLE: Hunter Fined $18,100 for Killing Rare Amur Tiger
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Vladivostok court handed down a fine of 575,125 rubles ($18,100) and 14 months of community service Tuesday to a man who shot and killed a Amur tiger in 2010.
About 50 to 60 of the rare felines, which are listed in Russia’s Red Book of endangered species, die at the hands of hunters every year, according to estimates by the World Wildlife Fund. But those responsible for the killings are rarely caught, and even more rarely successfully prosecuted.
Alexander Belyayev shot the Amur tiger on Nov. 15 while out hunting deer with friends in the Far East region of Primorye, and originally characterized the incident as one of self-defense after the beast tried to attack him, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.
But Vladivostok’s Khasansky District Court ruled that Belyayev shot the tiger from a distance and then approached the wounded animal and finished it off at close range, according to WWF experts.
This is the fourth guilty verdict of its kind since the Soviet collapse, said Sergei Aramilev, a biodiversity program coordinator for the WWF in Vladivostok. Three of the four sentences have been handed down since 2009, he said in a statement.
Unlike Bengal tigers, Amur tigers very rarely attack humans. Populations of the elusive predator in the Primorye region were devastated by poachers in the 1990s and the early 2000s. But an intense conservation effort and the personal support of President Vladimir Putin has helped to halt the decline.

TITLE: Professionals, Activists Query Duty-Free Drink Ban
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant and Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Aviation professionals and consumer rights activists have reacted with bemusement to plans to ban passengers from carrying duty-free alcohol on board airplanes.
The transportation minister is pushing amendments to the Aviation Code to stop passengers from carrying alcohol on board in order to stop violent behavior caused by drinking, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported Monday citing a ministry source. 
While passengers will still be able to drink alcohol served on board, drinks bought by passengers before boarding would be collected by flight attendants and returned to them after the end of the flight.
Passengers who buy duty-free alcohol on board would only be able to collect the bottles from the crew after landing. 
While fines for violent and abusive behavior have been increased from 100 rubles ($3) to 1,500 rubles ($47) in 2009, Russian air carriers report that alcohol-fueled violence among passengers is actually on the rise, the paper claimed.
The explanatory note released along with the bill said Aeroflot has reported more than 1,000 incidents of disorderly behavior among passengers since 2009, “most of which” were linked to alcohol.
Roman Gusarov, the head of Avia-Ru Network industry portal called the measure “understandable.”
“Drunk passengers cause a lot of problems to airlines,” said Gusarov. 
Drunken air passengers have created several high-profile incidents and produced some spectacular YouTube videos in recent years.
In October, a 22-year-old man was arrested after he told fellow passengers as their S7 jet was preparing for takeoff from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky that a bomb was hidden on board the aircraft. No bomb was found after a search.
In 2010, Alexei Beketov, a lawmaker representing Tikhvin in the Leningrad region, started a fight with a flight attendant while flying to Paris as a member of an official delegation. The deputy was drunk, members of the Rossiya airline said at the time.
Last year a BMI flight to London had to return to Domodedovo shortly after takeoff when a drunken female passenger started performing erotic dances in the aisles.
And it is not just passengers who are given to misbehaving.
In 2004, two intoxicated flight attendants were accused of beating up a passenger who complained they were in no condition to do their job on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Nizhnevartovsk, while in 2009 an Aeroflot pilot was removed from a New York-bound plane in Moscow after passengers, including socialite Ksenia Sobchak, accused him of being drunk. The airline later said tests revealed no signs of intoxication and the pilot might have suffered a stroke.
In a more serious incident, a drunk navigator was blamed for an air crash near Petrozavodsk that killed 47 people in 2011.
Airline professionals interviewed by The St. Petersburg Times were skeptical about the utility of the new law, however.
“No, we don’t need prohibition on board,” said Miroslav Boichuk, president of the Russian Pilots Union.
“If we see a problem we will deal with it. If things are run properly and according to [current] law that should not be a problem,” he said by telephone, though he conceded that heavy-drinking passengers do not make cabin crew’s jobs any easier.
He also claimed the problem of drinking among aircrew had been exaggerated by the media.
“The press has got hold of a single example — this incident at Petrozavodsk — and blown it out of proportion,” he said.
A spokesman for Transaero, the country’s largest privately-owned airline, said the law would make no difference to current practice.
“We already ban passengers from opening any alcohol bought duty free; and we don’t let passengers on board if they are in a drunken or disruptive state; so for us this doesn’t make any difference whatsoever,” the spokesman said.
He declined to offer statistics on the number of drunken air rage incidents the airline faces on a yearly basis or to identify any particularly problematic routes or time of year.
“It’s not proper to talk about that. It happens. It’s not just our problem, it is something faced by all airlines,” he said.
Consumer rights groups immediately denounced the move.
“Airlines just want to sell more alcohol, with a high percentage,” Mikhail Anshakov, head of the Society for Consumer Rights Protection, told the Russian News Service radio. “Their alcohol is two to three times more expensive than [that purchased] duty free.
“Troublemakers who consume too much alcohol get rowdy and must be dealt with. Nobody prevents airlines in the existing legal system to deal with them,” he added.
“They just want to make their own lives simpler and make passengers’ lives more difficult,” he added.
A spokeswoman for Aerofirst, which runs duty free shops at Sheremetyevo airport, declined to comment Monday.
Other proposals outlined in the law include installing bullet-proof doors and granting cabin crew and airline security the right to use “physical force” to restrain offenders, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Kremlin Chief Admits He Was Aware of Glonass Embezzlement
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff has acknowledged that he was aware of alleged embezzlement of state funds earmarked for Russia’s satellite navigation system, a statement seen by some as a sign of an intensifying battle among the Kremlin clans.
Sergei Ivanov said he discussed the probe with police officials but didn’t speak publicly about it for several years, to prevent the culprits from covering up their deeds. Ivanov, a KGB veteran like Putin, said years in the spy service taught him to be sly with the enemy.
“I have spent a large part of my life in foreign intelligence,” he told Channel One television. “The most horrible thing there is betrayal, and here we had the same thing. I had to be patient and not let my feelings show, because I realized that if I did that it would tip them off and push them to cover up their trail.”
Ivanov’s comments, broadcast late Sunday, come after a Russian police official said Friday that the Interior Ministry was investigating the allegations of embezzlement of 6.5 billion rubles ($205.6 million) earmarked for Russia’s Glonass satellite navigation system. As a former Cabinet member, Ivanov previously oversaw the development of the system that competes with the GPS navigation system run by the United States.
The allegations follow a military corruption scandal that led to last week’s ouster of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, and some observers alleged a link between them.
Some commentators saw Ivanov’s comments as a clumsy attempt to avoid blame for allowing corruption to flourish at the ambitious project that has seen a series of humiliating failures in recent years, including the loss of three satellites in a failed launch in December 2010.
“It’s a specifically Russian way of investigating corruption: After learning that someone intends to steal state funds through shell companies you just hide and wait for two or three years,” Anton Nosik, a prominent blogger, wrote in a sardonic post Monday.
Valery Morozov, an anti-corruption activist, said in his blog that the claims of embezzlement appeared to reflect the infighting among the Kremlin clans. Ivanov was widely seen as a driving force behind Serdyukov’s ouster, and the other camp seemed to strike back with the claim of corruption in Glonass, Morozov said.
Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister turned opposition leader, said in a commentary posted Monday on Gazeta.ru that Putin seems unable to mediate the escalating conflicts between his lieutenants.
“Simply speaking, Putin has rarely shown up at work and has been reluctant to play the role of an efficient arbiter on domestic conflicts that he did so well at the peak of his popularity,” Milov wrote.

TITLE: 14th-Century Egg Found In Azov Toilet
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Archeologists working in the town of Azov in southern Russia have unearthed a fully preserved chicken egg dating to the 14th century.
“The egg is approximately dated between 1330 and 1350,” Andrei Maslovsky, a senior research fellow at the Azov Nature Reserve, told Interfax on Tuesday.
Peculiarly, the egg was found in a public toilet in the central part of the Rostov region town founded in 1067.
“It is mind-boggling how a chicken egg could have ended up in a toilet and was not broken,” Maslovsky said.
He described the egg as being 52 millimeters long and about 39 millimeters in diameter.
He said it was very light, fragile and possibly empty because all the organic substances inside had likely decomposed and evaporated through the shell’s pores.

TITLE: Moscow Center to Help Migrants Integrate
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s largest association of migrants opened an “adaptation center” in Moscow on Monday that will help workers from other countries learn Russian, obtain professional training and get medical insurance and bank loans.
The center will help to fulfill goals set by President Vladimir Putin in late August to “secure the successful integration and adaptation” of migrants in Russia, which roughly corresponds to one of the goals of the state migration policy through 2025 that he approved in June.
It will also assist migrants in meeting the requirements of a law that introduces mandatory Russian-language tests from Dec. 1 for migrants who work in certain spheres.
The Multifunctional Migrant Adaptation Center opened with the backing of the Russian Migrants Federation in a rented building on Nizhny Kiselny Pereulok, near metro station Trubnaya in downtown Moscow.
Federation head Madzhumder Mukhammad Amin greeted several dozen guests, including municipal and federal officials, heads of migrant organizations, and reporters, at a long table in a room of the newly renovated building.
“We are addressing you to jointly fulfill the task set for us by the president,” Amin told the guests, including representatives of the Federal Migration Service, the Regional Development Ministry, the Moscow City Duma, and a representative of the United Nations Refugee Agency, among others.
“Within the framework [of the state migration policy through 2025] we must work together to achieve a civilized society,” Amin told the guests.
Some rooms in the building were still under repair and workers were seen moving around in the corridors. During a coffee break at the opening ceremony, guests were treated to vodka, champagne, wine, red caviar, pies and pastries.
Rental costs and repairs to the building were financed by business people from the International Labor Alliance, as well as by the Afghan, Uzbek, Pakistani and Kyrgyz diasporas in Moscow, among other groups, Amin told the guests. But state aid would be needed for a “large-scale implementation” of the center’s activities, he said.
Immigration is a lightning-rod issue in Russia, which has millions of illegal, low-skilled workers from former Soviet republics who boost crime rates and breed social tensions, but who also serve as major sources of cheap labor for industries like construction and cleaning services.
The current number of illegal migrants in Russia stands at about 3.5 million people but the figure fluctuates from 3 to 5 million at various times, deputy head of the Federal Migration Service Yekaterina Yegorova said last month, RIA-Novosti reported.
Foreigners, predominantly migrant workers, were responsible for 48 percent of all crime, including 70 percent of murders, since the start of the year, Moscow police chief Anatoly Yakunin said in early November.
In June, Putin said current legislation was aimed largely at attracting workers and not at helping to educate them and integrate them into Russian society.
Vladimir Volokh, head of the Federal Migration Service’s public council, concurred with that opinion, telling the guests at the new center Monday that “little had been done for the adaptation and integration of migrants” before the creation of the migration policy through 2025, which he called “a big stimulus.”
UN Refugee Agency representative in Russia Geshe Karrenbrock called the policy plan a “milestone.” But she also stressed “the importance of the influence of civil society.”
The center will offer courses in Russian language and culture, run a hotline for complaints from migrants, provide legal consultations for employers who hire migrants and render various kinds of assistance to families of mixed nationality.
Information services and consultations will be free for migrants and paid for employers.
More than 70 offices teaching Russian language and culture to migrants will open by late 2013, Amin said. The 110 hours of studies to get a state diploma may cost about 15,000 rubles ($475), he said.
In late October, the Federation Council passed a bill that would introduce compulsory Russian-language tests from Dec. 1 for foreigners working in residential housing and utilities, and retail and services.
The center will also sign contracts with a number of universities, banks and insurance companies to provide services for migrants through the center.
Universities will offer courses through the center to help improve migrants’ qualifications in fields from construction to journalism, while banks will offer loans and insurance companies will provide medical policies. The center will also hold seminars with the participation of migration officials.
The federation has also formed a group of 20 young volunteers from foreign diasporas in Moscow and Russian youths who will greet migrants at train stations and airports to explain behavioral norms in Moscow, Amin said. These range from the practical — how to use public transportation, how to use a cell phone — to the controversial, such as “not talking loudly in your own language” and wearing “standard European clothes.”
The volunteers, whose number will grow to 300 by late 2013, will wear smocks reading “Welcome to Moscow!” Amin said, putting one on himself.

TITLE: Court Grants Parole To ‘Spy’ Physicist Danilov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Valentin Danilov, a Siberian physicist jailed on charges of espionage and treason amid a spying frenzy that swept the country in President Vladimir Putin’s first term, was granted parole Tuesday and could be freed next week.
A Krasnoyarsk court, backed by local prosecutors, ruled that Danilov could be freed on parole after serving 11 years of a 13-year sentence on charges of selling sensitive information about space technology to China.
“This does not mean that Danilov will be released immediately,” the court’s press service told Interfax on Tuesday. “If the court ruling is not appealed, it will become effective in 10 days and the scientist will be released.”
That means Danilov could walk free as soon as Nov. 22.
Danilov, who headed the Thermo-Physics Center at Krasnoyarsk State Technical University at the time of his arrest, has asked the court to allow him to live in Novosibirsk until the completion of his parole term, Interfax reported.
“This is great news,” veteran rights campaigner Lyudmila Alexeyeva said.
“Danilov is a man of great honor and a talented scientist who did not deserve to spend a single day in prison,” she said, according to Interfax.
Alexeyeva, a co-founder of the Public Committee to Protect Scientists, created to defend scientists targeted in the spy-mania of the first half of the 2000s, said she had known Danilov for a long time and believed his professions of innocence from the first day of his arrest.
She said the information that Danilov was accused of selling to China was available in “school textbooks.”
The local FSB office in Krasnoyarsk opened the case against Danilov in May 2000, and the physicist was arrested in Feb. 2001. A jury acquitted Danilov of all charges in Dec. 2003, but a new jury convicted him during a second trial on the same charges in Nov. 2004 and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced by one year.

TITLE: Rotenberg: Putin ‘From God’
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom contractor and billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, 60, has said that his childhood friend President Vladimir Putin was sent to Russia “from God.”
Rotenberg, a judo sparring partner of Putin’s who has investments in the construction and finance industries, is ranked as Russia’s 94th wealthiest man by Forbes with a personal fortune of $1 billion.
“Friendship never hurt anyone,” Rotenberg told the Financial Times. “I have great respect for this person, and I consider that this is a person sent to our country from God.”
But Rotenberg denied that his relationship with Putin had been instrumental in his business success.
“You can’t just go to him and ask for something,” he said. “Firstly, this is not my style and secondly, he wouldn’t even let me through the door.”

TITLE: Gazprom Is Unlikely to Yield on Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom may have agreed to cut prices for many of its European customers, but the chances of its biggest foreign market, Ukraine, getting a discount appear slim, according to an analyst report.
“Perhaps Gazprom cannot afford yet another price cut when its revenues and net profits are under such strain,” Andrew Neff, a Russia analyst for IHS Energy, said last week.
In the latest concession, Gazprom agreed last week to shave 10 percent off the price that it charges Polish gas importer, PGNiG. Germany and Italy had won similar discounts in past months on the backdrop of increased scrutiny by the European Commission of Gazprom’s business in Europe.
Not a member of the EU, Ukraine doesn’t enjoy the political backing of the bloc, and it doesn’t have an alternative source for its huge gas imports, Neff said in the research note.
Ukraine’s current political leaders bear part of the blame for the price impasse with Russia, the note said.
“Ukrainian policymakers also can point the finger squarely in the mirror for their current predicament,” Neff wrote.
After President Viktor Yanukovich came to power in Ukraine, the country made a “major strategic error” when it didn’t tear up the current contract with Gazprom containing what Neff called an inflated base price, the note said. Instead, Yanukovich secured a discount for Ukraine’s national energy company Naftogaz in exchange for extending the Russian lease of the Sevastopol naval base.
“Not only has Russia argued since that time that Gazprom already has granted Naftogaz a price discount … but that accord set expectations on the Russian side that any concessions by Gazprom would be matched by concessions by Naftogaz and/or the Ukrainian government as well,” Neff wrote.
Thus, Russia has dangled the possibility of lower gas prices for Ukraine if it joins a Russia-led customs union – an offer that Ukraine has resisted so far.
Gazprom’s European customers have wrangled lower prices and retroactive discounts from the Russian export monopoly by threatening – or, in PGNiG’s case, actually launching – arbitration proceedings. But Ukraine didn’t cross that line, Neff noted.
Ukrainian President Yanukovich avoids a raucous legal standoff because his voter base is loyal to Russia, said Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta political studies center in Kiev. The Ukrainian government is also afraid of losing that battle, he added.
Kiev damaged its odds of gaining the upper hand in the price dispute by alienating the European Union political establishment, which criticized the prosecution — and imprisonment — of Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko as politically motivated, Fesenko said.
Ukraine has chosen the path of increasing its own production of gas — an effort that will not bear fruit any time soon, he said. Even so, significant progress on this could over time compel Gazprom to reconsider its adamant approach to dealing with Ukraine, Fesenko said.

TITLE: UTAir Mulls IPO Abroad
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: UTAir, Russia’s third-biggest airline, is considering raising $100 million to $350 million via a share float abroad.
Igor Petrov, the company’s financial director, said UTAir’s controlling shareholders would decide about the number of shares UTAir might float through an IPO or private placement, Vedomosti reported Monday.
Surgutneftegaz’s nongovernmental pension fund owns 60.67 percent of UTAir.
Airline chief Andrei Martirosov said the company needs to attract additional funds to promote its business development.
Raiffeisenbank analyst Konstantin Yuminov believes that UTAir will float less than 30 percent of its shares to reduce the company’s debt and renew its fleet of about 350 helicopters and 200 passenger planes, roughly half of which are foreign-made, Vedomosti said.
Martirosov said UTAir plans to buy 88 Boeing and Airbus passenger planes and 103 helicopters over the next several years.
UTAir is the third-biggest airline in Russia following Aeroflot and Transaero, with capitalization of $373 million.
So far UTAir has carried about 7.25 million passengers in 2012, which is 31.4 percent more than the previous year. The carrier reported a half-year profit of $8.5 million.
UTAir plans to expand its operations to fly 15 million passengers per year by 2017 and has ambitions of becoming Russia’s No. 2 carrier, according to Vedomosti.
In July, the airline signed a $2.07 billion contract to acquire 20 Airbus A321 planes, Interfax reported.

TITLE: U.S. Trade Bill to Normalize Trade Relations With Russia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — One of the first actions of the post-election Congress is an expected vote to give U.S. exporters greater access to Russia’s newly opened markets.
The House, returning to Washington next week after some six weeks on the campaign trail, plans to take up the legislation that would extend permanent normal trade relations to Russia and another former Soviet state, Moldova. Senate Democratic leaders have stressed the importance of the issue and said they hope to take the legislation up soon after it passes the House. The Obama administration is a strong supporter.
To make the bill more palatable to critics of Russia’s human rights record, both the House and Senate plan to combine the trade bill with legislation that imposes sanctions on officials involved in human rights violations. That bill is named after lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in jail in 2009 after allegedly being subjected to torture.
There are differences between the House and Senate approaches to the Magnitsky measure that need to be worked out.
The administration and economists have predicted that U.S. exports of goods and services, currently at $11 billion, could double in five years if normal trade relations are established.
But without congressional action, American businesses stand to lose out to other foreign competitors also bidding to increase their share of the Russian market. The United States, which now accounts for only 4.5 percent of Russian imports, already lags behind China, with a 16 percent share, and Europe with 40 percent.
The Coalition for U.S.-Russia Trade this week sent lawmakers a letter signed by more than 500 trade associations and businesses urging quick action on the trade bill. “In what should be an exciting time of Russia’s market-opening for U.S. business, our executives have been relegated to an ‘observer’ status — watching as our competitors will snap up contracts that will lock in commercial relationships for years to come,” the coalition wrote.
Christopher Wenk, senior director of international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said getting the trade bill passed has been the top legislative trade priority for the chamber this year. “This is obviously long overdue,” he said. “The bottom line is that we under-export to Russia right now, and there is a lot of potential out there.”
The main objective of the trade bill would be eliminating what is called the Jackson-Vanik provision, passed in 1974, that tied trade with the Soviet Union to Moscow’s allowing Jews and other minorities to leave the country. The act has long outlived its purpose and presidents have annually waived it over the past 20 years, but it must be removed before U.S.-Russia trade can be fully normalized.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that a repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment would normalize bilateral trade. 
“We’re very concerned with a lack of normal, serious, solid economic relations with the United States,” he said in an interview with the Public Post news portal, as cited by Interfax.

TITLE: Usmanov ‘Hired Firm To Edit Past’
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Alisher Usmanov, a billionaire businessman and Russia’s richest man, hired a London-based PR firm to edit a Wikipedia entry about him ahead of a stock market flotation of one of his companies, The London Times reported.
An investigation by the newspaper found that staff at RLM Finsbury had altered Usmanov’s Wikipedia entry, replacing information that could cast him in a bad light. They removed mention of his criminal convictions in the Soviet period and details of a “freedom of speech” row, in which Usmanov threatened bloggers repeating comments made by a former British ambassador who said the tycoon was a “gangster and a racketeer.”
These details were replaced by sections alluding to Usmanov’s philanthropic activities and passion for art.
The PR firm has since apologized for editing the Wikipedia entry and emphasized that Usmanov was unaware of this tactic.

TITLE: Ministry to Put $248M Into Regional Air Traffic
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry plans to spend 7.75 billion rubles ($248 million) on the development of regional airlines in 2013.
The ministry submitted to the government a “road map” for the development of regional air traffic, a ministry official told Vedomosti last week.
The plan allocates 2.15 billion rubles to subsidize aircraft leases and 2.9 billion rubles to local authorities for the development of regional air traffic.
The official added that the project was commissioned by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who in August spoke about poor development of regional airlines and their emphasis on providing connections with Moscow.
The Transportation Ministry predicts that the turnover of regional and local airlines will double by 2020.
Regional airlines are not profitable now and slow to develop due to the high operating costs of aircraft with small passenger capacity: local airlines have grown by only 8 percent compared with 15 percent for the industry as a whole, according to the Federal Air Transportation Agency.
Yury Slyusar, deputy industry and trade minister, said the ministry would work out steps to subsidize local carriers to reduce the deficit of planes on local airlines, according to Vedomosti.
The Transportation Ministry official added that the ministry would launch a test project in the Volga region to fly 125,000 passengers at a cost of 600 million rubles by the end of 2013.

TITLE: Outcry Erupts Over Izhmash
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Regional authorities might have orchestrated recent accusations by arms maker Izhmash employees against the company’s management in order to get control over the company, two people familiar with the matter said. 
The letter reportedly sent by Izhmash veterans, including legendary assault rifle designer Mikhail Kalashnikov, to President Vladimir Putin last month might have had fake signatures, the sources said. In the message, the workers said the factory’s management was inefficient and outlined problems like low wages and struggles in producing equipment commissioned by the government. 
The very fact that Kalashnikov, who turned 93 this week, discussed some such letter, let alone signed it, is a fiction based on an absence of information about the details of Kalashnikov’s life, a source in Putin’s administration said Monday, referring to the designer’s health problems. 
“No one has even seen the original [letter]. There is a text, typed on a computer, where there is simply a list of names, as if they had signed a real document,” said the source, who declined to be named since he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The letter is an example of a broader outcry around the plant, which is based in Izhevsk, 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow.
About 200 Izhmash workers organized a spontaneous protest at the factory last month after getting a meager monthly salary of 5,000 rubles ($158), Interfax reported at the time, citing Grigory Chernykh, chairman of the regional branch of the All-Russia Labor Union of Defense Industry Workers. 
Following the reports, the regional Prosecutor’s Office started an investigation that didn’t reveal any legal violations by the factory’s management, according to a statement posted on the office’s website last week. The media reports about the protest were not confirmed during the probe, the statement said. The source in Putin’s administration said no such protest actually took place. 
“The goal of all this disinformation is to influence who will be chosen as the next CEO of Izhmash,” the Kremlin source said, referring to a contest to appoint a new chief executive of the plant announced by its parent company Russian Technologies earlier this year.
A person close to Izhmash echoed that thought last week, calling the claims “a political move” by Udmurtia’s authorities seeking to appoint their protege as head of the company. The source was not authorized to speak to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity. 
Izhmash spokeswoman Yelena Filatova declined to comment on the issue.
Russian Technologies learned about the letter from media reports, said a spokeswoman for the state corporation, which owns Izhmash. She added, however, that there are no wage delays at Izhmash at the moment, and the average salary increased from 12,000 rubles in 2010 to 17,500 rubles this year. 
Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for Udmurtia President Alexander Volkov, on Monday called the rumors of regional government involvement in the matter an “absurdity.”
He couldn’t confirm that the letter was authentic, saying that he had only seen an online copy, not the original document. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov couldn’t be reached for comment.
Volkov made headlines earlier this year when a local blogger posted a photo of a billboard in Izhevsk depicting the regional president wearing a Breguet watch worth more than $120,000. The billboard was later updated, media reports said, with a photo of a different watch being glued on top of the previous picture.

TITLE: Private Firms to Take Part In Nuclear Arms Development
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Private weapons contractors will be allowed to take part in the development of nuclear weapons, a senior government official said Monday.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the defense sector, told RIA-Novosti that while the defense industry will remain under strict state control, private contractors will be able to play a role in producing nuclear arms.
He added that up to 400 companies could participate in such cooperation between the private and public sectors.
Rogozin, who supports the involvement of private enterprises in the defense sector, said that between 30 and 35 percent of the country’s defense contracts should be fulfilled with private companies’ involvement, reported RIA-Novosti.
Although private companies currently play a minor role in the government-controlled defense industry, Rogozin said earlier that private contractors have taken part in designing new sniper rifles and handguns for the military.

TITLE: Sberbank ATMs to Stop for Upgrades
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Sberbank’s ATMs and payment terminals across the country will stop working for roughly 40 minutes Wednesday night while the bank upgrades the software used in its processing center.
Sberbank said in a statement on its website Tuesday that its ATMs and terminals would be out of order between 12:30 and 1:10 a.m Moscow time while the software is upgraded, and apologized for the inconvenience caused to its customers.

TITLE: Serdyukov Leaves Big Shoes to Fill
AUTHOR: By Ruslan Pukhov
TEXT: The dismissal of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov prompted a storm of joyful shouts from a variety of places. Looking back, however, it is probably less amazing that Serdyukov was fired but that he managed to hang onto his post for almost six years.
From the beginning, it was clear that President Vladimir Putin brought in Serdyukov to implement what was perhaps the most challenging task before the government: Cleaning house at the Defense Ministry and bringing to the armed forces some form of accountability and battle readiness.
Attempts at military reforms have been made continuously since the Soviet collapse, and they have just as continuously ended in failure. By 2007, when Serdyukov took office, the armed forces were a shriveled semblance of the once-mighty Soviet Army, retaining all minuses of the Soviet-era forces and none of their pluses. The Russian army suffered from a chronic lack of funding and had an archaic structure, inadequate training, demoralized personnel with no desire to serve, obsolete and worn-out equipment and an enormous and burdensome infrastructure.
The result was an army of 1.2 million people with less than 10 percent ready to fight. All military reformers from the first Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev onward had attempted to solve these problems by creating separate battle-ready units and commands, but that only led to the creation of two parallel armies that the government could not afford due to the lack of resources.
An improved economic situation in the second half of the 2000s made it possible to increase defense spending, but that led to the discovery that huge amounts of money were disappearing without any tangible results.
The time was ripe — even overripe — for drastic military reforms. It was clear that tough and decisive action was needed to establish tight control over cash flows in the Defense Ministry, make deep cuts to the armed forces and radically restructure the entire military system.
Putin used Serdyukov to perform the crude, ruthless and cold-blooded operation.
Serdyukov, the onetime manager of a furniture store and former head of the Federal Tax Service, was an affront to all the instincts and traditions of the military hierarchy. His management style of unexpectedly introducing a flurry of administrative measures and installing female tax officials was very consistent with that image. Not since the time of Leon Trotsky had there been a defense minister who caused such a shock or elicited so much hatred in this country.
Yet it is clear that the reforms begun in 2008 were not Serdyukov’s. They were, from start to finish, Putin’s. Once they were finished, Putin showed Serdyukov the door, letting his minister make a quick exit as catcalls and expletives accompanied his retreat.
But Serdyukov was unexpectedly good in his role, and he pushed through the military reforms at a remarkable pace. His success turned what was originally supposed to be a temporary hit-and-run task into a stint of almost six years.
Now it is safe to say that Serdyukov accomplished more than anyone had expected of him. With unprecedented rapidity, the armed forces took on a new look that differs fundamentally in many ways from the traditional image of the Red Army, the Soviet Army and, later, the Russian Army. Those changes have affected all the main elements of Russia’s armed forces: their size, agencies, management, structures and officer training systems.
However, as a ruthless reformer, Serdyukov became too much of a political liability for Putin, who is experiencing a crisis among his electoral base and is drifting toward a more conservative populist approach similar to that of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Hard-hitting social reforms, which are ongoing, have undermined Putin’s goal of looking after his core electorate, thereby necessitating a little “populist therapy” with Serdyukov’s dismissal.
Thus, the hated Serdyukov has been noisily replaced with the popular Sergei Shoigu, who was immediately presented as a military general. It doesn’t matter that no one, not even Putin, can explain why Shoigu is so popular.
What’s more, Serdyukov at least once served as an enlisted soldier, whereas Shoigu was only a lieutenant in the reserves before being promoted to the rank of general. The military establishment is now naively claiming that Shoigu is one of its own, although it is obvious that he will continue Putin’s military reforms and that defense policy as a whole is unlikely to undergo any major changes.
Serdyukov represented more than an effective defense minister and an able administrator who carried out military reforms of great importance for the country. For the first time in Russia’s post-Soviet history, the Kremlin developed a truly comprehensive plan for the radical reform of the armed forces.
But more important, the Defense Ministry demonstrated the political and administrative will to implement it. Serdyukov was more than up to the task and was probably the best defense minister this country has had since Trotsky, who created the Red Army. Serdyukov laid the foundation for a modern Russian army, and for that accomplishment he received more blame than fame. He deserves the country’s praise.
But a long road lies ahead for Russia to finish building a modern military machine. For its continued development, the Army will need strong and effective management and the firm subordination of “corporate” military interests to the interests of the state as a whole — that is, a continuation of the policy Serdyukov attempted to instill in the Defense Ministry. The success of Shoigu and all subsequent defense ministers will be measured by their ability to follow Serdyukov’s example.

<i>Ruslan Pukhov is director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and publisher of the journal Moscow Defense Brief.</i>

TITLE: always a dissident: Why Did the Police Search My Apartment?
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: I was awakened during a trip to Berlin on Wednesday by a call from my wife. “Our apartment is being searched,” she said. Only 15 minutes later, journalists began calling to ask if I planned to apply for political asylum in Germany. The avalanche of phone calls almost made me miss my plane back to Russia. Fortunately, I caught the flight and was able to give a talk to a leftist group commemorating the Nov. 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Instead of reporting about what items the Investigative Committee seized from my apartment, I would have much preferred that the media write about more important issues affecting the country, such as the serious problems in the pension, education and health care sectors.
The obvious reason for the Investigative Committee’s interest in me was the testimony by Leonid Razvozzhayev, a member of the Left Front who was seized in Kiev and brought back to Moscow to face charges that he was planning to incite a riot.
Investigators themselves realized that there was no way to take Razvozzhayev’s testimony seriously. They questioned me even before I left for Berlin. I used the occasion to have them record my testimony regarding the behavior of the police during their confrontation with protesters on Bolotnaya Ploshchad on May 6. My complaint was that the police cordon created a bottleneck that provoked a skirmish with protesters. The police behaved more like angry soccer fans who had come to square off against supporters of the rival team. Several police officers charged at the protesters, sparking the standoff.
The work of the Investigative Committee has not created an impression of outstanding professionalism either. Who conducts a search only one full week after obtaining testimony from a witness? What’s more, if they needed my computer, didn’t they realize that I would have taken my laptop with me to Germany? I told them clearly during questioning that I would be out of town during the first week of November. But the group within the Investigative Committee responsible for searches clearly did not coordinate its actions with colleagues within the same agency who are responsible for interrogations.
I can’t help but compare the way the authorities searched my home last week with their predecessors during the Soviet period. Investigators may be more polite, but they are clearly less competent. Police conduct investigations in the same spirit that the authorities conduct “free” elections.
At the same time, however, many liberal commentators refer to the Kremlin’s crackdowns on the opposition as a “repeat of 1937.” This is ridiculous and an affront to the memory of millions of victims of Soviet political repression.
But the fact that today’s repressive measures are neither widespread nor effective is little consolation to those who have fallen victim to the authorities’ abuse. The latest victim is Maxim Luzyanin, who received a 4 1/2-year jail sentence Friday for taking part in the May 6 protest and allegedly assaulting police officers. There are 16 other defendants facing similar charges, and it is expected that they, too, will receive severe prison sentences.
The authorities’ actions are senseless and counterproductive, but this doesn’t make them any less ruthless.

<i>Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.</i>

TITLE: Song of innocence
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: What can break a person? Being accused of a crime they did not commit? Betrayal by a loved one? Physical abuse? A child’s illness? Or the death of those closest to them? 
Tragedy abounds in British filmmaker Rufus Norris’s film debut about a young girl’s harsh induction into the complex and fragmented world of adulthood, which saw its St. Petersburg premiere on Nov. 8. at Dom Kino movie theater. However, “Broken” is neither gratuitous nor censorial. On the contrary, it is a powerful, moving drama that probes the reasons people break down, but also explores the possibilities for healing and redemption offered by kindness and love. 
 “Broken” is based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Clay, which was inspired by Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and which also provides the movie with its thematic cue: The rites of passage a child faces as their secure world is shaken by a series of events in rapid succession. 
The main protagonist of the drama is Skunk, an 11-year-old girl, and the only character in the film who retains some kind of innocence. She has a loving father, brother and friends. But life is less peaceful among her neighbors. In the first of the movie’s cruel tragedies, one neighbor — the embittered father of three girls — beats up sweet but unstable Rick, the boy who lives next door. The carefree joy of Skunk’s childhood give way to a series of severe trials.
Norris, a multi-award-winning theater director for whom “Broken” is his debut movie project, is careful to distance himself from moralizing and the harsh condemnation of people for the acts they carry out. At the end of the film there are no clear villains, as the characters prove simply to be broken individuals who evoke the sympathy and compassion of the viewer.
“I have a strong dislike of two-dimensional representations of anything, particularly ‘bad’ people, so I was very drawn by the opportunity of showing a very dysfunctional neighborhood without being simplistic in my treatment of the characters,” Norris said.
Norris has made a highly emotional and at the same time believable drama that features both heartbreaking moments and comic episodes, seen through the eyes of a child. 
“What drew me most to this beautiful and incredibly moving story was a twofold challenge: To capture the essence of this open, vital child whilst having compassion for all the adults who in their separate ways manage to fail her, and to draw an unsentimental and total celebration of life from a seemingly tragic place,” said Norris. 
The use of flashbacks to provide background context — the signature style of cinematographer Rob Hardy (“Red Riding 1974” and “Boy A”) — and the original music by Damon Albarn (frontman of the alternative rock band Blur and creator of the virtual band Gorillaz) both play their part in ensuring that Norris’ first foray into filmmaking can be considered a highly successful work. But the film’s strongest asset is its excellent cast, the best known of whom are Tim Roth (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” “Pulp Fiction”), who plays Skunk’s father, and Cillian Murphy (“28 Days Later,” “The Dark Knight”), who portrays a schoolteacher. The leading actress, Eloise Laurence, who was chosen for the role from 850 girls, is a young newcomer to cinema, but her performance in “Broken” leaves no doubt that a glowing future in cinema awaits her.
The drama has received numerous positive reviews and won the Grand Prix at the Odessa International Film Festival, voted for by the audience. It has also been nominated for the European Discovery 2012 Prix FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics), due to be announced Dec. 1 at the 25th European Film Awards in Malta.

<i>“Broken” is showing in English with Russian subtitles through Nov. 30 at Dom Kino, 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa. Tel. 314 5614. www.domkino.spb.ru</i>

TITLE: An expat’s view of Moscow
AUTHOR: By Maximilian Gill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Finding a postcard in Moscow that captures the atmosphere and delights of living in Russia is almost impossible, even among the myriad souvenir shops that line Arbat. At best, an uninspiring shot of Red Square or Christ the Savior Cathedral will be settled for in an attempt to dispel impressions at home that Moscow is no more than a gray Soviet wasteland. 
Imagin’Elles is a new venture spearheaded by expats that aims to transform this stagnant market, selling images that show Russia at its very best with an eclectic mixture of quirky photography, drawing and graphic design. 
Images range from collages of Moscow’s church cupolas to Warhol-esque montages of clapped out Ladas to a quintessential babushka reading Pravda in the park. Only established this summer, the company has enjoyed growing success selling their wares in various locations across Moscow, including Arbat and the Radisson hotel Ukraina. 
Sara da Costa Lopes, a Portuguese expat who has been in Moscow for over six years, started the company with French friend Sandrine Rey de Rovere, whose photos are used in a number of cards, and Russian Yelena Depeille.
“In the U.K. you get whole shops that only sell cards, here in Moscow there is no real market at all,” Lopes said. “Russians are very happy to see our designs; they consider that foreigners see Russia as dark and unappealing and so they’re happy to see their lives presented in a nice way, wherever it is we are from.”
“They are very appealing and present Russia in an attractive but realistic way, which is important,” said Natalya, who works in an Arbat souvenir shop. 
An initial investment of several thousand euros has seen over 1,000 sales in the first two months, and they expect the numbers to grow. The cards cost between 30 and 80 rubles. 
Finding the right designer took a long time, Lopes said, but eventually Portuguese artist Bruno Ferreira da Silva was found. 
While some of the photographs used are from archives, many are original, and Lopes stressed that Photoshop is never used to enhance the features of their subjects in any way.
Lopes said that she and her partners are “motivated by our interest and curiosity in Russia and by the use of a small piece of paper to attract other tourists to come to Russia.”
Native Russians are responsible for the majority of Imagin’Elles’ sales so far, although there have been some complaints about the images chosen for the postcards.
What may appeal to a tourist can to a Russian be perplexing and even upsetting, said Lopes. A number have been unsettled by one image of an old woman holding up a photograph of Stalin. A postcard of Moscow’s controversial statue of Peter the Great also faced scrutiny.
For Lopes, who also runs a construction management company, starting up a new business as a foreigner hasn’t been as problematic as one might imagine. “If you have a brain and some ideas, you can do whatever you want here.”

<i>Imagin’Elles postcards are sold in Moscow along Arbat, at French tourism agent Tsar Voyages, hotel Radisson Ukraine and in CPrint, located in the Aeroexpress station at Sheremetyevo airport, Paveletskaya Railway Station, Komsomolskaya metro station and Cash&Carry. Contact: imaginelles@hotmail.com</i>

TITLE: The secret of French flair
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It is no secret that Russian chefs have a tendency to adapt foreign dishes to the local market, from spice-free Thai soups to dill-laden pizzas. This month, a French chef visiting the city explained what the term “Russian &#233;clair” means to a French pastry chef. It is an &#233;clair without glazing, and, according to the award-winning French chef Laurent Bourcier, pastry chef at the Wolkonsky bakery and caf&#233; chain, it appears to exist only in Russia.
The reason for this remains obscure, and it may be rooted in the Soviet-era shortage of culinary ingredients and the habit of making the process of food preparation a quick and convenient experience. The fact is, however, that a real &#233;clair — the way that the French make it — should adhere to certain standards.
Bourcier came to the city this month for a blind tasting of &#233;clairs and croissants that was aimed at raising awareness of the authentic taste of these two of France’s signature items of confectionary.
“When I first came to Russia some eight years ago, I was amazed to find &#233;clairs here in the first place; it seemed such an unlikely item for Russia,” Bourcier said. “My next surprise was that in quite a lot of places it came without glazing, which was replaced in some cases by cream or chocolate dusting. This was quite funny, actually, because the very name &#233;clair means something like lightning, or shine, and the shine refers to the quality of glazing!”
A chef working on an &#233;clair has three key elements to get just right: The glazing, the pastry and the filling.
“The glazing needs to be smooth and solid, without being sticky and overly moist; otherwise it will destroy the pastry,” Bourcier said.
The perfect cream for an &#233;clair is homogenous; the most common mistake that pastry chefs make is that it turns granulated, the chef added.
The blind tasting at the Wolkonsky caf&#233; on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt on Nov. 8 illustrated the importance of the balance of ingredients. In some of the samples, the glazing penetrated all the pastry, turning the cake into a sticky mass, in others the chef had overdone the pastry while failing to put enough filling in, but two &#233;clairs appeared to hit the top marks. The samples were bought on the morning of the tasting at seven local bakeries, including Garcon, Bize, Schastie, Bushe and Wolkonsky itself.
The second part of the tasting involved trying the local pastry shops’ efforts to create authentic croissants, with equally ambiguous results. 
“There is one item where even the pastry itself is not right,” Bourcier complained. “One of the biggest concerns in Russia is that chefs are forced to economize on ingredients, and it shows in the quality of the product greatly.”
Flaws detected in the croissants included raw pastry, using margarine instead of butter and a lack of volume.
“The ideal croissant should be buttery and leave soft traces on your fingers; it has to have volume and a deep dark amber color,” said Bourcier. 
“One key element of the success of a bakery is that you use hands wherever possible,” Bourcier said. “At Wolkonsky we do most of the work by hand, and I insist on that policy. Pastries made by a machine often do not have enough filling, for example, but more importantly they do not have soul. What is worse, some places that advertize themselves as French bakeries import frozen ingredients or semi-prepared food from France, and then claim that they are selling you genuine French pastries. That is a shame.”
With the prize-winning French chef in command of the pastry section and overseeing quality, as well as providing authentic French pastry recipes, Wolkonsky stops short of emphasizing its French connection.
“There are no French flags or any interior details that could be qualified as obviously French, and this is deliberate as we would like our Russian clients to feel at home,” the chef said. “One funny thing about Wolkonsky is that [when] the French search for it on the Internet, they type ‘Russian bakery Wolkonsky,’ and when the Russians do it, they type ‘French bakery,’” Bourcier added.
When Bourcier needs a quick refuel or a bite to eat, his first choice at Wolkonsky would be a salmon sandwich, he said. For sheer pleasure, he would choose a coffee &#233;clair.
“In France, chocolate and coffee &#233;clairs are some of the most popular desserts; in Russia, by comparison, most people prefer &#233;clairs with vanilla glazing,” he said.
Although various kinds of croissants — including savory ones with a Brie, ham or salmon filling — are multiplying at high speed and are sold around the clock, for Bourcier the ideal time of day to enjoy a croissant is the morning. Breakfast on Saturday or Sunday is ideal, he says.
“When I want to make a nice little surprise for my wife, I leave home on Sunday, early enough, when she is still asleep, and wake her up with the smell of freshly made coffee and croissants,” Bourcier said. “She is usually delighted!”
The world’s second-most authentic croissants, after France, can be found in Japan, Bourcier said. “In Japan, they have a huge respect for French culture and cuisine, and pay extremely close attention to technology,” he said. “In most cities in Japan, there are French bakeries, and the quality is top-notch. The Japanese get to the bottom of things, whatever they do, and it helps them to serve authentic cuisine in their dining establishments.”
Slowly but surely, Russia is also waking up to this culture. 
“Everything takes time,” said Bourcier. 
“There are now more and more French bakeries popping up in Russian cities, and I am convinced that in about 20 years’ time, most bakeries in Moscow will be able to serve you a croissant of the same standard that you would find in France. You just need a little bit of patience.”

TITLE: the word’s worth: United we stand
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ñîåäèí¸ííûé: united, connected, combined

The U.S. election cycle is finally over, and I can put away my crib sheets on the Electoral College and retire my standard explanation for the chaotic, confusing and contradictory state policies for registering voters and accepting absentee ballots: Ñòðàíà íàçûâàåòñÿ Ñîåäèí¸ííûå Øòàòû Àìåðèêè. Ýòî êàê Åâðîïà, ãäå êàæäûé øòàò – ñóâåðåííîå ãîñóäàðñòâî (The country is called the United States of America. It’s like Europe, where every state is a sovereign government.)
On about the 57th time I hauled out that phrase, I suddenly thought: Why is united translated as ñîåäèí¸ííûå and not îáúåäèí¸ííûå (also united), and what’s the difference between the two words? Those questions turned out to be a lovely distraction from wondering why anyone in their right mind would vote for someone who said he’d reveal his budget after he gets elected.
After a bit of poking around, I learned that a fair number of Russian translators and nonspecialists wondered the same thing — well, not about the nutty electorate, but: Why isn’t ÑØÀ (USA) really ÎØÀ — Îáúåäèí¸ííûå Øòàòû Àìåðèêè?
The armchair linguists agreed that while the verbs from these adjectives, ñîåäèíèòü and îáúåäèíèòü, are basically synonyms, they are used in different situations and have slightly different meanings. But they don’t agree on what they are.
As far as I can determine, the verb pair ñîåäèíÿòü/ñîåäèíèòü is used to combine or connect things or people. It can have the sense of establishing a line of transportation or communication. If you call someone’s office, the secretary might check to be sure the boss wants to talk to you and then say: Ñîåäèíÿþ (I’ll connect you now). Or it can mean mixing something together: Òâîðîã ïðîòåðåòü è ñîåäèíèòü ñ êèïÿùèì ìîëîêîì (Sieve the pot cheese and combine it with scalded milk). Or it can be used for combining several discrete objects or notions together: Ìû ñîåäèíèëè äâà ó÷àñòêà â îäèí áîëüøîé (We put together two plots of land to form one big parcel).
Îáúåäèíÿòü/îáúåäèíèòü isn’t generally used to describe communication or transportation lines or a mixture in a recipe, but it can be used to describe combining discrete things into one whole. Ìû îáúåäèíèëè íàøå èìóùåñòâî (We combined our property). It also has a loftier meaning of joining people or organizations together under one leader, ideology or goal. Sometimes people are joined together by their shared love of something: Îáúåäèíèëà åãî ñ áàáêîé èõ ëþáîâü ê ÷àþ (A love for tea brought him and the old lady together).
And then the verb or adjective can be used to describe a joint group that is either long-standing or temporary, like îáúåäèí¸ííîå êîìàíäîâàíèå (joint command).
The distinction is subtle and may have more to do with conventions of language use rather than shades of meaning. But when I looked at countries or organizations that have “united” in their name, the word is translated as îáúåäèí¸ííûé when the constituent parts existed before their unification, like Îáúåäèí¸ííûå Àðàáñêèå Ýìèðàòû (United Arab Emirates) or Îðãàíèçàöèÿ Îáúåäèí¸ííûõ Íàöèé (United Nations Organization). 
Maybe since the states in North America didn’t really exist as separate legal entities before unification, they are Ñîåäèí¸ííûå? Interestingly, Russian translators can’t make up their minds about the United Kingdom, which is either Ñîåäèí¸ííîå or Îáúåäèí¸ííîå Êîðîëåâñòâî. 
Or maybe the explanation is much simpler: Some translator working on a deadline 200 years ago wrote Ñîåäèí¸ííûå Øòàòû Àìåðèêè and it stuck?

<i>Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.</i>

TITLE: From military to millinery
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Without a degree in art or design or any kind of artistic background, a former bomb technician and an ex-taxi driver are now running an avant-garde fur fashion brand, arguably Russia’s most eccentric.
The history of Kaminsky, the brand in question, is a truly original start-up story. Back in the 1960s, when Marina Kaminskaya was choosing which university to go to, she decided on the Military Mechanical Institute for the most trivial reasons: “It was very close to home, and I knew for a fact there would be many guys there so I could be sure studying would be fun,” she said. 
“As for the degree, well, that degree would be as good as any,” she says, talking in her office, a cluttered room that is a peculiar hybrid of an office and a showroom, with fur hats filling high shelves, awards stacked in a glass cupboard and the most artful designs displayed on mannequins.
In the early 1970s, Kaminskaya met a friend who was starting up a private furrier’s shop. As their conversation progressed, she became excited. “I suddenly remembered that my grandfather was in fact a furrier; he had run his own shop back in the 1920s, during the years of Lenin’s New Economic Policy.”
And so she started helping out, and little by little the fur shop grew busier. 
“Sometimes our apartment would resemble an improvised warehouse, with some 500 hats piled up in various places,” she said. “Every surface in the flat was covered with fur ornaments and half-finished hats.”
It is hard to believe that these humble beginnings would eventually result in an extravagant brand that today produces elaborate, state-of-the-art items that grace the haute couture collections of the maestro of Russian fashion, Vyacheslav Zaitsev.
Zaitsev, who created the first fashion house in the Soviet Union, won international recognition for his striking, ultra-feminine designs with a revolutionary flair. Sharp-witted French journalists dubbed him the Red Dior, and Jacques Chirac granted the designer the title of “honorary citizen of Paris,” the world’s fashion capital. 
Marina Kaminskaya and her husband and partner Sergei Kaminsky have an enormous appetite for what they do. What appealed to Zaitsev about the Kaminskys was their passion for designs, their courage and their curiosity.
“There is a lot at your disposal when you create a new collection — contemporary technology, new fabrics that are appearing as we speak,” the designer says. “Curious souls indulge in this. Searching through ideas and then giving form to the right ones is huge fun and immensely rewarding.” 
“How did we do it? We just tried various new and unusual things …we were the first company to create colored fur hats — red, green, orange,” Kaminskaya recalls. “At first, these sold with difficulty: The Russian market is very conservative. Everyone was convinced that fur must have its natural color — and I personally think this is utterly boring — so it took a couple of years for us to break this stereotype.”
When the Kaminskys first went to see Zaitsev in 2006, the couturier threw the couple a challenge. “Make me a fur hat and mantle,” he said. The resulting items were soon gracing the pages of fashion magazines, while Zaitsev presented the Kaminskys with a real test: To design an entire collection. The designer gave them a few sheets of paper featuring black and white sketches of hat shapes, with swatches of multicolored fabrics attached to them. The samples indicated the fabrics that would be used in the fashion collection, and the sketches showed the desired shapes.
The Kaminskys passed the test with flying colors. “Some guests at the show couldn’t believe how we had done what we had — they thought that we had painted the hats with dots and ornaments, but the colored elements on the hats were actually inserts of different fur,” Kaminskaya explained.
One of the most eye-catching items in the showroom is a peach skullcap made of French lace and decorated with embroidered elements and beads with large fluffy Arctic fur pendants on both sides. The elaborate hat seems to have come straight out of a fairy tale, and would certainly be fit for a tsarina. 
But in response to a question about what the Kaminskys use for ideas and inspiration, Kaminskaya replies: “No archives — listen, I do not even draw. I go to the artists and tell them about my fantasies, the flashes of inspiration that I have.”
During a guided tour of the improvised showroom, the door bursts open and an athletic man enters the room, throwing a couple of new brightly colored books on the table. The title of the top book is “Sewing Patterns for Dog Coats.”
The man with the books is Kaminskaya’s husband, Sergei, whom she met in a taxi while he was working as a driver. The couple did not wait long to get married, and Kaminsky soon joined his new wife in the fur business.
“Oh, let’s introduce Timmy to her,” says Kaminskaya, noticing this journalist’s fascination with the intriguing books on dog clothing. Timmy is a two-year-old Maltese dog, and the only pet in the world to benefit exclusively from the Kaminskys’ creations. Timmy’s wardrobe includes winter coats decorated with Arctic fox, mink and even sable.    
The newest coat, made from a Pavlovo-Posad shawl — one of Russia’s trademark handicraft traditions — was clearly inspired by the fashion house’s most recent collection, which was shown in October at the Aurora Fashion Week and marked the brand’s 25th anniversary. 
Jolly, playful and eccentric, the collection brings together the bold floral fabrics of Pavlovo-Posad shawls and regal fur welting. The show made a splash in the fashion industry, guaranteeing more showbiz and high-profile engagements for the Kaminskys, who dress Svetlana Medvedeva, the wife of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, as well as opera diva Yelena Obraztsova and the risqu&#233; pop singer Lolita.
“Many people are sick and tired of Western brands, and they want to wear fashion items that are distinctly Russian, that have a particular Russian flavor to them,” Kaminsky said. 
“Here is our answer to Chanel,” he smiles, pointing out a small square evening bag made of luxurious white mink.
“Gucci is finished,” Kaminsky continues, opening a cupboard and taking out an opulent pair of eccentric high soft-top boots made from Pavlovo-Posad shawl fabric and decorated with red Arctic fox fur.
While the latter statement may be a deliberate exaggeration, Kaminsky’s pride is not completely unfounded. The brand’s art is a bold creative statement, one which puts to shame anyone who still believes the common phrase from the 1990s that “Russia is a fashion cemetery.” The Kaminskys will tell you otherwise. Russian fashion today is a feast of courage and color.

TITLE: THE DISH: Putanesca
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Italian cool</b>
As temperatures drop and days grow shorter, a change is sometimes needed to offset the inevitability of nature. To brighten the mood, the city changes its look with festive decorations, some update their wardrobes, and others sign up for a haircut or dance class.
The owners of the restaurant formerly known simply as Belinskogo 6 have decided that they too needed a change, and have redesigned their Spanish-themed tapas bar into a sleek new eatery, moving further east to take much of their fare — and a new name, Putanesca — from Italy. 
The kitchen and bar only opened last week (an English-language menu is yet to be printed, and final touches are still being put to the interior), but it already looks and tastes like a worthy successor to the popular tapas bar that came before it.
The owners have recruited interior designer Mikhail Orlov for the facelift, the brains behind the appearance of eateries including Beluga, Sky Terrace and a number of Ginza Project venues. Orlov has retained the cozy and intimate atmosphere of Belinskogo 6 with low ceilings, warm tones and ambient lighting, while adding a touch of sophistication and chic. 
Pop-art posters are scattered throughout, and a poster for Fellini’s “8 1/2” looks particularly welcoming when seen through the large but unimposing street windows. The modern feel imparted by stylish low red couches and glossy white enamel arches gives way to a pleasant groove: The room for smokers is flanked by a book case and a partitioned wall filled by suspended wine bottles and a glass-cubed lower section that changes coolly between blue and purple backlighting.
The relaxed no-frills atmosphere of its predecessor remains, as do reasonable prices for well-prepared European dishes. Don’t expect white tablecloths or pedantry — utensils come in a basket, and waiters wear jeans and checkered shirts, but the service is as European as the surroundings. 
While the restaurant is no gourmet dining experience, nor does it purport to be, the food did its job in pleasing taste buds and stomachs, while exciting conversation in an original and groovy interior. 
The starters were well prepared and substantial in size. The baked mussels in Parmesan (380 rubles, $12.60) were far from being the “catch of the day,” but were a good catch from the appetizers list, being pleasantly cheesy and tender and hardly warranting complaint from a non-seafood themed restaurant in Russia’s northern capital. Much the same can be said of the carpaccio of salmon (350 rubles, $11.60), which was nicely complemented by a drizzling of olive oil and capers. However, the fresh bread for 90 rubles ($3) proved to be an uninspired offer: A simple bun served with butter, more reminiscent of American diner fare than a modern Italian offering. 
Thankfully, betrayal of the Italian culinary tradition was not complete, as the linguine Putanesca (320 rubles, $10.60) was cooked al dente, with a fresh tantalizing tomato sauce including capers, olives and basil, topped off by slices of tuna cooked just enough to leave the delicate flesh smooth, though again, the fish did not create the impression of having been freshly caught.
The penne alla norma with eggplant (290 rubles, $9.60) was equally well cooked, with the vegetable cut wafer-thin and retaining its firmness, though the strong smoky flavor may not suit everyone’s palate. 
Apart from the mostly Italian themed appetizers, salads, soups, pasta and risotto, European entrees are also on offer, such as lamb ragout and ribeye steak, as well as the surprising addition of a wok section to the menu. 
Dessert offerings are equally diverse, but the strawberry flamb&#233; with ice cream doused in Sambuca (350 rubles, $12.60) is surely the most exotic, and a certain winning end to a pleasant meal.
While the kitchen might not take the claim of being the best on restaurant-laden Ulitsa Belinskogo, the laid-back and cool European atmosphere of Putanesca is top-notch, offering a relaxed alternative to the formalism of its neighbors: A very welcome change indeed.

TITLE: The Oil Town Where Abramovich Grew Up
AUTHOR: Ingrid Nevenchannaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: UKHTA, Komi Republic — If you drive a car in Moscow, chances are the gasoline in your tank came from this city, located smack in the middle of the northern Komi republic.
Oil springs were found near the Ukhta River during the days of Ivan the Terrible in the 17th century. But the first oil well — one of the first in Russia — was only drilled by industrialist Mikhail Sidorov in the 19th century.
The drilling started in earnest a few years after the 1917 revolution, leading to the founding of the village of Chibyu along the Ukhta River in 1929. In 1939, the village was renamed Ukhta, and it gained the status of a town in 1943.
While the local climate is known for being chilly, even during the short summer, the well-educated, often-English-speaking population is warm and friendly.
But this wasn’t always the case. The Soviet government used prisoners as slave labor to develop the area starting in 1938, and many people died through brutality and torture. This tragic chapter in Ukhta’s history is noted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago.”
These days, Ukhta is called the industrial capital of the Komi republic — and not without reason. It is where much of the regional production of oil, gas and bricks is concentrated. Most of Moscow’s automobile gasoline and diesel fuel comes from Ukhta.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that one of the city’s best-known former residents is billionaire Roman Abramovich, who made his fortune in the oil industry.
Both of Abramovich’s parents died when he was young, and he grew up here with an uncle, Leib Abramovich, who worked in the local timber industry and lived in an apartment at 22 Oktyabrskaya Ulitsa. Abramovich studied at the Ukhta Industrial Institute (now Ukhta State Technical University) but left without graduating to enter compulsory military service in 1984.
After his time in the army, Abramovich moved to Moscow and enrolled in an institute now known as the Moscow State Automobile and Road Technical University — and again didn’t stay through graduation. While in Moscow, he stayed with another uncle, Abram Abramovich.
The famously shy billionaire, ranked by Forbes magazine as the ninth-richest Russian, with a fortune of $12.1 billion in 2012, rarely talks about his days in Ukhta. But after he had amassed his wealth, the director of School No. 2, Abramovich’s alma mater, asked him to contribute money for repairs. In 2000, Abramovich donated 2 million rubles (worth roughly $70,000 at the time).

<b>What to see 
if you have two hours</b>

Head straight for the History Museum at Ukhta State Technical University (13 Pervomaiskaya Ulitsa; +7 216 774 402; ugtu.net), which is not only the best museum in town but is also located at the most prestigious university in the Komi republic. Here you can see documents from the 18th century mentioning Ukhta Oil Works, one of the first oil companies in Europe, and trace the history of local oil up to the present day. Part of the museum is devoted to the story of the Ukhta gulag, while another showcases the history of the development of the local timber industry.
While on the university campus, pay your respects at a chapel built to commemorate 25 people who died in an arson attack on the local Passazh shopping mall in 2005. Two 20-somethings were jailed for life by a local court after a second trial in 2009. But two investigators from the case made headlines that same year when they said the suspects were scapegoats and appealed to then-President Dmitry Medvedev to intervene. The two investigators were subsequently jailed on spurious charges.

<b>What to do 
if you have two days</b>

For an incredible weekend trip, catch a train to the Yugyd Va National Park (yugydva.komi.com), 225 kilometers away. From Ukhta, take the train to Vuktyl and then travel to Podcherem by ferry for the trip of eight to nine hours. Timetables and prices change from season to season. In 2012, boats ran on Tuesdays and Fridays and also on Sundays if occupancy reached 70 percent. The one-way boat fare is 69 rubles ($2).
At the park, the Pechora River and surrounding area is the place to try your hand at fly-fishing or hunting. The river is stocked with freshwater graylings, which are used in traditional local dishes. The park also offers many streams and rivers for boating.  
For the more physically active, climb up Mount Manaraga, which, at 1,663 meters, is an easy hike depending on the season and the chosen route. On the way up, take a break in Moroshkovy, a national cherry orchard, where you can spot wild deer walking among the trees. Locals believe that this mountain has magical powers, and even if you aren’t convinced, you will be enchanted when you look down on the beauty of the wooded taiga from the top of the mountain.

<b>What to do with the family</b>

With the weather cold for most of the year, locals love the banya, and a stop by the State Banya Complex (47 Prospekt Lenina; +7 2167 724 378) for a steam bath will leave you and your family refreshed. Another popular local sauna is the Shaggy Beaver (Mokhnaty Bober, 4 Stroitelnaya Ulitsa; +7 2167 779 041), which in addition to the sauna has a good restaurant on site.
The Recreation Center (26 Prospekt Lenina; +7 2167 721 774; centrlan.net/taxonomy/term/102) offers concerts and performances by Russian stars like Valery Leontyev and Grigory Leps.

<b>Nightlife</b>

If you want to dress up in evening clothes (and perhaps participate in a striptease competition), visit the club White Nights (3a Oktyabrskaya Ulitsa; +7 2167 752 054; uhta-gorod.ru/1150-belye-nochi-klub-uhta.php). The club often plays 1980s and 1990s disco-themed music. A highlight is the striptease contest, in which couples dance and the men compete to see which one can peel off the clothing of his female companion the most gracefully.
For a place to dine in a refined atmosphere, visit Planeta (24 Yubileinaya Ulitsa; +7 2167 745 696; planeta-ukhta.com). It is popular among local and foreign businesspeople and has a stage where foreign and local acts perform. Entrance is 300 rubles ($10).
For a disco, pub, bowling center and sushi bar all under one roof, try the Crystal Entertainment Center (3 Pionergorsky Proezd ; +7 2167 700 010; kristall.uhta24.ru). This is a favorite hangout for foreigners, perhaps in part because it offers reasonable prices and a wide choice of drinks.

<b>More places to eat</b>

Dvoryanskoye Gnezdo (2/15 Ulitsa Lenina; +7 2167 734 958; uhta24.ru/spravka/spravkaotzyv.php id=976) is considered by locals to be the best restaurant in the city center. Just steps from major business and administrative buildings, the place is often packed with city and business leaders. The most popular item on the menu is goulash cooked with vodka (300 rubles, ($10). Dishes made with mushrooms from the local forest are also a treat. Including alcohol, the average bill runs between 2,000 and 2,500 rubles ($65-80) per person.
Many locals travel abroad, and when they come back, they say the best pizza is found at Pizza Khata (22 Prospekt Lenina; +7 2167 412 919; yarmarkauhta.ru/catalog/cafe/pizza_hata.html), a cafe in the middle of the central city market, or yarmarka. A pizza costs about 200 rubles ($6). Also at the market, residents lean toward Sushi Khata, which offers the local favorite, California rolls, for 350 rubles ($11), and also serves other Japanese cuisine.

<b>Where to stay</b>

The Chibyu Hotel (38 Prospekt Lenina; +7 216 727 830; chibiu.ru), got its name from the nearby Chibyu River. Chibyu was also the name of the settlement founded in 1929, which was renamed Ukhta in 1939. Former guests include pop diva Alla Pughachyova and rockers from the group Lyube. Room rates run from 1,550 to 7,000 rubles ($50 to $230) per night, while breakfast and dinner each cost 300 rubles ($10).
If you want a cozy, smaller place, try the Hotel on Oktyabrskaya (23 Oktyabrskaya Ulitsa; +7 216 740 044; octoberhotel.ru). This elegant hotel is in the heart of Ukhta and near the popular KIO Park, where you can take an evening stroll. Prices start at 2,000 rubles ($65) per night and go up to 4,000 rubles ($125) for a luxury apartment. Pop singers Vladimir Presnyakov Jr. and Natalya Podolskaya have slept here, as has the rock band Chizh & Co. Foreign businesspeople prefer to stay here as well.
A new business hotel, the VIP Grand Hotel (7e Stroitelei Pereulok; +7 216 767 980; vip8888.ru), is only 200 meters from the central Komsomolskaya Ploshchad. Prices run between 3,000 ($95) and 6,800 rubles ($215).

<b>Conversation starters</b>

Ask about people’s work. Residents are ready to work and earn money — the very reason they live here. This is illustrated by a popular local joke: An Ukhta resident travels to the sea for a vacation at the end of the summer, and his lily-white complexion is greeted with astonishment.
“Excuse me, where are you from?” people ask.
“From Ukhta,” he answers.
“Doesn’t Ukhta have summer? You couldn’t sunbathe at all?”
“What do you mean?” the Ukhta resident says. “Of course we had summer. But I had to work that day.”

<b>How to get there</b>

The easiest and fastest route to Ukhta is by plane. You can fly daily to Ukhta from St. Petersburg with UTAir and Gazpromavia via Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. The flight takes about six and a half hours in total, including the connection in Moscow, and a round-trip ticket costs about 25,000 rubles ($790). The Ukhta airport (aviatablo.ru/ukhta) is only 7 kilometers from the city center.
A direct train to Ukhta (No. 388A) departs from St. Petersburg’s Ladozhsky Railway Station on odd-numbered dates. The journey takes around 33 hours and a round trip costs 2,700 to 7,500 rubles.

<i>Ingrid Nevenchannaya was born and raised in Ukhta.</i>
<hr />
<b>Ukhta</b>

Population: 103,340
Main industries: Oil, gas and timber
Mayor: Oleg Kazartsev
Founded in 1929

Interesting fact No. 1: Ukhta is known for its many language schools. As a result, a lot of its residents speak English, particularly young people.

Interesting fact No. 2: Ukhta is the birthplace of the well-known keyboard artist Andrei Derzhavin, a member of the band Mashina Vremeni.

Interesting fact No. 3: Ukhta is nicknamed the “Northern Pearl” because of its northern lights during winter, which lasts most of the year.

Sister cities: Usinsk, Komi republic; Naryan-Mar, Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.

Helpful contacts: Ilya Semyonov, spokesman for the Ukhta City Hall (+7 8216-789-034; mouhta.ru).

<b>Major Businesses</b>

• Sever Gazprom Company (39 /2 Ulitsa Lenina; +7 2167 762 605; 
severgazprom.ru) transports natural gas through pipelines to industrial and residential consumers throughout Europe.
• LUKoil-Komi (31 Ulitsa Neftyanikov; 
+7 216 755 111; lukoil-komi.lukoil.com) is a subsidiary of the oil giant LUKoil and is engaged in the exploration, extraction and development of hydrocarbons in the Komi republic.
• Northern Main Oil Pipelines (2/1 Ulitsa A.I. Zeryunova; +7 8216 760 171; severnyemn.ru) is one of 14 subsidiaries of the state oil pipeline monopoly Transneft.
<hr />
<b>Oleg Kazartsev</b>, &#8232;
Top Komi official 
for construction 
and public utilities and a former Ukhta mayor

<b>Q: Why should a foreign investor choose Ukhta?</b> &#8232;
A: Ukhta is open for business. We are looking for new and cooperative projects in industry, science, health care, education, culture and sports. We also wish to emphasize the increasing investment appeal of Ukhta as a place with a highly qualified workforce. &#8232;With the cooperation and help of our city government, we hope to demonstrate why Ukhta is indeed the “Northern Pearl.” Ukhta is already the heart of the oil and gas industry in the Russian northwest. In addition to a large oil refinery, we have major enterprises for the repair of oil and gas equipment and for energy research, as well as institutes working on the needs of the energy industry. 
<b>Q: What business advantages does Ukhta enjoy over other Russian cities?</b> &#8232;
A: We have many strengths and competitive advantages, including the availability of a considerable amount of municipal property for development; the codification of land use and construction rules and a city master plan; and the availability of rich natural resources. We also have a well-developed transportation system of roads, rail and air; a qualified workforce; a developed banking system; a developed community of small and mid-sized businesses; a wide network of educational and research institutions; and cultural and historical attractions including museums, monuments and many parks.
<b>Q: How are you looking to develop the economy?</b> &#8232;
A: Our first priority is the development of human capital and the improvement of services. We are tackling this issue by constructing housing, introducing a program for energy savings and power efficiency, developing high-tech medical facilities and continuing the advancement of Ukhta State Technical University. &#8232;Priority No. 2 is to develop small and mid-sized businesses, primarily by creating conditions favorable to the development of tourism. &#8232;Our third priority is to develop technology businesses by promoting innovation.
<hr />
<b>Nike Willie Taller</b>, &#8232;
Co-owner and marketing director of Taller, 
a consulting company that opened in March

<b>Q: Why should an investor consider setting up a business in Ukhta?</b> &#8232;
A: Ukhta is one of the most effective places to invest money in Russia. The unique advantages of the city and its infrastructure are favorable to business.
<b>Q: What challenges do investors have to contend with?</b> &#8232;
A: Ukhta has its share of corruption, and local bureaucracy can be sluggish.
<b>Q: Which sectors are the most promising for investors?</b> &#8232;
A: Ukhta’s strengths include oil and gas production, refining and transportation, good roads, local geological exploration capabilities, the production and processing of minerals and timber, and support services for all of the aforementioned businesses.
<b>Q: What has the government been doing to attract investors?</b> &#8232;
A: Unfortunately, the efforts of the government have not been particularly effective — or visible — in involving investors in new projects.

TITLE: State-of-the-Art Jewish Museum Opens in Moscow
AUTHOR: By Joanna Kozlowska
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW— Europe’s largest museum devoted to Jewish history and culture is now open in an old, elegant bus garage in the north of Moscow. 
The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow is a multimillion dollar sprawling, state-of-the-art show created by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia that allows visitors to see themselves dressed up as a rabbi, watch the beginning of the world and trace the good and the bad times of Jews in Russia.
“We had a clear vision when planning the museum,” said Baruch Gorin, a spokesman for the federation in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times. “Our aim is to ask questions about the present: What does it mean to be a Jew in today’s Russia?”
History is at the heart of the exhibition, charting the customs, culture and thought of Russian Jews from the inclusion of Poland’s Jewish population in the Russian empire in the 18th century to the pogroms that swept through the Jewish community at the start of the 20th century and on to the age of Soviet dissidents and refuseniks. 
Blending tradition with technology, the interactive exhibits allow the visitor to listen to the sounds of a 19th-century shtetl, a Jewish settlement, engage with Jewish thinkers in a virtual Odessa caf&#233; and immerse themselves in the Jewish vision of the Creation in a circular 4-D cinema. 
“Over 90 percent of information is to be found in the interactive material,” Gorin said. “This museum is not about objects, it is about the visitor’s personal experience.”
Visitors can be transformed with the touch of a screen into a rabbi or 19th-century Jewish craftsman. By moving their hand, the pages of a digital Torah will turn.
Personal experience is used to illustrate the darker pages in Jewish history. Video interviews and excerpts from diaries give insight into the horrors of the Holocaust and the war effort of the early 1940s. A wooden plane flown by the only female Jewish pilot is on display.
The museum boasts a one-to-one scale model of a 1960s apartment, complete with moving projections of inhabitants and recorded conversations, which bring to life the dilemmas of Soviet-Jewish families in the Brezhnev era.
The innovative exhibition was conceived by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the world’s largest museum design firm, who designed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum has been dubbed “Jewish Disneyland,” by the Internet TV channel Dozhd, but it is described by the designer himself as “a social learning experience.”
“Visiting this museum is meant to be hard work,” Appelbaum said at a news conference last Friday. “However, we have tried to make it as engaging and entertaining as possible, while showcasing its unique architectural setting.”
One initial idea was that each visitor would have their photo taken and then see in a video their face as a member of a Jewish family and follow his or her life ahead, said Alexander Boroda, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities in an interview with Vedomosti newspaper. One of the possibilities would be to watch as they die in a concentration camp. The idea was dropped after lawyers said that visitors could sue if their virtual Jewish self died in the camps, the paper reported.
The museum is housed in a constructivist bus garage designed by Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Shukhov in 1926, which previously housed the Garage Center for Contemporary Art. A special exhibition on the two architects and the Russian Avant-Garde can be viewed on the building’s mezzanine floor.
The garage also has an interactive “Tolerance Center,” where visitors can work with videos touching on multiculturalism, pluralism and tolerance.
“This is not just about tolerance toward Jews,” Boroda said. “Our aim is to promote mutual understanding and respect between all cultural and ethnic groups living in Moscow.”
Israeli President Shimon Peres visited the complex last Tuesday as part of his diplomatic visit to Russia. “I would like to thank the Russian people,” he said during the opening. “Thank you for several centuries of hospitality.”
Some commentators were more skeptical. “Russia has been so accommodating that everyone has left,” wrote one Facebook user who was quoted by the New York Times, recalling a recent nationalist march in the center of Moscow.

<i>The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center is located at 11a Ulitsa Obraztsova, Moscow. Metro Marina Roscha.</i>

TITLE: CIA Scandal Takes Dramatic New Twist
AUTHOR: By Pete Yost And Robert Burns
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The sex scandal that led to CIA Director David Petraeus’ downfall widened Tuesday with word that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is under investigation for thousands of alleged “inappropriate communications” with another woman involved in the case.
Even as the FBI prepared a timeline for Congress about the investigation that brought to light Petraeus’ extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta revealed that the Pentagon had begun an internal investigation into emails from General John Allen to a Florida woman involved in the case.
Allen succeeded Petraeus as the top American commander in Afghanistan in July 2011, and his nomination to become the next commander of U.S. European Command and the commander of NATO forces in Europe has now been put on hold, as the scandal seemed certain to ensnare another acclaimed military figure.
In a White House statement early Tuesday, National Security spokesman Tommy Vietor said President Barack Obama has held Allen’s nomination at Panetta’s request. Obama, the statement said, “remains focused on fully supporting our extraordinary troops and coalition partners in Afghanistan, who General Allen continues to lead as he has so ably done for over a year.”
It was Broadwell’s threatening emails to Jill Kelley, a Florida woman who is a Petraeus family friend, that led to the FBI’s discovery of communications between Broadwell and Petraeus indicating they were having an affair. Petraeus acknowledged the affair when he resigned from the CIA post on Friday.
In the latest revelations, a Pentagon official traveling with Panetta to Australia said “inappropriate communications” — 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents from Allen’s communications with Kelley between 2010 and 2012 — are under review. He would not say whether they involved sexual matters or whether they are thought to include unauthorized disclosures of classified information. He said he did not know whether Petraeus is mentioned in the emails.
Allen has denied wrongdoing. If Allen was found to have had an affair with Kelley, he could face charges of adultery, which is a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The decision by the FBI to hand off the Allen information to the military seems to indicate the issue is not one involving the handling of classified information, but rather some other issue.
The Petraeus case has sparked an uproar in Congress, with lawmakers complaining they should have been told earlier about the probe that has roiled the intelligence and military establishment.
Representative Peter King, a Republican for New York and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called the latest revelations in the case “a Greek tragedy.”
“It’s just tragic,” King said Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “This has the elements in some ways of a Hollywood movie or a trashy novel.”
The issue of what the FBI knew, when it notified top Obama administration officials, and when Congress was told, has brought criticism from lawmakers, who say they should have been told earlier.
The White House wasn’t informed of the FBI investigation that involved Petraeus until Nov. 6, Election Day, although agents began looking at Petraeus’ actions months earlier, sometime during the summer. Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat for California, complained that she first learned of the matter from the media late last week, and confirmed it in a phone call to the then-CIA director on Friday.
That was the same day Obama accepted Petraeus’ resignation, and the 60-year-old retired Army general, who headed U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan before taking charge of the CIA, acknowledged an affair with Broadwell, and expressed regret.

TITLE: Greece Sells Bills, Raises $5.15 Bln
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATHENS, Greece — Greece raised 4.06 billion euros ($5.15 billion) from the sale of short-term treasury bills Tuesday, money that will help it make a crucial debt repayment at the end of the week.
With the disbursement of a massive 31.5 billion euros ($40.1 billion) installment from Greece’s international bailout long delayed, the country’s finances have gone down to the wire. Without Tuesday’s sale, Athens would have found it impossible to repay the 5 billion euros ($6.4 billion) treasury bill maturing Friday, the day on which Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has said Greece would run out of money.
Despite concerns over Greece’s long-term economic outlook, the country’s euro partners and the International Monetary Fund are expected to agree on the release of the next tranche of the bailout over the next week.
The country’s debt management agency raised 2.76 billion euros ($3.51 billion) from the sale of 4-week bills at an interest rate of 3.95 percent, and 1.3 billion euros ($1.66 billion) of 13-week bills at 4.2 percent. The sale of the latter came at a marginally lower interest rate than the 4.24 percent seen in the previous equivalent auction in October.
The debt management agency will also be accepting non-competitive bids of up to another 30 percent of the auctioned amount until Thursday, as occurs with all Greek treasury bill sales - as a result, the country should be in a position to cover Friday’s repayment.
Greece has been locked out of the international long-term debt market by exceptionally high interest rates demanded for its bonds since 2010, and has been relying on funds from rescue loans by other European countries that use the euro, and the International Monetary Fund, since May that year.

TITLE: Gulf States Recognize New Syrian Opposition Group
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council recognized the new broad-based Syrian opposition group Monday as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people, the first formal endorsement of the opposition group that seeks to topple President Bashar Assad.
Syrian anti-government groups struck a deal Sunday after more than a week of meetings in Qatar. They were under intense international pressure to form a new opposition leadership that will include representatives from the country’s disparate factions fighting to topple Assad’s regime. The deal is backed by the U.S. and other Western countries.
The opposition has been deeply divided for months despite the relentless bloodshed in Syria that has left more than 36,000 people killed and repeated calls from their Western and Arab supporters to create a cohesive and representative leadership that could serve as a conduit for foreign aid.
In its statement, the GCC said it will offer “support and endorsement to this entity to realize the aspirations and hopes of the Syrian people.” The council said it hoped the new body will be a step toward quick political transfer of power and will put an end to the bloodshed. It called for Arab and international recognition of the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, the new body.
GCC Secretary-General Abdullatif al-Zayani said the Gulf states hope the opposition has taken “a step toward quick political transfer of power” in Syria.
The GCC is made up of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Meanwhile, the president of the new coalition, Maath al-Khatib and top opposition figure George Sabra flew to Cairo on the Qatari foreign minister’s plane to meet with Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby to push for recognition.
In the meeting with Elaraby, an official who attended the meeting said Qatar’s foreign minister discussed replacing the Syrian regime’s suspended membership status with the newly formed opposition coalition body. Al-Khatib and Sabra also addressed a meeting of Arab foreign ministers.
The Arab League official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said their participation in the meetings is not a formal Arab League recognition of the opposition group yet. The official said the issue is divisive among the 22 member states.

TITLE: Japan’s Economy Drops
AUTHOR: By Elaine Kurtenbach
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO — Japan’s economy contracted in the latest quarter, signaling that like Europe it may already be in recession, further weighing down world growth.
On an annualized basis, the world’s No. 3 economy shrank 3.5 percent in the July-September quarter, the government reported Monday. It was in line with gloomy forecasts after Japan’s territorial dispute with China hammered exports that were already weakened by feeble global demand.
The bad news will temper optimism over recoveries in China and the U.S., where some economists are predicting growth will top 3 percent in the third quarter. China’s painful slowdown likely bottomed out in the third quarter, with recent indicators such as factory production and auto and retail sales showing improvement. And although Europe may have turned a corner on its debt crisis as the financial system stabilizes, it is forecast to worsen before it gets better.
Japan’s outlook remains bleak, with most economists forecasting a further decline in economic activity for the October-December quarter, which would officially put it in a recession according to the common definition of two consecutive quarters of contraction.
Consumer spending fell 0.5 percent in the third quarter, as subsidies for auto purchases expired, and corporate capital spending fell 3.2 percent. Spending on reconstruction from the country’s March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disasters has also weakened.
The drop for the current October-December quarter may not be as severe as that experienced in July-September.
“If the economy does recover in any way it will be a minute rebound,” said David Rea, an economist in London with Capital Economics. He said the contraction in gross domestic product in the last quarter of 2012 could be a couple of percentage points.
More than two decades after Japan’s asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, its policymakers have yet to devise an effective strategy to help the economy break out of its deflationary funk. Meanwhile, the Japanese yen remains stubbornly high, discouraging its companies from investing at home and undermining its export competitiveness, especially against rivals Germany and South Korea.
Strangled by weak consumer spending and public investment, the economy grew at an anemic 0.3 percent annual pace in April-June, according to figures that were revised down from the originally reported 1.4 percent.
The robust 5.2 percent pace of growth in the first quarter raised hopes the recovery had taken hold, and until recently, the government was still forecasting growth at about 2 percent for the year. It had predicted a turnaround late in the year, but renewed tensions with China over disputed islands in the East China Sea, coupled with sluggish growth in Europe and other key export markets, have doused hopes for a significant rebound before 2013.

TITLE: Sri Lanka Deaths Draw Questions
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s opposition Sunday demanded a thorough investigation into a prison shootout that killed 27 inmates.
Tissa Attanayake, a leader of United National Party, said that clashes inside prisons have become frequent in Sri Lanka and their causes must be examined. The opposition says such incidents damage the country’s reputation internationally.
Twenty-seven prisoners were killed after Friday’s clash when police commandos tried to search the Welikada Prison facility in Colombo for narcotics. At least 42 others were wounded, including police commandos and soldiers who  were brought in as reinforcement to quell the unrest.
Another Marxist opposition party, People’s Liberation Front, blamed the government for the use of armed soldiers and police commandos for the search.
“Deploying military personnel in civilian affairs as well as improvidently using them in prisons for inspections would bring dire results,” the party said in a statement.
Officials said the clash erupted when prisoners attacked the search team and armed themselves by breaking into the armory.