SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1736 (47), Wednesday, November 21, 2012
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TITLE: Lawsuit Against Madonna Dismissed in St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: Max Seddon and Irina Titova 

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) -- A Russian court Thursday dismissed a lawsuit that sought millions of dollars in damages from Madonna for allegedly traumatizing minors by speaking up for gay rights during a concert in St. Petersburg.
The ruling came after a one-day hearing that bordered on the farcical. During it, plaintiffs claimed that Madonna's so-called "propaganda of perversion" would negatively affect Russia's birthrate and erode the nation's defense capability by depriving the country of future soldiers. At one point, the judge threatened to expel journalists from the courtroom if they laughed too much.
In the end, the Moskovsky district court in St. Petersburg threw out the Trade Union of Russian Citizens' lawsuit and the 333 million rubles ($10.7 million) it sought from the singer for allegedly exposing youths to "homosexual propaganda."
Madonna did not attend the trial, and her publicist Liz Rosenberg said Thursday the star wouldn't comment about it.
Anti-gay sentiment is strong in Russia, particularly in St. Petersburg, where local legislators passed a law in February that made it illegal to promote homosexuality to minors. Six months later, Madonna criticized the law on Facebook, then stood up for gay rights during a concert in St. Petersburg that drew fans as young as 12.
"Who will children grow up to be if they hear about the equal rights of the lesbian lobby and manly love with traditional sexual relations?" one of the plaintiffs, Darya Dyedova, testified Thursday. "The death rate prevails over the birth rate in the West; young guys are becoming gender neutral."
The plaintiffs submitted evidence about gay culture drawn from Wikipedia pages, claiming that a real encyclopedia could not have articles about homosexuality.
"We aren't against homosexual people, but we are against the propaganda of perversion among minors," Dyedova told the court. "We want to defend the values of a traditional family, which are currently in crisis in this country. Madonna violated our laws and she should be punished."
Madonna, who performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg in August as part of her world tour, also angered Russian officials by supporting jailed members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot. The American said during her Moscow concert that she would "pray for them," then turned around so the audience could see the words "Pussy Riot" written on her back. The singer also donned a ski mask similar to those worn by Pussy Riot.
Despite international outrage, three of that band's members were sentenced to two years in jail on hooliganism charges for performing a "punk prayer" at Moscow's main cathedral, during which they pleaded with the Virgin Mary to deliver Russia from President Vladimir Putin. One of the Pussy Riot members was later released from jail on appeal, but the other two were sent to prison camps to serve their sentences.
---
Seddon reported from Moscow.


TITLE: Pussy Riot Member Put in Solitary Confinement 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Jailed Pussy Riot band member Maria Alyokhina has been placed in solitary confinement for her own protection, prison authorities said Friday. 
Alyokhina, who is serving a two-year prison sentence at a prison colony in the Perm region, was moved to a safe room at her own request.
"The girl wrote to the leadership of the colony requesting measures to ensure her safety. She demonstrated that those around her have a bad attitude toward her. Therefore it was decided to transfer her to a room where she can be alone indefinitely," a prison representative told Interfax on Friday.
Alyokhina and fellow band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for a provocative performance in Moscow's largest cathedral in August. A third band member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released on appeal in October.
One of the band members' former lawyers, Mark Feigin, has said he thinks the women's lives could be endangered in the notoriously harsh conditions of a Russian prison colony.
An Internet campaign to bombard the Ministry of Justice with complaints about Pussy Riot's sentence was blocked Thursday night after more than 500 faxes addressed to President Vladimir Putin had been sent.
The campaign at faxyouputin.com appeared online on Wednesday. It allowed web users to use an automated service to fax the Ministry of Justice an A4 picture of a balaclava with the words "Dear Mr. Putin, free speech is a human right. Please reconsider Pussy Riot's punishment."
A message posted on the website and the group's Twitter feed late Thursday said the fax service it was using pulled the plug after having sent 595 faxes from 46 countries.

TITLE: Mutko: New St. Petersburg Stadium Will Be Ready by 2017 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko has called on St. Petersburg authorities to "demonstrate will" and finish the construction of a new football stadium by 2017, RIA-Novosti reported Wednesday.
"The governor in St. Petersburg must demonstrate will and finish the construction of the stadium; I believe it will be done," Mutko said at a press breakfast held by the organizing committee for the FIFA World Cup, which will be held in Russia in 2018.
Mutko added that work on the new stadium was under way and promised strict control over construction deadlines. "It is out of the question that St. Petersburg will miss the deadline," the minister said.
Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kazan are set to host the Confederation Cup in 2017, one year before the World Cup is held in Russia.
Construction of the new stadium, which will be the new home for the Zenit St. Petersburg football club, began in Russia's second city in 2007, but work was interrupted several times due to skyrocketing costs.
St. Petersburg's legislative assembly announced Monday that the stadium's final price tag will be 37.7 billion rubles ($1.2 billion), making it one of the most expensive in the world, according to Lenta.ru.

TITLE: NGOs Face 'Foreign Agent' Harassment
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — On the day that a much-criticized "foreign agent" law came into force, at least four nongovernmental organizations that spearheaded the opposition against it were harassed with graffiti and pickets Wednesday.
The Memorial civil rights group and the For Human Rights organization said they found "Foreign Agent" and a heart symbol followed by "USA" sprayed in white paint outside their offices Wednesday morning.
Also on Wednesday, the Young Russia pro-Kremlin youth movement held a picket outside the offices of the Russian branch of Transparency International. Activists handed out a leaflet in which they demanded that the anti-corruption watchdog "come out of the shadows" and officially register as a foreign agent, Transparency representative Gleb Gavrish said.
The picket included some 60 activists wearing sunglasses and carrying flashlights under the motto "night watch," according to an entry on Young Russia's VKontakte page. 
The same day, Young Guard, the ruling United Russia party's youth wing, staged a protest outside the U.S. Russia Foundation, which supports legal reform, RIA-Novosti reported.
The NGOs have said they would boycott the law, which obliges them to register as "foreign agents" if they use any foreign grants for political activities, because they deem it unconstitutional and insulting.
Memorial said in a blog post that its position remained unchanged and that the graffiti was a "conscious insult" to the millions of gulag victims. The organization is devoted to recording and publicizing Soviet crimes against humanity. 
For Human Rights director Lev Ponomaryov said he discovered similar graffiti on his office door, a photo of which spread around social networks Wednesday. He told The Petersburg Times that he had notified the police.
The new law stipulates that nongovernmental organizations affected by the law must register online with the Justice Ministry. However, the corresponding section of the ministry's website was inactive as of late Wednesday. Reached by telephone, a ministry spokeswoman could not say when the registry would appear. 
Daria Miloslavskaya, a Public Chamber member and NGO law expert, said she expected the registration to become possible only within a few days. She added that she had not heard of any organization that would register voluntarily.
Miloslavskaya said that while the ministry could investigate organizations' compliance with the law, that would probably not happen before late December or January.
But she said the legal situation remained murky as long as there was no clear definition of political activity. "The only definition seems to be a lack of definition," she said, explaining that this could lead to the law being implemented arbitrarily.
The Agora human rights organization said Wednesday that it was suing the ministry for failing to explain the law since it was published four months ago.
"They have not given a single explanation since July 23," Agora lawyer Ramil Akhmetgaliyev told Interfax. Many NGOs, including business lobby groups, have expressed fear that they will be affected by the law because lobbying can be interpreted as political activity.
Meanwhile, the presidential human rights council said a working group devoted to the case of deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky would continue to work under the council’s new format. The working group would also look at other “decisive cases,” Council chairman Mikhail Fedotov said Wednesday, Interfax reported.
Magnitsky died in pretrial detention in 2009 after being arrested on suspicion of fraud. His supporters say the charges were fabricated because the lawyer had investigated a multimillion-dollar tax fraud scheme.

TITLE: Russia's Miss Earth Contestant Speaks Her Mind
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia's delegate to the Miss Earth beauty pageant this week made international waves with an essay eviscerating her home country as a "beggar" and a "sinking ship" being bled dry by the greed of a "chosen few."
Kursk native Natalya Perverzeva began her essay on "what makes you proud of your country and what can you promote about it?" routinely enough, saying Russia is "all that I have, all the people I love, all that is dear to me."
But the 24-year-old civil service financier soon turned her attention to ills she said too many people want to close their eyes to and "reject as spoiling a look."
"My Russia is a poor long-suffering country, mercilessly torn to pieces by greedy, dishonest, unbelieving people. My Russia is a great artery from which the 'chosen' few people [are] draining away its wealth," she wrote. "My Russia is a beggar. My Russia cannot help her elderly and orphans."
"From [Russia], bleeding, like from a sinking ship, engineers, doctors and teachers are fleeing because they have nothing the live on. My Russia is an endless Caucasian war. These are embittered brother nations that formerly spoke in the same language but now prohibit the teaching of it in their schools. My Russia is a winner that overthrew fascism but bought the victory at the expense of the lives of millions of people. How, tell me, how and why does nationalism prosper in this country?" she wrote.
The comments, posted in inexpertly translated English on the Miss Earth website, have won her instant fame among the liberal opposition, with quotations from the speech being reposted by the Campaign for Fair Elections and other groups.
It is not all doom and gloom, however. She said she would be proud of the country "no matter who rules it," and she urged her countrymen to identify themselves with the "mercy, heroism, courage, diligence" that are the nation's saving grace. "Only we can improve the situation," she wrote.
Perverzeva, a WWF volunteer, is also a fierce advocate of renewable energy, which she believes has great potential in Russia.
The winner of the Miss Earth pageant, in which contestants are judged partially on their environmentalist credentials, will be crowned in Manila on Saturday.

TITLE: New Map Shows Ecological Blackspots
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new online environmental monitoring project aims to fight corruption and challenge the regional authorities. Conceived by the Russian Geographic Society together with RIA-Novosti news agency, the nationwide multimedia project is titled “The Ecological Map of Russia.”
The detailed map was launched in October and can be viewed at http://ria.ru/ecorating. Updated round the clock seven days a week, it allows environmentalists in each region to draw attention to ecological blackspots as well as unfolding disasters. Internet users can post information about accidents, pollution, illegal garbage sites and violations of environmental laws on the website, and also upload photos and videos as proof of their allegations.
“It is not uncommon for regional authorities to ignore people’s complaints for ages and stick their letters in a pile in their offices,” said Lina Zernova, editor-in-chief of the Ecology and Law environmental magazine, speaking at the project’s presentation on Monday.
Reports from green-minded members of the public complement the basic data that is collected by the project’s organizers, whose aim is to create a rating of the Russian regions. To award a position in the rating, experts assess a range of factors affecting the state of the environment, including air and water pollution, changing ecosystems, the production and treatment of industrial waste, environmental protection efforts, accountability by local business communities and the endangered status and extinction of animal species.
Pressure groups across Russia have welcomed the initiative as encouraging transparency and igniting public debate on environmental issues. 
“The map makes it possible to make a region’s problems very visual: Locations of major accidents or very polluted areas will turn red at high speed if activists submit their reports,” Zernova said. “The officials in these regions will have a hard time explaining why they have been lax in dealing with these issues. I am convinced this project has huge potential, and could really improve the situation.”
Dozens of reports have already been submitted to the website. Most of the complaints regard illegal garbage sites and water pollution.
Environmental non-governmental organizations say that the map, if regularly and thoroughly updated, could create a substantial and sweeping impression of the ecological situation in Russia. 
“Many ordinary Russians are not even aware of the existence of certain towns where people suffer from devastating environmental disasters,” said Yevgeny Schwartz, director of environmental protection policies at the Russian branch of the World Wildlife Foundation. “Having reviewed the first wave of complaints, we can easily see some of the ailing issues that exist across the country, such as, the rampant destruction of forest and other green areas in order to vacate space for expensive construction projects,” he said.
Sergei Vinogradov, chairman of the Green Front ecological non-governmental organization, said the map would enable regional environmental activists to join forces, helping ordinary people to find solutions and win victories.

TITLE: City Officials Mull Merger With Oblast
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The authorities of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, which spreads out from its city limits, are playing up a newfound level of cooperation and talking about blurring the lines between them.
Speaking at a recent intergovernmental meeting, St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko raised the idea of uniting the city and the whole region, which extends across the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga coastlines and surrounds St. Petersburg, RIA-Novosti reported.
“If it were objectively necessary to merge the two areas of the city and region, it would need to take place [in a way] imperceptible to residents,” Poltavchenko said, implying that it should not interrupt their daily lives.
At the same meeting, Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said city versus region wasn’t an important distinction for most people.
“Today, our citizens don’t care which area they live in when it comes to their social and residential problems,” Drozdenko said, BaltInfo.ru reported.
He said about 240,000 people living in the Leningrad Oblast have permanent jobs in St. Petersburg, while up to 2 million city dwellers make summertime commutes to their dachas in the region.
The two men have discussed forming a “joint investment council” so that the city and region can woo investment together.
“We shouldn’t be competing for major investors,” Drozdenko said at the Nov. 13 event with his St. Petersburg counterpart.
Besides investment, tariff policies, infrastructure, healthcare and horticulture also demand closer cooperation between St. Petersburg and the region, Poltavchenko said.
Alexei Titkov, an associate professor of applied political science at the Higher School of Economics, said the merger of St. Petersburg and the region “is not very realistic.” Though it is technically feasible, it is highly unlikely that President Vladimir Putin would give his imprimatur to such a plan, Titkov said.
Discussion of a potential merger of Moscow and the Moscow region has also come up this year.
As officials prepared to annex nearly 150,000 hectares from the Moscow region for the capital, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin had to quell rumors that the the government wanted to join the entire region to the city.
Moscow, St. Petersburg and their surrounding regions have all experienced a turnover in top executives in the past two years, with fresh faces supplanting politicians who had held the executive spot for anywhere from six to 16 years.
This new crop has introduced more cooperation to city-region relations. In spite of the political synergies, however, Moscow and St. Petersburg probably won’t be united with their respective regions, Titkov said by telephone.

TITLE: German State Refuses Forum
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Authorities in the German state of Baden-Wurtemberg have declined to host the annual Petersburg Dialogue German-Russian conference in 2013.
The suggestion to hold the conference in Baden-Baden was made by the organizers of the event. The authorities of the state said the conference would involve expenditure that the region could not afford for the moment, web portal Fontanka.ru reported.
The region’s authorities reportedly calculated they would have to spend 3 million euros ($3.8 million) on the event and additional policing.
However, sources with links to the organizers of the conference said the government of the region would not have to cover too many expenses, as businesses interested in good relations with Russia would cover the major costs, Fontanka reported, citing German magazine Der Spiegel.

TITLE: Hotel Boosts Neediest Sector
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city’s much-lamented mid-range hotel sector got a boost last week with the opening of the three-star Red Stars hotel at 30 Naberezhnaya Reki Pryazhki. 
The area is one of the most up-and-coming districts of the city for hotel development, with one of St. Petersburg’s major attractions, the Mariinsky Theater, located nearby.
The interior of the Red Stars hotel has been decorated in a street art style by local graffiti artists. The four residential floors are labeled New York, Tokyo, London and Rio de Janeiro, and the graffiti on each floor has been done in a corresponding style.
The walls of the hotel are fitted with plasma panels and media-art installations that show views of those cities on constant rotation, making the hotel reminiscent of a modern art gallery.
The design of the hotel is aimed at recreating a “young people’s environment,” said Alexander Zhukov, the hotel’s co-owner and creative director.
“Street art seems to have occupied quite a niche in modern art; it’s turned from a hooligan’s pasttime into quite a mainstream art movement. There are trends in life that we are simply obliged to embrace,” Zhukov said, explaining the hotel’s design concept.
“In this hotel, we’ve let the city atmosphere into the hotel,” Zhukov said, adding that they had chosen graffiti from cities across the world that are best known for interesting graffiti art.
Zhukov said that the hotel offers street art professionals from all over the world the opportunity to add their paintings to the hotel.
“We’ve saved space for such artists where they can leave their work on the walls to potentially turn our hotel into a contemporary art museum,” he said.
Zhukov said that the hotel is focused not only on its design, but also on modern conveniences including tap water that is safe for drinking and free Wi-Fi in the rooms.
“I think for young people, free Wi-Fi in the rooms is very important. I get irritated myself when some hotels have free Wi-Fi only in the reception area,” Zhukov said, adding that although the hotel positions itself as a three-star hotel, it provides four-star services. 
Zhukov said they had decided to open a three-star hotel because it was well known that St. Petersburg has a major lack of hotels in that category.
In low season, prices at the hotel start at 3,400 rubles ($110) per person, while in summer the prices are higher.
Yelena Snezhurova, the hotel’s director, said the sixth floor of the hotel building also houses a hostel where people can stay for 450 rubles ($14) per night.
The hotel, which has been open to guests since May last year, has also hosted several modern art seminars.
The biggest tourism website, Tripadvisor.com, has included Red Stars on its list of St. Petersburg’s ten best hotels.
Tatyana Gavrilova, head of the Northwest branch of the Russian Tourism Union, said the opening of Red Stars was “good news,” as the city is still in need of three-star hotels, which currently make up 34 percent of all hotels in the city. Four-star hotels account for 52 percent of the local market and five-star hotels occupy 14 percent of it.
Gavrilova said the demand for three-star hotels in St. Petersburg was so high that this year hotels in this category had raised their prices on average by 29 percent.
At the same time, the occupancy rate of three-star hotels was 67-69 percent in the third quarter of the year compared to 65-67 percent in four-star hotels and 60-62 percent in five-star establishments, she said.

TITLE: International Residents Prepare for Winter Fair
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This year’s annual Winter Charity Bazaar, organized by the International Women’s Club (IWC), will feature two lotteries as well as the traditional food and crafts stalls selling goods from all over the world.
Proceeds raised at the Winter Bazaar, which will take place at the city’s Astoria Hotel this Sunday, Nov. 25, go to various charities in the city and the Leningrad Oblast, or to individuals who are in urgent need of support.
The bazaar features a variety of international food and craft stalls manned by representatives of foreign communities and consulates. Food and drink, souvenirs and handicrafts specific to each particular country are on sale. 
Charity organizations and children’s homes are also represented at the events by stalls selling homemade items.
This year’s Winter Bazaar will feature two lotteries: The traditional Grand Raffle, which offers coveted prizes varying from airline tickets and vouchers for hotels or restaurants to jewelry. In the other lottery, the Lucky Draw, each ticket guarantees a small prize. 
The bazaar’s program will also see performances by the Upsala Circus and the Singing Catherines, the choir of the International Women’s Club. 
The bazaar’s partners include local hotels that have donated vouchers for overnight stays and meals; drinks companies that have sponsored the soft drinks and beer stands and Stockmann department store, which has donated gift hampers and two 100-euro vouchers to the Grand Raffle.
The bazaar will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday Nov. 25. Admission is free.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>PM Slams Soccer Crime</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said crimes like those committed during Saturday’s match between Moscow’s FC Dinamo and St. Petersburg’s FC Zenit in Moscow, in which a player was injured by a firecracker thrown onto the field, should be punished by imprisonment.
Medvedev expressed hope that police would find the person responsible for the incident, Interfax reported.
The game between the two clubs was stopped in the 38th minute of the first half, with Dinamo leading 1:0, after the Dinamo goalkeeper, Anton Shunin, was hit by a firecracker thrown from the stands. The missile exploded at the feet of Shunin, who reportedly suffered burns to his cornea.
The sector where the fans who threw the firecrackers were sitting was reportedly under video surveillance. A disciplinary committee from the Russian Football Association will conduct an investigation into the incident and make a decision. If the incident is found to have involved a Zenit fan, the club will be handed a 3:0 loss by default, in line with FIFA regulations. The club will also have to hold from one to five games behind closed doors on a neutral field and to pay a fine of 500,000 rubles ($15,850), web portal Fontanka.ru reported.

<b>Treasure Goes On Show</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A temporary exhibit showing the treasure hoard of Russia’s Naryshkin noble dynasty that was found in a St. Petersburg mansion earlier this year will open at the Pavlovsk Museum before the New Year.
Five hundred items from the collection are currently on display at the Konstantinovsky Palace in the St. Petersburg suburb of Strelna, but at Pavlovsk Palace, the whole contents of the find are to be displayed. 
The treasure hoard was found on March 27 during reconstruction of the Naryshkin-Trubetskiye mansion at 29 Ulitsa Tchaikovskogo, and consists of more than 2,000 objects. Among the items found were dinner sets and jewelry. After discovery, the objects were taken to the Konstantinovsky Palace for storage and to be exhibited in part.

TITLE: Science Fiction Author Boris Strugatsky Dies
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Prominent science fiction author Boris Strugatsky died in a St. Petersburg hospital late Monday after a serious illness, media reports said.
Strugatsky, who was 79 at the time of his death, wrote several dozen books with his late brother Arkady between the 1960s and 1980s. Their books were printed in 321 editions in 27 countries, according to the website of the Strugatsky Brothers Foundation.
President Vladimir Putin called Strugatsky “one of the brightest, most talented and popular writers of the [present and past] time” and the “ruler of the dreams of many generations” in a telegram to the writer’s relatives posted on the Kremlin’s website.
Arkady Strugatsky died in 1991.
Boris Strugatsky had accused film director James Cameron of taking the plot for the hit movie “Avatar” from his novel “World of Noon.”
In the 2000 presidential election, Boris Strugatsky voted for Putin’s first term, but in a February 2010 interview with the opposition-minded Novaya Gazeta newspaper he condemned Putin’s rule as “authoritarian.”
In 2005, he signed an open letter calling on the international community to recognize Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky a political prisoner, according to the writer’s biography on Ekho Moskvy.
Strugatsky’s family hasn’t yet decided on the place and time of the funeral.

TITLE: Putin and Merkel Trade Barbs in Kremlin Talks
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel traded barbs over Pussy Riot, human rights and democracy during Kremlin talks Friday that marked a turn in Berlin’s policy toward Moscow.
Merkel, who had been under pressure not to be soft on Putin, seemingly enjoyed confronting her host about the ongoing onslaught on the opposition.
During an at times fulminant panel debate in the Kremlin, she said that a series of recently passed legislation curtailed freedom and that the two-year prison sentences for Pussy Riot activists were too harsh.
A jovial Putin played down the criticism, saying the country’s partners hear about events in Russia “from far away.” He created fresh controversy by telling Merkel that the Pussy Riot members deserved no sympathy because they supported anti-Semitic positions. 
The president claimed that one of the young women had hanged an effigy of a Jew in a city shopping mall and said “Moscow needs to get rid of such people.”
Bloggers quickly pointed out that this resembled a 2008 performance by the Voina radical art group, in which, however, no effigies but five volunteers were mock-hanged in a supermarket to criticize City Hall’s policies toward migrants and gays. And while two known Pussy Riot members did take part, their trial and sentencing this summer had nothing to do with that performance but solely with their singing in a Moscow cathedral this February.
Putin, however, insisted on his version during a news conference hours later. “They hanged in a Moscow supermarket three effigies labeled Jew, immigrant and another category, with the call to rid Moscow of these people. I believe this is a direct anti-Semitic insult,” he said.
The president also left listeners baffled by telling Merkel during the panel debate that Germany had been criticized by human rights groups because five of its states lacked a “law for the protection of information.”
Germany does have data protection laws in each of its 16 states and at the federal level. However, only nine states have freedom of information laws that guarantee citizens access to state documents. Observers quickly pointed out that Russia has no such law.
Merkel, who appeared relaxed and at times smug during the debate, which marked the end of the Petersburg Dialogue, an annual Russian-German forum, also suggested that her hosts could not deal with criticism. “If I were sulky every time I’m criticized, I wouldn’t last three days as chancellor,” she said.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that it was useless to talk with the Kremlin’s critics in Berlin, calling them “hotheads” who were not among the friends of Russia.
Tension had been rising between Berlin and Moscow during past months, as German lawmakers prepared a highly critical report about the worsening opposition crackdown in Russia, which the Bundestag passed by a majority Nov. 9.
While Berlin has traditionally been one of Moscow’s staunchest supporters in the West, Merkel has recently faced strong calls from inside her ruling center-right collation for a more critical approach.
Unlike her predecessor Gerhard Schr&#246;der, who today heads the Nord Stream pipeline consortium, Merkel never established warm personal ties with Putin, but was said to get along very well with Dmitry Medvedev during his four-year stint in the Kremlin, which ended in May.
Her pragmatic course of wielding a “modernization partnership” with Moscow has been questioned since Putin’s return to the presidency, and Merkel has been criticized for investing too much hope in Medvedev. 
However, Merkel stressed Friday that Berlin would continue its cooperation with Moscow — by pointing to the annual talks between Cabinet ministers from both governments, which also took place Friday in the Kremlin, and to the fact that more than 6,000 German companies are operating in the country.
Germany is Russia’s second-largest trading partner after China, and bilateral trade is expected to peak at $102 billion this year.
Ministers and business leaders from both sides signed 10 new cooperation agreements Friday, including a letter of intent between technology giant Siemens and Russian Railways to purchase nearly 700 trains for about $3.2 billion.

TITLE: Missing Passport Sparks Row
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A member of female punk band Pussy Riot may ask for her former lawyers to be stripped of their legal status, a news report said Tuesday.
The news came a day after the band’s lawyers terminated their contract with the musicians, saying the publicity they had attracted to the case could harm their defendants.
Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, may petition a legal council to strip the lawyers of their licenses because one of them, Violetta Volkova, whom she fired in early October, has failed to return her passport, the keys to her apartment and the response to the band’s complaint to the European Council of Human Rights, Samutsevich’s new lawyer Sergei Badamshin told Kommersant.
Mark Feigin, another of the three former lawyers for the band, called Samutsevich’s move “a defamation campaign” against them “organized by the authorities” and said that the lawyers would hold a news conference in the next few days. 
Kommersant claimed to have obtained an official letter written by Samutsevich and dated Nov. 11 to Volkova, Feigin and Nikolai Polozov, the third lawyer, asking them to return her belongings before Nov. 19, which they failed to do, Badamshin said.
Samutsevich told Dozhd television late Monday that she last saw her passport in Volkova’s hands on March 16, when a city court sanctioned her arrest. 
Sometime after that, the lawyers separately told Samutsevich and her father that they didn’t know where her passport was, and the woman had to submit a request to the police to make her a new passport because she had lost the old one, the musician told Dozhd.
The request to disqualify the lawyers would be “an extreme measure, which we wouldn’t like to be driven to,” Badamshin said, according to Kommersant.
Samutsevich was released from custody in early October after she fired Volkova and pleaded partially guilty to the charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred over a February performance at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral that denounced President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill.
The court replaced the two-year prison term for Samutsevich with a suspended sentence while the two other performers — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23, and Maria Alyokhina, 24, who pleaded not guilty to the charges — were convicted and started serving similar terms in late October.
On Monday, the band’s lawyers said they were terminating their contracts with Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, who will be represented by Irina Khrunova, the lawyer who successfully argued for Samutsevich’s release.

TITLE: FBI Releases New Files on Stalin’s Daughter
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MADISON, Wisconsin — Newly declassified documents show the FBI kept close tabs on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s only daughter after her high-profile defection to the United States in 1967, gathering details from informants about how her arrival was affecting international relations.
The documents were released Monday to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act following Lana Peters’ death last year at age 85 in a Wisconsin nursing home. Her defection during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling Communists and made her a best-selling author. Her move was also a public relations coup for the U.S.
When she defected, Peters was known as Svetlana Alliluyeva, but she went by Lana Peters following her 1970 marriage to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. Peters said her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities’ poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, a prominent figure in the Indian Communist Party.
George Kennan, a key figure in the Cold War and a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, advised the FBI that he and Alliluyeva were concerned Soviet agents would try to contact her, a December 1967 memo reveals. The memo notes that no security arrangements were made for Peters, and no other documents in the file indicate that the KGB ever tracked her down.
One memo dated June 2, 1967, describes a conversation an unnamed FBI source had with Mikhail Trepykhalin, identified as the second secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C.
The source said Trepykhalin told him the Soviets were “very unhappy over her defection” and asked whether the U.S. would use it “for propaganda purposes.” Trepykhalin “was afraid forces in the U.S. would use her to destroy relationships between the U.S.S.R. and this country,” the source told the FBI.
An unnamed informant in another secret memo from that month said Soviet authorities were not disturbed by the defection because it would “further discredit Stalin’s name and family.”
Stalin, who was held responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen in labor camps, led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Stalin’s  successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him three years later as a brutal despot.

TITLE: Fire at Animal Shelter Wilful, Say Experts
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators said Tuesday that a fire that killed seven dogs in a Moscow animal shelter in early November was the work of arsonists.
Experts are continuing to examine the area surrounding the Alma shelter, which was engulfed in flames in the early hours of Nov. 5, but are now treating the case as an arson attack, Sergei Chervyakov, head of the Federal Fire Service, told RIA-Novosti.
Police have opened a criminal case on charges of animal cruelty and intentional destruction of property.
Shelter director Lyudmila Bychkova said a witness had seen a man in a green Lada stop outside the shelter in western Moscow and throw something into the compound, after which the building caught fire, Interfax reported.
The shelter housed around 200 animals at the time of the fire, but most were saved by staff opening their cages.

TITLE: Activists Vow Boycott Of New NGO Amendment
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Although much-debated amendments for nongovernmental organizations go into force this Wednesday, do not expect foreign-funded NGOs to rush to re-register as “foreign agents” with the Justice Ministry.
Prominent rights activists have announced they would boycott the new law, which they have lambasted as imposing an insulting title that makes them look like traitors or spies, whereas supporters say it merely raises transparency by showing citizens the origin of funding.
While observers say that much depends on how the new law is implemented in practice, some fear that the noncompliance declarations mean that the situation is bound to escalate because they force authorities to retaliate in order to save face.
“We won’t use that denomination and will use all legal means possible, both national and international, to oppose this law,” Alexander Cherkasov, head of the Memorial human rights organization, told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
His words were echoed by Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran campaigner and founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, who promised to challenge the law in the European Court of Human Rights.
“We are no foreign agents. We cannot call ourselves that. This is demanded by the law, but we cannot declare false information,” Alexeyeva told Interfax on Monday.
The law was passed by the State Duma this summer along with a raft of other measures seen as limiting civil rights in the wake of months of mass anti-government protests. It stipulates that non-government organizations declare themselves “foreign agents” in all official communication, if they receive foreign grants and engage in political activity.
Critics say this is meant to stifle activities of rights campaigners critical of the government. These groups were also hit by last month’s closure of the Russian operations of USAID, the agency that handles most U.S. government grants. They say it is unrealistic to replace foreign funding with domestic money because local donors are often unwilling to support organizations critical of the government.
“The law creates an extremely unhealthy climate for NGOs. It deals a huge blow to those who got foreign funding and now need to find new money to survive,” Anna Sevortian, head of Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office, told The St. Petersburg Times.
The measures are seen as part of a Kremlin orchestrated campaign against pro-democracy groups like election watchdog Golos, who had faced unprecedented pressure before last December’s Duma elections and the March presidential vote.
Golos chairwoman Lilia Shibanova reiterated Monday that she would challenge in court any order to comply. “Our position has not changed,” she said in comments carried by Interfax.
Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International has said the law violates both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. Among others, the amendment infringes organizations’ equality before the law and violates the constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination, Transparency Russia said in a declaration published earlier this month.
In response, the United Russia ruling party, whose 237 Duma deputies collectively submitted the bill in June and passed it a month later, called upon the Justice Ministry to investigate Transparency for deliberately calling to break the law. “An organization engaged in fighting corruption should obediently comply with the law,” said Irina Yarovaya, head of the Duma’s Security Committee and a prominent champion of the law.
The party has also initiated a bill that would raise fines for noncompliance to up to 500,000 rubles ($15,800) for organizations and 300,000 rubles for individuals.
Existing laws already enable the justice Ministry to close noncompliant organizations for up to six months without a court order. The new law stipulates prison terms of up to two years for noncompliant NGO staff.
Alexeyeva predicted that noncompliance would be persecuted harshly. “With a normal judiciary, a court would give us rights. But I have no illusions about our courts,” she told RBC Daily in an interview published Monday.
She went on to say that she does not fear imprisonment. “Let them arrest me. … I will die in detention after a few days,” she was quoted as saying. Alexeyeva celebrated her 85th birthday in July.

TITLE: VTB Head is Russia’s Top Earner
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Head of state-controlled lender VTB, Andrei Kostin, was ranked the highest paid executive in the country, having earned about $30 million last year, according to a list published by Forbes magazine Monday.
State company executives occupied the top five positions in the ranking by the magazine’s Russian edition, with Kostin being closely followed by his peers from Gazprom and Rosneft. The list includes heads of 25 companies, both state-controlled and privately-owned. 
Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller earned $25 million last year, overtaking the heads of other global oil and gas companies — James Mulva of ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil’s Rex Tillerson, the publication said.
“Heads of our biggest companies like VTB or Gazprom believe that they should earn no less than their Western colleagues,” an executive headhunter told Forbes. 
The annual income of Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who took office only in May, is likely to reach $25 million as well, putting him in third place in the ranking.
Sberbank chief executive German Gref was ranked fourth with a more modest take of $15 million, most of which was received in bonuses — the part that largely depends on the lender’s net profit, according to the publication. Gref’s contract stipulates that the size of his bonus can reach up to 0.075 percent of Sberbank’s annual net profit, which hit $10.75 billion last year, Forbes said. That means Gref could have earned almost $8 million in variable pay, it said.
Bank of Moscow President Mikhail Kuzovlev was the last in the top five with a compensation of $15 million. 
Some companies whose executives were ranked by Forbes took an ironic stance, saying the estimates provided by the magazine far from represented reality. 
“Dubious methods of calculation by the experts resulted in the publication stepping on the unsettled ground of speculations and guesses. One can say that the figure was literally pulled out of the hat,” a VTB spokesman told PRIME. The company’s executive board members jointly earned about 608 million rubles ($19.2 million) last year, he said, citing a VTB financial statement. 
According to the estimates by Forbes, the total compensation of the group’s key executives stood at $194 million last year. 
“Following Forbes’ logic, VTB’s executive board members have to pay extra for the honor of working in Kostin’s team,” the spokesman said ironically without elaborating. 
A representative of the Bank of Moscow, a VTB subsidiary, told Gazeta.ru that the estimates by Forbes are inaccurate, but declined to comment on Kuzovlev’s official pay. Sberbank said in an e-mailed comment that the pay of any employee is confidential information. 
It’s very hard to say whether the figures reported by Forbes are accurate, because the incomes of executives at Russian companies are “generally extremely secret information,” said Luc Jones, a partner at Antal Russia Recruitment Company. 
The calculations provided by the magazine are likely to be based on comparison with the salaries of senior executives at similar foreign companies, “but it’s rather guesswork,” he said by telephone. 
Jones pointed out that state company executives usually enjoy greater benefits than just high salaries. 
“Working in state-owned companies, they occupy very powerful political positions, so the political connections these positions involve are probably worth a lot more than the salaries they receive,” he said.

TITLE: Lavrov, Clinton Discuss Politics
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday discussed NATO plans to build an anti-missile shield in Europe, the Magnitsky list and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at their first meeting since U.S. President Barack Obama’s re-election on Nov. 6.
Lavrov and Clinton, who met in Cambodia on the sidelines of an event staged by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said bilateral attempts to find a compromise on the construction of the U.S.-backed anti-missile shield would continue, Interfax reported.
The Magnitsky list is a “practically decided matter” in Washington, Lavrov said. “Clinton knows that we will reply accordingly,” he said.
Russia has proposed holding an urgent meeting of the four countries who act as mediators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the main goal before that is to achieve a truce between Israel and Hamas, Lavrov said.

TITLE: Bout Innocent, Says Deputy
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government needs to do more to protect the rights of Russians abroad, including convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout, the head of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee said Monday.
Alexei Pushkov told a Duma round table dedicated to rights abroad that “Bout did not commit any crime” and was convicted in the U.S. “based on fabricated, forged documents,” Interfax reported.
The comments appeared as lawmakers mulled a response to the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage Friday of the Sergei Magnitsky Act, aimed at punishing Russian officials implicated in the whistle-blowing lawyer’s 2009 death in pretrial detention.
Over the weekend, Pushkov raised the prospect of a retaliatory “Bout List” against U.S. officials linked to the prosecution of the Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years in prison by an American judge in April.
Others at the round table also expressed support for Bout, and pledged to continue to press for his release.
“We’re not leaving this case. We’re going to work on it actively,” said Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s human rights envoy.
The U.S. Justice Department recently turned down a request to have Bout extradited to Russia, citing the seriousness of his 2011 conviction of conspiring to sell weapons to a terrorist group, RIA-Novosti reported earlier this month.
Bout was arrested in Bangkok after attempting to sell weapons to U.S. agents posing as representatives of the Colombian rebel group FARC. He was extradited from Thailand to the United States in 2009.
The Foreign Ministry and individual lawmakers have promised “retaliation” for the Magnitsky legislation, and harsh words continued to fly Monday, with a senior United Russia official accusing opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov of treason for supporting the bill.
Sergei Neverov said Kasyanov, co-leader of the People’s Freedom Party, or Parnas, was putting the interests of “a few American politicians” over Russia’s national interests, according to a statement on United Russia’s website.

TITLE: St. Petersburg Firms To Raise Wages, Hire Staff
AUTHOR: By Maria Buravtseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Employers in St. Petersburg are only raising employees’ salaries to match inflation, but almost half plan to take on new staff in the coming year.
Sixty-nine percent of Russian companies intended to increase salaries in the second half of 2012 and in 2013, according to analysts at the recruitment consulting company Case, who collected data from 80,000 employees from 618 companies, including 15,000 workers from 89 companies based in St. Petersburg. The average raise in St. Petersburg will be 8 percent in the second half of this year and 10 percent in 2013. On average, salaries in Russia will increase by 8 and 9 percent respectively in the same period. During the same time period, according to Case, 44 percent of companies plan to expand their number of staff, and the same number said they would retain their current staff levels. Ten percent of companies intend to reduce their number of employees.
The average salary in St. Petersburg, according to Case, is 56,627 rubles ($1,800) per month, although after discounting salaries received by top managers, that figure stands at 37,993 rubles ($1,200).
The automobile industry has become the driving force behind the wage increases in St. Petersburg; both car manufacturers and component suppliers have raised salaries, said Maria Margulis, director of the 1000 Kadrov recruitment agency. According to data from SuperJob, salaries in St. Petersburg’s automobile industry range from 18,000 to 43,000 rubles ($575-1,370). Toyota and Hyundai increase the salaries of staff at their manufacturing plants every year, say representatives. Car manufacturers are also actively taking on new staff, said Margulis. In September 2012, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Russia switched to a double-shift work schedule and by that point had taken on and trained 600 new employees, a company representative said.
Software developer Reksoft raised the salaries of staff considered key to business by 10 percent on average this year, Olga Barmash, director of human resources at Reksoft, said via the company’s press office. The number of technical specialists employed by the company increased by 10 percent this year and further recruitment is planned for 2013, she said. The job market in the IT sphere is a candidates’ market, and there is intense competition for experienced specialists between all technology companies working in the city, both international and Russian, she added.
Companies are compelled to raise their employees’ salaries to at least match inflation, although finding the means to do so is not easy because of the high tax burden, said Margulis. According to her, due to the increase in prices and the cost of housing and public amenities, this salary increase is essential in order to motivate employees to continue to work for a company.

TITLE: Vodka Prices May Rise by 36%
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The federal government is proposing to increase the minimum retail prices for hard alcohol, which may cause the price of vodka to skyrocket 36 percent starting Jan. 1.
The Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation published a draft decree Friday stipulating that minimum retail prices for vodka could reach 170 rubles ($5.30) for half a liter, up from the current 125 rubles. 
In conjunction, retailers wouldn’t be able to sell cognac cheaper than 280 rubles for half a liter, compared with the current price of 219 rubles, according to the draft published on the service’s website.
The jump could be the result of a planned 30 percent increase in excise taxes for pure alcohol. The tax rate is slated to rise to 400 rubles per liter starting in January, a representative of the service told the RBC newswire late last week.
The draft is pending approval by the Finance Ministry and the Justice Ministry, Vedomosti reported. If approved, it will come into effect next year.
The minimum pricing was introduced in 2010, when the lowest possible retail price for vodka was set at 89 rubles. The most recent increase was in July.
To reduce the bootleg market, the Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation plans to establish total control over retail sales of alcohol across the country by 2015, with the goal of keeping track of every bottle sold, service head Igor Chuyan said earlier this year.

TITLE: Megafon Appoints British Executive to Directors Board
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A British executive was appointed to MegaFon’s board of directors Monday, in an apparent move to boost the cell phone operator’s corporate governance outlook on the eve of its London IPO, Itar-Tass reported.
“[Paul] Myners’s experience and previous work as top manager and member of the board of directors of public companies is very valuable to us,” said Ivan Tavrin, MegaFon’s director general.
Myners joins Swedish entrepreneur Yan Rudberg to become the second independent director at MegaFon, The Times of London reported. His appointment brings the number of board members at MegaFon to seven. 
Besides Megafon’s two independent directors, three board members represent Russia’s richest man Alisher Usmanov, who has a controlling stake, and two are nominated by the Stockholm-based TeliaSonera telecom holding, Itar-Tass said.

TITLE: Russian Firms Keen to Make Inroads in Africa
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian companies appear eager to gain new ground in Africa and plan to build two pipelines on the continent.
These would be the longest pipelines ever built by a Russian company in Africa.
The firms that pursue the projects in the Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe are state-controlled Rosneft, run by powerful Kremlin insider Igor Sechin, and privately held Stroitransgaz, majority-owned by Gennady Timchenko, an acquaintance of President Vladimir Putin’s.
In countries like these, Russian companies do not face much competition from Western contractors, which are not willing to take the high political risks, said Marne Beukes, an energy analyst for sub-Saharan Africa at IHS Energy in London.
“Russian companies’ willingness to take on projects where others fear to tread gives them the advantage when negotiating for such contracts, while the crucial need for pipeline infrastructure in these regions means that governments cannot afford to be picky,” she said.
In the latest attempt to make inroads in Africa, Russia and the Congo signed a letter of intent for the construction of a 900-kilometer oil pipeline in the West African country. 
The tentative deal took place as part of a visit to Moscow by Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso last week.
Engineering company Stroitransgaz is prepared to design and build the pipeline, a statement from the Energy Ministry said last week. In the oil-rich Congo, the pipeline would connect Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire and Oyo, the ministry said.
A Stroitransgaz spokeswoman declined to comment Monday.
The Congo is one of the main oil producers in sub-Saharan Africa, but 70 percent of its people live in poverty. The government has tried in recent years to increase financial transparency in the oil industry, which is the mainstay of the economy.
Stroitransgaz perhaps has bigger plans for its project in Congo because its principal owner, Timchenko, has reportedly been considering greater diversification into upstream, said PFC Energy analyst Yelena Herold.
Rosneft last month agreed to construct a 700-kilometer oil-products pipeline, a storage depot and a sea terminal in Zimbabwe in a project estimated at $700 million.
The funding for the projects would likely come from such institutions as the African Development Bank and the World Bank and also from private investors, Beukes said. 
Some of the previous Russian ventures on the continent, however, have not gone well, she said, pointing to Gazprom’s predicament in Namibia and Equatorial Guinea. 
As part of the visit by the Congolese president, Russia raised the prospect of oil companies like LUKoil and Gazprom Neft and electrical utility Inter RAO taking on energy projects in the African country, the Energy Ministry said. 
Stroitransgaz is the only Russian company that has built pipelines in Africa before. It constructed two links in Algeria and is working on another one there.

TITLE: Activist Groups Urge Western Boycott of NTV
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Opposition and human rights groups on Monday urged Western consumer products giants to stop “financing politically motivated persecution” by advertising on a Kremlin-friendly TV network known for its biased coverage of government critics and demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin.
In the wake of unprecedented anti-Putin protests that followed last December’s rigged parliament vote and Putin’s return to the Kremlin in May, NTV has run dozens of news reports, talk shows and pseudo-documentaries accusing opposition leaders of plotting coups and terrorist attacks, of receiving money from Western governments, and of hiring migrant workers and neo-Nazis to participate in anti-Putin rallies. 
The White Ribbon movement, the Moscow Civil Forum and the For Human Rights group said in an open letter Monday that the broadcaster has become part of the Kremlin’s “machinery for repression.” 
In a statement directed at companies such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Nestle, and L’Oreal, the three groups said: “Please consider stopping placing your company’s advertising on the NTV channel because it is a way of financing politically motivated persecution.” 
Coca-Cola’s Russian office declined to provide contact information for its spokespeople, and a P&G spokeswoman said she needed a written request. The public relations offices of L’Oreal International and Nestle were not immediately available for comment. 
NTV reports have prompted several official investigations of opposition leaders and triggered at least two arrests. One of the arrested opposition activists, Leonid Razvozzhayev, claimed Russian prosecutors kidnapped him from neighboring Ukraine and tortured him for several days, forcing him to confess in anti-government activities.

TITLE: Ford Sollers Halts Production Amid ‘Italian Strike’
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Carmaker Ford Sollers suspended manufacturing at its Vsevolozhsk plant near St. Petersburg on Friday amid a strike by employees protesting decisions by the factory’s management. 
The plant workers started the strike last Monday after management announced that the manufacturing line would stand idle starting in mid-December because the production target for this year would be fulfilled ahead of schedule, chairman of Ford’s local labor union Alexander Kashitsin said. 
This will result in employees being forced to take vacation, with only two-thirds of their monthly salaries to be paid, he said by telephone from Vsevolozhsk, adding that previously, workers went on vacation for the New Year’s holidays starting in late December, in line with legislation. 
In a reciprocal move, Kashitsin said, workers started the so-called work-to- rule campaign to intentionally cause a manufacturing slowdown so the plant would continue working until the end of the year.  
The company’s plant in Vsevolozhsk, which has about 3,000 employees, produces Ford Mondeo and Ford Focus models. 
The idea of the campaign, which is also called an “Italian” strike, is to carry out manufacturing strictly following all the Labor Code regulations, like work safety rules and those governing production algorithms. 
“It often happens in Russia that if you fulfill all the rules you might not meet the production plan,” Kashitsin said. Such actions, especially if they are massive, may result in a factory not meeting its production target and missing supply deadlines, because employees stop taking the initiative, like working overtime to complete their daily assignments, said Nadezhda Ilyushina, head of employment, pensions and benefits at Goltsblat BLP. 
Kashitsin said the workers plan to continue the strike, the length of which will depend on whether the management changes its decision. He declined to specify the number of employees involved in the strike so as not to reveal their protest tactics. 
As part of the strike, plant workers also plan to organize a blood donation day, Kashitsin said. This will make them eligible for taking a day off, in line with the Labor Code. He sees it as a symbol of resistance to the policy by the head of the assembly department, who is trying to reduce the number of employees going on vacation or taking a sick leave.  
Work-to-rule strikes are rather common in Russian companies and are usually carried out by employees to demonstrate their discontent with managers’ decisions or a loss of loyalty towards the employer, but organizing a blood donation day is “a very creative campaign,” Ilyushina said. 
“I’m not aware of any similar actions taking place in Russia,” she said by telephone. 
The Labor Code allows employees to take paid days off on the day of donating blood and the day after. 
“So a company can’t prevent the employee from donating blood and cannot refuse to provide mandatory days off if an employee wants to donate blood,” Ilyushina said, adding that the Labor Code also doesn’t require an employee to inform the company in advance of a blood donation. 
Kashitsin said he believes that Friday’s manufacturing suspension was the management’s response to the blood donation day, which had initially been scheduled for Friday. The labor union had informed management in writing in advance about the work-to-rule plan. Now, plant employees have decided to postpone the blood donation event, he said. 
Ford Sollers — a joint venture between the U.S. car giant and Russia’s Sollers established last year — suspended production of Ford Mondeo models because of a shortage of car parts, with production to be resumed soon, the company said in a statement Friday, without specifying the reasons for the components shortage. 
Chief executive of the Interregional Labor Union of Car Industry Workers Alexei Etmanov told Vedomosti that there aren’t enough parts because of a strike at Ford’s Belgian facility in Genk, which manufactures parts for Mondeo vehicles. 
That plant is facing closure in 2014 as part of the car giant’s move to cut costs. 
Manufacturing in Russia of Ford Focus vehicles was suspended only on Friday and Saturday, because the plant had fulfilled the weekly production plan for that model, Ford Sollers said in a statement. 
Meanwhile, a plant employee who declined to be identified in the paper because of concerns that he might face punitive actions by management said that production of the Focus model at Vsevolozhsk had fallen by 10 percent since the start of the strike. 
Ford Sollers spokesman Sergei Kirillov said there was no sign of any strike actions at the factory, as there had been no drop in production. He also said that suspension of manufacturing at the plant wasn’t related to the planned blood donation day. 
“Regardless of the reasons, the suspension of the manufacturing line might affect the production volume negatively,” said Andrei Shenk, an analyst with Investcafe. “But I don’t think that sales will decline, as the company can use the warehouse reserves,” he said in a note Friday, adding that the case might cause concerns by investors. 
A total of 105,517 Ford cars, both imported and manufactured locally, were sold in Russia from January to October, up by 13 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to the Association of European Businesses. 
But Ford sales slid by 15 percent for the month of October from a year earlier to reach 9,640 vehicles, the association said in a statement earlier this month. 
Shenk said the two possible reasons for the decline are increasing competition and the problems arising at the plant intermittently. 
There have been several labor actions by disgruntled employees at the Vsevolozhsk plan since it was built in 2002. The most recent incident was a two-hour work stoppage that took place last year, while a strike in 2007 lasted for a month. Ford Sollers also has production facilities in Naberezhniye Chelny and Yelabuga.

TITLE: Putin’s Corruption Show Must Go On
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Many believe that the accusations against the Defense Ministry and former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov indicate that President Vladimir Putin has launched an anti-corruption campaign. But this is far from the truth.
For starters, there are conflicting opinions as to whether Putin initiated the public corruption investigation of the Defense Ministry or simply allowed rival political clans to attack each other. If the latter is true, the clans are clearly not out to end corruption. On the contrary, now that Serdyukov and several of his allies are out, some clan members are salivating over the opportunity to gain juicy bits of the 20 trillion rubles ($637 billion) allocated to modernize the army by 2020.
If Putin is willing to fire a minister over corruption charges, how will he now be able to keep his bargain in which he demanded personal loyalty in return for the right to pocket state funds? The fact that any top official could become the target of a serious criminal investigation would threaten to destroy the consensus among the ruling elite.
Meanwhile, the president is doing his best to build intrigue around the Serdyukov affair. During a news conference after a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week, Putin responded to rumors suggesting that Serdyukov might be named to a post at Russian Technologies. Putin told Merkel that Serdyukov would not be named to the company but that “if he wants to find a job somewhere and they agree to hire him, I don’t think we should prevent it. He has the right to work. This is not 1937, after all.”
But Putin’s words could mean almost anything. For example, they could signify that he has forgiven Serdyukov, that he won’t be given a prison sentence and that he might even be named to another post soon. Or they could mean just the opposite: That Serdyukov would be lucky to find anyone who would dare to hire him now, and worse, that criminal charges might be filed against him and he could land in jail. But a jail sentence is highly unlikely.
Meanwhile, the campaign against Serdyukov is growing in strength. Media reports appear almost daily about yet another “newly discovered” multibillion-dollar corruption scam linked to an individual or business close to Serdyukov or by a company under Defense Ministry control. Several people have already been arrested, but no accusations have yet been leveled against Serdyukov’s girlfriend, who heads Oboronservis. She is undergoing “medical treatment” and remains out of view. State-controlled television has unleashed a barrage of tabloid-style expos&#233;s showing raids on luxurious apartments where agents have found stashes of millions of dollars and rubles, jewels and even paintings missing from state museums.
Now, the logical question is this: With all these corruption accusations flying around — and video evidence to back them up — how many people will actually be arrested and tried, and how far up the chain of command will it go?
The problem is that Kremlin PR long ago supplanted reality. Russians are told that this or that scandalously corrupt scheme has been uncovered, and that Putin is intent on purging criminals from government. But remember how state television channels showed evidence of corruption among prosecutors in the Moscow region a year ago. Senior officials in the prosecutor’s office were accused of running a protection racket for illegal casinos, having ties to organized crime and owning lavish mansions filled with antiques, gold, expensive watches, pricey paintings and other items that could not have been purchased on their modest salaries.
What happened after these television reports? Nothing. Nearly all of the accused quietly resigned, escaped prison sentences and found cushy jobs in other state agencies or in business. The one exception is former Moscow region Deputy Prosecutor Alexander Ignatenko, who fled to Poland, where he was arrested and awaits possible extradition to Russia.
About the same time the Moscow region corruption cases were getting widespread media coverage, another television campaign focused on massive corruption under former Mayor Yury Luzhkov and his billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina. Yet all that bluster about fighting corruption in City Hall ended with Luzhkov not being charged and Baturina agreeing to fly in from Austria for interrogation on the condition that she be granted complete immunity. That was the abrupt beginning and end of the fight against corruption at City Hall.
Putin was right in saying that Russia is not experiencing a repeat of 1937. Mass repression and cleansing of the bureaucratic elite are impossible for two reasons. First, corruption is so endemic that the entire ruling elite would have to be completely replaced to end it, something the president clearly has no intention of doing. Second, nobody at the top levels of government is willing to introduce an open, transparent and law-based form system that would end the root causes of corruption. Instead, Putin is content with Band-Aid PR campaigns that occasionally remove corrupt officials, knowing full well that the replacement will likely behave no differently. To please corporate interests, the corruption show must go on.
Officials accused of corruption are far from being the most important figures in any corruption scandal. More likely, they make a deal with investigators to take the rap in return for keeping silent about how high up the corruption actually goes.
In the end, corruption is a necessary evil that provides the foundation of Putin’s vertical power structure. Except for a few show trials, Putin has no other choice but to tolerate corruption as long as he wants to remain in power.

<i>Georgy Bovt is a political analyst.</i>

TITLE: inside russia: Putin’s Tough Response to the Magnitsky Act
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin chided German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a meeting last week for supporting Pussy Riot members, especially considering that “one of them had hanged a Jew in effigy and said Moscow should get rid of such people.”
It soon came out that Putin’s advisers had given him bad information. One Pussy Riot member did hang a Jew in effigy — along with figures of an immigrant worker and a homosexual — but the motive was the exact opposite: to protest the widespread prejudice against them. Putin really thought he was telling Merkel the truth because that was what he had been told.
During his live call-in show in December 2011, Putin gave his version of how former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi died. “Drones … hit his column, and then they gave the order for soldiers and opposition forces to move in.”
Such statements seem to indicate that Putin and his inner circle live in a treacherous world — one in which the U.S. stages “color revolutions,” the State Department finances the Russian opposition, and U.S. Special Forces personally assassinate disagreeable presidents. In addition, Putin and Co. say U.S. elections are unfair. As Putin told a French journalist in January 2011, “I once told my American colleague, ‘How is it that a majority of the population can vote for one person but a different person becomes president?’”
What’s more, we are told, U.S. democracy is one big sham in which the ruling elite divvy up the country’s wealth among themselves and also give big chunks of it to their friends and colleagues. In the same interview, Putin said, “A French politician once told me, ‘Without a sack full of money, it would be impossible to get elected to Congress or especially the presidency. It’s futile to even try. What sort of democracy is that? It is a democracy of the wealthy.’”
In reality, however, Russia is organized just like the U.S. It is led by political elites who use so-called elections as cover for embezzling state funds. And it is obvious that Washington does not want to let Putin join its prestigious Bilderberg Club for the sole reason that the U.S. wants to seize all Russia’s wealth for itself, using its secret agents to foment orange revolutions and sending in its Special Forces to eliminate uncooperative leaders. A person living in such a world reacts not to objective reality but to his paranoid version of it. And that is exactly how the Kremlin interprets the motives behind the support of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. House of Representatives.
At first glance, it would seem that the “tough response” to the Magnitsky bill the Foreign Ministry is threatening is pointless. What reaction could follow if the U.S. freezes assets that Russian officials have stolen from the state budget and deposited in overseas banks? Will Moscow freeze money that U.S. politicians have embezzled from their country and deposited in Russian banks?
The root of the problem lies in Putin’s distorted worldview. What are those Yankees really up to? Obviously, they want to make a grab for Russia’s natural resources, finance the opposition and knock off Putin as they did Gadhafi. The Magnitsky act is just the latest in a series of Yankee provocations.
What would be a tough response to the Magnitsky act? Most likely, Putin will order the arrests of Alexei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov and other opposition leaders who are really agents of the State Department. That would explain why Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin is believed to meet with Putin several times a week nowadays.

<i>Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.</i>

TITLE: Identity thief
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A serial imposter — and a hugely successful one at that — is the central character of an extraordinary new British documentary that starts screening at Dom Kino on Nov. 22.
“The Imposter” is the story of a lie that became larger than life. Lies are what makes the main character tick. The story unfolds as we learn about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay, a carefree 13-year-old boy with blue eyes and blond hair from San Antonio, Texas. The boy went missing in 1993, and the film shows us his sudden resurface three years later in Linares, Spain. Here is when the breathtaking con begins. The man who claimed to be Barclay was Frederic Bourdin, a 23-year-old French-Algerian man of frighteningly strong manipulative skills. With deep brown eyes and a hint of dark black stubble, a heavy accent and flawed English, and at seven years older than the lost boy, he effectively convinced the boy’s relatives as well as investigators — and later on, when he appeared on national TV channels, millions of ordinary Americans — that he was indeed Barclay.
It was during a television talk show that his lie was exposed: One of the experts working on the case was watching the program and comparing the fake Barclay’s face to a photograph of the real Barclay up on the wall behind the imposter during the interview. At one point, the two faces were shown from an identical angle, and it suddenly struck the investigator that the shape of the ears was glaringly different. Amazingly, no DNA test had been carried out until the ear shapes were contrasted — a revealing testimony of the trickster’s qualifications in lying.
In his debut film, director Bart Layton interweaves documentary interviews with Bourdin and the many people that he had fooled together with reconstructions of key episodes that allowed the lie first to flourish and then to be discovered.
In one way, during the 95-minute masterpiece of cinematic suspense, Bourdin gives a priceless master class in fooling people. From a person with a proven record of 39 identity thefts, it is worth a fortune.
The film shows that sometimes, direct lying is not even necessary when dealing with people who want to be fooled, and who stubbornly stick to their illusions, come what may. Yet gaining access to Bourdin’s mental laboratory is fascinating. How could an adult in his twenties successfully pretend he was a teenager of another nationality, deceiving police, social workers, diplomats and even the relatives of the person he was imitating?
Bravado and confidence are the key to success, Bourdin tells us. Covering as much of the face as possible and not talking much, imitating being in shock and deeply traumatized is another trick. The overwhelming sympathy that such behavior is likely to evoke in others will safely muffle any suspicions they may have. When facing someone who is tangibly suffering, people’s first reaction is generally to help, to attempt to sooth their pain, whether physical or moral, and the question of whether the person’s eye color does in fact match the description of someone they claim to be is left aside.
“It did seem strange that he didn’t talk much, but it was natural considering what the poor boy had been through,” Barclay’s older sister says in an interview in the film.
Bourdin’s mythomania is a medical condition. While in prison, the chameleon-man was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. His rejection of himself was so overwhelming, doctors say, that to continue living he was forced to become someone else. In the film he speaks with pain and difficulty about the fact that his racist grandfather had urged his mother to have an abortion, as he was appalled by the idea of raising a half-Algerian grandson. Bourdin’s French mother said his father was a married Algerian immigrant by the name of Kaci.
“If my own relatives did not want me to be born, how on earth can I expect the world to accept me?” Bourdin wonders in an interview during the film. As a child he was teased and sometimes even abused by the other kids in the rough neighborhood in which he grew up. Even when he reached adulthood, Bourdin did not manage to put the humiliation of childhood behind him. The truth is that most of the world could not care less about the ethnic origins of his father, and in the world of adults, personality — and honesty — counts for far more than ethnicity to most people, and yet Bourdin himself does not seem to be able to recover from the fact that he was an unwanted child.
The astounding case of the Nicholas Barclay imposter ended in a six-year prison sentence for Bourdin. The list of the sociopath’s almost magical incarnations is not limited to this astounding American case. 
But the escalating chain of lies, however destructive it was for Bourdin’s victims, did not ruin the life of the man whose real life story has made a perfect suspense drama. The former outcast, now aged 38, now lives in France with his wife Isabelle and their three children. The director saves this fact until the thriller’s finale, serving the audiences a paradoxically peaceful ending.

TITLE: Autism: an alternative reality?
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A photo exhibit portraying the inscrutable and troubling world of autistic children opened last week in the city, under the title “Another Facet of Reality (Children’s Album).”
Held at the Rachmaninov Garden photo gallery, a venue better known for shows focusing on high culture and photography than socially relevant themes, the exhibit transports visitors emotively into an alternative reality through 25 black and white photographs of autistic children from around Russia, raising awareness about an issue that is largely marginalized and ignored by Russian authorities and society. 
The photographs offer a touching and humanistic view of the children affected by the disorder, showing them in various settings expressing joy, fear and excitement, while reminding viewers that they are children just like any others, who play, act silly and try to overcome adversity, such as in the inspiring shot of one child in the act of studying. 
Autism is a developmental disorder that impairs the sufferer’s ability to form social relationships and communicate with others. If treated, the child can overcome barriers and easily integrate into society.
In Russia, however, where the disorder is chronically ignored, children and their parents are left to fend for themselves, and often suffer from a lack of information and access to quality specialists and treatment that would alleviate the most difficult symptoms of the disorder, as well as institutes of education that are willing to accommodate the children, a key step in determining their future social standing.
According to project co-founder and Moscow psychologist Yulia Presnyakova, who treats autism at a clinic in the capital and whose son is affected by the disorder, therapy can enable affected children to go on to lead productive and normal lives. They are able to find work, get an education and even become specialists in their chosen fields.
The contrast between the situation in Russia and countries such as the United States is stark. While 85 percent of American autistic children are able to integrate into society, the same number is “cast overboard” in Russia, says Presnyakova.
While no official statistics exist about the exact numbers of autistic children in Russia, Presnyakova believes the number is growing. 
“We want to tell people that this problem exists, and that we can’t close our eyes to it, because more and more children are autistic. You can no longer hide this problem, or keep your mouth shut, because if we don’t do something about it now, we will have to face an enormous problem in the future.”
According to the organizers, change needs to come from the governmental level, with new laws that would help integrate autistic children into schools, as well as increased funding for programs that would educate teachers about welcoming children with special needs into the classroom. 
“Right now, governmental structures pretend that this problem doesn’t exist,” said Presnyakova.
A secondary goal of the exhibition is to help initiate a different social attitude to those that don’t fit into the norm. 
“This exhibition is for you and me, it’s not for the autistic children,” said Alexei Sivkov, the St. Petersburg-based photographer who took the photographs for the exhibition. 
“They’re comfortable with themselves; it’s us who don’t let them into our world. This exhibition is about love, in the general sense. It is about tolerance,” he added.

<i>“Another Facet of Reality (Children’s Album)” runs through Dec. 22 at the Rachmaninov Garden gallery, 
5 Kazanskaya Ulitsa. www.fotorachmaninov.ru.</i>

TITLE: Heroes of their time
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A photo of a sulky-looking pre-teen Ksenia Sobchak dressed in a party frock pictured with her father hangs a short distance from an image of Kino frontman Viktor Tsoi walking a dog in front of a backdrop of high-rise apartment buildings, while another snapshot captured in 1991 portrays a youthful Vladimir Putin. These are among the familiar faces on show at Loft Project Etagi in a new exhibit titled “Icons of the ’90s.”
The title is not without irony. The icons in question are not holy men, but celebrities captured on film by leading Moscow and St. Petersburg photographers, who subsequently published their snapshots in the tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines that were just emerging at the time.
In total, more than 300 portraits of high-profile figures are on show, ranging from Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin and former Yukos tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to pop diva Alla Pugacheva and representatives of underground culture such as Viktor Tsoi, artist Sergei Kuryokhin and Akvarium frontman Boris Grebenshchikov. 
According to the organizers of the exhibition, which they say aims to vividly and accurately reflect the atmosphere of the epoch, the extraordinary diversity of its stars is a distinctive feature of the ’90s.
“Icons of the ’60s were, so to say, almost canonical: They were all positive characters such as cosmonauts or actors who were constantly on TV. But in the ’90s, villains also appeared,” said Natalya Ponomareva, the exhibition’s curator.
“It is difficult to determine exactly what kind of period it was. You could say it was an abscess that finally burst. Others insist that it was an oil gusher that erupted from the bowels of the Earth. In any case, the ’90s were like a fountain that brought to the surface both good things and bad. Some of them have gone away, others have stayed with us,” she added.
The decade known in Russian as the likhiye devyanostye (the wild ’90s) was a turbulent time following the collapse of the Soviet Union that saw the arrival of many aspects of life previously unseen in Russia, such as TV advertisements and tabloid journalism, talk shows and music videos, and New Russians dressed in crimson jackets, as well as a wide array of new political figures. All were signs of these heady, troubled times that are revealed by the project from an apolitical point of view.
A significant part of “Icons of the ’90s” is devoted to figureheads from the world of the Russian underground. The photographers responsible for chronicling this particularly fascinating aspect of the period (Alexander Zabrin, Andrei “Willy” Usov, Sergei Borisov and Dmitry Konradt) were like-minded people and friends of the alternative celebrities that they captured on film. Their photos, often taken casually during informal gatherings, reflect the real spirit of the time.
The photos on show also demonstrate the changes that took place in photojournalism as a result of the emergence of a free press in Russia: They are far less inhibited and more stylistically diverse than standard news photography in the Soviet Union.
The exhibition is a continuation of a previous project, “Icons of the 1960-’80s,” which opened in Moscow in 2010 at the Lumiere Brothers Photography Center before coming to St. Petersburg’s own State Russian Museum.
“Icons of the 90s” was shown in Moscow last year, and is due to travel to Krasnoyarsk after its run in St. Petersburg.

<i>“Icons of the ’90s” runs through Dec. 16 at Loft Project Etagi, 74 Ligovsky Prospekt. Tel. 458 5005. M: Ligovsky Prospekt. www.loftprojectetagi.ru</i>

TITLE: TALK OF THE TOWN
TEXT: From the people who brought the city the Unified Documents Center, that bureaucratic Mecca that aims to allow long-suffering Russians to resolve all their official document-related nightmares under one roof (for a price), now comes an unlikely follow up: <b>Buddha-Bar</b>.
Irrefutably last week’s biggest opening, Buddha-Bar opened to the public on Friday, Nov. 16 (after a “closed opening” on Thursday for journalists and VIPs, including Zenit FC’s Hulk) in the vast — 2,500 square-meter — premises of a former factory on Sinopskaya Naberezhnaya. 
As in its other locations around the world, including Paris, New York, London, Kiev, Delhi, Mexico, Budapest and Tbilisi, St. Petersburg’s own Buddha-Bar will serve Pan-Asian, European and Russian food, and almost every drink known to mankind. 
This is not the city’s first Buddha-Bar: An unlicensed — and far smaller — copy existed briefly on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa back in 2006. Now the city has the real thing, and it looks set to be a hit with well-heeled yuppies and fashionistas, despite its rather unusual location. 
For gourmet cuisine from a little closer to home, the <b>miX</b> restaurant at the city’s W hotel is preparing for another visit from its brand chef, <b>Alain Ducasse</b>. The celebrated French chef will visit St. Petersburg for the third time to host two gala dinners on Nov. 29 and 30. The dinners are open to the public, but would-be diners are advised to book in advance — during Ducasse’s last visit, the restaurant was fully booked. 
The experience of sampling a six-course meal prepared under Ducasse’s expert eye, featuring marinated gilt-head bream, gold caviar, Kamchatka crab and lightly spiced duckling, among other things, will set gourmands back 8,200 rubles ($260). The price includes selected wine.  
This week will see the opening of the <b>Crystal Spa & Lounge</b> on Ulitsa Zhukovskogo. The latest addition to the city’s extensive beauty industry is described by its owners as a “luxury day spa,” and is equipped with 10 treatment rooms, as well as a fitness room, Turkish bath and “ice fountain.” The spa also boasts its own cosmetic product, Crystal Charisma.
Meanwhile, on the parallel street, Ulitsa Nekrasova, an opening of a different kind is set to take place at the beginning of next month. <b>Sergei Shnurov</b>, frontman of local stadium rockers Leningrad, is to open a bar and restaurant called <b>Kokoko</b> together with LavkaLavka, a farmers’ cooperative that prides itself on offering locally grown produce.
According to a press release sent out by the company, the establishment will be run by Shnurov’s wife, Matilda Shnurova.
This is not the first venture into the hospitality industry made by the notoriously foul-mouthed singer. Several years ago, he opened the Siny Pushkin (Blue Pushkin) bar on Khersonskaya Ulitsa.

TITLE: the word’s worth: Russian as she is taught
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Âîïðîñû è îòâåòû: questions and answers

Over 100 years ago, Mark Twain wrote a very funny piece called “English As She is Taught,” which chronicles American schoolchildren’s hilarious misapprehensions about the world, science and literature.
Some of them are clever in a wrong sort of way: Capillary is defined as “a little caterpillar” and mendacious is “what can be mended.” Some are very confused: “The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.” And one or two are so wrong they’re almost right: “The United States is quite a small country compared with some other countrys but is about as industrious.”
Since then, it seems like trumpeting American ignorance has become something of a national tradition, like the annual poll that shows about one-third of the population has no idea who the vice president is.
My Russian friends have always been a bit smug about this — and rightfully so. The Soviet school system had many drawbacks, but it was pretty good at getting basic facts into kids’ heads.
But times change. A compilation of answers on a recent Åäèíûé ãîñóäàðñòâåííûé ýêçàìåí (nationwide college-entrance exam) that has been making the rounds on the Internet indicates that some Russian kids may be texting during class instead of paying attention to history lessons. But their creativity — linguistic and interpretative — would make Twain proud.
For example, one kid writes, Ïðè Èâàíå Ãðîçíîì ïðîèñõîäèëî èñêîðåíåíèå èíàêîìûñëèÿ ïóòåì êîððóïöèè (Under Ivan the Terrible, opposing views were put down through the use of corruption). Another clearly sees the present in the past: Èâàí Ãðîçíûé óáèë ìíîãèõ âëèÿòåëüíûõ áèçíåñìåíîâ, ìåøàâøèõ åìó óïðàâëÿòü ãîñóäàðñòâîì (Ivan the Terrible killed a lot of influential businessmen who were preventing him from governing the state).
Some showed great use of figurative language: Ïðè Åêàòåðèíå II ñòðàíà ïîêðûëàñü óíèâåðñèòåòàìè (Under Catherine the Great, the country became covered with universities). Îíà ìåíÿëà ôàâîðèòîâ êàê êîëãîòêè (She changed her favorites like pantyhose).
Others had some issues with word choice, something I sympathize with:  ñîâåòñêèõ øêîëàõ äåòè áûëè êàê èíêóáàòîðû — ó íèõ âñ¸ áûëî îäèíàêîâîå (In Soviet schools, children were like incubators, they all had the same things). Âðàãîâ ñîâåòñêîé âëàñòè íàçûâàëè äèâèäåíòàìè. Äèâèäåíòñêîå äâèæåíèå ðîñëî è øèðèëîñü (Enemies of Soviet power were called dividents. The divident movement grew and spread.) Åëüöèí îñóùåñòâëÿë ïîëèòèêó øàãîâîé òåðàïèè (Yeltsin carried out a policy of step-by-step therapy).
But you have to applaud some of their logic: Áîëüøåâèêè ëèêâèäèðîâàëè íåãðàìîòíîñòü äëÿ îáëåã÷åíèÿ öåíçóðû. Âåäü êàê ìîæíî öåíçóðèðîâàòü íåãðàìîòíîñòü? Íèêàê. (The Bolsheviks liquidated illiteracy to make censorship easier. Because how can you censor illiteracy? You can’t.)
Kids knew that Yeltsin was important, but they were a bit shaky on why: Åëüöèí áûë ïåðâûì ïðåçèäåíòîì ÑÑÑÐ (Yeltsin was the first president of the U.S.S.R.). Åëüöèí — ïåðâûé ïðåçèäåíò ÑÍÃ (Yeltsin was the first president of the CIS). Åëüöèí ñîçäàë ïàðòèþ Åäèíàÿ Ðîññèÿ (Boris Yeltsin founded the United Russia party).
And then one kid was philosophical beyond his years: Çàêîí÷èëîñü âñ¸, êàê îáû÷íî â Ðîññèè: áåççàêîíèÿìè âëàñòè è íåäîñòàòêîì ïðîäîâîëüñòâèÿ (It all ended like it always does in Russia: with the lawlessness of the authorities and food deficits).
I hope that kid passed with flying colors.

<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: Operatic mind-reading
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Video art meets period costumes and psychological drama in the new production of “Don Carlos,” one of Giuseppe Verdi’s darkest operas, that premieres on Nov. 29 and 30 at the Mariinsky Theater.
For the renowned Italian director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, fusing modern technology with historical accuracy is something of a signature style. In his rendering of “Don Carlos” at the Mariinsky, Corsetti will serve up a visual feast, a blend of period drama and timeless nightmare.
Whether the Mariinsky production is a must-hear, only the premiere will tell, but the show’s concept convincingly suggests that the production is definitely a must-see.
“Don Carlos” is often referred to as the “Hamlet” of Italian opera. Grand in many senses, from the score to the plot, it explores both existential and political issues, from the confrontation between the state and clerics, to the relationship between father and son, to the eternal alliance of jealousy and revenge.
“This opera explores the mysteries of the human mind,” Corsetti said, speaking to The St. Petersburg Times between rehearsals at the Mariinsky Theater on Sunday. 
“Black is a key color for my staging, and one of the central images is the fa&#231;ade of a building and a courtyard with the tomb of Charles V projected onto the back wall,” he said. “The projections will change their angle and position as the story evolves.”
In “Don Carlos,” Corsetti employs video art for a number of purposes, with the main task being to illustrate the emotions of the main characters, showing what is happening in their minds and enabling the audience to penetrate the psyche of the protagonists.
Set in 16th-century France and Spain against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, the opera tells the story of Don Carlos’s doomed love for Elisabeth, who is initially betrothed to him but is instead obliged to marry Don Carlos’s father, Filippo, out of political expediency. Don Carlos is adored by Princess Eboli, but he ignores her as he cannot renounce his love for Elisabeth, and eventually his passion is discovered by Filippo. What lies in store for the main characters is lost or unrequited love, death and alienation.
Corsetti has first-hand experience of being on stage with the Mariinsky’s indefatigable artistic director Valery Gergiev: In 2011 the two artists created a production of Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Turandot” for Milan’s La Scala theater. The staging was the La Scala debut of both Gergiev and Corsetti.
After “Don Carlos,” the conductor and the director look forward to working together on another Verdi opera, “Othello,” also to be staged at La Scala.
Some operas are easier than others for stage directors to transpose into a modern or universal setting, to move to a different country or another century. In “Don Carlos,” the territory is very clearly marked both geographically and historically: The inquisition theme features prominently, while the Grand Inquisitor himself is an important character.
“The grand inquisitor is a spiritual leader. After all, in the opera, he is faced with the Herculean task of calming the enraged crowds,” Corsetti said.
Is this contextual clarity an asset to the director or does he consider it a limitation?
“I could have moved it to a different place or another era if I had wanted to, but I deliberately decided to stick to the original frame, as it is essential to deliver my vision of the subject,” Corsetti said. “One should really distinguish between an opera and a documentary; it is fruitless and pointless to expect an opera to reflect reality. Opera deals with human dreams and fantasies, it explores the emotional and the spiritual worlds, and in this sense it speaks directly to the souls of the people sitting in the audience.”
Rehearsing the main roles are Avgust Amonov, Akhmed Agadi, Viktoria Yastrebova, Anna Markarova, Yevgeny Nikitin and Mikhail Petrenko.
From 1999 to 2005, Corsetti was responsible for the performing arts section at the prestigious Venice Biennale, and then moved on to work as head of the Theater and Dance division of the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, where he created three festivals based on new circus, dance and performing arts. Now he runs Fattore K, his own theatrical company. 
The letter K in the company title hints at the director’s artistic preferences and tastes. “It could refer to, say, the filmmaker Takeshi Kitano and the writer Franz Kafka,” the director smiles.
In a sense, the location of the company’s shows are liquid: Every act of a staging is often performed at a different venue, from an abandoned industrial building or a park to a courtyard or a church, with the audiences migrating from place to place and following the itinerant troupe around. This active form of enjoying a theater production might well delight Russian audiences if it were adopted here — in Russia, a visit to a theatrical show is traditionally viewed as a static experience, with members of the audience being confined to their chairs and requested to remain quiet.
As the troupe’s name suggests, Corsetti is fascinated by the works of Kafka. One of Corsetti’s most recent stagings was a rendition of Kafka’s “The Castle” that he produced for the respected Il Spoleto music festival in Italy in 2011.  
“I admire Kafka most for his paradoxes,” Corsetti said. “It presents a particular challenge for a stage director to give a visual dimension to literary images and verbal paradoxes.”
In light of this statement, it is easy to see why Corsetti feels so comfortable in Russia, which is frequently described as one of the world’s most Kafkaesque destinations.
The bureaucratic labyrinths that the absurdist writer creates in “The Castle” would find a natural reflection in modern Russia.
“I would really enjoy staging “The Castle” in Russia, if I had the opportunity,” Corsetti admits.

TITLE: Kandinsky shortlist
AUTHOR: By Maximillian Gill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An exhibition of the 35 nominees for Russia’s most prestigious award for contemporary art, the Kandinsky Prize is now on at the former cinema Udarnik.
The prize, now in its fifth year, saw a record 385 submissions this year. One of the distinctive features of the prize is that artists are able to nominate themselves.
The submissions have been whittled down to 20 nominees for Project of the Year category and to 15 for the Young Artist. Project of the Year category. The winner of the former will receive a prize fund of 40,000 euros, and the latter 10,000 euros.
Last year, the provocative art group Voina was nominated and went on to win a prize for their drawing of a giant phallus on a drawbridge opposite the FSB headquarters in St. Petersburg, but this year’s art-punk sensations Pussy Riot, two of whose members are currently in prison for their performance in Russia’s chief cathedral, did not make it on to the shortlist.
Nevertheless, the list is not unreflective of the protests that rose up over the last year with Anton Litvin nominated for organizing an artist’s protest in May that saw more than a dozen artists set up easels on the embankment opposite the Kremlin and draw it in white on white — the color of the protest movement.
Other nominees include a number of the most famous Russian artists, such as art collective AE+F.
An international jury of experts, including U.K. curator David Thorp and American art historian and Dean of the Yale University School of Art Robert Storr, selected the shortlist.
One of the most exciting features of this year’s exhibition is its location in the former Udarnik cinema. Designed by Boris Iofan, the architect whose concept for the Palace of Soviets with a 70-meter statue of Lenin won a famous contest in 1932, the cinema is a unique landmark and part of the infamous House on the Embankment.
Intended for the Soviet elite, the block contained 505 apartments, but up to a third of its residents became victims of Stalin’s purges during the Great Terror.
In the 1990s the cinema became a car showroom and later one of the city’s biggest casinos. There are now plans to turn the building into a gallery space.
The organizers of the Kandinsky Prize hope the building’s eclectic history will add to the visual and aesthetic experience of the exhibition.
“It takes place within an area not yet adapted for a museum showing, an area that contains the temporal layers of previous eras,” said Igor Chirkin, one of the exhibit’s designers. “This encourages the presenters to play with time and ‘synchronize’ the works of art. Each work possesses its own temporality and, as such, interacts with the other works as well as the temporal-spatial context of the movie theater.”
It is a unique and engaging opportunity to see the works in this environment. Grisha Bruskin’s striking sculptures, nominated for Project of the Year, are impressive in front of the former main cinema screen in a work entitled “H-Hour.”
A complex wooden structure, “Universal Mind,” by Nikolai Polissky, roughly representing a brain in a box, fills the main lobby, providing a nice contrast between the organic properties of the work and the leftover kitsch of the former casino.
“In the States there is a great deal of concern about museums turning into casinos. Here it is nice to see a casino turned into a museum!” Storr said.
“This is an opportunity to see Russian art in a Russian context, to see art you have never seen before,” he said.
The winners of the competition will be announced on December 13.

<i>The exhibit runs through Dec. 16 
at Udarnik, 2 Ulitsa Serafimovicha, Moscow. Tel. (495) 225 8700. www.kandinsky-prize.ru</i>

TITLE: THE DISH: Cafe Trappist
AUTHOR: By Alastair Gill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Trappist temple</b>
As the old adage goes, ask someone to name five famous Belgians and inevitably they will struggle to formulate a list that doesn’t consist largely of long-dead Flemish painters and storybook characters such as Tintin and Poirot. However, this non-too-subtle cultural jibe is rather unfair — there’s more to this modest but cosmopolitan nation than fictitious detectives and Van Dyck. Belgium may not have the panoply of cultural and historical giants to compete with neighbors France and Germany, but it knows how to look after its stomach. There’s nothing quite like ensconcing yourself in a Bruges inn and devouring steaming plates of moules-frites or meatballs while savoring the mysteriously complex palate of a world-class beer.
So the arrival in St. Petersburg of a new Belgian pub and eatery is cause for celebration. Despite being squirreled away on a corner toward the far end of quiet Ulitsa Radishcheva, Cafe Trappist seems to have found instant success, to which the difficulty in finding an empty table at 5:30 p.m. on a recent Saturday attested.
The cafe (which, remarkably for Russia, is completely non-smoking) has two levels: A bar at street level and a dining room upstairs. The d&#233;cor — wooden floorboards, a large mirror, a piano, adverts for beer — is understated but underlines the place’s continental roots while creating an atmosphere of space.
The food menu is based largely on hearty Belgian dishes and a number of international standards, and while not especially broad, provides enough choice to satisfy the diner. But it is the beer that is king at Trappist. There are about 100 beers on the menu, running the gamut in all their multifarious glory: Blonds, dark ales, red ales, fruit beers and the eponymous Trappist monastic brews. They’re all here — Leffe, Duvel and Kriek, rubbing shoulders with lesser-known but equally exquisite gems such as Triple Karmeliet, Orval and Piraat. Prices average around 350 rubles ($11) for a 0.33-liter bottle, but go up to 1,000 rubles ($32) for the most exclusive ales.
Although the waitress seemed bewildered when asked for a description of one of the beers, she promised that their resident “beer expert” would be able to explain everything. Sure enough, shortly afterwards he appeared at the table and recommended the St. Feuillien Grand Cru (360 rubles, $11), which turned out to be a full-bodied blond with a delightfully hoppy nose and plenty of fruitiness. Another raid on the beer menu ended with a foray into Flanders and the Brugse Zot Dubbel (250 rubles, $8), a red ale with hints of chocolate and a bitter, spicy finish.
An order of moules-frites was determined mandatory in order to assess the establishment’s credentials. The mussels, farmed on an island in the White Sea and delivered to Trappist every week, are served here in four different ways. An order was duly placed for mussels in cream sauce with white wine (390 rubles, $12) and portions of Belgian frites (190 rubles, $6). The fries were admittedly good, and came with two different mayonnaise dips, but lacked the double-frying that gives Belgian fries their addictive crunchiness. The mussels, however, inexplicably arrived at the table half an hour after the fries. Although not as large as their Belgian counterparts, they were flavorsome if slightly dry, and the cream and white wine sauce was a mouth-watering variation on the traditional accompaniment of celery and shallots.
Gent-style chicken in bacon (290 rubles, $9) was a portion of tender chicken breasts wrapped in juicy bacon and served with fried parboiled new potatoes and a creamy white wine sauce. Another traditional option is the Liege salad (210 rubles, $6.50), a mixture of potato, green beans and bacon, though the uninitiated should be warned: The menu does not make it clear that this is a salad that is always served hot. Less traditionally Belgian was the goulash soup (240 rubles, $7.50), a faithful version of that Magyar classic that didn’t even disappoint on the spice count.
The smiling waitress was always on hand without seeming overbearing, and the only gripe was that a couple of the dishes arrived in an unusual order. By then, however, we had been won over by the warm welcome and the superlative ales at Caf&#233; Trappist. It’s all a matter of perspective — after all, who really needs world-famous cultural icons when you have cozy taverns and beer-brewing monks?


TITLE: Germany’s Great Melting Pot
AUTHOR: By Natalya Smolentseva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Berlin, a city of immigrants from all over the world, where historical buildings sit side by side with squats and modern business centers, can be defined as a melting pot of cultures, nations and cuisines. 
The initial surprise that first-time visitors to the German capital are likely to notice is the fact that it has no real city center — every district in Berlin has its own center and its own life and differs significantly from the rest of the city. Busy shopping streets can be found in Charlottenburg, while Kreuzberg is home to a Turkish market and restaurants serving up all kinds of eastern cuisine. For underground parties in abandoned buildings, Friedrichshain is the place to go, while if cozy local cafes, little stores selling goods made by young designers and art galleries are your thing, head to Prenzlauer Berg. Main tourist attractions like Alexanderplatz and the Reichstag are located in Mitte. Ultimately, it is only 23 years since the city was divided between two different countries, and the differences between East and West Berlin are still visible. 
Berlin was created from the union of two cities on opposite sides of the Spree River. The name of the city has nothing in common with the bear (“b&#228;r” in German) that is now its symbol and coat of arms. The metropolis’s name is more likely to have originated from “berl,” the German word for swamp. 
The city’s long history of immigration began in 1671, when 50 Jewish families from Austria were given a home in Berlin. In 1685, Frederick William I of Prussia offered refuge to the French Calvinist Huguenots, 6,000 of whom settled in Berlin. The cultural influence of France on the city in this period was enormous, as 20 percent of the city’s residents were French.  
At the beginning of the 18th century, Berlin became the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia and expanded to C&#246;lln, Friedrichswerder, Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt. After Greater Berlin was created by incorporating several neighboring towns and villages like Charlottenburg, K&#246;penick and Spandau, the population grew to four million, even more than it is today.
The city was badly damaged in World War II, and after the Nazi surrender was divided into four sectors by the Allies under the London Protocol. Berlin is a living monument to the events of the 20th century. Parts of the infamous Berlin Wall still remind Germans and tourists of the tragedies of the past century. A 1.4-kilometer stretch of the former border strip has been converted into the Berlin Wall Memorial, situated at a historic site on Bernauer Strasse. The free exhibit shows the history of this street that was once a border between two countries, of its residents, many of whom were separated from their friends and families, and of those who tried to get over the wall in search of a better life. 
The longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall (more than one kilometer in length) stretches along the river and is called the East Side Gallery. The paintings on the wall, executed by artists from all over the world, still attract crowds, despite being damaged and covered with graffiti and tourists’ signatures. 

<b>What to see</b>

If the weather is fine, rent a bike and explore some of Berlin’s residential districts, like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain. The lively street life, small stores, cafes and green areas of these districts will make any bike ride a pleasant one. Locals also recommend cycling to Tempelhof Park, formerly Tempelhof Airport, where a vast green zone can be found. City parks such as the Grosser Tiergarten and Volkspark Friedrichshain are great places to spend the day, especially in autumn. 
Those who like baroque and rococo architecture should visit Charlottenburg Palace in the east of the city. The only surviving royal city residence, it is surrounded by a huge garden with a belvedere, a mausoleum, a theater and a pavilion. Parks and palaces can also be found not very far from Berlin in the town of Potsdam, the summer residence of the Prussian kings. The journey by train takes around an hour.
To see Berlin from above, ascend the TV tower on Alexanderplatz. It costs 12 euros ($15) and lines can be long, but the view of the city from 203 and 207 meters is definitely worth the effort. To save time and money, you can also see a panorama of the city from the dome of renowned architect Norman Foster’s reconstructed Reichstag. Entrance to the building is free of charge, but visitors have to sign up on its website in advance. For Russians, entering the Reichstag may have a symbolic meaning, as they will be following in the footsteps of the Reichstag’s Soviet conquerors in 1945. During reconstruction, the Germans decided not to remove the graffiti left by Soviet soldiers on the walls, another surviving reminder of the tragic scars the 20th century left on the city. 
Near the Reichstag building, it is impossible to miss the iconic Brandenburg Gate, the sole survivor of the city’s former gates and one of its enduring symbols. The Holocaust Memorial, a 19,000-square-meter site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs that vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 meters, is also located in this area. 
A short walk further is Potsdamer Platz, the heart of Berlin’s business district, surrounded by modern office buildings, the most well known being the Sony Center building. 
The legendary Berlin Zoo is bound to be of interest to adults and children alike. There are in fact two zoos in the city, as a result of its divided history. East Berlin’s zoo is bigger, but more animals can be seen in the better-known Zoologischer Garten in what was formerly West Berlin. The elephants adorning the zoo’s gate do not give false expectations: These gray giants are some of the most popular animals in the zoo, which itself is the most popular in Europe, and is frequently praised for the conditions in which the animals live.
If you are in Berlin on a Sunday, check out the local flea market on the corner of Bernauer and Schwedler Strasse. Old cameras, posters, furniture, clothes, vinyl LPs and handmade jewelry can be easily found here. Whether you are searching for gifts for your friends or just want to treat yourself, the market is definitely worth a visit.

<b>Museums</b>

One of the best tourist attractions in Berlin is Museum Island, where the city’s five main museums are brought together. If you have time for only one of them, make it the Pergamon Museum, where collections of Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian art are on display. To avoid standing in line for more than an hour, you can buy tickets online.
Those who are interested in late 20th-century art may find the collection of the New National Gallery of interest. Works by Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Henry Moore are exhibited alongside the music video of The Beatles’ “All you need is love.”

<b>Alternative Berlin</b>

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city began to attract a lot of independent artists. Small contemporary art galleries can be found in the streets of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, while young artists, actors and poets hang out in the bars nearby. However, what is most impressive and inseparable from the appearance of Berlin is its street art. Huge swathes of abandoned factories, railway bridges and road signs are plastered in graffiti. Artists from all over the world use these spaces to protest against commercialization and the financial crisis, or simply to express their feelings. To see hidden street art and try to understand its language, you can join a free walking tour called Alternative Berlin (http://alternativeberlin.com/) that starts every day at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. from the not-so-alternative Starbucks cafe on Alexanderplatz. This tour offers a glimpse of the real life of the Berlin underground: Skateboarders’ practice sessions, squares where demonstrations take place, squats and of course impressive examples of street art. The guides are a wealth of interesting historical facts, and you might even find out about the old Turk who became a local celebrity for digging a garden in 1983 on a patch of wasteland beside the Berlin Wall that actually belonged to East Germany. 

<b>Nightlife</b>

“The city that never sleeps” is a suitable label for Berlin. Although noted for its techno parties, it offers music events for any taste. If you are looking for a crazy party full of local color, go to Friedrichshain. At least five nightclubs in the area occupy former factories now decorated by local street artists, where club, electronic and even swing evenings can be found. Entrance fees are usually around 5-10 euros ($6.50-$13).
<hr />
<b>Where to eat</b>

When you ask locals about traditional food, they think for a while and then, smiling, recommend currywurst and doner kebab. The original German pork sausage with warm curry ketchup, currywurst can be found practically everywhere, but one of the best places to try it is Curry 36 in Kreuzberg (36 Mehringdamm, +49 (0)30 25 800 8830, 
http://www.curry36.de/). 
Doner kebab is widely available in Berlin because of the abundance of immigrants from Turkey. The Turkish district is situated in West Berlin close to the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station, and the area has a Turkish market that is also worth visiting.
Blumencaf&#233; (127a Sch&#246;nhauser Allee, 030 4473 4226), which combines a caf&#233; and a flower shop, is especially good for breakfasts. Cozy little restaurants serving Italian, Japanese, Indian and local cuisine can be found along Kastanienallee, Bergmannstrasse and Oranienstrasse. The streets around Boxhagener Platz and Kollwitzplatz are also recommended. Finding a good place to eat in Berlin is never difficult — just ask locals on the streets. Berliners are very friendly and practically everyone speaks good English.
<hr />
<b>How To Get There</b>

Aeroflot, Air Berlin and other airlines together offer several daily flights between St. Petersburg and Berlin. One-way tickets cost upward of about 9,000 rubles ($285).

<b>Where to Stay</b>

When choosing which district to stay in, it’s best to determine what exactly you want to get out of your trip to the German capital. Those coming for just a couple of days are recommended to stay in Mitte to have quick access to the main tourist attractions. Nightlife lovers should choose Friedrichshain, while those after a bit of retail therapy should opt for Charlottenburg. 
The four-star Hotel Zoo Berlin (25 Kurf&#252;rstendamm, Charlottenburg) is situated in the main shopping street near the Zoological Garden. A perfect choice for a family, it is located just two minutes on foot from the U-Bahn, the railway station and the bus stop for Tegel Airport. They also serve good and diverse breakfasts. A triple room costs from 112 euros ($143), a single 55 euros ($70).
The comfortable Alcatraz Backpacker hostel offers a cheaper stay (133a Sch&#246;nhauser Allee, Prenzlauer Berg, www.alcatraz-backpacker.de/). Friendly staff, a colorful design, a well-equipped kitchen and free Internet access are the advantages of this hostel. A double room costs about 40-50 euros ($51-$64), a bed in a dormitory around 11-13 euros ($14-$17). Alcatraz Backpacker also offers bike rental for those who want to explore the city by bike.

TITLE: Aging Nuclear Plants Add to EU Economic Woes
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VISAGINAS, Lithuania — The parking lot outside the atomic power plant is weedy and potholed. Bus stops that once teemed with hundreds of workers are eerily empty.
Yet the stillness at Ignalina, a Lithuanian nuclear plant built in the 1980s Soviet era, belies an unsettling fact: There is still nuclear fuel inside one of its two reactors, three years after it was shut down due to safety concerns.
A temporary storage facility for spent fuel and radioactive waste is four years behind schedule, creating a money drain at a time when the 27-nation European Union grapples with a crippling economic crisis.
States don’t need EU permission to build nuclear plants, but they need to abide by its safety rules, and the problems at Ignalina have provoked threats from the EU to cut the funding promised for dismantling it.
That raises concerns that the facility will be around for years, possibly decades, longer than planned. Ignalina is turning out to be a hard lesson for Europe: It’s one thing to kill a nuclear power station; getting rid of the remains is another headache entirely.
Many experts downplay safety risks in delays to the dismantling of Ignalina and two other Communist-era plants in Slovakia and Bulgaria, but that is little comfort to nearby residents who fear risks of a radioactive leak will only grow with time.
Last year’s calamity at the Fukushima power station triggered by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami refocused global attention on nuclear technology’s vulnerability 25 years after the meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine. That Soviet-built plant is similar to Ignalina.
Germany, which has one of the world’s most advanced atomic energy industries, last year decided the dangers were too great and announced it would go nuclear-free by 2022.
Ignalina’s delays and massive cost overruns offer a cautionary tale for the EU, which aims to dismantle dozens of nuclear facilities over the next two decades.
In the poor nations of Eastern Europe, some fear offline nuclear reactors left in limbo pose extraordinary risks.
“Lithuania cannot continue the decommissioning process for an unlimited period and risk creating another Chernobyl in the middle of Europe,” Zigmantas Balcytis, a Lithuanian member of the European Parliament, said.
A major nuclear disaster is much less likely in a closed plant than in a live one. The Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency says an offline plant contains only one-thousandth of the radioactive material of one in operation. Still, there are dangers of smaller releases of radioactivity into the air or soil, while workers face exposure to lethal doses.
In October 2010, radioactive pipes connected with Reactor 1 in Ignalina burst during cleaning, leaking several hundred tons of radioactive sludge. It didn’t breach the concrete rooms inside the building, and no one was injured, but the accident caused alarm, particularly since the plant conceded in a statement that the cleaning technology “was in fact not tested in nuclear industry enterprises before.”
Dormant nuclear facilities could potentially pose a tantalizing prize for terrorists or smugglers of nuclear materials, and experts point to another worry: Only a handful of reactors worldwide have been fully dismantled, meaning the process is largely uncharted territory. Tearing apart reactor cores, for instance, creates unknown challenges and potential risks given the level of radiation inside them.
Steven Thomas, an energy expert at Britain’s Greenwich University, says taking apart the core will likely require robots that have not yet been invented. “The robots we have at the moment won’t do it because the levels of radioactivity will send them berserk,” he said.
Ignalina presents particular challenges. The nuclear fuel rod bundles, at seven meters, are twice as long as those in conventional plants and must be sawed in half to fit into storage casts.
Spent nuclear fuel is by far the biggest decommissioning headache. It is extremely radioactive and will remain so for thousands of years. In the U.S. and elsewhere, it’s a political bomb because no state or county wants to store it. France chooses to reprocess its fuel for further use in reactors, while Sweden and Finland bury it in casks deep underground.
In the long term, Lithuania hopes to send its fuel back to Russia, where it was manufactured. But for now it has nowhere to put many spent fuel bundles since the temporary storage facility that was supposed to be ready when the plant closed in 2009 is still not complete.
Decommissioning work in Lithuania, Slovakia and Bulgaria has been held up by vague contracts, lengthy regulatory approval, commercial disputes and management changes, according to officials involved in the projects.
Since closing the plants was a condition for their joining the bloc, the EU is paying almost the entire bill, and for taxpayers, it is huge — more than $2.6 billion so far, over half of it to Ignalina, the most troublesome. The three countries have re-estimated total costs at $6.8 billion — up from the original estimate of $5.1 billion — and doesn’t include the toughest job, dismantling the reactor cores.
The job was due to be completed between 2025 and 2035, but may take much longer and cost more. That’s a disturbing omen for the EU’s plans to shut down a third of its member states’ 143 active reactors by 2025. The bloc currently has 77 reactors offline in various stages of decommissioning.
Other EU countries will have to foot the bill for closing their own plants, adding to taxpayers’ woes. In Germany, it will be in addition to energy price increases as the government scrambles to finance an ambitious switch from nuclear to renewables, which should account for 60 percent of total energy consumption by 2030. Just last month, Germany’s main utilities announced that households could see their electricity bill jump up to 50 percent in order to finance this transition from nuclear power.
Experts say that disassembling atomic plants promises to be far costlier than previously estimated, given the lack of experience worldwide and nuclear operators’ propensity to underestimate decommissioning costs to make new projects look more attractive.
Thomas of Greenwich University said in Britain nuclear operators were supposed to pay for the decommissioning, but over decades the cost was passed to the government, which will have to come up with $153 billion over the next century to dismantle the country’s existing nuclear power plants.
Just abandoning the facilities with radioactivity trapped inside is not an option. But given the enormous expenditures, some governments are opting to drag out the decommissioning over many decades.
In its heyday, the Ignalina plant near the border with Russia employed 5,000 people and provided power to Estonia, Latvia, Belarus and Russia. Although 2,000 people still work there, the atmosphere inside is almost funereal.
CEO Zilvinas Jurksus, a soft-spoken telecommunications expert who took over Ignalina in May 2011, believes that the German company that leads the decommissioning, Nukem Technologies, underestimated the projects’ scope and has been too slow in preparing detailed documents.
Nukem, in turn, faults Lithuanian red tape and lack of experience.
“Nukem built a used fuel storage facility in Bulgaria. The project started at the same time as in Lithuania, and we handed the facility over to the customer last year, in the spring,” said Beate Scheffler, a Nukem spokeswoman. “In Lithuania, we are still working.”
It is becoming increasingly clear that the nuclear-free dreams of countries like Germany promise to be far more complicated to fulfill than originally anticipated.
“It’s one of those things that the industry has always said — ‘look, we know how to do it, it’s technically simple,’” Thomas said. “Well, put your money where your mouth is, and actually do it.”

TITLE: Egypt: Israel to Cease Gaza Onslaught
AUTHOR: By Ravi Nessman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM— Egypt’s president predicted Tuesday that Israel’s nearly weeklong offensive in the Gaza Strip would end within hours, and Israel’s prime minister said his country would be a “willing partner” to a cease-fire with Hamas aimed at ending relentless Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rocket attacks.
As indications grew of an imminent end to the fighting, international diplomats raced across the region to cement a deal. President Barack Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Middle East from Cambodia, where she had accompanied him on a visit.
Mohammed Morsi, perhaps the most important interlocutor between the militant Hamas group that rules the Palestinian territory and the Israelis, gave no explanation for his statement, saying only that the negotiations between the two sides will yield “positive results” during the coming hours.
In Brussels, a senior official of the European Union’s foreign service said a ceasefire would include an end to Israeli airstrikes and targeted killings in Gaza, the opening of Gaza crossing points and an end to rocket attacks on Israel. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
“If a long-term solution can be put in place through diplomatic means, then Israel would be a willing partner to such a solution. But if stronger military action proves necessary to stop the constant barrage of rockets, Israel wouldn’t hesitate to do what is necessary to defend our people,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a joint press conference in Jerusalem with visiting UN chief Ban Ki-moon.
Ban condemned Palestinian rocket attacks, but urged Israel to show “maximum restraint.”
“Further escalation benefits no one,” he said.
Minutes before Ban’s arrival in Jerusalem from Egypt, Palestinian militants fired a rocket toward the holy city. Earlier Tuesday, a man identified as Hamas’ militant commander urged his fighters to keep up attacks on Israel, even as Israeli airstrikes killed a senior militant and five others in a separate attack on a car, according to Gaza health officials.
Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets on several Gaza neighborhoods asking residents to evacuate and head toward the center of Gaza City along specific roads. ‘The army “is not targeting any of you, and doesn’t want to harm you or your families,” it said. Palestinian militants urged residents to ignore the warnings, calling them “psychological warfare.”
Clinton was scheduled to meet with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and Egyptian leaders in Cairo. Turkey’s foreign minister and a delegation of Arab League foreign ministers traveled to Gaza on a separate truce mission. Airstrikes continued to hit Gaza even as they entered the territory.
“Turkey is standing by you,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh. “Our demand is clear. Israel should end its aggression immediately and lift the inhumane blockade imposed on Gaza.”
It was unclear how much diplomatic efforts to achieve a ceasefire and stave off a threatened Israeli ground invasion into Gaza were hampered by the hard-to-bridge positions staked out by both sides — and by the persistent attacks. Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers have been dispatched to the Gaza border in case of a decision to invade.
Residents of Jerusalem ran for cover Tuesday when Palestinians fired a rocket toward the holy city for the second time since the fighting started last Wednesday. The rocket, which set off sirens in the city, landed harmlessly in an open area on the outskirts in one of the longest rocket strikes fired from Gaza.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the rocket landed in Gush Etzion, a collection of Jewish West Bank settlements southeast of the city. Last Friday’s attempt to hit Jerusalem, nearly 80 kilometers from Gaza, landed in the same area. No one was wounded in either attack.
Jerusalem had previously been considered beyond the range of Gaza rockets — and an unlikely target because it is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third-holiest shrine. Israeli officials feared Gaza’s Hamas rulers will try to stage similar attacks deep into Israel ahead of any possible truce.
Shortly afterward, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a car in Gaza City, killing five people and seriously wounding four others. Their identities were not immediately known.
In a sign of the difficulty diplomats will have in forging such a ceasefire, a man identified as Mohammed Deif, Hamas’ elusive military commander, urged his fighters to keep up attacks on Israel.
Speaking from hiding on Hamas-run TV and radio, Deif said Hamas “must invest all resources to uproot this aggressor from our land,” a reference to Israel.

TITLE: Asian Row Dominates Summit
AUTHOR: By Jim Gomez
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — President Barack Obama’s attendance at an annual summit of Southeast Asian leaders Tuesday thrust him right into the eye of the region’s most stormy dispute: The long-raging rivalry between China and five neighbors for control of strategic and resource-rich waters in the South China Sea.
The inability to resolve these territorial conflicts has become a major impediment to the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations as it tackles ambitious dreams like a plan to turn the economically vibrant region of 600 million people into an EU-like community by the end of 2015.
Neither the U.S. nor China is a member of ASEAN, but each has strong supporters in the group. Summit host Cambodia, an ally of China, has tried at this week’s summit to shift the focus to economic concerns, but Beijing’s territorial disputes with its ASEAN neighbors, including U.S. ally the Philippines, have yet again overshadowed discussions.
The disagreement sparked a tense moment Monday when Philippine President Benigno Aquino III challenged Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who had tried to cut off a discussion of the territorial disputes.
Into this heated atmosphere came Obama, who flew to Phnom Penh for Tuesday’s expanded East Asia Summit, in which the 10 ASEAN countries were joined by eight other nations, including China and the United States. Behind closed doors, the Chinese and Philippine leaders pressed their territorial claims while others called for restraint. After the summit, the exchange shifted to the chandelier-lit lobby, where diplomats of the two countries reiterated their positions.
Senior Chinese diplomat Fu Ying expressed dismay that the disputes again got the spotlight. “We do not want to bring the disputes to an occasion like this and we do not want to give over-emphasis to the territorial disputes and differences,” she said.
Washington has reiterated that it takes no sides in the territorial disputes but would not allow any country to resort to force and block access to the South China Sea, a vital commercial and military gateway to Asia’s heartland.
Washington has also called for the early crafting of a “code of conduct” to prevent clashes in the disputed territories, a call backed by Australia and Japan, but it remains unclear if and when China will sit down with rival claimants to draft such a legally binding nonaggression pact.
The potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea islands and waters are contested by China, Taiwan and four ASEAN members — Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The last fighting, involving China and Vietnam, killed more than 70 Vietnamese sailors in 1988, and fears that the conflicts could spark Asia’s next war have kept governments on edge.
Vietnam and the Philippines, backed by the U.S., have been loudest on the issue, and want China to negotiate with the other claimants as a group. China wants one-on-one negotiations — which would give it an advantage because of its sheer size and economic clout — and has warned Washington to stay away from an issue it says should not be “internationalized,” a position echoed by Cambodia at the Phnom Penh summit.

TITLE: Congo Rebels Enter Goma, Take Control Of Airport
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GOMA, Congo — A spokesman for a rebel group in Congo believed to be backed by neighboring Rwanda confirmed that his fighters have entered the border city of Goma and have taken the city’s international airport. The assault was punctuated by heavy gunfire.
Colonel Vianney Kazarama, spokesman for the M23 rebel movement, told The Associated Press by telephone that the rebels are now fighting for control of the rest of Goma. “We already took the airport,” Kazarama said Tuesday. “We are now inside the city of Goma.”
Goma was last threatened by rebels in 2008 when fighters stopped just short of the provincial capital. The United Nations has said that if Goma were to fall a humanitarian catastrophe would result. The rebels are opposed by Congolese government forces backed by UN peacekeeping troops and their attack helicopters.

TITLE: Colombia Reacts Coolly to Ceasefire
AUTHOR: By Andrea Rodriguez
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAVANA — Colombia’s main rebel group announced a unilateral ceasefire Monday as it began much-anticipated peace talks, but the Bogota government responded that it would continue military operations.
Top negotiator Ivan Marquez said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) would halt all acts of sabotage and attacks against government and private property starting at midnight Monday and running through Jan. 20.
He made the announcement as representatives for both sides entered the negotiations in Havana without other comment.
Marquez said the move was “aimed at strengthening the climate of understanding necessary for the parties to start a dialogue.”
Hours later, Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon told reporters in the Colombian capital that while the government hoped the FARC would keep its promise, “history shows that this terrorist organization has never kept its word. It’s very difficult to believe.”
He added that Colombian security forces have “the constitutional duty to pursue all criminals who have violated the Constitution.”
“As a result, the terrorists of the FARC are being pursued for all the crimes they have committed over so many years and not for future crimes,” said Pinzon, one of President Juan Manuel Santos’ most trusted collaborators.
The FARC had sought a ceasefire before entering the talks. But Santos firmly rejected halting military operations, intent on obtaining tangible results in the negotiations from an insurgency that has been weakened militarily in recent years.
Piedad Cordoba, a leftist former Colombian senator who has served as a go-between with the Western Hemisphere’s last remaining major insurgency, said the unilateral cease-fire gives the FARC “credibility and legitimacy.”
“It certainly puts political pressure on the Santos government” not to attack the rebels during the talks, said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America.
The talks got under way under threatening skies at a convention center in Havana, with most rebel and government negotiators dressed casually in short-sleeve shirts or guayaberas.
The rebel delegation came sporting a life-size cardboard cutout of Simon Trinidad, a FARC leader symbolically named to the negotiating committee. He is serving a 60-year jail term in the United States for hostage-taking conspiracy and the rebels consider him a prisoner of war.
Among the rebels at the talks was Tanja Nijmeijer, a 34-year-old polyglot Dutch woman who joined the rebels a decade ago and was a last-minute addition to the rebel delegation. Nijmeijer, the only woman at the negotiating table, entered the convention center wearing a dark beret with a FARC insignia.
Cuba is playing host to the talks in Havana following a formal inauguration in Oslo, Norway last month. The FARC has been at war with successive Colombian governments for half a century and the drug trade-fueled conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, mostly civilians, and included killings of suspected rebel sympathizers by right-wing death squads allied with the military.
There is no deadline for agreement, though Santos has said he expects results in months, not years, or he will halt the negotiations.
The talks, the result of seven months of secret negotiations in Havana, follow four failed efforts since the early 1980s.
A ceasefire reached with the FARC in the first of those efforts fell apart amid accusations of mutual failures to honor it.