SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #601 (0), Friday, September 8, 2000
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TITLE: Leaders Stay Firm On Missile Defense
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS - With both sides refusing to budge, President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin remained at odds about an American program to build an anti-missile defense system. Raising the stakes, the United States said it would not discuss deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals until Mos cow agrees to negotiations on strategic defense. 
Beginning a three-day marathon of diplomacy on Wednesday, Clinton met with Putin on the sidelines of the United Nations' Millennium Summit, a gathering of about 160 presidents, kings and prime ministers. 
Meeting for the third time in three months, now in a 35th-floor hotel suite in midtown Manhattan, Clinton and Putin registered stubborn differences about anti-missile defense systems. 
Clinton last week decided not to authorize deployment of a missile shield, deferring the decision to his successor. Russia adamantly opposes such a system, saying it would wreck arms-control agreements and trigger a new nuclear arms race. China opposes it, too. 
Clinton said his decision to put off deployment of a missile shield created the opportunity for Putin and the next American president "to reach a common position. And I hope they can," Clinton added, "because I think it's very important for the future that we continue to work together. 
"When we work together," said Clinton, "we can destroy thousands of tons of nuclear materials and lots of nuclear weapons, and work together in the Balkans for peace." 
Putin, in his own address to the United Nations, signaled that Russia would continue to press the United States to abandon its missile defense ambitions. 
Putin urged world leaders to come to Moscow for a conference to ban the militarization of space. He described the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a foundation of the entire nuclear arms control system.
Noting that the next year will see the 40th anniversary of Russia sending the first man into space, Putin - who is on his first visit to the United States as president - said that Moscow will be the "most appropriate place for such a conference." 
His statement came as the latest signal that Russia would continue pushing the United States to abandon fully its plans to deploy defenses against missile threats from what it calls rogue nations, such as North Korea. 
Putin also proposed in his speech to bar the use of enriched uranium and pure plutonium in world atomic energy production. "Incineration of plutonium and other radioactive elements creates prerequisites for the final solution of the radioactive residues problem," Pu tin said. 
The Russian leader followed up on his speech with a marathon series of meetings with world leaders, including Chinese President Jiang Zemin, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid. 
The meeting with Jiang gave Russia and China another chance to speak against the "unipolar world" - their favorite term to describe the alleged U.S. domination of global affairs. 
"We stand for the United Nations playing a stronger role in global affairs," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told reporters after Putin's meeting with Jiang. "We favor a multipolar world based on respect for international law." 
The meeting with Schroeder mostly focused on economic issues, and the two leaders agreed that the chancellor would soon visit Moscow, probably as early as this month.
The United States said it was prepared to open talks on deeper arms reductions - but only if they proceed "in parallel with meaningful and productive discussions on strategic defenses. And ... we're not there yet with the Russians," said Strobe Talbott, U.S. deputy secretary of state. 
Talbott said Russia needs to recognize that amendments will be necessary in the ABM "probably sooner rather than later." 
He also said that starting formal negotiations on arms cuts - a START III agreement - "is going to have to wait until Russia is prepared to join us in formal negotiations on strategic defense." 
Seeking areas of compromise, Clinton and Putin signed a statement on strategic stability cooperation. It commits both countries to finishing an accord on pre-notification of launches of ballistic missiles. Talbott said the statement "puts more flesh on the bones" of accords signed by Clinton and Putin in June in Moscow and in July in Japan. 
Clinton and Putin also discussed prospects for democracy in the Balkans, peace-keeping in Kosovo, U.S. objections to the transfer of Russian missile and nuclear weaponry technology to Iran, and Iraq's defiance of U.N. weapons inspection demands. 
Clinton also raised the case of Edmund Pope, an American businessman jailed by Russian authorities since April 3 on espionage charges. Talbott said that Putin "certainly understands the importance that President Clinton attaches to that."
He keeps up his busy diplomatic rounds on Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among other leaders.

TITLE: Berezovsky Names List of Trustees of His ORT Stake
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Looking nervous and exhausted after his private jet caught fire en route to Moscow from London and had to make an emergency landing in Duesseldorf, Boris Berezovsky announced to a delayed news conference Thursday a 14-member list of trustees who will control his 49-percent stake in ORT for the next four years. 
"It is a small step toward building a civil society," Berezovsky said agitatedly. 
He appealed to journalists to support his move, saying that barring President Vladimir Putin and his government from mastering full control of the three main national television channels, of which ORT has the greatest political influence, is crucial to preventing Russia's slide into authoritarianism. 
Berezovsky said Thursday that it was presidential Chief of Staff Alexander Voloshin who gave him the ultimatum of handing his stake over to the state or "follow in the steps of [Media-MOST founder Vladimir] Gusinsky," who was briefly jailed in July. 
In an open letter to Putin made public Monday, Berezovsky said he would not bow to Kremlin pressure and instead would transfer his 49-percent share of the country's largest television broadcaster in trust to a committee of "journalists and other representatives of creative intelligentsia." 
Government officials, including Press Minister Mikhail Lesin, welcomed Berezovsky's proposal. But several politicians expressed their skepticism Thursday, saying the move will change little in the way ORT is run while Berezovsky is using the situation to carve a new niche as an opposition leader. 
"With the powerful levers of power in the form of large debts, the government [which owns 51 percent of ORT] will handle the collective owner much faster than it has handled ... Berezovsky, and the channel will ultimately move to the government's property anyway," said Irina Kha kamada, deputy speaker of the State Duma, Interfax reported. 
Duma Speaker Gennady Selez nyov, whom Berezovsky described Thursday as the Kremlin's puppet, said the board of trustees is just a smokescreen that will allow Berezovsky to continue wielding control over the channel. 
Most of the journalists on the new board of trustees are prominent figures at Berezovsky's media outlets. Among the best-known names of the 14 people who have agreed to participate are writer Vasily Aksyonov, television anchors Vladimir Pozner and Sergei Do ren ko, lawyer Genri Reznik and editors Igor Golembiovsky, Vitaly Tretyakov and Yegor Yakovlev. Media analyst An na Kachkayeva, who works at Radio Liberty and Moscow State University, is also on the committee. 
Stressing the importance of journalists' solidarity, he also said he asked Media-MOST editors Alexei Venediktov, Yev geny Kiselyov, Sergei Parkho men ko and Mikhail Berger to join the ORT board, as well as TV Center Vla dislav Flyarkovsky, theater director Yury Lyubimov and writers Viktor Pelevin and Fazil Iskander. But none of them has responded to his offer yet, he said. 
Berezovsky repeated his challenge to the Kremlin to follow his suit and transfer its controlling stake to a similar group of trustees.

TITLE: City Assembly Hits Ground Running
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In a whirlwind opening session, the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly returned from summer vacation on Wednesday and got down to work like nobody's business, making deals, passing laws, shifting alliances, and plowing through a docket of 60 items. 
Highlights included the passage of a law adding to the city court system 211 judges - doubling the current number - who will deal specifically with the backlog of small-claims lawsuits and petty crimes, which often drag on for months, if not years. They also passed on the first reading a draft law to control city monopolies like Vodokanal and Lenenergo. 
But perhaps the most groundbreaking move of the day was the major shift in faction alliances away from City Hall into the arms of the Yedinstvo, or Unity, the pro-Kremlin party that emerged to support Vladimir Putin during the December elections. 
The move was spearheaded by six former pro-Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev Reasonable Compromise faction members, who announced on Wednesday that they were changing their affiliation to Unity. 
Among those jumping the Conscious Compromise ship was the Legislative Assembly's lone Communist, Sta nislav Zhitkov, which drew snickers from some lawmakers, who were tickled by the idea of a red presence in Unity. 
"It looks kind of exotic," said Mikhail Amosov, a Yabloko faction lawmaker, in an interview on Wednesday.
His colleague, Anatoly Kriven chen ko, head of the Bloc Yury Boldyrev faction, was shocked when he found out about Zhitkov's switch.
"How could it be, if he is a member of the Communist party?!" he said. "But I guess it's no surprise when people try to be closer to those who are in power." 
Zhitkov said the local Communist party council agreed with the initiative to join forces with Unity 10 days ago after they discussed the question.
"I showed the program of the Unity party at the meeting," he said. "It looks similar to the Communist party program."
Zhitkov then wrote an application letter to join the Unity faction. And he was accepted. 
"I am a member of the Unity faction," Zhitkov beamed on Wednesday.
Vadim Sergeyenko, a spokesman for Unity - though he himself is not a member of the Legislative Assembly - said he expected the new alliance to draw more members and become the most powerful political body in the 50-member assembly.
"The Reasonable Compromise faction lawmakers approached us first with an offer of cooperation," Ser ge yen ko said Wednesday. He added that other factions had come forward with the wish to join the reconstituted pro-government faction. 
The six new members will bring Unity to nine, making it No. 3 in size behind Yabloko-Zakonnost's 15 members.
Vadim Tyulpanov, leader of the defunct - but for one member - Reasonable Compromise faction, described the Caesar-like position Yakov lev finds himself in as "natural." 
Sergeyenko said the main aim for the new faction is to pass laws to defend the poor people of St. Petersburg, and to pass laws about communal services in the city. However, he did not specify the exact laws Unity would like to be passed.
"The members of this faction all came out in support of the Putin during the elections and it is natural that they would want to continue their work on the side of President Putin," Tyulpanov said. 
Igor Mikhailov, Reasonable Com promise's one remaining member said the shift was all just politicking in preparation for the 2002 Legislative Assembly elections - something the faction's ideals are above.
"The Reasonable Compromise was created to be above all in the Legislative Assembly," he said. "Any faction [like the Unity-Reasonable Compromise alliance] which acts under the power of some other political counsel will soon collapse." 
Nevertheless one concrete law the deputies passed during the politicking is the so-called Justice of the Peace Law, which will add 211 judges to the city court system who will deal specifically with small-claims suits and minor crimes that have clogged both court dockets and jails literally for years. 
"This is a very significant law for us. Everybody knows that all the jails in St. Petersburg are overcrowded and suspects have been waiting for a court hearing for years," said former city police chief and Unity party deputy Arkady Kramarev. 
"If this law - doubling the number of judges - means the court system will start working faster and more effectively," said former city police chief and current Unity party deputy Arkady Kramarev, "there is going to be a real possibility now for St. Petersburg citizens to defend their rights. It would be possible to file a suit and get a court hearing in just two weeks instead of months as it happens now."
Kramarev said the Justice of the Peace system would be in place by year's end. The new system, he said, will cost the city 17 million rubles annually.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: New Yeltsin Memoirs
MOSCOW (SPT) - Former president Boris Yeltsin's latest round of memoirs, "Midnight Diaries," are scheduled to be published in October in the United States.
The book, published by PublicAffairs publishers, and scheduled for an initial print run of 75,000 copies, is adapted by Yeltsin's former chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, from a series of interviews conducted soon after Yeltsin's resignation on New Year's Eve.
According to the PublicAffairs Web site, the book will be also published in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. However, the simultaneous Russian edition, which was announced earlier, may be delayed, Moskovsky Kom somolets daily reported Wednesday.
The book is expected to provide an account of the decision-making about Chechnya; the chain of prime ministers hired and fired by Yeltsin during his last years as president; and his resignation.
Duma Bans Smoking 
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's lower house of parliament has banned smoke-filled rooms. And hallways and bathrooms, for that matter. 
Deputies arriving Thursday in advance of Friday's opening of the State Duma's fall session found the ashtrays had been removed and signs put up declaring the building a smoke-free zone. 
The decision was made by deputies in May. But the ashtrays were not immediately removed, and no signs were posted. 
The move could cramp relations between deputies and journalists, since lawmakers would often leave lengthy sessions to light up in the corridor where reporters and camera operators could approach them for interviews. 
Smoking is a widespread habit in Russia, and a large number of deputies smoke, including Speaker Gennady Seleznyov. Skeptics have said that no matter what the official rules, smoke will still curl from under official doors. 
Estonia Urges Claim
TALLINN, Estonia (Reuters) - Estonia's top ruling party said the three Baltic states should make a joint appeal to Russia to compensate them for losses caused by the 50-year Soviet occupation.
On Tuesday, Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar's Pro Patria party said it would propose to the Baltic Assembly interparliamentary body later this year that the three countries make a coordinated effort to claim compensation.
"We decided that our delegate to the Baltic Assembly's next session will put forward a declaration ... that the Baltic states establish how large damages from the period of the occupation should be," Pro Patria board member Sirje Kiin said.
Heroin Dealers Busted
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg's Crime Unit arrested a group of four drug dealers and confiscated 810,000 rubles ($30,000) worth of heroin, Interfax reported Wednesday. The total weight of heroin was 1.2 kilograms.
According to the report, detectives ran across the drug-dealing group while investigating a contract hit, the agency reported. Police would not disclose the names of the detained, saying only that they had been unemployed and that they and their alleged 52-year-old leader had been trafficking and distributing heroin since the beginning of this year.
Earlier this week, the St. Petersburg Anti-Drug Squad also arrested a group in Kirishi, about 80 kilometers southeast of St. Petersburg. With that arrest, police claimed they had shut off a whole trafficking channel of heroin from Tadjikistan, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Fallout Cleaners Continue Hunger Strike
AUTHOR: By Anna Badkhen
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - When they were dispatched to liquidate the fallout of the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, they were not warned that they would be sick for the rest of their lives.
Then when the government increased their medication subsidies in 1998, they were not told that the money would be cut again in a year.
So after seeing repeated appeals to the government go unanswered, the Chernobyl liquidators decided to present their case in a more dramatic way: They went on a hunger strike.
That strike dragged into its 44th day on Thursday. Some 200 liquidators in Shakhty, a small town in the southern Rostov region, are living in tents on the main town square, surviving on water and occasional medications brought to them by their families and local doctors. They say they have not eaten a morsel since July 27.
"We drink water and soon we will die," Nikolai Mekhnyov, 49, said in a telephone interview from Shakhty. 
Mekhnyov was dispatched to mend the roof of the sarcophagus that covers melted reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. He is also a member of the Shakhty-based advocacy group Chernobyl.
"If we had free coffins, we would die right now. But we have to pay for coffins, and we have no money," Mekh nyov said.
In 1998, the Supreme Court ordered that the monthly state subsidies for Chernobyl liquidators be raised to between 2,000 rubles and 4,000 rubles. However, the Labor Ministry ignored that decision and it decided to cut all subsidies to 400 rubles to 1,000 rubles a month from the start of 1999.
An average Chernobyl liquidator needs 1,500 rubles per month to buy medications alone, according to Mekhnyov.
Labor Ministry representative Andrei Pryanishnikov said Thursday that the Supreme Court decision was "illegal." 
He said Labor Minister Alexander Pochinok would visit the regional capital of Rostov-on-Don on Monday to try to persuade the liquidators to call off the strike.
But Mekhnyov said liquidators would not roll up their tents until the subsidies are increased. 
A person can survive on water for an average of three weeks, according to doctors at the Moscow American Medical Center.
Meanwhile, a separate hunger strike was started in Rostov-on-Don on Monday by four contract soldiers who say they are owed four months' worth of wages for fighting with federal troops in Chechnya.
Alexander Kuyumdzhi, the lawyer representing the soldiers, said a total of 26 soldiers had not been paid and had come to demand their wages from the headquarters of the Northern Caucasus military district. He said that while only four are on hunger strike, all 26 men planned to sue.
Rostov-on-Don military officials refused to comment Thursday.

TITLE: Chechen Politican Disappears
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In a large-scale operation involving armored vehicles and helicopters, federal forces arrested Ruslan Alik hadzhiyev, the speaker of the Che chen parliament, at his home in Shali in broad daylight more than three months ago.
What happened to him after that is a mystery. The authorities say he is not in custody and they have no record of his arrest. But Chechen President Aslan Mas kha dov says he knows exactly where Alik hadzhiyev is - dead in Moscow's Lefortovo jail.
Saturday's announcement by Mask ha dov's press service, which claims Alik hadzhiyev was tortured to death, has attracted the attention of the media, human-rights watchdogs and Chechnya's newly elected deputy in parliament. But the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which operates Lefortovo, continued to deny this week that it is holding Alikhadzhiyev.
Disappearing in federal custody is nothing new for residents of Chechnya. The human-rights organization Memorial estimates that federal authorities have held thousands of Chechens for weeks or months without notifying relatives. Often, bodies are only found later.
But Alikhadzhiyev's case is striking because he is a political figure of moderate fame and was arrested in an operation that nobody tried to keep secret.
On the morning of May 17, federal forces arrived by armored vehicle, accompanied by helicopters, at Alik had zhi yev's house, the Chechen parliament speaker's cousin Visark Dombayev said in a telephone interview from his Mos cow hotel room Tuesday.
Dombayev, who lives across the street from Alikhadzhiyev and witnessed the arrest, said Alikhadzhiyev did not resist.
Dombayev's account matched one provided by the newspaper Kommersant on May 23.
On May 25, Col. Gen. Valery Ma ni lov, deputy chief of the General Staff, confirmed the arrest, off-handedly including Alikhadzhiyev's name in a list of prominent rebels taken prisoner that he ticked off at a briefing.
But in the following months, the record of Alikhadzhiyev's arrest somehow disappeared. State Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalyov sent an official inquiry about Alik had zhiyev to federal prosecutors in Chechnya. In late July, a deputy prosecutor, V.A. Russkikh, sent an answer, a copy of which was provided to The St. Petersburg Times: Alikhadzhiyev was not in federal custody and had never been arrested.
This week, Alikhadzhiyev's name surfaced again when Maskhadov's representatives declared that he was tortured to death in the Lefortovo jail.
Roman Khalilov, who calls himself the head of the political department of the Chechen Foreign Ministry, said in a telephone interview Monday that the information about Alikhadzhiyev's death came from Maskhadov himself and that the president, "of course, does not reveal his sources."
The FSB denied the charges. "Alikhadzhiyev was never in the Le for tovo detention center," Itar-Tass quoted an FSB spokesman as saying Tuesday. "Moreover, there has not been a single death in that detention center recently."
Aslambek Aslakhanov, who was elected in Chechnya to the State Duma last month, said that according to his sources, Alikhadzhiyev is alive but is indeed being held in Lefortovo.
Aslakhanov, a retired police general, said that after Alikhadzhiyev's supporters approached him this week he contacted his acquaintances in the Justice Ministry, which oversees most of the country's prisons.
He said an aide to a deputy minister informed him that Alikhadzhiyev is alive in Lefortovo. But since Lefortovo is run by the FSB and not by the Justice Ministry, the source said his hands were tied in the matter.
Alikhadzhiyev is considered a moderate in the rebel government and has publicly criticized extremists like field commanders Shamil Basayev and Khattab. Both his supporters and Chechens not explicitly allied with him say he did not participate in rebel attacks in the current war.
Nevertheless, the cousin Dombayev said, Alikhadzhiyev knew he could be captured. Three months before his arrest, federal forces stormed his house in Shali, but Alikhadzhiyev was not there.
After that, he only came back to visit his sick mother, said Dombayev, who had come to Moscow to try to get some answers about his cousin's whereabouts.
A month before his arrest, Alikhadzhiyev called for negotiations between Moscow and Maskhadov's government in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

TITLE: Arrest Warrant Issued for Elusive Duma Candidate
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One of the 12 candidates who have registered to run for a vacant State Duma slot in St. Petersburg now looks to be on the run from the law, as federal prosecutors this week issued a warrant for his arrest.
Mikhail Zhivilo, a Moscow-based businessman who owns the MIKOM metallurgical investment company, is being sought by the Prosecutor General's Office for his alleged involvement in an assassination attempt on the governor of the Kemerovo region, Aman Tuleyev, which the FSB said it had foiled in June.
"We have enough reason to suspect Zhivilo as having organized the assassination attempt against Tuleyev," said Boris Skopin, a spokesman for the FSB in Novosibirsk, in a telephone interview Thursday.
Zhivilo, however - who along with his brother Yury, MIKOM vice president, was one of the first candidates to be officially registered for district No. 209 - is still at large, with a number of local media reports speculating that he may have fled abroad.
Galina Zelyanina, a member of district No. 209's electoral committee, said that although candidates and their representatives are not generally obliged to let the committee know about their current activities, no committee members had seen or heard from Zhivilo or his brother since Aug. 3, when they registered.
"We have not been informed by [the Prosecutor General's Office] of the arrest warrant out on Zhivilo," she said. "But we don't know if he has even arranged meetings with voters since [registering]."
Yury Zhivilo is not considered a suspect in the case, said Skopin.
Federal prosecutors were effectively giving their backing on Wednesday to an initial arrest warrant issued Sept. 1 by their counterparts in Novosibirsk, thus bypassing the legal immunity Zhivilo acquired when he registered as a candidate.
Skopin said that Novosibirsk investigators, who opened the case in June, had initially considered Zhivilo as a "valuable witness" in the assassination case. Zhivilo was repeatedly summoned to give his testimony, but failed to show up.
Following several unsuccessful attempts to find Zhivilo at his permanent residence in Moscow, detectives then made him an actual suspect.
In early August, FSB agents from Novosibirsk came to the capital to search MIKOM's offices. The FSB took away a number of company documents.
Zhivilo had had several disputes with Tuleyev over a number of metallurgical plants in the Kemerovo region, located in Western Siberia, as well as general strategies in Russia's aluminum market.
Tuleyev, who came in fourth in the March presidential elections, said that the plot to kill him appeared linked to control of the metals industry, one of the most lucrative and allegedly crime-ridden sectors of the economy, according to The Associated Press.
In December 1999, Tuleyev sent regional police into the Kuznetsk steel mill, which is majority-owned by MIKOM, to oust a top manager. Several MIKOM employees were arrested. 
Tuleyev's administration also declared three plants owned by MIKOM bankrupt earlier this year, and assigned representatives from the rival Siberian Aluminum conglomerate to take over.
Already in custody is Alexander Tikhonov, a former Olympic champion biathlete turned food-industry businessman, whose assets include a bakery and a meat-processing factory. Tikho nov, originally from Novosibirsk, and his brother Viktor were arrested on Aug. 8, and accused of attempting to carry out the hit on Tuleyev, said Andrei Chernyshenko, an FSB investigator in Novosibirsk, by telephone on Thursday. They are being held at Moscow's Lefortovo prison.
Zhivilo and Tikhonov are said to have long-standing personal and financial ties. Zhivilo also helped Tikhonov with finances in his January campaign to become governor of the Moscow region. Retired Gen. Boris Gromov actually won that election.
Both Interfax and The Associated Press quoted MIKOM representatives as saying the case against Zhivilo was groundless, and that it was linked instead to the aluminum disputes.
Valentina Titova, the secretary for district No. 209's electoral committee, would not disclose the names or contact numbers of the Zhivilo brothers' representatives. She would not refer to any election rules that might prevent her from provide this information.

TITLE: Grenade Hurled at Moscow Prostitutes
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova and Anna Badkhen
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A man driving by in a car threw a grenade out the window at a group of prostitutes standing along the Garden Ring Road early Thursday, injuring 15 women and one man who was with them, police said.
Seven women and one man, whose names police and doctors refused to disclose, were hospitalized at the Sklifosofsky emergency hospital with shrapnel wounds to their legs. Doctors described their condition as "satisfactory."
Eight more women escaped with slight injuries and were released from the hospital shortly after receiving medical care, said Lyubov Zhomova of the city health department.
The injured were aged 19 to 36 and, with the exception of one Muscovite, were natives of the Tula and Ivanovo regions, Moldova and Ukraine. The man's relationship to the women was unclear.
The grenade attack took place at 4 a.m. on Bolshaya Sukharevskaya Ul, in front of the Sukharevskaya metro station, where prostitutes usually gather late at night. The attacker fled in the car. The injured made it to the hospital, which is located nearby, on their own.
Moscow police spokesman Yury Furman said investigators are looking into several possible motives, including a feud between criminal groups fighting for control over the prostitute business in the city. Other possibilites include a client taking revenge on the prostitutes or a terrorist attack that could have been ordered by the Chechen rebels, he said.
"It's too early to say which of these leads is more likely," Furman said.
He said the prostitutes described the attacker as aged 25 to 27, looking like he wasfrom the Caucasus, dressed in black trousers and sweater, and said he threw a grenade out of the window of a car. Investigators recovered the ring from the grenade and pieces of metal, the police spokesman said.
Two suspects, both natives of the Caucasus and matching the attacker's description, were detained Thursday in connection with the attack, Furman said. They have not been charged, he said.
The Prosecutor's Office of the Central District opened a formal investigation into the attack under articles in the criminal code covering attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
About 100 meters down the road from where the prostitutes were injured, a lone woman plied her trade Thursday evening. The woman, who said she has been working on the same spot for three years, said she was not shaken by the grenade attack.
"That doesn't bother me," said the prostitute, who gave her name only as Sveta. "What bothers me is that my friend went with a man for a night two days ago and I have not seen her since. Me, I never work nights. I only do blow jobs."
The assault also did not stop prostitutes from occupying their usual spots elsewhere in central Moscow on Thursday.
"Yeah, I'm afraid, but what am I going to do?" said Ira, who stood on the side of the road on 1st Brestskaya Ulit sa, near Belorussky Station.
"We all knew what this profession had in store for us," said a prostitute working with her, who refused to give her name.
Prostitution is not a crime under Russian law - a holdover from the Soviet regime's refusal to acknowledge that such a bourgeois practice even existed here.
In 1997, Moscow city police established a vice squad, but it was later disbanded. Attempts by the police to crack down on prostitution are generally limited to random night raids, during which dozens of prostitutes are arrested only to be fined and released within hours to go back to the streets.
There are up to 70,000 prostitutes working on the city's streets, according to the police.

TITLE: Huge Cuts Planned For Russia's Military
AUTHOR: By Michael Steen
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia will cut its armed forces by about a third over the next three years and begin a major restructuring of its Soviet-era command structure, the AVN military news agency quoted a source as saying on Thursday.
AVN, quoting what it said was a highly placed source in Russia's Defense Ministry, said the armed forces would be cut to 800,000 soldiers and officers during 2000 to 2003 - a reduction of 400,000.
The source also told AVN that Strategic Rocket Forces, which controls Russia's huge arsenal of land-based nuclear weapons, would be brought under the General Staff's command - ending its autonomy and effectively downgrading its importance.
Last month's Kursk submarine disaster prompted Russian President Vla dimir Putin to pledge speedier military reform, but the issue has been on the table for years.
Putin has promised to increase military spending and create a smaller, more professional force in line with post-Cold War threats and Russia's weakened economic position.
Putin discussed his reform plans at a meeting with top defense officials on the day before the Aug. 12 Kursk accident, in which the 118-man crew died when the nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea.
Details of reforms agreed at the meeting were officially kept under wraps, although elements have been gradually leaked to Russian media. AVN is an independent news agency reporting on military affairs.
Yury Gladkevich, AVN's military editor, told Reuters that his source had suggested the reductions would mainly be in support and backup units which had swollen in numbers and were "not at all mobile."
Russia's huge conventional and nuclear forces, largely staffed by teenage conscripts, have suffered poor morale as generous Soviet-era funding was deep ly eroded.
Two protracted wars against separatist rebels in Chechnya have highlighted some of the military's short comings.
Gladkevich said he thought the reduction program could only work if twinned with a modernization program to give troops new weapons and communications.
"The plan is realistic. The only question is if they definitely intend to carry it out," he added.
The death of the sailors on board the Kursk submarine prompted a renewed wave of concern about the state of Russia's crumbling military.
In a televised mea culpa after the accident, Putin said he felt guilt and responsibility, but also lashed out at unnamed critics who he said had left the military in a poor state by siphoning off funds. He said he wanted to ensure the armed forces became "compact, modern and well-paid."

TITLE: U.S. Releases Intelligence on Kursk Disaster
AUTHOR: By Robert Burns
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Responding to Russian requests, senior U.S. government officials provided detailed information about what the United States knows of the Aug. 12 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. 
A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, provided some information Wednesday to his Russian counterpart, Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov, during a meeting in New York. 
Also, the U.S. Navy's top officer, Adm. Vernon Clark, sent a note to his Russian counterpart providing some detailed information based on acoustical data collected by U.S. ships on the day of the incident. 
Clark's note, dated Aug. 31, reiterated the American position that no U.S. ship or submarine was involved in the sinking, which took the lives of all 118 men aboard, according to a defense official, who discussed the matter on condition he not be identified. The Russians have said they suspect the accident resulted from a collision with a foreign submarine, although no definitive cause has been identified. 
The defense official said Clark's note contained no classified information and responded to a request from the Russian Navy for any information the U.S. Navy has on the circumstances of the accident. 
Two American submarines were in the Barents Sea when the Kursk sank, U.S. officials have said, but insist there was no collision. The U.S. subs were monitoring a major Russian naval exercise in which the Kursk was participating. 
A U.S. surface ship equipped with underwater listening devices also was in the area, though much farther away. 
Clark's note said the sound of an underwater explosion in the vicinity of the Kursk was recorded at 11:28 a.m. local time on Aug. 12, followed about two minutes later by an explosion believed to be 45 to 50 times greater. The second explosion is believed to have been equal to between one and five tons of TNT. 
U.S. officials have said they believe the most likely explanation for the Kursk's sinking is the misfiring of one of its torpedoes. Much of the submarine was immediately flooded, and the sub fell to the floor of the sear. 
For several days after the Kursk's loss became known, the Russians insisted that the accident happened on Aug. 13. Later they revised their version to confirm U.S. news reports that it happened the previous day.

A Norwegian vice admiral involved in the effort to rescue 118 crewmen abroad the sunken Russian submarine Kursk has alleged that Russian authorities imperiled his team of deep-sea divers by giving them false and incomplete information. 
Einar Skorgen, who headed the Nor wegian rescue team, describes the problems in the latest issue of the weekly magazine Itogi. 
"Total information chaos reigned," Skorgen said. "They unleashed so much spurious and distorted information on us that it threatened the safety of our divers." 
In the article, Skorgen contested Russia's claim that strong underwater currents and damage to an escape hatch on the nuclear-powered submarine's rear deck hindered rescue efforts. "An absolute lie," he said. "I made the Russians admit this." 
A Norwegian deep-sea diver also disputed the description Russian officials gave of underwater conditions that confronted rescue teams. "As regards to underwater currents and poor visibility, these were not much different than what we were used to in the North Sea," the diver said. 
At one point, Skorgen said, he was so frustrated that he threatened to call off the operation. But he said he was able to work out the communications problems with Vyacheslav Popov, the commander of Russia's Northern Fleet. When they did dive, the Norwegians opened the submarine's hatch in just six hours after more than a week of failed efforts by the Russian navy.

TITLE: U.S. Releases Intelligence on Kursk Disaster
AUTHOR: By Robert Burns
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Responding to Russian requests, senior U.S. government officials provided detailed information about what the United States knows of the Aug. 12 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. 
A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, provided some information Wednesday to his Russian counterpart, Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov, during a meeting in New York. 
Also, the U.S. Navy's top officer, Adm. Vernon Clark, sent a note to his Russian counterpart providing some detailed information based on acoustical data collected by U.S. ships on the day of the incident. 
Clark's note, dated Aug. 31, reiterated the American position that no U.S. ship or submarine was involved in the sinking, which took the lives of all 118 men aboard, according to a defense official, who discussed the matter on condition he not be identified. The Russians have said they suspect the accident resulted from a collision with a foreign submarine, although no definitive cause has been identified. 
The defense official said Clark's note contained no classified information and responded to a request from the Russian Navy for any information the U.S. Navy has on the circumstances of the accident. 
Two American submarines were in the Barents Sea when the Kursk sank, U.S. officials have said, but insist there was no collision. The U.S. subs were monitoring a major Russian naval exercise in which the Kursk was participating. 
A U.S. surface ship equipped with underwater listening devices also was in the area, though much farther away. 
Clark's note said the sound of an underwater explosion in the vicinity of the Kursk was recorded at 11:28 a.m. local time on Aug. 12, followed about two minutes later by an explosion believed to be 45 to 50 times greater. The second explosion is believed to have been equal to between one and five tons of TNT. 
U.S. officials have said they believe the most likely explanation for the Kursk's sinking is the misfiring of one of its torpedoes. Much of the submarine was immediately flooded, and the sub fell to the floor of the sear. 
For several days after the Kursk's loss became known, the Russians insisted that the accident happened on Aug. 13. Later they revised their version to confirm U.S. news reports that it happened the previous day.

A Norwegian vice admiral involved in the effort to rescue 118 crewmen abroad the sunken Russian submarine Kursk has alleged that Russian authorities imperiled his team of deep-sea divers by giving them false and incomplete information. 
Einar Skorgen, who headed the Nor wegian rescue team, describes the problems in the latest issue of the weekly magazine Itogi. 
"Total information chaos reigned," Skorgen said. "They unleashed so much spurious and distorted information on us that it threatened the safety of our divers." 
In the article, Skorgen contested Russia's claim that strong underwater currents and damage to an escape hatch on the nuclear-powered submarine's rear deck hindered rescue efforts. "An absolute lie," he said. "I made the Russians admit this." 
A Norwegian deep-sea diver also disputed the description Russian officials gave of underwater conditions that confronted rescue teams. "As regards to underwater currents and poor visibility, these were not much different than what we were used to in the North Sea," the diver said. 
At one point, Skorgen said, he was so frustrated that he threatened to call off the operation. But he said he was able to work out the communications problems with Vyacheslav Popov, the commander of Russia's Northern Fleet. When they did dive, the Norwegians opened the submarine's hatch in just six hours after more than a week of failed efforts by the Russian navy.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: U.K. Rates Hold
n LONDON (Reuters) - The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee left British interest rates on hold at 6 percent on Thursday for the seventh month in a row.
The decision, which had been widely expected by financial markets, means that rates have now been left steady for the longest period since the incoming Labor government handed responsibility for the rates to the bank in May 1997.
Although the "no change" was expected, few economists had ruled out the chance of a rise, given that the vote at last month's meeting to leave rates steady was very close at 5 to 4.
Volvo May Up Stake
n STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Volvo would consider increasing its stake in Mitsubishi Motor Corp.'s new truck and bus subsidiary if the price were right, a spokesman said Thursday.
The Swedish heavy-vehicles maker agreed in July to acquire 19.9 percent of the new company, Mitsubishi Faso, being formed from the Japanese automaker's commercial vehicles operations.
Responding to media reports that Volvo was considering increasing its stake, spokesman Mats Edenborg said no firm offer has been made, but they were involved in a continuous dialogue.
The two companies first joined forces in October, with Volvo buying a 5 percent stake in Mitsubishi and Mitsubishi saying it would buy up to 5 percent of Volvo by the end of 2002.
IBM Wireless Laptops
n NEW YORK (AP) - IBM said Thursday it will launch the first laptops with built-in antennas for wireless connections later this year. The wireless capability replaces the Ethernet cables that connect computers to each other and the Internet in office and school computer networks.
Add-in cards using the same wireless technology have been available for some time, but IBM spokesman Rick McGee said it was the first time the technology was being built into a computer with an Intel microprocessor.
New Debt Indices
n HONG KONG (Reuters) - Shrinking sovereign debt supply in many of the world's largest credit markets has spurred Merrill Lynch to develop three new fixed-income indices to help track performance of top-quality bonds.
The U.S. bank's latest set of global indices, launched on Thursday, widens the scope of investment-grade debt instruments covered, and incorporates a number of local currency bond markets, including four Asian debt markets.
"The inclusion of foreign and local-currency-denominated Asian bonds in the Merrill Lynch global indices demonstrates the growing importance of Asia as a pool of capital, as well as issuance," said a Merrill Lynch spokesman.

TITLE: MP3.com Hit With Copyright Ruling
AUTHOR: By Larry Neumeister
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - A judge ruled Wed nesday that MP3.com willfully violated copyrights of music companies and awarded Universal Music Group $25,000 per CD, a penalty that could reach as much as $250 million. 
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said it was necessary to send a message to the Internet community to deter copyright infringement. Rakoff said some Internet companies "may have a misconception that, because their technology is somewhat novel, they are somehow immune from the ordinary applications of laws of the United States, including copyright law." 
MP3.com's lawyer, Michael Rhodes, told the judge a day earlier that a penalty of any more than $500 per CD was a virtual "death sentence" for the company. 
Outside court, Rhodes did not reject his earlier prognosis. "Just do the math," he said. MP3.com head Michael Robertson promised to appeal. Rakoff said he could have given an award of as much as $150,000 per CD but chose a number considerably lower because Universal had not specified how it lost money because of MP3.com's infringements, even though it could have done so. He also said MP3.com had acted more responsibly than other Internet startups. But experts were surprised at the severity of the ruling. 
"The ruling was much harsher than I anticipated, as it puts the company literally on the brink," said Nitsan Hargil, an analyst at Kaufman Brothers in New York. "If we assume the higher sum of money here, it would put MP3.com out of business," Hargil said. 
"In the more likely event that they could work out a payment scheme, they could survive another day, but it does still leave them with some very serious problems." Leonard Rubin, a Chicago attorney who specializes in copyright, trademark and entertainment law, said the decision was not a surprise given the judge's previous rulings. "But I would not have expected the severity of the award. It's very heavy," he said. 
Another phase of the trial in November will determine the number of CDs involved and the total damages. Katz has said the case could end up costing MP3.com as much as $3.6 billion - or roughly one-tenth of the industry's annual worldwide sales - once it is forced to pay all the other companies whose copyrights it had violated when it created an online catalog of 80,000 CDs.

TITLE: Sibneft Pins Hopes On Horizontal Wells
AUTHOR: By Peter Henderson
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NOYABRSK, Siberia - Flying out to a new Siberian oil field that uses a mix of Russian and Western technology, drilling manager Dave Struthers hollers his plans over the racket of the clunky Mi-8 helicopter.
With the help of oil services company Schlumberger Ltd, Struthers' employer, Russia's Sibneft oil is drilling a horizontal well, which dives down 2,823 meters, and soon will snake laterally for a final half kilometer or so through a series of layers of oil-bearing sand.
If it works, the well will outperform ones sitting next to it that are producing 100 tons of oil per day. If not, data gathered by Schlumberger at this field, Yarainskoye, will tell roughnecks how to do it better next time.
"We are going to be a lot smarter in a month than we are today," Struthers yells.
A slow circle of the drilling area shows a rusty tower, the rig, on a sand pile dumped in the middle of an endless swamp gleaming with shallow lakes - virgin territory for Sibneft.
Natural gas, which comes up with the oil, is flared off from a smokestack to the side, though the gas will soon power train engines that are the base's generators and now use diesel fuel.
For the new well, Sibneft has drilled straight down with Russian equipment which is cheap if relatively unsophisticated.
Schlumberger will do the last leg, taking the cost of the well, which would be some $3 million if drilled with all Western equipment, to $1.3 million to 1.5 million, Struthers says. Schlumberger is also using its technology to increase flows at older wells.
"The reality is that we are competing against a very cost-effective system," Struthers shouts as the helicopter touches down.
Blasted by sub-zero winds in the winter and gnawed by mosquitoes in the summer, this outpost is Sibneft's proof that making a buck, rather than simply producing oil, is the name of its game, and that is a sea of change for Russia.
Sibneft's attempt to show off its Western attitude is also a test case for companies that have clashed hard with shareholders and are trying to convince investors times have changed.
Leaner and meaner, Sibneft focuses on "value for money," says chief operations officer Alexander Korsik.
"Today, the weather has changed," he says back in Noyabrsk, a town barely 25 years old, built by and for the oil firm. "We have to change the way people think."
Take the drillers, seeking ways into one of the world's top 20 pools of oil reserves. Teams get paid according to how much they produce.
Results are clear. Newly drilled wells last year produced double what new wells produced in 1998, as Sibneft learned to manage reserves and drillers hit the right spots.
Production costs last year were 89 cents for a barrel of oil, which now sells for $30 on foreign markets. Costs will rise this year and next but will still be low.
Output is also rising, as Sibneft buys and finds reserves.
The fields Sibneft owns produced about 41 million tons of oil in their heyday, 1989, and only 16.3 million tons last year, but healthy gains to some 17 and 17.5 million tons are seen this year and next.
Sibneft shares are also priced attractively. United Financial Group (UFG) puts Sibneft's enterprise value to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, at a cheap 1.5, based on 2000 forecasts and a 29-cent stock price.
The average for the Russian oil industry is 1.8, while emerging-market comparatives average 5.7 and international integrated oil firms average 10.4.
However, UFG rates Sibneft a hold. "Low multiples reflect investors' discomfort with the companies' principal shareholders," it said.
Sibneft's ownership structure is unclear. Russian business magnate Roman Abramovich said last year that he controlled Sibneft, but he was elected to parliament in December and he should have formally surrendered all of his business interests upon taking up his seat.
Sibneft offers a list of shareholders consisting of chiefly Western investment banks.
Backers expect that while times are good and as the company tries to attract capital, it is unlikely to act to anger outside investors, and they point to independent directors on its board and a corporate-governance charter.
But Russian post-Soviet history is littered with examples of diluted share issues and accusations of transfer pricing, when a company sells oil at below market rates to another company, whose owners end up with the profits.

TITLE: Charges Unlikely in Defective-Tire Case
AUTHOR: By Michael J. Sniffen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The U.S. Justice Department is studying whether any criminal or civil laws apply to the case of defective Bridgestone/Firestone tires, Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday.
At her weekly news conference, Reno said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont had requested the department review the tire problem that has been blamed for dozens of fatal accidents.
"We are looking to what, if any, Justice Department action is warranted," Reno said. Justice lawyers are discussing the case with highway safety officials to see if any federal criminal or civil statutes apply.
But a senior Justice official said later that criminal action was considered unlikely and that a civil case would be pursued only if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration referred a case to the department. It has not done so.
This official, who requested ano nymity, said an early review indicated only two possible civil statutes under which the traffic safety administration could refer a case. One would allow the government to go to court to enforce a mandatory order to recall tires if the companies resisted such an order, but that has not happened, this official said.
Another civil statute provides penalties for companies failing to report some data to the government, but it was not clear that there had been any reporting failure covered by existing law, this official said. Even if there were, the traffic safety administration normally penalizes these by levying only administrative fines, the official added.
In an Aug. 28 letter, Leahy asked Reno to keep him informed of any investigative efforts by the department in the case. Leahy said he had become concerned "that the American public has been subjected to unnecessary risks and that criminal laws may be implicated."
"It is important to know whether Bridgestone/Firestone knew of the dangers and the threat to the civil rights of Americans before Aug. 9, 2000," Leahy added.
On Wednesday, Ford blamed Firestone. Firestone hinted at a problem with Ford vehicles. The new National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chief blamed them both. And lawmakers rebuked all three for the fatal accidents that may be linked to defective Bridgestone/Firestone tires on Ford vehicles.
But more than 13 straight hours of congressional hearings didn't determine what is happening with Bridgestone/Firestone tires and Ford trucks, primarily the Explorer sport utility vehicle, that has caused them to be linked to 88 deaths and 250 injuries.
"Countless Americans are on the road today picking up their kids, driving to work, and the last thing that should worry them is the quality and the soundness of their tires," said Rep. John Dingell of Michigan. "It is unconscionable that so many have been placed in this kind of situation."
But lawmakers aren't done. Arizona Sen. John McCain plans to hold hearings before his Senate Commerce Committee next week. "This is just the beginning of this investigative process," said Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauz, who led the House hearing Wednesday.
However, Tauzin said Thursday that "I think we've got it turned around."
"I think we've got [the NHTSA] realizing it's got to do a better job not only collecting but also reading information," he said on CBS television. "We've got the companies, I think, finally agreeing ... to set up an early warning system to report foreign recalls as they occur."

TITLE: Schroeder Downplays Weak Euro Worries
AUTHOR: By Hans Greimel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: FRANKFURT, Germany - German politicians attacked Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for loose-lipped comments as the euro plunged to new lows Thursday, on the eve of a European finance ministers summit aimed at halting the common currency's free fall.
Schroeder said earlier this week that he was not concerned about the euro's weakness against the dollar because it made German exports cheaper overseas. That contradicted leading European economic officials, who have warned that a weak euro is fueling inflation across the continent because it makes imports relatively more expensive.
"When a leading member of the euro zone doesn't know the sign of the times, the trust of international investors evaporates," said Rainer Bruederle, spokesman for the opposition Free Democratic Party. Christian Democrats also joined the chorus of outrage, blasting Schroeder for undermining trust in the euro.
The euro - which has plummeted 4 cents against the dollar since last week, losing 41/2 percent of its value - took another nose-dive after Schroeder's comments Monday. On Thursday, it hit a new low of 86.35 cents, before recovering by the end of the day to 87.17 cents. The volatility spurred officials across the continent to try to whitewash Schroeder's gaffe hastily.
Finance ministers and central bank governors from the 11 countries using the euro are meeting Friday, and intend to issue a statement of support for the currency ahead of Saturday's meeting of all European Union economic officials in Versailles, France.
But the statement is expected simply to repeat the mantra droned by euro-zone officials in the past, stressing the currency's potential to gain against the dollar when Europe's recovering economy kicks in.
German Finance Minister Hans Eichel and French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius got a jump on things Thursday, discussing the anemic euro by telephone and agreeing that it should bounce back, according to German Finance Ministry officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Even Schroeder began to backpedal: Speaking at the U.N. Millennium Summit in New York on Wednesday night, he said the ever-shrinking value of the euro doesn't reflect the strength of Europe's snowballing economy.
Germany, Europe's largest economy, is especially on track, posting its biggest growth rate in 10 years and chalking up improved industrial output and falling unemployment figures just this week. But that's not enough to woo investors when the U.S. economy is pumping along even stronger.
"It doesn't matter whether the euro-zone economy is growing at 3 percent or 4 percent," said Neil Parker, a currency analyst with the Royal Bank of Scotland. "When the United States is growing at 5 percent, it's always going to be more attractive to investors."

TITLE: Fight Over Aluminum Plant Enters New Stage
AUTHOR: By Maria Rozhkova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - Mikhail Zhivilo, head of the Metallurgical Investment Co., or MIKOM, has sold a 66-percent stake in the Novokuznetsk aluminum smelter to Grigory Luchansky, an investment entrepreneur and head of the Center for Investment Projects and Programs. 
It seems Luchansky will take on the role of mediator and could put an end to a year-long struggle between MIKOM and the owners of the Russian Aluminum holding, which controls about 75 percent of the nation's aluminum output. 
MIKOM has been involved in difficult negotiations regarding the sale of its 66.3-percent stake in the Novokuznetsk smelter to Russian Aluminum, set up earlier this year by Siberian Aluminum and shareholders of the oil major Sibneft.
"We began negotiating over the possibility for acquiring shares in the Novo kuz netsk aluminum plant in November. MIKOM made us an offer, we considered it and opted to buy the shares. The deal was closed Aug. 8," Luchansky said.
Luchansky did not reveal the value of the deal.
Sixty-six percent of the shares in the No vokuznetsk smelter had belonged to four companies affiliated with MIKOM, and will now belong to four other unrelated companies.
Luchansky does not intend to get involved in the aluminum business. His business is to sell and purchase property. Luchansky's Center for Investment Projects and Programs buys and consolidates blocks of shares, whereupon the company is brought into, in his words, "a heavenly state," and then sold. 
"For us, the purchase of the shares of the Novokuznetsk aluminum smelter is an investment project. So far the decision has not been made as to who will be the next owner of the shares of the plant. I do not deny that Russian Aluminum may have higher chances than most potentially interested parties" Luchansky said. 
Last year, one of the founders of Russian Aluminum, the Siberian Aluminum group, resolved to expand its presence in the aluminum sector by taking control of the Novokuznetsk smelter.
Siberian Aluminum's offer to buy a controlling stake in the smelter was rejected, but the Novokuznets managers did not have the strength to withstand the onslaught of the aluminum alliance. In January, an external administration was introduced - and the owners of Russian Aluminum had seized control. 
For over half a year, MIKOM and Russian Aluminum have battled. There were scandals and fierce court battles: The smelter's managers didn't include the MIKOM structures in the register of the factory's creditors, while MIKOM had the smelter's products seized and external management recognized as unlawful in the courts.
Luchanksy, it appears, has taken on the task of sorting out the conflict. 
He said the main job is to get all the interested parties to reach a compromise. Immediately after the deal was completed, a series of meetings took place at which Viktor Belyayev, the executive director of Russian Aluminum, and Dmitry Chirakadze, MIKOM vice president, took part as well as Luchansky.
Representatives for the parties said the essence of a possible compromise was as follows: Russian Aluminum would pay MIKOM appropriate compensation, and, in return, MIKOM would halt all court appeals against the factory and the external management.

TITLE: EU Set To Support Russia's WTO Bid
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Richard Wright, the new head of the European Commission delegation to Russia, said Thursday that Russia belongs in the World Trade Organization.
The commission is the executive branch of the 15-member European Union.
Speaking at his first news conference in his new role, Wright, who is from Great Britain, emphasized that the EU wanted long-term relations with Russia. The EU supported Russia's membership in the international trade body on "appropriate terms and conditions," he said.
He did not specify what these should be, but said that Russia being in the WTO would facilitate the integration of Europe.
Wright also said that substantial room remains for increased investment and trade with the EU.
The EU is Russia's largest trading partner, accounting for 35 percent of trade, according to the State Customs Committee. EU member Germany alone accounts for just under 10 percent of Russia's foreign trade.
In the first half of this year, exports to the EU amounted to some $17.18 billion and imports from the union were about $8.4 billion, according to data from the Central Bank.
The two sides are tied up in some trade disputes, including an impending ruling on whether to impose fines on Russian imports of ammonium nitrate, used for fertilizers. Also, the EU cut the annual steel quota by 12 percent early this year in answer to a Russian decision to impose 15-percent export duties on scrap metal. 
Despite a freeze in funding in the first half of this year - a decision that stemmed from objections to the war in Chechnya - the EU's Tacis program, which funds projects that promote the transition to a market economy, will release another 57 million euros ($50.2 million) at the end of October. Through Tacis, the commission has poured some 2 billion euros ($1.76 billion) into Russia in the last decade.
Also scheduled for the end of next month is a summit meeting in Paris with the French President Jacques Chirac and President Vla di mir Putin, Wright announced.
While Russia's entrance into the EU is not on anyone's agenda, the union is pressing on with expansion across Eastern Europe and is currently handling bids by 12 countries and beginning talks with Turkey.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Winter Fuel Fears
n MOSCOW (SPT) - The government is falling behind in preparations to provide Russians with sufficient heating and energy resources for the fast-approaching fall/winter hibernation period, and is looking for alternative solutions, officials said at a cabinet meeting Thursday.
Officials said the country's heat and energy supply might be so overwhelmed by increasing demand that alternative sources may have to be adopted.
Public coal and oil companies - along with the Energy Ministry, gas giant Gazprom and the national electricity grid, UES - may be asked to supply fuel and energy to state-owned power plants to meet the increasing demand.
Reserves Fall $300M 
n MOSCOW (SPT) - The nation's gold and hard currency reserves fell by $300 million to $23.8 billion in the week ending Sept. 1, the Central Bank said Thursday. 
The bank gave no reason for the increase in reserves, which stood at $23.4 billion on Aug. 18.
PM: Pass Budget
n MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has urged the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, to pass a balanced 2001 draft budget by the end of this year, Interfax said on Thursday. 
The Duma Council, which sets the agenda for the chamber, decided to postpone the first reading of the draft budget until Sept. 26 from an earlier planned Sept. 22. Some deputies called for a longer delay to rework the blueprint, raising projected revenues to show a budget surplus in 2001. 
Oil Deal Is in Doubt
n MOSCOW (SPT) - Agreements between shareholders of oil majors Tyumen Oil Co., or TNK, and Sidanko, on bringing Chernogorneft back into the Sidanko fold in exchange for a blocking share in Sidanko may not materialize, the Samotlor news agency reported TNK deputy chief executive German Khan as saying on Tuesday.
Sidanko lost Chernogorneft last year in a controversial bankruptcy auction. Sidanko shareholder BP hotly contested the sale, but later accepted a deal under which TNK will hand back the oil producer in exchange for a 25-plus-one-share stake in Sidanko. 
Ghan said TNK had fulfilled all its obligations on time and is prepared to return Chernogorneft, Samotlor reported, but Sidanko shareholders seem to be missing the deadline. 
If no agreement is reached, Cher no gor neft will remain part of TNK or shareholders will have to conduct new talks.

TITLE: Banking Giants Teaming Up To Tackle Russian Markets
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After taking over British investment bank Robert Fleming Holdings' international business, U.S. banking giant Chase Manhattan is rolling into the lucrative but hectic Russian stock market.
The British bank's local subsidiary Fleming UCB, on its part, is getting ready for big deals and bets on synergy effects by adding operations with debt instruments to its core business.
"From our point of view, it's a good match," Mark Jarvis, managing director with Fleming UCB in Moscow, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. "We now have a full armory."
Murad Megalli, country officer with Chase Manhattan, was travelling this week and was not available for comment.
Fleming has traditionally focused on equity operations and asset management, while Chase Manhattan has built a strong presence in the debt and fixed-income markets, so the acquisition could have strong synergic effects.
Chase's new strategy for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa is now being put together in London.
For Fleming, acquisition by a big parent means moving into business of a new scale.
"The major change to our business will be that we will be after larger clients rather than small, retail clients," Jarvis said.
Fleming rolled into Russia in 1992, opening a representative office to launch two funds - Fleming Russian Securities Fund and Venture Capital Fund - two years later.
It now has about $500 million in Russian securities under management through various offshore vehicles.
Fleming bought into United City Bank to get a broker's license and strengthen its foothold in the market in spring 1998, a few months before the crash.
At the time of the deal, industry sources said sellers fetched a hefty $24 million for a 60-percent stake in United City Bank, while the remaining 40 percent was left in the hands of management and employees.
After the Chase acquisition is completed, the company will be branded Chase Manhattan, with the exception of asset management, which will retain Fleming's name.
"I have an impression that their risk management has already become more conservative," said Andrei Galperin, managing director with Prospect brokerage. "But even with Chase, they have a long way to go up, because money is not all you need to make it to the very top."
With a turnover of $367 million, Fleming was No. 7 in terms of trading volumes in the Russian Trading System in August this year. It took the sixth spot last year with sales of $217.6 million.
Chase took over Robert Fleming Holdings in a deal valued at Pound4.8 billion ($7 billion) in April this year.
Robert Fleming and Co., founded in 1932, originated from a banking business founded in 1873 and is one of the oldest British banks with Pound70.4 billion ($102 billion) under management.
With Chase's $226 billion in funds under management, the group will have some $350 billion under control.

TITLE: Chubais Stands Firm on UES Debt Repayment
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Unified Energy Systems (UES), the national energy monopoly, will continue with their policy of cutting off the energy supplies to its debtor clients, Anatoly Chubais, the head of UES, said during his trip to St. Petersburg on Wednesday.
During his day in the city, Chubais also took time to visit the site of a new power plant to be opened in St. Petersburg, and to brief reporters on an appeal he had addressed to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
Chubais said that UES is presently owed the "astronomical" sum of 240 billion rubles ($8.6 billion) - by its debtors. Such a figure would represent over 5 percent of Russia's 1999 GDP of 4,476 billion rubles ($160.5 billion), according to statistics from the AK&M market analysis and consulting agency.
Chubais defended the company's policy of cutting off debtors, saying that the magnitude of the debt problem left UES with no alternative. He also said that UES, which owns significant stakes in all but three of Russia's approximately 80 regional energy providers, would extend the cutoff policy to nonpayers for heat energy in order to guarantee sufficient service to paying customers during the winter cold-weather period. 
"I don't agree with term 'cutoff,'" Chubais said. "We're not cutting anyone off - we're switching on those who honestly pay for energy, and our policy won't change."
"UES has 530,000 employees. That means that, including their family members, about 3 million people depend on our company," he added. "Why should they, working hard, have to face delays in receiving their pay?"
While in town, Chubais also visited the construction site of a new Northwest Energy station, in which UES holds a 46.7-percent stake. 
Construction of the new station was begun in 1993, and according to Andrei Likhachyov, the head of Lenenergo, the energy provider for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, had the project been completed three years ago, as originally planned, it would have been the most technically advanced and efficient power station in the world. Work on the facility was halted three years ago, however, as the building was frozen because of a shortage of funds. Work was resumed after UES provided further funds last year and the first production unit of the station is planned to start operating Dec. 22.
"Finishing the station makes a lot of sense for St. Petersburg," Chubais said. "We are facing a shortage of energy production facilities and this will be the first energy station built in Russia in the last 15 years."
But, while Chubais emphasized the importance of the new Northwest station for St. Petersburg, Likhachyov said that the aim of the station is the export of the energy to Finland, where energy prices are higher. 
"This step is necessary for the health of the energy sector," he said. "Further, once the station has started operations there is an opportunity for the city to benefit from an inexpensive source for heating. The process of producing electricity from natural gas produces a significant amount of heat which could be used to bolster the centralized heating systems in the city.
"However, this will be the case only if the city administration is interested in the project and willing to build the necessary infrastructure for conveying the heat to the Primorsky region, where the station is situated, and adjacent regions."
Chubais and UES have been challenged by difficulties of late - both from opposition from minority shareholders to proposed restructuring plans at the energy giant, and from investigations by the Federal Audit Chamber, which is headed by former prime minister Sergei Stepashin. The chamber's investigation has centered around the percentage of UES stocks are presently held by foreign investors. Russian law limits to 25 percent the amount of UES stock which may be held by foreign investors.
Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Chubais expressed his support for the continuing presence of the foreign companies among UES' shareholders. He said that he had already appealed to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, suggesting that Kasyanov ask Russia's Constitutional Court to strike down the law. According to Chu bais, UES today has about 20 significant foreign shareholders. 
"Actually, the appeal reflects the findings of the Audit Chamber," Chubais said. "The chamber's findings said that the government should either execute the law - which is impossible - or strike it down."
According to information posted on the UES Web site, and confirmed Thursday by UES deputy press secretary Sergei Pinchuk in a telephone interview, 30.59 percent of the company's stock is presently owned by foreigners.
According to Hartmut Jacob, utilities analyst at Renaissance Capital, Chubais' assertion that enforcing the law is impossible is the result of the value of UES stock.
"It seems that the level of foreign ownership is about 30 percent, so the question becomes that of how the state can bring this number in line with the law," Jacob said. "One variant is that the state could buy this 5 percent back, but the cost of such an undertaking would probably be about $350 million, which is very expensive."
"It would be a lot cheaper just to throw out the law," he said.
Vladimir Avetisyan, head of Samar energo, said that the Audit Chamber's report posed little threat to UES.
"The Audit Chamber's investigation is unlikely to represent a serious problem," Avetisyan said in an interview with Vedomosti business daily. "Everyone understands that it's impossible to reverse the effects of the company's privatization."
"The chamber turned up some irregularities which arose from the privatization process, but none of these were as a result of the actions of UES management," Avetisyan said.
Pinchuk agreed with Avetisyan.
"During the privatization process at UES, all of the shares were put on the market - for sale to whoever wanted to buy them," he said. "Foreigners bought the stock not only from UES, but also on the secondary market."
The first major wave of privatization in Russia, which took place in 1992 - when Chubais himself served as privatization minister - has been broadly criticized. There are charges of insider deals leading to properties being purchased for a fraction of their real value.

TITLE: Likely Output Hike Drops Oil Prices
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Oil markets retreated from 10-year highs in a reprieve for energy-importing nations on Thursday after Saudi Arabia told U.S. President Bill Clinton it expected OPEC to increase crude production by 3 percent.
Benchmark Brent crude slid 1.4 percent on word that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' dominant power expected the cartel to agree to add 700,000 barrels per day at a policy meeting this weekend.
The message was given to U.S. President Bill Clinton by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah during talks in New York during a break in the UN Millennium Summit, a source close to the talks said.
The surge in oil prices has been a boon to cash-strapped Russia, with every dollar-rise worth an additional billion rubles ($36 million) to budget revenues, according to estimates from NIKoil Capital Markets. Russia's budget forecasts an average price for its benchmark Urals crude at $18 to $19 per barrel. Urals closed at $33.39 on Thursday, slightly off Wednesday's 52-week high of $33.64. Siberian light was up slightly at $34.39.
"The long-predicted rally [for the Russian economy] appears to be upon us," said NIKoil analyst Eric Kraus, in a market note Thursday. "Urals is trading at a premium to Brent and Brent itself is at historic levels.
"In the short term, Russia is getting rich," Kraus said.
While the skyrocketing prices are a boon to net oil exporters like Russia, a price fall cannot come soon enough for oil-importing nations facing wholesale fuel bills up 40 percent this year. In Asia, where some governments are struggling to dismantle decades-old subsidies on oil, the higher prices threaten civil unrest in some countries.
In France, protesters tightened their stranglehold on oil supplies in a showdown with the government over fuel tax. Farmers planned a protest at the Channel Tunnel at Calais and threatened to block the entrance while taxi drivers converged on major cities for a massive "go-slow" protest.
This year's 15-percent fall in the euro against the dollar has aggravated a 43-percent rise in greenback-denominated crude prices to worsen wholesale energy costs for euro-zone economies.
In Washington, the Clinton administration said oil prices remained unacceptably high and urged OPEC exporters to consider raising output to bring down prices and meet demand.
"The markets around the world are very clearly insisting that there's not enough oil on the market to bring the stability that is needed," U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said.
Finance ministries around the world will be watching closely as the 11-strong Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in Vienna on Sunday to set output policy. The Saudi-dominated cartel is a key player in oil markets because it pumps the majority of internationally traded crude oil and wields the world's only spare production capacity.
The group is luxuriating in a revived flow of earnings that have rarely been stronger for members' economies. OPEC crudes have averaged some $26.50 this year - above a real $21.40 in 1990 and $21.20 in 1974, and well above $8.60 in 1973, according to London's Center for Global Energy Studies.
(Reuters, AP, SPT)

TITLE: Are North Korean Missiles Guided by Russia's Hands?
AUTHOR: By Jim Mann
TEXT: AT the moment, some of the world's leading experts on missile technology are intensively studying an explosive theory about North Korea's infamous missiles. 
It is a hypothesis with far-reaching ramifications for American diplomacy, but also one that sounds almost like a Hollywood movie script. 
It goes like this: The North Korean missiles - the ones that frightened Japan and prompted the United States to begin thinking seriously about missile-defense systems - aren't really North Korean at all. They're Russian, secretly built with Russian components and the active and ongoing help of some errant Russian scientists inside North Korea. 
Under this theory (and here's the Hollywood plot), a rogue team of Russian missile scientists - thrown out of work after the collapse of the Soviet Union - may have moved to North Korea. And there, for profit or glory or both, they have directed the North Korean program - with the North Koreans themselves doing little more than putting the pieces together. 
The missile experts who have been gathering evidence to support this theory phrase it in much drier terms, of course. 
"It must be concluded that various Russian companies - not necessarily the Russian government - and North Korean authorities are closely cooperating in the missile programs," wrote German missile-technology specialist Dr. Robert H. Schmucker in a recent paper. 
"From these [Russian] institutions, North Korea received everything necessary to manufacture or assemble missiles. ... The future of North Korea's work and success depends completely on the Russian involvement." 
Timothy McCarthy, senior analyst at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, says he has been quietly examining for months the possibility that some Russians are continuing to provide key components for the North Korean missiles. 
There is no evidence to suggest that the Russian government has been involved. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang last July and suggested afterward that North Korea might be willing to abandon missile development if other nations would launch North Korean satellites. 
Still, if even individual Russian scientists or factories were privately helping to produce the North Korean missiles, there would be important implications for U.S. foreign policy. 
"If the North Korean program isn't viable without Russian components, then you'd have to look at Russia, not North Korea, for the solution to the problem," McCarthy said. 
So far, U.S. intelligence agencies are said to be skeptical about this theory. 
However, the idea has gained adherents among missile experts in Europe, particularly in Germany. Since the Gulf War, when it was revealed that German companies were supplying Saddam Hussein's missile program in Iraq, the Germans have played a growing role in combating missile proliferation. 
And so a subterranean debate has broken out among missile experts about the degree of Russian involvement in producing North Korea's missiles. 
Virtually everyone agrees that, at a minimum, the North Korean program began in the 1980s with Russian help, and that the North Korean missiles are based upon Russian designs. 
"We've taken a close look at the design of the [Korean missile] and it's clearly a knock-off of the [Russian] SS-4," says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. 
It's also undisputed that in October 1992, Russian security officials detained more than 60 Russian missile specialists at Mos cow's Sheremetyevo airport as they were about to leave for North Korea. The scientists were from the Makayev State Missile Center in the Ural Mountains, which was in the midst of budgetary cutbacks. 
With these facts, the consensus ends. Some experts believe that Russian help for the North Korean missiles stopped in the early 1990s. "The paper trail ended eight years ago," Pike said. 
But others believe that Russian work has continued right up to today. They point to the Russian-style design of the North Korean missiles and to the fact that they were developed more rapidly, and with fewer flight tests, than those of other nations. 
"Countries like Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Chile and Egypt all tried to develop these missiles and failed," says Joachim Krause, deputy director of a German research institute. "Only North Korea, this totally run-down country that can't feed its own people, succeeded." 
There also have also been some remarkable customs seizures in Europe of missile parts that North Korea was exporting, these experts say. The parts appear to be Russian. "The components bear Cyrillic markings on them," McCarthy says. 
Those who see a Russian hand behind the North Korea program argue that while the Ma ka yev missile scientists failed to make it through the Moscow airport in 1992, some of them could have reached North Korea on their own. 
Schmucker, a propulsion engineer who advises the German government who earlier served on the UN commission for Iraq, says that there are "so many indications [of Russian involvement], and there is no other way. ... 
"The North Korean missile is a complete Russian system, with nothing developed in North Korea," he concludes. 
Jim Mann writes on foreign policy for the Los Angeles Times, where this comment originally appeared.

TITLE: Eavesdropping Law Is All Too Easy To Bypass
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: IMAGINE that you come home one fine day to find the following letter in the mail: "Dear citizen: Buy a video camera as soon as possible and install it in your bedroom. Turn it on each night and hand over everything you record to the Federal Security Service. Buy the video camera in Store X on Street Y. Signed, the Culture Minister." 
Sound preposterous? Well, all telephone companies and operators of mobile communications received an analogous letter in August - signed by Leonid Reiman, the communications minister. 
In short, all telephone companies and operators of mobile communications must, with their own money, install equipment that will allow their conversations with clients to be overheard by seven security agencies, including the FSB and Customs. 
Yet no one has presented a court decision blessing this move. And if someone listens to your conversation on behalf of your competitor - and not for the government - you'll never be able to prove he's done so. 
The government has thus essentially permitted the hounding of normal businessmen. As for more highly placed people in the business world - thieves, bribetakers, oligarchs - they needn't worry. Their cell communications can be protected with a $700 scrambler. As for use of the Internet, the World Wide Web is teeming with free cryptographic programs that will confound the FSB. Thus, this attempt to ferret out criminals by using legal eavesdropping will be no more successful than using the traffic police to catch Chechen terrorists through routine vehicle checks. 
In this most recent instance, it looks like the desire to eavesdrop might be a cover for material gain. For example, now the producers of inexpensive analogous Automated Telephone Systems for offices shouldn't even try to import their goods into Russia, because such ATSs don't allow eavesdropping in an office while the handset is in its cradle. Only more expensive digital ATSs can perform this function. 
The authorities' desire to be informed of all events actually opens up new ways for foreign producers of telephone technology to conquer our markets. After all, not all units need to be certified, even if they do allow the complete eavesdropping of your office. It might work out that only those units that, shall we say, fully comply with the Chekists' material needs will be certified. 
Of course, all of this will be totally legal. But some firms will take two days to receive certification; others, two years. But don't despair: So far as I can tell, the Chekists aren't interested in what you do in your bedroom. It looks like they just want you to buy your camera with a certified manufacturer.
Yulia Latynina is the creator and host of "The Ruble Zone" on NTV television.

TITLE: Laptop Spices Up Russian Life
AUTHOR: By Russell Working
TEXT: IF I wanted to make a man's head bloat electronically like a squash, turn his face green, remove his tie and color his shirt orange, I could do so. In fact, I spent a happy hour Sunday night doing just that as I explored the properties of the Adobe photo program on my computer.
I now have the software to watch movies, make Web telephone calls, download Robert Cray's "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" from the Internet, and use a spreadsheet program to discover that an American newspaper underpaid me by $750 over the past year. As I write, I am listening to a CD by the Mongolian "larynx singers." Altain Ogil perform the patriotic ballad "Chingis Khaan," better known to us as Genghis Khan.
"Udurtl tsagt ezen Chingis turukhduu sagain chinee nujiig baruun gartaa," they growl through my laptop's headset.
I don't know what all that means, but, stirred by the drumbeat and the thrumming of a horse-head fiddle, I am ready to saddle my pony and leave a trail of slaughter from Korea to Poland.
The real point, however, is that I recently bought a new laptop on a trip abroad. There is nothing more addictive than to give a new computer to an expatriate far from home, in a city where it is impossible to buy periodicals in English or find music that wasn't produced by a guy waving a tape recorder in front of his friend's CD player.
It was Russia that first taught me computer literacy. For years when I lived in Oregon, I resisted my parents' suggestions that I get e-mail for my aging PC. My computer was reserved for writing and printing out 600-page novels, which I would later burn in the grip of a dangerous rage.
I didn't dare open my computer to "the Information Superhighway," as we used to call the realm that Einsteinian theoreticians have since demonstrated is actually "cyberspace." I feared I would have to master technical matters such as blast-forwarding jokes to my entire e-mail address list, mastering the use of the abbreviation "LOL," and composing winking Ronald Reagan faces out of punctuation marks.
But when I came to Russia in 1997, I couldn't see myself lugging my PC across the Pacific, and I left it in my brother's garage in Seattle. I bought a laptop and a modem to write and to stay in touch with family back home. I mooched off the publisher's Internet account after our Web master gave me the password. 
Our publisher evidently didn't even know he had an account, but our Web master had thoughtfully set it up just in case and sent the accountants the bill every month.
I soon grew dependent on a computer. There is no way I could have freelanced for perhaps 25 newspapers and magazines around the world over the past 2-plus years were it not for the Internet. This is best demonstrated not in the stories that I sell to major dailies, but in the smaller pieces that I have localized through the help of the Internet.
When a freighter carrying U.S. humanitarian-aid wheat anchored in Vladivostok last year, I sold the same article to a newspaper in an Iowa town where the grain shipping line was headquartered; two dailies in Washington state, where the ship was loaded; an East Coast paper published near the ship's home port; and an English-language broadsheet in Japan. I used Yahoo! and Hotbot to search the Web for local angles, find regional papers, and ferret out editors' names and e-mail addresses. I can't tell you why the Internet has proven such a boon to the U.S. economy, but it certainly has made possible a remarkable fiscal growth for the expatriate journalistic community in the Russian Far East (me, that is).
Thus, it was alarming this year to notice dire problems with my old laptop. After an hour or two of use, it grew so hot it slowed to a crawl. The computer crashed randomly when I used the Internet. And so I had to buy a new laptop.
The guy who set up my computer for a local Internet company was astounded at the new Sony Vaio I bought back to Russia. "I wish I had $2,000 so I could buy one of these," he said. I felt somehow guilty, although I did get a discount.
But not too guilty. I thought, I gave up my country when I moved to Vladivostok. I gave up language in everyday life. The least I can have is a link to my own world. And maybe the occasional ballad about Genghis Khan.
Russell Working is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok.

TITLE: What Other Papers Are Saying
AUTHOR: by Ali Nassor
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin pleaded for Japanese money this week, while at the same time not proposing to offer one square meter of the disputed Kuril Islands in return. Moving on from that deadlock, Putin went to New York to tell the world's political heavyweights that Russia was still a great and friendly power - leaving behind tycoon and arch rival Boris Berezovsky to keep the country's main television station out of state hands.
Island Politics
Putin told the cream of Japanese businessmen in Tokyo this week that Russia was one of the best places to invest, and that he would take all necessary measures to protect foreign investors, reports Izvestia.
But the idea that investing in Russia was safe was just too much of a stretch for the Japanese to believe. It's a concept that has been in existence ever since the so-called "Russian-Japanese Investment Campaign" blueprint, formed many years before Putin had even dreamed of becoming president, says the paper. Even when Putin asked the Japanese to forget what he called the old Russian stereotype, and muster fresh initiatives to promote business between the two nations, he got a cold shoulder in response.
Izvestia says that Putin was wrong in thinking it would be easy to convince the Japanese to abandon their multibillion-dollar trade deals with China and turn to the much less lucrative Russia. And he seems to have forgotten the importance of the Kuril Islands - seized by Stalin in 1945 - in negotiating economic relations with Japan. As a result, Tokyo regarded the cooperation agreement it eventually signed with Putin as a mere diplomatic and political formality.
But, says Kommersant, such a document was the best Putin could have hoped for. Both sides knew that it was too premature to reach any concrete settlement on the Kurils, given the 1998 agreement between Boris Yeltsin and former Japanese premier Rutaro Hashimoto, when the former point blank rejected the proposal to return the islands. Yeltsin refused to give in on the matter despite Hashimoto's promises not to evict Russians from the islands, and to give them special privileged status, plus financial subsidies and visa-free travel to Japan. Had Putin surrendered the islands now, Russians would have seen him as a traitor, the paper says. Any Japanese aspirations regarding the return of the Kurils are a pipe dream, opines the paper.
Lesser Evil
However, Kommersant adds that Russia may not be much of a loser, either, bearing in mind that Japan would prefer ties with a strong Russia, which has an abundance of desirable raw materials, than being forced into cooperating with the traditional enemies of China and the Koreas. Japan does not want to see relations with Russia spoiled when the two countries need each other: Japan for Russia's cheap energy and raw materials, Russia for Japan's money to develop Siberia and the Far East.
A strong China and the future reunification of North and South Korea - with whom it has had a number of territorial disputes thanks to past wars - will prompt Japan to forge an alliance with Russia, the paper says.
Underwater Bridge
Rossiiskaya Gazeta, however, commends Putin for a job well done. The paper says Putin was able to paint an attractive picture of grandiose and ambitious joint projects that would benefit both sides. And his idea of building a tunnel to link the Russian mainland with the islands of Hokaido and Sakhalin deserves serious Japa nese attention.
Izvestia says that Putin had no escape anyway, since handing over the Kurils would have exploded his strong-Russia theories.
But if Japan finds Putin's ideas economically sound, then it has for the moment to forget about the islands, the paper says. It also points at two other models that both sides might follow. The first and rather underhanded example comprises the Chinese waves of illegal migrants and traders onto Russian territory - a tactic designed to solve problems by ending up with more Chinese than Russians in border regions, a de facto seizure. The second idea is based on the British handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, a gradual and more official process.
United We Stand
Putin then made haste to get to the United Nations summit in New York to meet the world's leaders and their retinues for the largest gathering of its kind in history, meant to formulate an international charter for the next century.
Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti says that Putin is managing to raise his country's profile and enhance its status on the world stage, reminding everyone of Russia's significant role in forging world peace through the auspices of the United Nations (to which, according to Kommersant, this country's financial contribution has fallen to a mere 1 percent, compared to more than 14 percent before the fall of the Soviet Union a decade ago).
The strong-Russia policy went international, says Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti, when Putin came up with a proposal to host an international conference next year on preventing the militarization of space. 
He was evasive on the subject of the Chechen War, a controversial issue world leaders had been expecting to hear about, but clever to court support by saying that the "threats and challenges facing Russia are common enemies to all free nations."
Hands Off My TV
But while the president devoted the whole week to diplomacy, media mogul Berezovsky declared he wanted to reduce Putin's hegemony in the Russian media, says Peterburgsky Chas Pik.
A fine announcement, says the paper, if the media in Russia really served the interests of its people rather than those of the state, and if Berezovsky actually had good intentions by placing his stake in ORT, the most widely viewed channel in the land, in the hands of various journalists and what he called the creative intelligentsia.
Those intentions are doubtful, says the paper, arguing that a change of ownership of the 49-percent stake does not mean a change in the nature of the propaganda it spews out, and that the public may not gain anything from the move.

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Garkundel, the club that Auktsyon showman Oleg Garkusha had been speaking about for years, turned out to be more than words. It will open on Tuesday - but, strangely enough, ot the premises of SpartaK, a club which itself shares its rooms with a cinema.
According to the SpartaK spo kes man, Gar kundel (called after Gar kusha's nickname from his school years) will be located on the second floor, formerly occupied by SpartaK's small stage. There will be "small changes" both in design and repertoire. The Tuesday opening will be a closed affair with some of Garkusha's famous friends present. It is said that both Boris Grebenshchikov and Yury Shevchuk "promised to come."
Meanwhile, over this weekend SpartaK will play host to the Highland Games concert, Moscow "alternative" rapper Delfin and Leningrad, which plays both as Leningrad and 3D a bit too often these days. See Gigs for dates.
In September and October, the club scene promises to become bigger than ever, with at least four new clubs opening. But one club failed to return from its summer vacation - the cosy and cheap art cafe Shaltai-Boltai, which combined rock and world music with sci-fi seminars, found out they had no place anymore at the European University where they were based. The management is looking for a new location.
Although all the recent open-air shows have been ruined by wind and rain, the local Radio Re-cord is planning to celebrate its anniversary with an open-air event featuring both live acts and DJs at the TsPKiO Park on Saturday.
Napua Davoy, the U.S. jazz singer, pianist and composer, will perform in the city again in the course of her Russian-Ukrainian tour. The vocalist who has been to Russia a few times and collaborates with local pianist Andrei Kondakov, the head of the JFC Jazz Club, will perform at the JFC on Sunday and at Sadko Restaurant on Monday. Davoy was raised in Southeast Texas by a Hawaiian mother and Anglo/Cherokee father, and this diverse heritage is felt in her both original songs and interpretations of jazz and pop classics. Hear her - as a critic put it - "succulent Nina Simone-esque tones" and visit her official Web site at http://bravecoolworld.com. She will perform opposite Kondakov and Swedish trumpetist Anders Bergcrants.
Jazz Philharmonic Hall, the only jazz venue which was on vacation last summer, will open its new season on Friday. The place's two main house bands - the Leningrad Dixieland Band and David Goloshchokin Band - will be playing on both floors.
- by Sergey Chernov

TITLE: orchestra dupes hong kong
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan and Andrei Zolotov Jr.
TEXT: Hong Kong is a city of fakes - fake Swiss watches, fake French couture and now perhaps a fake Russian orchestra.
While the Symphonic Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic Society was on tour in Europe last month, a group of freelancers representing the same orchestra performed a series of concerts in the Chinese enclave, earning thousands of dollars and winning good reviews. 
The musicians, who included six members of the proper orchestra, played in Hong Kong from Aug. 7 to Aug. 13. But it was not until the South China Daily Post broke the story of the "fake orchestra" on Sept. 1 that Hong Kong culture authorities learned that they and almost 10,000 people who paid up to $31 for a ticket may have been duped. 
Delora Sim, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong's Leisure and Cultural Services Department, said in a telephone interview that they are now "seeking clarifications." 
She said her department has yet to decide whether to sue Chinese-born conductor Mak Ka-lok and the Hong Kong-based Wave Motion agency, which organized the concerts for her department. It has requested a list of the orchestra's musicians from Wave Motion, but has not yet received it. 
The Hong Kong culture authority has also sought clarifications from conductor Mak, who conducts the Philharmonic Orchestra in the central Russian city of Voronezh. 
Reached by telephone Wednesday, Mak, who is an Austrian citizen, declined to comment, citing his poor knowledge of Russian and English. He referred questions to his associate, Moscow composer Leonid Gofman. 
Gofman said the Moscow Philarmonic Society has three orchestras, including the Symphonic Orchestra, and while this renowned orchestra was touring Europe in August, some of its musicians went to Hong Kong along with freelancers. The tour had chief conductor Yury Simonov's personal consent, according to Gofman. 
The administration and musicians of the Moscow Philharmonic Society were on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

TITLE: lavrov celebrates 70th birthday
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: Roles as disparate as doctor Astrov (in "Uncle Vanya"), monk Pimen (in "Boris Go dunov"), Lenin ("Reading Over Again") and Yurka-Baron (in the movie "Bandit St. Petersburg") come equally natural to Kirill Lavrov, who will be as busy as ever when he celebrate his 70th birthday on Sept. 15.
Theater and films aside, Lavrov rules over the Bolshoi Drama Theater company, which he joined 45 years ago. One of Lavrov's most important achievements as BDT's artistic director was that he has managed to preserve the spirit of Tovstonogov's theater - and the maestro admits this was his original goal.
But as productions are aging and people get older, now only two of Tovstonogov's productions are running: 1978 "Pickwick's Club" and 1982 "Uncle Vanya."
The youngest member of the "Uncle Vanya" cast is nearly 60 years old. Ma ria Prizvan-Sokolova, at 92, is going to make a stage appearance on Sept. 12 in the role of Voinitskaya.
Recently, Lavrov was considering making a statement before the beginning of the show, to ask people not to concentrate on the cast's age, but appreciate the director's bright and meticulous work.
This apology attempt is, in fact, an appealing demonstration of this man's sense of responsibility and thoroughness, quite a departure from a typically fickle actor's personality.
Lavrov is not a person whose mood constantly changes, but is rather a calm philosopher, willing to listen, and not trying to be the center of any company he enters.
One widespread belief in the theater world has it that an actor does his best when he plays himself. Though the statement is open to debate, it would be hard to disagree that Lavrov's own life experience and wisdom are inevitably seen in his stage personages, who are trusted - yet he sometimes doesn't quite agree with what is being said by his hero.
"I doubt there is a person in whom everything is fine," Lavrov said, referring to doctor Astrov's cue. "An ideal is always nothing more than a dream."
Lavrov's theatrical career had its ups and downs, with sometimes years passing before a new role came along.
"Of course, this made him suffer. But even at times when he was only involved in one production in the theater - a situation that lasted for quite a long time - he never entered Georgy Tov sto nogov's office to remind the director about himself and ask for a role," recalls Irina Shimbarevich, Lavrov's (and formerly Tovstonogov's) personal assistant.
As an old Chinese saying goes, every person's life can be divided into four major phases: childhood, apprenticeship, maturity and contemplation.
Lavrov's friends keep telling him he is becoming a living exception to the rule, as he doesn't seem to notice that the fourth part exists at all.
When trying to discern several key periods in his life, Lavrov mentions childhood, the army, Kiev, when he began his career; then Tovstonogov and the current time of thwarted contemplation.
War, in particular, is a period of special importance. "I am well aware that I could have died - and there wouldn't have been Kiev or Tovstonogov or anything," Lavrov said.
"The eight years in the army - I volunteered for the army at the age of 17 - was the very time my character was taking shape," Lavrov recalls."It is always crucially important what and who surround you during your teens as it is the very time a youngster is exposed to others' mental influence."
"Being old is no good," he shakes his head, smiling, eyes still serious, "But I've learned to unveil my thoughts and opinions freely, without psychological dependence on anyone or anything. This is a positive thing about aging."
But since he took the position of BDT's artistic director 11 years ago, Lavrov - who was elected for the job after an anonymous vote within the BDT troupe - felt like a temporary leader for the company, saying that he was looking for a successor.
"Unfortunately, I couldn't convince Temur Chkheidze to replace me," Lavrov said. This fall he asked Russia's Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi, responsible for reshuffling of top management of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, for advice on possible new candidates.
Till then, Lavrov remains BDT's leader with hopes that a reliable successor will indeed come.
On Sept. 15 - Lavrov's actual birthday - high-ranking state officials are coming to Russia's cultural capital to greet one of the country's most popular actors and most respected public figures, with guests like Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev and half the Russian government expected, not to mention the two country's capitals' cultural beau monde.
This, of course, will leave a good portion of the regular audience behind, but they'll be rewarded by watching their favorite acting on stage: "Before the Sun Goes Down" (Sep t. 10 and 14) and "Uncle Vanya" (Sept. 12).
As for Lavrov, his happiest birthday scenario is far from any official ceremonies. The actor has his private ritual instead. "I wish we could go to the park in Tsarskoye Selo - as our family tradition has it - with a bottle of champagne and glasses in a basket," Lavrov smiled, eyes sparkling. "And drink our toasts on some narrow bridge hidden in the woods."

TITLE: young writer discovers winning crime formula
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: She has published 14 books over the last five years since she began writing in 1996, and now has 3,000,000 copies of her books in print. At 26, Muscovite detective writer Anna Malysheva is now one of Russia's youngest best-selling authors in her field.
What does it take to be a successful detective writer? Not necessarily a legal education or investigative experience. A graduate from the Literature Institute in Moscow, Malysheva - unlike her older rival Alexandra Ma ri nina - has never served in the police or a private investigative agency, or in any law enforcement structures.
Furthermore, she prefers to rely on her own imagination when creating a plot rather than turning to any real crimes for inspiration.
There is, in fact, only one book where she described a real situation: "Striptease Before Death," a story of a striptease dancer whose boyfriend is involved in an Arab sect. Ironically, this one seems the most unrealistic to her readers.
Though she is frequently offered many proposals for story ideas, in particular from people who have survived or witnessed extraordinary events, to describe them in her stories, Malysheva feels like her own imagination serves her better.
"Naturally, I am familiar with the technical literature professional investigators use. My sister is a psychologist, so I've read a lot on psychotic pathology, and related literature," Malysheva said. "But for me personally it is a lot easier to write about evil forces which only exist in my imagination. Thinking of any real killers or psychotics has always been too disgusting for me."
Remarkably enough, Ma lysheva's main characters are no policemen, but ordinary people like reporters, and even night guards working at a parking lot.
"Back in the Soviet era, two types of detective novels were available here: books by foreign authors like Agatha Christie or Georges Simenon, or Russian novels, where the hero was always a policeman, which would eventually make the readers sick," Malysheva said.
"Private investigation was not welcome in Soviet Union, and so there was no way that a private detective could be shown outsmarting the country's powerful police."
So, Malysheva has been giving the readers what they wanted: a story with Russian material, but not a traditional police detective story. The latter genre, however, is now making a comeback in television series, in an attempt to restore long-lost faith in the country's law enforcers.
Commenting on the impressive popularity of detective books over the last decade, Malysheva says that readers find psychological relief when reading these kinds of books. "These books show them that there may well be much harsher things happening than what is going on around us now," she said. "And, remember, these stories end well. The most complicated cases still finally get solved. This feeling can give one more strength to live on."
During one of her book presentations, a woman came up to the writer saying that she saved her life. At first Malysheva thought she was a weirdo, but the woman explained herself. She had found herself in a deep depression, and wanted to commit suicide. She bought one of Malysheva's books on impulse, while passing by a kiosk, and began to read on the bus home. "Somehow the story engrossed me," the woman said. "I read all night, and when I finished in the morning I didn't think about killing myself anymore."
"I believe just this one story justifies what I have done as a writer," Malysheva said.
The fact that the woman chose a detective novel rather than a love story seems quite natural to Malysheva. She offers her version as to why circulation of love stories in Russia is scarce. "To stick to love stories a woman has to live in an absolutely safe country, which Russia is not," she said. "Lovers of these books live entirely in their fantasies, but Russia's realities are far too obtrusive."
The Soviet Union once boasted the world's highest number of books read per person. Winning back the country's lost status will be hard, Malysheva said, as most readers have irrevocably switched their attention to television. "In Soviet times, theater and books were the only two reliefs available to ordinary people," she said. "Television channels were all the same boring stuff. Now the viewer can stay in front of the screen as long as he wants to. The choice is great enough."
As for the future of the detective novel, whose popularity is also dropping, Malysheva said that recently it has become much more difficult for newcomers to begin their careers. "This niche of the book market is already fully occupied, and I think only those who have already made their names can survive."
Needless to say, writers' rights are strongly violated, especially if the author is a beginner, Malysheva said.
Normally, a publishing house may offer you a contract for a certain number of books, say, five, without a single word about circulation, hard/soft cover and even the language the books will be published in. A beginner is always under pressure from his publisher, so there is often no choice.

TITLE: dogmatic film movement gets local screening
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: In the 100-year history of cinema, the world has seen almost no truly international film aesthetics movements. Most films are not challenging, due to the comfortable routine of increasingly complex and garish entertainments from Hollywood.
Dogme95, or Dogma Filmmakers, as they have come to be called, are small but growing group of film artists who have willingly created a reactionary film movement. The first three films from the movement, "The Celebration (Festen)," "The Idiots (Idioterne)," and "Mifune's Last Song (Mifunes sidste sang)" are being shown together for the first time in St. Petersburg at the Spartak. The three-film retrospective is being sponsored by the Cinema Without Borders (Kino Bez Granits) home video company, which has also released the films on video in Russia.
Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration," subtitled as Dogme1 using the movement's cataloging system, is an exploration of what happens when too many of one family's dark secrets are revealed at the family patriarch's 60th birthday celebration. Lars Von Trier's "The Idiots," the second dogma film, is the unabashedly frank story of a group of diverse, intelligent Danish people who come together in a group and feign mental retardation in social situations, each for his or her personal reasons. Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's "Mifune's Last Song" deals with the painful choices a young man must make when his father dies, like returning to the family farm and caring for his "mentally challenged" brother.
The aim of the austere aesthetics of Dogme95, originally drawn up by Vinterberg and Von Trier, is to "counter 'certain' tendencies in cinema today." One of these tendencies is the aforementioned Hollywood syndrome of mounting films that have all sorts of visual and aural trappings - special effects, hip soundtracks - but are ultimately empty. The Dogma is a set of rules to follow which essentially force the film maker to stick to the basics- location camera and sound, a well-written story and acting.
"The advantage of the rules is also that they ensure a great freedom of movement during the shooting," notes Vinterberg, "While nearly all other filmmaking instruments have been stripped away, what remain are the two most essential of instruments to a director, the story and the acting talent. Dogme95 allows me to focus on these instruments to an extreme degree."
One can see how Von Trier has been moving in this direction. His films "Europa" (known as "Zentropa" in the U.S.), "Breaking the Waves," and the TV miniseries "The Kingdom," all of which have achieved fame or notoriety due to their cinematic daring, can all be seen as stepping stones to his partial creation and total acceptance of all the tenets of the movement.
"There is an implicit duplicity in the Dogme95 Manifesto," declares Von Trier, "On the one hand it contains deep irony, and on the other it is most seriously meant. Irony and seriousness are interlinked and inseparable. What we have concerned ourselves with is the making of a set of rules. In this sense it is a kind of play, a game called 'rule-making'. Seriousness and play go hand in hand. A clear example of this is that the very strict and serious Manifesto was actually written in only 25 minutes and under continuous bursts of laughter. Still, we maintain that we are in earnest. Dogme is not for fun."
Despite these claims, any iron-clad set of rules is ultimately limiting, and there have been some legitimate criticisms of the Dogma movement, from the resulting in-your-face hand-held style, to the notion that Dogme95 has mushroomed into little more than a PR stunt. Is Dogme95 just more shameless commercialism, albeit in a different form?
"Most definitely not," asserts Von Trier, "While the ideas behind the Dogme95 Manifesto were born out of honest analysis it is true that the enormous international and local success of the first three dogme films has to a degree turned 'dogme' into a commercial gimmick - a PR stunt. That is fine with us. After all we are missionaries for the message."
Nonetheless, the movement has managed to attract an array of low-budget filmmakers who have an affinity for the aesthetics. The principal perpetrators refer to their Dogma colleagues as "brothers." Indeed the movement finds soul brothers in such people as Harmony Korine, director of the notoriously weird independent film "Gummo," and Rick Schmidt, the man who wrote a well-known book on low-budget filmmaking called "Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices."
The best summary of the appeal of the movement is provided by Jacobsen: "In every musician's life there comes a time and place where you want to go back to basics, where you want to play unplugged. That's what Dogme95 is about."
For dates and times, check listings.For information on Dogma films and filmmakers consult the official Dogme95 Web site, http://www.dogme95.dk

TITLE: so hungry that we ate a horse
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson
TEXT: It's not often that one gets the opportunity to eat horse meat, but a new Uzbek restaurant on the corner of Ulitsa Nekrasova and Liteiny Prospect lets you do just that. Karavan Sarai is a fine new addition to the restaurants in this city providing cuisine from former Soviet republics, and gives an excellent idea of what they really eat in Uzbekistan, horse and all. The only dish from that region which is really in general currency in these parts, the rice dish known as plov, makes its obligatory appearance on the menu, in both standard and dietary versions, but there are plenty of other interesting tastes to sample.
The interiors are convincing enough to make you think you just might be in Samarkand, and pleasantly subdued, with pale yellow walls and appropriate wall hangings, while the waiters wear skullcaps and traditional Uzbek dress. 
The place is very relaxed, striking an ideal balance between cafe and restaurant, and the service is very prompt, so that it could also make a good location for a quick bite to eat - if you are familiar with Uzbek food and know what you want to order, you could probably be in and out in half an hour or so. 
On the other hand, if you wanted to sit there for hours on end and enjoy a sumptuous repast, you could probably do that as well without any waiters giving you evil looks.
We ourselves needed a bit of time to sort the menu out, and even had to send our waiter away (he soon returned), but after a good look we ordered a range of cold starters, all priced at around 50 rubles, with delicious horse meat (it really is worth a try), radishes, and a "Tashkent" salad, composed of beef, onion and radish. 
Looking across at the next table, we couldn't help noticing an attractive-looking pile of greenery, so we ordered that as well. Bearing the misnomer "vegetable assortment," it turned out to be a huge collection of coriander, parsley and dill, swamping tomato and cucumber slices. Simply munching on these makes you feel instantly healthy, even for such bar-dwelling slovenly journalist types as ourselves.
It was then time for the soups, and we chose the interestingly named shurpa (80 rubles), lagman (90 rubles) and mampar (80 rubles), all lamb-based stew-type hearty meals, with the excellent Uzbek bread (25 rubles).
For mains I had the kazan-kabob, (155 rubles), a wonderful fried lamb concoction, while my dining companions had besh-barmak (140 rubles) (lamb with some of that famous horse meat thrown in) and the "Chaikhansky" plov (125 rubles), the classic Uzbek meal of rice and lamb.
While the meals were excellent, and reasonably priced, the drinks menu gave us pause, as a half-liter of Baltika was at the positively Astorian rate of 60 rubles, and the cheapest wine was well over 300 rubles. We decided to settle for beer, but felt it was really a bit overpriced. Once again, a restaurant where the drinks and food prices are simply not compatible.
This, however, was the only complaint we had with the restaurant, and we weren't at all upset with just one beer each. You can drink beer anywhere, after all, but you can't always sample horse meat in exotic surroundings.
Karavan Sarai, 1 Ul. Nekrasova. Open daily. Dinner for three with not much alcohol, 1,385 rubles ($50) Tel: 272-71-53

TITLE: bard fans gather for 'volgastock' festival
AUTHOR: by Sophia Kishkovsky
TEXT: A sea of music fanatics and thrill-seekers drink and sway blissfully to songs of peace and love in a muddy field. It could be a Grateful Dead concert, or Woodstock just half a world away. Call it Woodstock on the Volga.
Every summer thousands of Russians make the journey to the Grushinsky Festival, known as Grusha for short, held on a riverbank between two cities, Samara and Tolyatti, the center of Russia's auto industry. The festival celebrates bard music, a genre identified with the Soviet cultural thaw of the '60s and the subsequent growth and popularity of allegorical songs as a creative and spiritual outlet. Today conditions are different, but the songs of contemporary bard musicians seem to serve a similar comforting purpose.
Various theories trace the origins of bard music to Soviet prison camp songs, soldiers' ballads, prerevolutionary romances and even the songs of the wandering minstrels of centuries ago. Some bard songs even sound like American country music, but by any measure, Russians are much more likely than the average American to pick up a guitar and sing with their friends, all of whom have dozens, sometimes hundreds of songs committed to memory. It's all part of the seemingly infinite national capacity to recite verse. 
Fans of bard songs even sound like Deadheads when they talk about what the music means to them. One of those soaking up the vibes with his wife and two small sons at this year's festival was Mikhail Ovcharenko, owner of a bodyguard service in Samara. "People don't communicate with each other enough," Ovcharenko said. "We live in a big crowd. Here everyone is equal, everyone is naked." 
This summer's 20th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Vysotsky, a beloved actor and bard, has produced a host of television retrospectives and concerts in his memory. Vysotsky's angry songs about the degradation of Soviet life, sung in his raspy voice at private gatherings and passed around on hissing reel-to-reel recordings, were the soundtrack to a thwarted generation.
But for all the enduring popularity of Vysotsky and other bards, the genre has been declared dead as often as rock music has in the United States. Critics charge that it has sold out to the saccharine dictates of the market and been taken over by a pseudo-collective spirit that undermines the music. Some critics are especially irritated by the fashion for singing bard songs in chorus.
"Now bard singing is like fascism," said Alexander Marchenko, a Moscow musician and composer who creates arrangements for contemporary bards. "It's a chamber genre meant to be sung in the kitchen. Now they want to make it into a mass genre and say it's so spiritual."
Even so, "Songs of Our Century," a two-part easy-listening collection of classics performed by popular bards in chorus and with instrumentals, has topped Spice Girl knockoffs on the Russian pop charts and inspired knockoffs and pirated editions of its own. Helped by word of mouth, the first recording sold nearly 100,000 cassettes and CDs a month when it was released in early 1999, unheard of in Russia's struggling, payola-plagued pop music industry.
The bards behind "Songs of Our Century" call their work a mission. "In a time when the animal instinct rules, we must stand against this," Sergei Nikitin told an audience of several thousand at the start of a concert tour promoting part two of the collection. "I am absolutely certain these songs will live in the 21st century."
For the first time, in fact, bards are becoming professional musicians who make a living performing. But hundreds of so-called amateur song clubs around Russia remain centers of the bard movement, which the Communist Party once tried to control.
In poorer provincial cities like Smolensk, it is now lack of money that makes life hard for local bards. As for the words, freedom of expression sometimes means they have less of a message to convey.
"If before people sang in allegories, now we can speak openly," said Sergei Pogorely, a bard from the Karelia region. "Something has even been lost with this possibility, just as literature has suffered." Bard songs suffered less, he said, because they are one of the most democratic kinds of Russian literature. And politics and pain are not completely absent from today's lyrics. A song about the war in Chechnya took first place at a bard festival in St. Petersburg this spring.
- NYT

TITLE: France's Fuel Tax Protestors Bring Country to Standstill
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS - Tension mounted in France's fuel-tax showdown on Thursday as protesters tightened their stranglehold on fuel supplies, and Socialist Prime Minster Lionel Jospin faced an angry ultimatum from his Green allies.
Farmers who joined the movement for lower fuel prices planned a protest at the Channel Tunnel at Calais and threatened to block the entrance while taxi drivers converged on major cities for a massive "go-slow" protest.
Some staff from Air France joined the protest, blocking access to some terminals at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. Ambulance and tour-bus drivers, Seine boatmen and driving instructors were also taking part in the spreading strike.
About 80 percent of all gasoline stations in France were reported to be either dry or under tight rationing. Stations were also shutting in Paris, the area least hit by the protest.
In Dunkirk, truck owners vowed to fight on after hearing Jospin's announcement on Wednesday evening that the government would not concede more than the 15-percent diesel-fuel tax-cut offer the transporters first accepted and then rejected.
"That can only heighten the tension on the ground," Gerard Cardon, a member of the National Association of Road Hauliers [FNTR] in Dunkirk, told Reuters. "The government urges us to be responsible, but it's responsible for this situation."
"FNTR head Rene Petit told France Info radio he would meet regional officials of his association, the biggest of the three leading the protests, on Thursday to assess the situation.
"The talks [with the government] have stopped but the dialog must continue," he said.
Environment Minister Dominique Voynet drew a line in the sand on Wednesday, saying her Greens party would not go along with further concession to petrol-guzzling truck owners.
Voynet denied she would resign in protest but said: "I back the cabinet that I am a member of, but I want to recall that I joined it on the understanding that we would work for clean air and for moving away from road to rail transport."
Voynet is one of two Greens ministers in the Socialist-led left-wing cabinet.
The fuel-tax crisis, now in its fourth day, seemed close to an end on Wednesday morning when Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot and the three truck owners' associations signed the tentative deal to cut tax on diesel for heavy trucks by 35 centimes to 2.22 francs ($0.303) per liter this year.

TITLE: Indonesian Militia Kills Civilians in West Timor
AUTHOR: By Heather Paterson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DILI, East Timor - Dozens of foreign aid workers fled West Timor on Thursday, and Indonesia sent in fresh troops a day after a mob led by pro-Indonesian militia gangs killed three UN workers.
Wednesday's attack in the border town of Atambua shocked world leaders, including Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, attending a UN summit in New York.
The brutality of the slayings has placed new pressure on Wahid, already struggling to fix a myriad of crises across the sprawling nation, to crack down on the militias and close refugee camps they use as safe havens in West Timor.
Critics claim the militias are supported by rogue sections of Indonesia's military who oppose Wahid's push for democratic reform and independence for neighboring East Timor.
UN officials said 75 foreign and Indonesian aid workers flew out of West Timor on a chartered flight Thursday to the tourist island of Bali.
A further 96 UN and other aid workers, who spent Wednesday night in hiding or under Indonesian army protection in Atambua, were being trucked out to the East Timor border. From there they would be flown to the East Timor capital, Dili, said UN spokes woman Barbara Reis.
The bodies of the three victims also would be brought out of West Timor, she said.
On Wednesday night, UN peace-keepers from East Timor used helicopters to rescue 55 aid workers from Atambua just hours after a mob of 3,000 stormed the town's UN office and killed three staffers from Puerto Rico, Croatia and Ethiopia.
The militias blamed for Wednesday's slayings are the same ones that terrorized and devastated East Timor a year ago after its people voted to break free of Indonesian rule in a UN-supervised referendum.
Indonesia still controls the western part of the island, where the UN refugee agency has been delivering aid to an estimated 90,000 refugees who remain in border camps after fleeing East Timor last year.
Witnesses said militiamen beat and stabbed the three UN employees to death before burning their bodies in the street. Other workers were hit and cut by machetes and axes before they escaped.
Indonesian security forces, who had earlier assured the world body that it would protect its Atambua operations, stood by as the mob torched the UN office, the witnesses said. On Thursday, the Indonesian army said it had sent two additional infantry battalions to Atambua. 
UN officials said it was the worst attack on their civilian personnel anywhere in the world. Wednesday's rampage in Atambua was apparently triggered by the killing Tuesday of a militia leader. Witnesses said some in the crowd accused the United Nations of not paying attention to their plight.
One of the slain UN workers - Puerto Rican Carlos Caceres - sent a desperate e-mail to a UN security office six hours before the slayings.
"These guys act without thinking and can kill a human being as easily [and painlessly] as I kill mosquitoes in my room," Caceres wrote.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Berlin Wall Pardon
n BERLIN (Reuters) - Mayor Eberhard Diepgen pardoned two former East German Politburo members Wednesday who were jailed for ordering the shooting of escapers along the Berlin Wall.
In a gesture timed to mark a decade of German unification, justice officials said Guenther Kleiber and Guenter Schabowski would be freed on Oct. 2 after serving less than a third of their three-year sentences.
Germany celebrates the 10th anniversary of reunification on Oct. 3.
The pardon was intended to be a symbolic gesture to promote rehabilitation for those who had apologized for their role in the oppressive East German state, without forgetting the suffering of its victims, the officials said.
Shelling Kills 5
n SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Five people were killed when Pakistani troops fired artillery shells across the Himalayan region's military control line, Indian police said on Thursday as both countries braced for hard diplomacy at the United Nations.
"Pakistani troops resorted to heavy artillery shelling in Uri area on Wednesday evening. An [Indian] army major, a jawan [soldier] and three civilians were killed in the shelling," a police official told Reuters in Srinagar, summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir.
Indian troops retaliated, resulting in an exchange of fire, police said.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is due to speak at the UN in New York on Friday, but is not expected to meet Pakistan's military ruler.
Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in his first appearance at the UN on Wednesday offered talks with India and urged the Security Council to summon the political will to resolve the long dispute over Kashmir.
China's WTO Demand
n BEIJING (AP) - Pushing its claim over Taiwan into complex trade negotiations, Beijing insisted Thursday that the World Trade Organization only admit Taiwan as a part of China.
The demand by Beijing threatens to impede Taiwan's membership bid as both the island and China near the end of their separate years-long negotiations to join global trade's rule-setting body. It also complicates a debate in the United States Senate this week on whether to approve a WTO pact with China.
Influential senators released a letter from President Clinton on Wednesday weighing in on Taiwan's side.
Brushing aside the opposition, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said Thursday that China wanted its sovereignty claim to Taiwan written into the terms for Taiwanese membership to WTO.

TITLE: Uzbekistan Delegation Is Detained In Sydney
AUTHOR: By Adrian Warner
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SYDNEY - Australian customs officers detained an Olympic team official at Sydney airport on Thursday for carrying an illegal performance-enhancing drug into the country ahead of the Games, an Olympic official said.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) medical commission member Jacques Rogge told reporters that he had been told the person involved was from the Uzbekistan delegation.
"The Australian Customs Service has detained a small quantity of what appears to be human growth hormone after it was found in the baggage of an Olympic team official at Sydney airport today," customs said in a statement.
Customs spokesman Leon Bedington added: "It is a team official, not a competitor. Under privacy laws we cannot identify the person."
Asked if the customs officials had reacted to a tip-off, he replied: "The Australian Customs services work on a risk-assessment basis. We do not do random or routine searches."
Under Australian law, HGH is a tier-one substance. The maximum punishment for carrying it illegally into the country is a fine of A$100,000 ($56,000) or a five-year prison sentence.
Two years ago a Chinese swimmer and her coaches were caught smuggling the same muscle-building hormone through Sydney airport on the way to the Perth world championship.
The incident caused a major stir in the sports world, because it showed that competitors were prepared to take the risk of taking banned drugs to a competition.
The IOC has yet to develop a way of testing athletes for HGH, an expensive substance which is believed to be fashionable with athletes who want to cheat their way to glory.

TITLE: World Leaders Gather at Historic Summit
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS - The world laid out its hopes for the third millennium Wednesday at an extraordinary convocation of leaders great and obscure, with U.S. President Clinton pleading for help in bringing peace to the Middle East before it is too late.
About 150 world leaders - the greatest assembly of presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and other rulers in history - listened as Russian President Vla dimir Putin called for an international conference to outlaw the militarization of space.
And they heard Cuban President Fidel Castro, viewed by many developing countries as their premier spokesman, decry the poverty that he says afflicts 80 percent of the world's 6 billion people, and accuse three dozen wealthy nations - especially the United States - of using their power "to make us poorer, more exploited and more dependent."
The leaders observed a moment of silence to remember UN workers slain when their headquarters was overrun by rioters in Indonesian-controlled West Timor, then launched a three-day marathon of speeches and negotiations on the world's most vexing problems. Outside the hall, New York's streets gave an alternative podium to commoners.
In the largest demonstration, about 2,000 followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement marched from China's UN mission to the United Nations, protesting Beijing's crackdown against the sect. There were others who protested slavery in Sudan, and who objected to the Mideast peace process.
On the sidelines of the conference, the statesmen were meeting privately - Clinton with Putin and with the parties in the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak with French President Jacques Chirac, British Prime Minister Tony Blair with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah, and many more.
Privately and publicly, they exchanged advice and warnings on Mideast peace, disarmament, access to new technology, and above all, giving billions of the world's poor a better life.
The leaders were in a festive mood - they kissed and shook hands and smiled, milling about and drinking orange juice.
The start of the meeting was overshadowed by a reminder of the United Nations' very real difficulties in a world in which violence is never far from the surface: a moment of silence in memory of UN aid workers killed in West Timor.
"The problems seem huge," said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, listing poverty, AIDS, wars and environmental degradation. "But in today's world, given the technology and the resources around, we have the means to tackle them. If we have the will, we can deal with them."
Clinton strongly backed Annan's controversial call for the international community to intervene to protect civilians from ethnically based terror and other gross human-rights abuses - overriding national sovereignty if necessary.
Much of Clinton's day was devoted to the Middle East. He held back-to-back meetings with Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Arafat said his side had agreed to share Jerusalem, "eliminate barriers and borders therein, in contrast to attempts at monopolizing it."
He called the city "the cradle of Christ and the site of Prophet Mohammed's ascension to heaven," making no mention of Jews' attachment to the city for more than 2,000 years.
Barak, in turn, asked Arafat to join him in making painful concessions for peace. "We are at the Rubicon and no one of us can cross it alone," Barak said. Arafat listened impassively.
In his speech, Putin referred indirectly to U.S. proposals to create a national missile defense system, citing the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which must be amended if Washington is to go ahead with the program.
"The new century of the United Nations must ... go down in history as a period of real disarmament," Putin said.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin called for the world's nations to commit themselves to living in peace and building common security.
"The Cold War mentality must be abandoned once and for all," Jiang declared. "A new security concept based on mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality and cooperation should be established."
Castro said the current underdevelopment and poverty in the world are the result of "conquest, colonization, slavery and ... imperialism." And he declared that those responsible have a moral obligation "to compensate our nations for the damages caused throughout centuries."
Before his speech, Castro poked fun at himself and his decades-old reputation for marathon speeches.
He stepped onto the podium, pulled out a white handkerchief and covered a yellow light that warns speakers they are approaching the five-minute time limit. The audience of kings, presidents and prime ministers understood immediately and burst into laughter.
As he did at the UN 50th anniversary celebration five years ago, Castro stuck to the five-minute limit.
(AP, Reuters)

TITLE: Former Champs Lay Their Ghosts To Rest at U.S. Open
AUTHOR: By Steve Wilstein
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - It was a night of paybacks for Pete Sampras and Lindsay Davenport, each of them conquering a personal tormentor and edging closer to regaining the U.S. Open titles they once held. 
For the four-time champion Sampras, it was the sweet 4-6, 7-6, 6-4, 6-2 defeat Wednesday night of Richard Krajicek, who had the best record against him of any active player and was the only man to beat him at Wimbledon in the past eight years.
For Davenport, the women's titlist in 1998, it was a 6-4, 6-2 quarterfinal rout of defending champion Serena Williams that ended a string of five straight losses to her over the past three years.
Krajicek, who beat Sampras en route to winning Wimbledon in 1996, and had held a 6-3 record against him, sought to impose his big serve on Sampras once again. He did just that in the first set and wound up with 23 aces, but the match turned on a spellbinding comeback by Sampras from 2-6 in the second-set tie breaker.
Facing four set points, Sampras saved them all. First came a spectacular drop volley that nicked the net cord. Next there was a forehand return that Sampras mishit but saw land safely for a winner. He then drilled a backhand pass into the corner and pumped his fist to the crowd.
When he saved number four with an approach shot that Krajicek netted, and followed it up with a service winner and a return winner to close out the set, Sampras delivered an uppercut to the air that might as well have been to Krajicek's jaw.
"It was his tie breaker, somehow," said Krajicek, who couldn't figure out how it slipped away. "It was meant to be that he would win that set. I don't know."
"I thought I was finished. I was getting outplayed," said Sampras, now 14-0 in night matches at the open. "Richard puts a lot of pressure on my service game. I thought I was gone. Richard always plays me tough. After I won the second set, Richard got a little down. The second set turned the match around. I was making him play. It was a big match."
The Davenport-Williams match was big, too, but unexpectedly one-sided.
Williams broke her racket on the court as her game fell apart, and Davenport emerged from the shadows as a forgotten former champion.
Williams, the defending champion who was so eager to meet her sister, Venus, in the final, succumbed to her own impatience and Davenport's deep, sizzling groundstrokes in a rout that took everyone by surprise.
"It feels great to get over the hurdle of beating her," Davenport said. "It was a big match to get through, but I'm only into the semis and I look to keep going.
"There's no revenge. I'm going to lose to her again and I'm going to beat her again."
Williams said Davenport's performance was "the best she ever played against me. She should take that attitude toward everyone."
Williams finally cracked at 4-4 in the first, slapping forehands long on the last two shots of her service game and screaming as she was broken.
"When I broke her at four-all it seemed to deflate her," Davenport said. "She had break points and didn't take advantage."
Williams rapped her racket on the court, but not nearly as hard as she did in the next game when she netted a backhand for a second set point. The racket frame broke this time, leading to an automatic code violation for racket abuse, and for all practical purposes her game was undone, too.
Another backhand error by Williams gave Davenport the set, and Davenport went on to win six straight games and take a 4-0 lead in the second set as Williams lost control of her shots. It wasn't a case of Williams simply missing close shots. She was too excited, too caught up in trying to blow Davenport away with power, and she never found a backup plan.