SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #605 (0), Friday, September 22, 2000
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TITLE: Gazprom Demands Gusinsky Pay Up
AUTHOR: By Anna Badkhen and Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The conflict over Media-MOST's debts to energy giant Gazprom continued on Thursday, when Gazprom-Media appealed to a Moscow court seeking a return of the debts and asking for the holding's property to be seized.


Reports following the filing of the lawsuits were conflicting.

Gazprom-Media head Alfred Kokh said in televised remarks that bailiffs were on their way to arrest the holding's assets.

"We are sick and tired of playing games. We decided to act," Kokh said. Interfax reported Justice Ministry officials as saying that bailiffs had begun seizing Media-MOST assets on Thursday.

However, Moscow Arbitration Court officials denied that any action had been taken to take over Media-MOST property, and said that the court had yet to consider Gazprom-Media's suits. The officials said the court will consider them no earlier than Friday.

Media-MOST officials said they were unaware of any court decision to arrest the holding's property, and Justice Ministry officials could not be reached for comment.

The current quarrel centers on a deal linking the sale of Media-MOST to criminal charges being dropped against Gu sin sky and his freedom to travel abroad. Gu sinsky was jailed for a few days in June on corruption charges, and he left Rus sia shortly after signing the deal.

The deal, known as Appendix 6 in a document signed by Gusinsky and Kokh, came to light on Monday when negotiations between Media-MOST and Gazprom over $473 million owed by the media holding broke down. The deal called for Gazprom to forgive the $473 million and to buy the Media-MOST for $300 million in cash.

The deal was also signed by Press Minister Mikhail Lesin. Lesin conceded Wednesday, however, that "as a minister" he had made a mistake by putting his signature on the deal. He told reporters that he did so "as an individual" who wanted to help resolve the conflict and save Media-MOST from bankruptcy.

Lesin said he would not resign because he had had the right intentions, but was prepared to be disciplined by President Vladimir Putin or Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

Putin ordered Kasyanov to look into Lesin's participation in the conflict on Thursday, Itar-Tass reported.

Media-MOST and a number of politicians are calling Appendix 6 evidence of governmental pressure to crack down on the independent voice of the media holding. They say the pressure under which Gusinsky signed invalidates the deal, which called for Gaz prom to forgive Media-MOST of the $473 million and to buy the holding for $300 million in cash.

Kokh lashed out at Gusinsky on Wednesday, saying he was hiding under a rhetoric of free speech to cover up his own greed and unwillingness to admit that he had driven Media-MOST into bankruptcy.

Lesin said that Kokh and Gusinsky drew up the agreement through lawyers on July 20, but when they met face to face to sign it a fistfight broke out. The two men called Lesin to sign the paper as an arbiter to guarantee the deal, the press minister said.

He said Gusinsky had demanded that the document be drawn up.

Media-MOST spokesman Dmitry Ostalsky said Wednesday that the draft of the appendix was "brought from the Kremlin."

Media-MOST said in a statement Wednesday that the deal "was written in the Kremlin with the authors' intention that it become the main link in the chain of a 'freedom-for-shares' deal."

And Ostalsky said in a telephone interview that the fistfight between Kokh and Gusinsky took place on July 26, the day charges against Gusinsky were dropped.

Meanwhile, observers said on Wednesday that Appendix 6 had no legal foundation.

"Of course, it is legal nonsense," said prominent human-rights lawyer Yury Schmidt. "If you consider it as a doctrine or declaration, it has the right to exist. But it has no force as a document obliging the authorities to stop prosecution of Gusinsky.

"Both sides behaved immorally," Schmidt said in a telephone interview from St. Petersburg. "I profoundly dislike the authorities' action in this situation, but I don't think that Gusinsky was in such a bad situation that he could easily agree to these conditions and then back out of the deal. ... All of this generates a feeling of disgust."

Kokh said in an interview Wednesday that he also would no longer negotiate with Gusinsky. "How can I talk to people who have changed their position six times in six months?" Kokh said. "Should we now demand a special statement or a medical certificate to prove he is in full control of his faculties every time we get a proposal from him?"

Kokh said that it would take up to six months for the court to rule on the two suits Gazprom has filed.

Loudly publicized debates are likely to continue over the next few weeks.

Media-MOST deputy director Igor Malashenko, speaking Wednesday on NTV's "Hero of the Day" program, accused Lesin and Kokh of being part of a "band of racketeers" who have attempted to gain control of Media-MOST at the Kremlin's bidding.

Lesin said he was no longer on speaking terms with Malashenko. He also invited Gusinsky to a debate on the government-owned RTR television channel.

Kokh challenged Malashenko to a debate on NTV's "Glas Naroda" on Friday. It was not clear if Malashenko would accept.

TITLE: Berezovsky Dismisses Anti-Clinton Report
AUTHOR: By Deb Riechmann and Gerald Nadler
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky scoffed Wednesday at a report by leading congressional Republicans that the Clinton administration failed in its policy to build democracy in Russia and allowed corruption to flourish. 


Berezovsky - in the United States to seek support in a battle with Russian President Vladimir Putin over control of the ORT television network - defended President Clinton and the U.S. point man on Russian policy, Vice President Al Gore. 

"The U.S. and Clinton himself played a great role in moving Russia to democracy," Berezovsky said at a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

The White House was defending itself against the 209-page report released Wednesday that "however well- intentioned the policy" to Russia "it didn't work" - turning a blind eye to corruption and doing little that's been effective in helping to nurture a free-market Russian economy.

Made public just seven weeks before the presidential election, the report claims the White House botched the "greatest foreign-policy opportunity for the United States since the end of World War II."

Democrats dismissed the report as a partisan document aimed at attacking Vice President Al Gore, who has been the administration's point man in dealing with the Russians. Gore is co-chairman with Russia's prime minister of the U.S. Russia-Commission on Economic and Technical Cooperation.

"We have worked very diligently over the last eight years to engage the Russians to try to promote democracy and to make the world a safer place," said White House press secretary Joe Lockhart when asked to respond to the Republican charges Tuesday.

He cited U.S. efforts in getting Russia to dismantle nuclear warheads and programs aimed at fostering economic and political reforms. "This work is all ongoing and unfinished, but there is a lot to be said for what's been done in the last eight years," said Lockhart.

The report, written by 12 Republicans on the House of Representatives' Speaker's Advisory Group on Russia, was completed without input from the Democrats. "Coming so close to election time ... it raises questions about why an important foreign-policy issue is being done in such a partisan manner," complained Lockhart.

The report says the United States poured too much money into the Russian central government and relied too heavily on ties with individual personalities instead of establishing better relations within the nation's legislature. Russians' view of Americans has soured, the report says, and the nation is developing stronger relations with China and other non-Western nations.

Rep. Christopher Cox, the California Republican who is chairman of the advisory group, said the administration has used "an amazingly narrow vision of what the opportunity was when we won the Cold War."

"Some of the claims of success by the Clinton-Gore policy include that we haven't had a nuclear holocaust, there's not a Stalinist state in place and that they're still building a democracy," Cox said.

Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway denounced the criticism. "This is a partisan report not worth the taxpayer-provided paper it's written on," he said.

According to the report, U.S. President Bill Clinton, in his early years at the White House, did not focus on Russia. Oversight for U.S.-Russia relations fell to an insular "troika" of subordinate officials: Gore, Strobe Talbott, who is now the deputy secretary of state, and Lawrence Summers, now the treasury secretary.

By using massive "lending and aid to plug the gap in the Russian central government's operating budget," says the report, the Clinton administration "exposed these funds to theft and fraud."

The administration disputes this claim. Last July, Leon Fuerth, Gore's national security adviser, said in a speech that the administration has "continuously sought to tighten our internal auditing procedures to achieve accountability for U.S. assistance."

Asked about Gore's role, Berezovsky said corruption was endemic in Tsarist and Soviet Russia and that it multiplied as bureaucrats privatized government property the last eight years. 

''[But] that's no basis to say that Gore corrupted Russia or participated in a program that corrupted Russia,'' said Berezovsky. 

"The report overstates the impact our policy could have had," said Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and a member of the House International Relations Committee. 

"The Russians need to clean up their own act. They have crime, corruption and the mafia. To blame the American administration for the failure of the Russian government to do things is absurd."

According to Reuters, the report was ordered by House Speaker Dennis Hastert in March to examine U.S.-Russia policies after a rash of corruption scandals and reports that billions of dollars in Russian funds had been laundered through the Bank of New York. 

Berezovsky, who supported Pu tin during the March elections but has since broke with him, was in the United States to seek support for his battle for control over ORT - like Media-MOST chief Vladimir Gusinsky last week.

Berezovsky said that although Putin has "concentrated all political power" in his hands, the Russian leader still has a vision of a democratic Russia. "But he has decided to follow an authoritarian way to push us to democracy," he said. 

Berezovsky said Putin had also destroyed the political structure set up by Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. "All political power today belongs to the president," he said. 

He said Russia must have political stability to get Russian business leaders to return capital into the economy. "We need to make sure that power is predictable," he said.

TITLE: 40 Days On, Country Grieves
AUTHOR: By Anna Dolgov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Marking the 40th day of grieving, a Russian Orthodox tradition, relatives of the sailors who died on the sunken submarine mourned their loss Wednesday and questioned why the government plans to risk more lives recovering the bodies.


President Vladimir Putin has ordered an operation to retrieve the remains of the 118 crewmen who died when the nuclear submarine Kursk was shattered by a massive explosion Aug. 12.

But many who gathered for mourning services said they opposed the idea, saying the bodies should be left in the submarine, 110 meters below the Barents Sea, until authorities try to raise the vessel next year.

"At this time ... the main thing is how to protect people's lives from additional risk, which the divers would be exposed to," said naval cadet Dmitry Bagryantsev, whose father, Capt. Vla dimir Bagryantsev, was among the crew.

"Why risk additional tragedies? Why deprive those divers' families of fathers, as happened in this case?" Bagryantsev said on state-run RTR television.

But Gleb Lyachin, son of the Kursk's commander, Capt. Gennady Lyachin, disagreed.

"I want them to do this as soon as possible. Everything should be done out of respect for the dead," said Lyachin, a naval cadet in St. Petersburg.

Services for the sailors were held across Russia, where Orthodox Christians traditionally mark the 40th day of bereavement.

Priests chanted liturgies on the military base of Vidyayevo, from which the Kursk set out on its last voyage. Families of the seamen packed churches in the city of Kursk, for which the submarine was named and which was the hometown of many of the crew. There were also services in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Russia's Rubin military design agency and Norway's Stolt Offshore company were expected to sign an agreement Friday to begin the recovery operation next month, said Igor Spassky, head of the Rubin agency that designed the Kursk, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Stolt Offshore provided the team of divers who opened the submarine's hatch after Russian efforts failed.

Russian naval commanders and government officials say the Kursk disaster appeared to have been caused by a collision with another vessel, probably a foreign submarine, though U.S. and British officials say none of their vessels were involved. Other theories suggest a collision with a World War II mine or an explosion of one of the Kursk's own torpedoes.

After the Kursk sank, the naval command insisted for days that some of the crew could be alive, and Russian rescuers struggled to gain access to the submarine.

The government initially refused help from abroad. When Norwegian divers finally arrived and opened a hatch, they found the vessel completely flooded, with no hope of survivors.

"Forty days ago we sincerely believed in a miracle," the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper wrote. "Sworn atheists recited prayers. Nothing helped."

TITLE: 2 Versions of Media-MOST Debt Talks
TEXT: Gazprom-Media head Alfred Kokh and Media-MOST spokesman Dmitry Ostalsky offered two different versions Wednesday of how negotiations broke down over Media-MOST's $473 million debt last week. Below are each of their versions.




Alfred Kokh: "Now we know how much free speech in Russia costs - $200 million."

Sept. 13

Negotiations were held in London between Igor Malashenko, Alfred Kokh and Lesin's personal representative, Vi deo International official Oganes Sobolev.


Malashenko asked Gazprom-Media to add $200 million in cash to the $300 million promised in the July 20 deal. He said the company needed the cash to buy back 25 percent of Media-MOST held by unidentified Israeli investment funds. He said the funds were unwilling to co-own Media-MOST with Gazprom.

He also said that if Gazprom refused to pay the additional $200 million, the July 20 deal would be ignored, Appendix 6 would be published and a campaign would be unleashed accusing Kokh and Press Minister Mikhail Lesin of using political pressure to seize control of Media-MOST.

Kokh refused.

Malashenko then proposed giving up 10 percent of NTV (giving Gazprom 40 percent in total) and stakes of 25 percent plus one share in all the other Media-MOST companies in exchange for $211 million of the debt. Another 25 percent of all the companies, including NTV, would be handed over as collateral for the remaining $262 million debt, which matures next year. An additional 20 percent in NTV would be sold on international markets - with the proceeds going to Gazprom - to ensure the channel's political independence.

Kokh said he could discuss these terms.



Sept. 14

Kokh called Media-MOST deputy chair man Andrei Tsimailo and asked him to put the proposals in writing.




Sept. 15

Kokh received proposals signed by Vla di mir Gusinsky that were radically different from what was discussed Sept. 13 with Malashenko. (Media-MOST provided a copy of the letter to The St. Petersburg Times.)


The 25-percent stakes to be handed down as collateral were whittled down to 25 percent minus one share, meaning that Gazprom would still lack a controlling stake in the media companies. Gazprom would still get 10 percent in NTV, but only 9 percent of the channel would be sold abroad. Also, Media-MOST would get unspecified "financial compensation" for the loss of controlling stakes in its companies.

Kokh refused and turned to the Prosecutor General's Office to investigate asset-stripping.



Sept. 18

Media war reopens.


Media-MOST spokesman Dmitry Ostalsky: "It appears that those political forces who have hired Mr. Kokh could not accept a situation in which NTV would remain without their political control. The differences between the positions of Mr. Kokh and Mr. Mala shen ko are small enough to be the subject of negotiations and not a reason to start a war."




Sept. 13

No additional sums were discussed at the negotiations. Malashenko proposed settling the debt by giving up shares in Media-MOST companies. No Israeli companies were discussed at the negotiations. Kokh said there was no economic obstacles to accepting the offer and asked them to put it in writing.




Sept. 15

Gusinsky sent the proposal.




Sept. 18

Gazprom-Media sent a letter of complaint to the prosecutor's office revealing the July 20 deal. Lesin and Kokh unleash an anti-Media-MOST campaign on state-owned ORT and RTR television channels.

TITLE: Danes Help Tidy Up City Parks
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Organizers of an environmental project to clean up three of St. Petersburg's parks say that they are hoping to turn the scheme into an example for other European cities to follow.


The project, which was launched this month, is being funded by Danish Cooperation for Environment in Eastern Europe (DANCEE), part of the Danish Environment Ministry. Intended to run until 2002 - a joint effort of the Denmark's Forest and Landscape Research Institute and the St. Petersburg Department for Gardens and Parks - it will be implemented in the Sosnovka Park in the Vyborgsky district, Park Pobedy in the Moskovsky district, and the Tavrichesky Garden in the city center.

"The ecology in Denmark will also benefit from the project," said Cecil Konijnendijk of the Danish institute. "If it proves to have been successful in three years, other European towns may want to gain from the experience."

Denmark already has a number of similar schemes, said the organizers, but is seeking to export the idea by using St. Petersburg as a guinea pig.

All three parks have been identified by Russian and Danish officials as those most in need of emergency repair: cleaning, draining of water, and repairing fences and bridges.

They are also three of the most frequently visited parks in St. Petersburg, according to German Vikharev, head of the city's Department for Gardens and Parks, in an interview last week.

City statistics state that St. Petersburg boasts over 70 parks and hundreds of smaller gardens. But, said Vikharev, the money to maintain them and fight off the effects of pollution and vandalism has dried up.

"In the 1980s, our department was creating 150 to 200 hectares of new 'green areas' a year," he said, "as well as restoring 200 hectares of existing parks. Now, we can afford the upkeep of only 20 to 30 hectares annually, and create up to seven hectares of green zones." 

Vikharev said that the 70 million rubles ($2.5 million) his department had received this year was around 30 percent of the required figure.

"The physical and functional aging of parks is a common problem in St. Petersburg, and it needs a solution," said Kjell Nilsson, the vice chairman of the Danish Forest and Landscape Research Institute.

According to the organizers, the project also includes the development of a database on ecological "hotspots" in the city, supporting a children's environmental information center, and the construction of ecology-themed playgrounds.

The local side also plans to devote special days devoted to the public, when those living near parks will be encouraged to participate in cleaning them and planting new trees.

The total cost of the project is estimated at 18 million rubles ($650,000), half of which has already been donated this year by the Danish Environment Ministry. Next year, the ministry plans to allocate between $10 million to $12 million on similar projects in Russia, according to Danish Consulate spokesman Klaus Sorensen. Approximately half of that would go to St. Petersburg, he said.

"Money is important," said Soren sen, "but perhaps even more important is creating a more caring attitude in society towards the environment."

TITLE: U.S. Pressure Stops Russia Making Laser Sale to Iran
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia has frozen a contract to sell laser equipment to Iran because of U.S. concern about technology transfers to the Islamic republic, the Nuclear Energy Ministry said Thursday.


But Boris Yatsenko, director of the Science and Technology Center of Microtechnology in St. Petersburg, maintained Thursday that his institute was proceeding with the contract because no military questions were at issue.

The Nuclear Energy Ministry announced the freeze two days after a White House spokesman said that Moscow had suspended the deal at U.S. President Bill Clinton's urging, because of concern that the equipment could help Tehran produce nuclear weapons.

"Given the sensitive nature of the issue, especially on the part of the United States, for the moment the question is being dealt with by two commissions - one Russian, one American," Nuclear Energy Ministry spokesman Yury Bespalko said.

The two commissions, he said, were expected to present their conclusions soon.

But Yatsenko said in a telephone interview that a first shipment of lasers would be sent to Iran at the end of the year.

He said the institute had not received any orders from the government to stop the contract.

Yatsenko said that his institute produced isotopes for medical use and slammed the U.S. stance.

"They [the United States] are linking this to production of nuclear weapons but in essence this is a fight for markets," he said by telephone.

"This is normal teaching equipment, used strictly for medicine. It certainly cannot be used to make weapons-grade uranium. I think our nuclear scientists will soon make it known that such a great stupidity should never have been thought up."

He said the technology could, in theory, produce fuel for a civil nuclear reactor, but the process would be very expensive.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said Clinton had raised the issue with President Vladimir Putin at the July Group of Eight summit in Japan and at this month's UN Millennium summit. 

A U.S. official said, however, that officials had determined that the equipment had "no commercial application" and could not be used in commercial reactors.

Russia's relations with Iran and its insistence on pursuing commercial deals, particularly in the nuclear sphere, have been a source of irritation to Washington.

Russia has pursued a deal to help build a reactor at Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station, despite Washington's insistence that Tehran could use the technology to produce nuclear weapons.

Bespalko said there were inherent guarantees for Iran's use of technology as it was a member of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency and therefore subject to periodic inspections of its civil nuclear sites.

Mikhail Pogorely, editor of the periodical "Nuclear Safety," saw no direct link to weapons production, but said Iran could still benefit from the technology.

"There is no clear answer here," he said. "I think the technology on its own cannot simply be turned into nuclear weapons, but once people start learning the alphabet, you can't stop them from learning the rest on their own."



Staff writer Vladimir Kovalyev also contributed to this report.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Hostages in Sochie


n MOSCOW (Reuters) - Three masked men brandishing firearms and grenades took four people hostage in a southern Russian resort town on Thursday, demanding a $30 million ransom and the freeing of all Chechens from jail.

The FSB security service said in a statement the gunmen had initially taken four people hostage in a small hotel under construction in the Black Sea resort town of Lazarevskoye, but that one of the captives had escaped by jumping from a window.

It said the hostage-takers had thrown a video cassette from a window of the building, showing three men and one woman chained with handcuffs to a pipe. A jerry-can, said to contain petrol, and a grenade were also shown in the film.

The drama was being played out in a town around 50 kilometers from the main Black Sea resort centre of Sochi, in a region lying some 450 kilometers west of war-torn Chechnya. A government spokesman said, however, that the incident had no Chechen connection.



Kremlin Eyes Elections


n MOSCOW (SPT) - A pack of the top dogs from the country's defense and security agencies are poised to run for the gubernatorial seats up for grabs in 33 regions this year in what analysts say reflects both the Kremlin's drive to tighten its grip over the provinces and the general public's desire for a stronger hand in local government.

At least five regions will see senior officers from the Defense Ministry and Federal Security Service vying for gubernatorial posts between October and December. 

Analysts said the Kremlin is trying to install its loyalists in as many regions as possible, with preference given to those candidates who have years of military or security service under their belts and, thus, are more likely to obey commands from Moscow.



Duma Still Immune


n MOSCOW (SPT) - The State Duma on Wednesday defeated a bill proposed by liberal legislators to limit immunity from prosecution that lawmakers now enjoy.

The Duma voted 119 to 133, with nine abstentions, against the bill that was lambasted by Communists and ultranationalists.

The bill appeared to be partially prompted by accusations in the press that some lawmakers were involved in shady doings or had criminal connections. Under current legislation, prosecutors cannot open a criminal case against any parliamentary deputy unless it is approved by the chamber.

The bill, proposed by the Union of Right Forces, would have allowed prosecutors to open criminal cases against Duma deputies without securing the chamber's approval.



Babitsky Trial Date


n MOSCOW (AP) - Radio journalist Andrei Babitsky, who was detained in Chechnya earlier this year after his reporting angered Russian authorities, faces a trial on Oct. 2 on charges of using false documents.

Babitsky, who works for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty, said Tuesday he had been told the trial would be held in the town of Makhachkala in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, adjacent to Chechnya. 

If found guilty, Babitsky faces up to two years in a labor camp. 



Space Pioneer Dies


n MOSCOW (Reuters) - Cosmonaut German Titov, Moscow's second man in space and the first person to spend more than a day in orbit, has been found dead in his home sauna, police said on Thursday. He was 65.

A police spokesman said the early suggestion was Titov probably died of carbon monoxide poisoning late on Wednesday. Gennady Seleznyov, speaker of parliament's lower house where Titov was a Communist deputy, said the ex-cosmonaut may have suffered a heart attack.

On Aug. 6 and 7, 1961, Titov spent 25 hours and 18 minutes on board the tiny Soviet Vostok-2 spacecraft in what was the first full-scale space mission after two mostly symbolic space flights by a Russian and an American. On April 12 that year, Yury Gagarin made the first flight on Vostok-1, which lasted less than two hours. Titov was the backup cosmonaut for that flight.



Iraq Oil Program


n UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russia, France and Tunisia lobbied UN Security Council members on Thursday on the need to lower the amount of funds Iraq contributes for Gulf war victims from 30 percent to 20 percent of oil sales, diplomats said.

The council was holding closed-door discussions on the latest UN report on the "oil-for-food" program that allows Iraq to sell unlimited quantities of oil to buy food, medicine and other civilian necessities to offset the impact of 10-year old sanctions on ordinary Iraqis.

No decisions are expected by the 15-member body on Thursday or on Friday when Hans Blix, the director of the new UN weapons agency, talks to the council about how his teams are ready to go to Iraq if Baghdad ever allows them in.

Most council members would not oppose Russia's proposal if it came to a vote, not expected before December, if then, diplomats said.

TITLE: Arms Deals on the Table As Klebanov Visits India
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia and India are close to clinching a package of hefty arms deals that are capable of keeping the order books of some of the nation's defense industry flagships busy for years, experts said.


Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov arrived in New Delhi on Tuesday to negotiate what he has described as "an enormous package" of documents that cover all spheres of Russian-Indian relations, including arms deals. Klebanov, whose delegation includes top brass from Russia's leading arms exporters - Rosvooruzheniye and Promexport - said Russia has never signed so many cooperation deals with foreign countries before, but disclosed only one.

Klebanov told Itar-Tass that he will discuss a contract that will cover exports and the licensed production of 320 T-90S tanks in India, but noted that he cannot say when this deal would be signed.

Nikolai Malykh, the general director of Uralvagonzavod, which manufactures these main battle tanks, arrived in New Delhi with Klebanov and Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region where the tank maker is based, and told reporters on Tuesday that the deal will be signed within the next few days.

The deal will provide for exports of 124 T-90Ss and licensed production of another 196 of these tanks in India for an estimated $750 million to $900 million, according to Konstantin Ma ki yen ko, deputy head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategy and Technologies.

Makiyenko said Klebanov will probably finalize these and other deals, but President Vladimir Putin will formally sign them when he is in India on Oct. 2-4. Another major deal that could be clinched soon is licensed production of up to 100 Su-30MKI fighters by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.

Klebanov said in an interview in July that the contract will be signed by the end of this year. Sukhoi chief Mikhail Pogosyan is also in India negotiating the deal that may fetch a whopping total of more than $1 billion for his company, according to CAST's estimates.

Sukhoi's chief rival MiG is also set for a hefty deal with India.

A MiG official said Wednesday in a telephone interview that the deal will be clinched during Putin's visit and will include retrofitting the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier, which Russia is to give to India after India pays for the work, and delivery of dozens of MiG-29Ks. The official, who asked not to be named, said MiG general director Nikolai Nikitin will travel to India with Putin.

MiG wants to deliver up to 60 MiG-29K fighters to be based both on the Gorshkov and a coastal air base. Such a quantity of fighters and retrofitting of the Gorshkov will cost India a total of more than $2 billion, according to CAST's estimates.

Yet another deal that will be discussed, but probably not signed, during Klebanov's visit will be the delivery of six S-300PMU air defense systems that have a range of more than 200 kilometers and can intercept ballistic missiles, a Defense Ministry official said Wednesday.

TITLE: Onako Sale: Better Times Ahead for Investors?
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With a surprise bid of $1.08 billion, a company connected to Tyumen Oil Co. beat out three other contenders to win a privatization tender for control of the Onako oil company, the Federal Property Fund announced Tuesday.


The bid by Yevrotek for the 85-percent stake was more than double the starting price of $425.25 million, a sign that the sell-off was conducted fairly, industry observers said.

The tender, the first privatization under the government of President Vladimir Putin, had been seen as a crucial test of its pledges to distance themselves from the well-connected oligarchs and insider deals that played a big role in the sell-offs of the mid-1990s. Dozens of stakes in state-owned companies were sold at that time for bids barely above the starting price.

"This is the first time in Russian privatization that a company was sold for its real value," said Gennady Kra sov sky, an oil analyst at the NIKoil brokerage.

The Onako prize will boost Tyumen Oil, or TNK, from fifth to fourth place among Russian oil companies in terms of output, oil analysts said. No. 11 Onako produced just under 8 million tons of crude last year, while TNK produced 24 million tons.

Federal Property Fund head Vladimir Malin said that the $1.08 billion bid was the biggest sum ever paid in the privatization of an oil company, even though Onako was one of the smallest oil firms to have been auctioned.

Property Minister Farit Gazizullin hailed the sell-off as a turning point, saying the size of the winning bid and the way the tender was executed signaled an improvement in the investment climate.

"At last, bidders have begun to treat a sale as a competition between financial proposals," Gazizullin was quoted by Interfax as saying.

The bid also more than fulfilled the government's announced target in May to reap $1 billion from the privatization of stakes in oil companies Onako, Rosneft, Slavneft and LUKoil. Sales of the stakes in the latter three companies were later abandoned.

The only privatization auction to fetch more money was the sale in 1997 of a 25-percent stake in the Svyazinvest telecommunications holding for $1.875 billion. A 9-percent stake in LUKoil, the nation's No. 1 oil firm, sold for $440 million last year.

The starting bid for Onako of $425.25 million, plus a $4.5 million fee to cover tender costs, was fixed by organizer Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. Oil analysts had predicted that bidding would top out at $500 million to $600 million.

Malin of the Federal Property Fund said the other participants in the tender were TNK with a $1.03 billion bid, Profit House with $1 billion and Yugraneft with $450 million. Profit House represented an alliance between oil majors Yukos and Sibneft and Gazprom subsidiary Stroitransgaz.

LUKoil, which had said earlier that it would take part in the auction, was conspicuously absent. LUKoil declined to comment Tuesday on the sale.

TNK spokesman Vladimir Bobylyov confirmed in a telephone interview that the company had played a significant role in founding Yevrotek, but he declined to give further details. TNK is part of the powerful Alfa Group holding headed by tycoons Pyotr Aven and Mikhail Fridman.

Yevrotek is based in the Ural Mountains town of Kamensk Uralsky and was established in late 1998 by the firms Uralsky and Kongurs, Malin said. The ownership structure of those two companies was unclear Tuesday.

But Malin said he had few details on Yevrotek's operations. Yevrotek's annual budget is about $10 million, or 10 times less than its winning bid, and - like all the bidders - it has no debts, he said.

The company intends to take out loans to pay for the Onako stake, he said.

Yevrotek must now pay the government $1.08 billion within the next 10 days. It will take control of the stake in a month, providing the sale is cleared by the Federal Security Service and the Anti-Monopoly Ministry.

Interfax quoted TNK first vice president Viktor Vekselberg as saying Wednesday that the company will have no trouble raising the cash to buy the 85-percent state stake in Onako.

He said financial arrangements to borrow the money from state banks Vnesh ekonombank and Sberbank had been made before the privatization auction. Foreign investors would also be involved, he added.

Vekselberg said at a news conference that TNK had adequate resources to bid for stakes in more oil-company privatizations.

"If, for example, a privatization auction was held for Slavneft [the nation's No. 9 oil major] in the near future, then we are ready to find the finances to make a bid."

Oil analysts said the billion-dollar bids placed for the stake suggested that competition had been fierce and that it had been sold for a fair price.

"The high sale price showed there had been real competition in the tender," said Ivan Mazalov, oil analyst at the Troika Dialog investment bank.

Onako produced 7.49 million tons of crude in 1999, bringing in net profits of $310 million on revenues of $840 million. This year, revenues are expected to jump to almost $1 billion and profits to $350 million, according to NIKoil.

The jewel in Onako's crown is its production unit Orenburgneft in the Orenburg region of the Urals. Orenburgneft owns 94.5 percent of the company's proven oil reserves of 295 million tons and exports about 40 percent of what it produces. Those exports account for 70 percent of Onako's revenues.

With Onako's output, TNK will fall between No. 3 Surgutneftegaz and No. 5 Tatneft.

The remaining 15 percent of Onako is owned by a group of foreign and Russian shareholders. About 4.5 percent is held by Credit Suisse First Boston and the Depositary Clearing Co. and is in free trade on the stock market, according to Aton brokerage. Cyprus-based Cougar Investments also holds 2.3 percent. Yukos is thought to own a 2-percent stake acquired from U.S. investor Kenneth Dart.

The sale of Onako comes as the oil industry continues to consolidate and the bigger players hone in on their smaller rivals. LUKoil has assumed control over Komineft, and Sidanko has been caught in a fight to protect its oil-producing subsidiaries from take-over attempts.

TITLE: UES Heads Investigated Over Taxes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian tax police have launched a criminal investigation into top managers of Russia's Unified Energy System, UES, the national power utility headed by Anatoly Chubais, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday.


Itar-Tass cited tax officials as saying the investigation was connected with suspected tax evasion of 3.2 billion rubles ($115 million).

Prime quoted Kuzma Sha len kov, a spokesman for the federal tax police, as saying the probe could be dropped if UES paid its debts, which were discovered during a check at the end of July and the beginning of August.

The criminal investigation was launched on Aug. 28, he said.

Tax police were investigating why UES had not been able to pay taxes on time and planned to check UES subsidiaries in Sa ma ra, Rostov and Stavropol regions, it quoted Shalenkov as saying.

In July, Russia's Audit Chamber launched an investigation into the partial privatization of UES, alleging that a stake in the company which had been earmarked for Russian investors had been illegally sold to foreigners.

The charges were seen by many then as part of a crackdown on powerful businessmen known as oligarchs, and the Audit Chamber passed the case on to prosecutors without publicly calling for any sanctions.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Ericsson Gets the Nod


n MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Sonic Duo, in which Finland's Sonera has a minority stake, has chosen Sweden's Ericsson to build a Moscow GSM mobile network, Deputy Commercial Director Anton Mironov said on Thursday.

An Ericsson spokesman in Moscow declined to comment on the deal.

Mironov said the contract for building the GSM 900/1800 standard network with would be worth around $100 million.

"A precise figure will be named in about two weeks, perhaps," he added.



IMF Wants Action


n PRAGUE, Czech Republic - The International Monetary Fund is in talks with the government but is looking for deeds and not words on the reform of the economy, IMF Managing Director Horst Kuehler said Wednesday at a news conference.

Kuehler said the government's economic program looked "promising" and the IMF would like to be able to support it.



AGD Says Its Piece


n MOSCOW (SPT) - A local diamond firm said Thursday it had outlined its side in a two-year license dispute with a Canadian company over a $6 billion diamond field in northern Russia.


Oil and diamond firm Arkhangelskgeoldobycha, or AGD, and Canadian firm Archangel Diamond Corp. joined in a venture in 1994, but since summer 1988 the firms have been in a dispute over who should possess the license and who should fund the exploration of the Verk hotina deposit, a 440-square-kilometer area 150 kilometers west of Arkhangelsk.

The Stockholm court is to adjudicate on the rift in December.

TITLE: U.S. Normalizes Chinese Trade Relations
AUTHOR: By Paul Eckert
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING - China cheered Wednesday the U.S. Senate's approval of a trade deal as a potential new beginning for often tortured relations between the world's last major communist government and the world's capitalist superpower.


"We hope the passage of the bill can become a new starting point," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi told reporters after the U.S. Senate approved permanent normal trade relations for China.

Sun called the overwhelming 83 to 15 Senate vote for PNTR on Tuesday "conducive to creating a long-term and stable environment for Sino-U.S. economic and trade cooperation."

PNTR, approved by the House of Representatives May 24 in a 237 to 197 vote, will come into effect once China becomes a member of the World Trade Organization, expected within months.

It will widen for U.S. businesses the doors to China's markets, which only began to open in the late 1970s, and bring huge change to China as it tries to remold its once hermit state-run economy to fit a globalized market.

Most major Asian stock markets shrugged off the widely expected news, although it did boost China-linked shares listed in Hong Kong as investors bought into companies viewed as likely to benefit from China's entry into the WTO.

The annual vote in the U.S. Congress on China's trade status, which PNTR removes, has been a major irritant in relations.

Beijing fumed over every opportunity it gave American critics to lambaste China over human rights and other issues on which there was little or no agreement.

Sun did make plain China's displeasure at an amendment setting up a watchdog body to monitor China's human rights record - part of the price U.S. President Bill Clinton paid to get PNTR passed.

"This is a trade agreement ... and we think it is inappropriate to include items which have nothing to do with trade," Sun said.

Critics were just as unhappy that PNTR had passed.

"Today's vote by the U.S. Senate marks a low watermark in America's honorable commitment to defend the human rights of people around the globe," Wang Xizhe, exiled co-founder of the China Democracy Party, said in a statement from Washington.

Dozens of members of Wang's group, which tried in vain to set up China's first opposition party in 1998, languish in jail among thousands of political prisoners.

But American businessmen, the big winners in the Washington vote, were ecstatic after lobbying hard to get the bill through. They argued that opening China's economy far wider was a major boon for the U.S. economy.

Christian Murck, speaking for the American Chamber of Commerce in China, called the vote "the most important thing that's happened in U.S.-China relations in the last 10 years."

"It certainly puts the economic and trade relationship on a much sounder footing," said Murck, general manager of the Beijing branch of Chase Manhattan Bank.

And ordinary people also celebrated the prospect of wider choice in a market that a decade ago had none - and the higher paying jobs foreign firms will bring.

Twenty-six-year-old Shanghai salesman Li Shuwen said, "I earn about 2,000 yuan [$240] a month, but if more foreign firms are here after WTO, I will most probably job hop because they pay better."

China has pushed its dogged 14-year pursuit of WTO membership hard over the last few years as a crucial element in its attempt to reform a command economy producing many substandard goods.

But the move to a more market-based economy will be painful for Chinese labor, forcing tough choices on Chinese leaders over reform of state banks and firms and producing winners and losers in a way socialism never did.

"New high-tech companies and private companies are prepared for entry into the WTO," said Beijing sales manager Xu Xiaodong.

"However, for most traditional and state-owned companies, it means they will have to modernize to cope with the international competition," he said.

WTO membership is likely to throw millions of Chinese out of work on factories and farms - the main basis of Communist Party rule - and threaten to unleash more of the unrest China has experienced over the past decade.

TITLE: St. Petersburg Is Prime Target For Fuel Crisis
TEXT: THE European fuel crisis has found an echo in St. Petersburg, with gasoline prices starting to rise and local suppliers saying that stocks are going down.


The same combination in fact sent fuel prices rocketing twice in April and May 1999, and it was too much of a shock for anyone to have forgotten it. In June the same year, prices went down again, although they stayed above the levels they were at before the crisis hit. And there are certain aspects of last year's problems that help explain the current problems.

Why St. Petersburg? Well, one reason is the city's geographical peculiarities. Being so close to a number of borders, St. Petersburg sees a predominance of export deals over domestic contracts, expressed in terms of transportation and pipelines. When world oil prices went soaring, the advantages of export became all too obvious to Russian oil companies, who either sold their wares abroad or witheld supplies back at home in order to hike the domestic price up.

Surgutneftegaz, the city's main fuel supplier and the owner of the closest refinery, is a case in point - all the more so because, when it comes to the local market, it has few serious competitors in St. Petersburg.

When the crisis hit last year, we witnessed something that we may well witness again: drivers forming massive lines at gas stations in a rush to fill up their tanks as soon as possible. I wasn't one of them - but I won't try and hide the fact that this time, I raced out to fill up soon after filing an article on the local fuel market, which raised interesting ethical questions about journalists using the information they dig out for their own purposes. As everyone knows, those who report on the stock market are not supposed to buy shares (although it hasn't stopped one or two editors around the world from benefiting from inside knowledge and a well-timed article). I hope, however, that buying a full tank of 92-octane gasoline didn't violate any major professional code of conduct.

In any case, despite widespread reporting and discussion at the beginning of this week of the imminent rise in fuel costs, the scene at the city's gas stations remained calm. Thankfully, the fuel market is not the same beast as, for example, the banking sector, where an imprudent article can cause horrendous damage to client loyalty to financial institutions.

I find it unlikely, however, that local oil barons are in this case trying to spread rumors and manipulate the press in order to give themselves an excuse to raise their own prices. That's because it is, in fact, true that the two biggest oil-storage points in the city contain enough gasoline for only three days' consumption. And it is also true that export contracts are becoming more and more lucrative for Russian oil companies. Apart from anything else, the economic force of international oil prices is bound to affect our market here.

Oil experts have been prophesying a domestic price hike since the beginning of the summer. This doesn't mean that the oil companies won't try and use the stir to their advantage. But the press cannot create this crisis - it can only forecast it, and try and forecast it accurately. And the events in Europe are a good illustration of what oil shortages can result in. 


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

TITLE: Russian Leaders' Relations
AUTHOR: By Hal Piper
TEXT: AMERICAN presidents (and presidential candidates) come with families. Beaming wives and well-scrubbed children are a feature of every campaign. Laura Bush spoke up for her husband at the Republican convention, and Tipper Gore got a famous kiss from hers. 


At least since Eleanor Roosevelt, American political family members have been visible personalities. When a critic panned Margaret Truman's singing, father Harry threatened to punch him in the nose. 

What a contrast to Russia, where the families of leaders are rarely seen and almost never heard. 

Or is it? In fact, the offspring of Russian leaders often cut larger figures than their U.S. counterparts. Americans of a certain age remember Tricia Nixon's wedding or Amy Carter reading a book during state dinners, but few of us have kept track of them since they left the White House. What Russian, on the other hand, could forget Galina Brezhneva and her mink-booted lover Boris the Gypsy? 

Most of the principal Soviet and Russian leaders had family members who made waves. And the niece of the first, Vladimir Lenin, stirred up the latest controversy. 

After Lenin died in 1924, his remains were embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum in Red Square. In the new, post-communist Russia, there are periodic suggestions that the body be removed and reburied. When that happens Olga Ulyanova, 78, springs into action. 

The nearest relative of the childless Lenin, Ulyanova lived in the Kremlin with the children of Josef Stalin and other leaders until 1949. A retired chemistry professor and still a convinced Communist, she lives on a small pension a short subway ride from her uncle's tomb. And she continues to organize letter-writing campaigns to denounce the idea of reburying Lenin. You can't rewrite history, she says: "Lenin is the history of the creation of the socialist state." 

One of Ulyanova's childhood playmates was Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Josef Stalin. In 1967, when she was 41, Alliluyeva provoked worldwide headlines by defecting to the United States. She married, had a child, wrote a best-selling book and then in 1984 she returned to Russia, saying she was disillusioned with American life. 

But she remained there only a couple of years before moving back to the United States and then on to England where, at 74, she lives quietly. 

At least Svetlana's is a happier story than those of her brothers. Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's first child, an artillery lieutenant, was captured during World War II. When Germany offered to exchange him for a captive field marshal, Stalin replied through the Swedish Red Cross: "I do not exchange a marshal for a soldier." Adding to the son's humiliation was another of his father's statements: "There are no prisoners of war, there are traitors." 

Yakov died in the POW camp, and this summer, 57 years later, the Soviet Military Journal published an article claiming to explain his death. The young prisoner was humiliated, the journal said, by reports that his father had ordered the murder of 15,000 Polish army officers in the Katyn forest. So he flung himself against an electric fence. 

Of all the Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev had perhaps the most productive progeny. His daughter Rada married a journalist, Alexei Adzhubei, who probably owed his rise, and certainly owed his fall, to family connections. But in the late 1950s and early '60s, Adzhubei shook up and greatly improved Soviet journalism. 

Khrushchev's son, Sergei, made headlines last year when he took American citizenship - 40 years, as gloating American commentators were quick to point out, after his father had vowed that the Soviet Union would bury America. 

But Sergei Khrushchev, 64, is no defector. He is a scholar, teaching at Brown University and writing about Russia and Soviet-American relations. 

Leonid Brezhnev's son Yury was a legendary drunk who got the dream sinecure for a high-liver: deputy foreign trade minister. His duties took him hunting in Africa and night-clubbing in Paris. 

Yury's sister Galina was a philology student in Kishinev, Moldavia, already with a reputation for promiscuity, when in 1951 the circus came to town. When it left, Galina went, too. First she married a strongman, then a magician. She had affairs with lion tamers, clowns and acrobats. Eventually she acceded to her father's will and married a young police lieutenant. 

Both spouses prospered: Galina got an apartment of her own and cover for her continuing adventures; and her new husband, Yury Churbanov, enjoyed a meteoric career, rising to three-star general and deputy interior minister. 

In 1982, rumors started to fly about corruption and licentiousness reaching right into the Kremlin. Someone, it seemed, was trying to discredit the senescent Leonid Brezhnev. The central figure in the scandal was the flamboyant Boris Buryatse, known as "Boris the Gypsy." It was said that Galina and Boris used their connections to smuggle diamonds - in one case, in a circus elephant's teeth. 

Convicted of speculation in contraband goods, Boris the Gypsy was bundled off to prison, where he eventually died. Galina's husband Churbanov was convicted of taking bribes and sentenced to 12 years in prison, while Galina escaped prosecution and lived out her days on the outskirts of Moscow, gradually selling off her mementos to buy vodka. 

When Galina died in 1998 at age 69, one Russian television station eulogized her thus: "She loved diamonds and wild rides in Papa's Mercedes; but by today's standards she was a good girl." 

"Today's standards" was presumably a dig at the wide-open corruption of post-Communist Russia. One participant, according to whispers in Mos cow, was Boris Yeltsin's daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko. 

Russian media unfriendly to her father claimed to know that she had made tens of thousands of dollars' worth of purchases on the credit card of a Swiss company that had lucrative Kremlin contracts, and that her husband, Leonid, was linked to foreign bank accounts and oil trading. 

And the new man in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin? He met his wife, Lyudmila, an airline stewardess, on a blind date. Their daughters, Masha and Katya, 15 and 14, are being tutored at home. They seem to be the ideal Kremlin family, seldom seen and almost never heard.


Hal Piper writes for The Baltimore Sun, where this comment first appeared.

TITLE: What Other Papers Are Saying
AUTHOR: by Ali Nassor
TEXT: As it emerged this week that the government, acting - as many suspect - through the agency of Gazprom, was plotting to take over Vladimir Gusinsky's media empire, Gusinsky himself claimed that an agreement handing over control of his Media-MOST holding amounted to little more than blackmail.


Meanwhile, a professional hitman was sending a message to a leading local crime-fighter, while the country's minister in charge of law and order was in town berating the police for their abysmal record.



A Share in Freedom


Relations between former business partners Media-MOST and Gazprom, one of the state's richest companies, had begun to sour long before July 20, the date when the two parties signed a deal that has been the focus of a bitter financial and political row, according to Izvestia.


Without going into the detailed background of the issue, the paper asks questions as to why the deal was kept secret for so long, only for its signatories to begin screaming at each other. The previous silence, says Izvestia, implies that some other kind of secret deal hung on the negotiations.

The paper also says that the two sides will never understand one another: One puts money first, while the other sees freedom of speech as a far more important issue.

But Gazprom was not the only sneaky party in getting Gusinsky to sign away his pride and joy in return for freedom and the right to travel. Gusinsky was equally cunning, if claims by Gazprom-Media's general director Alfred Kokh, also a signatory to the document, hold any water.

Quoting him, the paper says that by July, Media-MOST was found to be the owner of not more than 20 percent of the stock of all its subsidiaries, as opposed to the 70 to 100 percent it was in possession of just four months earlier - giving us reason to believe that Gusinsky had been registering the stock in the name of different organizations, including offshore companies in Gibralter, to avert their seizure as debt compensation. 



Vanishing Act


But, according to Vedomosti, only a handful of people know the exact number of organizations under Media-MOST's umbrella. However, if a Web site belonging to an organization calling itself "Democrats for the Freedom of Information" is to be trusted, then Gazprom is looking at the takeover of 52 companies, says the paper.


If Gazprom president Rem Vyak hi rev has got to know of this number, it might explain why he has turned up the heat on Gusinsky. "If [the deal] was signed, it must be fulfilled ... or else we'll have to [resort to] non-peaceful tactics," the paper quotes him as saying.

However, Vedomosti suggests that if Vyakhirev resorts to the courts to settle the issue and wins, then he may end up reigning over an empty empire, whose contents have mysteriously disappeared.

Yevgeny Kiselyov, general director of Media-MOST's NTV television station, has his plan for an amicable and mutually beneficial settlement relayed to the world by Kommersant (owned by Boris Berezovsky, by the way).

Except that it's Gusinsky's plan really, says the anchorman, put forward in the earlier stages of negotiations between him and Gazprom - one that was turned down by the latter because it had political rather than commercial interests at heart.

This can be the only reason, according to Kiselyov, why Gazprom rejected offers of a 25-percent-plus-one-share slice of every Media-MOST company, but only 10 percent in NTV. 



Escape Route


Perhaps the Kremlin is contemplating a return to accusing Gusinsky of criminal activity, says Rossiiskaya Gazeta, which claims that the Prosecutor General's Office is determined to see the original embezzlement charges thoroughly investigated. This would involve obtaining information on the alleged transfer of Media-MOST shares to Gibraltar, but the paper says that getting Gibraltar's autorities to help them out will not be an easy task.


Novaya Gazeta, on the other hand, believes that Gusinsky has now gained the upper hand in the dispute - and all thanks to a helping hand from an unexpected quarter - Press Minister Mikhail Lesin.

Since Lesin stamped the agreement with his seal, argues the paper, Media-MOST now has much more weight behind it when it claims that the whole freedom-for-shares affair is politically motivated.

At the same time, the paper says Lesin has done what has always been traditional in Russian political circles: signing a document without having the slightest idea of what it says.

Moreover, says the paper, working out the precise location of the boundary between what you want to do and what you are legally entitled to do has always been tricky for the nation's bureacrats. Even so, one might have thought that the logic of a government minister not mediating a deal between a state-owned organization and a private company was self-explanatory.

This is not uncommon practice in Russia, says Novaya Gazeta, especially if one recalls the behavior of Berezovsky, Boris Abramovich and Boris Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko during the previous regime. All worked behind the scenes as shadow presidents, so there should be nothing unusual seen in Lesin's decision to grant or withhold amnesty and freedom of movement.

But the paper expresses disappointment that Lesin didn't seem to realize freedom of movement is a constitutional right already well defined by law.



Warning Shots


Speaking of the law, back in St. Petersburg Interior Minister Vladimir Ru shai lo was reminded of the city's glorious reputation for contract murders, hot on the heels of his discussions with FBI director Louis Freeh, says Novosti Peterburga.


While Rushailo was hammering the cops for their poor performance - comparing the situation in St. Petersburg not so favorably to that in the capital and the war-torn North Caucasus - it was no surprise to the man on the street when a hitman set out to prove he could bump off a leading detective whenever he wished.

The shooting - had it succeeded - would have been the third contract hit in a week, following the successful assassinations of the head of a district education committee, Igor Froyanov, and the murder of three people in a broad daylight in front of Astoria Hotel, says the paper.

Senior detective Vasily Beglov, who is in the final stages of a probe into corruption allegations surrounding the local funeral business, escaped with his life, in an incident the Prosecutor's Office is certain was a warning to scare him, says Smena. 

But the paper reckons the shooting should be no surprise: the "Funeral Affair" reportedly involves former officials from City Hall - and the trial opens in December.

TITLE: jackie chan tries hand at chinese western
AUTHOR: by Kevin Thomas
TEXT: The hilarious, knockabout "Shanghai Noon," Jackie Chan's best American picture to date, breathes fresh life into the virtually dormant comedy-western. It also marks the relaxed and confident directorial debut of Tom Dey, working from a consistently funny, inventive and perceptive script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, whose previous major screen credit was "Lethal Weapon 4."


To top off all these pluses, Chan has a sensational sidekick in Owen Wilson and a beautiful and intrepid leading lady in Lucy Liu. All in all, it's a kick in more ways than one.

The film opens like "The Last Emperor," in Beijing's Forbidden City in all its vast grandeur, pomp and ceremony. It's 1881, and the exquisite Princess Pei Pei (Liu), who's been reading "The Sleeping Beauty" in English and longing to live happily ever after, resists being married off to the emperor, a goofy 12-year-old.

The princess naively allows herself to be spirited away by a young Briton (Jason Connery) who delivers her to an evil ex-Imperial Guard, Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), who runs a Nevada mine with Chinese forced labor. He sends word that the princess' safe return depends upon receiving a treasure in gold. Imperial Guardsman Chon Wang (Chan) winds up in a party dispatched to Carson City to ransom the princess.

Mayhem comes fast and furious when the train carrying the Imperial party, dressed in their elaborately embroidered silk robes, is held up by rowdy bandit Roy O'Bannon (Wilson) and his really nasty henchmen (headed by Walter Goggins). O'Bannon, a rangy blond guy and a classic western good-bad man, and the rugged Chon strike up a wildly seesawing relationship, squaring off repeatedly but with O'Bannon gradually ending up Chon's sidekick.

Roy is much amused when he finally learns Chon's name, which comes out of his mouth sounding like "John Wayne," a name O'Bannon finds comically inappropriate for a frontiersman. (Never mind Roy's real name.) When Chon, in one of his literally countless grand flourishes of martial arts, rescues a Sioux boy from some Crow warriors, the Sioux chief (Russell Badger) treats Chon to a peace pipe so powerful he wakes up the next morning betrothed to the chief's gorgeous daughter (Brandon Merrill).

"At least he's not a white man," shrugs the chief philosophically, in one of the film's amusing multicultural asides.

Chan and his colleagues must have decided at the outset to have some fun while engaging in the hard work an action-filled western demands. (It's an attitude that has always permeated Chan's films.)

Gough and Millar have created a sterling script that allows Dey, a seasoned commercials director, to keep things moving along with a spaciousness that inspired zaniness demands. The script is good-natured yet sharp, filled with deft characterizations like Wilson's Roy, who comes across like a laid-back California surfer dude who's both reckless and canny.

In its own lighthearted way, the film is quite candid about racism on the frontier, which older Hollywood westerns rarely, if ever, were. There's an essential dignity, too, in the depiction of the Chinese and a respect for their ancient traditions, even if the regal but independent-spirited princess has no intention of returning to her cloistered existence.

One dazzling feat of derring-do follows another, defying descriptions in the speed and bravura of Chan's martial artistry, in particular, and in all the action sequences in general. Yet the moment that just could become a classic finds Roy and Chon getting drunk while soaking in adjacent tubs in a fancy brothel and singing the craziest songs you'll ever hear.

No action picture is complete without just the right setting for the big showdown - in this instance, the dashing, virile villains Lo Fong and the crooked sheriff (Xander Berkeley), whose name is Van Cleef, surely a homage to the great heavy Lee Van Cleef. It happens to be a fine old Spanish Mission-era church, with a belfry put to the best use since Hitchcock shot "Vertigo" in a similar tower structure.

For all the easy-going quality of "Shanghai Noon," it is a work of impeccable craftsmanship, with splendid cinematography by Dan Mindel (with Alberta, Canada, standing in for Nevada) and impeccable costumes by Joseph Porro and faultless production design by Peter J. Hampton; period authenticity often goes out the window in comedy-westerns, but not here. Randy Edelman's score rounds out the buoyant, effervescent delight that is "Shanghai Noon."



"Shanghai Noon" is now playing at the Crystal Palace. See listings for showtimes.


- LAT

TITLE: 70 years in the acting business
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: She entered the Bolshoi Drama Theater in 1931, and is preparing to mark a venerable 70 years on stage next year. Yes, Maria Prizvan-Sokolova, born in 1909, is still acting, with her most recent performance being Voinitskaya in Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" on Sept. 12. The cast playing in the production now - apart from the late Yevgeny Lebedev - is exactly the same as the one in the premiere of Tovstonogov's show in 1982.


"Talented actors, who sense the threads in a director's staging - this is what gives a production long life and resonance," Prizvan-Sokolova said. "And 'Uncle Vanya' is a case in point."

Unlike those actors who claim they cannot express themselves to the fullest in a small role, Prizvan-Sokolova enjoyed her walk-on parts as well.

"I started with walk-on parts: My first stage appearance at BDT was a page in Schiller's 'Don Carlos,' and it helped me a great deal to gain professional maturity," she said.

She has always been what is called "a character actress," with her characters as varied as a naughty boy and an insane old woman. "The character's essence, this is what has always been important for me, not the stage presence at all," Prizvan-Sokolova said.

Recalling the 70 years with the BDT, the actress says that the theater has changed, of course, and not just artistically. "The atmosphere within the company is entirely different. When the theater's artistic director entered the hall, the entire troupe would bow, and this was not at all ostentatious, like it would be now, but came from the heart, full of true respect," she said. "There was a sacred spirit within the theater. Now, it is far more liberal."

"I like both, the new freedom, and the past respect," she smiles. "I've loved theater all my life."

Theater has literally become her life, she admits, and not without sacrifice. "Though I have been married twice, I don't have any children," she says. "But everything in my life has happened very naturally. I never regret choosing the career of an actress, and I thank God for the long and happy life I've lived."

"I am not a career person, not at all. I never wanted someone else's role, and never refused to perform."

There was only one, not deliberate, exception: the role of Margarita in Grigory Dityatkov sky's interpretation of August Strindberg's "The Father," which premiered in 1998.

"I played the first eight premiere performances, and then fell ill, but wanted to be back on stage in this role," she said. "But as I gave it second thoughts sitting at home, I realized I simply couldn't accept what the director had made of my character."

Prizvan-Sokolova argues that the role was severely altered with Margarita's originally negative nature turning neutral, if not sweet. "The character lost all her spark," she said. "And it is an obvious departure from the original author's text, which I cannot take."

What attracts her most in an actor's work, Prizvan-Sokolova said, is the ability to create a character, to plunge into roles completely. To get deeper into one of her characters - an old, insane Jewish woman who lost her children during World War II - she visited a psychiatric hospital. When meeting the patients, she talked to them, watched them and analyzed their behavior.

"I went to the clinic several times, but felt like I was meeting the wrong people," she recalls. "But I kept going, till I finally saw a patient, hunched up, with her hands bent to her face. Then I realized that I had found what I was looking for."

"BDT has been through quite a few ups and downs during the 70 years I have been with the troupe, with perhaps the most challenging period coming after Georgy Tovstonogov's death," she said. "Some actors died, some went to Moscow, and we were losing one production after another. It is encouraging for me to see the revival we are having now. And I take my hat off to Kirill Lavrov, who has managed to rescue the theater."

Prizvan-Sokolova said she has reservations about further acting.

"The theater is the very thing that makes me live on now, but I am not sure if I can appear on stage again. My last performance gave me a shaky feeling, I dreaded that I might forget my lines," she said. "But if they tell me they need me in another show, I'll do my best."

TITLE: center of judaism plans to restore jewish museum to city
AUTHOR: by Aliona Bocharova
TEXT: While St. Petersburg can claim to have museums devoted to a bewildering array of topics, there is no museum devoted to Judaism as such. But the center "Petersburg Judaism," which was opened this year, plans to recreate the Jewish Museum that existed in the city from 1916 to 1928, and also to research Jewish architecture memorials. Perhaps the first step towards organizing a museum display can be seen at the photo exhibition "Great Synagogues: The Third Destruction of the Temple," now showing at the Institute of Arts History.


The exhibition is the result of expeditions to Ukraine and Belarus, undertaken from 1986 to 2000 with the help of the St. Petersburg Jewish University.

"On this territory Jews represented majority of the population up until the early 20th century. Therefore, we visited all the small communities on our way, finding synagogues almost everywhere," says Alla Sokolova, one of the authors of the exhibition and a worker at the University who took part in the expedition of 1989.

Synagogues shown at the exhibition date from the 16th to the 19th century, and follow an architectural tradition of the time. "Not only did they serve a religious function, they were also used as fortifications," says Sokolova. "Thus, they have no precedent in modern architecture."

The exhibition not only reveals synagogues as ancient architectural monuments, but also illustrates contemporary attitudes towards them. And although the expression "The Third Destruction of the Temple" is the Yiddish expression for the Holocaust, it gains new meaning in the context of the exhibition and can be interpreted as a third - contemporary - stage of destroying Jewish architecture.

The first stage, the post-revolutionary period in Russia, was marked the destruction of many synagogues by the Soviets. During World War II the most significant historical temples were blown up by Nazis, for example, the synagogue "Golden Rose" in Lvov, built in 1582. However, the process is still going on today, when these synagogues are neglected and have no religious function.

In the 1960s, when the Soviets began destroying synagogues again, the destruction enters its third stage.

As Alla Sokolova explains: "Despite the process of restitution - returning synagogues to Jewish communities - the situation is not changing for the better, because these buildings are of no use. In Satanov, famous with tourists for its Jewish cemetery of the 17th and 18th centuries, there are no Jews at all. In Ostrog there is a museum dedicated to the history of the old temple built in 1532, and also a small Jewish community. However, it is beyond their powers to make the synagogue operational."

Jewish architecture is an almost unexplored field of study, and thus the activities of the "Petersburg Judaism" center and their project have a great future. "We lack knowledge about these temples, even the dates are something we are not always sure of," says Alla Sokolova.

Reconstructing the Jewish museum will take a great deal of effort. "Exhibits that were a part of the Jewish Museum are now scattered in other museum collections, such as the St. Petersburg Ethnographic Museum and the Vernadsky Library in Kiev. However, "we hope to travel, making photo-reports and interviews, collect old photos from family archives in St. Petersburg, as well as cooperate with museums abroad that have Jewish collections or separate exhibits, borrowing them for carrying out our own exhibitions." 




"Great Synagogues: The Third Destruction of the Temple." Now on at the Institute of Arts History, 5 St. Isaac's Square. Tel: 314-40-34. Opening hours: Wed., Thu., Fri. 4 to 6 p.m.., Sun. 1 to 5 p.m.

TITLE: dutch museum keeps peter's memory alive
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: Far from St. Petersburg, in the Nether lands, rests a microcosm of Russian history in the form of a small house where Peter the Great once lived. This humble dwelling is located in the town of Zaandam, which is about 20 minutes by commuter train from Amsterdam.


The Tsar Peter House is a museum which contains the humble dwelling where Peter the Great lived the first few days of his stay in Holland. It is half of an old wooden house, supported by a heavy wooden frame, encased in an almost chapel-like brick building. Various paintings of Peter and other Romanovs adorn the walls. A footpath on the asphalt leads to a monument on the small square where Peter first disembarked.

Zaandam used to be called Saardam in the late 17th century. Being a major Dutch shipbuilding center, it was of tremendous interest to Peter, and upon crossing the Dutch border, he travelled directly there. A busy riverside village, with 50 small wharves, numerous sawmills and other supporting infrastructure, it was also home to the Dutch craftsmen who had worked for Peter in Moscow.

One of the latter was a certain Gerrit Kist, whom Peter recognized immediately upon his arrival in Saardam. Peter, who was travelling incognito at the time, with only a few boyars and servants in tow, asked Kist to put him up for a few days.

Kist complained that his house was but a hovel, and he lived in the front half with his wife, and the back half was occupied by a widow of one of his workers. Peter would have none of it, however, and for 7 guilders, the widow was persuaded to move out.

Kist's wooden house, built from the hulls of old ships, a customary building material for houses for the poor, was situated on the very edge of Saardam, in a place called the Crimp. The house had two windows and a tile fireplace which was used for food preparation. Peter slept in a small enclosed box-like bed, which could hardly contain his prodigious size. A small storeroom in the vestibule was where he kept his newly bought carpenter's tools. Here he lived, carefully concealing his identity, posing as a Russian carpenter named Pyotr Mikhailov.

The suspicions of Saardam's populace were raised by the Russian dress of Peter's entourage. One carpenter in Peter's service had even written ahead to his father in Zaandam from Mos cow that Peter the Great would undoubtedly visit, and gave a description of his appearance. 

Kist, held in the tsar's confidence, did not reveal his guest's identity, though eventually it was discovered, much to Peter's dismay. He would get very worked up indeed when the townspeople would come by the wharf where he was working and gawk at him. 

Rumors had even spread in Russia that the tsar had gone abroad and died there. This hearsay gave impetus to the first Streltsy Rebellion, which interrupted Peter's travels, and which he quite ruthlessly quelled.

Peter did return to the house on subsequent trips to Holland, the last of these being in 1717. After Tsar Peter's departure, the house changed hands several times and was forgotten. In the latter half of the 18th century, after Voltaire mentioned the house in his 1761 biography of Peter the Great, and Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich Romanov (later Pavel I) visited it, the house became renowned among royalty and high society, as well as a place of pilgrimage for Russians travelling in the Netherlands.

Napoleon left his mark in the form of comment. After taking note of the small size of Peter's bed, he quipped, "For a truly great man, nothing is too small!"

Alexander I, Alexander II, and many Russian writers visited, including poet Gavrila Derzhavin (a wall plaque bears his refrains) and another of Peter the Great's biographers, Alexei Tolstoy. Over the centuries, many visitors left their autographs carved in the wood, and this practice was only prohibited in the mid '70s. In 1972, Leonid Brezhnev officially signed over the house to the Dutch, and gave the museum a clay death mask of Peter the Great.

Being a bit out of the way, the house is not a major international tourist attraction. The overwhelming majority of the tourists who do come are Russians or are of Russian descent. The house is now managed by Gerard Horneman, who is also the curator of the Zaans Museum in the Zaanse Schans historical village near Zaandam.



Tsar Peter House (Czaar Peterhuisje), Krimp 23, 1506 AA Zaandam, the Netherlands. Tel: +31 (075) 616 03 90.

TITLE: african musician revolutionizes local rock scene
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: When local Afro-rock band Markscheider Kunst plays at Moloko, it's advisable to stay away from the event - otherwise you risk finding yourself sweating in a stuffy basement crammed with 400 or so fans, or even having to hang around outside.


The danceable band's only link to the dark continent is the Congolese singer known as Seraphim, who has been adding hot African rhythms to the lukewarm St. Petersburg beat since 1991.

Seraphim Selenge Makangila was born on Aug. 31, 1968 in Kasongo, the Democratic Republic of Congo (later renamed Zaire, now back to its original name), into the unlikely family of a Muslim mother and Catholic father, which had 12 children. "Seraphim" was later dropped from official papers when Mobutu - the dictator who was in power from 1965 to 1997 - had the idea to ban Christian names.

Seraphim was going to become a Catholic preacher but was expelled from a seminary for impurity. He went on to become a medical student, but chose to leave the country because of increasing repressions against students from the regime as a reaction to student protests.

"In May [1991] all the universities were closed ... and if you showed a student card on public transport you were taken to a police station," said Seraphim. "Things got very serious, and I realized that I had to get away any way I could - there was no chance to study there anymore."

Coming to the Soviet Union on a UNICEF program in 1991, Seraphim entered the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, where he got involved in music in November 1991.

His friends who came from Congo (Brazzaville), Benin and Guinea - none of them with any music background - started a group.

"We didn't like what we saw on television, so we wanted our fellow countrymen to gather in some place and listen to African music," said Seraphim. "We had no drum kit, so we just drummed on the table when we started rehearsing."

Called M'Bond Art (the "art of the drum"), the nine-piece band performed Zouk, Afro rumba and Soukuss - first for the local African community, but after a while extended their activities into early local clubs, such as the Art Club, Indie and the fabulous TaMtAm (all defunct now).

"We wanted to share it with the Russian people, because they didn't know this part of African culture - they knew only folklore, carefully chosen by communists, which reached Russia," said Seraphim. "Not the most real, not the best. So we wanted to have fun and to share it with friends. It was primitive but interesting."

Seraphim, who sings and writes songs in his native tongue Lingala, has never studied music. "Of course, we are taught to sing since early childhood," he said. "When a child starts to talk, parents teach him to sing folk songs."

M'Bond Art split when most of its members graduated and went home. Seraphim stayed and formed a new group with local musicians who hung out at TaMtAm - called Motema Pembe ("pure soul" in Lingala), also known as the Makangila Band, which made its debut in March 1995 at the place - getting visiting David Byrne dancing at the closed "pancake party" for the chief Talking Head.

As time went by, inevitable lineup changes came - after a while, both Seraphim's band and Markscheider Kunst became almost identical, so it was only natural for Seraphim to join the band.

There were hard times, too. Seraphim has a scar on his head from a racist attack. "How could you survive at TaMtAm without having to protect yourself from people who don't know what they defend and what ideology they have in their heads," he said.

Despite wearing Rasta colors, Seraphim insists he is not Rastafarian. "Since 1990 I ceased to be a religious person. I realized that religions are like political parties," he said. "They are public organizations rather than spiritual. I believe in Jesus Christ and can contact him in my prayers. I'm interested in the practice of living, not in words - showing crosses or wearing dreadlocks and saying, 'I am Rastafarian, which means I am saintly.' No."

Seraphim follows the turbulent developments in his war-torn country by listening to RFI (Radio France Internationale) and watching television news when touring abroad.

"I follow it with horror and pain," said Seraphim, who wrote the anti-war song "No No No" in 1996. "'Don't fight, don't kill each other, people must help, be one and love one another ...' I wrote it when I didn't know that there would be war in my home country. I didn't worry that much about what was happening in my country in this song - I worried about what was happening to mankind everywhere."

Seraphim is currently trying to get Russian citizenship, because he is planning to stay in Russia for a long time. "It's not worse here than in other countries. I have a lot of friends who understand and tolerate me, and it's interesting for me to be with them, to share their sorrows and joys."

TITLE: dining on the old main drag
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson
TEXT: Stary Nevsky - the part of Nevsky Prospect that stretches from Ploshchad Vosstaniya to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery - is not exactly the best place to go walking at a late hour. The only activity of any kind is usually short -skirted women plying their trade on the side of the road, and cars stopping for them, which contain either prospective clients, or policemen who take them down to the station for some routine harassment.


Into this rather sordid environment comes the cafe Gondola, a 24-hour restaurant/bar which is a welcome addition to the city's culinary landscape, and which also stands in sharp contrast to its surroundings. The place is full of flight-related bric-a-brac, with hot-air balloons, zeppelins, real sand bags, and a life-sized pilot dummy slumped at the bar. There is also a great photo opportunity, with a board through which one can put one's head in order to look like a hot-air balloonist. The reverse side of this board depicts Lenin addressing the Bolsheviks, so you can take your pick.

We started by ordering a couple of Bochkarov beers at 35 rubles (for some reason the menu bills beer on tap as "loose beer," perhaps in homage to the ladies who work in the area) with some prawns (60 rubles) and a selection of smoked meats (110 rubles) as zakuski. Used to the general slow pace of service in local restaurants, I had expected we would have plenty of time to finish the zakuski before anything else arrived, but not so: Before we knew it our soups were steaming before us, with huge helpings of borshch (60 rubles) and the shchi cabbage soup (85 rubles) which came with a shot of vodka (or as the English version of the menu frighteningly had it, a glass). The small table we were sitting at could scarcely accommodate all of this food, but our helpful waitress found a way to make it fit.

The menu, as you may have gathered, is quite an interesting repository of curious English expressions. While it is very helpfully laid out, with English and Russian side by side, and generally translated well, you might think twice about ordering the "Rare Pound Stake" which is said to be "a meal for a 'he' man."

I, however, didn't think twice, and no sooner had I finished the soup and vodka than it was sizzling in front of me. It is indeed a hearty meal, but more subtle and flavorsome than its "he man" status would suggest. Getting a decent steak in this city is no easy task, but this one certainly was, though the "red wine sauce" it was supposed to be served in seemed to have emerged from a ketchup bottle.

My dining companion had pork in cranberry sauce, which was also pronounced fabulous. As we sipped our beers and watched a semochki-chewing policeman on the street outside hauling three ladies into his van, we decided to leave our waitress a sizable tip for a job well done. As it turned out, we were pre-empted by the management, which automatically adds a 10 percent service charge on to the bill, though there was no mention of this on the menu or anywhere else. While the service is certainly worth it, it might be better either to inform the customers beforehand, or to let them decide for themselves. But aside from this little niggle, we had no complaints.



Gondola, 150 Nevsky Prospect. Tel: 277-21-54. Dinner for two with alcohol, including service charge, 930 rubles ($33). Open 24 hours, 7 days a week. Credit cards accepted.

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: 
Bryan Ferry's St. Petersburg concert is approaching, and it was confirmed Thursday that everything is going ahead, so the 28-strong entourage will land on St. Petersburg on Monday as scheduled to prepare for Ferry's first concert in Russia. Backed by his 13-member band of jazz and classical musicians, including one harp player, he will sing songs from his entire career, which started in 1972 with Roxy Music. He even promised to perform Roxy's first hit "Virginia Plain." The St. Petersburg and Moscow shows will be the end of his current tour promoting his "best-of" album "Slave to Love," which also features two new songs. Philharmonia, Wednesday, 8 p.m.


Jean-Luc Ponty, the man of Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Mahavishnu Orchestra, will play this weekend in the course of a tour promoting his CD "The Very Best Of Jean-Luc Ponty." In one interview, the late jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli said, "[Ponty] is a great musician and he invented a new style on the violin." Unfortunatly, the two of his 1980s solo albums we've heard, sound a little too cheesy for such a respected musician, but we hope the collaboration with West African musicians he started in 1991 has brought some fresh blood into his work. The five-member multi-national band will play at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture on Saturday. The after-concert jam at Sadko is not happening, and will probably take place at Plaza instead.

Note that the Moscow and St. Petersburg dates on Ponty's official Web site at www.ponty.com are confused.

Those who wish to buy cheaper tickets should hurry up - as out brief survey revealed, it's impossible to buy tickets for less than 500 rubles either for Ferry or Ponty.

New Western tours keep popping up, with Catalonia-born Jose Carreras, modestly called "the Prince of Tenors" on his posters, coming to town. Carreras, who blends operatic arias with pop songs, will perform on Tuesday.

Finally, Akvarium will play its "autumn concert" at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture on Sunday. Boris Grebenshchikov surprised his fans recently by playing a full set of Russian rock covers from the 1980s, including songs by Kino and Zvuki Mu. He went through another image change recently (David Bowie should be envious) - and, as one critic noted, looks suspiciously like Captain Beefheart on Akvarium concert posters, with his new beard and hair style. The Buddhist imagery on his official Web site's front page is gone - replaced by a Russian Orthodox icon called "Increase of Wisdom," which according to Grebenshchikov, who claims that God is one, is an indication of the band's "new period" and is supposed to "influence mass subconsiousness." Check out www.aquarium.ru. Don't forget to bring extra money to the show for sandal incense sticks and other such things.


- by Sergey Chernov

TITLE: Peruvian Military Backs Fujimori's Call for New Elections
AUTHOR: By Bill Cormier
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LIMA, Peru - The powerful armed forces declared their support Thursday for President Alberto Fujimori, ending days of silence over his decision to call new elections and not run again.


In a joint communique, the commanders of the armed forces and police said they supported Fujimori's surprise weekend announcement, which also included deactivating Peru's National Intelligence Service, closely allied with the military.

The statement of allegiance came after days of public worries about the military's unusual silence amid a crisis sparked by a bribery scandal involving Peru's spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos.

"The Armed Forces High Command and the general directorate of the National Police ... reiterate their firm commitment to collaborate permanently with the government," said the four-point statement, signed by the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Jose Villanueva Ruesta, and branch commanders.

The announcement came as Peruvians remain divided over Fujimori's authoritarian rule, filling the streets with rallies both for and against him. Fujimori is credited with defeating bloody leftist insurgencies and ending economic chaos.

Hundreds of anti-Fujimori demonstrators lighted tire fires and protested outside his home Wednesday night, burning an effigy of the president's unpopular spy chief, a shadowy figure at the center of a bribery scandal that is forcing Fujimori to end 10 years in power.

Chanting slogans, about 500 students and labor activists called for Montesinos to be prosecuted. They also demanded Fujimori step down immediately.

As the scandal surfaced last week, the president stunned Peruvians by announcing he would call new elections and cut short his own term. He later said he would stay on until a new government is inaugurated July 28.

Until the military declaration early Wednesday, one major lingering political question in a country with a long history of military coups had been the position of the armed forces.

Fujimori assured Peruvians that military commanders remain loyal to him and that there was no danger of rebellion over his decision to fire Montesinos. But several days of military silence had stood in contrast to the solid support they have expressed for him in the past.

The military has played a leading role during Fujimori's rule, shoring up his government in times of protest against his often-tough measures. Peru's military last ruled from 1968 to 1980.

Former presidential candidate Alejandro Toledo said Wednesday there was a tug of war between Fujimori and Montesinos over control of the army.

"President Fujimori apparently does not have the power to fire Montesinos," said Toledo, who withdrew from May's presidential runoff after accusing Fujimori of planning to rig the results.

Peru's ombudsman, Gorge Santistevan, had urged the armed forces to make a public declaration of support for Fujimori.

Meanwhile, Fujimori's approval rating soared after his announcement Saturday that he would not run for office in the new elections.

The independent polling firm CPI said 62.5 percent of Peruvians agreed with that decision. At the same time, CPI said Fujimori's approval rating had risen to 59.1 percent, his highest rating this year. The poll of 400 Peruvians had a margin of error of five percentage points.

Opponents continued to pressure Fujimori to show he was in control by dealing decisively with Montesinos, his former top adviser.

Toledo demanded that Montesinos face justice after last week's release of a videotape that showed the national intelligence chief allegedly bribing an opposition lawmaker to join Fujimori's ranks.

The videotape's airing unleashed the political crisis, and Montesinos has not been seen publicly since.

TITLE: British Intelligence HQ Target of Missile Attack
AUTHOR: By Giles Elgood
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - A "small missile" was fired at the headquarters of the MI6 foreign intelligence service in central London Wednesday night, a high-profile symbol of the establishment and one of Britain's most secure buildings.


Police at the scene of the explosion said early Thursday it had hit the upper part of the building but caused little damage. There were no reports of casualties, but commuters faced morning rush-hour chaos as police sealed off the area.

"An examination of the exterior of the building would show some form of small missile hit the building at around the eighth floor. It caused minimal damage," Alan Fry, head of the police's anti-terrorist branch, told reporters.

He was unable to say who had fired the missile, but would not rule out that renegade Northern Irish guerrilla groups opposed to the peace process in the British province might have been responsible: "Clearly I have to keep in mind the capability of dissident Irish groups, but at this stage I would not be ruling out any other group who might see the secret intelligence service as a potential target."

No warning had been given and no group had claimed responsibility. But police warned the public earlier in the year to be alert to the threat of guerrilla attacks.

Fry said he did not believe the building had been hit by a mortar, as this would have caused more damage.

He said that a forensic examination of the surrounding area would mean that the Eurostar rail link with Paris and Brussels as well as local train services and traffic would need to be disrupted during Thursday's morning rush hour.

The futuristic green glass MI6 building located on the south bank of the River Thames, less than a kilometer from parliament and the main government offices in Whitehall, is probably one of the most secure and closely guarded building compounds in Great Britain.

It is surrounded by an array of video cameras, and the attack was certain to prompt questions about security.

The building is already famous for having featured in the last James Bond film "The World is not Enough," where it exploded in the opening scene.

A Reuters photographer said a window high up on the facade had been smashed.

A series of bombs planted in London earlier this year has been blamed on Northern Irish republican splinter guerrilla groups opposed to the province's fragile peace process.

Northern Irish republican guerrillas have a long history of bomb attacks in Britain.

In 1991, the Irish Republican Army attacked the prime minister's Downing Street office with homemade mortars launched from a van parked nearby.

Although the IRA is now observing a cease-fire, dissidents are believed to be responsible for a bomb attack that damaged Hammersmith Bridge, farther up the Thames, in June, and for a bomb planted at a west London railway station in July.

MI6, which deals with foreign intelligence, is the responsibility of the Foreign Office. The domestic intelligence service, MI5, is the responsibility of the Home Office.

One witness, 23-year-old Sridharan Balakrishnan, who works at a nearby petrol station, said: "I was out to buy food when I heard a very big blast. I saw smoke coming from the top of the building and when the police came they asked me to close up the shop."

TITLE: Cuban Crisis: Champions Fall in Baseball
AUTHOR: By Joe Kay
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SYDNEY - There's only one unbeaten team left in Olympic baseball, and it's not Cuba.


Helped by some former Yanks, the Dutch put an end to one of the Olympics' most enduring streaks by beating the Cubans 4-2 Wednesday, leaving the United States (3-0) with the only perfect mark.

Stripped of their perfect record and their swagger, the Cubans (3-1) packed their equipment bags, slung them over their shoulders and headed for the bus after their first loss in 22 Olympic games.

"It's not embarrassing," outfielder Luis Ulacia said in a matter-of-fact tone. "That's why they send so many teams to the Olympics. They don't just bring Cuba."

In Barcelona, the Cubans left everyone else behind, dominating the eight-team field as it won the gold. With defections starting to take a toll, the Cubans had to survive a few close calls en route to another 9-0 record and gold medal in Atlanta four years ago.

Amateur baseball's dynasty finally cracked Wednesday, failing to come through like it had every other time in the past.

Former New York Yankees outfielder Hensley "Bam Bam" Meulens doubled with the bases loaded and former San Francisco Giants pitcher Ken Brauckmiller pitched eight strong innings as the Netherlands (2-2) closed in on the upset.

When former Mets infielder Ralph Milliard cradled the ball at second for a game-ending forceout, the Netherlands had the win that had eluded the rest of the world.

"This is for all the Dutch people around the world!" exclaimed Meulens, who broke into the majors with the Yankees in 1989.

By switching from aluminum bats to wood and allowing professionals - mostly minor leaguers and former major leaguers - into the Olympic tournament this year, organizers left Cuba vulnerable.

"You can't win 'em all," Brauckmiller, a former San Francisco Giants pitcher who handled the Olympics' best-hitting lineup for eight innings. "You win 20 in a row and sooner or later maybe things catch up to you."

Players exchanged high-fives and hugs in front of the mound after the final out in a celebration that was subdued for the circumstances.

"Honestly, it still hasn't sunk in," said shortstop Robert Eenhoorn, who made his major league debut with the Yankees in 1994.

The first hint of things ahead came in the third, when hard-throwing Maels Rodriguez - his fastball registered 99 mph (160 kph) on the scoreboard - left a slider over the plate for Meulens.

He lined it to left for a standup double and three runs - all that was needed.

"It was probably the biggest hit of my career," Meulens said. "Getting to the major leagues is one of the greatest things anyone can have. Being part of the Yankees and getting to play my first game at Yankee Stadium was great. This ranks right up there."

By the ninth, the crowd of 12,450 was on its feet, waiting to see if the Cubans could forestall history. Arizona State manager Pat Murphy, also coaching the Netherlands, decided to bring in center fielder Rikkert Faneyte - who doubles as a pitcher - to get the last three outs.

"It's pretty unorthodox," Murphy said, laughing. "It's called sandlot baseball. It's old-school."

"Nothing seemed to bother them," Murphy said. "They didn't get too excited. They didn't get into an emotional game. They kept their cool."

Just like Cuba used to do.

TITLE: Romanians Steal Show In Women's Gymnastics
AUTHOR: By Steve Keating
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SYDNEY - Andreea Raducan led a Romanian sweep of the medals in the Olympic gymnastics women's all-round competition on Thursday, but they were made to wait for their victory after some gymnasts were allowed to repeat vaults because of faulty apparatus settings. Raducan, the first Romanian to claim the all-round title since Nadia Comaneci in 1976, posted a winning mark of 38.893.


Simona Amanar, the winner of four medals at the 1996 Olympics, took the silver with 38.642 and Maria Olaru, the world all-round champion, the bronze with 38.581, in an error-filled final that ended in controversy and confusion.

With the normal competition finished and the Romanians waiting impatiently to celebrate their victory, International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) officials gave the 18 gymnasts from the first two rotations the opportunity to re-do their vaults after it was discovered the height of the apparatus was five centimeters too short.

In the end, only five gymnasts accepted the offer, none of whom made an impact on the final standings, with Romania becoming just the second country to sweep the event and first since the Soviet Union in 1960.

"I'm very excited," said Raducan, who also led Romania to the team gold medal on Tuesday. "I'm happy about the gold for the team and I expected a good result today.

It was thought that all-round favorite Svetlana Khorkina of Russia, who saw her gold-medal hopes slip with a poor result on the vault, might reappear and attempt at least to salvage a place on the podium.

But with a near perfect 10 needed just to get the bronze, the Russian starlet decided not to return to the competition.

Khorkina, who left the floor in tears after a spill on the uneven bars, contributing to Russia's failure to win gold in Tuesday's team event, was a picture of stern concentration as she returned to the Superdome.

Wearing a basic black leotard sprinkled with sparkles, Khorkina dazzled another crowd with a dramatic floor exercise performed to a Spanish flamenco.

The sultry routine enticed a 9.812 from the judges and wild applause from a captivated audience but could not prise a smile from the willowy Russian.

But on the very next rotation, Khor ki na was once again on the verge of tears after two disastrous vaults and a mark of 9.343 dropped her from first to 10th.

Disaster struck again on the uneven bars, Khorkina's signature event, when she failed to exit a move invented and named after her and came crashing down on the mat, her hopes of the all-round gold medal gone, finishing 11th.

Russian coaches complained that her errors on the vault caused by the improper settings, so disturbed their star that she was unable to focus. 

"It was too low, she was emotionally depressed after that," said Russian coach Valeri Dianov. "She's number one on the team and she's a World Cup champion, but that bothered her.

"We were expecting a gold medal, this is the worst performance the Russian team has ever had at the Olympics."

Russia's Elena Zamolodtchikova, a last minute replacement for Elena Prodounova, had assumed the lead from Khorkina after the second rotation but immediately fell on her backside during the floor exercise.

Viktoria Karpenko, leading going into her final rotation and in position to give Ukraine its third successive all-round title, dropped 12th after scoring a paltry 8.725 on her floor exercise.

TITLE: U.S. Outlasts Rival Russia in Hoops Action
AUTHOR: By Alan Crosby
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SYDNEY - The U.S. women's basketball team outlasted arch rival Russia 88-77 on Wednesday in a preliminary round Group B match in what was widely seen as a preview of the gold-medal game.


Russia, and its predecessor the Soviet Union, is the only team to have beaten the Americans in Olympic play, doing it twice in 1976 and once in 1992. The U.S. women became world champions in 1998 with a win over Russia.

Neither team gave an inch as more bodies hit the floor in the first half than they will at the Olympic boxing tournament. In the end the U.S.- 38-2 over the last year - came as close to defeat as they have since a March loss to Brazil.

"They came out hard, they always play us tough and we always get up to play them," said Houston Comets forward Sheryl Swoopes.

To negate the U.S. team's speed advantage Russia laid a body on anything that moved. The tactic worked in the first half as they built a three-point half-time lead.

The Americans adjusted and played stronger defensively in the second half but Russia kept pace until shooters Svetlana Abrossimova and Irina Rout kov skaja went cold with about five minutes to play.

"They have such a deep bench it's tough, you can't let up for the whole 40 minutes. But we hope to have another chance to play them later in the tournament," said Abrossimova, who plays for the University of Connecticut.

Los Angeles Sparks forward Lisa Leslie had 18 points and nine rebounds and Sacramento Monarchs forward Yolan da Griffiths chipped in 16 points and 11 rebounds - including five on the offensive glass - to lead the U.S. scorers. Guard Anna Archipova had 15 points for Russia.

With the win the U.S. now leads Group B with a perfect 3-0 record while Russia is second. If the preliminary round ends with the two teams in first and second, they cannot meet again until the final.

The United States men's Olympic basketball team of NBA stars was booed off court by a capacity crowd on Thursday after Lithuania pushed them harder than any team in the past eight years before losing 85-76.


As has been the case throughout the tournament, the U.S. started slowly and shot a dismal 32 percent from the field in the first half.

Despite missing their three best players, the 1996 bronze medallists kept pace with their opponents for the first half, trailing the U.S. by a mere six points, the narrowest margin since NBA players came to the Olympics in 1992.

Fans returning late from the concession stands could hardly be faulted for doing double takes when the scoreboard read Lithuania 50, U.S. 49 with just over 17 minutes left to play.

Nevertheless, the sloppy second half was filled with more lowlights than highlights from a squad that collectively earns over $25 million annually.

At one point they threw the ball into Lithuanian hands three times in less than a minute and managed to shoot only 36 percent for the entire game.

As Seattle SuperSonics guard Gary Payton dribbled out the final few seconds of the game, a disappointed capacity crowd rang out with a chorus of boos.

"We didn't shoot well the whole game. I take my hat off to the other team, they did a good job of making us make plays, but I thought we had good shots. When you don't shoot the ball well, it makes it look like you're playing much worse than you may be," said U.S. head coach Rudy Tomjanovich.

Payton was 4 for 10 from the field to lead the U.S. with 14 points but got little support. Lithuanian center Darius Songaila had 16 points and eight rebounds.

"We expected them to be our toughest game because they aren't scared to go into the middle. They clogged up the lane well and we didn't shoot as well as we can," Payton said.

"Right now everyone wants to see us get beat so they come at us with no fear. But you don't think about losing, even when they were taking big runs at us, we just tried to slow them down and knew we would be able to generate the shots we needed to."

Even before the Olympics began, the U.S. team was criticized for not holding the mystique or talent that other NBA-laden teams in the past have had.

Several Australian players, including five-time Olympian Andrew Gaze, dared to say out loud what many had suspected. The U.S. can be beaten.

"Some teams come out against them [the U.S.] like it's a day off but we came out to play," said guard Kestutis Marciulionis.

"I think they are going to lose a game here the way they played today. They are treating this whole tournament like a vacation. Obviously they are capable of turning it on, and if they do they will beat people. But if they don't they are going to have some problems. They should have lost today."

TITLE: Arsenal Scores Late To Steal 3-2 Victory
AUTHOR: By Bill Barclay
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Lazio and Rangers asserted their authority in the Champions League on Wednesday, but Arsenal was given the fright of their lives by 300-1 outsiders Shakhtar Donetsk.


The English side recovered from 2-0 down against the 10-man team from Uk raine to win 3-2 with two late goals from defender Martin Keown.

It was Arsenal's second win in Group B which is headed by Italian champion Lazio, which secured its second successive 3-0 win, this time over Sparta Prague in Rome.

An early Giovanni van Bronckhurst goal gave Scottish side Rangers a 1-0 victory in Monaco, their second successive win in Group D, which they also lead.

Holders Real Madrid ground out their first victory, a 1-0 home win over Spartak Moscow, while UEFA Cup holders Galatasaray tumbled to a surprise 3-0 defeat in Austria by Sturm Graz.

Arsenal is playing its home games at Highbury in a bid to improve on last season's dire record when they played at Wembley, but they quickly found themselves on the rack.

Alexei Bakharev and Andrei Vo ro byey scored in the space of three minutes for Shakhtar, whose home town is the birthplace of pole-vault world champion Sergei Bubka.

But the turning point came on the stroke of half time when their captain Sergei Popov was sent off and Frenchman Sylvain Wiltord scored for Arsenal after Thierry Henry's penalty was saved.

Shakhtar's goalkeeper Yurii Virt produced several more stunning saves as Donetsk dug deep to stave off an Arsenal onslaught in the second half.

But they caved in when Keown bundled home an 85th-minute equalizer with his chest and then side-footed a dramatic winner two minutes into stoppage time.

Arsenal next faces Lazio, whichjustified itsco-favorite tag by making it two wins out of two with an easy 3-0 success over Sparta Prague in Rome.

Simone Inzaghi scored either side of a goal by Argentine Juan Veron for the Italian champions, who lead the group with six points, having scored six goals and conceded none.

Looking forward to the Arsenal game next Wednesday, Lazio coach Sven Goran Eriksson said: "It is going to be tough, very tough but it is set up to be a beautiful match."

Rangers have an identical record in Group D after Dutchman van Bronckhurst's wonderful long-range drive after eight minutes gave the Scottish club a 1-0 win in Monaco.

But Turkish side Galatasaray slumped to a disappointing 3-0 defeat in Austria by Sturm Graz and had Suat Kaya sent off in the process, their third red card in two games.

Russian Sergei Yuran, Markus Schopp and Markus Schupp were on target for the Austrians, thrashed 5-0 by Rangers in their opener last week.

Real Madrid heads Group A with four points after Ivan Helguera's 50th-minute effort gave them a barely deserved 1-0 home win over Spartak Moscow.

"I have to admit that we didn't have a great game," said Helguera.

Bayer Leverkusen relieved some of the pressure on coach Christoph Daum with their first win, a 3-2 success over Portuguese visitors Sporting.

Sporting led 1-0 through Andre Cruz but then had Joao Pinto red-carded and Bayer took advantage, with Oliver Neuville scoring what proved to be their winner.

In Group C, Valencia maintained the Spanish challenge by recording its second successive win, beating Dutch side Heerenveen 1-0 in the Netherlands.

Out-of-favor striker Kily Gonzalez scored the 38th-minute winner for last year's finalists.

First-half goals by Peter Ofori-Quaye and Giovanni Silva de Oliveira were enough to give Olympiakos a 2-1 home win over Olympique Lyon in the group's other game.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Iran Cuts Sentences


n TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An appeals court has reduced the sentences against 10 Iranian Jews found guilty of spying for Israel, the judiciary announced Thursday, casting aside two of the three charges on which they were convicted in a trial that won international condemnation.

The court reduced their prison terms from a range of four to 13 years to terms of two to nine years, provincial judiciary chief Hossein Ali Amiri said. He said that the time they already served would be included in the sentences.

The case attracted international attention, with jurists questioning whether the trial could be fair when there was no jury and the judge also acted as prosecutor.


China Passes Sentence


n BEIJING (AP) - Chinese judges are expected to hand out significant number of death sentences to officials who are on trial for a smuggling and kickback scheme, which has been called China's biggest corruption scandal, a state-run newspaper reported Thursday.

In an editorial, the China Daily decried pervasive corruption and applauded the court-ordered executions of two bribe-taking officials: legislative Vice Chairman Cheng Kejie and Hu Changqing, deputy governor of Jiangxi province.

Trials began Sept. 13 in Xiamen and four other cities in southeastern Fujian province. Several courts were needed to try the large number of defendants.

Although the communist government and the media that it controls have disclosed very few details about the case, two Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspapers reported this week that more than 90 officials were on trial in 26 cases related to the sprawling scandal.



Iraq Accuses Iran


n BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A senior Iraqi official has accused Iran of using dozens of its planes, which were sent to Tehran for safekeeping during the 1991 Gulf War.

"Iran is using our airliners held since the 1991 aggression in domestic flights," the al-Zawra weekly newspaper quoted Undersecretary of Transport Jamil Ibrahim as saying.

He said Iraq had repeatedly asked Iran for information about the planes, but Iran had ignored the requests.

Iraq ordered its aircraft to foreign airports during the Gulf War that drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

Iraqi Airways is grounded as a result of United Nations sanctions that were imposed in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.



Soldiers Implicated


n JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Indonesian soldiers have been implicated in the murders earlier this month of three UN aid workers in West Timor, attorney general Marzuki Darusman said Thursday.

Police in the town of Atambua were in the process of questioning and arresting six people, including some members of the military, for the killings of three staff workers of the UN High Commission for Refugees on Sept. 6, Darusman said.

Darusman did not know the ranks of the soldiers involved, but stressed that the suspects were rogue elements of the armed forces and were acting outside the chain of command.

The three were killed by an anti-independence militia mob, and international pressure on Indonesia to rein in such militias has grown dramatically since the killings.



ETA Kills Politician


n MADRID (Reuters) - A town councilor for Spain's ruling party was shot dead in a suburb of Barcelona Thursday in the latest of a wave of attacks blamed on ETA Basque separatist rebels.

The assassination appeared to have been the first reprisal for a recent police crackdown carried out in Spain and France that included the capture last Friday of ETA's suspected leader, Ignacio Gracia Arregui, in the French Basque region.

The victim, Jose Luis Ruiz Casado, was a 42-year-old town councilor from Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party in the industrial suburb Sant Adria de Besos, near Barcelona. He was married with two children.

The killing was the 13th either claimed by or blamed on ETA since it called off a 14-month cease-fire in December. The rebels' summer offensive of bombings and assassinations has been the bloodiest in a decade.

TITLE: Knicks Star Heads West After Blockbuster Trade
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK - The Patrick Ewing era in New York came to an end Wednesday night as the longtime Knicks star center was traded to Seattle as the centerpiece of a 12-player deal involving four NBA teams.


A month after a blockbuster deal to send the aging franchise player to Seattle fell apart, the SuperSonics will get the big man they had been seeking after all. Seattle forward Vin Baker, who had been part of the original deal, will remain with the Sonics and play alongside the 38-year-old Ewing.

In return for the man who had been the heart of the team for 15 years but failed to bring a championship to New York, the Knicks received six players and four draft picks, most notably forward Glen Rice from the Los Angeles Lakers in a sign-and-trade deal.

Rice, who was not happy with the Lakers while playing coach Phil Jackson's triangle offense, reportedly signed a four-year, $36-million deal before being shipped to New York.

The Knicks, who likely have further trades in mind, also picked up Australian center Luc Longley from the Phoenix Suns, center Travis Knight and a 2001 first-round draft pick from the NBA champion Lakers, and center Vla dimir Stepania, guard Vernon Maxwell, forward Lazaro Borrell, a 2001 first-round pick and a pair of 2001 second-round picks from Seattle.

The SuperSonics only received Ewing, who has one year left on a four-year, $68-million contract and has said he would like to play two more seasons after this one, despite health problems over the last three years.

The defending NBA champions acquired the power forward they coveted in Horace Grant. They also received center Greg Foster, guard Emanuel Davis and forward Chuck Person from Seattle.

Phoenix received center Chris Dudley from the Knicks as well as a first-round draft pick and cash.

Ewing, voted one of the 50 greatest NBA players and twice an Olympic gold medalist, is one of only 12 players to amass 20,000 points (23,665) and 10,000 rebounds (10,759) in his career.

Despite holding franchise records for points, rebounds, blocked shots and games played, the injury-plagued Ewing had come under increasing criticism in recent years for his failure to live up to his promise to bring the Knicks their first NBA title since 1973.

But Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy, for one, is sorry to see him go.

"Patrick Ewing is one of the hardest-working, most loyal players I have ever been around," said Van Gundy, one of Ewing's staunchest supporters.

"I have told him more than once that he is a champion even if he hasn't won a championship yet. He practised and played like a champion every day he was here. Seattle is fortunate to get a player of his talent and character."

TITLE: Milosevic 2nd in Pre-Vote Polls
AUTHOR: By Philippa Fletcher
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - More than 150,000 people turned out to cheer the man seeking to replace Slobodan Milosevic in Sunday's elections, leaving the Yugoslav president to fire verbal volleys at him from a suburban sports stadium.


Vojislav Kostunica, already leading in opinion polls, took the initiative from Milosevic on Wednesday evening when he drew 10 times as many people to a pre-election rally in downtown Belgrade as turned up at the president's indoor meeting.

"I am an ordinary man like everyone else. I have no intention to reorganize the world. My intention is that together with you I reorganize this state of ours," the soft-spoken lawyer and opposition leader told the cheering crowd.

Milosevic, who called the election confident that it would extend his rule, launched a fierce attack on his opponents, accusing them of terrorism, spying and of corrupting the country's youth.

He was also met with cheers, by some 15,000 people, who were entertained with patriotic songs and video clips of a number of Orthodox monasteries and other symbols of Serbian culture.

It was the second scheduled appearance in a day for the country's reclusive leader, who has stayed behind the scenes for much of the campaign, letting his wife, Mira Markovic, take the glare of the limelight.

Earlier in the day he had visited Montenegro for the first time in four years to help his loyalists, now in opposition to a Western-backed government, warn that the election was a question of life or death for the Yugoslav federation.

"The outside world has nothing better to do than try to provoke conflict between Serbs and Montenegrins," Milosevic told some 20,000 supporters at a military airfield - one of the few places in the republic where he still has full control.

Montenegrin President Milo Dju ka novic returned fire, accusing Milosevic of trying to scare voters ahead of the polls because he knew that he had little chance of winning and said that Montenegro would defend itself if it was attacked.

The latest opinion poll showed Kostunica with a 6-percent lead over Milosevic, for whom holding onto power remains the best guarantee of protection from being arrested for alleged war crimes.

While speaking in a rare appearance on state television, Kostunica slammed the indictment by a UN tribunal for Milosevic's crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatism in Kosovo, saying that it had made Serbia a hostage.

He told the rally Milosevic must be under pressure.

"It is a miserable state indeed which is the hostage of a single man. It must be frightening and difficult to be that man," he said, adding that if it were him he would withdraw.

"But Slobodan Milosevic will never withdraw," Kostrunica said. "He is like a king who is as the sun, the king who said apres moi le deluge."

Opposition leaders, Western politicians and many Serbs feel that Milosevic is unlikely to give up the reins of power, even if he ends up losing in the voting.

Buoyed by the carnival atmosphere - police kept a low profile in the square - people in the crowd said they planned to come again on Sunday night to hear the results.

But not all were optimistic.

Milos, a 40-year-old worker, recalled the local elections held in 1996, when Milosevic was finally forced to recognize opposition victories in many towns only after three months of street protests.

"If he didn't want to relinquish those few towns peacefully we can expect even less that he will hand over power peacefully since his life is at stake," he said.

Tomislav Stefanovic of the opposition Democratic Party said people had to be prepared to stand up for their choice.

"If we are not ready for all of this we deserve more dictatorship," he said.

TITLE: N. Korea Turns to Europe To Open Diplomatic Ties
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea has proposed to open diplomatic ties with several European countries, the communist state's official news agency reported Thursday.


Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun recently sent letters carrying the proposal to his counterparts in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Britain and the external relations commissioner of the European Commission, according to KCNA, the North's official foreign news outlet.

The report didn't specify exactly when the letters were sent.

North Korea is pursuing contacts with the outside world in gestures apparently aimed at easing international concerns over the isolated, hardline communist country and facilitating outside economic aid.

In January, Italy established diplomatic ties with North Korea, becoming the sixth European country to open relations with Pyongyang after Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Denmark and Austria. The North has also sealed such relations with Australia and the Philippines this year.

Diplomats from New Zealand began a four-day visit to North Korea on Tuesday to discuss establishing diplomatic relations.

On Thursday, KCNA said North Korea was ready to open relations with any country that respects independence and does not interfere in its internal affairs.

North Korea's economy began declining after the collapse of the former Soviet bloc stripped Pyongyang of key ideological and trade partners and aid providers in the early 1990s.

Years of disastrous weather devastated its already inefficient collective-farm system, forcing the North to depend on outside handouts to feed its 22 million people.

The North has also engaged in periodic talks with the United States and Japan to normalize relations.

The United States is prepared to improve ties with Pyongyang if North Korea ends its alleged support for terrorism. The two countries are to meet in New York next week.

TITLE: Israeli Road Project Has Palestinians Fuming
AUTHOR: By Mark Lavie
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM - Israel pressed ahead Wednesday with a highway around Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem, handing out eviction notices to Arab landowners even as negotiators for both sides resumed low-level contacts.


Palestinians pledged to stop the highway project, charging that Israel intends to confiscate more than 250 acres of Palestinian land, though Israel might end up handing parts to the Palestinians in peace negotiations now in progress.

Contacts between Israel and the Palestinians sputtered on with no progress reported, after Israel suspended the talks Tuesday and then quickly renewed them.

Hindering the talks is a dispute over control of holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. Palestinians complain Israel is blocking them from renovating Islamic holy sites there.

Israel has started giving eviction notices to Arab landowners to make room for a superhighway around the city, Jerusalem official Hagai Elias confirmed. He said compensation would be paid.

The project, called the ring road, is an Israeli plan to reduce congestion in Jerusalem, plagued by narrow streets and constant traffic jams. The road around the west side of the city, where Jews live, is mostly completed.

Building the ring around Jerusalem by encircling Palestinian neighborhoods is a political scheme, not a transportation plan, said Ziad Abu-Zayyad, a Palestinian cabinet minister who deals with Jerusalem affairs.

The object is to "make east Jeru sa lem an integral part of west Jerusalem," Abu-Zayyad told The Associated Press. He said the Palestinian Authority would take steps to force Israel to halt construction.

Israel annexed the Arab section of the city two weeks after capturing it in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel used to claim all of Jerusalem inside the expanded 1967 boundaries as its capital. However, in recent negotiations, Israel has offered the Palestinians control of Arab neighborhoods.

Meir Margalit, a member of the Jerusalem city council, said the road would allow Palestinians to drive from one section of the West Bank to another without going through Jerusalem, but Israel should have consulted the Palestinians about the plan. "They did it the wrong way," he said

Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic Trust that runs the mosque compound, charged Wednesday that Israel is preventing the renovation of Islamic holy sites on the disputed hill. Israel has been stopping trucks with building materials from entering the compound, also the site of the biblical Jewish Temples.

The Israelis say the Muslims are destroying Jewish sites in their construction work on the disputed hill, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Both sides claim sovereignty there.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat met Wednesday with lawyer Gilead Sher, representing the Israeli side, after Israel canceled their meeting a day earlier. In a series of confused signals, Israel first said it was suspending the talks, then said the contacts were continuing.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak said there have been no real negotiations since Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat turned down American proposals at the failed Camp David summit in July. He said if Arafat agrees to discuss the ideas, negotiations will resume.