SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #610 (0), Tuesday, October 10, 2000
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TITLE: UN Opens Center To Help Petersburg's Refugees
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A new center set up by the United Nations and the Red Cross may help relieve the suffering of hundreds of refugees who have fled their homes - but found little solace in St. Petersburg.

Take the case of Mugalina Muradova. More than 10 years ago, Muradova, 59, left her home in Tajikistan for St. Petersburg seeking medical aid for her daughter, Gulfia, who was suffering from a mysterious brain disease. 


Since then, her daughter, though disabled, is recovering - but war in Tajikistan has made returning home dangerous, making the family refugees - with all the attendant discrimination and hatred that sometimes come with that. 

"I dread going back to my apartment," Muradova said. "Our neighbors only refer to us as chernozhopiye [ black asses] and we live with constant aggression and daily threats of being kicked out."

Her home is one room in a communal apartment on Suvorovsky Prospect, which she shares with her daughter and husband, who because of his illegal status is unable to work. 

"The neighbors don't let us in to the bathroom and they call the police, complaining about us all the time," Muradova said. The police often come, apparently based on the racial description of the alleged aggressors. On several occasions, Gulfia, now 35, has been detained. 

Though both Muradova and her daughter secured Russian citizenship long ago, both Muradova's age and her disability, and Gulfia's infirmity, make it impossible for them to work, so they must scrape by on a pension that adds up to less the $30 a month.

Their only solution to avoid starvation is for Mu radova's husband to get Russian citizenship enabling him to work or receive a pension. Currently he is officially designated a bomzh, a Russian bureaucratic acronym for an individual without a fixed address. This at least shields him from endless detentions by the police who target dark-skinned residents of the city. 

At long last, however, the Muradov family has a place to tell its story, be taken seriously, and get some legal help toward getting her husband refugee status and, eventually, a job.

"Foreigners who come here need advice on how to be granted refugee status," said Mikhail Petrov, a lawyer with the Center for Refugees and Migrants, which opened in September at 1 Pushkinskaya Ul.

Founded and financed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the International Red Cross, the center offers everything from legal help, psychological treatment, medical attention, vocational training and even child care. 

All services are free of charge. The center also offers help to those who are not seeking refugee status but who are simply needy. Its operating hours are 10 a.m to 6 p.m, from Monday through Friday.

"Some potential refugees have already been rejected by the Federal Migration Service," said Petrov, referring to the agency that first reviews refugee cases.

Indeed, the granting of refugee status in Russia is a foggy business. 

Technically speaking, in order to receive refugee status, foreigners need to prove that there is a legitimate threat to their lives in their home country which prevents them from returning there. 

Even for those coming from countries such as Afgha ni stan or Rwanda, this is not an easy thing to prove.

According to Petrov, in certain countries, just the fact that one has studied in Russia can cost a person his life.

Calling Russian legislation on refugee and migrant status "incomplete," Petrov said that the current system leaves much room for arbitrary decisions from regional migration services, with their officials' personal views and opinions influencing the outcome of cases.

"The political situation in your home country isn't always a sufficient argument," Petrov said. 

"But even if you were refused you can still appeal the migration service's decision through the courts. The majority of people win such cases."

Apart from legal advice and psychological support, the center also offers free medical help via the Red Cross medical center on Bolshaya Monyetnaya Ul.

"All a person needs to get medical aid at our center is to show legal documents confirming his status as a refugee or migrant," said the medical center's doctor, Yury Alyoshin. The center, he said, was created especially for such patients and works under the aegis of International Red Cross.

"A physical therapist and a nurse are on hand Monday through Friday from 10.00 to 18.00, but if there is a need for other specialists, such as a surgeon or an oculist we can arrange it as well," Alyoshin added. 

"And we have an agreement with a hospital, in case our patients need in-patient care."

According to Anatoly Yakovlev, one of the Refugee center staff, the center can assist women in finding work as hairdressers or sewing machine operators. 

"During the mothers' classes, children can be looked after," he said. 

'We can also provide the poorest of our visitors with cards for humanitarian aid at the Red Cross center at 95, Nevsky Prospect" Yakovlev said.

While waiting for news from her lawyers, Muradova received a card allowing her to get free second hand clothes at the Red Cross humanitarian aid center.

"Of course, we miss home badly, sometimes we want to go back just for a little while, see old faces," Muradova said. 

"But we will never be able to afford the tickets. [...] All in all, return means war, starvation, devastation, a complete nightmare [...] And my disabled daughter can only be cured in St. Petersburg."

TITLE: West Bank Violence at Boiling Point
AUTHOR: By Wafa Amr
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JERUSALEM - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan landed in Israel on Monday to try to avert the danger of all-out war as an Israeli deadline for Palestinians to halt a wave of protests approached without the bloodshed ending.


Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protesters fought clashes in several towns and cities across the West Bank, including Ramallah and Nablus, and at least 14 people were hurt, witnesses said.

Each side accused the other of firing live rounds on the 12th day of clashes that have now killed at least 89 people, most of them Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said that Israel would consider the Middle East peace process dead if clashes did not stop by the end of Yom Kippur later on Monday. And he has threatened that security forces would use all means to restore order if violence does not end.

Palestinians say Israel is to blame for the bloodshed. They say it is up to Barak to end the conflict.

After holding consultations with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said the situation was "dangerous" but gave no sign of bowing to the ultimatum set by Barak.

Israeli and Lebanese soldiers were on alert on either side of Israel's border with Lebanon after pro-Iranian Hizbollah guerrillas seized three Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appealed for calm and U.S. officials said President Bill Clinton hoped to arrange a peace summit, although no decision had been taken on this. He might also travel to the region himself, they said.

"They have to get back to the peace process and it's important to realize there is no military solution to this," Albright said.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov held talks in Syria and was due to visit Lebanon before heading to Israel.

Annan met Israeli Acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in Tel Aviv before heading to Gaza to see Arafat. 

Talks with Barak were expected on Tuesday.

A spokesman said Annan was aware of the uncertainty of his mission. "Nevertheless, the stakes are so high, not least in terms of innocent lives, that he feels it is his duty to expend every effort," he said.

He said Annan had taken the trip at his own initiative, after consulting with all involved. "He has the support of all the parties involved, whether mediators, or Israelis and Palestinians," he added.

Barak's deadline for ending the protests was at about 10 p.m., after the end of Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the Jewish New Year.

But fierce clashes raged in Ramallah and near Nablus in the West Bank following a stormy night in which two people were killed in clashes between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews in the northern Israeli city of Nazareth.

The violence has severely dented hopes that Arafat and Barak can reach agreement to end more than 52 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since the Jewish state was founded on parts of British-mandate Palestine in 1948.

Israelis have been nagged by memories of the Middle East war that erupted on Yom Kippur in 1973.

Frustrations run deep among Palestinians over the peace process and they say Israel's use of force, deemed excessive by the United Nations Security Council, has increased anger.

The Palestinians are also wary of suggestions that Barak might forge a unity government bringing in right-wing politician Ariel Sharon. Such a move might torpedo any peace moves.

The wave of clashes began after Sharon visited a Jerusalem shrine on Sept. 28 that is holy to Muslims and Jews, and Palestinians accused him of defiling the site by going there.

Tensions have been high with Syria and Lebanon since the three Israeli soldiers were grabbed by the pro-Iranian Lebanese Hizbollah group on Saturday and Hizbollah rained mortar bombs across the border.

Diplomatic efforts are under way to resolve the soldiers' fate. Hizbollah wants to exchange them for scores of Lebanese and Arab prisoners in Israeli detention.

Barak said he would hold Syria, Lebanon's political master, responsible for the soldiers' well-being, and vowed to be ready to take decisive action to ensure their safety.

The worst violence at the border since Israel ended its 22-year occupation of south Lebanon in May has deepened concern that violence could spread through the Middle East.

TITLE: Law of the Land Is Laid Out By Duma
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Remember to grab your passport when you don a robe and slippers to take out the garbage in the morning. If you forget, the police may soon be able to fine you 80 rubles.


Driving over the middle divider of the road could lead to a fine from the traffic police of 240 to 400 rubles.

And the refusal of an HIV-positive individual to divulge the identity of the person who infected him could cost 400 to 800 rubles.

So reads the new Administrative Code that passed 366-1 with two abstentions in a final reading by the State Duma on Thursday. The 500-page document, which now goes to the Federation Council and then the president for approval, sets out the laws that guide everyday life - from driving a car and remodeling an apartment to fishing and hunting.

The new code will apply to all Russians, and to foreigners who visit or live here.

It is meant to replace the 16-year-old Soviet administrative code and its outdated provisions banning drinking, gambling, trading and even feeding cattle with bread. Subsidized bread was at one time cheaper than grain.

While the bill is seen as a step in the right direction, critics are already concerned that it leaves room for civil liberties to be curtailed and encourages bribe-taking.

The code explicitly states that citizens must be presumed innocent, but in the same breath increases the number of governmental organizations that can administer fines from 38 to 58.

"This [the new code] was just a cosmetic change. Eighty percent of the code is still just a club to beat over the heads of ordinary people," said Lev Livenson, one of the Duma aides who worked on the code and was clearly disappointed with the results.

Livenson is an assistant to Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalyov, a human rights advocate. But, as the overwhelming vote of confidence suggests, the code does have staunch support.

Nikolai Shaklein, a member of the Duma committee on state-building and one of the main authors of the code, said the final draft of the bill was "the best that the Duma could do at the present time."

"We managed to order a jungle of amendments and decrees that were adopted over the last 10 years in order to bring the code closer to reality," he said. "Now we finally have it all in one book."

Despite the broader authority given to demand fines, the code also places much heavier responsibility on state officials, Shaklein said.

"Three-fourths of the provisions envision fines for state officials that are much higher than the ones for normal citizens," he said. "There are also whole paragraphs dealing with bureaucratic offenses."

Paragraph 5.39, for instance, levies a fine of 400 to 800 rubles on officials who refuse to divulge information or who give out partial or false information to citizens.

However, Livenson said, even with the fines there is no one to keep the officials in check.

"There is one basic thing missing in the code - how to enforce the responsibility of the state bureaucracy," he said.

Take Chapter 12, which expands the powers of arguably the most infamous of bureaucracies: the traffic police. Lawmakers engaged in the fiercest fight over that chapter and lopped off more controversial aspects such as a provision that would have allowed police to impound any improperly parked vehicle.

But critics say other worrisome aspects remain. Among them is a provision allowing a traffic police officer to ticket a driver or confiscate his license on the spot.

"It's easy to imagine a policeman offering the transgressor a deal: You pay an amount more than the fine and I won't take your license away," Livenson said.

Shaklein and other backers of the new code rebuff such criticism, saying that corrupt officials will take bribes no matter what the law says.

"These things happen anyway," Shaklein said. "If a policeman wants to take a bribe, he'll take it with or without the code. Our provisions don't differ that much from the ones on power elsewhere in the world."

Shaklein may have a point. U.S. cities and states have for years had odd laws on their books. For example, in Hartford, Connecticut, residents are forbidden from crossing a street on their hands and from educating their dogs, according to the Dumb Laws Web site.

But in the meantime, residents in Russia may soon have to remember to carry their passports with them at all times, as stated in section 19.15 of the code. But don't forget to make sure the passport contains a valid registration stamp, or you could face a fine of 80 to 240 rubles.

TITLE: Putin Promises Kostunica Support
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin sent a message of congratulation to new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica on Monday and said he would push for a full lifting of sanctions against Belgrade.


Putin said in the message released by the Kremlin that he hoped the "historic friendship" of the two countries would continue.

"We will consistently and firmly aim for the return of Yugoslavia to the international community as a full member, the definitive and urgent end of all outside sanctions," Putin's message said.

As he sent his communique, European Union foreign ministers were meeting in Luxembourg. They were expected to endorse the partial lifting of sanctions, with the end of other restrictions expected to take more time.

Meanwhile, Interfax news agency reported Monday that Marko Milosevic, the son of Yugoslavia's former president Slobodan Milosevic, will be allowed to stay in Moscow if he chooses. Interfax was quoting sources in Russia's Border Guards. China earlier turned Marko Milosevic back at Beijing airport after he made an apparent bid to seek sanctuary there, days after his father was ousted from power.

A source in the Russian Border Guards told Interfax the service was aware Milosevic was heading back from Beijing. He carries a diplomatic passport and his uncle Borislav Milosevic is the Yugoslav ambassador to Moscow.

"But [the Border Guards] have not been given any concrete order on how to deal with the son of the former Yugoslav president. It will all depend on Marko Milosevic himself," the source was quoted as saying, adding he could stay in Moscow or go back to Belgrade.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has made no comment on whether Milosevic will be allowed to stay. 

On Friday, the Russian government gave the final push to the end of Milosevic's reign when it recognized Kostunica's outright victory in a Sept. 24 presidential election.

Putin had sent his congratulations on the victory on Friday and the latest message followed Kostunica's swearing-in on Saturday.

Russia, a fellow Orthodox and Slav state, had stood by Milosevic despite persistent Western pressure, including last year's NATO bombing during the Kosovo crisis.

But Moscow's about-face on Friday changed the situation in the Balkans and left Milosevic friendless.

"I am convinced that the multi-level relationship of friendship and cooperation between Russia and Yugoslavia will develop actively in the future in the interests of the people of our two countries, in the interest of strengthening peace and stability in the Balkans," Putin said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Bolshoi Director Fired


MOSCOW (AP) - The artistic director for the Bolshoi Theater's legendary ballet company has been fired, continuing a shakeup of the company's leadership.

Alexei Fadeyechev said he had been handed an order canceling his contract, Interfax reported Thursday. He blamed his dismissal not only on the new leadership, but "primarily on Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi."

President Vladimir Putin put the Bolshoi under the Culture Ministry's control and fired general and artistic director Vladimir Vasiliyev on Aug. 28. Vasiliyev's job was abolished and he was replaced by Anatoly Iksanov, executive director, and conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, artistic director.



Pope Hearings Set


MOSCOW (AP) - A Moscow city court will open espionage hearings against U.S. businessman Edmond Pope on Oct. 18, and it rejected Pope's request for a jury trial, his lawyer said Friday.

The opening arguments will focus on Pope's fitness to stand trial on health grounds, lawyer Pavel Astakhov said.

Pope, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, has been held in Mos cow's Lefortovo Prison since the Federal Security Service arrested him April 3 on charges of buying plans for a high-speed torpedo.



Explosive Salts Seized 


ST. PETERSBURG(SPT) - City traffic police detained a truck with nearly three tons of an explosive ammonium salt in the Moskovsky region of the city, Interfax reported Monday.

The truck, a ZIL-130, was impounded at 9:30 a.m. at a Moscovsky district check point located on the motorway leading to the city. Inspection revealed about 3 tons of ammonium salt in the cargo section of the vehicle. Anton Ivushkin, the 19-year-old driver, did not have documents for the cargo, the agency said. 

The explosives were confiscated and taken to police precinct 68 for investigation, Interfax reported.

Officials from police precinct 68 and traffic policemen at the check point denied to The St. Petersburg Times that they had seen the truck with explosives.



Stavropol Bomb Kills 2


MOSCOW (SPT) - A series of closely timed bomb explosions shook the southern Stavropol region Friday, killing at least two people and injuring more than a dozen.

One woman was killed and four injured when the first bomb went off on a railway platform in the town of Pyatigorsk at 4:05 p.m., Interfax reported, citing the office of the Kremlin's spokes man on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky.

Just five minutes later, another bomb exploded at a market in the town of Nevinnomyssk, followed another five minutes later by a blast at a bus station near the town's administrative building. Yastrzhembsky's office said one woman was killed and eight injured - some seriously - but Interior Minister Vla di mir Rushailo later said the number of injured was higher, around 20.



Georgian Power Crash


TBILISI, Georgia (Reuters) - Most of Georgia was plunged into darkness Friday after a system failure at one of the country's power stations.

Some Georgians woke up to find they had no drinking water, while the underground in Tbilisi also ground to a halt.

"The crash prompted an automatic shutdown of all energy systems in the country," said Yelisbar Yeristavi, a spokes man for the national energy board. It was not known what caused the shutdown.

TITLE: Siberian Man Joins List of World's Moronic Deaths
AUTHOR: By Anna Badkhen
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Whatever happens when you die?

According to Shakespeare, you "lie in cold obstruction and ... rot." According to priests, it all depends on how you live.

But in some cases, it depends precisely on the way you die - and if you off yourself in a really idiotic fashion, you go straight to DarwinAwards.com.

The first Russian citizen finally made it to the six-year-old collection-slash-contest of the world's most moronic deaths. The man, a resident of the Siberian city Khabarovsk whose name was not released, intended to deal with his wife and her lover last month when the home-made explosive he tried to attach to the door of their ostensible hideout apartment blew up, taking his life.

The Khabarovsk man was the second resident of the former Soviet Union to end up on DarwinAwards.com. The first, a 43-year-old resident of Kiev whose name was likewise withheld by the site, electrocuted himself last year while fishing. He threw electric cables into the river, killing the fish with electric shock, and then waded in to collect the catch without removing the wires.

According to the story posted on the site, titled "Gone Fishin'," the man was trying to get some fish for a meal on the first anniversary of the death of his mother-in-law.

He lost the Darwin Award in 1999 by a narrow margin. The award winners are determined by a vote of the site's roughly 400,000 visitors per month.

DarwinAwards.com claims to commemorate "in the spirit of Charles Darwin ... individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives."

The owner of the site - Wendy Northcutt, 37, a Californian biochemist and a webmaster - maintains that her collection of stories, "which range from the sublimely ironic to the pathetically stupid, display examples of trial and [fatal] error that vividly illustrate evolution in all its selective glory."

In an interview Thursday, Northcutt said the shortage of death stories from Russia was not because Russians are smarter.

"I think it might be the fact that not many people in Russia speak English," she said. "I suspect that there are plenty of stories in Russia that nobody's telling me about."

Biting the dust in a most farcical way is the sole requirement for the competition, which elects from two to four winners each year.

The man from Khabarovsk is competing for first place in the 2000 Darwin Awards, along with a U.S. truck driver who froze to death in Ohio en route from California while trying to fish out a stash of cocaine he had hidden in a truckload of frozen broccoli.

The man dived headfirst into the broccoli, apparently hit his head and lost consciousness and soon "suffered from a fatal case of hypothermia."

Past winners of the award include Polish farmer Krzystof Azninski, who, after a drinking spree with his friends, "suggested that they strip naked and play some 'men's games.'"

After hitting each other with frozen turnips for a while, one of the men decided to push it a little further by grabbing a chainsaw and cutting off part of his foot.

"Not to be outdone, Azninski grabbed the saw and, shouting 'Watch this then,' ... swung at his own head and chopped it off," the "Macho Man?" story says.

Steve Kaminsky, a human genetics specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, choked with laughter when he heard about the contest and said Northcutt may be right in saying the nominees "significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race in an obviously stupid way.

"This certainly does keep their genes out of the gene pool," Kaminsky said Thursday.

"That is, always assuming that they have not already propagated offspring."

TITLE: Lottery Proposed To Help Nation's Athletes
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A day before Russia's victorious Olympic athletes attend a reception at the Kremlin, the president of the country's Olympics committee called Thursday for a national lottery to support the sports programs.


"In that way, we can somehow solve the financial problems of national sports," said Vitaly Smirnov at a news conference. He cited the Italian Olympics committee, which he said receives $1.5 billion every year from lottery proceeds.

A lack of finances, Smirnov said, hurt the medal chances of cyclists, rowers and sailors at the Sydney Games, competitions where Russia won only four medals. Many of the facilities used for training haven't been renovated since the 1980s.

Other problems included a lack of psychologists for the team - Smirnov said the only help they had was from a Russian Orthodox priest - and a lack of advice on nutrition and diet.

The Russian team still did better than in the previous Olympic Games, winning 32 gold medals, 28 silver and 28 bronze, second only to the U.S. team. The Russians won 24 golds in Atlanta in 1996.

"We're satisfied with how our athletes did," Smirnov said. "They demonstrated miraculous courage at the Olympic Games."

It was only in the last weekend that the Russian team moved into second place in the medal table after spectacular performances in wrestling and rhythmic gymnastics. Smirnov said that it was like a thriller where everything goes wrong in the first half of the film, such as controversial losses by Greco-Roman wrestler Alexander Karelin and gymnast Svetlana Khorkina, before the happy denouement at the end.

"They were good professional Games," said Smirnov, who has been at every Olympics since 1960. He wasn't too sure, though, if he agreed with International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who said they were the best Games ever.

Samaranch, 80, hadn't been at the first Olympics in 1896, Smirnov said.

Gold-medal winning athletes were invited to a Kremlin reception Friday. They received a prize from the sponsors Gazprom, according to Smirnov, who said he did not know what the prize was.

Each gold-medal winner also was to receive $50,000 from the state.

A Russian team of disabled athletes will take part in the Paralympic Games in Sydney from Oct. 18 to Oct. 29.

TITLE: Oceanographer Claims Interference by Security Services Ruined Research
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIVOSTOK, Far East - A scientist accused of illegally exporting acoustic equipment to China denied the charges against him Friday and said the investigation had halted important research.


The Federal Security Service charged oceanographer Vladimir Shchu rov on Tuesday with illegally exporting two pieces of equipment he had designed to pick up ocean noises.

The FSB claims the equipment could be used for military purposes such as detecting submarines.

But Shchurov denied that, saying the equipment, which he designed in 1992, was harmless.

"I don't make weapons," he said. "It's ridiculous to say that the results of my work could be used for something like that."

The FSB seized Shchurov's equipment last year on the Chinese border as it was being transported to the Harbin Engineering University as part of a research project.

He said that intelligence and customs officials had previously approved exporting the equipment, and accused the FSB of ruining an $80,000 contract he had with the Chinese university. "What I'm doing is the newest and most promising work in contemporary acoustics," Shchurov said. "They took away all my devices and documents. They ruined the research."

In recent years, the FSB has forced Russian researchers to abandon their cooperation with foreign colleagues over concerns that they might divulge secrets or endanger Russia's military capabilities.

"It's a familiar story," said Diederik Lohman of Human Rights Watch. "They're highly sensitive whenever it comes to any kind of sophisticated equipment."

The most prominent such researcher was former naval captain Alexander Nikitin, who was charged with divulging state secrets in a report he co-authored on the environmental dangers posed by the country's northern submarine fleet.

The information Nikitin used in his report was all in the public domain, but he spent 11 months in jail while an FSB investigation was carried out.

Shchurov, meanwhile, is the third scientist from the Academy of Sciences' Pacific Oceanographic Institute who has faced prosecution on security-related charges in just the past three years.

Viktor Akulichev, director of the institute, received a four-year suspended sentence in 1997 for smuggling an acoustic radiator to China. Vladimir Soifer, who researched nuclear contamination in the ocean, is still under investigation after agents accused him of mishandling classified documents in 1999.

TITLE: Babitsky Gets Fine In 'Political' Ruling
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Dagestani court Friday convicted Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky of having a false passport, in what both he and his lawyers described as a politically motivated case.


Judge Igor Goncharov ruled that Babitsky, who was arrested by federal troops in Chechnya early this year and spent several weeks in captivity, should pay a fine of 10,000 rubles (about $350) for using the passport to register at a hotel in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, soon after he was freed.

However, this crime falls under a recently introduced amnesty and Babitsky won't have to pay the fine, Gon cha rov said in his verdict.

Babitsky, who maintains his innocence, told reporters in the court in Makhachkala that he will appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court of Dagestan.

Babitsky has repeatedly claimed that he is being prosecuted for what the Kremlin saw as pro-rebel coverage of the Chechen war. Radio Liberty is funded by the U.S. government.

Babitsky was detained by police on Jan. 23 in Grozny for failing to have obtained accreditation to travel to the war zone. He was then handed over to what the Interior Ministry has described as Chechen rebels in exchange for several Russian soldiers on Feb. 3.

According to Babitsky, however, the exchange was staged and he was handed over not to the rebels, but to supporters of pro-Moscow Che chen politician Adam Dei ni yev. It was these men, Babitsky said, who took his documents and gave him a passport that identified him as a native of Azerbaijan, Ali Isa-Ogly Musayev.

Babitsky's captors tried to ship him from Russia into Azerbaijan, but he fled to Makhachkala on Feb. 25 only to be arrested after using the Musayev passport to register at a Mak hach ka la hotel. 

There was at least one Federal Security Service officer among those who tried to smuggle Babitsky out of Russia, the newspaper Segodnya said.

These reports failed to impress either Judge Goncharov or the Interior Ministry's investigative committee, which probed Babitsky's use of the fake passport before sending the case to court. 

Vladimir Martynov, spokesman for the investigative committee, said in a telephone interview Friday that his committee is "satisfied" with Friday's verdict.

TITLE: Lithuania Vote Forces Coalition Talk
AUTHOR: By Liudas Dapkus
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VILNIUS, Lithuania - A left-wing coalition led by a former communist leader won the most votes in Lithuanian parliamentary elections, but fell short of the support needed to form a government. 


The Social Democrats led by Algirdas Brazauskas won the largest parliamentary bloc in Sunday's elections, but its failure to win outright means parties will begin negotiating to hammer out a viable coalition. A new government could even exclude Brazauskas' party. 

The Social Democrats won 31 percent of the vote with ballots from all 2,027 polling stations counted. That share, plus several directly elected mandates, gave them 49 seats in the 141-seat Seimas parliament. At least 71 seats are needed to control the legislature. 

Seven seats from direct mandates still must be determined and could decide which parties take the lead in forming a government. 

The ruling Conservatives, blamed for the country's increasing economic hardships, won just 8 percent of the vote to earn them eight seats. In the last election in 1996, they won over 40 percent of the vote. 

The center-left New Union party came in second place with 19 percent and 28 seats. 

During the campaign, left-leaning parties promised to create jobs, restore subsidies to farmers, and raise the minimum wage, now pegged at $107 a month. 

The Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, will stay in power in a caretaker role until a new prime minister and cabinet are approved. The process could take as long as several weeks or more. 

The Conservatives were popular during their first two years in office as the economy expanded. But their approval ratings fell due to a recession brought on by 1998 financial turmoil in Russia, Lithuania's third-largest export market. 

To stabilize the economy - which shrank by 4 percent last year and is expected to grow by only 1 percent this year - the government slashed spending and farm subsidies.

TITLE: Apartment Slaying Claims Lives of 3
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two adults and a child were killed Thursday in a central city apartment, when, according to police reports, a woman and her daughter were shot by their neighbor, who then took his life.


Yelena Sentimova, 33, and her 13-year-old daughter, Ksenia, were found dead in their room when her husband Vya cheslav Sentimov came home from work at about 5 p.m. Their neighbor, whose name the police would not disclose, was found dead in the other room, with a hunting rifle beside his body.

"We have reason to believe the woman and the daughter were killed by their neighbor, who then committed suicide," said Igor Paradeyev, head of the Central district's police department, who refused to give additional information.

According to local media, police are considering mental health problems and alcoholism as the most probable reasons for the killing. However, Valentina Titova, Sentimova's mother, who came from her home in Udmurtiya as soon as she heard the news, said the neighbor was "a quiet, reserved man."

TITLE: Yakovlev Vetoes Legislative Assembly Law on Small Claims Court
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev last week rejected a law put forward by the Legislative Assembly that would have created justices of the peace for small court claims, in a the latest conflict between City Hall and the local parliament.


Having vetoed the law in its original form, Yakovlev then returned it to the assembly with 16 amendments - including one demanding the exclusive right to nominate the 211 judges who would fill the new posts.

Lawmakers, who passed the law in September, say that the nominations should be made by the Supreme Court's St. Petersburg representative. They have also accused Yakovlev of trying to wreck a new and independent legal system which, they say, would lighten the load of the City Civil Court.

Small cases are defined in the law as suits involving sums of 40,000 rubles ($1,430) or less, and criminal cases with the term of punishment less than two years in prison.

"The governor doesn't want an additional judicial power in the city," said Anatoly Kalinin, a lawmaker who heads the assembly's Legislation Committee, in a telephone interview on Monday. 

"And City Hall doesn't want to finance the new system." Lawmakers say the system would cost the city 17 million rubles (about $612,000) annually.

According to the local branch of the Supreme Court, the 296 federally appointed judges who work in the St. Petersburg Civil Court hear about 70 cases a month.

"Obviously this is far too much," said Andrei Medvedyev, a local spokesman for the Supreme Court, on Monday. "Judges should not be dealing with cases about hooliganism. There are many people sitting in jail for various small crimes waiting for a trial."

Arkady Kramarev, a lawmaker on the Legislative Assembly's Law and Order Committee, said that most of Yakovlev's amendments were of a technical nature - such as dividing the city up into districts - to which the assembly could agree.

"But [in terms of] the governor wanting to nominate the judges, this is just not his business. He has no right to interfere with the legal system," he said.

Gov. Yakovlev's spokesman Alexander Afanasiyev said on Monday that the law had been rejected because the Legislative Assembly had been unprofessional in forming it.

"As it was passed, the law looks like a declaration, and does not describe how a justice of the peace is supposed to operate," Afanasiyev said. "The governor is not trying to meddle in affairs that aren't his business; he is just trying to improve the law."

Kalinin said that the assembly would try and overturn the veto, for which it would need a 34-vote majority out of the 50-member body.

TITLE: Navigators Call Off Strike After Meeting
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Maritime pilots who threatened to begin striking on Monday canceled their action after meeting Transport Ministry officials, but said that the situation was far from resolved.


"Even though Transport Ministry officials have agreed to postpone [efforts to create state-run navigators organization], and to halt the one that already exists in Novorossiisk, we are waiting to see if they keep their word," said Vladimir Yegorkin, president of the Russian Maritime Pilots Association (RMPA), by telephone on Monday.

The government announced plans to set up state-managed "pools" of sea pilots in May, saying that it wanted to strengthen the role of the state in the activities of Russia's ports and the shipping companies that operate there. The state navigation service was scheduled to be up and running by Jan. 1, 2001.

The pilots say the Transport Ministry's plans will draw on inexperienced navigators, and that this could lead to major accidents at sea. Furthermore, they say, the state-run groups would significantly undercut RMPA rates.

St. Petersburg navigators like Yegorkin say they currently earn an average of 25,000 rubles ($900) a month, but that under the new plans the state would pay as little as 4,000 rubles.

However, they maintain that the cost of maintaining a state navigators' organization would be enormous, in addition to the cost of cleaning up in the event of an environmental disaster.

"The director of the Novorossiisk sea port has hired people with no training and no experience of sea piloting, taking away RMPA navigators opportunity to work, and dramatically increasing the risk of ecological disasters in a port where there is a large number of oil tankers present," said Viktor Chernov, head of the Novorossiisk Maritime Pilotage Association - part of the RMPA - at a press-conference at the National Press Institute last month.

Yegorkin said he wanted the government to cancel its plans completely.

"But the ministry has taken the first step, and [therefore] we have canceled the strike," he said. 

A letter to President Vladimir Putin written by Duma Deputy Ivan Zhdakayev said that a strike would disrupt nearly 80 percent of Russian sea traffic. Zhdakayev is deputy head of the Duma's Energy, Transport and Communications Committee. The strike would have affected 14 ports across the country.

The government has also received appeals from several foreign sea pilots' organizations.

"The situation in Novorossiisk could lead to an ecological disaster if immediate steps are not taken to return matters to the state they were in before this conflict," wrote Albert Cools, secretary general of the European Maritime Pilotage Association, in a letter to Putin and Deputy Transport Minister Sergei Frank.

Yegorkin said that talks with the Transport Ministry officials would continue. The Transport Ministry was unavailable for comment.

TITLE: State To Remain Force in Banking Sector
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government will keep a presence in the banking industry as a temporary measure to share exorbitant risks with the private sector, but it will reduce its participation to four or fewer banks, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said Monday.


"In my view, the government's participation in most banks is economically inefficient," Kasyanov said after the 13th meeting of the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, which is composed of government officials and executives from large foreign corporations doing business in Russia.

The government owns stakes in 469 of the country's roughly 1,330 banks, and has been heavily criticized in the past for its failure to address chronic problems in the industry.

Kasyanov said that for the time being the government should keep stakes in two, but not more than four, banking institutions in order to share macroeconomic risks with private investors. Once the investment climate shows concrete signs of improvement, he said, the state's engagement would no longer be necessary.

While praising some recent moves by the government to liberalize the industry, Tessen von Heydebreck, a Deutsche Bank board member, said Monday that excessive bureaucracy is still suffocating the sector.

For a company to open an account, for example, it must produce 10 different documents issued by at least five different institutions, said Heydebreck, who oversees the accounts of Deutsche Bank's private clients. His remarks came from a transcript of the meeting published by the government's press service.

Heydebreck also said the Central Bank contradicts a recognized international legal concept - all that is not prohibited is permitted - by telling banks which capital account transactions are allowed, not which transactions are not allowed.

Finally, Heydebreck criticized the Central Bank for limiting the lending activities of international banks without taking into account the borrower's international credit ratings.

Jean Lemierre, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said at a meeting Monday that the growing role of state-owned banks and proposals to set up new state institutions in the industry is a cause for "certain concern," Prime-Tass reported.

Separately, the State Duma's Banking Committee last week drafted a law limiting the state's participation in commercial banks.

According to the head of the committee, Duma Deputy Alexander Shokhin, the government should keep control of the Russian Bank of Development and the Russian Agricultural Bank, and create a Russian version of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, as well as maintain its role in Sber bank and Vnesh torgbank.

Details on the amount of public funds that have been plowed into the banking sector were revealed last week by the local press, which quoted a Finance Ministry report and led to widespread speculation that the government is attempting to set up a holding company that will manage its stakes in commercial banks.

Kasyanov dismissed these allegations, saying that no holding company would be created. He also mapped out a banking reform plan that focuses on three major areas:

First, the state will concentrate its stakes in existing commercial banks.

Second, it will promote competition in the banking industry, hamstrung by excessive regulations, red tape and lack of transparency.

Finally, it will encroach on the Central Bank's commercial empire, solving the conflict of interests that exists due to the bank's role as a regulator of the banking industry and owner of several commercial subsidiaries.

The government and the Central Bank, however, have not yet arrived at a consensus on overhauling the industry.

TITLE: 'External Factors' Cause Drop in the RTS Index
AUTHOR: Igor Semenenko
TEXT: The stock market made a zig-zag on the week and the RTS index dropped 0.94 percent to 197.20 driven by external factors.


"Hedge funds were shifting to oil stocks while local brokers kept buying power and telecoms that were underperforming the market at the start of the week," said Vladimir Detinich, head of research with Olma brokerage. "When people understood that no new money was coming in, the market sagged."

The RTS rebounded to close at 212.91 Tuesday, but when the Nasdaq tumbled in the middle of the week on weak third-quarter earnings reports, local stocks followed suit.

The Nasdaq was down 8.5 percent last week to 3,361, sending a negative signal to all emerging markets, and Russia was no exception.

Oil stocks weathered the storm best. Surgutneftegaz was up 1.7 percent to 30 cents per share, Tatneft gained 2.2 percent to 52 cents per share and LUKoil was down 0.2 percent to $14.37.

Rostelecom, the most correlated with the Nasdaq, was again an underdog, shedding 11.5 percent to $1.42.

But the market regained some life Friday after traders gave their positions a critical look.

"Traders started to ask themselves whether the market had fallen too much in the previous days," said Denis Sarantsev, a trader with Aton. 

Unified Energy Systems opened up at 12 cents per share Friday, but closed at 12.5 cents, still down 6.7 percent on the week.

Hit by chilly winds from across the Atlantic, local stocks ignored a string of positive news released last week.

December Brent futures was up 0.87 percent to $30.10 per barrel, fuelling expectations of rainfall profits in the oil industry.

The State Duma passed the budget on first reading, dodging a clash with the government on issues related with budget spending. 

The nation's international reserves surged to $25 billion, up 100 percent since the year's start, and may reach $30 billion by year-end if oil prices hold firm.

TITLE: Budget Squeaks Past But Trouble in Store
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The 2001 budget squeaked through the State Duma on first reading Friday amid outcries from some lawmakers that they were being pressured by the Kremlin for their votes.


The 1.19 trillion ruble ($39.7 billion) budget was approved 232 to 186 with two abstentions, just six votes more than necessary to gain approval.

The vote marks the first time the government has won a green light from parliament on a first attempt. 

The balanced budget forecasts the economy will grow 4 percent and inflation will be reined in at 12 percent. It sets the average currency rate at 30 rubles to the U.S. dollar.

If the anger of lawmakers over Kremlin lobbying was any indication Friday, the government may face a struggle getting the budget passed at the next three Duma hearings. The second hearing is set for Oct. 20. The Federation Council must pass the budget before President Vladimir Putin can sign it into law.

Even in the hours before the vote Friday, the Kremlin showed its confidence that the budget would sail through.

"For the first time we want to break with the tradition of the budget being refuted in first reading and open the way for bargaining," said First Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Ulykaev on Russian television Friday morning.

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin warned lawmakers that the cabinet would not give up pushing through its budget, and the country could start a new year without a budget if the vote failed.

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov dodged a clash with Duma members during the formal presentation of the budget by sending his deputy, Kudrin, to cut a deal with the Duma.

At the core of the debate was the government's spending of 1.17 trillion rubles. The government set expenditures at 15.4 percent of a projected 7.75 trillion-ruble gross domestic product.

As in previous budget debates, the Duma once again urged the government to increase GDP in order to boost spending. The Kremlin has historically undercalculated GDP. In 1999 the GDP was penned in at 4 trillion rubles but actually turned out to be 4.44 trillion rubles. Likewise, the 2000 budget had a forecast of 5.1 trillion rubles that was later raised to 5.35 trillion rubles under pressure from the Duma. But even that adjustment appears to fall short since GDP is now forecast at 6.45 trillion rubles.

Only the pro-Kremlin Unity party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's LDPR called the GDP forecast realistic. Still, many deputies said they wanted to avoid a showdown with the Kremlin.

"Our position on the budget is dictated by our political preferences," said Irina Khakamada, a leader with the Union of Right Forces faction.

Right-wing liberals said they disliked the way the government was dealing with the parliament, but supported the budget in principle since it runs no deficit and is aimed at reducing the debt burden.

Communists, Agrarians and Fatherland-All Russia, which together control 176 seats, vehemently protested against the government's plans.

"No attempts were made to reach a compromise," said Yevgeny Primakov, head of the Fatherland-All Russia faction. "Our faction supports the president, but these maneuvers damage his reputation."

"If in the past the budget was one of survival ... [now] it's a budget of foreign-debt service. It degrades the people and borders on catastrophe,'' said Vladimir Tikhonov of the Communist Party.

The budget earmarks about a fourth of the budget - $11.3 billion - to pay off debts to international lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The IMF, which froze loans to Russia after the 1998 crisis, has not yet resumed lending in full, and the government is not counting on any bailout cash next year.

The money set aside for debt servicing does assume that Russia will be able to reschedule $3 billion in debt coming due to the Paris Club.

The way the vote panned out was a minor coup for the Kremlin. 

The Unity, People's Deputy, LDPR and Union of Right Forces factions together control 193 votes, so the fate of the government's proposal lay in the hands of the Yabloko and Russia's Regions parties, which have 19 and 44 seats, respectively.

Yabloko during the debate gave its members carte blanche on the vote, and the opposition was doomed.

To sweeten the pill, the government proposed splitting extra revenues, if any, between debt servicing and areas designated by the Duma. 

But the scheme to split those extra funds is clearly in favor of the Cabinet. For example, the Cabinet could spend its half of the extra funds raised in the first quarter on debts immediately, but the Duma's half would be held in safekeeping. Those funds would only be released if the government collected enough proceeds in the second quarter.

TITLE: Council Plots To Boost U.S. Deals
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A newly created lobbying group of business heavyweights held its second general meeting Friday to hammer out a plan of action for promoting commerce with the United States.


The Russian-American Business Council, or RABC, is a non-profit trade association representing more than 50 companies - including No. 1 oil major LUKoil, natural gas monopoly Gazprom, leading arms exporter Promexport, cellular operator Vimpelcom and beverage retailing powerhouse Wimm-Bill-Dann.

RABC president and former Russian ambassador to the United States Yuly Vorontsov said after the closed-door meeting that the idea behind the council was to emulate the success of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, a loose counterpart to the RABC.

"When I was ambassador to the United States, I saw American businesses coming to Russia in an organized way. They created an association - the US-Russia Business Council, which helped them do business in Russia," Vorontsov told reporters after the meeting. "I wanted to see something similar here for our young and active businessmen that are unfamiliar with the specifics of working in the United States," he said.

Vorontsov said he hoped to use his extensive personal contacts that he developed when he was ambassador to Washington to further economic cooperation between the two countries.

"We have to have access to the U.S. government," Vorontsov said. "We have contacts there - I know [U.S. Vice President Al] Gore - and we will build up contacts in the new administration, work with the U.S. Congress, and help lift logistical obstacles in the way of Russian businesses."

Formed earlier this year with the blessings of both President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, RABC now has the official status of "consultant to the Russian government on the bilateral economic relationship with the United States." The council has also been officially designated a consulting body to the US-Russian Joint Commission on Economic and Technological Cooperation.

Among its many spheres of interest, the council will help tailor the state's policy in relation to business, pursue protection of shareholders' rights and try to ensure a smoother functioning legal system. As a mediator between Russian and U.S. businesses, the council will help find concrete investment opportunities on both sides. 

"The Russian government has invited us to help promote Russian business abroad and we hope to live up to its expectations. ... If a strong economic fabric is created then it will favorably influence the political relationship of both countries," Verontsov said.

Verontsov said the council already has meetings scheduled with Putin, Kasyanov and U.S. Ambassador James Collins in the next few months.

The council will also work with the Duma on creating favorable economic legislation and improving the investment climate in Russia, Verontsov said. He said the Law on Protection of Investment, which is currently stranded in the Duma, is particularly vital to gain foreign companies' confidence that their investments will be protected, and he vowed to help get it passed. 

RABC vice president Ednan Agaev - a partner in the Moscow-based law firm Yegorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev and Marks - specifically listed U.S. tariff policies and U.S. anxiety over shareholders rights in Russian companies as high on the council's immediate agenda.

"Russian companies think that U.S. companies over-dramatize the problem of minority shareholders rights and we have to reach a mutual understanding about that," Agaev said.

Also high on the council's agenda is cooperation in the energy sector, especially Production Sharing Agreements, a key to unlocking massive investment.

James Balashak, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents over 550 companies in Russia, said the new council was a positive development. 

"It's a terrific idea to see Russian businessmen organize and take their message to either the U.S. or Russian government with one voice," he said. "This is very good for creating a general atmosphere for developing business in Russia."

TITLE: Local Microsoft Office Faces Piracy Battle
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In an attempt to attain a degree of control over the piracy-ridden Russian software market, software giant Microsoft is planning to open a representative office in St. Petersburg.


Microsoft employees who are staffing the office in St. Petersburg said that they would comment officially on the situation only at the official opening of the office, which is planned for some time later this year. Microsoft representatives at company headquarters in Redmond, Washington, could not be contacted on Monday.

However, Tatyana Valuiskaya, general director of local chain Computer World, which is licensed to sell Microsoft software, said in an interview on Monday that the representative office would probably aim to keep an eye on regional computer hardware dealers.

"Many [of them are] dishonest and install pirated copies of Microsoft software for free in order to sell computers," Valuiskaya said.

According to Valuiskaya, licensed software in Moscow accounts for only 30 percent of the software market, and only 10 percent or less in St. Petersburg.

Valuiskaya said that Computer World, whose sales account for about 18 percent of the software and hardware market in St. Petersburg, always sold computers with licensed software.

"However, our customers have a choice. They can buy a computer with no software - but we lose many customers that way," she said. "They go to another shop where they can buy the same computer with a pirated copy of Windows for about $70 cheaper. We would like our competitors to work in the same conditions as we do."

A trip to another store confirmed Valuiskaya's claim. An employee of that store, who did not wish to be identified, said that when showing a computer to a customer, "The company should install all packages to show that the computer works, and then the salesperson must format the hard drive."

"However, if the customer is alone, doesn't look suspicious and wants to buy a computer, we can leave the program package on the computer," he said.

Valuiskaya said that according to the Tax Code, when a company's documentation is being checked, the Tax Inspectorate is allowed to request the license number of all software used by the company.

"Computers with licensed software cost about 10 percent more [than those without]," she said. "For companies, the decision depends on their readiness to take a risk. I expect that Microsoft will want to defend their intellectual property rights and request that the Tax Police run a number of inspections in local computer shops."

I hope that the St. Petersburg market will soon reach the same 30 percent of legal software sales [as in Moscow]," she said. "However, Microsoft should not forget about the specific nature of the Russian software market. The low income of the population is especially congenial to piracy."

"If customers want a licensed copy of Windows, they can buy it for $60," said the unidentified salesman. "A more advanced program such as designers use, for instance, may cost $400 to $600. I guess not many people can afford this. On the black market, the same product only costs about 50 rubles [about $1.80]. If Microsoft wants to fight computer piracy, it will have to get rid of the black market first."

Anton Ilyin, a press spokesman for the St. Petersburg Tax Police, said by telephone on Monday that local markets selling software are frequently checked.

"The police have found some real violations, including copyright violations," he said.

But he added that the Tax Police did not run checks on companies on the basis of anonymous tipoffs, in case they were from rival firms. "Whether the Tax Police check somebody out or not depends on the reliability of the information we receive," he said.

TITLE: Reiman Skirts Controversy To Talk Telecoms
AUTHOR: By Pavel Nefedov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The Communications Ministry is embroiled in a conflict over radio frequencies. It is widely believed that the ministry wants to take the frequencies from two cellular-communications providers and transfer them to the Sonic Duo company, which plans to launch its very own GSM network next year.


A few days ago the Supreme Court considered a claim against the Communications Ministry made by Pavel Netupsky, a St. Petersburg journalist seeking to invalidate the ministry's order on Means for Supporting Investigation Activities, or SORM.

However, Communications Minister Leonid Reiman declined to discuss these burning issues in detail, preferring to stick to the more global problems of the Russian telecoms industry. 



Q: What changes have occurred in the telecoms industry over the past year?

A: The industry has started to develop much faster. First of all, foreign and domestic investors are again showing interest in the industry. We are back to pre-crisis development rates, and in certain areas, we have even outstripped them. 


This is evidenced by investments, which have grown by 12 percent. In addition, a number of Russian telecoms companies have been floated on the international stock market.

The most acute issue now is how capital assets can be replenished - in 1998 [regional telecoms operator] Electrosvyaz found itself unable to pay back its loans. The loans had to be restructured. The company borrowed money for many years, so it will take a few years to return to its pre-crisis financial position.



Q: What stage is [national telecoms holding] Svyazinvest's reform in now?

A: As you know, a consortium of four Western consultancies headed by Arthur Andersen was formed to analyze ways of restructuring. Potential restructuring models were researched exhaustively. 


Materials were discussed in the Communications Ministry and the Property Ministry on several occasions. The issue was also discussed within Svyazinvest itself. Restructuring proposals were developed and filed. We are getting close to a final version. The Communications Ministry, Property Ministry and Svyazinvest agree. The final scenario will be developed by the end of the year, when we can get down to the task of implementation.

At the same time, the process of merging Electrosvyaz regional companies, which started a while ago, is going ahead successfully. 



Q: Will they become bigger by incorporating all companies within each federal district?

A: A few years ago, when Svyazinvest started developing its consolidation, the concept of federal districts did not exist. 


However, when the decree came out establishing them, the merger proposals corresponded with the borders of the federal districts, with some minor exceptions. We didn't need to make the consolidated companies fit the federal district borders - it happened naturally.



Q: What is your view of the state's regulatory role regarding the Internet?

A: "The state's regulatory role" is not quite the right term, as we never set ourselves the task of establishing monopolistic state regulation for the Internet. It would be more accurate to say the mass media were saying over and over that the state wanted to regulate the Internet. We believe a legal foundation should be laid whereby Internet companies would be subject to basic Russian legislation. At the moment, it is not always possible to resolve Internet-related conflicts in court, because the Internet phenomenon is not fully documented.


As a first step, we suggested the state registration of IP addresses or the registration of addresses by accredited independent bodies. 

This will bring a degree of order. It will give confidence to those who work with the Internet, and it will create the right conditions for developing a legislative base in the future. Russia is by no means unique in setting itself this task. It is a problem for nearly all countries. 

We held a meeting to discuss the idea of setting up an Internet advisory board with state representatives and members of the Internet community. The discussion that ensued was extremely interesting.



Q: Recently, the Supreme Court considered a complaint made by [Pavel Netupsky] against the Communications Ministry order a Means for Supporting Investigation Activities, or SORM. The court canceled the provision stating that law-enforcement bodies won't inform telecoms operators about their activities. What is your opinion of this ruling?

A: We expected the court to confirm that the order on implementing SORM is lawful. The order was issued pursuant to the law on investigative activities adopted in 1995. We cannot be accused of trying to infringe upon anyone's rights or to violate citizens' constitutional freedoms. The court has effectively confirmed this.




Q: Tempers are now flying in connection with new GSM operator ...

A: As for tempers, it is best not to listen to your emotions in matters such as these. The state must carry out its regulatory functions with respect to frequency allocations. 


We aren't wasting our time either - at present we are studying the possibility for communications operators to use frequencies of the E-GSM 900 standard.[E-GSM is an extended version of the GSM standard for cellular communications.]

TITLE: Ozone Hole Expands, Affects City In Chile
AUTHOR: By Ray Lilley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WELLINGTON, New Zealand - The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has stretched over a populated city for the first time after ballooning to a new record size, New Zealand scientists said.


Previously, the hole only opened over Antarctica and the surrounding ocean.

Citing data from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, atmospheric research scientist Stephen Wood said Thursday that the hole covered 29.3 million square kilometers - an area more than three times the size of the United States.

For two days, Sept. 9 to 10, the hole extended over the southern Chile city of Punta Arenas, exposing residents to very high levels of ultraviolet radiation.

Too much UV radiation can cause skin cancer and destroy tiny plants at the beginning of the food chain.

Wood is a researcher with New Zealand's respected National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

Dr. Dean Peterson of the Antarctica New Zealand research group said Wood's findings showed for the first time a city being exposed by the ozone hole.

"The longer it gets, the greater the chances of populated areas being hit by low ozone levels,'' said Peterson, the group's science strategy manager.

Peterson said segments separating from the hole could affect Argentina and even the tip of South Africa, Australia or New Zealand.

"The hole won't grow to that size. But as it breaks apart, fingers of low ozone, or filaments as we call them, will go over major land mass areas. Those filaments will be over the land mass for a few weeks.''

Last month, scientists expressed surprise when NASA data from Sept. 3 showed the hole at just under 28.5 million square kilometers - the biggest it had ever been.

Record-low temperatures in the stratosphere are believed to have helped the expansion of the ozone hole during spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

Antarctic ozone depletion starts in July, when sunlight triggers chemical reactions in cold air trapped over the South Pole during the Antarctic winter. It intensifies during August and September before tailing off as temperatures rise in November or early December.

Depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica and the Arctic is being monitored because ozone protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

Human-made chlorine compounds used in refrigerants, aerosol sprays, solvents, foam-blowing agents and bromine compounds used in firefighting halogens cause most ozone depletion.

The temperature over Antarctica also significantly affects the size of each year's hole. Starting in October, warmer temperatures reduce the ability of chlorine and other gases to destroy ozone.

Experts agree that the man-made chemicals are leveling off thanks to the 1989 Montreal Protocol, which commits countries to eliminating production and use of ozone-depleting substances. But it could be 20 years before ozone levels recover noticeably.

"Although CFC [chlorofluorocarbon] levels will begin to reduce over the next 10 years, variations in the weather pattern will continue,'' Peterson said.

TITLE: Top Automakers Expect Losses
AUTHOR: By Todd Nissen
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DETROIT - General Motors Corp. is expected to be the only traditional Big 3 Detroit automaker to report improved third-quarter earnings, even though the American auto industry is surging ahead to a second year of record car and truck sales.


Ford Motor Co., coping with the Firestone recall crisis, is forecast to snap its 17-quarter string of operating profit gains.

German-American automaker DaimlerChrysler AG is also expected to post lower results because of ballooning marketing costs that will cause a loss at its Chrysler group.

GM is scheduled to report results Oct. 12, Ford on Oct. 18 and DaimlerChrysler on Oct. 26. Third-period results are traditionally the weakest of the year for automakers because of factory summer shut-downs and changeovers to new models.

Although the Firestone crisis has marred Ford results, one analyst said the companies should be performing better in a strong sales year. Sales of cars and light trucks are forecast to easily top last year's record-breaking 16.9 million.

"The concern I have for the industry is that this is a 17.5-18 million [unit sales] year," said analyst David Cole at the University of Michigan. "Everybody should be saying these are the best of times. But the profits are not what they should be for everybody."

GM, the No.1 automaker, is expected to earn $1.59 a share compared to $1.33 a year ago, according to analysts polled by First Call/Thomson Financial.

Some of the per-share rise will stem from a buyback program that has reduced the number of shares outstanding. On a net income basis, results are forecast to rise only slightly, said Burnham Securities Inc. analyst David Healy. GM, which has struggled to boost sales amid stiff foreign competition, is projected by Healy to report net earnings of $920 million, up from $877 million.

North America remains GM's strongest region, with estimated profits of $751 million, said Healy.

Europe is expected to lose $55 million, Latin American is forecast to make a small profit, while Asia-Pacific is also expected to lose money.

"Bottom line, the net income doesn't change very much," he said.

Ford is predicted by analysts to earn 49 cents a share, down from an adjusted 54 cents a share. The last time Ford failed to report a year-over-year operating profit improvement was first quarter 1996. Merrill Lynch analyst John Casesa said in a research note Monday that, based on a briefing from Chief Executive Officer Jac Nasser Friday, Ford's results "should meet or exceed expectations."

The No. 2 automaker has been hit by Bridgestone Corp's Firestone recall of 6.5 million tires. Most of the tires were on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles.

Because recall costs are accounted for under a designated reserve, the company does not expect to post any separate one-time charges related to the recall. Other expenses incurred because of the recall, including advertising or extra staffing, are not expected to materially hurt the earnings.

But what will bring Ford's results down are the three weeks of Ranger pickup truck and Explorer production, equal to 35,000 vehicles, that it lost so it could reroute tires to the recall replacement effort. Ford has not said what the recall will cost. But Nasser said on the television program "60 Minutes" Sunday that an estimate of $500 million is "in the ballpark."

Also expected to report lower results is DaimlerChrysler AG. The German-American automaker warned last month its North American Chrysler unit would lose about $530 million in the third quarter, battered by surging marketing costs to clear out old models from its aging product line.

The First Call/Thomson Financial consensus of U.S. analyst estimates predicts DaimlerChrysler will earn 53 cents a share, down from 61 cents.

TITLE: Beijing's WTO Bid Still Facing Obstacles
AUTHOR: By Bill Savadove
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING - A Chinese trade official said on Monday that Beijing would press ahead with the process of joining the World Trade Organization, despite concerns that problems will delay membership until next year.


The comments follow remarks by U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky that slow progress in talks threatened to delay China's entry past the end of this year, which Beijing had set as its target for acceding to the world trade club.

"We will make efforts to enter WTO," said the official from the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC), who declined to be named.

"We will still follow our set policy to gain entry," she said, but gave no specific timetable.

The official declined to comment on what problems might be delaying the talks.

Diplomats say sticking points include how China will implement WTO rules on intellectual property and other reforms, including how it will assign safeguard quotas for a vast array of goods imported under special tariffs.

Barshefsky hopes to meet Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji and other leaders later this month or early in November to help break the stalemate. Zhu will be on visits to Japan and South Korea from Oct. 12 to 22.

"It is still possible to finish this up by year-end," Barshefsky, the top U.S. trade negotiator, told Reuters in an interview.

"For us to wrap up the negotiations this year, China will have to make very rapid progress in the talks," she said.

But state media have quoted China's chief trade negotiator as saying Beijing would not accept provisions which were harmful to its rights.

"We cannot accept provisions which are detrimental to China's legitimate rights under WTO," Long said in September at the end of the last session of the working party on China's entry.

"What we care mostly is not the specific timing of accession, but the terms of accession," he said.

The Swiss official chairing the talks, Pierre-Louis Girard, has said the talks have hit serious problems which needed high-level political guidance to resolve.

Analysts said a delay until next year could disappoint investors in the Hong Kong and Chinese stock markets, but would do no lasting harm to China's economy.

Prices in transport stocks and other firms expected to benefit have risen in anticipation of China's WTO entry.

"I think timing wise, it's going to be first quarter of next year because of technical issues," said Charles Cheung, head of China equity research for Salomon Smith Barney in Hong Kong.

"The stock market is expecting some time by the end of this year, so it will be slightly disappointing," he said. "The economy has been improving on its own, so I think three months, six months of delay should not be that much of a problem."

China sealed a bilateral deal with the United States in November last year and with the European Union in May. It must still conclude a bilateral agreement with Mexico and complete procedures at the multi-lateral level.

TITLE: Japanese Insurance Giant Goes Bankrupt
AUTHOR: By Miki Shimogori
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TOKYO - In the biggest failure of a Japanese life insurer to date, Japan's Chiyoda Mutual Life Insurance Co. said on Monday it had filed for court protection from creditors under new fast-track laws for financial firms.


The failure - making Chiyoda Mutual the nation's biggest corporate bankruptcy with 2.94 trillion yen ($26.95 billion) in total debt - should heat up a survival battle in the hard-hit industry, already reeling from a triple blow of falling premium income, low investment returns and weak share prices.

Those still in weak financial health will be pressed harder to seek mergers or rescue takeovers amid the increasing competition that has developed since 1998, when deregulation opened the way for international insurers to enter the domestic market, analysts said.

The Chiyoda move was likely to hurt sentiment in Japan's share market on Tuesday after a holiday on Monday.

Chiyoda Mutual President Reiji Yoneyama told a news conference the nation's 12th-largest life insurer had filed for protection with the Tokyo District Court. That would make the company the fifth life insurer to fail in Japan's post-war history.

Yoneyama also said he has submitted his resignation to a court-appointed administrator.

The 96-year-old Chiyoda Mutual was the first institution to seek court protection under the new laws, enacted in June with the aim of dealing with troubled financial institutions.

Left with hefty non-performing assets after Japan's late 1980s assets-price bubble burst, Chiyoda Mutual has been plagued by persistent worries about its financial health and hit by a rush of insurance policy cancellations.

Its failure had little sustained impact on the yen in Asian trading on Monday, but it could weigh on Japanese stocks.

"This isn't news that came as a total surprise, as Chiyoda has long been thought to be in weak health, but news of its actual failure could add caution, especially among foreigners, over potential risks in their Japanese asset holdings," said Masaaki Higashida, deputy general manager at Nomura Securities.

Higashida said the benchmark Nikkei average of 225 leading shares could dip as low as 15,550 this week. The Nikkei ended down 0.65 percent at 15,994.24 on Friday.

In a move that echoed its past interventionist policies, Japan's government had urged banks on Friday to press on with efforts to save the mid-sized Chiyoda after Tokai Bank clouded its future by toughening conditions for a bailout.

Tokai, which has spearheaded rescue efforts for Chiyoda Life, told the insurer it must tie up with a foreign firm to get any financial help. The bank had toughened its stance while it concentrated on a planned union next April with Sanwa Bank and Toyo Trust & Banking.

Chiyoda had been in talks with several foreign firms including Germany's Allianz group, but none of the alliance discussions have borne fruit thus far.

"We have tried to form an alliance with several foreign supporters, but we have judged that such an alliance would be difficult," said Yoneyama.

Chiyoda expressed hope it would find foreign supporters after the court filing, saying it had recently held talks with American International Group (AIG) of the United States to seek its financial help under the court-led rehabilitation process.

Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) Commissioner Masaharu Hino had confirmed on Friday that AIG was a possible candidate to help Chiyoda reconstruct its troubled operations.

Chiyoda asked Tokai in June for a capital infusion after its solvency margin ratio - a key gauge of its ability to meet claims - fell to 263.1 percent, considered dangerously near the 200 percent warning level.

Analysts say Chiyoda's balance sheet has only worsened since it requested help in February and unveiled restructuring plans that included 800 job cuts and closure of four-fifths of its branches.

Chiyoda, which held assets of some 3.5 trillion yen as of the end of March, was expected to have suffered negative net worth of some 34.3 billion yen as of the end of September.

FSA's Hino said that no other insurers were in a financial crisis or faced a negative net worth at the end of September, but few analysts believe the industry's woes are already over.

An FSA inspection outcome showed last month that 19 life insurers held loans with serious recovery risks of 233 billion yen as of March, four times the amount declared by the firms.

Chiyoda's policyholders will be largely protected by current reserves at Chiyoda and an existing safety net set up by the industry, but some insurance payouts could be lower than planned.

With the government having committed to providing 400 billion yen to the safety net, a total of 960 billion yen will be made available in the safety net scheme until March 2003.

Japan's second-biggest corporate bankruptcy took place in September 1998, when Japan Leasing, a unit of failed Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, went under with 2.18 trillion yen in debt.

TITLE: Reports: General Motors To Purchase Korean Automaker
AUTHOR: By Lisa M. Collins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DETROIT - General Motors Corp. and Fiat SpA reportedly are in talks to buy at least some of the assets of South Korea's second-largest automaker, Daewoo Motor Co., with an announcement on the matter expected Monday.


GM, which had a 15-year alliance with Daewoo that ended in 1992, has long been interested in Daewoo as a way to expand further into Asia's auto markets, which are starting to recover from their slump during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

GM would not comment specifically on reports by The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal that it had reached agreement with Daewoo's creditors to begin negotiations for a potential purchase. Steve Harris, GM's vice president of communications, said: "We've had preliminary contact with the South Korean government, but beyond that we have nothing to say at this point."

Last month, Ford Motor Co. pulled out of talks to purchase Daewoo.

The chairman of South Korea's Financial Supervisory Commission, Lee Keun-young, said: "GM sent a letter of intent to buy Daewoo Motor and its affiliated units as a single package," the Times reported.

Officials close to both companies are playing down the likelihood that GM will bid for all of Daewoo's assets.

The Times reported that GM and Fiat are contemplating an offer under which GM would hold up to 50 percent of Daewoo and Fiat would own 20 percent.

GM emerged as the most likely bidder for Daewoo after DaimlerChrysler AG and Hyundai Motor Co. confirmed - once Ford withdrew its offer - that they would no longer bid for an outright purchase of the South Korean automaker. However, Hyundai may consider acquiring parts of Daewoo's operations, Dow Jones reported.

In June, the South Korean government gave Ford, which made a $6.9 billion offer, exclusive negotiating rights for Daewoo, after dismissing joint bids made by GM and Fiat and another from DaimlerChrysler and Hyundai Motor, South Korea's largest car maker.

Daewoo Motor, which collapsed financially in August 1999, Daewoo has been kept alive since then with cash injections and is burdened with huge debts, run up by its parent company, the now-bankrupt Daewoo "chaebol" - a conglomerate with a powerful presence in the South Korean economy.

The Seoul government has been desperate to sell off Daewoo, hoping to use the money to bail out other troubled sectors, such as the banking industry.

TITLE: Ancient Treasures Saved From Reservoir
AUTHOR: By Harmonie Toros
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BELKIS, Turkey - It was a race against time - and archeologists say they won.


Water crept in 25 centimeters each day over the past three months, slowly drowning the ancient Greek and Roman city of Zeugma while more than 250 archeologists and other specialists fought to rescue the key historical remains.

The operation was to have finished Thursday, when the water of the Birecik dam - part of a multibillion-dollar energy and irrigation project in southeast Tur key - was due to have reached its maxi mumlevel, covering 30 percent of Zeugma.

But everyone agrees: It's truly a success story. 

"It was one of the most ambitious archeological rescue campaigns ever," said Robert Early, head of the Oxford Archaeology Unit team of 50 people that took part in the digs.

Teams from France, Turkey, Britain and Italy gathered in just a few days to excavate and record the ruins of the city, extract mosaics and statues and carefully rebury the section to be flooded for future generations to rediscover.

"We should now be able to rewrite the history of Zeugma from the third century B.C. to the 10th century A.D.," Early said.

Zeugma, founded around 300 B.C., was the key transit point across the Euphrates river and a Roman legion's headquarters. It is believed to have been more than three times the size of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii and continued to be a wealthy city until the Middle Ages.

"Through the study of Zeugma, we can discover more about the expansion and administration of the Roman Empire, the crossing of the Euphrates, daily life in Mesopotamia," said Kemal Sertok, director of the Gaziantep museum in Turkey, which is in charge of the work.

The city's wealthy left scores of elaborate mosaics.

A first part of the city was flooded in May, and a dozen figurative mosaics were rescued from the rising waters.

Another three were cut in pieces and lifted off their floors, including a 25-square-meter pastel-colored mosaic depicting three women surrounded by cupids and geometrical designs.

"It is the most beautiful mosaic I've ever worked on," said Aurea Pica of the Centro di Conservazione Archeologica, based outside Rome, as she precisely chipped away the mortar from the back of a slice of the mosaic.

It was the discovery of mosaics that alerted the world to Zeugma's imminent drowning. Until then, a Turkish-French team had for years tried to get the funding to rescue what it believed to be precious archaeological remains.

Widespread news coverage as the waters started covering the ruins brought in the much-needed money, and the hard work began.

"Usually we would spend just three months planning the excavations. Here we had three months to do everything," Early said.

Preservation for mosaics under water involves covering the mosaics with mortar, with a specifically designed textile and then with sand and pebbles. Under such conditions, they say, the art can remain intact for even 1,000 years.

TITLE: Scientists Give Planet Status To Low-Mass Brown Dwarfs
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Scientists have always favored diversity and tolerance when it comes to defining a planet. Gassy monsters like Jupiter qualify, and so do icy little spit-wads like Pluto.


Now a team of Spanish, American and German researchers is straining that inclusiveness to the limit by claiming that it has detected 18 "planet-like objects" in a setting considered impossible even under the current loose definition. If the observations are confirmed, some scientists say, they could scramble theories of planet formation.

The 18 dim, reddish objects were detected in the familiar constellation Orion, drifting free of any central star. Perhaps the chief defining characteristic of a planet, however, is that it formed in a condensing swirl of gas and dust around a star.

The objects appear to have formed within the past 5 million years. Planets are generally thought to require tens of millions of years to develop.

"The formation of young, free-floating planetary-mass objects like these are difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form," said Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, in Tenerife, Spain.

The immediate reaction of several planet experts was that these are not planets, but failed stars known as brown dwarfs. "I think this is probably an inappropriate use of the 'p' word," said Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, member of a leading team of scientists hunting for new planets. "But the discovery of brown dwarfs is a wonderful thing."

Brown dwarfs would have formed - like stars - in the breakdown of a giant molecular cloud. They are generally defined as too massive to be planets but not massive enough to sustain the thermonuclear processes that make stars shine.

The apparent discovery of such low-mass brown dwarfs, said astrophysicist Alan Boss, also at Carnegie, means that "nature is throwing us a curve ball ... telling us it's not going to be easy for us to tell the difference between a planet and a brown dwarf. They overlap." He predicted the possible existence of very low-mass brown dwarfs in 1993.

The discovery team argued that measurements of the objects' energy spectrum suggest the cool temperatures of young giant planets. When plugged into accepted models of planet and brown dwarf formation, they said, their data indicates the objects have the mass of planets - that is, from eight to 15 times the mass of Jupiter, and possibly as little as five Jupiter masses.

"If planets can only exist around a star, then our candidates are very low-mass brown dwarfs," Zapatero Osorio said. "But if planets must be a certain mass, then these objects are planets. This is only a problem of terminology, however."

The Zapatero Osorio group said it would be surprising if these are brown dwarfs because so many have never been found packed into such a small region.

(WP, LAT)

TITLE: George Bush and Al Gore: Not a Great Choice, Really
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Yardley
TEXT: CERTAINLY it is true, as an editorialist for The Washington Post quite nicely put it, that last week's debate between the vice presidential candidates was, by contrast with the one between the presidential candidates, "serious, well-informed, substantive, grown-up," and that it left one "with the sense that perhaps the tickets are upside down, that the country might face a less-troubling choice if Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman were the rivals for the presidency instead of the men who picked them." 


Even as one who has little love for Lieberman - what his admirers see as sincerity and piety, I see as opportunism and sanctimoniousness - I agree with that judgment. The debate - if "debate" is the word for it - between George W. Bush and Al Gore was a travesty, a Gong Show at the end of which only one conclusion was possible: Neither of these men is fit to be president of the United States. 

Their confrontation had fireworks, which journalists love, so many postmortems on television and in print were predictably gaga. The vice presidential debate was merely civil, thoughtful and even witty, so it was dismissed as dull and meaningless; but in fact it was important for the simple reason that it underscored the central truth of this election, which is that somehow the country has managed to leave itself with just about the worst imaginable choice for its highest elective office. 

It's the worst of my own lifetime, that's for sure, with the possible exception of Bush-Dukakis in 1988. In hindsight some of the choices the nation has faced in the past six decades were pretty dreary, but Jimmy Carter looked better in 1976 than he does now, as did Bill Clinton in 1992, and in 1996 Bob Dole seemed an entirely reasonable alternative to the disaster that Clinton by then had revealed himself to be. Even the 1988 race offered two plausible candidates; Dukakis ran a dreadful campaign but had a decent record as governor of Massachusetts, and Bush pere had long experience in an impressive variety of federal positions, including eight years as vice president. 

By contrast, try to find any such consolations in the choice now before us, a dispiriting judgment that was soundly reinforced by last Tuesday's encounter before the television cameras in Boston. What is one to say, for example, about the performance of Al Gore? Not merely was he, as Michael Kelly observed in a devastating critique, "so programmed, so artificial, that it seemed as if he had been put together with an Identikit, hurriedly and in the dark." 

Not merely was he snide, bullying and condescending. Into the bargain he flatly, baldly lied, claiming to have made a visit to a disaster site in Texas that in fact he never made, making an assertion about overcrowding at a Florida high school that was immediately rebutted, in wholly convincing detail, by the principal of that school. As The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that is, for my money, the last word on the Democratic candidate: 

"What Mr. Gore is engaged in here lies somewhere between propaganda and compulsion. It is a twisting and violation of the truth that reflects a degree of cynicism about what one can get away with just now in American politics. This was nowhere evident in the Democratic campaigns of such past candidates as Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis or Jimmy Carter. Our political culture is now heir to the Clinton and Gore years." 

The Journal of course looks far more kindly on George W. Bush, but it is exceedingly difficult to see why, apart from ideological and political partisanship. Talk about "programmed" and "artificial"! He had all the animation of a puppet, with choruses of eminences grises cueing his scripted responses from backstage. All the things his critics say about Bush are true: He is callow, he is flippant, he is inexperienced if not downright ignorant, and his chief apparent motives in seeking the presidency are a deep sense of personal entitlement and a desire to avenge his father's defeat eight years ago at Clinton's hands. He was chosen for the nomination by the Republican grandees before he had even the barest opportunity to demonstrate his unfitness for it, and now they must be crying in their beer, though probably they need far-stronger drink than that. 

So here is our choice: a vice president who, though celebrated among his enthusiasts for his mastery of policy questions, seems as incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies as the man whom he has served since 1992, and a governor who, like Willy Loman, has gotten so far as he has on "a smile and a shoeshine" and who to date has offered nothing more substantial to the nation of more than 275 million souls whom he proposes to govern. 

If you can't take those two, you can always take Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader. As the late and much-lamented Henny Youngman surely would have put it: Take them, please. The former is a lout, and the latter - for whom I would have voted four years ago had he been on the ballot where I lived - has revealed himself to be just another opportunist, albeit one with a far-higher sanctimony quotient than even Joe Lieberman. 

It's easy to make jokes about all this, and my scouts in the night-owl brigade tell me the television comedians are doing just that. The only trouble is, in four weeks the joke - whichever clown wins - will be on the American people.


Jonathan Yardley contributed this comment to The Washington Post.

TITLE: Lenin: A Model For Managers To Learn From
AUTHOR: A. Shcherbakova
TEXT: IN a recent interview with a top American manager, I heard mentioned the name of the hero of the workers of the world, Vladimir Lenin. "This is Lenin's city," said the manager, who went on to say that, when he himself was faced with certain situations requiring agreement with his work force, he had wondered what the Bolshevik leader would have done.


Now, my first thoughts were that this American male was a communist, but he is not. He simply admires Lenin as a great manager, who created a system that functioned long after his death.

Whatever the merits of that system, I started to think about what happens to business empires after the death of those who founded them - particularly in the light of the amount of vicious assassinations of businesspeople that have taken place in this city. Are their businesses still alive? Are those who took over and inherited the mantle of the deceased able to manage the business in the same manner and keep it afloat?

Take the case of Pavel Kapysh, who created and managed the Baltic Financial Industrial Group - known more commonly by its Russian acronym, BFPG - who was shot dead in July 1999. BFPG is a major player on the extremely criminalized fuel market, and integrates retail and wholesale operations with transportation services. Kapysh apparently made all of the big decisions that had to be taken, and he also controlled his company's supply of money and information. According to the unconfirmed but persistent rumors, he was also linked to the former Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev, who even reportedly handed Kapysh a few oil wells in the region. In other words, Kapysh was BFPG - the classical rules of Western capitalism, such as top managers delegating various responsibilities and tasks not really in vogue in the wilder days of Russian free marketeering. So, many experts - and all of BFPG's competitors - at the time expected Kapysh's creation to collapse after his death. 

However. After a short period of uncertainty, BFPG continued to function. Its new chairman took over many of the company's assets that had previously belonged to Kapysh, and there has been no notable loss of business since.

Or take the Orimi concern, which specializes in the timber and shipping industries. Orimi's boss, Dmitry Varvarin, was assassinated last March. (A new ship belonging to the Belomoro-Onezhsky shipping company, which Varvarin assimilated into his empire shortly before he was murdered, was named after him.)

Thanks to well-established export contracts, Orimi is still generating revenues of several million dollars. but no one has taken over Varvarin's overall responsibilities: A board of directors divided up the tasks between them, while Varvarin's widow tries to manage the business as best as she can be expected to from her position abroad.

Some parts of Orimi, such as its consumer goods retail trade, fell apart, but current management doesn't much like to admit it. Orimi, which is organized as a holding company, recently made a new partnership agreement with another holding - which I assume means that another big-time boss somewhere is eyeing Varvarin's creation. It might not be much of a comfort, but at least it's an epitaph of sorts.


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

TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: Altered States


Same-sex couples hankering for the sanctity of legal matrimony have found a most unlikely sanctuary these days: George W. Bush's born-again, Bible-believing, for-the-family state of Texas.

State officials were forced to uphold the legality of a lesbian marriage last month, The Associated Press reports, after an appeals court decision gave Jessica Wicks and Robin Manhart the bona fides to their San Antonio marriage license.

But it's not that Bush's boys had suddenly been converted to a decidedly un-Texan level of sexual tolerance by watching reruns of "Ellen" or anything like that; no, they were hoisted on the petard of their own earlier anti-gay laws.

In an attempt to nail down once and for all the notoriously fluid notion of gender (and, presumably, to prevent any frilly girlie-men from using the ladies room at Dallas Cowboys games), Texas lawmakers had earlier decreed that gender can only be determined by the chromosomes you were born with, not by the clothes you wear - nor by the genitals you may have discarded or added.

Thus the XY chromosomes that formed part of Jessica's original equipment meant that, by state law, she and Robin could be married, state officials said. If she had been a double X back in the womb, the marriage would have been illegal, for only the fleshly packages of male chromosomes and female chromosomes may legally be wed. (Talk about getting back to the basics!)

Gay and transgender activists hailed the ruling and said Bush's hitherto hetero backyard might soon be filling up with ex-men and their lesbian lovers heading for the altar. Maybe that's why he's trying to move to Washington?



Inside Job 


It's happened to us all. You fire up your personal computer on a Friday night, settle in with the wife, kids and a big bowl of popcorn, and click the mouse in happy anticipation. Soon the screen is filled with the usual mass of writhing, undulating naked bodies slithering and slathering their way to heights of erotic bliss. But doggone it, something is wrong, something keeps pulling your eyes away from the action. Everybody notices it: Mom looks perplexed, Junior is antsy, Granny keeps squinting and shaking her head. Finally, little Trixie looks up from the bean bag and cries: "Those interiors, Dad! They're yucky!" 

Now this family experience has been captured in a new Web site, Obscene Interiors. There, a pair of sharp-eyed designers, "Kyle B." and "Justin J.," run through a number of screen shots from amateur porn sites and - having first meticulously cropped out the offending flesh - offer their expert commentary on the videomaker's taste in decorating, The Guardian reports.

The home furnishings of homemade pornographers leave much to be desired, it seems. Behind the blacked-out images of rollicking nudes, Kyle and Justin perceive the horror of true obscenity. "It's a shame that he's pushed the comforter aside," says Kyle of one reclining self-pleasurer, "because the drawer pulls were clearly painted to match. That said, the patterns of the curtains, pillows and loosely tucked top sheet belie any such aesthetic coordination."

Justin agrees: "This room looks like it would have an odor and not a pleasant one. Those curtains or whatever it is hanging behind him needs to go."

Good to know we have gatekeepers to steer us away from tack in our insatiable search for sleazy Web fare. There's nothing more degrading than mismatched throw pillows and naff drapes.



Tight Pants


But let's talk a little bit more about marriage. America has been treated to an "inside glimpse" of a very special marriage these past weeks, as a best-selling book has blessed the nation with the love story of "Mommie Poo Pants" and "Daddie Poo Pants."

They might be better known to you as Nancy and Ronald Reagan, but now that Nancy has invited us all into their boudoir (where double beds are de rigueur), with her new book, "I Love You, Ronnie," we will never think of that onetime power couple as anything but The Poo-Poos.

The book, now at No. 3 on The New York Times bestseller list, covers almost 40 years of delightful infantalia passing back and forth between the couple, like a soggy piece of shared chewing gum. The Poo-Poos' epistles are taking the country - well, the mainstream media, anyway - by storm, New Statesman reports. "If men took more time to write to their wives like this, they might have better marriages," declared USA Today. Another paper said the Poo-Poo letters show "how a woman should be loved by her husband."

With red-hot woo-pitching like this, presumably: "Dear Nancy Pants, yesterday I went directly from the train to rehearsal, only stopping to check in here, then suddenly it was 2 p.m. and rehearsal was over." Or how about this Shakespearean flourish: "Dear Mommie Poo Pants: The plumbers finish today. The slab gets poured next week. The carpenters start July 5. We should move in by Dec. 1. Daddie Poo Pants."

Excuse us while we step aside and dab a gentle tear. The letters were so moving, in fact, that the Great Googilymoogily of American media himself, Larry King, staged a public reading of them on his CNN show, utilizing a rather bizarre chorus of readers: "60 Minutes" maven Mike Wallace, Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, and ex-chat show host Merv Griffin. "My God, this is poetry!" Larry proclaimed.

Oddly enough, the published letters contain no mention of some of the most interesting aspects of the Poo-Poos' relationship, such as directives that Mommie Poo Pants' astrologer used to pass on to Daddie Poo Pants when he was formulating government policy. Maybe Mommie Poo Pants just whispered those kinds of instructions directly to Daddie Poo Pants.

Or maybe those letters all got shredded by Oliver North when the Iran-Contra prosecutors began to close in.

TITLE: Polish Incumbent Is Re-elected
AUTHOR: By Beata Pasek
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW, Poland - President Aleksander Kwasniewski easily won a new five-year term in a vote that proved his popularity as a champion of average Poles struggling with the painful shift from communism to a market economy.


Partial official returns showed Kwasniewski winning 55 percent of Sunday's vote in the country's third popular presidential election since communist rule ended in 1989.

None of the 11 hopefuls, including legendary Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, mustered even a third as many votes. The closest challengers were independent economist Andrzej Olechowski, with 18 percent, and current Solidarity chief Marian Krzaklewski, with 15 percent.

The returns closely matched nationwide exit polls reported after voting ended Sunday evening. An estimated 61 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, a higher than expected turnout. Final official results are not due until Tuesday.

In conceding defeat, Krzaklewski, whose party runs a minority government in Poland, said the vote was a warning that Solidarity must regroup for parliamentary elections due by next fall.

Rejoicing ex-communists in the Democratic Left Alliance said the victory bodes well for them.

"It's a knockout," the party's head, Leszek Miller, said of the apparent victory margin. He said his party now hopes to win in a similar fashion in the parliamentary elections.

"This victory was not certain until the ballots were cast," Kwasniewski told supporters at a Warsaw hotel. "But tonight I can say: We won! We won!"

The Polish presidency is largely ceremonial, but carries legislative veto power and the moral authority that the 46-year-old, media-savvy president used well to bolster his popularity.

A former communist-era sports minister, Kwasniewski is credited with transforming his communist colleagues into Western-style Social Democrats who won parliamentary elections in 1994.

But Solidarity showed its resilience by taking back the parliament in 1997. Now the stage is set for another tough fight.

Prior to the election, Solidarity had launched attack ads that included a video of him and an aide appearing to mock Polish-born Pope John Paul II in 1997. Poland is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and Kwasniewski is an atheist.

But the president's non-confrontational style won him broad support among an electorate weary of political bickering and personality clashes.

A small gathering of Walesa's Christian Democracy of Poland party, which he formed back in 1997, looked morose as state television reported his exit poll results at just under 1 percent.

He issued a brief statement from his home in Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement, congratulating Kwasniewski and saying the Polish people had expressed their will.

Though Poland has recorded solid annual growth and improved living standards, many average Poles have felt left behind by the country's so-called shock therapy economic reforms. Unemployment has soared to nearly 14 percent, partly the result of closure or restructuring of communist-era state enterprises.

Though Kwasniewski has not opposed change, he has pleaded the case of average Poles and vetoed at least one bill - an income tax reform - that he said was unfair to workers.

He said his priority now is to prepare Poland for the rigors that will come with eventual membership in the European Union.

TITLE: Candidates Deadlocked in Runup to Election
AUTHOR: By Carol Giacomo
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON - In less than a week, Republican George W. Bush has virtually eliminated Democrat Al Gore's lead and now the U.S. presidential race is deadlocked, according to the Reuters/ MSNBC poll released on Monday.


The sampling of 1,208 likely voters by pollster John Zogby showed that with 29 days to go before the Nov. 7 election, Gore, the vice president, had support from 43 percent of the likely voters and Bush, the Texas governor, had 42 percent.

Gore's advantage was within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In the daily tracking survey conducted Friday through Sunday, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader continued to pull 5 percent, making gains among voters who might otherwise back Gore.

Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan and Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne each garnered 1 percent in the poll.

Undecided voters stayed the same at 8 percent.

"The race for president between Democratic nominee Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush is now deadlocked," pollster Zogby said.

He added that the "most ominous sign for Gore is that this is the first time since the tracking survey began that he has gone below 44 percent, although Bush has yet to capitalize."

Gore lost ground as Republicans pressed an aggressive attack on the vice president for allegedly embellishing his record and also pushed Bush's promise of a sweeping tax cut.

Trying to change the subject from the embellishment allegations, Demo crats were poised to launch a coordinated negative attack on Monday on Bush's record as Texas governor.

As Gore spent time in Sarasota, Florida preparing for the next presidential debate, his campaign was set to announce details of the attack on Bush's record on health care, the environment and gun control. According to the poll, Gore maintained his lead over Bush in the East but this narrowed from the previous day from 46 to 37 percent to 43 to 39 percent.

In the South, Gore lost his slim lead and he and Bush were now tied at 44 percent.

The two candidates also were tied in the Central/Great Lakes region and in the West.

Bush maintained his lead among the important $25,000 to $50,000 income group. Since 1972, no president has been elected without the support of this voter segment.

Gore still had the lead among moderates, but Zogby said that Nader has made "impressive" gains among left-leaning voters.

The race was still very close among Roman Catholics. This is a group that President Clinton won by double digits in 1996.

Bush continued his lead among men, while Gore maintained his lead among women.

Bush also maintained his lead among whites, while Gore continued to hold a lead among blacks and Hispanics.

Democrats led by 2 percentage points when voters were asked which party they would support in elections for the House of Representatives. This was a drop from 6 percentage points on Saturday.

The Democrats are trying to regain control of the House, where Republicans now possess a narrow margin of a mere six seats.

Reuters and MSNBC will release a new poll every day until the election. The surveys are made up of a rolling daily sample of 400 likely voters each day to create a three-day sample of about 1,200 people.

TITLE: Milosevic's Allies Step Down From Government
AUTHOR: By Misha Savic
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - The government of Serbia, the largest republic of Yugoslavia and a bastion of power for former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, resigned Monday, paving the way for new elections.


The resignation came as Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bulatovic, a Milosevic ally, also stepped down, Tanjug news agency said.

The moves constitute a sharp blow to Milosevic's efforts to keep a foothold in Yugoslavia's institutions. The top leaders in the Serbian government were close Milosevic allies.

Serbia is Yugoslavia's largest republic, accounting for 90 percent of Yugoslavia's population of 10 million.

Pro-democracy leader Zoran Djindjic said that new elections for the Serbian legislature, which is separate from the Yugoslav parliament, will be held on Dec. 19.

Serbian lawmakers will formally announce the decision about the government and the election date at a session later Monday, Djindjic said.

"We have achieved an important step in trying to create a transitional government, to create conditions for free and fair elections," Djindjic said.

If the Serbian government were allowed to remain in place, it would have been in position to block many reforms that the new government of Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica wants to implement.

Given the current popular wave of support for the new president, Kostunica is likely to win a strong majority in the republic's new parliament.

Serbia's president and parliament are elected separately from federal posts and were not involved in the contentious federal vote Sept. 24.

Serbian President Milan Milutinovic and other Serbian government leaders were elected in 1998 to four-year terms.

Djindjic said that a transitional government consisting of economic experts and party leaders will be formed to replace the existing Serbian administration, which is headed by Milosevic's staunch ally, Mirko Marjanovic.

Kostunica's allies have insisted that the pro-Milosevic authorities in Serbia had lost all legitimacy after a massive triumph by pro-democracy forces in elections last month.

Meanwhile, Yugoslavia's defense minister attempted Monday to rally opponents of the new government, issuing a last-ditch appeal to Milosevic's shaken supporters not to abandon the ousted leader.

Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic said that the disunity among the Serbs is "inciting the plans of our proven [foreign] enemies'' to occupy the country. Milosevic's allies have consistently referred to Kostunica and his followers as Western lackeys bent on taking over the Serb state.

"If we continue like this, we won't get far ... how can we save the people of Serbia, how can we prevent our extinction,'' Ojdanic said, indicating that if the pro-democracy forces prevail in the country, the Serbs would "disappear."

Ojdanic, a close Milosevic ally who has also been indicted for war crimes, has not formally recognized Kostunica as the new Yugoslav president and is not expected to keep his position in the new government. He has no direct control of the military, which has fallen under Kostunica's command.

Still, he retains influence among the military brass, and any call he might make to rally pro-Milosevic forces could be problematic for the new regime.

"Is the struggle for power more important that the fate of the nation?" Ojdanic said in a statement.

The military leadership - which consist mostly of Milosevic loyalists - has only grudgingly endorsed Kostunica as the new head of state. The top generals will likely all be replaced as part of a sweeping purge of Milosevic's supporters which many pro-democracy activists and the pro-Western leadership of Montenegro - Yugoslavia's other republic - have long been demanding.

Yugoslavia was calm on Monday, and there were no apparent signs of any trouble.

On Sunday, Montenegro's pro-Western President Milo Djukanovic and Djindjic agreed to fire all of the top army generals, including Ojdanic.

Kostunica, Djukanovic and the Serbian president comprise the Supreme Defense Council, which will decide on the changes in the next few days, the Montenegrin Vijesti daily said.

Although Kostunica was sworn in as Yugoslav president on Saturday, numerous hurdles still stand in his way before he can push through democratic reforms after 13 years of autocratic rule by Milosevic.

That rule ended after a popular uprising last week forced Milosevic to accept defeat in Sept. 24 presidential elections.

Meanwhile, a mob of angry workers attacked Radoman Bozovic, a close Milosevic aide and the director of a major trading corporation.

He tried to flee from his car, but he was caught and beaten. His bodyguards snatched him into a nearby building for safety. Later, Bozovic resigned as the head of the export-import company.

In the third largest Serbian city of Nis, workers stormed a state-run textile factory Nitex, demanding the Socialist management be fired.

Meanwhile in Luxembourg, the European Union foreign ministers debated lifting some economic sanctions against Yugoslavia on Monday, a step toward rebuilding the war-torn country after Kostunica became its new president.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: U.S. Hosts Korean Visit


SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - North Korea's second-most powerful official, Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, arrived in San Francisco on Sunday for a one-day stopover before heading to Washington where he will become the highest-ranking North Korean ever to visit the U.S. capital.


Jo, a soldier with 50 years of service at one of the hot spots of East-West conflict, comes to Washington as the special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, son of the founder of North Korea.

The visit, which marks the fall of another Cold War barrier, has been in the making for almost a year.

It shows how far North Korea and the United States, enemies in the 1950-1953 Korean War, have come in a gradual rapprochement driven largely by U.S. fears of North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile technology and its military sales to governments that Washington dislikes.

The United States wants to talk to Jo about his country's weapons programs, its status as a "state sponsor of terrorism'' and how to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.

While in Washington, Jo will meet President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen.



Floods Strike Vietnam


HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (Reuters) - An Australian C-130 aircraft flew in emergency aid for Vietnam's flood victims in driving monsoon rain on Monday as meteorologists warned of fresh downpours that could bring more misery.

In the Mekong Delta, where wide areas of eight provinces have been swamped by the worst floods for decades, officials said the floods had killed more than 310 people in the past month, including 233 children.

In all, the homes of about 4 million people have been flooded, some up to the rafters. Official media says 200,000 people have been evacuated and 500,000 need emergency relief.

The Royal Australian Air Force C-130 plane ferried more than 4,000 lightweight blankets and thousands of collapsible water containers into Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat airport.

The supplies, worth A$115,000 ($62,500 U.S.), were donated by the Australian Red Cross and form part of a multi-million-dollar relief effort.



Sri Lankan Elections


COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Thousands of armed police and paramilitary forces fanned out across Sri Lanka on Monday as a tight security blanket was thrown over the war-torn country to ward off further violence ahead of parliamentary elections.

Some 40,000 security personnel will guard polling booths in Tuesday's election in which a 17-year-old ethnic war between the government and guerrillas of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels is the main issue.

Voters will choose between the competing strategies of President Chandrika Kumaratunga's ruling People's Alliance (PA) and the main opposition United National Party (UNP) to end the protracted ethnic conflict, which has claimed thousands of lives on both sides.

A close contest between the two parties is widely expected.

At least 40 people were killed in suicide bombings and 10 in clashes between political groups during the bloody month-long election campaign that ended on Saturday.



Flag Sparks Violence


JAKARTA, Indonesia (Reuters) - Separatist leaders in Indonesia's Irian Jaya on Monday vowed to keep flying their ''Morning Star'' flag, setting them on a violent collision course with police charged with hauling down the banners.

Independence groups say at least 58 people have died since bloody clashes erupted in the highland town of Wamena on Friday after police shot dead several people protesting against efforts to pull down the separatist emblem.

Officials have put the death toll at around 30.

But national police chief Gen. Bimantoro said his men would pull down any Morning Star flags they found in Irian, also referred to as Papua.

Another independence leader, Tom Beanal, warned of more violence.

"They [the tribesmen] are using traditional warfare. If you're with them [the military], you're the enemy and you will be killed,'' he told a news conference in Jakarta.



Nobel Laureates Named


STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for their discoveries concerning how messages are transmitted in the nervous system, work that has paid off for treating Parkinson's disease.

The three Nobel laureates will share the $915,000 prize for their pioneering discoveries concerning one way brain cells send messages to each other, according to the award citation.

These discoveries have been crucial for an understanding of the normal function of the brain. In addition, it laid the groundwork for developing the standard treatment for Parkinson's disease and contributed to the development of a class of antidepressants that includes Prozac, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute said.

Carlsson, 77, is with the University of Goteborg in Sweden, Greengard, 74, is with Rockefeller University in New York and Kandel, 70, is an Austrian-born U.S. citizen with Columbia University in New York.



Quakes Hit Japan


TOKYO (AP) - Two fairly strong earthquakes rocked western Japan Sunday, two days after a more powerful temblor buckled streets, knocked down houses and paralyzed traffic for hours in a nearby region, officials said.

A 5.4 earthquake struck Sunday afternoon and was centered 9.6 kilometers beneath eastern Shimane prefecture, located 608 kilometers southwest of Tokyo, the Meteorological Agency said.

"There was one strong jolt. But the shaking only lasted a few seconds," Shimane official Masayuki Murakami said.

About eight hours later, a 5.2-magnitude temblor hit at about the same location, the Meteorological Agency said. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

A magnitude-5 quake can crack walls in homes if it occurs in a residential area.

On Friday, an earthquake with preliminary magnitude of 7.3 struck a largely rural area in Tottori prefecture, 496 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. Tottori borders Shimane to the east.

Though at least 120 people were hurt in Friday's quake, none of the injuries were reported to be life-threatening.